GIFT OF 
 
 MICHAEL REE^E 
 

 
STUDIES IN POETRY AND 
 
 PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 BY 
 
 J. C. SHAIRP, 
 
 PRINCIPAL OF THE UNITED COLLEGE OF ST. SALVATOR AND ST. LEONARD, 
 3T ANDREWS 
 
 AUTHOR OF "CULTURE AND RELIGION. 
 
 PII 
 
 UTL 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 PUBLISHED BY KURD AND HOUGHTON. 
 
 1872. 
 
J/M ^f// ^fjf 
 
 v* srf " 
 
 [Reprinted from the Second Edinburgh Edition.] 
 
 
 RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE : 
 
 STEEEOTTPED AND PRINTED BY 
 II. 0. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY. 
 
THE RIGHT HONORABLE 
 
 SIR JOHN TAYLOR COLERIDGE, 
 
 THE NEPHEW OF COLERIDGE, 
 
 THE FRIEND OF WORDSWORTH, 
 
 THE LIFE-LONG FRIEND OF KEBLE, 
 
 AND HIS BIOGRAPHER, 
 IX WHOSE SERENE AGE AND BEAUTIFUL CHARACTER 
 
 ANOTHER GENERATION SEES EMBODIED 
 THE BEST WISDOM OF HIS POET FRIENDS. 
 
PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION. 
 
 THE Essays on Wordsworth, Coleridge, and 
 Keble, were, as stated in the former Preface, 
 intended to be in some sort thank-offerings, 
 single stones contributed to their memorial cairns. 
 Another name I feel should have followed, or 
 rather have preceded these. Of Walter Scott 
 and his poetry, the first poetry I knew, it was 
 my wish to have said something in another essay, 
 and to have added it to this series, or perhaps put 
 it in the first, which would have been its proper 
 place. But before this was done, his Centenary 
 had come, during which so much was spoken, and 
 well spoken, on the subject, that this does not 
 seem the time for saying more. But if, adopting 
 Wordsworth s lines, we say 
 
 " Blessings be with them and eternal praise, 
 Who gave us nobler loves, and nobler cares 
 The Poets, who on earth have made us heirs 
 Of truth and pure delight by heavenly lays ! " 
 
 to Walter Scott will fall a large share in that 
 benediction. 
 
 These Essays are in. no sense criticisms of the 
 poets they deal with, at least as that word is 
 generally understood. To take the measure of 
 
viii PREFACE. 
 
 these great and good men, and assign them, as 
 the phrase goes, their place in literature, I would 
 not try if, I could, and I could not if I would. 
 Such attempts seem to me to be generally more 
 pretentious than solid. Enough will have been 
 done, if, by pointing to some of the sources of 
 delight I found in them, others may be induced 
 to study them and find the same. 
 
 A hope was expressed that all the four Essays, 
 distinct though they are in subject, might yet be 
 found pervaded by a unity of thought and pur 
 pose. Of the reviewers who have noticed the 
 Essays and all whom I have read have done so 
 very kindly some have perceived no such unity, 
 others have not failed to find it. One reviewer 
 has so well described this thread of connection, 
 that I cannot do better than give his words : 
 
 " His subjects Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keble, 
 and the Moving Force of the Moral Life are 
 all, and not slightly, connected. All four sub 
 jects may be said to be concerned with the rela 
 tion of the divine life to that of man : Words 
 worth as the prophet of Nature, as the poet who 
 interpreted the relations between the elemental 
 powers of creation and the moral life of man ; 
 Coleridge as the thinker, who tried to find, and 
 partially found, a philosophy of the supersensual 
 life ; Keble as the singer, who applied both these 
 great worlds of thought so far as they fitted into 
 the limitations of his own . . ecclesiastical 
 
PREFACE. ix 
 
 system ; and, finally, the subject of Mr. Shairp s 
 last essay the great moving force which helps 
 man to become what he perceives that he ought 
 to be is one almost inevitably suggested by the 
 lives of the three men who, from their different 
 points of view, had all been chiefly concerned to 
 discover new links between the life above and the 
 life beneath." 
 
 The reviewer in the sequel expresses a doubt 
 whether I have enough insisted on " the affinity 
 of Wordsworth s poetry for the great elemental 
 forces both of nature and of humanity" "the 
 power which the poet displays of giving a strange 
 elemental vastness to the dominant thread of 
 character in either the human or the natural sub 
 ject on which he happens to be dwelling, so that 
 his poem yields up not a particular man or a 
 particular place, so much as the same element 
 which, while belonging to either, stretches away 
 into the infinite." 
 
 Likely enough I have not dwelt on this with 
 sufficient emphasis, though I certainly have always 
 felt it. But where there is so much room for 
 thought, it is not easy in a short essay to bring 
 out every aspect of the truth with the promi 
 nence it deserves. I am therefore grateful to 
 the reviewer for supplying in some measure my 
 deficiency. 
 
 The same writer then goes on to object to my 
 defense of Wordsworth against being a merely 
 
x PREFACE. 
 
 " subjective " poet, as it is called one who draws 
 no pictures of human character different from his 
 own. Here again, though at the risk of quoting 
 too largely, I must give the reviewer s own words. 
 " If the terrible word subjective means that 
 poetry so described takes no note of external life 
 and nature, it has, of course, no application to 
 Wordsworth. But if it means that the individ 
 ual imagination of the poet so overbalances the 
 external features of his object that the point of 
 departure seems in the end to have dwindled into 
 insignificance in comparison with the grandeur 
 of the forces which it has called up before him, 
 we should differ with Mr. Shairp. Wordsworth 
 takes a scene or character, and getting it under 
 the magnifying-glass of his meditative genius, he 
 follows out the most striking train of associations 
 it suggests to him, till he describes, not his sub 
 ject, but what his subject might have been, if 
 these special influences had swept through it as 
 pure and unalloyed as they swept over the heart 
 of the poet who muses thereon." 
 
 With much in this account of the matter I 
 should not disagree. To one part of it only I 
 demur. However great the flood of meditative 
 light which Wordsworth pours around the object 
 he describes, the object itself and its external 
 features are not lost or obliterated before it. No 
 doubt when he describes a man, he shows us 
 much more in him and his character than the 
 
PREFACE. xi 
 
 man was aware of in himself. He paints from 
 the side of the soul rather than that of the body, 
 but the meditative associations called up are uni 
 versal and catholic, not individual or fanciful 
 ones. And however powerful these are, the ex 
 ternal features given remain and agree with the 
 meditations that rise out of them. They answer 
 each to the other. A painter could from Words 
 worth s description paint the Cumberland Beg 
 gar, Michael, Peter Bell, and each would be a 
 clear individual portrait, differing from the others 
 not only in surroundings, but in every feature, 
 and in the whole expression of countenance. The 
 subjectivity, in short, which I denied to Words 
 worth s characters, was that which belongs to so 
 many of Byron s his Giaour, Corsair, Lara, 
 Alp the Renegade, which are each so many 
 pieces of himself, shadows of his own personality, 
 colored by his own peculiar temperament and 
 destiny. Any painter who tried to render these, 
 vary their outward form and drapery as he might, 
 would still paint but one expression the same 
 misanthropic scowl would sit on every brow. It 
 was the absence of this kind of subjectivity 
 this projecting of his own mere individuality into 
 his human characters that I claimed for Words 
 worth. Probably enough, this may have been 
 done too unconditionally ; the limits of his power 
 of representation may not have been carefully 
 enough denned. What I meant was, that within 
 
xii PREFACE. 
 
 certain limits lie truly renders other characters 
 than his own ; that his meditations about them 
 lo not so far hide their distinctive features but 
 ;hat you would know them if you met them on 
 ohe highway. 
 
 Further to enter into these matters, and to 
 define the limits of Wordsworth s power in this 
 direction for limits very definite it has would 
 require more than a Preface. His characters are 
 meditative representations, not dramatic exhibi 
 tions of men. For these last no poet ever had 
 less gift. 
 
 The four Essays have all been carefully revised, 
 and here and there retouched. In re-reading the 
 Essay on Coleridge, I feel that in what I said but 
 scant justice has been done to his poetry. But 
 to reopen this subject would be to rewrite the 
 essay. That I have made too little of his poetry 
 may have arisen from this, that my chief intention 
 at the time I wrote was to bring out the contents 
 and tendency of Coleridge s philosophic specula 
 tions. 
 
 The Essay on Keble has received larger addi 
 tions than any of the others. Indeed, it would 
 have been easy to have added much more, for 
 hardly a year passes but brings to light some 
 thing which gives new meaning to the character of 
 Keble and " The Christian Year." But if much 
 enlarged, what was meant as an essay would have 
 become a book. 
 
 ST. ANDREW S, December 7, 1871. 
 
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 
 
 THE contents of this volume, written during 
 leisure weeks of recent summers, originally ap 
 peared in the " North British Review." They 
 were put together not hastily at first, and have 
 since been revised, in some places retrenched, in 
 more enlarged. This is true of all the papers, 
 except the third, which stands now much as it 
 did at first. Though each of the four Essays has 
 a distinct subject of its own, it is hoped that they 
 will be found to have a unity both of thought and 
 purpose. The first three were written from a 
 desire to acknowledge, as far as possible, a debt 
 of gratitude long owed to three eminent teachers 
 of the last age. The only way in which that 
 acknowledgment could now be rendered, was by 
 trying to hand on some knowledge of the men 
 and of the work they did to a few at least of the 
 younger generation. Each of these three papers 
 has been introduced by a short biography, in the 
 hope that the concrete facts might throw light on 
 the abstract thoughts, and add to them a human 
 interest. 
 
 The thought of Wordsworth and Coleridge is 
 
Xiv PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 
 
 of such worth, that too much cannot be done to 
 commend it to those unacquainted with it. They 
 deserve to be known for this, if for nothing else, 
 that they two were the men of most original 
 genius who have been born into England for 
 a century and more. But original genius has 
 sometimes done questionable work, for which per 
 haps small thanks are due. Theirs, however, 
 was not only original, it was beneficent genius. 
 To a sense-bound age, rejoicing in a mechanical 
 philosophy, they came speaking from the soul to 
 the soul. In time they awakened a response. 
 Younger men, one by one, turned towards them, 
 and found in their teaching that which at once 
 called out and satisfied their aspirations as no 
 other writings of the time did. Whatever is best, 
 deepest, most spiritual in the thinking and feeling 
 of the last thirty years, is either their product or 
 akin to it. But now again the recoil has come, 
 and we are once more in the midst of a way of 
 thinking which excludes the spiritual. As against 
 this compacted system Wordsworth and Coleridge 
 have certainly no complete system, no spiritual 
 theory of life to furnish, but they supply a body 
 of thought which, though unsystematized, is the 
 best counteractive to be found in English litera 
 ture, till the full spiritual theory gets born. 
 
 There is another aspect in which the mental 
 experience of these men is instructive. This is 
 proclaimed on all hands to be an age of disin- 
 
DEFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. xv 
 
 when all old things must either be 
 reconstructed or disappear. An uneasy, restless 
 searching after something larger and more satis 
 fying, is no doubt visible on the surface both of 
 books and of society. In this mood of men s 
 minds, is there not something to be learnt from 
 the experience of Wordsworth and Coleridge ? 
 Here were two men of amplest power, born into 
 an age fuller of anarchic change than our own. 
 They threw themselves fearlessly on their time, 
 broke with old faiths and institutions, in search 
 of truth set their faces to the wilderness, and 
 after sojourning for a season there, came out on 
 the other side, and found peace. They have been 
 branded for this as mere timid reactionaries. But 
 this I believe to be no true account of them. If 
 they returned in some sense to their first faiths, 
 they did so not in blind conservatism, not as 
 grasping at mere tradition in despair of truth, 
 but as having, after long soul-travail, discovered 
 a meaning in old truths they had not divined be 
 fore. After wandering many ways of thought, 
 and having learnt in their wanderings to know 
 themselves, they came back and found in Chris 
 tian truth that which alone met their need. 
 They held it no longer by hearsay from with 
 out, but learned it anew from within, apprehend 
 ing it not in oldness of the letter, but in newness 
 of the spirit. The spiritual principles, which as 
 thinkers they held, found their complement in 
 
xvi PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 
 
 evangelical religion, and gave to this last increased 
 depth and expansion. This experience of theirs 
 has not lost its import for our own day. 
 
 Keble, the subject of the third essay, was not 
 in mental endowments at all the equal of Words 
 worth and Coleridge. But he had gifts of his 
 own as singular and as interesting as theirs. The 
 devoutness and saintly purity, embalmed in his 
 poetry, are as rare among men as their genius. 
 Then he represents the most winning, to wit, the 
 poetical and devotional, side of that great move 
 ment which has in so many ways changed the 
 religious, the ecclesiastical, and the aesthetical 
 aspects of English life. Many, no doubt, will 
 think this small praise to him. But without 
 entering on this subject, which has many sides, 
 every religious heart must acknowledge not only 
 the devout depth but the catholic sentiment of 
 " The Christian Year." 
 
 His strain, overheard among louder- voiced poets, 
 is like that of his favorite red-breast among the 
 other song-birds, and has added to English poe 
 try the note in which it was most wanting. 
 
 The last essay is different from the other three. 
 It does not centre round one man and his teach 
 ing, but deals with an abstract subject. But the 
 thoughts it contains are, I believe, in harmony 
 with the views set forth in the first three essays, 
 are indeed, as it were, but a prolongation of 
 these views. In this country the ground prin- 
 
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. xvii 
 
 ciples of morality and religion have generally been 
 carefully kept apart. The moralist and the relig 
 ious teacher have each warned the other off his 
 own ground, and resented any attempt to com 
 bine the two departments as an interference. 
 Both have suffered from this unnatural estrange 
 ment. This fourth essay is an attempt to find 
 the common ground on which these two subjects 
 meet. It is certain that, when seen in their close 
 and vital bearing on each other, moral thought 
 will give substance and steadfastness to religion, 
 and religion will give to morality a transcendent 
 sanction and spiritual energy. 
 
 This volume is published chiefly in the hope 
 that it may reach some of the thoughtful young. 
 Older persons do not much affect books of this 
 kind. It is otherwise with those in whom thought 
 is just awakening. If what I have written should 
 lead any of these to acquaint themselves with the 
 men here described, and to assimilate their thought, 
 they will, I am sure, be the better for it, and the 
 happier. 
 
 ST. ANDREW S, March, 1868. 
 
CONTENTS, 
 
 PAGE 
 1 
 
 WORDSWORTH . 
 
 90 
 COLERIDGE 
 
 KEBLE 204 
 
 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER 269 
 

 
 
 
 

 * 
 
 C^ V OF THE 
 
 ltnirrv.-BB.sitT 
 
 THE deep stirring of men s minds with which the 
 <;, last century closed, and the present century set in, 
 expressed itself in many ways ; in no way more con 
 spicuously than in the prodigality of poetic genius which 
 it poured forth. What gave the impulse to the broader, 
 profounder, more living spirit, which then entered into 
 all regions of thought, who shall determine? To re 
 count the literary commonplaces on the subject, to refer 
 that great movement of mind to the French Revolu 
 tion, or to the causes of that Revolution, is easy ; but 
 such vague talk does not really increase our knowl 
 edge. Perhaps it may be for the present enough to 
 say, that the portentous political outbreak in France 
 was itself but one manifestation of the new and changed 
 spirit which, throughout Europe, then penetrated every 
 department of human thought and action. Whatever 
 the causes, the fact i& plain, that with the opening of 
 this century there was in all civilized lands a turning 
 up of the subsoil of human nature, a laying bare of 
 the intenser seats of action, thought, and emotion, such 
 as the world had seldom, if ever before, known. That 
 time was, what it has been called, " the new birth of 
 imagination." 
 
 The new spirit reached all forms of literature, and 
 changed them. Un this country it told more immedi 
 ately on poetry than on any other kind of literature, 
 1 
 
f.l 
 2 WORDSWORTH: 
 
 \ w^ 
 
 and recast it into manifold and more original forms. 
 The breadth and volume of that poetic outburst can 
 only be fully estimated by looking back to the narrow 
 and artificial channels in which English poetry Jiad run 
 since the .days of Milton. In the hands of Dryden 
 and Pope, that which was a natural, free-wandering 
 river, became a straight-cut, uniform canal. Or, with 
 out figure, poetry was withdrawn from country life, 
 made to live exclusively in town, and affect the fashion. 
 Forced to appear in courtly costume, it dealt with the 
 artificial manners and outside aspects of men, and lost 
 sight of the one human heart, which is the proper 
 haunt and main region of song. Of nature it repro 
 duced only so much as may be seen in the dressed 
 walks and gay parterres of a suburban villa on the 
 Thames. As with the subjects, so with the style. Al 
 ways there was neatness of language, and correctness, 
 according to a conventional standard ; often there was 
 terseness, epigrammatic point, polished vigor ; but along 
 with these there was monotony, constraint, tameness of 
 melody. Those who followed, jCpllins and Gray, 
 Goldsmith and Thomson, though with reviving nat 
 uralness, and more of melody, could not shake them 
 selves wholly free of the tyrant tradition, and throw 
 themselves unreservedly on nature. jBurns, if in one 
 sense an anticipation of the nineteentncentury poetry, 
 is really, in reference to his contemporaries, to be re 
 garded as $n accident : he grew so entirely outside, 
 and independently, of the literary influences of his 
 I time. His poetry was a stream flowing apart, un- 
 reached by the main current of literature. Yet, though 
 little affected by contemporary poets, he was powerful 
 with those who came after him. Wordsworth owns 
 that it was from Burns he learnt the power of song 
 founded on humble truth. It was Cowper, however, 
 
 
, 
 
 THE MAN AND THE POET. 3 
 
 who first of English poete brought poetry back from 
 the town to the countryJ His landscape, no doubt, 
 was the tame one of the eastern counties, the fens of 
 England ; there was in it nothing of the stern wild joy 
 of the mountains. His sentiment moved among the 
 household sympathies, not the stormy passions. But 
 in Cowper s power of simple narrative and truthful de 
 scription, in his natural pathos and religious feeling, 
 more truly than elsewhere, may be discerned the dawn 
 of that new poetic era with which this century began. 
 
 When we remember that during its first thirty years 
 appeared all the great works of Wordsworth, Scott, 
 Byron, Southey, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, not to men 
 tion many a lesser name, we may be quite sure that 
 posterity will look back to it as one of the most wonder 
 ful eras in English literature. What other age in this, 
 I had almost said in* any country has been, within the 
 same space of time, so lavish of great poets ? In Eng 
 land, at any rate, if the Elizabethan and the succeed 
 ing age had each one greater poetic name, no age can 
 show so goodly a poetic company. They who began 
 life while many of those poets were still alive, and 
 who can perhaps recall the looks of some of them, as 
 they still sojourned with us, may not perhaps value 
 to the full the boon which was bestowed on the gen 
 eration just gone. Only as age after age passes, and 
 calls up no such second company, will men learn to 
 look back to that poetic era with the admiration that 
 is due. To sum up in one sentence the manifold im 
 port of all that those poets achieved, I cannot perhaps 
 do better than borrow the discriminative words of Mr. 
 Palgrave in his " Golden Treasury." They < carried 
 to further perfection the later tendencies of the cen- \f 
 tury preceding, in simplicity of narrative, reverence for 
 human passion and character in every sphere, and im- 
 
4 WORDSWORTH- 
 
 passioned love of nature : whilst maintaining on the 
 whole the advances in art made since the Restoration, 
 they renewed the half-forgotten melody and depth of 
 tone which marked the best Elizabethan writers ; lastly, 
 to what was thus inherited they added a richness in 
 language and a variety in metre, a force and fire in 
 narrative, a tenderness and bloom in feeling, an insight 
 into the finer passages of the soul, and the inner mean 
 ings of the landscape, a larger and a wiser humanity, 
 hitherto hardly attained and perhaps unattainable even 
 by predecessors of not inferior individual genius." 
 
 It is worth while to look somewhat more closely at 
 the one of that poetic brotherhood who was the eldest 
 born, the hardiest, the most original innovator of them 
 all. For a survey of Wordsworth and his poetry there 
 would seem to be now the more room, because his 
 popularity, which during his lifetime underwent so re 
 markable vicissitudes, has, during the interval since his 
 death, receded, and seems now to be at the ebb, with 
 all save the few of genuine poetic instinct. 
 
 It would form a strange chapter in literary history 
 to trace the alternate rise and fall in poetic reputations. 
 To go no further back than the contemporaries of 
 Wordsworth, how various have been their fortunes ! 
 Some, as Byron, were received, almost on their first 
 appearance, with a burst of applause which posterity is 
 not likely fully to reverberate. Some, as Scott I 
 speak only of his poetry, were at first welcomed with 
 nearly equal favor, afterwards for a time retired before 
 a temporary caprice of public taste, but have since re 
 sumed what was their earliest, and is likely to be their 
 permanent place. Others, as Campbell, had at once 
 the poetic niche assigned them, which they are likely 
 hereafter to fill ; while others, as Shelley and Keats, 
 received little praise of men, till they themselves were 
 
THE MAN AND THE POET. 5 
 
 beyond reach of it. Wordsworth had a different for 
 tune from any of these. For more than twenty years 
 after his earlier poems appeared, he experienced not 
 simply neglect, but an amount of obloquy such as few 
 poets have ever had to encounter. But sustained by 
 his own profound conviction that his work was true and 
 destined to endure, and by the sympathy of a very few 
 discerning men, he calmly and cheerfully bode his hour. 
 In time the clamor against him spent itself, the reaction 
 set in between the years 1820 and 1830, reached its 
 culmination about the time of his Oxford welcome in 
 1839, and may be said to have lasted till his death in 
 1850. Since then, in obedience to that law which gives 
 living poets a stronger hold on the minds of their own 
 generation than any poet, even the greatest, of a past 
 age, Wordsworth may seem to have receded somewhat 
 in the world s estimate. But his influence is, in its na 
 ture, too durable to be really affected by these fashions 
 of the hour. It is raised high above the shifting damps 
 and fogs of this lower atmosphere, and shines from the 
 poetic heaven with a benign and undying light. The 
 younger part of the present generation, attracted by 
 newer, but certainly not greater luminaries, may not 
 yet have learned fully to recognize him. But there 
 are many now in middle life, who look back to the time 
 of their boyhood or early youth, when Wordsworth first 
 found them, as a marked era in their existence. They 
 can recall, it may be, the very place and the hour when, 
 as they read this or that poem of his, a new light, as 
 from heaven, dawned suddenly within them. The 
 scales of custom dropped from their eyes, and they 
 beheld all nature with a splendor upon it, as of the 
 world s first morning. The common sights and sounds 
 of earth became other than they were. The heart 
 leapt up to the white streaks of cloud, and looked on 
 
6 WORDSWORTH: 
 
 the early stars of evening with a young wonder, never 
 felt till then. Man too, and human life, cleared of the 
 highway dust, came home to them more intimately, 
 more engagingly, more solemnly, than before. For 
 their hearts were touched by the poet s creative finger, 
 and new springs of thought, tenderer wells of feeling, 
 broke from beneath the surface. And though time and 
 custom may have done much to dim the eye, and 
 choke the feelings which Wordsworth once unsealed, 
 no time can ever efface the remembrance of that first 
 unvailing, nor destroy the grateful conviction that to 
 him they owe a delicate and inward service, such as no 
 other poet has equally rendered. 
 
 Something of this service Wordsworth, I believe, is 
 fitted to render to all men with moderately sensitive 
 hearts, if they would but read attentively a few of his 
 best poems. But to receive the full benefit, to draw 
 out, not random impressions, but the stored wisdom of 
 his capacious and meditative soul, he, above all modern 
 poets, requires no cursory perusal, but a close and con 
 secutive study. It was once common to call him mys 
 tical and unintelligible. That language is seldom heard 
 now. But many, especially young persons, or those 
 trained in other schools of thought, or in no school at 
 all, will still feel the need of a guide in the study of his 
 poetry. For what is best in him lies not on the sur 
 face, but in the depth. It is so far hidden that it must 
 needs be sought for. Not that his language is obscure : 
 what he has to say is expressed for the most part in 
 words as well ordered, as luminous, as adequate as any 
 words in which thought so subtle and so deep has ever 
 clothed itself. But many of his thoughts are of such a 
 nature, so near, yet so hidden from men s ordinary ways 
 of thinking, that the reader, ere he apprehend them, 
 must needs himself go through somewhat of the same 
 
THE MAN AND THE POET. 7 
 
 processes of feeling and reflection as the poet himself 
 passed through in creating them. The need of this re 
 flective effort on the part of the reader is inherent in 
 the nature of many of Wordsworth s subjects, and can 
 not be dispensed with. No doubt the effort is rendered 
 much lighter to us than it was when his poems first ap 
 peared ; so much of what was then new in Wordsworth 
 has since passed into the atmosphere of literature, and 
 found its way to most educate^ minds. Still, with all 
 this, there remains a large * perhaps the largest 
 portion of Wordsworth s peculiar wisdom unabsorbed, 
 nor likely to be soon absorbed, by this excitement-crav 
 ing, unmeditative age. A thorough and appreciative 
 commentary, which should open avenues to the study 
 of Wordsworth, and render accessible his imaginative 
 heights and his meditative depths, would be a boon to 
 the younger part of this generation. The opening 
 chapter of such a commentary would first set forth the 
 facts and circumstances of the poet s life,/_vyould show 
 what manner of man he was, how and by what influ 
 ences his mind was matured, from what points of view 
 he was led to approach nature and human life, and to 
 undertake the poetic treatment of these. A portion 
 of such a chapter I propose to place now before my 
 readers, at least so far as to describe the facts of 
 Wordsworth s early life, and the influences among 
 which he lived, up to the time when he settled at Gras- 
 mere, and addressed himself to poetry as the serious 
 business of his life. 
 
 Wordsworth was sprung from an old North-Hum- 
 brian stock, as contrasted with the South-Humbrian 
 race, a circumstance which has stamped itself visibly on 
 his genius. The name of Wordsworth had been long 
 known in the West Riding of Yorkshire, about the 
 course of the Dove and the Don. Of old they had 
 
8 WORDSWORTH: 
 
 been yeoman, or landed gentry, for both of these they 
 call themselves in old charters, at Penistone, near 
 Doncaster. In this neighborhood they can be traced 
 back as far as the reign of Edward III. From York 
 shire the poet s grandfather is said to have migrated 
 westward, and to have bought the small estate of Sock- 
 bridge, near Penrith. His father, John Wordsworth, 
 was an attorney, and having been appointed law-agent 
 to the then Earl of Lonsdale, was set over the western 
 portion of the wide domain of Lowther, and lived in 
 Cockermouth, in a manor-house belonging to that noble 
 family. John Wordsworth married Anne Cookson, 
 daughter of a mercer in Penrith, whose^ mother, 
 Dorothy, was one of the ancient northern family of 
 Crack en thorpe, a name of note, both in logical and 
 theological lore. These facts may be of little moment 
 in themselves ; but they serve to show that in the wis 
 dom of Wordsworth, as in so many another poet, the 
 virtues of an ancient and worthy race were condensed, 
 and bloomed forth into genius. In that old mansion- 
 house at Cockermouth, William was born on the 7th of 
 April, 1770, the second of four sons. There was only 
 one daughter in the family, Dorothy, who came next 
 after the poet. Cockermouth, their birthplace, though 
 beyond the hill country, stands on the Derweut, called 
 by the poet, " fairest of all rivers," and looks back to 
 the Borrowdale mountains, among which that river is 
 born. The voice of that stream, he tells us, flowed 
 along his dreams while he was a child. When five 
 years old, he used to spend the whole summer-day in 
 bathing in a mill-race let off the river, now in the water, 
 now out of it, now scouring the sandy fields, naked as a 
 savage, while the hot, thundery noon was bronzing 
 distant Skiddaw ; and then plunging in once more. 
 His mother, a wise and pious woman, told a friend 
 
THE MAN AND THE POET. 9 
 
 that William was the only one of her children about 
 whom she felt anxious, and that he would be " remark 
 able either for good or evil." According to the Scot 
 tish proverb, he would either " mak a spoon or spoil 
 a horn." This was probably from what he himself 
 calls his " stiff, moody, and violent temper." Of this, 
 which made him a wayward and headstrong boy, all that 
 he seems afterwards to have retained was that reso 
 luteness of character which stood him in good stead 
 when he became a man. 
 
 Of his mother, who died when he was eight years 
 old, the poet retained a faint but tender recollection. 
 At the age of nine, William, along with his elder brother 
 Richard, left home for school. It would be hard to 
 conceive a school-life more fitted for a future poet than 
 that in which Wordsworth was reared at Hawkshead. 
 This village lies in the vale, and not far from the lake, 
 of Esthwaite, a district of gentler hill-beauty, but in full 
 view, westward and northward, of Kirkstone Pass, Fair- 
 field, and Helvellyn. Hawkshead school, as described 
 in " The Prelude," must have been a strange contrast 
 to the highly-elaborated school-systems of our own day. 
 High pressure was then unknown ; nature and freedom 
 had full swing. Bounds and locking-up hours they had 
 none. The boys lived in the cottages of the village 
 dames, in a natural, friendly way, like their own chil 
 dren. Their playgrounds were the fields, the lake, the 
 woods, and the hill-sides, far as their feet could carry 
 them. Their games were crag-climbing for ravens 
 nests, skating on Esthwaite Lake, setting springes for 
 woodcocks. For this latter purpose they would range 
 the woods late on winter nights, unchallenged. Early 
 on summer mornings, before a chimney was smoking, 
 Wordsworth would make the circuit of the lake. 
 There were boatings on more distant Windermere, and, 
 
10 WORDSWOKTH: 
 
 when their scanty pocket-money allowed, long rides to 
 Furness Abbey and Morecambe Sands. 
 
 In Wordsworth s fourteenth year, when he and his 
 brother were at home for the Christinas holidays, their 
 father, who had never recovered heart after the death 
 of his wife, followed her to the grave. The old home 
 at Cockermouth was broken up, and the orphans were 
 but poorly provided for. Their father had but little to 
 leave his children. For large arrears were due to him 
 by the strange, self-willed Earl of Lonsdale, whom De 
 Quincey describes, and these his lordship never chose 
 to make good. But the boys, not the less, returned to 
 school, and William remained there till his eighteenth 
 year, when he left for Cambridge. 
 
 From Hawkshead, Wordsworth took several good 
 things with him. In book-learning, there was Latin 
 enough to enable him to read the Roman poets with 
 pleasure in after years ; of mathematics, more than 
 enough to start him on equality with the average of 
 Cambridge freshmen; of Greek, I should suppose not 
 much at least we never hear of it afterwards. It 
 was here that he began that intimacy with the English 
 poets which he afterwards perfected ; while for amuse 
 ment he read the fictions of Fielding and Swift, of Cer 
 vantes and Le Sage. But neither at school nor in after 
 life was he a devourer of books. 
 
 Of actual verse-making, his earliest attempts date 
 from Hawkshead. A long copy of verses, written on 
 the second centenary of the foundation of the school, 
 was much admired, but he himself afterwards pro 
 nounced them but a " tame imitation of Pope." Some 
 lines composed on his leaving school, with a few of 
 which the edition of his works of 1 857 opens, are more 
 noticeable, as they, if riot afterwards changed, contain a 
 hint of his maturer self. But more important than any 
 
THE MAN AND THE POET. 11 
 
 juvenile poems, or any skill of verse-making acquired 
 at Hawkshead, were the materials for after thought 
 there laid up, the colors laid deep into the groundwork 
 of his being. In the " Evening Walk," composed 
 partly at school, partly in college vacations, he notices 
 how the boughs and leaves of the oak darken and come 
 out when seen against the sunset. " I recollect dis 
 tinctly," he says nearly fifty years afterwards, "the 
 very spot where this first struck me. It was on the 
 way between Hawkshead and Ambleside, and gave me 
 extreme pleasure. The moment was important in my 
 poetical history ; for I date from it my consciousness 
 of the infinite variety of natural appearances, which had 
 been unnoticed by the poets of any age or country, so 
 far as I was acquainted with them ; and I made a reso 
 lution to supply in some degree the deficiency. I could 
 not have been at that time above fourteen years of age/ 
 Not a bad resolution for fourteen ! And he kept it. It 
 would be hardly too much to say that there is not a 
 single image in his whole works which he had not 
 observed with his own eyes. And perhaps no poet 
 since Homer has introduced into poetry, directly from 
 nature, more facts and images which had not before 
 been noted in books. 
 
