button to main menu  Gents Mag 1851 part 1 p.586
button introduction
button list, 3rd qtr 19th century
button previous page button next page
Gentleman's Magazine 1851 part 1 p.586
charm will last. We have left ourselves but little room to speak of them; but they stand in no need of a lecturer to show them off. If we should attempt indeed to fix their exact place in the scale of poetical merit we should have to begin a long discussion. But why trouble ourselves to fix their place? They advance no pretensions; they demand of no man to admire them beyond their worth; but they have a beauty of their own, which those who have a sense for it will feel at once, without being told why or how. Only we will say, by way of warning, that Hartley Coleridge's excellence lies, not in the creative, but in the reflective department of the imagination. He reveals no new worlds; but he can set the profounder emotions suggested by his own epxerience to a peculiar and delicate music; and when a thought strikes him - an intellectual perception, which if drily told in prose would be accepted as a fine and striking observation - he can deck it out with a profusion of illustrative imagery, so apt, so fanciful, and so graceful, that it becomes doubtful where the charm most lies - in the sense, the sentiment, or the setting forth. We must content ourselves with two or three specimens, taken almost at random, for the variety of choice perplexes us.
First, however, let us hear his own estimate of his pretensions as a poet - an estimate we have reason to believe contains his real and deliberate judgment - before we form an opinion of our own:-

POIETES APOIETES.

No hope have I to live a deathless name,
A power immortal in the world of mind,
A sun to light with intellectual flame
The universal soul of human kind.

Not mine the skill in memorable phrase
The hidden truths of passion to reveal,
To bring to light the intermingling ways
By which unconscious motives darkling steal.

To show how forms the sentient heart affect,
How thoughts and feelings mutually combine,
How oft the pure impassive intellect
Shares the mischances of its mortal shrine.

Nor can I summon from the dark abyss
Of time the spirit of forgotten things,
Bestow unfading life on transient bliss -
Bid memory live "with healing on its wings."

Or give a substance to the haunting shades
Whose visitation shames our vulgar earth,
Before whose light the ray of morning fades,
And hollow yearning chills the soul of mirth.

I have no charm to renovate the youth
Of old authentic dictates of the heart -
To wash the wrinkles from the face of truth,
And out of nature form creative art.

Divinest poesy! 'tis thine to make
Age young - youth old - to baffle tyrant time;
From antique strains the hoary dust to shake,
And with familiar grace to crown new rhyme.

Long have I loved thee - long have I loved in vain,
Yet large the debt my spirit owes to thee.
Thou wreath'dst my first hours in a rosy chain,
Rocking the cradle of my infancy.

The lovely images of earth and sky
From thee I learnt within my soul to treasure,
And the strong magic of thy minstrelsy
Charms the world's tempest to a sweet sad measure,

Not fortune's spite, &c.
button next page
button to main menu Lakes Guides menu.