BOYHOOD AT CHRIST CHURCH HOSPITA L. 105 long friend, Charles Lamb, recalling the days spent many years before in that famous London school, the noble foundation of good King Edward VI., thus apostrophizes the "inspired charity-boy." "Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Logician, Metaphysician, Bard:-how often have I seen the casual passer through the cloisters stand still, entranced with admiration to hear thee unfold in thy deep and sweet intonations the mysteries of Iamblicus or Plotinus, or reciting Homer in his Greek, or Pindar, while the walls of the old Grey-Friars' echoed to the accents of the inspired charity-boy." The day-dreams that filled so large a portion of the visionary Coleridge's existence,-they too began in early life. The story is told of him when quite a child, going down the Strand, (a crowded London thoroughfare,) he was very earnestly thrusting his hands out, so as to come in contact with a person walking before him, who seized him and accused him of an attempt to pick his pocket. The little dreamer sobbed out his protestations. of innocence, and, to the astonishment of the bystanders, explained how he thought himself Leander swimming across the Hellespont. I may cite an instance of the early force of Coleridge's imagination from his monody on the death of Chatterton. The wondrous career of that young poet, and the melancholy close of it by suicide in boyhood, were then fresh recollections. Nature had beautifully endowed him, and the world by a wicked harshness extinguished all light in a spirit already darkened with somewhat of the gloom of hereditary insanity. This earth was no home for him ; and it is a fine stroke of imagination when Coleridge associates the chance knell from any distant steeple with the mother-voice of nature calling back the young and earth hapless poet. "Oh, what a wonder seems the fear of death, Babes, children, youths, and men, Night following night, for threescore years and ten. To sigh and pant with up Want's rugged steep. "Lo! by the grave I stand of one for whom * Made each chance knell, from distant spire or dome, Return, poor child! home, weary truant, home!" When Coleridge's genius was developing itself, he avowed a high admiration and gratitude to a poet somewhat his senior, though still surviving him,-one whose reputation has never been a general one, the poet Bowles, -perhaps chiefly known by his controversy with Lord Byron on the subject of the poetry of Pope. Coleridge's admiration of Bowles's poems is not to be accounted for by any of that intensity of imagination which was eminently his own characteristic, but because he found in them something more real, more true and manly, than in most of the poetry then in fashion,-a combination of natural thoughts with natural diction. I can digress from my main subject no longer than to give one short specimen of Bowles's poetry,-what strikes me as a well-told recollection of childhood, and what all who have experienced it will recognise as truly recording the impression made on the imagination on the occasion of a first approach to the ocean:— "I was a child when first I heard the sound Of the Great Sea. 'Twas night, and, journeying far, My head was resting on her lap; I woke; And how the talking bird, when he returned, Thoughts like these aruse When first I heard at night the distant sound, There are no passages of Coleridge's poetry in which the peculiar traits of his genius are more distinct than those of a descriptive cast. He shared that which belongs to all poetic minds,-a genuine and unaffected love of nature. In the lines of one of his poems, "I know That nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure. No plot so narrow, be but nature there, No waste so vacant, but may well employ Each faculty of sense, and keep the heart But the predominant habit of his genius was self-communion, in-looking rather than out-looking, so wrapt in meditation as perhaps often to preclude that open submissive susceptibility to impressions from the outward world of sense. This, however, led him finely to proclaim that great tenet of the poetic creed, that the influences of inanimate nature are dependent on the shaping faculty of imagination : "That outward forms the loftiest still receive Their finer influences from the life within." Unhappily, Coleridge did not steadily possess that genial mood of imagination by which the poet's song "Should make all nature lovelier, and itself Be loved like nature." He tells of this very unhappiness-this morbid torpor of the imagination-in some of the stanzas in his ode on "Dejection:" "A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear, A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief, Which finds no natural outlet, no relief In word, or sigh, or tear. O lady, in this wan and heartless mood, To other thoughts by yonder throstle wooed, And still I gaze; and with how blank an eye! That give away their motion to the stars; Those stars, that glide behind them or between, In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue: I see them all so excellently fair; I see, not feel, how beautiful they are. "My genial spirits fail; And what can these avail To lift the smothering weight from off my breast? Though I should gaze forever On that green light that lingers in the west. I may not hope from outward forms to win The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.” In another strain of the same ode the important imaginative truth is set forth: "From the soul itself must issue forth And from the soul itself must there be sent Of all sweet sounds the life and element." When Coleridge's poetry gives forth "This light, this glory, this fair, luminous mist, 66 the purport of his descriptions is to discover "religious musings in the forms of nature." "Let me," he exclaims in an admirable passage of his prose, digress for a few moments from the written word to another book, likewise a revelation of God,-the great book of his servant nature. That in its obvious sense and literal interpretation |