 But more than any book-lore, more than any skill 
 in verse-making, or definite thoughts about poetry, was 
 the free, natural life he led at Hawkshead. It was 
 there that he was smitten to the core with that love 
 of nature which became the prime necessity of his be 
 ing ; not that he was a moody or peculiar boy, nursing 
 his own fancies apart from his companions. So far 
 from that, he was foremost in all schoolboy adventures, 
 the sturdiest oar, the hardiest cragsman at the harry 
 ing of ravens nests. Weeks and months, he tells us, 
 passed in a round of school tumult. No life could have 
 
1 2 WORDS WOR TH : 
 
 been every way more unconstrained and natural. But 
 school tumult though there was, it was not in a made 
 playground at cricket or rackets, but in haunts more 
 fitted to form a poet on the lake s and the hill-sides. 
 Would that some poets, who have since been born, had 
 had such a boyhood, had walked, like Wordsworth, 
 unmolested in the cool fields, not been stimulated at 
 school by the fever of emulation and too early intellect 
 uality, and then hurled prematurely against the life- 
 wrecking problems of existence ! [Whatever stimulants 
 Wordsworth had came from within, awakened only by 
 the common sights and sounds of nature. All through 
 his school-time, he says that in pauses of the " giddy 
 bliss " he felt 
 
 " Gleams like the flashing of a shield, the earth 
 And common face of nature spake to him 
 Rememberable things." 
 
 And as time went on, and common school pursuits lost 
 their novelty, these visitations grew deeper and more 
 frequent. At nightfall, when a storm was coming on, 
 he would stand in shelter of a rock, and hear 
 
 " Notes that are 
 
 The ghostly language of the ancient earth, 
 Or make their dim abode in distant winds." 
 
 At such times he was aware of a coming down upon 
 him of the visionary power." On summer mornings 
 he would rise, before another human being was astir, 
 and alone, from some jutting knoll, watch the fir- f 
 gleam of dawn kindle on the lake : 
 
 " Oft in these moments such a holy calm 
 Would overspread my soul, that bodily eyes 
 Were utterly forgotten, and what I saw 
 Appeared like something in myself, a dream, 
 A prospect of the mind." 
 
 Is not this the germ of what afterwards became the 
 
THE MAN AND THE POET. 13 
 
 " Ode on Intimations of Immortality ? " or rather, it is 
 of hours like these that that Ode is the glorified re 
 membrance. 
 
 In October, 1787, at the age of eighteen, Words 
 worth passed from Hawkshead School to St. John s 
 College, Cambridge. College life, so important to 
 those whose minds are mainly shaped by books and 
 academic influences, produced on him but little impres- 
 
 V sion.; On men of strong inward bias the University 
 often acts with a repulsive rather than a propelling 
 force. Recoiling from the prescribed drill, they fall 
 back all the more entirely on their native instincts. 
 The stripling of the hills had not been trained for col 
 lege competitions ; he felt that he was not " for that 
 
 > hour, and for that place." The range of scholastic 
 studies seemed to him narrow and timid. The college 
 dons inspired him with no reverence, their inner heart 
 seemed trivial ; they were poor representatives of the 
 Bacons, Barrows, Newtons of the old time. As for 
 college honors, he thought them dearly purchased at 
 the price of the evil rivalries and narrow standard of 
 excellence, which they fostered in the eager few who 
 entered the lists. Altogether, he had led too free and 
 independent a life to put on the fetters which college 
 contests and academic etiquette exacted. No doubt he 
 was a self-sufficient, presumptuous youth, so to judge 
 of men and things in so famous a University. Such at 
 least he must have appeared to college authorities ; 
 very disappointing too he must have been to friends at 
 home. They had sent him thither, with no little 
 trouble, not to set himself up in opposition to authority, 
 but to work hard, and by working to make his liveli 
 hood. And perhaps home friends and college tutors 
 were not altogether wrong in their opinion of him, if 
 we are to judge of men not wholly by after results. 
 
14 WORDSWORTH: 
 
 Wordsworth at this time may probably enough have 
 been a headstrong, disagreeably independent lad. Only 
 there were latent in him other qualities of a rarer kind, 
 which in time justified him in taking his own line. 
 
 When he arrived in Cambridge, a northern villager, 
 he tells us that there were other poor, simple school 
 boys from the north, now Cambridge men, ready to 
 welcome him, and introduce him to the ways of the 
 place. So, leaving to others the competitive race, he 
 let himself, in the company of these, drop quietly down 
 the stream of the usual undergraduate jollities : 
 
 " If a throng were near, 
 That way I leaned by nature; for my heart 
 Was social, and loved idleness and joy. 
 
 It sounds strange to read in the pompous blank verse 
 of "The Prelude," how, while still a freshman, he 
 turned dandy, wore hose of silk, and powdered hair. 
 And again, how in a friend s room in Christ College, 
 once occupied by Milton, he toasted the memory of 
 the abstemious Puritan till the fumes of wine took his 
 brain the first and last time that the future water- 
 drinker experienced that sensation. During the earlier 
 part of his college course he did just as others did, 
 lounged and sauntered, boated and rode, enjoyed wines 
 and supper-parties, " days of mirth and nights of rev 
 elry ; " yet kept clear of vicious excess. 
 
 When the first novelty of college life was over, he 
 grew dissatisfied with idleness. Sometimes, too, he was 
 haunted by prudent fears about his future maintenance. 
 He withdrew somewhat from promiscuous society, and 
 kept more by himself. Living in quiet, the less he felt 
 of reverence for those elders whom he saw, the more 
 his heart was stirred with high thoughts of those whom 
 he could not see. As he lay in his bedroom in St. 
 
THE MAN AND THE POET. 15 
 
 John s, he could look into the ante-chapel of Trinity, 
 and watch the moonlight moving over the countenance 
 of the great statue there 
 
 
 ; Of Newton, with his prism and silent face, 
 The marble index of a mind forever 
 Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone." 
 
 He read Chaucer under the hawthorn by Tromping- 
 ton Mill, and made intimate acquaintance with Spenser. 
 Milton he seemed to himself almost to see moving be 
 fore him, as, clad in scholar s gown, that young poet 
 had once walked those same cloisters in the angelic 
 beauty of his youth. 
 
 So his time at Cambridge was not wholly lost. Two 
 advantages at least he gained, noble thoughts about the 
 great men who of old had tenanted that "garden of 
 high intellects," and free intercourse with his fellow - 
 men of the same age and of varied character a special 
 gain to one whose life, both before and afterwards, was 
 passed so much in retirement. 
 
 During the summer vacations he and his sister Doro 
 thy, who had been much separated since childhood, met 
 once more under the roof of their mother s kindred in 
 Penrith. With her he then had the first of those ram 
 bles by the streams of Lowther and Ernont which 
 were afterwards renewed with so happy results. Then, 
 too, he first met Mary Hutchinson, his cousin, and his 
 wife to be : 
 
 " By her exulting outside look of youth 
 And placid tender countenance, first endeared." 
 
 (It was during his second or third year at Cambridge, 
 when he had somewhat withdrawn from society, and 
 lived mdre by himself, that he first seriously formed 
 the purpose of being a poet, and dared to hope that he 
 mighjr leave behind him something that would live. ) 
 
16 WORDSWORTH: 
 
 His last long vacation, to reading men often the sever 
 est labor of their lives, was devoted to a walking tour 
 on the Continent along with a college friend from 
 Wales. For himself he had long cast college studies 
 and their rewards behind him, but friends at home, it 
 may readily be imagined, could not see such foolhardi- 
 ness without uneasy forebodings. What was to become 
 of a penniless lad who thus played ducks and drakes 
 with youth s golden opportunities ? But he had as yet 
 no misgivings, he was athirst only for nature and free 
 dom. So with his friend Jones, staff in hand, he 
 walked for fourteen weeks through France, Switzer 
 land, and the north of Italy. With four shillings each 
 daily, they paid their way. They landed at Calais, on 
 the eve of the day when the king was to swear to the 
 new constitution. All through France, as they trudged 
 along, they saw a people rising with jubilee to welcome 
 in the dawn of, as they believed, a new era for man 
 kind. Nor were they onlookers only, but sympathizers 
 in the intoxication of the time, joining in village revels 
 and dances with the frantic multitude. But these 
 sights did not detain them, for they were bent rather 
 on seeing nature than man. Over the Alps, along the 
 Italian lakes, they passed with a kind of awful joy. 
 As they hurried down the southern slope of the Alps, 
 Wordsworth tells us that the woods " decaying, never 
 to be decayed," the drizzling crags, the cataracts, and 
 the clouds, appeared to him no longer material things, 
 but spiritual entities, "characters in a dread Apoca 
 lypse." 
 
 In January, 1789, Wordsworth took a common de 
 gree and quitted Cambridge. The crisis of his life lay 
 between this time and his settling down at Grasmere. 
 He had resolved to be a poet, but even poets must be 
 housed, clothed, and fed ; and poetry has seldom done 
 
THE MAN AND THE POET. 17 
 
 this for any of its devotees, least of all such poetry as 
 Wordsworth was minded to write. But it was not the 
 question of bread alone, but a much wider, more com 
 plex one, which now pressed on him, the same which 
 so many a thoughtful youth, on leaving the University, 
 with awakened powers, but no special turn for any of 
 the professions, has had to face, the question, What 
 next? In such cases the more gifted the querist, the 
 harder becomes the problem. 
 
 This mental trial, incident at all times to early man 
 hood, how must it have been aggravated to a youth 
 such as Wordsworth, turned loose on a world just 
 heaving with the first throes of the French Revolution ! 
 He had seen it while it still wore its earliest auroral 
 hues, when the people were mad with joy, as at the 
 dawn of a regenerated earth. That he should have 
 staked his whole hope on it, looked for all good things 
 from it, who shall wonder? Coleridge, South ey, almost 
 every high-minded young man of that time, hailed it 
 with fervor. Wordsworth would not have been the 
 man he was, if he could have stood proof against the 
 contagion. ( Ou leaving Cambridge he had gone to 
 London. The spring and early summer months he 
 spent there, not mingling in society, for probably he 
 had few acquaintances, but wandering about the streets, 
 noting all sights, observant of men s faces and ways, 
 haunting the open book-stalls. During these months 
 he tells us that he was preserved from the cynicism 
 and contempt for human nature which the deformities 
 of crowded life often breed, by the remembrance of 
 the kind of men he had first lived amongst, in them 
 selves a manly, simple, uncontaminated race\ and in 
 vested with added interest and dignity by living in the 
 same hereditary fields in which their forefathers had 
 lived time out of mind, and by moving about among 
 2 
 
18 WORDSWORTH: 
 
 the grand accompaniments of mountain storms and 
 sunshine. The good had come first, and the evil, 
 when it did come, did not stamp itself into the ground 
 work of his imagination. ( The following summer he 
 visited his travelling companion Jones in Wales, made 
 a walking tour through that country, and beheld at 
 midnight, on Snowdon, that marvelous moonlight vis 
 ion, which toward the end of " The Prelude " he em 
 ploys as an emblem of the transmuting power which 
 resides in a high imagination, and which it exerts on 
 the visible universe. 
 
 When in London, he had heard Burke speaking 
 from his place in the House of Commons on the great 
 debates called forth by the Revolution, then in full 
 swiii" : but he had listened unconvinced. In Novem- 
 
 O 
 
 ber, 1791, he passed to Paris, and heard there the 
 speeches that were made in the Hall of the National 
 Assembly, while Madame Roland and the Brissotins 
 were in the ascendent. A few days he wandered 
 about Paris, surveyed the scenes rendered famous by 
 recent events, and even picked up a stone as a relic 
 from the site of the demolished Bastile. This rage 
 for historic scenes he however confesses to have been 
 in him more affected than genuine. From Paris he 
 went to Orleans, and sojourned there for some time to 
 learn the language. His chief acquaintance there was 
 Beaupois, according to Wordsworth s description, a 
 rarely gifted soul, pure and elevated in his aims. In 
 youth he had been devoted to the service of ladies, 
 with whom beauty of countenance, grace of figure, and 
 refined bearing made him a great favorite. But now, 
 though by birth one of the old French noblesse, he had 
 severed himself from his order, and given himself .with 
 chivalrous devotion to the cause of the poor, j One 
 day, as Wordsworth and he were walking near Or- 
 
THE MAN AND THE POET. 19 
 
 leans, they passed a hungry-looking girl leading a half- 
 starved heifer by a cord tied to its horn. The beast 
 was picking a scanty meal from the lane, while the 
 girl, with palli I hands and heartless look, was knitting 
 for her bread. Pointing to her, Beaupois said with 
 vehemence, "It is against that we are fighting." As 
 they two wandered about the old forests around the 
 city, they eagerly discussed, both the great events that 
 were crowding on each other, and also those abstract 
 questions about civil government, and man s natural 
 rights, which the times naturally suggested. Words 
 worth owns that he threw himself headlong into those 
 questions without the needful preparation, knowing 
 little of the past history of France nnd of her institu 
 tions, and wholly unversed in political philosophy. He 
 only saw that the best ought to rule, and that they 
 don t. I In his boyhood, he says, he had lived among 
 plain people, had never seen the face of a titled man, 
 had therefore no respect for nor belief in such. He 
 therefore now became a patriot and republican, deter 
 mined that kings and aristocracies should cease, and 
 longed for a government of equal rights and individual 
 worth, whatever that may mean. In the days that 
 were coining, abject poverty was to disappear, equality 
 was to bring in a golden time of happiness and virtue. 
 After some months, spent together in sharing dreams 
 like these, they parted, Wordsworth for Blois, and 
 then for the fierce metropolis ; Beaupois to perish ere 
 long 
 
 " Fighting in supreme command 
 Upon the borders of the unhappy Loire." 
 
 When, in the autumn of 1792, Wordsworth came 
 from Blois to Paris, the September massacre had taken 
 place but a month before ; the king and his family 
 
20 WORDSWORTH: 
 
 were in prison ; the Republic was proclaimed, and 
 Robespierre in power. The young Englishman ranged 
 through the city, passed by the prison where the king 
 lay, visited the Tuileries, lately stormed, and the Place 
 de Carrousel, a month since heaped with dead. As he 
 lay in the garret of a hotel hard by, sleepless, and filled 
 with thoughts of what had just taken place, he seemed 
 to hear a voice that cried aloud to the whole city, 
 " Sleep no more." Years after, those scenes still 
 troubled him in dreams. He had ghastly visions of 
 scaffolds hung with innocent victims, or of crowds ready 
 for butchery, and mad with the levity of despair. In 
 his sleep he seemed to be pleading in vain for the life 
 of friends, or for his own, before a savage tribunal, 
 page of " The Prelude " is filled with the some 
 what vague reflections that came to him as he lay 
 sleepless in his garret. The most definite of these is, 
 that a nation s destiny often hangs on the action of 
 single persons, and that the bonds of one common 
 humanity transcend those of country and race. These 
 vague truisms Lockhart, glad no doubt to make the 
 young republican poet look ridiculous, condenses into 
 this : " He revolved in his mind how the crisis might 
 be averted, and, taking the measure of himself and of 
 the various factions, lie came to the conclusion that he, 
 William Wordsworth, was the proper person to rally 
 the nation and conduct the revolution to a happy 
 issue." What authority for this interpretation Lock- 
 hart had, except his wish to ridicule Wordsworth, it is 
 not easy to guess. But just at this crisis, when the 
 young poet, whatever line he had taken, was in immi 
 nent danger of falling along with his friends, the 
 Brissotins, in the then impending massacres of May, 
 he was forced by what he then thought a harsh ne 
 cessity, but afterwards owned to be a gracious provi- 
 
THE MAN AND THE POKT. 21 
 
 dence to return to England. Lockhart suggests that 
 his friends at home, becoming aware of the peril he 
 was in, prudently recalled him by stopping the supplies. 
 
 Returning to England at the close of 1792, he spent 
 some time in London in great unsettlement and mental 
 perplexity. He was horrified with the excesses in 
 which the Revolution had landed, yet not the less he 
 clung to his republican faith, and his hope of the 
 revolutionary cause. When at length Britain inter 
 posed, his indignation knew no bounds ; this step, he 
 said, was the first great shock his moral nature re 
 ceived. With an evil eye, he watched, off the Isle of 
 Wight, the fleet that was to transport our armies to the 
 Continent, heard of the disasters of our arms with 
 joy, and of our success with bitterness. When every 
 month brought tidings of fresh enormities in France, 
 and opponents taunted him with these results of equal 
 ity and popular government, he retorted that these 
 were but the overflow of a reservoir of guilt, which had 
 been filling up for centuries by the wrong doings 
 
 kings and nobles. Soon France entered on a war 
 of conquest, arid he was doomed to see his last hopes 
 of liberty betrayed. Still striving to hide the wounds 
 of mortified presumption, he clung, as he tells us, more 
 firmly than ever to his old tenets, while the friends of 
 old institutions goaded him still further by their tri 
 umphant scorn. Overwhelmed with sharne and despond 
 ency at the shipwreck of his golden dreams, he turned 
 to probe the foundations on which all society rests. 
 Not only institutions, customs, law, but even the 
 grounds of moral obligation and distinctions of right 
 and wrong, disappeared. Demanding formal proof, 
 and finding none, he abandoned moral questions in de 
 spair. This was the crisis of his malady. 
 
 The nether gloom into which he was plunged, and 
 
 )* 
 
22 WORDS WOR 777 : 
 
 the steps by which he won his way back to upper air, 
 are set forth in the concluding Books of " The Pre 
 lude, and are partly described in the character of the 
 Solitary in " The Excursion."/ These self-descriptions, 
 though somewhat vague, are yet well worth attention, 
 for the light they throw on Wordsworth s own mental 
 history, and as illustrating by what exceptional methods 
 one of the greatest minds of that time was floated clear 
 of the common wreck in which so many were en 
 tangled. His moral being had received such a shock 
 that, both as regards man and nature, he tried to close 
 his heart against the sources of his former strength. 
 The whole past of history, he believed, was one great 
 mistake, and the best hope for the human race was to 
 cut itself off forever from all sympathy with it. Even 
 the highest creations of the old poets lost their charm 
 for him. They seemed to him mere products of pas 
 sion and prejudice, wanting altogether in the nobility 
 of reason. He tried by narrow syllogisms, he tells us, 
 to unsoul those mvsteries of being which have been 
 through all ages the bonds of man s brotherhood. This 
 is rather vague ; but perhaps we are not wrong in sup 
 posing it to mean that he grew skeptical of those higher 
 faiths which cannot be demonstrably proved. This 
 moral state reacted on his feelings about the visible 
 universe. It became to him less spiritual than it used 
 to be. Turning on it the same microscopic, unimagina 
 tive eye which he had turned on the moral world, he 
 learnt, by an evil infection of the time, alien to his 
 own nature, to compare scene with scene, to search for 
 mere novelties of form and color, dead to the moral 
 power and the sentiment that resides in each individual 
 place. He fell for a time under a painful tyranny of 
 the eye, that craves ever new combinations of form, 
 uncounteracted by the reports of the other senses, unin- 
 
THE MAN AND THE POET. 23 
 
 formed by that finer influence that streams from the 
 soul into the eye. 
 
 In this sickness of the soul, this " obscuration of the 
 master vision," his sole sister Dorothy came, like his 
 better angel, to his side. Convinced that his office on 
 earth was to be a poet, not to break his heart against "\ 
 the hard problems of politics and philosophy, she led 
 him away from perplexing theories and crowded cities 
 into the open air of heaven. Together they visited, 
 travelling on foot, many of the most interesting districts 
 of their native England, and mingled freely with the 
 country people and the poor. There, amid the fresh 
 ness of nature, his fevered spirit was cooled down, 
 earth s " first diviner influence " returned, he saw already 
 things again as he had seen them in boyhood. It was 
 not merely that nature acted on his senses and so re 
 stored his mind s health. His understanding saw in the V \j 
 processes of earth and sky, going on by steadfast laws, / 
 a visible image of right reason. His overwrought 
 feelings were cooled and soothed by the contemplation 
 of objects in which there is no fever of passion, no im 
 patience, no restless vanity. II is imagination, dazzled 
 erewhile with the whirl of wild and transitory projects, 
 found here something to rest on that was enduring. 
 This free intercourse with nature in time brought him 
 back to his true self, so that he began to look on life 
 and the frame-work of society with other eyes, and to 
 seek there too for that which is permanent and in 
 trinsically good. At this time, as he and his sister 
 wandered about various out-of-the-way parts of Eng 
 land, where they were strangers, he found not delight 
 only, but instruction, in conversing with all whom he 
 met. The lonely roads were open schools to him. 
 There, as he entered into conversation with the poor 
 est, often with the outcast and the forlorn, and heard 
 
24 WORDSWORTH: 
 
 from them their own histories, he got a new insight 
 into human souls, discerned in them a depth and a 
 worth where none appear to careless eyes. The per 
 ception of these things made him loathe the thought 
 of those ambitious projects which had lately deceived 
 him. He ceased to admire strength detached from 
 moral purpose, and learned to prize unnoticed worth, 
 the meek virtues, and lowly charities. Settled judg 
 ments of right and wrong returned, bul they were es 
 sential, not conventional judgments. [In his estimate of 
 men he set no store by rank or station, little by those 
 "formalities" which have been misnamed education.] 
 For he seemed to himself to see utter hollowness in 
 the talking, so-called intellectual world, and little good 
 got by those who had held most intercourse with it. 
 He now set himself to see whether a life of toil was 
 necessarily one of ignorance ; whether goodness was a 
 delicate plant requiring garden culture, and intellectual 
 power a thing confined to those who call themselves 
 educated men. And as he mingled freely with all 
 kinds of people, he found a pith of sense and a solidity 
 of judgment here and there among the unlearned 
 which he had failed to find in the most lettered ; from 
 obscure men he heard high truths, words that struck in 
 with his own best thoughts of what was fair and good. 
 And love, true love and pure, he found was no flower 
 reared only in what is called refined society, and requir 
 ing leisure and polished manners for its growth. Ex 
 cessive labor and grinding poverty, he grants, by 
 preoccupying the mind with sensual wants, often crush 
 the finer affections. And it is difficult for these to 
 thrive in the overcrowded alleys of cities, where the 
 human heart is sick, and the eye looks only on de 
 formity. But in all circumstances, save the most ab 
 ject, sometimes even in these, [ie had seen the soul 
 
THE MAN AND THE POET. 25 
 
 triumphing over sense, the heart beating all the truer 
 from living in contact with natural wants, and with the 
 reality of things. In our talk of these matters we mis 
 lead each other, and books mislead us still more, 
 books, which in that day more than now, being written 
 mostly for the wealthy, put things in artificial light ; 
 lower the many for the pleasure of the few, magnify 
 external differences arid artificial barriers that separate 
 man from man, and neglect the one human heart. In 1 
 opposition to all this, he himself had found " love in 
 huts where poor men lie," the finest bloom of the, 
 affections where the outward man was rude to look 
 upon ; under the humblest guise had seen souls that 
 were sanctified by duty, patience, and sorrow: 
 
 " Of these, said I, shall he my song: of these, 
 If future years mature me for the task, 
 \Yill I record the praises, making verse 
 Deal boldly with substantial things. My theme 
 No other than the very heart of man, 
 As found among the hestof those who live 
 Not unexalted by religious faith, 
 Not uninformed by l>ooks, ijood books, though few 
 In nature s presence: thence may I select 
 Sorrow, that is not sorrow, but delight; 
 And miserable love, that, is not pain 
 To think of. for the ylory that redounds 
 Therefrom to human-kind, and what we are." 
 
 Then follows a passage, perhaps the most finely 
 thought, most perfectly expressed, in the whole " Pre 
 lude," in which he describes the different kinds of 
 power, the different grades of nobleness, which he had 
 found among the poor. It is too long to quote here, 
 but those who care for these things will find it worth 
 turning to. 
 
 His mind being thus restored to tone, and able to 
 look once more on common life with love and imagina 
 tive delight, the visible world reassumed the splendor 
 
26 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 which it had worn for him in childhood, combined with 
 that which only thought could add a fuller conscious 
 ness of the sources whence this beauty comes. His 
 eye now looked on nature with the wonder of the 
 world s childhood, mellowed with the reflectiveness of 
 its mature age. 
 
 Such is the pathway by which Wordsworth describes 
 himself as having travelled from darkness up to light, 
 from distrust of all truth and despair, back to clear con 
 victions, and peace and hope. In reading it as set forth 
 in u The Prelude " and " The Excursion," many have 
 complained that his experience wa,s an exceptional one, 
 and contains no help for others. / If so, small blame to 
 him. Processes of this kind cannot be transferred bod 
 ily from one mind to another, like historical facts or 
 mathematical proofs. It is not possible for minds of 
 the order of Wordsworth s, which live by intuitions, 
 rather than by chains of reasoning, to impart to others, 
 or indeed to do more than hint at those intuitions, 
 which, though the light of all their seeing, are born 
 within them, they know not how. Even those who 
 deal more with processes of reasoning, and who can 
 trace exactly the lines of thought by which they seem 
 to themselves to have been led upward, as Coleridge 
 has in some measure done, although they may commu 
 nicate to others the intellectual shape which their own 
 spiritual apprehensions have taken, cannot at the same 
 time give that which is the life of these apprehensions. 
 Those who read their arguments may, no doubt, grasp 
 them and find help in them, in so far as their intellect 
 ual difficulties are the same as those of the writer. 
 But will this enable them to envisage and make their 
 own the primal truths on which the reasonings repose, 
 and from which alone they draw their power? Is it not 
 of the nature of moral and spiritual truths, that if they 
 
THE MAN AND THE ^JWT JJ J Y 27 
 
 once reach a man, they are their owo sufficient evi 
 dence ? Once to feel them is to know them to be true, 
 with a conviction such as no arguments can produce. 
 But who shall enable another thus to feel truths which 
 may be to himself the life of life ? Not the reasoner. / 
 He at best but convinces the understanding, doesTiot 
 satisfy the spirit. The inspired thinker, poet or other, 
 can do more. He can touch others who are lower 
 sunk than himself, by a kind of spiritual contagion. 
 But even he cannot reach to the bottom, and minister 
 healing to the mind diseased. In the last resort it will 
 not be from the intellects and teachings of others that 
 light will come. That, if it come at all, will come from 
 a region beyond a man s consciousness, and by a pro 
 cess that he cannot analyze. In these deepest, most 
 secret workings of the soul, no one man s experience 
 will exactly fit in with that of any other man. 
 
 But here I must pause. For in this account of ! 
 Wordsworth s hour of darkness and restoration to light, 
 given almost in his own words, I have somewhat out 
 run the order of dates and places. This restoration, 
 though summed up in the concluding books of " The 
 Prelude," could not have taken place in a few months, 
 but must have been the work of at least several years. 
 Though this inward fermentation working itself to 
 clearness was the most important, the bread-question 
 must, at the same time, have been tolerably urgent. 
 To meet this, he had, as far as appears, simply nothing, 
 except what was allowed him by his friends. Of 
 course neither they nor he could long tolerate such a 
 state of dependence. /What, then, was to be done? 
 Three or four courses were open to him the bar, 
 taking orders, teaching private pupils, and writing for a 
 London newspaper. All passed under his review, but 
 to each and all he Was nearly equally averse. It must 
 
28 WORDSWORTH: 
 
 have been at this time that he felt so keenly those fore 
 bodings, afterwards beautifully described in his poem 
 of u Resolution and Independence," when the fate of 
 Chatterton and Barns rose mournfully before him, and 
 he asked himself 
 
 " How can he expect that others should ^X 
 Build for him, sow for him, and at his call 
 Love him, who for himself will take no heed at all? " 
 
 In this juncture, the newspaper press, an effectual 
 extinguisher to a possible poet, was ready to have ab 
 sorbed him. He had actually written to a friend in 
 London, who was supporting himself in this way, to 
 find him like employment, when he was delivered from 
 these importunities by a happy occurrence/ In the 
 close of the year 1794 and the beginning of 1795, he 
 was engaged in attending at Penrith a friend, Raisley 
 Calvert, who had fallen into a deep consumption. Cal- 
 vert died early in 1795, and bequeathed to Wordsworth 
 a legacy of 900. He had divined Wordsworth s 
 genius, and believed that he would yet do great things. 
 Seldom in deed has so small a sum produced larger 
 results. It removed at once Wordsworth s anxiety 
 about a profession, rescued him from the newspaper 
 press, set him free to follow his true bent, and give free 
 rein to the poetic power he felt working within him. 
 
 One of the first results of the legacy was to restore 
 K Wordsworth permanently to the society of his sister. 
 Hitherto, though they met whenever occasion offered, 
 they had not been able to set up house together ; but 
 now this was no longer impossible. And surely never 
 sister performed a more delicate service for brother 
 than Dorothy Wordsworth did for the poet. De 
 Quincey has given a full and engaging portrait of that 
 lady, as she appeared some years later than this, but 
 still in her fervid prime, when he first made acquaint- 
 
THE MAN AND THE POET. 29 
 
 ance with her brother s family at Grasmere. He de 
 scribes her as of " warm, even ardent rammer," now 
 bursting into strong expression, now checked by deco 
 rous self-restraint, of profound sensibility to all things 
 beautiful, with quick sympathy and deep impressibility 
 for all he said or quoted, seemingly inwardly con 
 sumed by u a subtle fire of impassioned intellect." And 
 yet withal, so little of a literary lady, so entirely re 
 moved from being a blue-stocking, that she was ignorant 
 of many books and subjects which, to most educated 
 persons, were quite commonplace. Such she was 
 when De Quincey lirst saw her more than ten years 
 after the brother and sister began to live together. 
 We have seen how, when Wordsworth returned from 
 France, depressed with shame, and despondency for his 
 shipwrecked hopes, she turned him from dark and 
 harassing thoughts, and brought him into contact with 
 the healing powers of nature. In many places of his 
 works the poet has borne grateful testimony to all she 
 did for him. At this time, he tells us, it was she who 
 maintained for him a saving intercourse with his true 
 self, opened for him the obstructed passage between 
 head and heart, whence in time came genuine self- 
 knowledge and peace. Again, he says that his imagina 
 tion was by nature too masculine, austere, even harsh ; 
 he loved only the sublime and terrible, was blind to the 
 milder graces of landscape and of character. She it 
 was who softened and humanized him, opened his eyes 
 to the more hidden beauties, his heart to the gentler 
 affections : 
 
 " She gave me eyes, she ?ave me ears : 
 And humble cares, and delicate fears; 
 A heart, the fountain of sweet tears, 
 And love, and thought, and joy." 
 
 If there were no other records of her than those 
 
30 WORDSWORTH: 
 
 brief extracts from her journal during the Highland 
 tour, which stand at the head of several of her brother s 
 poems, these alone would prove her possessed of a large 
 portion of his genius. Longer extracts from them occur 
 in the poet s biography and in the edition of the poems 
 of 1857, and often they seem nearly as good as the 
 poems which they introduce. Might not that wonder 
 ful journal, even yet, be given entire, or nearly so, to 
 the world ? 
 
 It was in the autumn of 1795, at Racedown in 
 Dorsetshire, that the brother and sister, on the strength 
 
 i of the nine hundred pounds, set up house together. 
 
 fThis was the first home they had of their own, and 
 Wordsworth always looked back to it with a special 
 love. So retired was the place, that the post came only 
 once a week. But the two read Italian together, gar 
 dened, and walked on the meadows, and on the tops of 
 the combs. These ware their recreations. For serious 
 work, Wordsworth fell first to writing Imitations of 
 Juvenal, in which he assailed fiercely the vices of the 
 time, but these he never published. / Then he wrote in 
 the Spenserian stanza the poem of "Guilt and Sorrow," 
 not published till long afterwards, but in which there is 
 more of his real self than in anything he had yet done. 
 Then followed his tragedy, " The Borderers, which all, 
 even his greatest admirers, feel to be a failure. Be 
 sides, there were one or two shorter poems, in his 
 matured manner, such as the " Cumberland Beggar," 
 which was written partly here, partly at Alfoxden. 
 So many trials had Wordsworth to make, " The Even 
 ing Walk," the " Descriptive Sketches," " Imitations of 
 Juvenal," " The Borderers," before he found out his 
 true strength and his proper style. 
 
 More important, however, than any poetry composed 
 at Racedown was his first meeting there with S. T. 
 
THE MAN AND THE POET. 31 
 
 Coleridge. Perhaps no two such men have met any 
 where on English ground during this century. Cole 
 ridge when at Cambridge had read the u Descriptive 
 Sketches," and finding in them something he had never 
 found in poetry before, longed to know their author. 
 Since leaving Cambridge, though two years and a half 
 younger than Wordsworth, he had gone through half a 
 lifetime of adventure, had served as a private in a 
 cavalry regiment, been an enthusiast for the French 
 Revolution, had tried to emigrate with Southey, and to 
 found a Pantisocracy on the banks of the Susquehanna, 
 been stopped by want of funds, then turned Unitarian 
 preacher, and was now a young poet and philosopher 
 on the loose. JMiss Wordsworth describes him as he 
 looked on his first visit to Racedown. For the first 
 three minutes he seemed plain : " Thin and pale, the 
 lower part of the face not good, wide mouth, thick lips, 
 not very good teeth, longish, loose, half-curling, rough, 
 black hair," a contrast to Wordsworth at this time, 
 with his fine light- brown hair and beautiful teeth. But 
 the moment Coleridge began to speak, you thought 110 
 Baore of these defects. You saw him as his friend after 
 wards described him 
 
 " The rapt one of the godlike forehead, 
 The heaven-eyed creature." 
 
 Or, as he elsewhere more fully portrayed him 
 
 " A noticeable man with large grey eyes, 
 And a pale face that seemed undoubtedly 
 As if a blooming face it ought to he; 
 Heavy his low-hung lip did oft appear 
 Depressed by weight of brooding phantasy; 
 Profound his forehead was, though not severe." 
 
 During this visit Wordsworth read aloud to Cole 
 ridge nearly twelve hundred lines of blank verse, 
 "superior," says Coleridge, "to anything in our Ian- 
 
1 
 
 32 WORDSWORTH: 
 
 guage." This probably included the story of Margaret, 
 or " The Ruined Cottage," which now stands at the 
 opening of The Excursion," and certainly, in blank 
 verse, Wordsworth never surpassed that. AVhen they 
 parted Coleridge says, " I felt myself a small man beside 
 Wordsworth ; " while of Coleridge, Wordsworth, cer 
 tainly no over-estimater of other men, said, I have 
 known many men who have done wonderful things, but 
 the only wonderful man I ever knew was Coleridge." 
 Their first intercourse had ripened into friendship, and 
 they longed to see more of each other, i As Coleridge 
 was at this time living at the village of Nether Stowey 
 in Somersetshire, the Wordsworths removed in the 
 autumn of 1797 to the country-house of Alfoxden, in 
 the immediate neighborhood. The time he spent at 
 Alfoxden was one of the most delightful seasons of 
 Wordsworth s life. The two young men were of one 
 mind in their poetic tastes and principles, one too in 
 political and social views, and each admired the other 
 more than he did any other living man. In outward 
 circumstances, too, they were alike ; both poor in 
 money, but rich in thought and imagination, both in the 
 prime of youth, and boundless in hopeful energy. 
 That summer as they wandered aloft on the airy ridge 
 of Quantock, or dived down its silvan combs, what high 
 talk they must have held ! Theirs was the age for 
 boundless, endless, unwearied talk on all things human 
 and divine. Hazlitt has said of Coleridge in his youth, 
 that he seemed as if he would talk on forever, and you 
 wished him to talk on forever. With him, as his youth, 
 so was his age. But most men, as life wears on, having 
 found that all their many and vehement talkings have 
 served no lasting end of the soul, grow more brief and 
 taciturn. Long after, Wordsworth speaks of this as a 
 very pleasant and productive time. The poetic well- 
 
THE MAN AND THE POET. 33 
 
 head, now fairly unsealed, was flowing freely. Many 
 of the shorter poems were then composed from the 
 scenery that was before his eyes, and from incidents 
 there seen or heard. Among the most characteristic 
 of these were, " We are Seven," " The Mad Mother," 
 " The Last of the Flock," " Simon Lee," " Expostula 
 tion and Reply," u The Tables Turned," " Lines to his 
 Sister," beginning "It is the first mild day of March," 
 " Lines in early Spring," beginning " I heard a thou 
 sand blended notes, the last containing these words, 
 which give the key-note to Wordsworth s feeling about 
 nature at this time 
 
 " And tis my faith that every flower 
 Enjoys the air it breathes." 
 
 If any one will read over the short poems above 
 named, they will let him see further into Wordsworth s 
 mood during this, the fresh germinating spring-time of 
 his genius, than any words about them can. 
 
 The occasion of their making a joint literary ven 
 ture was curious. Coleridge, Wordsworth, and his sis 
 ter wished to make a short walking tour, for which 
 five pounds were needed, but were not forthcoming. 
 To supply this want they agreed to make a joint 
 poem, and send it to some magazine which would give 
 the required sum. Accordingly, one evening as they 
 trudged along the Quantock Hills, they planned " The 
 Ancient Mariner," founded on a dream which a friend 
 of Coleridge had dreamed. Coleridge supplied most 
 of the incidents, and almost all the lines. Words 
 worth contributed the incident of the shooting of the 
 albatross, with a line here and there. "The Ancient 
 Mariner " soon grew, till it was beyond the desired 
 five pounds worth, so they thought of a joint volume, j 
 Coleridge was to take supernatural subjects, or roman- 3 
 3 
 
34 WORDSWORTH: 
 
 (tie, and invest them with a human interest and resem 
 blance of truth. Wordsworth was to take common 
 every-day incidents, and by faithful adherence to na 
 ture, and by true but modifying colors of imagination, 
 was to shed over common aspects of earth and facts 
 of life such a charm as light and shade, sunset and 
 moonlight, shed over a familiar landscape. "^Words 
 worth was so much the more industrious of the two, 
 that he had completed enough for a volume when 
 Coleridge had only finished " The Ancient Mariner," 
 and begun u Christabel " and " The Dark Ladie." Cot- 
 tie, a Bristol bookseller, was summoned from Bristol to 
 arrange for publication, and he has left a gossiping 
 but amusing account of his intercourse with the two 
 poets at this time, and his visit to Alfoxden. He 
 agreed to give Wordsworth 30 for the twenty-two 
 pieces of his which made up the first volume of the 
 " Lyrical Ballads," while for " The Rime of the Ancient 
 Marinere," which was to head the volume, he made a 
 separate bargain with Coleridge. This volume, which 
 appeared in the autumn of 1798, was the first which 
 made Wordsworth known to the world as a poet, for 
 the " Descriptive Sketches " had attracted little or no 
 notice. Of the ballads or shorter poems, which, as we 
 have seen, were mostly composed at Alfoxden, and 
 which reflect the feelings and incidents of his life there, 
 I shall reserve what I have to say for a more general 
 survey. The volume closes with one poem in another 
 style, in which the poet speaks out his inmost feel 
 ings, and in his own 4 grand style." This is the poem 
 on Tintern Abbey, composed during a walking tour on 
 the Wye with his sister, just before leaving Alfoxden 
 for the Continent. Read these lines over once again, 
 however well you may know them. Bear in mind 
 what has been told of the way his childhood arid boy- 
 
THE MAN AND TI1K POET. 35 
 
 hood had passed, living in the eye of nature, the sepa 
 ration that followed from his favorite haunts and ways, 
 the wild fermentation of thought, the moral tempest 
 he had gone through, the return to nature s lonely 
 places, and to common life and peaceful thoughts, with 
 intellect and heart deepened, expanded, humanized, by 
 having long brooded over the ever-recurring questions 
 of man s nature and destiny ; bear these things in 
 mind, and as you read, every line of that master 
 piece will come out with deeper meaning and in ex- 
 acter outline. And then the concluding lines, in which 
 the poet turns to his sister, his fellow-traveller, with 
 " the shooting lights in those wild eyes," in which 
 he caught " gleams of past existence " 
 
 " If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief, 
 Should be thy portion " 
 
 what prophetic pathos do these words assume when we 
 remember how long arid mournfully ere life ended 
 those wild eyes were darkened ! 
 
 Before the volume appeared, Wordsworth and his 
 sister had left Alfoxden, and sailed with Coleridge for 
 Germany. It has been said that the reason for their 
 leaving Somersetshire was their falling under suspicion 
 as hatchers of sedition. A government spy, with a 
 peculiarly long nose, was sent down to watch them. 
 Coleridge tells an absurd story, how, as they lay on 
 the Quantock Hills, conversing about Spinoza, the spy, 
 as he skulked behind a bank, overheard their, talk, and 
 thought they were speaking about himself under the 
 nickname of " Spy-nosey." Coleridge was believed to 
 have little harm in him, for he was a crack-brained, 
 talking fellow; but "that Wordsworth is either a 
 smuggler or a traitor, and means mischief. He never 
 speaks to any one, haunts lonely places, walks by 
 
36 WORDSWORTH: 
 
 moonlight, and is always booing about by himself." 
 Such was the country talk ; and the result of it was, 
 the agent for the owner of Alfoxden refused to re-let 
 the house to so suspicious a character. So the three 
 determined to pack up, and winter on the Continent. 
 At Hamburg, however, they parted company. Their 
 ostensible purpose was to learn German, but Words 
 worth and his sister did little at this. He spent the 
 winter of L798-99, the coldest of the century, in 
 Goslar, and there, by the German charcoal-burners, the 
 poet s mind reverted to Esthwaite and Westmoreland 
 hills, and struck out a number of poems in his finest 
 vein. " She dwelt among the untrodden ways," * Lucy," 
 or " Three years she grew in sun and shower," " Ruth," 
 " The Poet s Epitaph," " Nutting," " The Two April 
 Mornings," The Fountain," " Matthew," are all 
 products of this winter. So Wordsworth missed Ger- 
 .man, and gave the world instead immortal poems. 
 Coleridge went alone to Gottingen, learned German, 
 dived for the rest of his life deep into transcendental 
 metaphysics, and the world got no more Ancient 
 Mariners. 
 
 In the spring of 1799, Wordsworth and his sister set 
 forth from Goslar on their return to England. As 
 they left that city behind, and felt the spring breeze 
 fan their cheeks, Wordsworth poured forth that joyful 
 strain with which <k The Prelude " opens. Arrived in 
 their native land, they passed most of the remainder of 
 the year with their kindred, the Hutchinsons, at Sock- 
 burn-on-Tees, occasionally travelling into the neighbor 
 ing dales and fells of Yorkshire. In September, 
 Wordsworth took Coleridge, who also had returned 
 from abroad, and had seen but few mountains in his 
 life, on a walking tour to show him the hills and lakes 
 of native Westmoreland. " Haweswater," Coleridge 
 
THE MAN AND THE POET. 37 
 
 writes, " kept my eyes dim with tears, but I received 
 the deepest delight from the divine sisters, Rydal and 
 Grasrnere." It was then that Wordsworth saw the 
 small house at the Town End of Grasmere, which he 
 and his sister soon after fixed on as their home. 
 
 From Sockburn-on-Tees William and Dorothy 
 Wordsworth set forth a little before the shortest day, 
 and walked on foot over the bleak fells that form the 
 watershed of Yorkshire and Westmoreland. As side 
 by side they paced the long dales, and set their faces 
 to the Hambleton hills, the ground was frozen hard 
 under their feet, and the snow-showers were driving 
 against them. Yet they enjoyed the snow-showers, 
 turned aside to see the frozen waterfalls, and stopped 
 to watch the changing drapery of cloud, sunshine, and 
 snow-drift as it coursed the hills. At night they 
 lodged in cottages or small wayside inns, and there, by 
 the kitchen fire, Wordsworth gave words to the 
 thoughts that had occurred to him during the day. 
 A great part of " Har-t-leap W^ell " was composed 
 during one of these evenings, from a tradition he had 
 heard that day from a native. And of a sunset seen 
 during the same journey, some of the glory still lives 
 in the sonnet ending 
 
 They are of the sky, 
 And from our earthly memory fade away." 
 
 The poet and his sister reached Grasmere on the 
 shortest day of the year 1799, and settled in the small 
 two-storied cottage at that part of the village called 
 Town-End. The house had formerly been a public 
 house, with the sign of the Dave and the Olive Bough, 
 but was henceforth to be identified with Wordsworth s 
 poetic prime. The mode of life on which they were 
 entering was one which their friends, no doubt, and 
 
38 WORDSWORTH: 
 
 most sensible people, called a mad project. With 
 barely a hundred pounds a year between them, they 
 were turning their back on the world, cutting them 
 selves off from professions, chances of getting on, so 
 ciety, and settling themselves down in an out-of-the- 
 way corner, with no employment but verse-making, 
 no neighbors but the homely dalesmen. When a man 
 makes such a choice, he has need to look well what he 
 does, and to be sure that he can go through with it. 
 In the world s eyes nothing but success will justify 
 such a renunciant, and the world will not be too ready 
 to grant that success has been attained. But Words 
 worth, besides a prophet- like devotion to the truths he 
 saw, had a prudence, self-denial, and perseverance, rare 
 among the sons of song. To himself may be applied 
 the words he uses in a letter to Sir George Beaumont, 
 when speaking of another subject than poetry : " It 
 is such an animating sight to see a man of genius, re 
 gardless of temporary gains, whether of money or 
 praise, fixing his attention solely upon what is interest 
 ing and permanent, and finding his happiness in an 
 entire devotion of himself to such pursuits as shall 
 most ennoble human nature. We have not yet seen 
 enough of this in modern times." He himself showed 
 this sight, if any man of his age did. Plain living and 
 high thinking were not only praised in verse, but acted 
 out by him and his sister in that cottage home. 
 
 The year 1800 was ushered in by a long storm, 
 which blocked up the roads for months, and kept them 
 much indoors. This put their tempers to the proof, 
 but they stood the test. Spring weather set them free, 
 and brought to their home a much loved sailor brother, 
 John, who was captain of an Indiaman. In their 
 frugal housekeeping the sister, it may be believed, had 
 much to do indoors, but she was always ready, both 
 
THE MAN AND THE POET. 39 
 
 then and years after, to accompany her brother in his 
 mountain walks. Those who may wish to know more 
 of their abode and way of life, will find an interesting 
 sketch of these given by De Quincey, as he saw them 
 seven years later. There was one small room con 
 taining their few books, which was called, by courtesy, 
 the library. But Wordsworth was no reader ; the 
 EngUbih p.Qets and ancient history were the only two 
 subjects he was really well read in. He tells a friend 
 that he had not spent five shillings on new books in 
 as many years, and of the few old ones which made 
 up his collection he had not read one fifth. As for 
 his study, that was in the open air. " By the side of 
 the brook that runs through Eusdale," he says, " I 
 have composed thousands of verses : " 
 
 " He murmurs near the running brooks 
 A music sweeter than their own." 
 
 Another favorite resort for composition at this time 
 was the tall fir-wood on the hillside above the old road 
 leading from Grasmere to Rydal. Society they found 
 in the families of the " statesmen " all about. For 
 Grasmere was then, like most of the neighboring dales, 
 portioned out among small but independent peasant 
 lairds, whose forefathers had for ages lived and died on. 
 the same farms. With these men Wordsworth and his 
 sister lived on terms of kindliness and equal hospitality. 
 He would receive them to tea in his home, or would 
 go to sup in theirs. If the invitation was to some 
 homestead in a distant vale, the ladies would travel in 
 a cart, the poet walking by its side. Among these 
 men, in their pastoral republic, the life was one of not 
 too laborious industry ; the manners were simple, 
 manly, arid severe. The statesmen looked after the 
 sheep, grew hay on their own land in the valley, and 
 
40 WORDS WOR TH : 
 
 each could turn out as many sheep to feed on the fell 
 or common (as they call it) during the summer months, 
 as they could provide hay for in the winter. Their 
 chief source of income was the wool from the flock, 
 and this not sold in the fleece, but spun into thread by 
 the wives and daughters. These, with their spinning- 
 wheels, were in high esteem, for they did more to 
 maintain the house than the spade or plough of the 
 husbands. Wordsworth loved this manner of life, not 
 only because he had been familiar with it from child 
 hood, but also because he knew what sterling worth 
 and pure domestic virtues sheltered under these roofs. 
 He lived to. see it rudely broken up. Machinery put 
 out the spinning-wheel, and the statesmen s lands 
 passed for the most part into other hands. 
 
 The few statesmen s families who survived down to 
 a recent time in and around Grasmere, retained an 
 affectionate and reverent remembrance of the " pawej.," V 
 as they in their Westmoreland dialect called him, long 
 after he had left them for Rydal Mount. Many stories 
 I have heard them tell of his ways, while living at the 
 Town-End ; how, alone, or oftener with his sister, at 
 night-fall, when other people were going to bed, he 
 would be seen setting out to walk to Dunmail liaise, 
 or climbing that outlying ridge of Fairfield which over 
 hangs the forest side of Grasmere, there to be all night 
 long till near the breaking of the day. At such a time 
 it may well have been, when on those heights he was 
 alone with the stars, and the voices of the mountain 
 streams were coming up from far below, that the Ode 
 on Mortality " first came to him. When in their 
 houses strangers have read aloud, or told in their own 
 words some of his shorter poems descriptive of incident 
 arid character, or the two books of " The Excursion " ^ 
 which describe the tenants of the churchyard among 
 
THE MAN AND THE POET. 41 
 
 the mountains, I have heard old residenters name many 
 of the persons there alluded to, and go on to give more 
 details of their lives. 
 
 The first months at Grasmere were so industriously 
 employed, that some time in the year 1800, when a 
 second edition of the first volume of " Lyrical Ballads " 
 was being reprinted, he added to it a new volume con 
 taining thirty-seven new pieces. Among these were 
 the poems already mentioned as having been composed 
 during the German winter, as well as some new ones 
 which had been suggested since he settled at Grasmere. 
 Such were the " Idle Shepherd Boys," " Poems on the 
 Naming of Places," " The Brothers," " Michael," all 
 redolent of the Westmoreland fells. These two vol 
 umes cannot be said to have foiled, for they were re 
 printed in 1802, arid again in 1805; and in 1806, 
 Jeffrey, even when inveighing against a new and better 
 volume of poems, speaks of the " Lyrical Ballads " as 
 " unquestionably popular." I shall not, however, stay to 
 comment on their contents till I have done with narra 
 tive. Only a few facts stand out prominently from the 
 happy and industrious tenor of the life at Grasmere. 
 /In 1802, that Earl of Lonsdale, who to the last refused 
 to pay to the Wordsworths their due, died, and was 
 succeeded by a better-minded kinsman, who paid to 
 them the original debt of 5,000 due to their father, 
 with 3,500 of interest. /This was divided into five 
 shares, of which two went to the poet and his sister. 
 This addition to his income enabled the poet to take 
 to himself a wife, his cousin, and the intimate friend 
 of his sister, Mary Hutchinson, whom he had long 
 known and loved. It is she whom he describes in his 
 exquisite lines 
 
 " A creature not too bright or good 
 For human nature s daily food ; 
 
42 WORDSWORTH: 
 
 A perfect woman, nobly planned, 
 To warn, to comfort, and command; 
 And vet a spirit still, and bright 
 With something of an angel light." 
 
 They lived together in as great happiness as is allowed 
 to human beings, till the poet had fulfilled his fourscore 
 years, when she survived him a few years longer. 
 
 In the August of 1803, Mrs. Wordsworth having 
 been kept at home by domestic duties, Wordsworth 
 and his sister set out from Keswick with Coleridge on 
 their memorable tour in Scotland. They travelled 
 great pari of the way on foot, up Nithsdale, and so on 
 towards the Highlands. Coleridge turned back soon 
 after they had reached Loch Lomond, being either lazy 
 or out of spirits. Everywhere as they trudged along, 
 they saw the old familiar Highland sights, as if none 
 had ever seen them before ; and wherever they moved 
 among the mountains, they left footprints of immortal 
 beauty. He expressed what he saw in verse, she in 
 prose, and it is hard to say which is the more poetic. 
 Of all that has been, or yet may be, said or sung about 
 the Highlands, what words can ever equal those entries 
 in her journal ? what poems can ever catch the soul 
 of things like the " Address to Kilchum Castle," 
 " Glen-Almain," " Stepping Westward," and " The 
 Solitary Reaper ? " The last of these, perhaps the 
 most perfect of Wordsworth s poems, must have been 
 suggested as they walked somewhere in the region 
 about Loch Voil, between the braes of Balquhidder 
 and Strathire. W r hat was the name of her who sug 
 gested it, and where is she now? Who can tell ? But 
 whether she be still alive in extremest old age, or, as 
 is far more likely, long since laid in Balquhidder kirk- 
 yard or in some other, in that poem she will sing on for 
 ever in eternal youth, to delight generations yet to be. 
 
THE MAN AND THE POET. 43 
 
 In the beginning of 1805, the first great sorrow fell 
 on Wordsworth s home, in the loss of his brother, Cap 
 tain Wordsworth. He was leaving England, intend 
 ing to make one more voyage, and then to return and 
 live with his sister and brother, when, by the careless 
 ness of a pilot, his ship was run on the shambles of the 
 Bill of Portland, and he with the larger part of his 
 crew went down. For long Wordsworth was almost 
 inconsolable, he so loved and honored his brother. His 
 letters at this time, and his poems long after, are 
 darkened with this grief. In one of these letters this 
 striking thought occurs: " Why have we sympathies 
 that make the best of us so afraid of inflicting pain and 
 sorrow, which yet we see dealt about so lavishly by the 
 Supreme Governor ? Why should our notions of right 
 towards each other, and to all sentient beings within 
 our influence, differ so widely from what appears to be 
 his notion and rule, if everything were to end here ? " 
 Captain Wordsworth had greatly admired his brother s 
 poetry, but saw that it would take time to become pop 
 ular, and would probably never be lucrative. So he 
 would work for the family at Town-End, he said, and 
 William would do something for the world. " This is 
 the end of his part of the agreement," says the poet ; 
 " God grant me life and strength to fulfill mine ! " 
 
 In 1807, Wordsworth came out with two more vol 
 umes of poetry, for the most part produced at Gras- 
 mere. He was now in his thirty-seventh year, so that 
 these volumes may be said to close the spring-time of 
 his genius, and to be its consummate flower. Some of 
 his after works may have equaled these, and may even 
 show an increased moral depth and religious tender 
 ness. But there is about the best of the Grasmere 
 poems an ethereal touch of ideality which he perhaps 
 never afterwards reached. Besides the Scottish poems 
 
44 WORDSWORTH: 
 
 already noticed, there were the earliest installment of 
 sonnets, some of them the best he ever wrote, as that 
 " London seen from Westminster Bridge ; " " It is a 
 beauteous evening, calm and free ;" " The World is too 
 much with us ; " " Toussaint L Ouverture ; " " Milton, 
 thou shouldst be living at this hour ! " 
 
 These volumes contain also u The Song of Brougham 
 Castle ; " " Resolution and Independence ; " the poem 
 to the Cuckoo, beginning, " O blithe new-comer ; " 
 " Elegiac Stanzas suggested by the picture of Peele 
 Castle ; " and last, and chief of all, the " Ode on Inti 
 mations of Immortality." The three last named espe 
 cially have that indescribable, unapproachable ideality, 
 which I have spoken of as the characteristic of his 
 best poems at this time. Indeed, the " Ode on Immor 
 tality " marks the highest limit which the tide of po 
 etic inspiration has reached in England within this cen 
 tury, or indeed since the days of Milton. 1 
 - As Wordsworth s outward as well as his inward his 
 tory has been traced thus far, it may be well not to 
 take leave of it without here noting the few facts that 
 yet remain. The cottage at the Town-End of Gras- 
 mere was his home from the close of 1799 till the 
 spring of 1808. This was the time when his inspira 
 tion was at flood-tide. At Town-End, as we have 
 seen, " Michael," " Resolution and Independence," " The 
 Cuckoo," " The Solitary Reaper," and the other memo 
 rials of Scotland, u The Song of Brougham Castle," 
 " Stanzas on Peele Castle," and, above all, the immor 
 tal " Ode," first saw the light. There too most of 
 
 1 Tt has lately been suggested that Wordsworth owed the first hint of 
 this great ode to Henry Vauirhan s poem called the R-treat. But those 
 who have observed how deep down in Wordsworth s nature lay that sense 
 of the mystery and ideality of childhood, and how often it crops out in 
 his works, will be slow to believe that he had to go to any extrinsic source 
 to find it. 
 
THE MAN AND THE POET. 45 
 
 " The Prelude " was written, besides many smaller 
 poems. In 1808, as the Town-End cottage had grown 
 too small for his increasing family, he was obliged to 
 move to Allan Bank, a new house which was hardly 
 finished, on the top of a knoll to the west of Grasmere, 
 overlooking the lake. Here he remained till the spring 
 of 1811 ; but the house was for some time unfinished, 
 and the chimneys smoked, and to this his biographer 
 has attributed, what he thinks, a comparative dearth of 
 production during these three years. But it should be 
 remembered that it was probably at Allan Bank that 
 the greater part of " The Excursion " was composed, 
 though it was not published till some years later. 
 Coleridge was an inmate of Wordsworth s home during 
 the earlier part o7 the Allan Bank residence. In the 
 spring of 1811, Wordsworth was obliged to remove 
 thence to the Parsonage of Grasmere, situated between 
 the church and the lake. The poet s stay here was 
 darkened by the loss of two of his little children, a girl 
 and a boy, who were laid side by side in the same 
 grave, hard by in Grasmere churchyard. A small blue 
 stone preserves the following epitaph written by the 
 poet over his boy : 
 
 " Six months to six years added he remained 
 Upon this sinful earth, hy sin unstained: 
 O blessed Lord ! whose mercy then removed 
 A Child whom every eye that looked on loved ; 
 Support us, teach us calmly to resign 
 What \ve possessed, and now is wholly thine! " 
 
 This affliction, which at the Parsonage was rendered 
 insupportable by the continual sight of the two graves, 
 made the poet and his family glad to quit the vale of 
 Grasmere for a new home at Rydal Mount, which 
 offered itself in the spring of 1813. This was their 
 last migration, and there the poet and his wife lived 
 
46 WORDSWORTH: 
 
 till, many years after, they were carried back to join 
 their children in the churchyard of Grasmere. 
 
 Rydal Mount saw a good deal of poetry composed, 
 but not much in the poet s finest vein. It witnessed, 
 however, many other good things : an easy competence 
 brought to the poet s door in the shape of a distributor 
 ship of stamps, the steady growth of his reputation 
 from comparative obscurity till he took his acknowl 
 edged place beside the chief kings of P^nglish song. 
 thirty-seven years of contented and beneficent life, 
 rounded by a peaceful close. Besides the two children 
 lost in 1812, the poet s family consisted of a daughter 
 and two sons. The daughter, " Dora," afterwards Mrs. 
 Quillinan, died before her father ; the two sons still 
 survive. These facts are not irrelevant, but essential 
 ones to the understanding of Wordsworth. Few poets 
 have been by nature so fitted for domestic happiness, 
 and fewer still have been blessed with so abundant a 
 share of it. The strength and purity of his home 
 affections, so deep and undisturbed, entered into all that 
 he thought and sang. Herein may be said to have 
 lain the heart of " central peace " that sustained the 
 whole fabric of his life and poetry. 
 
 The account I have given of the growth of Words 
 worth s mind from childhood to maturity has been ex 
 tracted mainly from u The Prelude," and is meant to 
 throw light on the aim and spirit of his poetry. If a 
 discriminating mental history of the poet could be given, 
 followed by an edition of his works, in which the sev 
 eral poems were arranged, not in the present arbitrary 
 manner, but chronologically according to the date of 
 their composition, this would form the best of all com 
 mentaries. ( There were three epochs in Wordsworth s 
 poetry, though these shade so insensibly the one into 
 the other, that any attempt exactly to define them 
 
THE MAN AND THE POET. 47 
 
 must be somewhat arbitrary. What I have already 
 called the spring-time of his genius would reach from 
 his first settling at Racedown, or at any rate his going 
 to Alfoxden in 1797, till his leaving Grasmere Town- 
 End in 1808. The second epoch, or full midsummer 
 of his poetry, would include his time at Allan Bank 
 and his first years at Rydal Mount, as far as 1818 or 
 1820. This was the time when "The Excursion," 
 k> Luodamia," " Dion," and the " Duddon Sonnets " were 
 composed. The third epoch, or the sober autumn, 
 reaching from about 1820 till he ceased from the work 
 of composition, is the time of the ecclesiastical and other 
 sonnets, of " Yarrow Revisited," and the Scottish poems 
 of 1833 ; and lastly, of the memorials of his Italian 
 tour in 1837 > ^- 
 
 But to return to the poems of the first epoch. It 
 was the two volumes of 1807, those which, as we have 
 seen, contained the very prime ore of his genius, that 
 called forth Jeffrey s well-known vituperation. The 
 unfairness of that review lay in this, that the weak 
 parts of the book were brought out in strong relief, 
 while the best were thrown as far as possible into the 
 background. Over " the unfortunate Alice Fell," as it j 
 has been called, the critic makes himself merry, and by 
 extracting a number of homely matter-of fact lines and 
 stanzas, which occur here and there in the other poems, 
 contrived to make Wordsworth s name a by-word for 
 many a day for bathos arid puerility. But his verdict 
 on the very best those which all the world has since 
 acknowledged prove that to the Edinburgh lawgiver 
 on matters of taste, poetic originality was as a picture 
 to a blind man s eye. " Yarrow Unvisited " he calls 
 " a very tedious, affected performance." After quoting 
 from and describing " Resolution and Independence," 
 he thus concludes : " We defy the bitterest enemy of 
 
48 WORDSWORTH: 
 
 Mr. "Wordsworth to produce anything at all parallel to 
 this from any collection of English poetry, or even from 
 the specimens of his friend Mr. Southey." In the same 
 strain he quotes from the " Ode to the Cuckoo," in 
 which he thinks that the author, striving after force and 
 originality, produces nothing but absurdity. Lastly, 
 \/ the " Ode on Immortality " is " the most illegible and 
 unintelligible part of the publication." The only parts 
 of the two volumes quoted with approbation are the 
 Brougham song and three sonnets. These facts I have 
 mentioned, not from a wish to disinter long since buried 
 strifes, but because allusion to them is necessary to 
 bring out the true force of Wordsworth both as a man 
 and a poet. The result of this review was to stop the 
 sale of his poems for a number of years. But whoever 
 else might be snuffed out by a severe review, Words 
 worth could not be so silenced. To a friend who wrote 
 condoling with him on the severity of the criticism 
 and it must be remembered that in those days the ver 
 dict of the " Edinburgh " was all but omnipotent he 
 replied : " Trouble not yourself upon their present re 
 ception ; of what moment is that compared with what I 
 trust is their destiny ! to console the afflicted ; to add 
 sunshine to daylight, by making the happy happier ; to 
 teach the young and gracious of every age to see, to 
 think, and feel, and, therefore, to become more actively 
 and securely virtuous ; this is their office, which 1 trust 
 they will faithfully perform, long after we (that is, all 
 that is mortal of us) are mouldering in our graves." 
 Again : " I doubt not that you will share with me an 
 invincible confidence that my writings (and among them 
 these little poems) will cooperate with the benign 
 tendencies in human nature and society, wherever 
 found ; and that they will, in their degree, be efficacious 
 in making men wiser, better, and happier." This Ian- 
 

 THE MAN AND THE POET. 49 
 
 guage is not vanity, but the calm confidence of a man 
 who feels the rock under his feet, knows that he is in 
 harmony with the everlasting truth of things. In the 
 issue between the critic and the poet, the world, long 
 neutral, or rather adverse to the latter, at length sided 
 with him, and will continue permanently to do so. 
 Before his death he saw posthumous fame secured to 
 him ; but it is instructive to note what a change thirty 
 years had made in his feeling regarding it. In 1837, \ 
 he thus writes to another correspondent : " I am stand- j 
 ing on the brink of that vast ocean I must sail so soon ; 
 I must speedily lose sight of the shore ; and I could 
 not once have conceived how little I now am troubled 
 by the thought of 
 who remain on 
 
 of how long or how short a time they 
 that shore may have sight of me." 
 
 What is there in these poems which there is not in 
 any other ? What is their peculiar virtue ? To seize 
 and set forth in words the heart of anything with 
 which we have been long familiar is not easy ; never 
 theless something of this kind must, however imper 
 fectly, be attempted. In the opening of " The Pre 
 lude," Wordsworth tells us that when he first seriously 
 thought of being a poet, he looked into himself to see 
 how he was fitted for the work, and seemed to find 
 there " that first great gift, the vital soul." In this 
 self-estimate he did not err. The vital soul, it is a 
 great gift, which, if ever it dwelt in man, dwelt in 
 Wordsworth. Not the intellect merely, nor the heart, 
 nor the imagination, nor the conscience, nor any of 
 these alone, but all of them condensed into one, and 
 moving all together. In virtue of this vital soul, 
 whatever he did see he saw to the very core. He did 
 not fumble with the outside or the accidents of the 
 thing, but his eye went at once to the quick, rested 
 
50 WORDSWORTH: 
 
 on the essential life of it. He saw what was there, but 
 had escaped all other eyes. He did not import into the 
 outward world transient fancies or feelings of his own, 
 " the pathetic fallacy," as it has been named ; but he 
 saw it, as it exists in itself, or perhaps rather as it exists 
 in its permanent moral relations to the human spirit. 
 
 Again, this soul within him did not work with effort ; 
 no painful groping or grasping. It was as vital in its 
 respectivity as in its active energy. It could lie long 
 in a " wise passiveness," drawing the things of earth 
 and sky and of human life into itself, as the calm, clear 
 lake does the imagery of the surrounding hills and 
 overhanging sky. 
 
 " Think not, mid all this mighty sum , 
 
 Of things forever speaking, 
 That nothing in itself will come, 
 But we must still be seeking." 
 
 Those early spring poems at Alfoxden, from which 
 these lines are taken, specially express what I mean, 
 the wonderful interchange that went on between 
 him and all the things about him, they flowing into 
 him, he flowing out into them. His soul attracted 
 them to itself, as a mountain-top draws the clouds, and 
 at their touch woke up to feel its kinship with the 
 mysterious life that is in all nature, and in each sepa 
 rate object of nature. This is the cardinal work of the 
 imagination, to possess itself of the life of whatever 
 thing it deals with. In the extent to which he did 
 this, and the truthfulness with which he did it, lies 
 Wordsworth s supreme power: 
 
 Hence one may observe that all genuine imagina 
 tion is essentially truthful, and the purer it is, the 
 more truthful. The reports it brings in, so far from 
 being mere fancies, are the finest, most hidden truths. 
 In Wordsworth, the higher his inspiration rises, the 
 
 y. 
 
 *r </ 
 
y i ^j 
 
 r/ if".i\r A\-T\ rrriT< Tin r.-"n fi.1 
 
 \^ "*\ Sf 
 
 THE MAN AND TEE POET. 
 
 \ *- tr-tf 
 
 more penetrating is his truthfulness. What may be 
 v.the relation between the truths which imagination re 
 veals, and those which are the result of scientific dis 
 covery, who shall determine ? it would be a fine 
 inquiry for one who can to work at ; but every one 
 
 A must feel that 
 , *\ * 
 
 " The moon doth with delight 
 Look round her when the heavens are bare," 
 
 * : gives the essence of a clear moonlight sky more truth- 
 
 M "fully in its relation to the human spirit, than any mere 
 \ meteorologist can do. What words, poetic or scientific, 
 jj will ever fender the mountain stillness like these few 
 |, plain ones ? 
 
 " The sleep that is among the lonely hills; " 
 
 V ^J or the impression made by a solitary western peak, 
 S.like 
 
 " There is an eminence of these our hills, 
 The last that parleys with the setting sun." 
 
 It is this rendering of the inner truth of things which 
 Mr. Arnold has happily called " the interpretative 
 power of poetry." This must be that which Words- i 
 worth himself means when, in his preface, he says that *> 
 " poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge ; 
 it is the impassioned expression which is in the coun 
 tenance of all science." And it is " the vital soul " 
 in the poet which penetrates into this, and reads it off 
 for other men. This, too, is what is meant when we 
 find it said in " The Prelude " that imagination, in its 
 highest use, is but another name for " absolute power, 
 clearest insight, reason in her most exalted mood ; " 
 and that this imagination, exercised on outward nature 
 and on human life, is the parent of love, or feeling . 
 intellect. This language will, no doubt, to sorfe sound 
 
 - v 
 
 y ; . 
 
 f. r * 
 
 k xjr 
 
 
 

 , : 
 
 mystical. But it is the language of one who possessed 
 that which he spoke of in larger mass, arid of finer 
 quality, than any Englishman since Shakespeare and 
 Milton. It is the presence of this power in Words 
 worth which is the source of that indescribable charm 
 which many have felt in his poetry, and have found in 
 none other before or since. They were brought by it 
 for a moment soul to soul with truth, caught, as they 
 read, a glimpse into the life of things such as no other 
 poet of these days has given them. This clearness of 
 vision, rare at all times, becomes much rarer as the 
 ages go on. The naming era, when men could still 
 give names to things, is long past, and -with disuse the 
 faculty has died out. Under heaps of words, which we 
 receive without effort, dead metaphors, fossils of extinct 
 poetic acts, the moulding power of imagination lies 
 buried. And not only language has got stiff and hard 
 ened, but society has become complicated in a thousand 
 ways ; phrases, custom, conventionality, doubts, dis 
 putes, lie many layers thick above every new-born 
 soul. The revolutionary age into which Wordsworth 
 was born may have made some rents in these, and let 
 the basement of truth be here and there seen through. 
 And yet, even with this help,} what power must have 
 dwelt in that quiet eye to put all these obstructions 
 aside, and see things anew for itself, as if no one had 
 ever looked on them before,/ 
 
 i^Jliis power manifests itself in Wordsworth especially 
 in two directions, as it is turned on nature, and as it is 
 turned on man. Let us, for the sake of clearness, ex 
 amine them separately, though, in reality, they often 
 blend. Between Wordsworth s imagination, however, 
 as it works in the one direction and in the other, there 
 is this difference. In dealing with nature, it has no 
 limit : it is as wide as the world ; as much at home 
 
THE MAN AND THE POET. 53 
 
 when gazing on the little celandine, as when moving 
 with the vast elemental forces of earth and heaven. 
 In human life and character his range is narrower, 
 whether these limitations came from within, or were 
 self-imposed. His sympathies embrace by no means 
 all human things, but within the range which they do 
 embrace, his eye is no less penetrating and true. 
 About nature, it has become so much the fashion to 
 rave, there has been so much counterfeit enthusiasm, 
 that it is a subject one almost dreads speaking of. But 
 whatever it may be to most men, there can be no doubt 
 that free nature, mountain solitudes, were as essential 
 to Wordsworth s heart, as the air to his lungs. About 
 this, nothing he has said goes beyond the simple truth. 
 Of his manner of dealing with it in his poetry, the fol 
 lowing thjngs may be noted : 
 
 ^First/When he would place some particular land 
 scape before the reader, he does not heap up an ex 
 haustive enumeration of details. Only one or two of 
 the most essential features faithfully given, and then 
 from these he passes at once to the sentiment, the 
 genius of the place, that which gives it individuality, 
 and makes it this and no other place, j Numerous in 
 stances of the way in which he seizes the inner spirit 
 of a place and utters it, will occur to every reader. To 
 give one out of many : after sketching briefly the out 
 ward appearance of the four fraternal yew-trees of Bor- 
 rowdale, who else could have condensed the total 
 impressions into such lines as these, so intensely imag 
 inative, so profoundly true ! 
 
 " Beneath whose sable roof 
 Of boughs, as if for festal purpose, decked 
 With unrejoicing berries ghostly shapes 
 May meet at noontide; Fear and trembling Hope, 
 Silence and Foresight; Death the Skeleton, 
 And Time the Shadow; there to celebrate, 
 
54 WORDS WOR TH : 
 
 As in a natural temple, scattered o er 
 With altars undisturbed of mossy stone, 
 United worship; or in mute repose 
 To lie and listen to the mountain flood, 
 Murmuring from Glaramara s inmost caves." 
 
 When in this passage, or in that wonderful poem, 
 " What, are you stepping westward ? " and many more, 
 we find the poet spiritualizing so powerfully the famil 
 iar appearances and common facts of earth, adding, as 
 he himself says, 
 
 " The gleam, 
 
 The light that never was, on sea or land, 
 The consecration, and the poet s dream," 
 
 one is tempted to ask, Is this true, is the light real, or 
 only fantastic ? Now in this, I conceive, lies Words 
 worth s transcendent power, that the ideal light he 
 sheds is a true light, and the more ideal it is, the more 
 true. Poets, all but the greatest, are apt to adorn 
 things with fantastic or individual .hues, to suffuse 
 them with their own temporary emotions, which Mr. 
 Ruskin has called the u pathetic fallacy." The ideal 
 light which Wordsworth sheds does not so, but brings 
 out only more vividly the real heart of nature, 1 the in- 
 
 1 This expression has been objected to as vague or meaningless. It is 
 certainly a condensed form of words, hut it aims at expressing a real 
 though subtle truth. If asked to explain it, I should do so in this way: 
 Each scene in nature has in it a power of awakening in every beholder 
 of sensibility, an impression peculiar to itself, such as no other scene can 
 exactly call up. This may be called the " heart " or " character " of that 
 scene. It is quite analogous to, if somewhat vaguer than, the particular 
 impression produced upon us by the presence of each individual man. 
 Now the aggregate of the impressions produced by many scenes in nature, 
 or rather the power in nature on a large scale of producing such impres 
 sions on us, is what, for want of another name, I have called the 
 " heart " of nature. The test of what is the real heart or character of 
 any scene is to be ascertained by the experience of what the largest num 
 ber of men of the truest poetic sensibility feel in the presence of that 
 scene. What it is in nature which produces these impressions on human 
 imaginations I do not undertake to say. But that one cannot explain 
 the cause or mode of operation, is no reason why one should not notice 
 and name the fact. 
 
THE MAN AND THE POET. 55 
 
 most feeling, which is really there, and is recognized 
 by Wordsworth s eye in virtue of the kinship between 
 nature and his soul. If it be asked How is this? I can 
 but reply, that there is a wonderful and mysterious 
 adaptation between the external world and the human 
 soul, the one answering to the other in ways not yet 
 explained by any philosopher. 
 
 / Secondly, It is perhaps but turning to another side 
 of the same quality to note what a base of natural, 
 rather than philosophical idealism lay at the bottom of 
 the eye which Wordsworth turned on nature. Whereas 
 to most men the material world is a heavy, gross, dead 
 mass, earth a ball of black mud, painted here and there 
 with some color, Wordsworth felt it to be a living, 
 breathing power, not dead, but full of strange life ; his 
 eye almost saw into it, as if it were transparent. So 
 strongly did this feeling possess him, that in childhood 
 he was a complete idealist. Speaking of himself at 
 that age, he says, " I was often unable to think of ex 
 ternal things as having external existence, and I com 
 muned with all I saw as something, not apart from, but 
 inherent in my own immaterial nature. Many times \ 
 while going to school have I grasped at a wall or tree to 
 recall myself from the abyss of idealism to the reality. 
 At that time I was afraid of such processes. In later 
 periods of life I have deplored, as we have all reason to 
 do, a subjugation of an opposite character, and have 
 rejoiced over these remembrances." Here is idealism, 
 far beyond that of Berkeley or any other philosopher, 
 engendered not by subtle arguments of metaphysics, but 
 born from within by sheer force of soul, before which 
 the solid mass of earth is fused and unsubstantialized. 
 Out of moods like these, or rather the remembrance of 
 them, are projected some of his most ideal lights, such 
 as form the charm of his finest poems, like the lines to 
 
:. 
 WORDSWORTH: 
 
 the Cuckoo, and the " Ode on Immortality." Heiice 
 came the 
 
 " Obstinate questionings, 
 Of sense and outward things, 
 Fallings from us, vanishings," 
 
 which he looked back to with thankful joy in mature 
 manhood. With these abstract and visionary feelings 
 there blended more tender human remembrances of 
 that early time, making together a beautiful light of 
 morning about his after days, and touching even the 
 common things of life with an affecting, tender so 
 lemnity. <i 
 
 Thirdly, f With this spiritualizing power of soul 
 Wordsworth combined another faculty, which might 
 seem the most opposed to it, wonderful keenness 
 and faithfulness of eye for the minutest facts of the 
 outward worldJ Seldom in his library, much in the 
 open air, at all hours, in all seasons, from childhood 
 to old age, his watchful observant eye had stored his 
 mind with all the varied and ever-changing aspects 
 of nature. His imagination was a treasure-house 
 whence he drew forth things new and old, the old as 
 fresh as if new. No modern poet has recorded so 
 large and so varied a number of natural facts and 
 appearances, which had never before been set down 
 in books. And these he brings forth, not as if he 
 had noted and carefully photographed them, to be 
 reproduced whenever an occasion offered, but as famil 
 iar knowledge that had come to him unawares, and 
 recurred with the naturalness of an instinct. Many 
 no doubt had seen before, but who before him had so 
 described the hare ? 
 
 " The grass is bright with raindrops ; on the moors 
 The hare is running races in her rnirth; 
 And with her feet she from the plashy earth 
 
T 
 
 H U 
 
 * 
 
 >OET. ,07 
 
 Cr\ 
 
 Raises a mist, that, glittering in the sun, 
 
 Runs with her all the way, wherever she doth run." 
 
 fy-v<*A"Or again, who else would have noted the effect of 
 a leaping trout, or of a croaking raven, in bringing out 
 the solitariness of a mountain tarn ? 
 
 1 
 
 >* 1> V " T nere sometimes doth a leaping fish 
 
 Send through the tarn a lonely cheer; 
 The crags repeat the raven s croak 
 In symphony austere." 
 
 Or again, in the calm bright evening after a stormy 
 day 
 
 " Loud is the Vale ! the voice is up 
 
 With which she speaks when storms are gone, 
 A mighty unison of streams! 
 Of all her voices, one ! 
 
 " Loud is the Vale ! this inland depth 
 
 In peace is roaring like the sea; 
 Yon star upon the mountain -top 
 Is listening quietly." 
 
 Who but Wordsworth would have set off the uproar 
 of the vale by the stillness of the star on the mountain 
 head ? Here, in passing, I may note the strange 
 power there is in his simple prepositions. The star 
 is upon the mountain-top ; the silence is in the starry 
 sky ; the sleep is among the hills ; " the gentleness 
 of heaven is on the sea," not " broods o er," as the 
 later editions have it. / This double gift of soul and 
 eye, highest ideality and most literal realism combined, 
 have made him of all modern poets nature s most un 
 erring interpreter. 1 / 
 
 Fourthly, Hence it conies that all the moods and 
 outgoings of -nature are alike open to him ; every kind 
 
 I 1 No one, that I know, has yet laid his finger on a single mistake 
 made by Wordsworth with regard to any appearance of nature, or fact 
 
 in natural history, though keen observers have done this in the case of 
 
 both Walter Scott and Burns. 
 
58 WORDSWORTH: 
 
 of country renders up to him its secret. He is alike 
 true, whether in describing the boundless flats of Salis 
 bury Plain, combs and dells of western Somersetshire, 
 fells and lakes of native Cumberland, Yorkshire moors 
 and dales, wilder glens of our own Highlands, or the 
 pastoral quiet of the Border hills. Who save him 
 could have gathered up the whole- feeling of Yarrow 
 into that consummate stanza, " Meek loveliness," etc., 
 etc.? 
 
 (If there is preeminence in any one department, it 
 is in the interpretation of his own mountains, j This 
 is so altogether adequate and profound, that it has 
 often seemed as if those dumb old solitudes had, after 
 slumbering since the beginning of time, at last waked 
 to consciousness in him, and uttered their inmost heart 
 through his voice. No other mountains have ever 
 had their soul so perfectly expressed. Philosophers 
 have dreamed that nature and the human soul are the 
 two limbs of a double-clefted tree, springing from and 
 united in one root ; that nature is unconscious soul, 
 and the soul is nature become conscious of itself. 
 Some such view as this, if it were true, might account 
 for the marvelous sympathy there is between Words 
 worth s poetry and the spirit that is in his own moun 
 tains, and for his power of rendering their mute being 
 into his solemn melodies. 
 
 But it is now time to look at that other side of 
 things in which his vitality of imagination is seen. 
 His meditative eye penetrates not less deep when 
 turned on the heart and character of man, than when 
 it contemplates the face of nature. It has, however, 
 been already noted, that while in the latter depart 
 ment his range is limitless, in the former it is not 
 only restricted, but restricted within very marked and 
 definite bounds. For man as he is found in cities. 
 
THE MAN AND THE POET. 59 
 
 or as he appears in the complex conditions of advanced 
 civilization, Wordsworth cares little ; he turns his back 
 on the streets, the drawing-rooms, the mart, and the 
 change, but lovingly enters the cottage and the farm, 
 and walks with the shepherd on his hills, or the va 
 grant on lonely roads. The choice of his characters 
 from humble and rustic life was caused partly by the 
 original make of his nature, partly from his early 
 training, which made him more at home with these 
 than with artificial man, partly also from that repub 
 lican fervor which he imbibed in his opening manhood. 
 He believed that in country people what is permanent 
 in human nature, the essential feelings and passions 
 of mankind, exist in greater simplicity and strength. 
 Their manners, he thought, spring more directly from 
 such feeling, and more faithfully express them. Their 
 lives and occupations too are " with grandeur circum- 
 fused." Thus they are invested with a glory, beyond 
 others, from the background of wild and beautiful na 
 ture against which they are seen. These are the rea 
 sons he gives for selecting his subjects from humble 
 life, and within this range he, for the most part, con 
 fines himself. There is still another limitation. Even 
 in these characters he is not so much at home in deal 
 ing with their trivial outside appearance, or little 
 laughable peculiarities of manner or costume. He has 
 small caring for these things, and when he sets to de- ., 
 scribe them he often fails, as in the "Idiot Boy" per- Y^ 
 haps, and in " Goody Blake."/ A few touches of real 
 humor would have wonderfully relieved these person 
 ages, but this Wordsworth has not to give/ He can 
 not, as Burns often does, exhibit his humble characters 
 dramatically, does not laugh and sing, much less drink, 
 with his peasants ; he is not quite one of themselves, 
 sharing their thoughts, and having no other and higher 
 
GO WORDSWORTH: 
 
 thoughts. What he sets himself to portray is their 
 serious feelings, the deep tliiugs of their souls, that in 
 which the peasant and the peer are one, and in which, 
 us Wordsworth thinks, the advantage may often lie 
 with the former. [He has, as Coleridge has said, "deep 
 sympathy with man as man ; but it is the sympathy 
 of a contemplator, rather than a fellow-sufferer or co- 
 mate ;| but of a contemplator from whose view no dif 
 ference of rank conceals the sameness of nature ; no 
 injuries of time and weather, of toil, or even of igno 
 rance, wholly disguise the human face divine." / In 
 fact it is the moral and spiritual part of man which 
 he most sees and feels, and other things are interesting 
 chiefly as they affect this./ His thoughts dwell in 
 
 V The depth, and not the tumult of the soul," 
 
 not on the surface manners, nor on the effervescent and 
 transitory emotions, but on those which are steadfast 
 and forever. It is in virtue of his deep insight into 
 these, that common incidents assume for him an impor 
 tance and interest which to less reflective men has 
 seemed exaggerated or sometimes even ludicrous. The 
 reflections, however, which they awake in him are not 
 only true and deep, but they are such as add new 
 dignity or tenderness to human life. A frail old man 
 thanked him fervently for cutting through for him at a 
 blow an old root, which he had long been haggling at 
 in vain. The tears in the old man s eyes drew out 
 from Wordsworth this reflection 
 
 u I ve heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds 
 
 With coldness still returning; 
 Alas ! the gratitude of men 
 Hath oftener left me mourning." 
 
 Qln setting forth such characters as The Brothers, 
 chael, the Cumberland Beggar, etc., etc. (though in 
 
THE MAN AND THE POET. 61 
 
 the last of these there is somewhat too much moraliz 
 ing), he gives them not only as common acquaintances 
 see them, or as they appear to themselves ; this he 
 does, but something more. He lets us see them in 
 their relations to those unseen laws of the moral world, 
 of which they themselves may be unaware, but which 
 they suggest to the inspired insight of the poet. And 
 in this way the emotions called forth by the sight of 
 suffering do not end in mere emotion, but strike into a 
 more enduring, that is, a moral ground, and so are 
 idealized and relieved. This moral vision has a 
 wonderful power to elevate, often to solemnize, things, 
 the lowliest and most familiar. It has been said that 
 Burns has caused many an eye to look on the poorest 
 thatched cottage of the Scottish peasantry with a feel 
 ing which, but for Burns, the beholder had never 
 known. The same may be said of Wordsworth, with a 
 difference. He has revealed, in the homeliest aspects 
 of humble life, a beauty and worth not recognized be 
 fore, or long forgotten. He has opened for men new 
 sources of interest in their kind, not only in shepherds 
 and peasants, but in tattered beggars, and gypsies, and 
 wayworn tramps. 
 
 Much stuff has been talked and written about Words 
 worth being^a^ me.mly subjective poet. Critics had 
 good need to be sure they were right before they char 
 acterize great poets by such vague, abstract words ; for 
 they quickly get into the minds of the reading public, 
 and stick there, and do much mischief. True it is that " 
 Wordsworth has read his own soul, not 1 that which was r 
 accidental or peculiar in him, but that which he had in / 
 common with all high and imaginative men, But is \ 
 this all ? has he done nothing more ? If ever man 
 caught the soul of things, not himself, and expressed it, 
 Wordsworth did. That he has done it in nature almost 
 
62 WORDSWORTH: 
 
 limitlessly we have seen. In man he has done it not 
 less truly, though more restrictedly. Taking the re 
 strictions at their utmost, what contemporary poet (I 
 do riot speak of Scott in his novels) has left to his 
 country such a gallery of new -and individual portraits 
 as a permanent possession ? The deeper side of char 
 acter no doubt it is, the heart of men, not their 
 clothes, but it is character in which there is nothing 
 of himself, nothing which all men might not or do not 
 share. The affliction of Margaret, the Mad Mother, 
 Gypsies, Laodamia, the Highland Reaper, the Wag 
 oner, Peter Bell, Matthew, Michael, the Cumberland 
 Beggar, all the tenants of the Churchyard among the 
 Mountains what are these? What, but so many 
 separate, individual, outstanding portraits, into which 
 all of himself that enters is only the eye that can see 
 arid read their souls on their deeper side. For it is 
 not their outward contour, nor their complexion, nor 
 dress, he busies himself with. He painted, as Titian 
 and Leonardo did their great portraits, with the deeper 
 soul predominating in the countenance. If he seized 
 this, he cared little for the rest. Let us discard, then, 
 that foolish talk about Wordsworth as a merely subjec 
 tive poet, who could give nothing but his own feelings, 
 or copies of his own countenance. 
 
 There are many other aspects in which this vital 
 power of imagination in Wordsworth might be viewed. 
 Qnly one more of these I must note, and then pass on. 
 /He pushed the domain of poetry into a whole field of 
 subjects hitherto unapproached by the poets./ In him, 
 perhaps more than any other contemporary writer 
 either of prose or verse, we see the highest spirit of 
 this century, in its contrast with that of the preceding, 
 summed up and condensed. What most strikes one, in 
 recurring to the poetry of the Pope and Addison period, 
 
THE MAN AND THE FOET. 63 
 
 is its external character, and the limited range of sub 
 jects which it dealt with. In the writings of that time, 
 the play of the intellect is little leavened by sentiment, 
 little of individual character is suffered to transpire. 
 The heart, it would seem, was either dormant, or kept 
 under strict surveillance, and not allowed to interfere 
 with the working of the understanding. Literature 
 appeared like a well-bred, elderly gentleman in ruffles 
 and peruke, of polished but somewhat chilling manners, 
 which meet all warmth of feeling with the frost of 
 etiquette. And just as in such society conversation is 
 restricted to certain subjects, of these touches but the 
 surface, and does even that in set phrases, so it was 
 with the literature of the golden days of Queen Anne 
 and the first two Georges. From this very limitation 
 in the range both of subjects and treatment, there arose 
 in the hands of the masters a perfection of style within 
 these limits ; just as in the finitude of Grecian archi 
 tecture, perfection is more easily attained than in 
 Gothic with its infinite aims. In the writers who 
 followed, so-called classicism degenerated into conven 
 tionality in subject, in treatment, and in language. In 
 Cowper, as has been said, we see the beginning of the 
 recoil. But it was by Wordsworth that the revolt was 
 most openly proclaimed and most fully carried out. 
 The changed spirit was no doubt in the time, and would 
 have made its way independently of any single man./ 
 But no one power could have helped it forward more 
 effectually than the capacious and inward-seeing soul of 
 Wordsworth. Whereas the poetry of the former age 
 had dealt mainly with the outside of things, or if it 
 sometimes went further, did so with such a stereotyped 
 manner and diction as to make it look like external 
 work, Wordsworth everywhere went straight to the 
 inside of things. We have seen already how, whether 
 
64 WORDSWORTH: 
 
 in his own self-revelations, or in his descriptions of the 
 visible creation, or in his delineations of men, he passed 
 always from the surface to the centre, from the outside 
 looks to the inward character. This one characteristic 
 set him in entire opposition to the art of last century. 
 Out of it arose the entire revolution he made in sub 
 jects, treatment, and diction. Seeing in many things 
 which had hitherto been deemed unfit subjects for poe 
 try, a deeper truth and beauty than in those which had 
 hitherto been most handled by the poets, he reclaimed 
 from the wilderness vast tracts that had been lying 
 waste, and brought them within the poetic domain. In 
 this way he has done a wider service to poetry than 
 any other poet of his time, but since him no one has 
 arisen of spirit strong and large enough to make full 
 proof of the liberty he bequeathed. 
 
 The same freedom, and by dint of the same powers, 
 he won for future poets with regard to the language 
 of poetry. He was the first who both in theory and 
 practice entirely shook off the trammels of the so-called 
 poetic diction which had tyrannized over English 
 poetry for more than a century. This diction of course 
 exactly represented the half-courtly, half-classical mode 
 of thinking and feeling. As Wordsworth rebelled 
 against this conventionality of spirit, so against the 
 outAvard expression of it. The whole of the stock 
 phrases arid used-up metaphors he discarded, and re- 
 
 rned to living language of natural feeling, as it is 
 used by men, instead of the dead form of it which had 
 got stereotyped in books. And just as in his subjects 
 he had taken in from the waste much virgin soil, so in 
 his diction he appropriated for poetic use a large 
 amount of words, idioms, metaphors, till then by the 
 poets disallowed. In doing so, he may here and there 
 have made a mistake, the homely trenching on the 
 
THE MAN AND THE POET. 65 
 
 ludicrous, as in the lines about the washing-tub and 
 some others, long current in the ribaldry of critics. 
 But, bating a few almost necessary failures, he did 
 more than any other by his usage and example to 
 reanimate the effete language of poetry, and restore to 
 it Jhealthfulness, strength, and feeling. His shorter 
 poems, both the earlier and the later, are for the most 
 part very models of natural, powerful, and yet sensitive 
 English ; the language being like a garment woven 
 out of and transparent with the thought. Of the 
 diction of his longer blank verse poems, which is far 
 from being so faultless, I shall have something to say 
 in the sequel. 
 
 As to the theory which he propounds in his famous 
 Preface, that the language of poetry ought nowise to 
 differ from that of prose, this is only his protest against 
 the old poetic phraseology, too sweepingly laid down. 
 His own practice is the best commentary on, and anti 
 dote to, his theory, where he has urged it to an ex 
 treme. Coleridge and De Quincey have both criticised 
 the " Preface " severely, so that in their hands it 
 would seem to contain either a paradox or a truism. 
 Into this subject I cannot now enter. This only may 
 be said on the Wordsworthian side, as against these 
 critics, that while the language of prose receives new 
 life and strength by adopting the idioms and phrases 
 used in the present conversation of educated men, that 
 of poetry may go further, and borrow with advantage 
 the language from cottage firesides. Who has ever 
 listened to a peasant father or mother describing the 
 last illness of one of their own children, or speaking 
 of those who were gone, without having heard from 
 their lips words which, for natural and expressive 
 feeling, were the very essence of poetry ! Poets may 
 5 
 
66 WORDSWORTH: 
 
 well adopt these, for, if they trust to their own re 
 sources, they can invent nothing equal to them. 
 ^ These reflections on the main characteristics of 
 Wordsworth arose out of a survey of the poems 
 written during his first Grasmere period. But they 
 have passed beyond the bounds for which they were 
 originally intended, and may apply in large measure to 
 his poems of the second period, written at Allan Bank 
 in Grasmere, and during his first years at Rydal 
 Mount. These were " The Excursion," " The White 
 Doe of Rylstone," " The Duddon Sonnets," and some 
 smaller poems. In these there is perhaps less of that 
 ethereal light, that spiritualizing power shed over 
 nature, which forms the peculiar charm of the best of 
 his earlier poems. But if there is less penetrating 
 interpretation of nature, there is a deepened moral 
 wisdom, a larger entering into the heart of universal 
 man. I spoke above of the limitations of his earlier 
 poetry in this latter region. These in his later poems 
 are perhaps less apparent, partly from the expansion 
 of the philosophic mind by years of meditation, and by 
 kindly though limited intercourse with men ; partly 
 from a gradual lessening of the exclusive bias towards 
 humble life, as his Republican fervor abated. 
 
 To discuss " The Excursion," as its importance de 
 mands, would require a long separate treatise. It was 
 a theme worthy of a great philosophic poem, which 
 Wordsworth proposed to himself. A being, like the 
 Solitary, by domestic bereavement, and by ardent hopes 
 of the first French Revolution, too rudely disappointed, 
 driven into skepticism and despondency how can 
 such an one win his way back to sympathy with man, 
 and to faith in God ? The outward circumstances of 
 such a subject may vary, but itself is of perennial im 
 port. French Revolutions may not repeat themselves 
 

 67 
 
 with every generation, but unbelieving cynicism is an 
 evil of continual recurrence, an evil which Is not 
 checked by, but would rather seem increasingly to at 
 tend on, our much vaunted march of mind. As to the 
 poet s way of dealing with the problem, there is ground 
 for the disappointment which many have felt, that the 
 truths of revelation, though everywhere acknowledged, 
 are nowhere brought prominently forward. It is the 
 religion which the poet has extracted from nature and 
 man s moral instincts on which he mainly dwells ; yet 
 it is such a religion, so pure and so elevated, as these 
 sources, but for the light they draw from the revelation 
 close at hand, never could have supplied. In the crisis 
 of the poem, when the poet has to apply his medicine 
 to the mind diseased, and when the Solitary is importu 
 nate for an answer, the poet turns aside, and recom 
 mends communion with nature, and free intercourse 
 with men, in a way which to many has seemed like a 
 disavowal of the power of Christian faith. This seems, 
 however, too severe a judgment. Wordsworth knew 
 clearly that there are many cases in which, as the pas 
 sages to the heart have been closed by false reasonings 
 and morbid views, the way to it is not to be found by 
 any direct arguments, however true. What is wanted 
 is some antidote which shall bring back the feelings to 
 a healthful tone, remove obstructions from within, and 
 so, through restored health of heart, put the under 
 standing in a condition which is open to the power of 
 truth. Awaken healthful sensibilities in the heart, and 
 a right state of intellect will be sure to follow. This 
 is Wordsworth s moral pathology. And the restorative 
 discipline he recommends is that which in his own 
 mental trial he had found effectual. This I believe to 
 be the true account ; and yet one cannot help thinking 
 there was not only room, but even a call for a fuller 
 
68 WORDSWORTH: 
 
 acknowledgment of the Christian verities. The defect 
 probably arose from the poet s carrying his own expe 
 rience, and his peculiar views about the sanative power 
 of nature, further than they hold true, at least for the 
 majority of men. While such is the advice given to 
 the Solitary, the course practically taken is to lead him 
 to the churchyard among the mountains at Grasmere, 
 there to hear from the lips of the pastor how they lived 
 and died, the lowly tenants of the surrounding graves, 
 in order that hearing he may learn 
 
 " To prize the breath we share with human kind ; 
 And look upon the dust of man with awe." 
 
 To many who little care for the philosophy, " The 
 Excursion " will always be deaf^FTKe^ictures of 
 mountain scenes, and the pathetic records of rural life 
 which it contains. The two books of the " Churchyard 
 among the Mountains," are beyond all the others sus- 
 j tained in interest, and perfect in style. In themselves 
 they form a noble poem, full of deep insight into the 
 heart, of attractive portraits of character, and of tender 
 and elevating views of human life and destiny. No 
 one with a heart to feel can read them carefully with 
 out being the better for it. Of all the lives there por 
 trayed, perhaps there is none which goes so straight to 
 the heart as the affecting story of Ellen : 
 
 " As, on a sunny bank, a tender lamb 
 Lurks in safe shelter from the winds of March, 
 Screened by its parent, so that little mound 
 Lies guarded by its neighbor; the small heap 
 Speaks for itself; an Infant there doth rest; 
 The sheltering hillock is the Mother s grave. 
 If mild discourse, and manners that conferred 
 A natural dignity on humblest rank; 
 If gladsome spirits, and benignant looks, 
 That for a face not beautiful did more 
 Than beauty for the fairest face can do; 
 And if religious tenderness of heart, 
 
THE MAN AND THE POET. 69 
 
 Grieving for sin, and penitential tears 
 
 Shed when the clouds had gathered and disstained 
 
 The spotless ether of a maiden life; 
 
 If these may make a hallowed spot of earth 
 
 More holy in the sight of God or man ; 
 
 Then, on that mound, a sanctity shall brood 
 
 Till the stars sicken at the day of doom." 
 
 Then follows the character of the cottage girl, her 
 love, betrayal, the broken vow ; her shame and sorrow, 
 relief by the birth of her child, the necessity to leave 
 her own and nurse a neighbor s ; her own child s sick 
 ness, and her cruelly enforced absence from it ; its 
 death, her long vigils by its grave, a weeping Magda 
 lene ended by her own decline : 
 
 " Meek saint ! through patience glorified on earth ! 
 In whom, as by her lonely hearth she sate 
 The ghastly face of cold decay put on 
 A sun-like beauty, and appeared divine ! 
 
 She said, 
 
 * He who afflicts me knows what I can bear; 
 And, when I fail, and can endure no more, 
 Will mercifully take me to Himself. 
 So through the cloud of death her spirit passed 
 Into that pure and unknown world of love 
 Where injury cannot come." 
 
 They say that Wordsworth wants .passion. For! 
 feeling, not on the surface but in the depth, pathos pure/ 
 and profound, what of modern verse can equal this\ 
 story and that of Margaret? The very roll of these 
 lines above quoted is oracular. There is in them the 
 echo of a soul the most capacious, tender, and profound, 
 that has spoken through modern poetry. 
 
 The mention of these lines suggests one word in 
 passing, on Wordsworth s blank verse. In " The Ex 
 cursion," and more still in " The Prelude," it often 
 greatly needs condensation, may even be said to be 
 tediously prolix. When speaking of homely matters, 
 there is circumlocution at times amounting to awk- 
 
70 WORDSWORTH: 
 
 wardness ; and when philosophizing there is, unlike the 
 smaller poems, too profuse a use of long-winded Latin 
 words, to the neglect of the mother Saxon. Yet, even 
 in these passages, there is hardly a page without some 
 atoning lines in the true Wordsworthian mould. Even 
 in those disquisitions of " The Excursion " which seem 
 most prosy, as the paragraphs on a system of National 
 Education, there are seldom wanting some of those 
 glances of deeper vision, by which old neglected truths 
 are flashed with new power on the consciousness, or 
 new relations of truth, which had hitherto lain hidden, 
 are for the first time revealed. Of such apothegms 
 of moral wisdom, how large a number could be gleaned 
 from that poem alone ! But it is in the passages where 
 Wordsworth s inspiration kindles that the full power 
 of his blank verse is to be seen. Wordsworth s blank 
 verse, so prolix in ordinary narrative, so grand in its 
 loftier passages, brings forcibly to mind what I once 
 heard Hartley Coleridge say of his whole poetry. 
 When employed to do a hackney s work along the 
 common highway, he stumbles and blunders at almost 
 every step ; it is only when he strikes a higher strain 
 and " soars steadily into the region " that you discover 
 him to be a veritable Pegasus. His blank verse is 
 seen at its best in such passages of " The Excursion " 
 as these : The Wanderer s account of his own feelings 
 when, a boy, he watched the sunrise over Athole, and 
 indeed the whole description of his boyhood ; the story 
 of Margaret, already spoken of; the description of the 
 Langdale Pikes ; the Solitary s history of himself ; the 
 Wanderer s advice to him at the close of Despondency 
 Corrected ; and I may add, almost the whole of the 
 two books of the Churchyard. On the characters who 
 form the chief speakers in the poem, the Pedlar or 
 Wanderer, the Solitary, and the Pastor, I cannot now 
 
THE MAN AND THE POET. 71 
 
 dwell. Those who wish to see from what materials 
 Wordsworth framed them, will find some interesting 
 memoranda from his own lips, contained in the biogra 
 phy by his nephew, and now incorporated in the edition 
 of his Poems of 1857. It seems strange to look back 
 to the outcry that was long made against the employ 
 ment of a pedlar as the chief figure of the poem. That 
 this should now seem to most quite natural, or at least 
 noways offensive, may serve to mark the change in 
 literary feeling which Wordsworth himself did so much 
 to introduce. 
 
 "The Excursion" was published mj14j and the 
 following year brought to ligh another long poem, 
 j "The White Doe of Rylstone." ! A great part of it, 
 however, had been composed as early as 1807, while 
 Wordsworth was on a visit to his wife s family at 
 \ Sockburn-upon-Tees. Whether he then visited Bol- 
 ton Abbey and its neighborhood for the first time 
 does not appear. This poem, pronounced by the great 
 critic of the day to be " the very worst poem he ever 
 saw imprinted in a quarto volume," has a very be 
 witching and unique charm of its own. The scene 
 is laid in the days of Queen Elizabeth, and begins and 
 ends with Bolton Priory, and the story of a white doe 
 which haunts it. This doe had been the favorite of 
 Emily Norton, sole daughter of Richard Norton of 
 Rylstone Hall, who, with his eight sons, had marched 
 forth in the army of the Catholic Lords engaged in 
 the insurrection known as the Rising of the North. 
 Emily and a ninth son, Francis, were of the Protestant 
 faith, and disapproved of the enterprise. But he, 
 without taking part in the expedition, follows his 
 father, to be of what use he can ; sees him and his 
 eight brothers led to execution, and is himself accident 
 ally slain, and buried in Bolton Priory. The sister s 
 
72 WORDSWORTH: 
 
 lot is to remain behind, to hear of the utter extinction 
 of her house, and by force of passive fortitude, 
 
 " To abide 
 
 The shock, and finally secure 
 O er pain and grief a triumph pure." 
 
 The white doe, which had been her companion in 
 happier days, comes to her side and seems to enter 
 into her sorrow, attends her when on moonlight nights 
 she visits Bolton Abbey, and her brothers grave, and 
 long years after she is gone continues to haunt the 
 hallowed place and couch by that same grave. " Every 
 thing attempted by the principal personages fails in 
 its material effects, succeeds in its moral and spiritual." 
 This is Wordsworth s own account of it. Certainly 
 the active and warlike parts of the poem are need 
 lessly tame and unexciting, forming a marked contrast 
 with the way Scott would have handled the same sub 
 jects. That Wordsworth could, if he had chosen, 
 have improved these parts of his poem, there can be 
 no doubt, for the song of " Brougham Castle," and 
 several of the warlike sonnets prove that he could, 
 when so minded, strike a Tyrtasan strain. But if, in 
 "The White Doe," he fails where Scott would have 
 succeeded, he does what neither Scott nor any one 
 else could equally have done. It is, in truth, a poem 
 not of action at all, but entirely of sentiment, and sen 
 timent as deep as life. Gazing on Bolton s ruined 
 abbey, as it stands on its green holm, looked down on 
 by majestic woods and quiet uplands, and lulled by the 
 murmuring Wharf, his whole heart is filled by the 
 impressive and hallowed scene. And all the feelings 
 awakened within him he gathers up and concentrates 
 in this legendary creature, making her at every turn, 
 whether passing into shadow under broken arch, or 
 
THE MAN AND THE POET. 73 
 
 throwing a gleam into gloomy vault, or crouching in 
 the moonlight on the last Norton s green grave, bring 
 out some new lineament, call up some fair imagination. 
 She is the most perfectly ideal embodiment of the 
 finer spirit of the place that it could have entered into 
 poet s heart to conceive. 
 
 Of " Peter Bell " and The Wagoner," both com 
 posed long before, but published after " The White 
 Doe," I have not now space to say one word. At the 
 time when he was preparing his eldest son for college, 
 Wordsworth studied carefully several of the Latin 
 poets, which led to his attempting two or three poems 
 on classical subjects. One of these, " Laodamia," will 
 always stand out prominent even among his happiest 
 productions. Throwing himself naturally into the sit 
 uation, he informs the old Achaian legend with a fine 
 moral dignity peculiarly his own : 
 
 " Elysian beauty, melancholy grace, 
 Brought from a pensive, though a happy place." 
 
 At the same time there is a visible change from the 
 simple homespun Saxon diction of the lyrical ballads 
 to a more full-mouth amplitude which suited well such 
 a subject as " Laodamia," but which grew upon him 
 more and more till it became verbosity. 
 
 And now but a word on the third period of Words 
 worth s poetry. This began, one may say, about the / C. 
 year 1820, and lasted till the close of his poetic life. 
 It was the time when he wrote the " Ecclesiastical 
 Sonnets," which, though containing here and there 
 some gems, such as that on " Old Abbeys " 
 
 " Once ye were holy, ye are holy still ; 
 Your spirit freely let me drink, and live; " 
 
 are not, on the whole, equal to many of his earlier 
 ones. Sonnet writing begun at Grasmere, had long 
 
74 WORDS WOE TH : 
 
 \ been a favorite relaxation with him in the midst of 
 ; larger works. The sonnets are like small off- lets from 
 \ the main stream of his poetry, into which whatever 
 thoughts from time to time arose might overflow. 
 This form is well fitted for the .detached musings of a 
 meditative poet. As each new thought awakes, a new 
 form for it has not to be sought, the mould is here 
 ready, and all the poet has to do is to cast the liquid 
 metal into it. Wordsworth s sonnets are so numerous 
 and so important that they form quite a literature, 
 which, if justice were done them, would demand an ex 
 tended notice for themselves. The rest of the poems 
 of this epoch are memorials of four separate tours : 
 two on the Continent in 1830 and 1837, two in Scot 
 land in 1831 and 1833. Taken as a whole, none of 
 these tours produced anything equal to his earliest one 
 in Scotland. But the former of the two continental 
 tours produced one poem almost equal to any of his 
 prime, that on the Eclipse in 1820. The description 
 there of Milan Cathedral, with its white hosts of angels, 
 and its starry zone, 
 
 " All steeped in that portentous light, 
 All suffering dim eclipse," 
 
 is in his finest later style. 
 
 But that among all these later poems which most 
 wins regard is the beautiful and affecting thread of 
 allusion to Walter Scott that runs through them. 
 Open-minded appreciation of contemporary poets was 
 not one of Wordsworth s strong points. A very 
 marked one-sidedness, not hard to explain, arose out 
 of at once his weakness and his strength. Disparag 
 ing remarks about Scott s poetry were reported from 
 his conversation, and these seem to have been present 
 to Lockhart s thought as he penned his last notice of 
 
THE MAN AND THE POET. 75 
 
 Wordsworth. He might have recalled at the same 
 time the many kind and beautiful lines in which he 
 who never said in verse what he did not truly feel, has 
 embodied his feelings about Scott. Wordsworth had 
 cordially welcomed " The Lay of the Last Minstrel," 
 and always continued to like it best of Scott s poems. 
 He and the " Shirra " first met in the latter s house in 
 Lasswade, just after Wordsworth and his sister had 
 left Yarrow un visited 
 
 " For when we re there, although tis fair, 
 Twill be another Yarrow." 
 
 In 1814, as he descended from Traquair accom 
 panied by the Ettrick Shepherd, he exclaimed 
 
 And is this Yarrow? This the stream 
 
 Of which my fancy cherished, 
 So faithfully a waking dream ? 
 An image that hath perished ! " 
 
 In September 1831, Wordsworth and his daughter 
 Dora set out on a visit to Abbotsford, to see Scott 
 once more before the latter left Tweedside for Italy in 
 hopes of repairing there his broken health. It was a 
 brief visit, as Scott was on the very eve of his depart 
 ure, but, ere they parted, they snatched one more 
 look at Yarrow, the last both for Scott and Words 
 worth : 
 
 " Once more, by Newark s Castle-gate 
 
 Long left without a warder, 
 I stood, looked, listened, and with thee, 
 Great Minstrel of the Border." 
 
 And though the hand of sickness lay heavy upon Scott, 
 they did their best 
 
 \J To make a day of happy hours, 
 Their happy days recalling." "" 
 
 But throughout the " Yarrow Revisited," written in 
 remembrance of that day, there is visible the pressure 
 
76 WORDSWORTH: 
 
 of an actual grief, little in harmony with the pensive 
 ideal light that is upon the two former Yarrows. " On 
 our return in the afternoon," says Wordsworth, " we 
 had to cross Tweed (by the old ford) directly opposite 
 Abbotsford. The wheels of our carriage grated upon 
 the pebbles in the bed of the stream that there flows 
 somewhat rapidly. A rich, but sad light, of rather a 
 purple than a golden hue, was spread over the Eildon 
 Hills at that moment, and thinking it probable that it 
 might be the last time Sir Walter would cross the 
 stream, I was not a little moved, and expressed some 
 of my feelings in the sonnet beginning 
 
 " A trouble not of clouds, or weeping rain. " 
 
 This is the noble sonnet in which he says 
 
 The might 
 
 Of the whole world s good wishes with him goes; 
 Blessings and prayers in nobler retinue 
 Than sceptred king or laureled conqueror knows, 
 Follow this wondrous Potentate." 
 
 "At noon, on Thursday," Wordsworth continues, 
 " we left Abbotsford, and on the morning of that day 
 Sir Walter and I had a serious conversation tete-a-tete, 
 when he spoke with gratitude of the happy life which, 
 upon the whole, he had led. He had written in my 
 daughter s album before he came into the breakfast- 
 room that morning, a few stanzas addressed to her ; 
 and while putting the book into her hand, in his own 
 study, standing by his desk, he said to her in my pres 
 ence, I should not have done anything of this kind, 
 but for your father s sake they are probably the last 
 verses I shall ever write. " And they were the very 
 last. I remember one most affecting stanza of these 
 lines, which I heard long ago from one who had seen 
 them in the album, that same album which contained 
 
THE MAN AND TEE POET. 77 
 
 autograph and unpublished lines written by Coleridge, 
 Southey, and other poets of the time, for Wordsworth s 
 daughter. When I wrote this two years ago, the lines 
 had never been made public ; and therefore I felt that 
 I hud no right to give the stanza which I remembered. 
 Since then, Bishop Wordsworth has quoted it in a 
 published letter, and the seal of secrecy is thus re 
 moved. The allusion is to Scott s early friendship 
 with Wordsworth : 
 
 " Tis well the gifted eye which saw 
 
 The first faint sparks of genius burn, 
 Should mark its latest flash with awe, 
 Low glimmering from its funeral urn." 
 
 They who wish to see all the four stanzas will find 
 them, along with an interesting note, in the " Selections 
 from the Works of Scott," lately edited by Mr. Morti 
 mer Collins, in Moxon s " Miniature Poets." 
 
 During the same journey, Wordsworth seems to have 
 revisited, besides Yarrow, other places in Scotland, 
 which he had seen and sung in his earlier day. Among 
 these he again passed through the Trosachs, bright with 
 their autumnal glory. The record of this visit is that 
 sonnet, so full of the calm, yet not mournful meditation 
 which that season brings everywhere, and especially in 
 such a place, deepened, perhaps, by his feeling for the 
 Border Minstrel from whom he had just parted : 
 
 " There s not a nook within this solemn Pass, 
 But were an apt confessional for one 
 Taught by his summer spent, his autumn gone, 
 That life is but a tale of morning grass 
 Withered at eve. From scenes of art which chase 
 That thought away, turn, and with watchful eyes 
 Feed it mid Nature s old felicities, 
 Rocks, rivers, and smooth lakes more clear than glass 
 Untouched, unbreathed upon." 
 
 Compare this with the stave which Wordsworth 
 chanted on the same ground long before, when 
 
78 WORDSWORTH: 
 
 " Stepping westward seemed to be 
 A kind of heavenly destiny : 
 I liked the greeting ; twas a sound 
 Of something without place or bound, 
 And seemed to give me spiritual right 
 To travel through that region bright. 
 The voice was soft, and she who spake 
 Was walking by her native lake ; 
 The salutation had to me 
 The very sound of courtesy: 
 Its power was felt, and while my eye 
 Was fixed upon the glowing sky, 
 The echo of the voice en wrought 
 A human sweetness with the thought 
 Of travelling through the world that lay 
 Before me in my endless way." 
 
 Between the sonnet and these lines, the one in his best 
 early, the other in his best latest style, you have the 
 whole difference between the vernal hopefulness, the 
 ethereal ideality of his prime, and the sober coloring, 
 the more chastened feeling which thirty years had 
 brought. 
 
 Once again, in 1833, Wordsworth visited Scotland, 
 but by that time Scott was lying in the ruined aisle at 
 Dryburgh, within sound of his own Tweed. Two 
 years after this, in the autumn of 1835, on hearing of 
 the death of the Ettrick Shepherd, he poured forth 
 that fine lament over his brother poets who had fol 
 lowed each other so fast " from sunshine to the sunless 
 land." In it he alludes once again to his two visits to 
 Yarrow, the one with the shepherd-poet for his guide, 
 the other with Sir Walter. 
 
 Once more, the last time, when on a tour in Italy in 
 1837, amid the " Musings near Aquapendente," his 
 heart reverts to Scott. Seeing the broom in flower on 
 an Italian hill-side, his thoughts turned homeward to 
 think how it would be budding on Fairfield and Hel- 
 vellyn. Then the thought strikes him, what use of 
 
THE MAN AND THE POET. 79 
 
 coming so far to see these new scenes, if his thoughts 
 kept wandering back to the old ones ? 
 
 " The skirt of Greenside fell, 
 And by Glenridding-screes, and low Glencoign, 
 Places forsaken now, though loving still 
 The Muses, as they loved them in the days 
 Of the old minstrels and the border bards." 
 
 One there was, he says, who would have sympathized 
 with him 
 
 Not the less 
 
 Had his sunk eye kindled at those dear words 
 That spake of bards and minstrels ; and his spirit 
 Had flown with mine to old Helvellyn s brow, 
 Where once together, in his day of strength, 
 We stood rejoicing, as if earth were free 
 From SOITOW like the sky above our heads." 
 
 He alludes to the day, then thirty years gone, when 
 Sir Walter, Sir Humphry Davy, and Wordsworth had 
 ascended Helvellyn together. Then he goes on : 
 
 " Years followed years, and when, upon the eve 
 Of his last going from Tweedside, thought turned, 
 Or by another s sympathy was led 
 To this bright land, Hope was for him no friend, 
 Knowledge no help ; Imagination shaped 
 No promise. Still, in more than ear-deep seats, 
 Survives for me, and cannot but survive 
 The tone of voice which wedded borrowed words 
 To sadness not their own, when, with faint smile 
 Forced by intent to take from speech its edge, 
 He said, When I am there, although tis fair, 
 Twill be another Yarrow. . . . 
 
 " Peace to his spirit ! why should Poesy 
 Yield to the lure of vain regret, and hover 
 In gloom on wings with confidence outspread 
 To move in sunshine ! Utter thanks, my soul ! 
 Tempered with awe, and sweetened by compassion 
 For them who in the shades of sorrow dwell, 
 That I so near the term to human life 
 Appointed by man s common heritage 
 Am free to rove where Nature s loveliest looks, 
 Art s noblest relics, history s rich bequests, 
 
80 WORDSWORTH: 
 
 Failed to reanimate and but feebly cheered 
 The whole world s Darling." 
 
 This poem, and the one suggested by Hogg s death, 
 burst out from the somewhat tamer reflections of his 
 later days as the last gleams of his old fervor. Hence 
 forth he wrote little more poetry, but he continued 
 almost to the end to keep retouching his former poems. 
 Careful as he had always been in the work of composi 
 tion, he went over them again and again in his later 
 years, changing them here and there, but seldom for 
 the better. What seemed asperities were smoothed 
 away, but for the most part the original ruggedness is 
 poorly exchanged for the more faultless, but tamer, 
 afterthought. It would be an interesting, and for those 
 who make a study of these things a profitable, task, to 
 bring together, by comparing one edition with another, 
 the successive changes which many well-known lines 
 were in this way made to endure. One or two speci 
 mens only must now suffice. In " The Solitary Reap 
 er," instead of the strong vernacular line 
 "I listened, till I had my fill," 
 
 of the original edition, we now have the faultless, but 
 tame 
 
 I listened, motionless and still." 
 
 Again, in the poem describing Mary Hutchinson, 
 
 " And yet a spirit still, arid bright 
 With something of an angel light," 
 
 there is one change to " angelic light," and in another 
 edition I think I have seen " celestial light." Again, 
 in that consummate sonnet, beginning 
 
 " It is a beauteous evening, calm and free," 
 
 some one had suggested that beauteous is an album 
 word, and so the first line was tortured into 
 
TIIK MAN AND THE POET. 81 
 
 " A fairer face of heaven could not be; " 
 
 and again into something like this 
 
 " From fret and stir the clouds are free," 
 
 as I remember once seeing it printed. Happily the 
 original line is now restored. But in the same sonnet 
 the first form df the line 
 
 " The gentleness of heaven is on the sea," 
 
 with its transparent simplicity, has been finally super 
 seded by the more commonplace 
 
 " The gentleness of heaven broods o er the sea." 
 
 During those silent years, the aged poet might be 
 seen in green old age (and who that has seen that 
 venerable figure will forget it ?), either as he moved 
 about the roads in the neighborhood of Rydal Mount, 
 or drove towards Grasmere or Ambleside in his small, 
 rustic-looking phaeton, or as he appeared on Sundays, 
 in the corner of the family pew near the pulpit, in the 
 small church of Rydal. There, Sunday by Sunday, he 
 was seated, his head inclining forwards, and the long 
 silver white hair like a crown of glory on either side 
 of the broad majestic brow. 
 
 Towards the close of 1847, the household at Rydal 
 Mount was darkened by a great grief, the death of the 
 poet s daughter Dora, Mrs. Quillinan. " Our sorrow, 
 I feel, is for life," he wrote, " but God s will be done ! " 
 And it was for life. At the age of seventy-seven such 
 a loss was not to be got over. Still, with firm step, 
 though saddened heart, he might be seen going about. 
 As late as the autumn of 1849, as a stranger came 
 down the road from the back of Rydal Mount, he met 
 Wordsworth walking slowly back towards his house 
 from the highway, to which he had just conducted some 
 visitors. His head leant to one side, somewhat as it 
 6 
 
82 WORDSWORTH: 
 
 does in his picture, and in his hand he carried a branch 
 with withered leaves. He who passed him happened 
 to have on a plaid, wrapt round him in Scottish shep 
 herd s fashion. This attracted his notice, and as the 
 stranger looked round, thinking it might be the last 
 sight he should ever have of him, the poet had turned 
 round, and was looking back too. There was one long 
 look, but no word, and both passed on. 
 
 " Matthew is in his grave, yet now, 
 
 Methiriks, I see him stand, 
 As at that moment, with a bough 
 Of wilding in his hand." 
 
 In the March of next year he was still able to walk 
 to Grasmere and to Ambleside, the last two walks he 
 took. The last day he was out of doors, he sat down 
 on the stone seat of a cottage porch, where he had been 
 calling, and watched the setting sun. It was a cold, 
 bright evening, and he got a chill which resulted in 
 pleurisy. He survived the attack, but sank from after 
 weakness. On the 7th of April*, his eightieth birthday, 
 he was prayed for in Rydal chapel, morning and even 
 ing. On Saturday, the 20th, when asked by his son 
 whether he would receive the communion, he replied, 
 " That is just what I want." When his wife wished to 
 let him know that there was no hope of recovery, she 
 said to him, " William, you are going to Dora." He 
 made no answer at the time, but next day, as one of 
 his nieces drew aside his curtain, he awoke from a quiet 
 sleep, and said, " Is that Dora ? " He breathed his 
 last, almost imperceptibly, on Tuesday the 23d of April, 
 exactly at noon, the same day as that on which Shake 
 speare was born and died. 
 
 A few days after, he was laid in that corner of Gras 
 mere churchyard where his children had been laid be 
 fore him, and to which his wife and sister have since 
 
THE MAN AND THE POET. 83 
 
 been gathered. A plain blue stone, with no other word 
 on it than " William Wordsworth," marks the spot. 
 On one side of it are the eight yew-trees planted there 
 long before, under his direction, and carefully tended 
 by himself. On the other, the Rotha, through a clear, 
 calm, deep pool, creeps quietly by. Fail-field, Helm- 
 crag, and Silver-How look down upon his grave. 
 Westminster contains no resting-place so fit for him. 
 
 And now, looking back on those fourscore years, \ 
 may it not be said that if any life in modern times has \ 
 been well-rounded and complete, Wordsworth s was ? 
 From first to last it was one noble purpose, faithfully 
 kept, thoroughly fulfilled. The world has rarely seen 
 so strong and capacious a soul devote itself to one, and 
 that a lofty end, with such singleness and concentration 
 of aim. No doubt there was a great original mind to 
 begin with, one that saw more things, and deeper, than 
 any other poet of his time. But what would this have 
 achieved, had it not been backed by that moral strength, 
 that ironness of resolve ? It was this that enabled 
 him to turn aside from professions that he was little 
 suited for, and with something less than a hundred a 
 year face the future. In time, doubtless, other helps 
 were added, and long before the end he had obtained a 
 competence. But this is only another instance of the 
 maxim, " Providence helps those who help themselves." 
 That life at Town-End had encountered and overcome 
 the difficulty before the help came. Again, the same 
 moral fortitude appears in the firmness with which he 
 kept his purpose, and the industry with which he 
 wrought it out. Undiscouraged by neglect, undeterred \ 
 by obloquy and ridicule, in the face of obstacles that \ 
 would have daunted almost any other man, he held on 
 his way unmoved, and wrought out the gift that was in i 
 him till the work was complete. Few poets have ever 
 
84 WORDSWORTH: 
 
 so fully expressed the thing that was given them to 
 utter. And the result has been that he has bequeathed 
 to the world a body of high thought and noble feel 
 ing which will continue to make all who apprehend it 
 think more deeply and feel more wisely to the end of 
 time. 
 
 The question has often been asked how far Words 
 worth was a religious poet ; that he was a religious 
 man no one doubts. In his earlier poems especially, 
 as in " Tinterri Abbey," and others, men have pointed 
 to passages, and said, These are in their tendency Pan 
 theistic. The supposition that Wordsworth ever main 
 tained a Pantheistic philosophy, ever held a deliberate 
 theory of the Divine Being as impersonal, is contra 
 dieted both by many an express declaration of his own 
 and by what is known of his life. 
 
 But it is none the less true that, though he never 
 held the Pantheistic doctrine, the presence of nature, 
 when he was in the heydey of imagination, stirred in 
 him what is called the Pantheistic feeling in its highest 
 and purest form. The subject is a deep one, and to do 
 it justice would require not a few sentences, but a vol 
 ume. The truth seems to be that the outward world, 
 which to commonplace minds is no more than a piece 
 of dead mechanism, is in reality full of a vast all- 
 pervading life, which is very mysterious. Not to be 
 grasped by the formulas of science, this life is appre 
 hended mainly by the imagination, and by those men 
 most deeply in whom imagination is most ample and 
 profound. Possessing this faculty, larger in measure, 
 and more genuine in quality, than any man since 
 Shakespeare, Wordsworth felt with proportionate in 
 tensity the life which fills all nature. In her presence 
 he felt in some measure, as only the first fathers of the 
 Aryan race in the world s infancy felt, the 
 
THE MAN AND THE POET. 85 
 
 " Something far more deeply interfused, 
 Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
 And the round ocean, and the living air, 
 And the blue sky, and in the mind of man : 
 A motion and a feeling that impels 
 All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
 And rolls through all things." 
 
 Comparative mythology is only now deciphering 
 traces of the primeval intuitions of a something Divine 
 in nature, traces which lie far down in the lowest lay 
 ers of the world s early religions. And those who study 
 those things have found in no other modern poet so 
 many thoughts yielding glimpses into that morning feel 
 ing for nature which seems to have vanished with the 
 world s childhood. As life went on with Wordsworth, 
 the visionary gleam grew dimmer, and the moral faith 
 grew stronger, so that his later poems contain less of 
 that mystical feeling about nature which is the peculiar 
 charm of the earlier ones, but more recognition of those 
 truths by which conscience lives, and which Christian 
 ity reveals. That he has not clearly bridged over the 
 chasm, has not fully harmonized the earlier with the 
 later feeling, must be admitted. But for this defect, 
 this limitation of insight, who is he that has a right to 
 blame him ? only that man who having felt as 
 broadly and profoundly the infinite life I allude to, has 
 reconciled it with higher religious truth, and taught 
 men so to do. But where is such reconciliation to be 
 found ? only here and there in some verses of the 
 Psalms, or in the Prophecies of Isaiah ; or still more 
 in brief passages of the Gospels do these two sides of 
 truth seem to meet in harmony. 
 
 In Wordsworth s treatment of human nature the 
 same question meets us in another form. In " The 
 Prelude," and other poems of the first epoch, it cannot 
 be denied that the self-restorative power of the soul 
 
86 WORDSWORTH: 
 
 seems to be asserted, and the sufficingness of nature to 
 console the wounded spirit is implied in a way which 
 Wordsworth, if distinctly questioned, would, perhaps at 
 any time, certainly in his later years, have disavowed. 
 That he was himself conscious of this defect may be 
 gathered from the change he made in the reflections 
 with which the story of Margaret, in " The Excursion," 
 closes. This story was written among the last years 
 of last century, at Racedown or Alfoxden. Through 
 all the early editions of his poems it stood thus : 
 
 " The old man, noting this, resumed, and said, 
 My friend ! enough to sorrow you have given, 
 The purposes of wisdom ask no more ; 
 Be wise and cheerful, and no longer read 
 The forms of things with an unworthy eye. " 
 
 In the one-volume edition of his works, which ap 
 peared in 1845, we for the first time read the following 
 addition, inserted after the third line of the above : 
 
 " Nor more would she have craved as due to One 
 Who, in her worst distress, had ofttimes felt 
 The unbounded might of prayer; and learned with soul 
 Fixed on the Cross, that consolation springs, 
 From sources deeper far than deepest pain, 
 For the meek Sufferer. Why then should we read 
 The forms of things with an unworthy eye? " 
 
 A little further on, the " Wanderer " proceeds to say 
 that once as he passed that way the ruined cottage 
 conveyed to his heart 
 
 " So still an image of tranquillity, 
 So calm and still, and looked so beautiful 
 Amid the uneasy thoughts which filled my mind, 
 That what we feel of sorrow and despair 
 From ruin and from change, and all the grief 
 The passing shows of Being leave behind, 
 Appeared an idle dream that could not live 
 Where meditation was." 
 
 Instead of the last line and a half, the later editions 
 have the following : 
 
THE MAN AND THE POET. 87 
 
 " Appeared an idle dream that could maintain 
 Nowhere dominion o er the enlightened spirit, 
 Whose meditative sympathies repose 
 Upon the breast of faith." 
 
 To say that as years increased Wordsworth s faith 
 in the vital Christian truth grew more confirmed 
 and deep, and that in himself were fulfilled his own 
 words 
 
 " Peace settles where the intellect is meek, 
 The faith Heaven strengthens where He moulds the creed," 
 
 is only to say that he was growingly a good man. 
 This growth many a line of his later poems, besides 
 incidental notices in his letters, and other memoranda 
 of his nephew s biography, clearly attests. No doubt 
 the wish will at times arise that the unequaled power 
 of spiritualizing nature, and of originating tender and 
 solemn views of human life, had, for the sake of other 
 men, been oftener and more unreservedly turned on 
 the great truths of Christian faith. When such a re 
 gret does arise, it is but fair that it should be tempered 
 by remembering, as he himself urges, that " his works, 
 as well as those of other poets, should not be considered 
 as developing all the influences which his own heart rec 
 ognized, but rather those which he felt able as an artist 
 to display to advantage." At another time he assured 
 a correspondent that he had been averse to frequent 
 mention of the mysteries of Christian faith, not because 
 he did not duly feel them, but because he felt them too 
 deeply to venture on a free handling of them. Above 
 all, if he has not, any more than the greatest of former 
 poets, done all that our hearts desire, let us be thank 
 ful for the work he has done. 
 
 What that work is, the great religious poet of the 
 time, himself a disciple of the elder bard, hinted, in 
 the words with which he dedicated to Wordsworth his 
 
88 WORDSWORTH: 
 
 Oxford lectures on poetry : " Ut animos ad sanctiora 
 erigeret ; " " to raise our minds to holier things." 
 
 Perhaps I cannot better sum up the whole matter 
 than by adopting, if I may, the words of a correspond 
 ent. He observes, 1st, That while Wordsworth spirit 
 ualizes the outward world more than any other poet- 
 has done, his feeling for it is essentially manly. Na 
 ture, he always insists, gives gladness to the glad, com 
 fort and support to the sorrowful. 2d, There, is the 
 wondrous depth of his feeling for the domestic affec 
 tions, and more especially for the constancy of them. 
 3d, He must be considered a leader in that greatest 
 movement of modern times care for our humbler 
 brethren ; his part being, not to help them in their suf 
 ferings, but to make us reverence them for what they 
 are, what they have in common with us, or in greater 
 measure than ourselves. These are the tendencies 
 breathed from every line he wrote. He took the com 
 monest sights of earth, and the homeliest household 
 affections, and made you feel that these, which men 
 commonly take to be the lowest things, are indeed the 
 highest. 
 
 If he seldom ventures within the inner sanctuary, he 
 everywhere leads to its outer court, lifting our thoughts 
 into a region " neighboring to heaven, and that no for 
 eign land." If he was not universal in the sense in 
 which Shakespeare was, and Goethe aimed to be, it 
 was because he was smitten with too deep an enthusi 
 asm for those truths by which he was possessed. His 
 eye was too intense, too prophetic to admit of his look 
 ing at life dramatically. In fact, no poet of modern 
 times has had in him so much of the prophet. In the 
 world of nature, to be a revealer of things hidden, the 
 sanctifier of things common, the interpreter of new and 
 unsuspected relations, the opener of another sense in 
 
 , 
 
THE MAN AND THE POET. 89 
 
 men ; in the moral world, to be the teacher of truths 
 hitherto neglected or unobserved, the awakener of 
 men s hearts to the solemnities that encompass them, 
 deepening our reverence for the essential soul, apart 
 from accident and circumstance, making us feel more 
 truly, more tenderly, more profoundly, lifting the 
 thoughts upward through the shows of time to that 
 which is permanent and eternal, and bringing down on 
 the transitory things of eye and ear some shadow of 
 the eternal, till we 
 
 " Feel through all this fleshly dress 
 Bright ghoots of everlastingness " 
 
 this is the office which he will not cease to fulfill, as 
 long as the English language lasts. What earth s far- 
 off lonely mountains do for the plains and the cities, 
 that Wordsworth has done and will do for literature, 
 and through literature for society ; sending down great 
 rivers of higher truth, fresh purifying winds of feeling, 
 to those who least dream from what quarter they come. 
 The more thoughtful of each generation will draw 
 nearer and observe him more closely, will ascend his 
 imaginative heights, and sit under the shadow of his 
 profound meditations, and, in proportion as they do so, 
 will become more noble and pure in heart. 
 
COLERIDGE. 
 
 MORE than enough has perhaps been said in dispar 
 agement of the eighteenth century. It is not there 
 fore to speak more evil of that much abused time, but 
 merely to note an obvious fact, if I say that its main 
 tendency was towards the outward and the finite. Just 
 freed from the last ties of feudalism, escaped too from 
 long religious conflicts which had resulted in war and 
 revolution, the feelings of the British people took a 
 new direction ; the nation s energies were wholly 
 turned to the pacific working out of its material and 
 industrial resources. Let us leave those deep, inter 
 minable questions, which, as experience has shown, 
 lead only to confusion, and let us stick to plain, obvious 
 facts, which cannot mislead, and which yield such com 
 fortable results. This was the genius and temper of 
 the generation that followed the Revolution of 1688. 
 Nor was there wanting a man to give definite shape 
 and expression to this tendency of the national mind. 
 Locke, a shrewd and practical man, who knew the 
 world, furnished his countrymen with a way of think 
 ing singularly in keeping with their then temper ; a 
 philosophy which, discarding abstruse ideas, fashioned 
 thought mainly out of the senses ; an ethical system 
 founded on the selfish instincts of pleasure and pain ; 
 and a political theory which, instead of the theocratic 
 dreams of the Puritans or the divine right of High- 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 91 
 
 Churchmen, or the historic traditions of feudalism, 
 grounded government on the more prosaic but not less 
 unreal phantasy of an original contract. This whole 
 philosophy, however inconsistent with what is noblest 
 in British history, was so congenial a growth of the 
 British soil, that no other has ever struck so deep a root, 
 or spread so wide, and with such endearing influence. 
 This way of thinking, introduced by Locke for the 
 purpose of moderating the pretensions of human 
 thought, came to be believed in by his followers as its 
 highest achievement. The half century after Locke 
 was no doubt full of mental activity in certain direc 
 tions. It saw Physical Science attain its highest tri 
 umph in the Newtonian discoveries ; History studied 
 after a certain manner by votaries more numerous 
 than ever before ; and the new science of Politi 
 cal Economy created. But while these fields were 
 thronged with busy inquirers, and though Natural 
 Theology was much argued and discussed, yet from the 
 spiritual side of all questions, from the deep things of 
 the soul, from men s living relations to the eternal 
 world, educated thought seemed to turn instinctively 
 away. The guilds of the learned, as by tacit consent, 
 either eschewed these subjects altogether, or, if they 
 were constrained to enter on them, they had laid down 
 for themselves certain conventional limits, beyond 
 which they did not venture. On the other side of 
 these lay mystery, enthusiasm, fanaticism spectres 
 abhorred of the wise and prudent. It is a striking 
 proof of how entirely the mechanical philosophy had 
 saturated the age, that Wesley, the leader of the great 
 spiritual counter-movement of last century, the preacher 
 of divine realities to a generation fast bound in sense, 
 yet in the opening of his sermon on Faith indorses 
 the sensational theory, and declares that to man in his 
 
92 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 natural condition sense is the only inlet of knowl 
 edge. 
 
 The same spirit which pervaded the philosophy and 
 theology of that era is apparent not less in its poetry 
 and literature. Limitation of range, with a certain 
 perfectness of form, contentment with the surface view 
 of things, absence of high imagination, repression of 
 the deeper feelings, man looked at mainly on his con 
 ventional side, careful descriptions of manners, but no 
 open vision, these are the prevailing characteristics. 
 Doubtless the higher truth was not even then left 
 without some witnesses. Butler and Berkeley in spec 
 ulation, Burns and Cowper in poetry, Burke in polit 
 ical philosophy, these were either the criers in the 
 wilderness against the idols of their times, or the 
 prophets of the new truth that was being born. Men s 
 thoughts cannot deal earnestly with many things at 
 once ; and each age has its own work assigned it; 
 and the work of the eighteenth century was mainly 
 one of utilitarian understanding, of criticising and ques 
 tioning things hitherto believed, of active but narrow 
 intelligence divorced from imagination, from deep feel 
 ing, from reverence, from spiritual insight. And when 
 this one-sided work was done, the result was isolation, 
 individualism, self-will ; the universal in thought lost 
 sight of, the universal in ethics denied ; everywhere, 
 in speculation as in practice, the private will dominant, 
 the Universal Will forgotten. To exult over the igno 
 rant past, to glory in the wonderful present, to have 
 got rid of all prejudices, to have no strong beliefs ex 
 cept in material progress, to be tolerant of all tenden 
 cies but fanaticism, this was its highest boast. And 
 though this self-complacent wisdom received some rude 
 shocks in the crash of revolution with which the last 
 century closed, and though the soul and spirit that are 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 93 
 
 in man, long unheeded, then once more awoke and 
 made themselves heard, that one-sided and soulless 
 intelligence, if weakened, was not destroyed. It was 
 carried over into this century in the brisk but barren 
 criticism of the early " Edinburgh Review." And at 
 this very moment there are symptoms enough on every 
 side that the same spirit, after having received a tem 
 porary repulse, has once more regained the ascendant. 
 
 The same manner of thought which we have at- 
 tempted to describe as it existed in our own country, 
 dominated in others during the same period. So well 
 is it known in Germany that they have a name for it, 
 which we want. They call it by a term which means 
 the Illumination or Enlightenment, and they have 
 marked the notes by which it is known. Some who 
 are deep in German lore tell us that Europe has pro 
 duced but one power really counteractive of this Illu 
 mination, or tyranny of the mere understanding, and 
 that is, the philosophy which began with Kant and 
 culminated in Hegel. And they affect no small scorn 
 for any attempt at reaction which has originated else 
 where. Nevertheless, at the turn of the century, there 
 did arise men nearer home, who felt the defect in the 
 thought of the preceding age, and did much to supply 
 it ; who strove to base philosophy on principles of 
 universal reason; and who, into thought and senti 
 ment, dwarfed and starved by the effects of Enlighten 
 ment, poured the inspiration of soul and spirit. The 
 men who mainly did this in England were Wordsworth 
 and Coleridge. These are the native champions of 
 spiritual truth against the mechanical philosophy of 
 the Illumination. Of the former of the two, I have 
 already spoken. In something of the same way I 
 propose to place now before my readers some account 
 of the friend of Wordsworth, whom his name naturally 
 
94 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 recalls, a man not less original nor remarkable Sam 
 uel Taylor Coleridge. And yet, though the two were 
 friends, and shared together many mental sympathies, 
 between the lives and characters of the philosophic 
 poet and the poetic philosopher there was more of 
 contrast than of likeness. The one, robust and whole 
 hi body as in mind, resolute in will, and single in pur 
 pose, knowing little of books and of other men s 
 thoughts, and caring less for them, set himself, with 
 his own unaided resources, to work out the great orig 
 inal vein of poetry that was within him, and stopped 
 not, nor turned aside, till he had fulfilled his task, had 
 enriched English literature with a new poetry of the 
 deepest and purest ore, and thereby made the world 
 forever his debtor. The other, master of an ampler 
 and more varied though not richer field, of quicker 
 sympathies, less self-sustained, but touching life and 
 thought at more numerous points, eager to know all 
 that other men had thought and known, and working 
 as well on a basis of wide erudition as on his own 
 internal resources, but with a body that did him griev 
 ous wrong, that, far from obeying, frustrated his better 
 aspirations, and a will faltering, and irresolute to fol 
 low out the behests of his surpassing intellect, only 
 drove in a shaft here and there into the vast mine of 
 thought that was in him, and died leaving samples 
 rather of what he might have done, than any full and 
 rounded achievement, yet samples so rich, so varied, 
 so suggestive, that to thousands they have been the 
 quicken ers of new intellectual life, and to this day they 
 stand unequaled by anything his country has since 
 produced. In one point, however, the friends are 
 alike. They both turned aside from professional aims, 
 devoted themselves to pure thought, set themselves to 
 counterwork the mechanical and utilitarian bias of 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 95 
 
 their time, and became the great spiritualizers of the 
 thought of their countrymen, the fountain-heads from 
 which has flowed most of what is high and unworldly 
 and elevating in the thinking and speculation of the 
 succeeding age. 
 
 It is indeed strange, that of Coleridge s philosophy, 
 once so much talked of, and really so important in its 
 influence, no comprehensive account has been ever 
 attempted. The only attempt in this direction that I 
 know of, is that made six years after Coleridge s death, 
 and now more than twenty years ago, by one who has 
 since become the chief expounder of that philosophy 
 which Coleridge spent most of his life in combating. 
 In a well-known essay, Mr. Mill, while fully acknowl 
 edging that no other Englishman, save only his own 
 teacher Bentharn, had left so deep an impress on his 
 age, yet turns aside from making a full survey of 
 Coleridge s whole range of thought, precluded, as he 
 confesses, by his own radical opposition to Coleridge s 
 fundamental principles. After setting forth clearly the 
 antagonistic schools of thought which, since the dawn 
 of philosophy, have divided opinion as to the origin of 
 knowledge, and after declaring his own firm adhesion 
 to the sensational school, and his consequent inability 
 to sympathize with Coleridge s metaphysical views, 
 he passes from this part of the subject, and devotes 
 the rest of his essay mainly to the consideration of 
 Coleridge as a political philosopher. This, however, 
 is but one, and that by no means the chief department 
 of thought, to which Coleridge devoted himself. Had 
 Mr. Mill felt disposed to give to the other and more 
 important of Coleridge s speculations, his views on 
 metaphysics, on morals, and on religion, as well as 
 to his criticisms and his poetry, the same masterly 
 treatment which he has given to his politics, any 
 
06 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 further attempt in that direction might have been 
 spared. But it is characteristic of Mr. Mill, that, 
 though gifted with a power which no other writer of 
 his school possesses, of entering into lines of thought, 
 and of apparently sympathizing with modes of feeling 
 most alien to his own, he still, after the widest sweep 
 of appreciation, returns at last to the ground from 
 which he started, and there entrenches himself within 
 his original tenets as firmly as if he had never caught a 
 glimpse of those other and higher truths, with which 
 his own principles are inconsistent. 
 
 Before entering on the intellectual result of Cole 
 ridge s labors, and inquiring what new elements he has 
 added to British thought, it may be well to pause for a 
 moment, and review briefly the w r ell-known circum 
 stances of his life. This will not only add a human 
 interest to the more abstract thoughts which follow, 
 but may perhaps help to make them better understood. 
 And if, in contrast with the life of Wordsworth, and 
 with its own splendid promise, the life of Coleridge is 
 disappointing even to sadness, it has not the less for 
 that a mournful interest ; while the union of transcend 
 ent genius with infirmity of will and irregular impulses, 
 the failure and the penitential regret, lend to his story 
 a humanizing, even a tragic pathos, which touches our 
 common nature more closely than any gifts of genius. 
 
 The vicarage of Ottery St. Mary s, Devonshire, 
 was the birthplace and early home of Samuel Taylor 
 Coleridge. As in Wordsworth we saw that his whole 
 character was in keeping with his native Cumberland, 
 the robust northern yeoman, only touched with 
 genius, so the character of Coleridge, so far as it 
 had any local hue, seems more native to South Eng 
 land. Is it fanciful to imagine that there was some- 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 97 
 
 thing in that character which accords well with the 
 soft mild air, and the dreamy loveliness that rests on 
 the blue coombes and sea-coves of South Devon ? He 
 was born on the 21st of October 1772, nearly two 
 years and a half after Wordsworth s birth, the youngest 
 child of ten by his father s second marriage with Anne 
 Bowden, said to have been a woman of strong practical 
 sense, thrifty, industrious, very ambitious for her sons, 
 but herself without any " tincture of letters." Plainly 
 not from her, but wholly from his father, Samuel 
 Taylor took his temperament. The Rev. John Cole 
 ridge, sometime head-master of the Free Grammar 
 School, afterwards vicar of the parish of Ottery St. 
 Mary s, is described as, for his age, a great scholar, 
 studious, immersed in books, altogether unknowing and 
 regardless of the world and its ways, simple in nature 
 and primitive in manners, heedless of passing events, 
 and usually known as " the absent man." In a Latin 
 grammar which he wrote for his pupils, he changed the 
 case which Julius Ca3sar named, from the ablative to 
 the Quale-quare-quidditive, just as his son might have 
 done had he ever taken to writing grammars. He 
 wrote dissertations on portions of the Old Testament, 
 with the same sort of discursiveness which his son 
 afterwards showed on a greater scale. In his sermons 
 he used to quote the very words of the Hebrew Scrip 
 tures, and the country people would exclaim admir 
 ingly, " How fine he was ! He gave us the very words 
 the Spirit spoke in." Of his absent fits and his other 
 eccentricities, many stories were long preserved in his 
 own neighborhood, which Coleridge used to tell to his 
 friends at Highgate, till the tears ran down his face at 
 the remembrance. Among other well-known stories, 
 it is told that once when he had to go from home for 
 several days, his wife packed his portmanteau with a 
 7 
 
98 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 shirt for each day, charging him strictly to be sure and 
 use them. On his return, his wife, on opening the 
 portmanteau, was surprised to find no shirts in it. On 
 asking him to account for this, she found that he had 
 duly obeyed her commands, and had put on a shirt 
 every day, but never taken off one. There were all 
 the shirts, not in the portmanteau, but on his own 
 back. With all these eccentricities, he was a good and 
 unworldly Christian pastor, much beloved and respected 
 by his own people. Though Coleridge was only seven 
 years old when his father was removed by a sudden 
 death, he remembered him to the last with deep rev 
 erence and love. " O that I might so pass away, if, 
 like him, I were an Israelite without guile ! The 
 image of my father my revered, kind, learned, simple- 
 hearted father is a religion to me." 
 
 During his childhood, he tells us, he never took part 
 in the plays and games of his brothers, but sought 
 refuge by his mother s side, to read his little books and 
 listen to the talk of his elders. If he played at all, it 
 was at cutting down nettles with a stick, fancying them 
 the seven champions of Christendom. He had, he says, 
 tjie simplicity and docility of a child, but he never 
 thought or spoke as a child. 
 
 But childhood with him, such as it was, did not last 
 long. At the age of nine he was removed to a school 
 in the heart of London, Christ s Hospital, " an institu 
 tion," says Charles Lamb, " to keep those who yet hold 
 up their heads in the world from sinking." The pres 
 entation to this charity school, no doubt a great thing 
 for the youngest of so many sons, was obtained through 
 the influence of Judge Buller, formerly one of his 
 father s pupils. " what a change," writes Coleridge 
 in after years, " from home to this city school ; de 
 pressed, moping, friendless, a poor orphan, half- 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 99 
 
 starved ! " Of this school, Charles Lamb, the school 
 companion, and through life the firm friend of Coleridge, 
 has left two descriptions in his delightful Essays. 
 Everything in the world has, they say, two sides ; cer 
 tainly Christ s Hospital must have had. One cannot 
 imagine any two things more unlike than the picture 
 which Lamb draws of the school in his first essay, and 
 that in the second. The first sets forth the look which 
 the school wore to Lamb himself, a London boy, with 
 his family close at hand, ready to welcome him at all 
 hours, to send him daily supplies of additional food, and 
 with influential friends among the trustees, who, if he 
 had wrongs, would see them righted. The second 
 shows the stepdame side it turned on Coleridge, an 
 orphan from the country, with no friends at hand, for 
 lorn, half starved, "for in those days the food of the 
 Blue-coats was cruelly insufficient for those who had no 
 friends to supply them." Any one who cares to see 
 these things sketched off as no other could sketch them, 
 may turn to Lamb s essay, " Christ s Hospital Five-and- 
 Thirty Years Ago." " To this late hour of my life," he 
 represents Coleridge as saying, " I trace impressions 
 left by the recollection of those friendless holidays. 
 The long warm days of summer never return, but they 
 bring with them a gloom from the haunting memory of 
 those whole-day leaves, when, by some strange arrange 
 ment, we were turned out for the livelong day upon 
 our own hands, whether we had friends to go to or 
 none. I remember those bathing excursions to the 
 New River. How merrily we would sally forth into 
 the fields, and strip under the first warmth of the sun, 
 and wanton like young dace in the streams, getting us 
 appetites for noon, which those of us that were penniless 
 (our scanty morning crust long since exhausted) had 
 not the means of allaying ; the very beauty of the day, 
 
100 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 and the exercise of the pastime, and the sense of liberty 
 setting a keener edge upon them ! How faint and lan 
 guid, finally, we would return towards nightfall to our 
 desired morsel, half rejoicing, half reluctant that the 
 hours of our uneasy liberty had expired." In one of 
 these bathing excursions Coleridge swam the New 
 River in his clothes, and let them dry on his back in 
 the fields. This laid the first seeds of those rheumatic 
 pains and that prolonged bodily suffering which never 
 afterwards left him, and which did so much to frustrate 
 the large promise of his youth. 
 
 In the lower school at Christ s the time was spent 
 in idleness, and little was learnt. But even then Cole 
 ridge was a devourer of books, and this appetite was 
 fed by a strange accident, which, though often told, 
 must here be repeated once again. One day as the 
 lower schoolboy walked down the Strand, going with 
 his arms as if in the act of swimming, he touched the 
 pocket of a passer-by. " What, so young and so 
 wicked ! " exclaimed the stranger, at the same time 
 seizing the* boy for a pickpocket. " I am not a pick 
 pocket ; I only thought I was Leander swimming the 
 Hellespont." The capturer, who must have been a 
 man of some feeling, was so struck with the answer, 
 and with the intelligence as well as simplicity of the 
 boy, that instead of handing him over to the police, he 
 subscribed to a library, that Coleridge might get thence 
 in future his fill of books. In a short time he read 
 right through the catalogue and exhausted the library. 
 While Coleridge was thus idling his time in the lower 
 school, Middleton, an elder boy, afterwards writer on 
 the Greek article, and Bishop of Calcutta, found him 
 one day sitting in a corner and reading Virgil by him 
 self, not as a lesson, but for pleasure. Middleton re 
 ported this to Dr. Bowyer, then head-master of the 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 101 
 
 school, who, on questioning the master of the lower 
 school about Coleridge, was told that he was a dull 
 scholar, could never repeat a single rule of syntax, but 
 was always ready to give one of his own. Henceforth 
 Coleridge was under the head-master s eye, and soon 
 passed into the upper school to be under his immediate 
 care. Dr. Bowyer was one of the stern old discipli 
 narians of those days, who had boundless faith in the 
 lash. Coleridge was one of those precocious boys who 
 might easily have been converted into a prodigy, had 
 that been the fashion at the time. But, "Thank 
 Heaven," he said, " I was flogged instead of flattered." 
 He was so ordinary looking a boy, with his great black 
 head, that Bowyer, when he had flogged him well, 
 generally bestowed on him an extra cut, " For you are 
 such an ugly fellow." When he was fifteen, Coleridge, 
 in order to get rid of school, wished to be apprenticed 
 to a shoemaker and his wife, who had been kind to 
 him. On the day when some of the boys were to be 
 apprenticed to trades, Crispin appeared and sued for 
 Coleridge. The head-master, on hearing the proposal, 
 and Coleridge s assent, hurled the tradesman from the 
 room with such violence, that had this last been litig- 
 iously inclined, he might have sued the doctor for as 
 sault. And so Coleridge used to joke, " I lost the 
 opportunity of making safeguards for the understand 
 ings of those who will never thank me for what I am 
 trying to do in exercising their reason." 
 
 While Coleridge was at school, one of his brothers 
 was attending the London Hospital, and from his fre 
 quent visits there the Blue-coat boy imbibed a love of 
 surgery and doctoring, and was for a time set on mak 
 ing this his profession. He devoured English, Latin, 
 and Greek books on medicine voraciously, and had by 
 heart a whole Latin medical dictionary. But this 
 
102 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 dream gave way, or led on to a rage for metaphysics, 
 which metaphysical reading finally landed him in Vol 
 taire s " Philosophical Dictionary," after perusing which 
 he sported infidel. When this new turn reached 
 Bowyer s ears, he sent for Coleridge. " So, sirrah ! 
 you are an infidel, are you? Then I ll flog your infi 
 delity out of you." So saying, the doctor administered 
 the severest, and, as Coleridge used to say, the only 
 just flogging he ever received. 
 
 Of this stern scholastic Lamb has left the following 
 portrait : 
 
 " He had two wigs, both pedantic, but of different 
 omen. The one serene, smiling, powdered, betokening 
 a mild day. The other, an old, discolored, unkempt, 
 angry caxon, denoting frequent and bloody execution. 
 Woe to the school when he made his morning appear 
 ance in his l Passy/ or passionate wig. Nothing was 
 more common than to see him make a headlong entry 
 into the school-room from his inner recess or library, 
 and with turbulent eye, singling out a lad, roar out, 
 Ods my life, sirrah ! his favorite adjuration, I have 
 a great mind to whip you, then with as sudden a re 
 tracting an impulse fling back into his lair, and then, 
 after a cooling relapse of some minutes (during which 
 all but the culprit had totally forgotten the context), 
 drive headlong out again, piecing out his imperfect 
 sense, as if it had been some devil s litany, with the 
 expletory yell, and I will, too. In his gentler moods 
 he had resort to an ingenious method, peculiar, for 
 what I have heard, to himself, of whipping a boy and 
 reading the l Debates at the same time a paragraph 
 
 and a lash between Perhaps," adds Lamb, 
 
 u we cannot dismiss him better than with the pious 
 ejaculation of Coleridge " (the joke was no doubt 
 Lamb s own) " when he heard that his old master was 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 103 
 
 on his death-bed, Poor J. B., may all his faults be for 
 given, and may he be wafted to bliss by little cherub 
 boys, all head and wings, with no bottoms to reproach 
 his sublunary infirmities. " 
 
 How much of all this may be Lamb s love of fun one 
 cannot say. Coleridge always spoke of Dr. Bowyer 
 with grateful affection. In his literary life he speaks 
 of having enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a very 
 sensible, though severe master ; one who taught him to 
 prefer Demosthenes to Cicero, Homer and Theocritus 
 to Virgil, and Virgil to Ovid ; who accustomed his 
 pupils to compare Lucretius, Terence, and the purer 
 poems of Catullus, not only with " the Roman poets of 
 the silver, but even with those of the Augustan era, 
 and on grounds of plain sense and universal logic, to 
 see the superiority of the former in the truth and na- 
 tiveness both of their thoughts and diction." This 
 doctrine was wholesome though rare in those days, not 
 so common even now, so much so that some have sup 
 posed that in these and other lessons with which Cole 
 ridge credited Dr. Bowyer, he was but reflecting back 
 on his master his own afterthoughts. 
 
 While Coleridge was being thus wholesomely drilled 
 in the great ancient models, his own poetic power 
 began to put forth some buds. Up to the age of fifteen, 
 his school verses were not beyond the mark of a clever 
 schoolboy. At sixteen, however, the genius cropped 
 out. The first ray of it appears in a short allegory, 
 written at the latter age, and entitled " Real and Im 
 aginary Time." The opening lines are 
 
 " On the wide level of a mountain s head, 
 I knew not where; but twas some faery place." 
 
 In that short piece, short and slight as it is, there is a 
 real touch of his after spirit and melody. 
 
104 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 During those years when he was in the upper school, 
 metaphysics and controversial theology struggled for 
 some time with poetry for the mastery ; but at last, 
 under the combined influence of a first love and of 
 Bowles s poems, he was led clear of the bewildering 
 maze, and poetry for some years was paramount. It 
 may seem strange now that Bowles s sonnets and early 
 poems, which Coleridge then met with for the first 
 time, should have produced on him so keen an impres 
 sion of novelty. But so it often happens that what 
 was, on its first appearance, quite original, when we 
 look back upon it in later years, after it has been ab 
 sorbed into the general taste, seems to lose nearly all 
 its freshness. There can be no doubt of the powerful 
 effect that Bowles had on Coleridge s dawning powers ; 
 that he opened the young poet s eyes to what was false 
 and meretricious in the artificial school from Pope to 
 Darwin, and made him feel that here, for the first time 
 in contemporary poetry, natural thought was combined 
 with natural diction heart reconciled with head. To 
 those who care for these things, it would be worth 
 while to turn to the first chapter of Coleridge s " Liter 
 ary Life," and see there the first fermenting of his 
 poetic taste and principles. But during those last 
 school years, while his mind was thus expanding, and 
 while his existence was a more tolerable, in some re 
 spects even a happy one, he was suffering severely in 
 that body, which throughout life was such a clog to 
 him. Full half his time from seventeen to eighteen 
 was passed in the sick-ward, afflicted with jaundice and 
 rheumatic fever, inherent it may be in his constitution, 
 but doubtless not lessened by those swimmings over the 
 New River in his clothes. But, above these sufferings, 
 which were afterwards so heavily to weigh him down, 
 Coleridge, during his early years, was enabled by buoy- 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 105 
 
 ancy of heart to rise, and to hide them from ordinary 
 observers. Having dwelt thus long on Coleridge s 
 school-days, because they are very fully recorded, and 
 contain as in miniature both the strength and the weak 
 ness of the full-grown man, I may close them with 
 Lamb s description of Coleridge as he appeared in the 
 retrospect of Lamb s school companions : 
 
 " Come back to my memory like as thou wert in the 
 dayspring of my fancies, with hope like a fiery column 
 before thee the dark pillar not yet turned Sam 
 uel Taylor Coleridge, Logician, Metaphysician, Bard ! 
 How have I seen the casual passer through the clois 
 ters stand still, entranced with admiration (while he 
 weighed the disproportion between the speech and the 
 garb of the young Mirandula), to hear thee unfold, in 
 thy deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of lam- 
 blichus or Plotinus ; for even then thou waxedst not 
 pale at such philosophic draughts ; or reciting Homer 
 in his Greek, or Pindar ; while the walls of the old 
 Grey Friars reechoed the accents of the inspired 
 charity boy ! " 
 
 It is hardly possible to conceive two school-times 
 more unlike than this of Coleridge at Christ s, pent up 
 in the heart of London city, and that of Wordsworth 
 at Hawkshead, free of Esthwaite Mere, and all the 
 surrounding solitudes. And yet each, as well in habits 
 and teaching as in outward scenery and circumstance, 
 answers strangely to the character and after lives of 
 the two friends. 
 
 Coleridge entered Jesus College, Cambridge, in Feb 
 ruary 1791, just a month after Wordsworth had quitted 
 the University. On neither of the poets had their 
 University much effect. For neither was that the 
 place and the hour. Coleridge for a time, under the 
 influence of his elder friend Middleton, was industrious, 
 
106 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 read hard, and obtained the prize for the Greek Sap 
 phic ode. It was on some subject about slavery, and 
 was better in thought than in Greek. Afterwards he 
 tried for the Craven Scholarship, in which contest his 
 rivals were Keat, afterwards head-master of Eton, 
 Bethell, who became an M. P. for Yorkshire, and But 
 ler, the future head of Shrewsbury School and Bishop 
 of Lichfield. The last-named won the scholarship. 
 Out of sixteen or seventeen competitors, Coleridge was 
 selected along with the above three ; but he was not 
 the style of man to come out great in University com 
 petitions. He had not that exactness and readiness 
 which are needed for those trials ; and he wanted en 
 tirely the competitive ardor which is with many so 
 powerful an incentive. After this there is no more 
 notice of regular work. His heart was elsewhere 
 in poetry, with Bowles for guide ; in philosophy, with 
 Hartley, who had belonged to his own college ; plung 
 ing into politics too, which then filled all ardent young 
 minds even to intoxication. For the French Revolu 
 tion was then in its first frenzy, promising liberty, vir 
 tue, regeneration to the old and outworn world. Into 
 that vortex of boundless hope and wild delirium what 
 high-minded youth could keep from plunging? Not 
 Coleridge. u In the general conflagration," he writes, 
 " my feelings and imagination did not remain unkin- 
 dled. I should have been ashamed rather than proud 
 of myself if they had." Pamphlets were pouring 
 from the press on the great subjects then filling all 
 men s minds ; and whenever one appeared from the 
 pen of Burke or other man of power, Coleridge, who 
 had read it in the morning, repeated it every word to 
 his friends gathered round their small supper-tables. 
 Presently one Frend, a Fellow of Jesus College, being 
 accused of sedition, of defamation of the Church of 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 107 
 
 England, and of holding Unitarian doctrines, was tried 
 by the authorities, condemned, and banished the Uni 
 versity. Coleridge sided zealously with Frend, not 
 only from the sympathy which generous youth always 
 feels for the persecuted, but also because he had him 
 self adopted those Unitarian and other principles for 
 which Frend suffered. Hence arose a growing disaf 
 fection, which must have weakened his attachment to 
 his University. Other circumstances supervened, which 
 in his second year of residence, brought his Cambridge 
 career to a sudden close. 
 
 The loss of Middleton, his trusty friend and guide, 
 who, failing in the final examination, quitted the Uni 
 versity without obtaining a fellowship ; and the press 
 ure of some college debts, less than 100, incurred 
 through his own inexperience, drove Coleridge into 
 despondency. He went to London, and wandered 
 hopelessly about the streets. At night he sat down on 
 the steps of a house in Chancery Lane, where, being 
 soon surrounded by swarms of beggars, real or feigned, 
 he emptied to them the little money that remained in 
 his pockets. In the morning, seeing an advertisement 
 "Wanted, Recruits for the loth Light Dragoons," 
 he said to himself, " Well, I have hated all my life sol 
 diers and horses ; the sooner I cure myself of that the 
 better." He enlisted as Private Comberbach, a name, 
 the truth of which he himself was wont to say, his 
 horse must have fully appreciated. A rare sight it 
 must have been to see Coleridge perched on some hard- 
 set, rough-trotting trooper, and undergoing his first les 
 sons in the riding-school, with the riding master shout 
 ing out to the rest of the awkward squad, " Take care 
 of that Comberbach; he ll ride over you." For the 
 grooming of his horse and other mechanical duties 
 Coleridge was dependent on the kindness of his com- 
 
108 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 rades, with whom he was a great favorite. Their ser 
 vices he repaid by writing all their letters to their wives 
 and sweethearts. At last the following sentence, written 
 up in the stable under his saddle, " Eheu, quam infortu- 
 nii miserrimum est fuisse felicem," revealed his real 
 condition to a captain who had Latin enough to trans 
 late the words, and heart enough to feel them. About 
 the same time an old Cambridge acquaintance passing 
 through Reading on his way to join his regiment, met 
 Coleridge in the street in dragoon uniform, stopped him 
 when he would have passed, and informed his friends. 
 After about four months service he was bought off, 
 returned to Cambridge, stayed there but a short time, 
 and finally left in June 1794, without taking a degree. 
 Then followed what may be called his Bristol period. 
 This included his first friendship with Southey, their 
 dream of emigration, their marriage, Coleridge s first 
 attempts at authorship, and his many ineffectual plans 
 for settling what he used to call the Bread and Cheese 
 Question. On leaving Cambridge he had gone to 
 Oxford, and there met with Southey, still an under 
 graduate at Balliol, whose friendship, quickly formed, 
 became one of the main hinges on which Coleridge s 
 after life turned. Their tastes and opinions on religion 
 and politics were then at one, though their characters 
 were widely different. Southey, with far less genius 
 than Coleridge, possessed that firmness of will, that 
 definite aim and practical wisdom, the want of which 
 were the bane of Coleridge s life. Southey s high and 
 pure disposition and consistent conduct, combined with 
 much mental power and literary acquirement, made 
 Coleridge feel, as he had not done before, the duty 
 and dignity of bringing actions into accordance with 
 principles, both in word arid deed. In after years 
 Southey was to Coleridge a faithful monitor in word, 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 109 
 
 and a friend firm and self-denying in deed. In moral 
 ity of action, it must be owned that he rose as much 
 above Coleridge, as in genius he fell below him. But 
 at their first meeting, pure and high-minded as Southey 
 was, he had not so fixed his views, or so systematically 
 ordered his life, as he afterwards did. He too, like 
 Coleridge and Wordsworth, had been stirred at heart 
 by the moral earthquake of the French Revolution. 
 Enthusiastically democratic in politics and Unitarian 
 in religion, he at once responded to the day-dream of 
 Pantisocracy, which Coleridge opened to him at Ox 
 ford. This was a plan of founding a community in 
 America, where a band of brothers, cultivated and 
 pure-minded, were to have all things in common, and 
 selfishness was to be unknown. The common land 
 was to be tilled by the common toil of the men ; the 
 wives, for all were to be married, were to perform all 
 household duties ; and abundant leisure was to remain 
 over for social intercourse, or to pursue literature, or 
 in more pensive moods 
 
 " Soothed sadly by the dirgeful wind, 
 Muse on the sore ills they had left behind." 
 
 The banks of the Susquehanna were to be this earthly 
 paradise, chosen more for the melody of the name than 
 for any ascertained advantages. Indeed, they hardly 
 seem to have known exactly where their paradise lay. 
 Southey soon left Balliol, and the two friends went 
 to Bristol, Southey s native town, there to prepare for 
 carrying out the Pantisocratic dream. Such visions 
 have been not only dreamed since then, but acted on 
 by enthusiastic youths, and the result leaves no reason 
 to regret that the project of Coleridge and Southey 
 never got further than being a dream. Want of 
 money was, as usual, the immediate cause of the fail- 
 
110 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 ure ; everything else had been provided for, but when 
 it came to the point it was found that neither the two 
 leaders, nor any of the other friends who had embarked 
 in the scheme, had money enough to pay their passage 
 to America. Southey was the first to see how matters 
 stood, and to recant. At this Coleridge was greatly 
 disgusted, and gave vent to his disappointment in no 
 measured language. The scheme was abandoned early 
 in 1795, and the two young poets, having been for 
 some time in love with two sisters of a Bristol family, 
 were married, Coleridge in October of that year to 
 Sarah Fricker, and Southey six weeks later to her 
 sister Edith. 
 
 Marriage, of course, brought the money question 
 home to Coleridge more closely than Pantisocracy 
 had done. The three or four following years were 
 occupied with attempts to solve it. But his ability 
 was not of the money making order, nor did his habits, 
 natural or acquired, give even such ability as he had 
 a fair chance in the toil for bread.. First he tried 
 lecturing to the Bristol folks on the political topics of 
 the time, and on religious questions. But either the 
 lectures did not pay, or Coleridge did not stick to 
 them steadily, so they were soon given up, and after 
 wards published as " Conciones ad populum," Cole 
 ridge s first prose work. Attacking with equal vehe 
 mence Pitt, the great minister of the day, and his oppo 
 nents, the English Jacobins, Coleridge showed in this 
 his earliest, as in his latest works, that he could not 
 be warranted to run quietly in the harness of any 
 party, and that those who tried to set him to this work 
 were sure of an upset. Coleridge s next enterprise 
 was the publication of a weekly miscellany ; the con 
 tents were to range over nearly the same subjects as 
 those now discussed in the best weeklies, and the aim 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. \\\ 
 
 was to be, as announced in the motto, that " all may 
 know the truth, and that the truth may make us free." 
 But powerful as he would have been as a contributor, 
 Coleridge was not the man to conduct such an under- 
 
 & 
 
 taking, least of all to do so single-handed. The most 
 notable thing about " The Watchman " was the tour 
 he made through the Midland county towns with a 
 naming prospectus, " Knowledge is power," to try the 
 political atmosphere. It was during this tour that 
 Coleridge encountered the Birmingham tallow-chan 
 dler, whom he describes with hair like candlewicks, and 
 face pinguinitescerit, for it was a melting day with him. 
 After Coleridge had harangued the man of dips for 
 half an hour, and run through every note in the whole 
 gamut of eloquence, now reasoning, now declaiming, 
 now indignant, now pathetic, on the state of the world 
 as it is, compared with what it should be ; at the first 
 pause in the harangue the tallow-chandler interposed : 
 " And what might the cost be ? " " Only fotcrpence 
 (0 the anti-climax, the abysmal bathos of that four- 
 pence !) only fourpence, sir, each number." " That 
 comes to a deal of money at the end of a year ; and 
 how much did you say there was to be for the money ? " 
 " Thirty-two pages, sir ! large octavo, closely printed." 
 " Thirty and two pages ? Bless me ! except what I 
 does in a family way on the Sabbath, that s more than 
 I ever reads, sir, all the year round. I am as great 
 a one as any man in Brummagem, sir, for liberty and 
 truth, and all that sort of things, but as to this (no 
 offense, I hope, sir) I must beg to be excused." 
 
 Notwithstanding this repulse^ Coleridge returned to 
 Bristol triumphant with above a thousand subscribers 
 names, having left on the minds of all who heard his 
 wonderful conversation an impression that survived 
 long after "The Watchman" was forgotten. The 
 
112 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 first number appeared on the 1st of March, the tenth 
 and last on the loth of May, 1796. From various 
 causes, delay in publishing beyond the fixed day, of 
 fense given to the religious subscribers by an essay 
 against fast-days, to his democratic patrons by inveigh 
 ing against Jacobinism and French philosophy, to the 
 Tories by abuse of Pitt, to the Whigs by riot more 
 heartily backing Fox, the subscription list rapidly 
 thinned, and he was glad to close the concern at a dead 
 loss of money to himself, not to mention his wasted 
 labor. Though this failure was to him a very serious 
 matter, he could still laugh heartily at the ludicrous 
 side of it. He tells how one morning, when he had 
 risen earlier than usual, he found the servant girl light 
 ing the fire with an extravagant quantity of paper. 
 On his remonstrating against the waste, " La, sir ! " 
 replied poor Nanny, " why, it is only Watchmen." 
 
 The third of the Bristol enterprises was the publica 
 tion of his "Juvenile Poems," in the April of 1796, 
 while " The Watchman " was still struggling for exist 
 ence. For the copyright of these he received thirty 
 guineas, from Joseph Cottle, a Bristol bookseller, who 
 to his own great credit undertook to publish the works 
 of Southey, of Coleridge, and of Wordsworth, at a 
 time when those higher in the trade would have noth 
 ing to say to them. If Cottle long afterwards, when 
 their names had waxed great, published a somewhat 
 gossiping book of reminiscences, and gave to the pub 
 lic many petty details which a wiser man would have 
 withheld, it should always be remembered, to his honor, 
 that he showed true kindness and liberality towards 
 these men, especially towards Coleridge, when he greatly 
 needed it, and that he had a genuine admiration of 
 their genius for its own sake, quite apart from its mar 
 ketable value. No doubt, if any one wishes to see 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 113 
 
 the seamy side of genius, he will find it in the letters 
 and anecdotes of Coleridge preserved in Cottle s book. 
 
 Other plans for a livelihood were ventilated during 
 his Bristol sojourn, such as writing for the " Morning 
 Chronicle " and taking private pupils, but as these 
 came to nought, I need only notice one other line in 
 which Coleridge at this time occasionally employed 
 himself, not without some thought of making it a per 
 manent profession. We have seen that before leaving 
 Cambridge he had become a Unitarian, and so he con 
 tinued till about the time of his visit to Germany. 
 While he was in Bristol he was engaged from time to 
 time to preach in the Unitarian chapels in the neigh 
 borhood. The subjects which he there discussed seem 
 to have been somewhat miscellaneous, and the reports 
 of his success vary. Nothing can be more dreary, if 
 it were not grotesque, than Cottle s description of his 
 first appearance as a preacher in a Unitarian chapel 
 in Bath. On the appointed Sunday morning, Cole 
 ridge, Cottle, and party drove from Bristol to Bath in a 
 post-chaise. Coleridge mounted the pulpit in blue coat 
 and white waistcoat, and for the morning service, choos 
 ing a text from Isaiah, treated his audience to a lecture 
 against the Corn Laws ; in the afternoon, he gave them 
 another on the Hair-Powder Tax. The congregation 
 on the latter occasion consisted of seventeen, of whom 
 several walked out of the chapel during the service. 
 The party returned to Bristol disheartened, Coleridge 
 from a sense of failure, the others with a dissatisfying 
 sense of a Sunday wasted. Compare this with Haz- 
 litt s account of his appearance some time afterwards 
 before a Birmingham congregation : 
 
 " It was in January, 1798, that I rose one morning 
 before daylight, to walk ten miles in the mud to hear 
 this celebrated person preach. Never, the longest day 
 
114- SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 I have to live, shall I have such another walk as that 
 cold, raw, comfortless one. When I got there the 
 organ was playing the 100th Psalm, and when it was 
 done, Mr. Coleridge arose and gave out his text, " He 
 departed again into a mountain himself alone." As 
 he gave out this text, his voice rose like a steam of rich 
 distilled perfumes ; and when he came to the two last 
 words, which he pronounced loud, deep, and distinct, it 
 seemed to me, who was then young, as if the sound 
 had echoed from the bottom of the human heart, and 
 as if that prayer might have floated in solemn silence 
 through the universe. The preacher then launched 
 into his subject, like an eagle dallying with the wind. 
 The sermon was upon peace or war, upon Church and 
 State not their alliance, but their separation ; on the 
 spirit of the world and the spirit of Christianity not 
 as the same, but as opposed to one another. He 
 talked of those who had inscribed the Cross of Christ 
 on banners dripping with human gore. He made a 
 poetical and pastoral excursion, and, to show the fatal 
 effects of war, drew a striking contrast between the 
 simple shepherd-boy, driving his team a-field, or sitting 
 under the hawthorn, piping to his flock as though he 
 should never be old ; and the same poor country lad, 
 crimped, kidnapped, brought into town, made drunk at 
 an alehouse, turned into a wretched drummer-boy, with 
 his hair sticking on end with powder and pomatum, a 
 long cue at his back, and tricked out in the finery of 
 the profession of blood. 
 
 " Such were the notes our own loved poet sung. 
 
 " And for myself, I could not have been more de 
 lighted if I had heard the music of the spheres. 
 Poetry and Philosophy had met together, Truth and 
 Genius had embraced, under the eye and sanction of 
 Religion. This was even beyond my hopes." 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 115 
 
 Which of the two was right in his estimate of 
 Coleridge s preaching, Cottle or Hazlitt? Or were 
 both right, and is the difference to be accounted for by 
 Coleridge, like most men of genius, having his days 
 now above himself, now below ? With one more pas 
 sage from Hazlitt, descriptive of Coleridge s talk at 
 that time, I may close his Bristol life : 
 
 " He is the only person I ever knew who answered 
 to the idea of a man of genius. He is the only person 
 from whom I ever learned anything. There is only 
 one thing he might have learned from me in return, 
 but that he has not. He was the first poet I ever 
 knew. His genius at that time had angelic wings, 
 and fed on manna. He talked on forever ; and you 
 wished him to talk on forever. His thoughts did not 
 seem to come with labor and effort ; but as if borne on 
 the gusts of genius, and as if the wings of imagination 
 lifted him off his feet. His voice rolled on the ear 
 like a pealing organ, and its sound alone was the music 
 of thought. His mind was clothed with wings ; and 
 raised on them he lifted philosophy to heaven. In his 
 descriptions, you then saw the progress of human 
 happiness and liberty in bright and never ending suc 
 cession, like the steps of Jacob s ladder, with airy 
 shapes ascending and descending. And shall I who 
 heard him then, listen to him now? Not I ! That 
 spell is broke ; that time is gone forever ; that voice is 
 heard no more: but still the recollection comes rush 
 ing by, with thoughts of long past years, and rings in 
 my ears with never-dying sound." 
 
 fit is pitiful to turn feora such high-flown descrip 
 tions to the glimpses of poverty and painful domestic 
 cares with which his letters of this date abound. Over 
 these one would gladly draw the veil. WTioso wishes 
 to linger on them may turn him to Cottle. There are 
 
116 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 many more incidents of this time which I can but 
 name : his residence for some months in a rose-covered 
 cottage in the neighboring village of Clevedon ; the 
 birth of his first son, whom he named Hartley, for love 
 of that philosopher whom Coleridge then admired as 
 the wisest of men ; his complete reconciliation with 
 Southey on the return of the latter from Portugal. 
 One little entry, in a letter of November 1796, is sadly 
 memorable as the first appearance of 
 
 " The little rift within the lute, 
 Which soou will muke the music mute." 
 
 He complains of a violent neuralgic pain in the face, 
 which for the time was like to overpower him. " But," 
 he writes, " I took between sixty and seventy drops 
 of laudanum, and sopped the Cerberus." That sop 
 was soon to become the worst Cerberus of the two. 
 
 It was early in 1797 that Coleridge removed with 
 his family from Bristol, and pitched his tent in the 
 village of Nether Stowey, under the green hills of 
 Quantock. One of the kindest and most hospitable 
 of his friends, Mr. Poole, had a place hard by ; and 
 Coleridge having in June made a visit to Wordsworth 
 at Racedown, persuaded this young poet, and his 
 scarcely less original sister, to adjourn thence to the 
 neighboring mansion of Alfoxden. With such friends 
 for daily intercourse, with the most delightful country 
 for walks on every side, and with apparently fewer em 
 barrassments, Coleridge here enjoyed the most genial 
 and happy years that were ever vouchsafed to his 
 changeful existence. " Wherever we turn we have 
 woods, smooth downs, and valleys with small brooks 
 running down them, through green meadows to the 
 sea. The hills that cradle these valleys are either 
 covered with ferns and bilberries or oak woods. Walks 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 117 
 
 extend for miles over the hill-tops, the great beauty of 
 which is their wild simplicity; they are perfectly 
 smooth, without rocks." Over these green hills of 
 Quantock the two young poets wandered for hours 
 together, rapt in fervid talk ; Coleridge no doubt the 
 chief speaker, Wordsworth more silent, not less sug 
 gestive. Never before or since have these downs 
 heard such high converse. " His society I found an 
 invaluable blessing, and to him I looked up with equal 
 reverence as a poet, a philosopher, and a man." So 
 wrote Coleridge in after years. By this time Words 
 worth had given himself wholly to poetry as his work 
 for life. Alfoxden saw the birth of many of the 
 happiest, most characteristic of his shorter poems. 
 Coleridge had some years before this, when he first 
 fell in with Wordsworth s "Descriptive Sketches," 
 found even in these the opening of a new vein. He 
 himself, too, had from time to time turned aside from 
 more perplexing studies, and found poetry to be its 
 own exceeding great reward. But in this Nether 
 Stowey time Coleridge came all at once to his poetic 
 manhood. Whether it was the freedom from the 
 material ills of life which he found in the aid and 
 kindly shelter of Mr. Poole, or the secluded beauty of 
 the Quantock, or the converse" with Wordsworth, or all 
 combined, there cannot be any doubt that this was, as 
 it has been called, his annus mirabilis, his poetic prime. 
 This was the year of " Genevieve," " The Dark Ladie," 
 " Kubla Khan," " France," the lines to Wordsworth on 
 first hearing " The Prelude " read aloud, the " Ancient 
 Mariner," and the first part of " Christabel," not to 
 mention many other poems of less mark. The occasion 
 which called forth the two latter poems, to form part 
 of a joint volume with Wordsworth, has been already 
 noticed. If Coleridge could only have maintained the 
 
118 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 high strain he then struck, with half the persistency of 
 his brother poet, posterity might perhaps have had 
 more reason to regret that he should ever have turned 
 to other subjects. During all his time at Nether 
 Stowey he kept up a fire of small letters to Cottle in 
 Bristol, at one time about poems or other literary 
 projects, at another asking Cottle to find him a servant- 
 maid, "simple of heart, physiognomically handsome, 
 and scientific in vaccimulgence ! " When they had 
 composed poems enough to form one or more joint 
 volumes, Cottle is summoned from Bristol to visit 
 them. Cottle took Wordsworth in his gig from Bristol 
 to Alfoxden, picking up Coleridge at Nether Stowey. 
 They had brought the viands for their dinner with 
 them in the gig : a loaf, a stout piece of cheese, and a 
 bottle of brandy. As they neared their landing place, 
 a beggar whom they helped with some pence, returned 
 their kindness by helping himself to the cheese from 
 the back of the gig. Arrived at the place Coleridge 
 unyoked the horse, dashed down the gig-shafts with a 
 jerk that rolled the brandy bottle from the seat, and 
 broke it to pieces before their eyes. Then Cottle set 
 to unharnessing the horse, but could not get off the 
 collar. Wordsworth next essayed it, with no better 
 success. At last Coleridge came to the charge, and 
 worked away with such violence that he nearly thrawed 
 the poor horse s head off. He too was forced to desist, 
 with a protest that " the horse s head must have grown 
 since the collar was put on." While the two poets 
 and their publisher were standing thus nonplussed, the 
 servant girl happened to pass through the stable yard, 
 and seeing their perplexity, exclaimed, " La, master 
 you don t go about the work the right way ; you 
 should do it like this." So saying, she turned the 
 collar upside down, and slipped it off in a trice. 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 119 
 
 Then came the dinner, "a superb brown loaf, a dish 
 of lettuces, and, instead of the brandy, a jug of pure 
 water." The bargain was struck, and Cottle under 
 took the publication of the first edition of the famous 
 " Lyrical Ballads," which appeared in Midsummer, 
 1798. About the same time the two Messrs. Wedge- 
 wood settled on Coleridge 150 a year for life, which 
 made him think no more of Unitarian chapels, and 
 enabled him to undertake, what he had for some time 
 desired, a continental tour. In September of that 
 year the two poets bade farewell, Wordsworth and his 
 sister to Alfoxden, Coleridge to Nether Stowey, and 
 together all three set sail for Hamburg. 
 
 So ended the Nether Stowey time, to Coleridge the 
 brief blink of a poetic morning which had no noon ; to 
 Wordsworth but the hopeful dawn of a day which com 
 pletely fulfilled itself. 
 
 Landed at Hamburg, Wordsworth was interpreter, 
 as he had French, Coleridge nothing but English and 
 Latin. After an interview with the aged poet Klop- 
 stock, the two young poets parted company, Words 
 worth, with his sister, settling at Goslar, there to com 
 pose, by the German fire-stoves, the poems on 
 "Matthew," "Nutting," "Ruth," "The Poet s Epi 
 taph," and others, in his happiest vein ; tyhile Coleridge 
 made for Ratzeburg, where he lived for four months in 
 a pastor s family, to learn the language, and then 
 passed on to Gottingen to attend lectures and consort 
 with German students and professors. Among the lec 
 tures were those of Blumenbach on Natural History, 
 while Eichhorn s lectures on the New Testament were 
 repeated to him from notes by a student who had him 
 self taken them down. Wordsworth kept sending 
 Coleridge the poems he was throwing off during this 
 prolific winter, and Coleridge replied in letters full of 
 
120 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 hope that their future homes might be in the same 
 neighborhood : " Whenever I spring forward into the 
 future with noble affections, I always alight by your 
 side." His whole time in Germany seems to have 
 overflowed with exuberant spirits and manifold life. 
 " Instead of troubling others with my own crude no 
 tions, I was better employed in storing my head with 
 the notions of others. I made the best use of my time 
 and means, and there is no period of my life to which 
 I look back with such unmingled satisfaction." 
 
 He had passed within a zone of thought new to him 
 self, and up to that time quite unknown in England ; 
 one of the great intellectual movements which occur 
 but rarely, and at long intervals, in the world s history. 
 The philosophic genius of Germany which awoke in 
 Kant during the latter part of last century was an im 
 pulse the most original, the most far-reaching, and the 
 most profound, which Europe has seen since the Ref 
 ormation. It has given birth to linguistic science, has 
 recast metaphysics, and has penetrated history, poetry, 
 and theology. For good or for evil, it must be owned 
 that, under the shadow of this great movement, the 
 world is now living, and is likely to live more or less 
 for some time to come. Perhaps we should not call it 
 German philosophy, for philosophy is but one side of a 
 great power which is swaying not only the world s 
 thought, but those feelings which are the parents of its 
 thoughts, as well as of its actions and events. If asked 
 to give in a sentence the spirit of this great movement, 
 most men in this country would feel constrained to an 
 swer, as the great German sage is reported to have an 
 swered Cousin, " These things do not sum themselves up 
 in single sentences." If any one still insists on a form 
 ula, he must seek it from some adroit French critic who 
 will clench the whole thing for him in a phrase, or at 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 121 
 
 most a sentence. Into this great atmosphere, define it 
 how you will, then seething and fermenting, it was that 
 Coleridge passed. Most of his fourteen months were, 
 no doubt, given to acquiring the language, but he could 
 not mingle with those professors and students without 
 catching some tincture of that way of thought which 
 was then busy in all brains. It was not, however, till 
 after his return to England that he studied Kant and 
 other German philosophers. His name will ever be 
 historically associated with the first attempt to intro 
 duce these new thoughts to the English mind, which, 
 having been for more than a century steeped to reple 
 tion in Lockeism, was now sadly in need of other ali 
 ment. Some have reviled Coleridge because he did 
 not know that whole cycle of thought so fully as they 
 suppose that they themselves do. As if anything so 
 all-embracing as German philosophy can be taken in 
 completely at once ; as if the first delver in any mine 
 ever yet extracted the entire ore. But to such impugn- 
 ers it were enough to say, We shall listen with more 
 patience to your accusations, when you have done one 
 half as much to bring home the results of German 
 thought to the educated British mind now, as Coleridge 
 did in his day. 
 
 The first fruits, however, of his newly acquired Ger 
 man were poetic, not philosophic. Arriving in London 
 in November, 1799, he set to work to translate 
 Schiller s " Wallenstein," and accomplished in three 
 weeks what many competent judges regard as, notwith 
 standing some inaccuracies, the finest translation of any 
 poem into the English language. It is a free transla 
 tion, with here and there some lines of Coleridge s own 
 added where the meaning seemed to him to require it. 
 At the time, the translation fell almost dead from the 
 press, but since that day it has come to be prized as it 
 deserves. 
 
122 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 In the autumn of 1799, Coleridge joined Wordsworth 
 on a tour among the lakes, that tour on which the lat 
 ter fixed on the Town-End of Grasmere for his future 
 home. This was Coleridge s first sight of English 
 mountains. Rydal and Grasmere, he says, gave him. 
 the deepest delight; Haweswater kept his eyes dim 
 with tears. During the last days of the year, Words 
 worth, -with his sister, walked over the Yorkshire fells, 
 and settled in their new home. From this time for 
 ward, Coleridge wrote for the " Morning Post," off and 
 on, till the close of 1802. About Coleridge s contri 
 butions to that paper, there has been maintained, since 
 his death, a debate which hardly concerns us here. 
 Enough to say, that having originally agreed with Fox 
 in opposing the French war in 1800, and having at 
 that time written violently against Pitt in the " Morn 
 ing Post" and elsewhere, he was gradually separated 
 from the leader of the opposition by the independent 
 view he took against Napoleon, as the character of the 
 military despot gradually unfolded itself. Coleridge 
 passed over to the Tories, as he himself says, " only in 
 the sense in which all patriots did so at that time, by 
 refusing to accompany the Whigs in their almost perfid 
 ious demeanor towards Napoleon. Anti-ministerial 
 they styled their policy, but it was really anti-national. 
 It was exclusively in relation to the great feud with 
 Napoleon that I adhered to the Tories. But because 
 this feud was so capital, so earth-shaking, that it occu 
 pied all hearts, and all the councils of Europe, suffer 
 ing no other question almost to live in the neighbor 
 hood, hence it happened that he who joined the Tories 
 in this was regarded as their ally in everything. Do 
 mestic politics were then in fact forgotten." 
 
 But though he was constrained to come round to 
 Pitt s foreign policy, he never, that I know, recanted 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 123 
 
 the invectives with which he assailed that minister in 
 1800. There is still extant, among " The Essays on 
 his Own Times," a well-known character of Pitt from 
 the pen of Coleridge, which appeared in the " Morning 
 Post." Coleridge, in general fair-minded and far-see 
 ing, had one or two strange and unaccountable antip 
 athies to persons, which Wilson mentions, and this 
 against Pitt was perhaps the strongest and the blindest. 
 On the day that the character of Pitt appeared, the 
 character of Bonaparte was promised for " to-morrow," 
 but that to-morrow never arrived. What that portrait 
 would have been may perhaps be gathered from a par 
 agraph on the same subject, contained in Appendix B 
 to the first " Lay Sermon." The will, dissevered from 
 conscience and religion, " becomes Satanic pride and 
 rebellious self-idolatry in the relations of the spirit to 
 itself, and remorseless despotism relatively to others ; 
 the more hopeless as the more obdurate by the subju 
 gation of sensual impulses, by its superiority to toil and 
 pain and pleasure ; in short, by the fearful resolve to 
 find in itself alone the one absolute motive of action, 
 under which all other motives from within and from 
 
 without must be either subordinated or crushed 
 
 This is the character which Milton has so philosoph 
 ically, as well a ssublimely, embodied in the Satan of 
 his Paradise Lost Hope in which there is no 
 cheerfulness ; steadfastness within and immovable re 
 solve, with outward restlessness and whirling activity ; 
 violence with guile ; temerity with cunning ; and, as 
 the result of all, interrninableness of object with per 
 fect indifference of means these are the marks that 
 have characterized the masters of mischief, the liberti- 
 cides, and mighty hunters of mankind, from Nimrod to 
 Bonaparte By want of insight into the possibil 
 ity of such a character, whole nations have been so far 
 
124 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 duped as to regard with palliative admiration, instead 
 of wonder and abhorrence, the Molochs of human na 
 ture, who are indebted for the larger portion of their 
 meteoric success to their total want of principle, and 
 who surpass the generality of their fellow-creatures in 
 one act of courage only, that of daring to say with their 
 whole heart, Evil, be thou my good ! All system is 
 so far power ; and a systematic criminal, self-consistent 
 and entire in wickedness, who entrenches villainy within 
 villainy, and barricades crime by crime, has removed a 
 world of obstacles by the mere decision that he will 
 have no other obstacles but those of force and brute 
 matter." 
 
 It must have been early in 1801 that Coleridge 
 turned his back for a time on London and the " Morn 
 ing Post," to transfer his family to the Lakes, and set 
 tle them at Greta Hall. The landlord of it was a Mr. 
 Jackson, the " Master " of Wordsworth s poem of the 
 " Wagoner." From this house, destined to become 
 Southey s permanent earthly home, Coleridge writes 
 to Southey, then in Portugal, this description of it : 
 " In front we have a giant s camp, an encamped army 
 of tent-like mountains, which, by an inverted arch, 
 gives a view of another vale [meaning, I suppose, the 
 range of peaks which close the head of the Newlands 
 vale]. On our right the lovely vale and wedge-shaped 
 lake of Bassenthwaite ; and on our left, Derwentwater 
 and Lodore in full view, and the fantastic mountains 
 of Borrowdale. Behind us the massy Skiddaw, smooth, 
 green, high, with two chasms, and a tent-like ridge in 
 the larger. A fairer scene you have not seen in all 
 your wanderings." There Southey soon joined Cole 
 ridge, and the two kindred families shared Greta Hall 
 together, a common home with two doors. 
 
 Coleridge was now at the full manhood of his 
 
SAM DEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 125 
 
 powers ; -lie was about thirty, and the time was come 
 when the marvelous promise of youth ought to have 
 had its fulfillment. He was surrounded with a coun 
 try which, if any could, might have inspired him, with 
 friends beside him who loved and were ready in any 
 way to aid him. But the next fifteen years, the prime 
 strength of his life, when his friends looked for fruit, 
 and he himself felt that it was due, were all but unpro 
 ductive. The " Ode to Dejection," written at the be 
 ginning of the Lake time, and " Youth and Age," 
 written just before its close, with two or three more 
 short pieces, are all his poetry of this period, and they 
 fitly represent the sinking of heart and hope which 
 were now too habitual with him. What was the cause 
 of all this failure ? Bodily disease, no doubt, in some 
 measure, and the languor of disease depressing a will 
 by nature weak and irresolute. But more than these, 
 there was a worm at the root that was sapping his 
 powers, and giving fatal effect to his natural infirmities. 
 This process had already set in, but it was some years 
 yet before the result was fully manifest. During 
 these first years at the Lakes, though Greta was his 
 home, Coleridge, according to De Quincey, was more 
 often to be found at Grasmere. This retirement, for 
 such it then was, had for him three attractions, a love 
 liness more complete than that of Derwentwater, an 
 interesting and pastoral people not to be found at 
 Keswick, and above all, the society of Wordsworth. 
 It was about this time that there arose the name of 
 the Lake School, a mere figment of the " Edinburgh 
 Review," which it invented to express its hatred of 
 three original writers, each unlike the other, and all 
 agreeing only in one thing, their opposition to the hard 
 and unimaginative spirit which was then the leading 
 characteristic of the " Edinburgh." How unlike 
 
126 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 Wordsworth and Coleridge really were in their way 
 of thinking and working may be now clearly seen by 
 comparing the works they have left behind. And as 
 for Southey and Wordsworth, they had but little in 
 common, and were not even on friendly terms till more 
 than ten years after the Lake School was first talked 
 of. Likely enough Coleridge found Wordsworth more 
 original and suggestive than Southey. But the single 
 ness and wholeness of moral purpose which inspired 
 the lives of both his friends, must have been to Cole 
 ridge a continual rebuke ; and Southey, as being a near 
 relation, and a closer observer of the domestic unhap- 
 piness caused by Coleridge s neglects, had perhaps 
 added to the silent reproof of his own example more 
 open remonstrance. 
 
 In August, 1803, Wordsworth and his sister visited 
 Coleridge at Keswick, and took him with them on that 
 first tour in Scotland of which Wordsworth, and his 
 sister too, have left such imperishable memorials. 
 Most of the way they walked, from Dumfries up 
 Nithsdale, over Crawfordmuir by the Falls of Clyde, 
 and so on to Loch Lomond. Coleridge being in poor 
 health and worse spirits than usual, and somewhat too 
 much in love with his own dejection, left his two com 
 panions somewhere about Loch Lomond to return 
 home. But either at this or some other time not 
 specially recorded, he must have got further north, for 
 we find him, in his second " Lay Sermon," speaking of 
 his solitary walk from Loch Lomond to Inverness, and 
 describing the impression made upon him both by the 
 sight of the recently unpeopled country, and by the 
 story he heard from an old Highland widow near Fort 
 Augustus, of the wrongs she herself, her kinsfolk and 
 her neighbors, had suffered in those sad clearances. 
 But if Scotland woke in him no poetry on this his first 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 127 
 
 and perhaps only visit, and if Scotchmen have had 
 some severe things said of them by him, they can af 
 ford to pardon them. The land is none the less beau 
 tiful for not having been sung by him ; and if from 
 the people he could have learned some of that shrewd 
 ness of which they have enough and to spare, his life 
 would have been other and happier than it was. 
 
 If the Lake country had suited Coleridge s constitu 
 tion, and if he had turned to advantage the scenery and 
 society it afforded, in no part of England, it might 
 seem, could he have found a fitter home. But the 
 dampness of the climate brought out so severely the 
 rheumatism from which he had suffered since boyhood, 
 that he was forced to seek a refuge from it on the 
 shores of the Mediterranean, a doubtful measure, it 
 is said, for one in his state of nerves. Arriving at 
 Malta in April, 1804, he soon became known to the 
 Governor, Sir Alexander Ball, and during a change of 
 secretaries Coleridge served for a time as a temporary 
 secretary. The official task-work, and not less the offi 
 cial parade, expected from him, which he never at 
 tempted to maintain, were highly distasteful to him, 
 and he gladly resigned, as soon as a new secretary 
 came out. He made, however, the friendship of the 
 Governor, whose character he has painted glowingly in 
 " The Friend." Whether Sir Alexander Ball merited 
 this high encomium I cannot say, but Professor Wilson 
 mentions that Coleridge s craze for the three B s, Ball, 
 Bell, and Bowyer, was a standing joke among his 
 friends. The health he sought at Malta he did not 
 find. The change at first seemed beneficial, but soon 
 came the reaction, " limbs like lifeless tools, violent 
 internal pains, laboring and oppressed breathing." For 
 relief from these he had recourse to the sedative, 
 which he had begun to use so far back as 1796, and 
 
128 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 the habit became now fairly confirmed. Leaving Malta 
 in September, 1805, he came to Rome, and there spent 
 some time in seeing what every traveller sees, but 
 what Coleridge would see with other eyes and keener 
 insight than most men. Full observations on these 
 things he noted down for after use. There, too. he 
 made the acquaintance of the German poet Tieck, of 
 an American painter, Allston, and of Humboldt, the 
 brother of the great traveller. Gilman informs us that 
 Coleridge was told by Humboldt that his name was on 
 the list of the proscribed at Paris, owing to an article 
 which he (Coleridge) had written against Bonaparte 
 in the " Morning Post ; " that the arrest had already 
 been sent to Rome, but that one morning Coleridge 
 was waited on by a noble Benedictine, sent to him by 
 the kindness of the Pope, bearing a passport signed by 
 the Pope, and telling him that a carriage was ready to 
 bear him at once to Leghorn. Coleridge took the 
 hint ; at Leghorn embarked on board of an American 
 vessel sailing for England ; was chased by a French 
 ship ; and was, during the chase, forced by the captain 
 to throw overboard all his papers, and among them his 
 notes and observations made in Rome. So writes Cole 
 ridge s biographer. Wilson laughs at the thought of 
 the Imperial eagle stooping to pursue such small game 
 as Coleridge. And certainly it does seem hardly cred 
 ible that Bonaparte should have so noted the secrets 
 of the London newspaper press, or have made such 
 efforts to lay hands on one stray member of that corps. 
 De Quincey, however, argues from Bonaparte s char 
 acter and habits that the thing was by no means im 
 probable. 
 
 It is hardly worth while to attempt to trace all the 
 changes of his life for the next ten years after his re 
 turn from Malta. Sometimes at Keswick, where his 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 129 
 
 family still lived ; sometimes with Wordsworth at the 
 Town-End of Grasmere ; sometimes in London, living 
 in the office of the " Courier," and writing for it ; 
 sometimes lecturing at the Royal Institution, often, 
 according to De Quincey, disappointing his audience by 
 non-appearance ; anon an inmate in Wordsworth s new 
 home at Allan Bank, while " The Excursion " was 
 being composed; then taking final farewell of the 
 Lakes in 1810, travelling with Basil Montagu to Lon 
 don, and leaving his family at Keswick, for some years, 
 under care of Southey ; domiciled now with Basil 
 Montagu, now with a Mr. Morgan at Hammersmith, or 
 Calne, now with other friends in or not far from Lon 
 don ; so passed with him those homeless, aimless, 
 wasted years of middle manhood. No doubt there 
 were bright spots here and there, when his marvelous 
 powers found vent in lecturing on some congenial sub 
 ject, or flowed forth in that stream of thought and 
 speech which was his native element. During these 
 wanderings he met now and then with the wits of the 
 time, either in rivalry not of his own seeking, or in 
 friendly intercourse. Scott has recorded a rencounter 
 he had with Coleridge at a dinner party, when some 
 London litterateurs sought to lower Scott by pitting 
 Coleridge against him. Coleridge had been called on 
 to recite some of his own unpublished poems, and had 
 done so. Scott, called on to contribute his share, 
 refused, on the plea that he had none to produce, but 
 offered to recite some clever lines which he had lately 
 read in a newspaper. The lines were the unfortunate 
 " Fire, Famine, and Slaughter," of which Coleridge 
 was the then unacknowledged author. It is amusing 
 to see the two sides of the story ; the easy, off-hand 
 humor with which Scott tells it in a letter, or in his 
 journal ; and the laborious self-defense with which 
 9 
 
130 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 Coleridge ushers in the lines in his published poeins. 
 More friendly was his intercourse with Lord Byron, 
 who, while he was lessee of a London theatre, had 
 brought forward Coleridge s " Remorse," and had taken 
 much interest in its success. This brought the two 
 poets frequently into company, and in April, 1816, 
 Coleridge thus speaks of Byron s appearance : " If 
 you had seen Lord Byron you could scarcely disbelieve 
 him. So beautiful a countenance I scarcely ever saw ; 
 his teeth so many stationary smiles ; his eyes the open 
 portals of the sun things of light, and made for light ; 
 and his forehead, so ample, and yet so flexible, passing 
 from marble smoothness into a hundred wreaths and 
 lines and dimples, correspondent to the feelings and 
 sentiments he is uttering." But lecturing, or conversa 
 tion, or intercourse with brother poets, even taken at 
 their best, are but a poor account to give of the prime 
 years of such genius as Coleridge was intrusted with. 
 
 The record of his writings from 1801 till 1816 con 
 tains only one work of real importance. This was 
 " The Friend," a periodical of weekly essays, intended 
 to help to the formation of opinions on moral, political, 
 and artistic subjects, grounded upon true and permanent 
 principles. Undertaken with the countenance of, and 
 with some slight aid from, Wordsworth, it began to be 
 published in June, 1809, and ceased in March, 1810, be 
 cause it did not pay the cost of publishing, which Cole 
 ridge had imprudently taken on himself. The original 
 work having been much enlarged and recast, was pub 
 lished again in its present three-volume form in 1818. 
 Even as it now stands, the ground-swell after the great 
 French Revolution tempest can be distinctly felt. It 
 is full of the political problems cast up by the troubled 
 waters of the then recent storm, and of the attempt to 
 discriminate between the first truths of morality and 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 131 
 
 maxims of political expediency, and to ground each on 
 their own proper basis. No one can read this work 
 without feeling the force of Southey s remark : " The 
 vice of The Friend is its round-aboutness." But 
 whoever will be content to bear with this and to read 
 right on, will find all through fruit which will more 
 than repay the labor, with essays here and there which 
 are nearly perfect both in matter and in form. But 
 its defects, such as they are, must have told fatally 
 against its success when it appeared as a periodical. It 
 was Coleridge s misfortune in this, as in so many of his 
 works, to have to try to combine two things, hard, if 
 not impossible to reconcile, popularity that will pay, 
 and thought that will elevate. The attempt to dig 
 deep, and to implant new truths which can only be 
 taken in by painful thought, finds small favor with most 
 readers of periodicals. Few writers have attained pres 
 ent popularity and enduring power, and least of all 
 could Coleridge do so. " The Friend " contains in its 
 present, and probably it did in its first shape, clear 
 indications of the change that Coleridge s mind had 
 gone through in philosophy, as well as in his religious 
 belief. But of this we shall have to speak again. 
 This middle portion of Coleridge s life may, perhaps, be 
 not inaptly closed by the description of his .appearance 
 and manner, as these appeared to De Quincey when he 
 first saw him in 1807 : 
 
 " I had received directions for finding out the house 
 where Coleridge was visiting; and in riding down a 
 main street of Bridgewater, I noticed a gateway cor 
 responding to the description given me. Under this |^ 
 was standing and gazing about him a man whom I will 
 describe. In height he might seem to be about five 
 feet eight (he was in reality about an inch and a half 
 taller, but his figure was of an order which drowns the 
 
132 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 height) ; his person was tall and full, and tended even 
 to corpulence ; his complexion was fair, though not 
 what painters technically style fair, because it was 
 associated with black hair ; his eyes were large and 
 soft in their expression ; and it was from the peculiar 
 appearance of haze or dreaminess which mixed with 
 their light that I recognized my object. This was 
 Coleridge. I examined him steadfastly for a minute 
 or more, and it struck me that he saw neither myself 
 nor any other object in the street. He was in a deep 
 reverie, for I had dismounted and advanced close to 
 him before he had apparently become conscious of my 
 presence. The sound of my voice, announcing my 
 name, first awoke him ; he started, and for a moment 
 seemed at a loss to understand my purpose or his own 
 situation. There was no mauvaise honte in his manner, 
 but simple perplexity, and an apparent difficulty in 
 recovering his position amongst daylight realities. This 
 little scene over, he received me with a kindness of 
 manner so marked that it might be called gracious. 
 The hospitable family with whom he was domesticated 
 all testified for Coleridge deep affection and esteem ; 
 sentiments in which the whole town of Bridgewater 
 
 seemed to share 
 
 " Coleridge led me to the drawing-room, rang the 
 bell for refreshments, and omitted no point of a court 
 eous reception That point being settled, Cole 
 ridge, like some great Orellana, or the St. Lawrence, 
 that, having been checked and fretted by rocks or 
 thwarting islands, suddenly recovers its volume of 
 waters, and its mighty music, swept at once, as if re 
 turning to his natural business, into a continuous strain 
 of eloquent dissertation, certainly the most novel, the 
 most finely illuminated, and traversing the most spa 
 cious fields of thought, by transitions the most just 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, 133 
 
 and logical that it was possible to conceive To 
 
 many people, and often I have heard the complaint, 
 he seemed to wander ; and he seemed then to wander 
 the most when in fact his resistance to the wandering 
 instinct was greatest, namely, when the compass and 
 huge circuit by which his illustrations moved, trav 
 elled furthest into remote regions, before they began 
 to revolve. Long before this coming round com 
 menced, most people had lost him, and naturally enough 
 supposed that he had lost himself. They continued to 
 itdmire the separate beauty of the thoughts, but did 
 not see their relations to the dominant theme. How 
 ever, I can assert, upon my long and intimate knowl 
 edge of Coleridge s mind, that logic the most severe 
 was as inalienable from his modes of thinking as gram 
 mar from his language." 
 
 Admirable as in the main the essay is from which 
 this sketch is taken, it contains some things which one 
 could wish unwritten. De Quiucey dwells on some 
 alleged faults of Coleridge with a loving minuteness 
 which the pure love of truth can hardly account for ; 
 and with regard to the great and all-absorbing fault, 
 the habit of opium-taking, his statements are directly 
 opposed to those made by Coleridge himself, and by 
 his friends who had the best means of knowing the 
 truth. He says that Coleridge first took to opium, 
 " not as a relief from bodily pains or nervous irrita 
 tions, for his constitution was naturally strong and 
 excellent, but as a source of luxurious sensations." 
 Here De Quincey falls into two errors. First, Cole 
 ridge s constitution was not really strong. Though 
 full of life and energy, his body was also full of dis 
 ease, which gradually poisoned the springs of life. His 
 letters bear witness to this, by the many complaints 
 of ill health which they contain, before he ever touched 
 
134 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 opium. Again, as we have already seen, what he 
 sought in opium was not pleasurable sensations, but 
 freedom from pain, an antidote to the nervous agi 
 tations under which he suffered. But whatever may 
 have been the beginning of the habit, the result of 
 continued indulgence in it was equally disastrous. We 
 have already seen the letter which notes his first re 
 course to the fatal drug in 1796. As his ailments 
 increased, so did his use of it. At Malta, opium-taking 
 became a confirmed habit, and from that time for ten 
 years it quite overmastered him. In 1807, the year 
 when De Quincey first met him, he writes of himself 
 as "rolling rudderless," with an increasing and over 
 whelming sense of wretchedness. The craving went 
 on growing, and his consumption of the drug had, by 
 1814, reached a quite appalling height. Cottle, then, 
 on meeting Coleridge, saw what a wreck he had be 
 come, discovered the fatal cause, and took courage to 
 remonstrate by letter. Coleridge makes no conceal 
 ment, pleads guilty to the evil habit, and confesses 
 that he is utterly miserable. Sadder letters were per 
 haps never written than those cries out of the depths 
 of his agony. He tells Cottle that he had learned 
 what " sin is against an imperishable being, such as is 
 the soul of man ; that he had had more than one 
 glimpse of the outer darkness and the worm that dieth 
 not; that if annihilation and the possibility of heaven 
 were at that moment offered to his choice, he would 
 prefer the former." More pitiful still is that letter to 
 his friend Wade : " In the one crime of opium, what 
 crime have I not made myself guilty of? Ingratitude 
 to my Maker ; and to my benefactors injustice ; and 
 
 unnatural cruelty to my poor children After 
 
 my death, I earnestly entreat that a full and unquali 
 fied narrative of my wretchedness, and of its guilty 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 135 
 
 cause, may be made public, that at least some little 
 good may be effected by the direful example." It is 
 painful to dwell on these things, nor should they have 
 been reproduced here, had it been possible to have 
 given a true picture of the man, without touching on 
 this, the dark side of his character. 
 
 Strange and sad as it is to think that one so gifted 
 should have fallen so low, it is hardly less strange 
 that from that degradation he should ever have been 
 enabled to rise. The crisis seems to have come about 
 the time when those letters passed between Cottle and 
 him in 1814. For some time there followed a struggle 
 against the tyrant vice, by various means, but all seem 
 ingly ineffectual. At last he voluntarily arranged to 
 board himself with the family of Mr. Oilman, a physi 
 cian, who lived at Highgate, in a retired house, in an 
 airy situation surrounded by a large garden. It was in 
 April, 1816, that he first entered this house at High- 
 gate, which continued to be his home for eighteen 
 years till his death. The letter in which he opens his 
 grief to Mr. Oilman, and commends himself to his care, 
 is very striking, showing at once his strong desire to 
 overcome the inveterate habit, and his feeling of in 
 ability to do so, unless he were placed under a watchful 
 eye and external restraint. In this home he learned 
 to abandon opium, and here, though weighed down by 
 ever increasing bodily infirmity, and often by great 
 mental depression, he found on the whole 
 
 " The best quiet to his course allowed." 
 
 That the vice was overcome might be inferred from 
 the very fact that his life was prolonged. And though 
 statements to the contrary have been made from quar 
 ters whence they might least have been expected, there 
 is, as I have learned from the most trustworthy author- 
 
136 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 ities still living, no ground for these statements. The 
 friends of Coleridge, who have had best access to the 
 truth, believe that at Highgate he obtained that self- 
 mastery which he sought. No doubt, the habit left a 
 bane behind it, a body shattered, a mind shorn of much 
 of its strength for continuous effort, ever-recurring 
 seasons of despondency and visitings of self-reproach 
 for so much life wasted, so great powers given, so little 
 achieved. No man ever felt more painfully than he 
 the contrast between 
 
 " The petty Done, the Undone vast." 
 
 But still, under all these drawbacks, he labored ear 
 nestly to redeem what of life remained ; and most of 
 what is satisfactory to remember of his life belongs to 
 those last eighteen years. It was a time of gathering 
 up of the fragments that remained of saving splinters 
 washed ashore from the mighty wreck. To this time, 
 such as it is, we owe most of that by which Coleridge 
 is now known to men, and by which, if at all, he has 
 benefited his kind. 
 
 During those years the great religious change that 
 had been long going on was completed and confirmed. 
 As far back as 1800 his adherence to the Hartleian 
 philosophy and his belief in Unitarian theology had 
 been shaken. By 1805 he was in some sense a be 
 liever in the Trinity, and had entered on a closer 
 study of Scripture, especially of St. Paul and St. John. 
 There were in him, as De Quincey observed, the 
 capacity of love and faith, of self-distrust, humility, and 
 child-like docility, waiting but for time aud sorrow to 
 mature them. Such a discipline the long ineffectual 
 struggle with his infirmity supplied. The sense of 
 moral weakness, and of sin, working inward contrition, 
 made him seek for a more practical, supporting faith 
 
*" F TI *fy 
 
 /Tun iv 
 
 SAMUEL TAYLOR C01 
 
 ^^ fr , < ^ v 
 
 than he had known in his early years. A^l s.o he 
 learned that, while the consistency of Christianity with 
 right reason and the historic evidence of miracles are 
 the outworks, yet the vital centre of faith lies in the 
 believer s feeling of his great need, and the experience 
 that the redemption which is in Christ meets that 
 need ; that it is the " sorrow rising from beneath and 
 the consolation meeting it from above," the actual 
 trial of the faith in Christ, which is its ultimate and 
 mot satisfying evidence. With him, too, as with so 
 many before, it was credidi, ideoque intellexi. The 
 Ilighgate time was also the period of his most pro 
 longed and undisturbed study. Among much other 
 reading, the Old English divines were diligently pe 
 rused and commented on ; and his criticisms and reflec 
 tions on them fill nearly the whole of the third and 
 fourth volumes of his " Literary Remains." A dis 
 criminating, often a severe critic of these writers, he 
 was still a warm admirer, in this a striking contrast to 
 Arnold, who certainly unduly depreciated them. 
 
 Almost the whole of his prose works were the 
 product of this time. First the "Two Lay Sermons," 
 published in 1816 and 1827. -Then the " Biographia 
 Literaria," published in 1817, though in part composed 
 some years before. In 1818 followed the recast and 
 greatly enlarged edition of " The Friend ; " and in 
 1825 he gave to the world the most mature of all his 
 works, the " Aids to Reflection." Incorporated es 
 pecially with the earlier part of this work, are selec 
 tions from the writings of Archbishop Leighton, of 
 which he has said that to him they seemed " next to 
 the inspired Scriptures, yea, as the vibration of that 
 once-struck hour remaining on the air." The main 
 substance of the work, however, contains his own 
 thoughts on the grounds of morality and religion, and 
 
138 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 of the relation of these to each other, along with his 
 views on some of the main doctrines of the faith. The 
 last work that appeared during his lifetime was that on 
 "Church and State," published in 1830. After his 
 death appeared his posthumous works, namely, the 
 four volumes of " Literary Remains," and the small 
 volume on the inspiration of Scripture, entitled " Con 
 fessions of an Inquiring Spirit." 
 
 It is by these works alone, incomplete as many of 
 them are, that posterity can judge of him. But the 
 impression of overflowing genius which he left on his 
 contemporaries was due not so much to his writings as 
 to his marvelous talk. Printed books have made us 
 undervalue this gift, or at best regard it more as a 
 thing of display than as a genuine thought-communi 
 cating power. But as an organ of teaching truth, 
 speech is older than books, and for this end Plato, 
 among others, preferred the living voice to dead letters. 
 Measured by this standard, Coleridge had no equal in 
 his own, and few in any age. How his gift of dis 
 course in his younger days arrested Hazlitt and De 
 Quincey, has been already seen ; and in his declining 
 years at Highgate, when bodily ailments allowed, dur 
 ing the pauses of study and writing, fuller and more 
 continuous than ever the mighty monologue streamed 
 on. Some faint echoes of what then fell from him 
 have been caught up and preserved in the well-known 
 " Table-Talk," by his nephew and son-in-law, Henry 
 Nelson Coleridge, who in his preface has finely de 
 scribed the impression produced by his uncle s conversa 
 tion on congenial listeners. To that retirement at 
 Highgate flocked as on a pilgrimage most of what was 
 brilliant in intellect or ardent in youthful genius at 
 that day. Edward Irving, Julius Hare, Sterling, and 
 many more who might be named, were among his 
 
8AMUKL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 139 
 
 frequent and most devoted listeners. Most came to 
 listen, wonder, and learn. But some came and went 
 to shrug their shoulders, and pronounce it unintelligible, 
 as Chalmers ; or in after years to scoff, as Mr. Carlyle. 
 Likely enough this latter came craving a solution of 
 some pressing doubt or bewildering enigma ; and to 
 receive instead a prolonged and circuitous disquisition 
 must to his then mood of mind have been tantalizing 
 enough. But was it well done, O great Thomas ! for 
 this, years afterwards, to jeer at the old man s en 
 feebled gait, and caricature the tones of his voice ? 
 
 In the summer of 1833 Coleridge was seen for the 
 last time in public, at the meeting of the British Asso 
 ciation at Cambridge. Next year, on the 25th of July, 
 he died in Mr. Gilman s house in The Grove, High- 
 gate, which had been so long his home, and was laid 
 hard by in his last resting-place within the old church 
 yard by the roadside. 
 
 Twelve days before his death, not knowing it to be 
 so near, he wrote to his godchild this remarkable let 
 ter, 1 which, gathering up the sum of his whole life s 
 experience, reads like his unconscious epitaph on him 
 self: 
 
 " MY DEAR GODCHILD, .... Years must pass 
 before you will be able to read with an understanding 
 heart what I now write ; but I trust that the all-gra 
 cious God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the 
 Father of mercies, who by his only begotten Son (all 
 mercies in one sovereign mercy) has redeemed you 
 from the evil ground, and willed you to be born out of 
 darkness, but into light ; out of death, but into life ; out 
 of sin, but into righteousness, even into the Lord our 
 
 1 This letter was written on the 13th, and he died on the 25th day of 
 July. 
 
140 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 Righteousness, I trust that He will graciously hear 
 the prayers of your dear parents, and be with you as 
 the spirit of health and growth in body and mind. 
 
 " .... I, too, your godfather, have known what 
 the enjoyments and advantages of this life are, and 
 what the more refined pleasures which learning and 
 intellectual power can bestow ; and with the ex 
 perience which more than threescore years can give, 
 I now, on the eve of my departure, declare to you 
 (and earnestly pray that you may hereafter live and 
 act on the conviction) that health is a great blessing, 
 competence obtained by honorable industry a great 
 blessing, and a great blessing it is to have kind, faith 
 ful, and loving friends and relatives ; but that the 
 greatest of all blessings, as it is the most ennobling of 
 all privileges, is to be indeed a Christian. But I have 
 been likewise, through a large portion of my later life, 
 a sufferer, sorely afflicted with bodily pains, languors, 
 and infirmities; and for the last three or four years 
 have, with a few and brief intervals, been confined to a 
 sick-room, and at this moment, in great weakness 
 and heaviness, write from a sick-bed, hopeless of a 
 recovery, yet without prospect of a speedy removal ; 
 and I, thus on the very brink of the grave, solemnly 
 bear witness to you, that the Almighty Redeemer, 
 most gracious in his promises to them that truly seek 
 Him, is faithful to perform what He hath promised, and 
 has preserved, under all my pains and infirmities, the 
 inward peace that passeth all understanding, with the 
 supporting assurance of a reconciled God, who will not 
 withdraw his Spirit from me in the conflict, and in 
 his own time will deliver me from the Evil One. 
 
 " O, my dear godchild ! eminently blessed are those 
 who begin early to seek, fear, and love their God, trust 
 ing wholly in the righteousness and mediation of their 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. HI 
 
 Lord, Redeemer, Saviour, and everlasting High Priest, 
 Jesus Christ. 
 
 " O, preserve this as a legacy and bequest from your 
 unseen godfather and friend, S. T. COLERIDGE." 
 
 And now, perhaps, this sketch cannot close more 
 fitly than in the affectionate words of his nephew, the 
 faithful defender of the memory of his great uncle : 
 
 " Coleridge ! blessings on his gentle memory ! Cole 
 ridge was a frail mortal. He had indeed his peculiar 
 weaknesses as well as his unique powers ; sensibilities 
 that an averted look would rack, a heart which would 
 beat calmly in the tremblings of an earthquake. He 
 shrank from mere uneasiness like a child, and bore the 
 preparatory agonies of his death-attack like a martyr. 
 He suffered an almost life-long punishment for his 
 errors, whilst the world at large has the unwithering 
 fruits of his labors, and his genius, and his sufferings." 
 
 If I have traced in any measure aright the course of 
 Coleridge s life, no more is needed to show what these 
 failings and errors were. It more concerns us to ask 
 what permanent fruit of all that he thought, and did, 
 and suffered under the sun, there still remains, now 
 that he has lain more than thirty years in his grave. 
 To answer this fully is impossible in the case of any 
 man, much more in the case of one who has been a 
 great thinker rather than a great doer ; for many of 
 his best ideas have so melted into the general atmos 
 phere of thought, that it is hard to separate them from 
 the complex whole, and trace them back to their origi 
 nal source. But the abler men of his own generation 
 were not slow to confess how much they owed to him. 
 In poetry, Sir Walter Scott acknowledged himself as 
 indebted to him for the opening key-note of " The Lay 
 
142 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 of the Last Minstrel." In the metre, sentiment, and 
 drapery of that first canto, it is not difficult to trace the 
 influence of " Christabel," then unpublished, but well 
 known. Wordsworth, aloof from his contemporaries, 
 and self-sufficing as he was, felt Coleridge to be his 
 equal " the only wonderful man I have ever known." 
 Arnold, at a later day, called him the greatest intellect 
 that England had produced within his memory, and 
 shared with, perhaps learned from him, some of his 
 leading thoughts, as that the identification of the church 
 with the clergy was " the first and fundamental apos 
 tasy." Dr. Newman pointed to Coleridge s works long 
 since as a proof that the minds of men in England were 
 then yearning for something higher and deeper than 
 what had satisfied the last age. Julius Hare speaks of 
 him as " the great religious philosopher, to whom the 
 mind of our generation in England owes more than to 
 any other man." Mr. Maurice has everywhere spoken 
 with deeper reverence of him than of any other teacher 
 of these latter times. Even Mr. Mill has said that " no 
 one has contributed more to shape the opinions among 
 younger men, who can be said to have any opinions at 
 all." 
 
 But what need to note the impression he made here 
 and there on single men, however eminent? He was 
 the spirit-quickener not only of this man or that, but 
 of his whole age. The greatest men of his time were 
 the most susceptible of his influence, and the first to 
 feel it Wordsworth, Scott, Byron, Irving, Wilson, 
 Hazlitt, even Carlyle on these, as has been lately 
 said, he laid his spell, and " spoke through them." 
 And partly through them, partly by his own immediate 
 agency, he has since entered into the inner thought of 
 every reflective man. For his was the most germina- 
 tive mind England has this century given birth to. 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 143 
 
 Like a vast seed-field it lay, till the winds of inspiration 
 wafted over it, blowing the seeds of his new thought 
 over all the land. Incommensurable as Scott and 
 Coleridge in all other respects are, lying as they do at 
 the very opposite poles of thought, in one thing they 
 are alike the width of their operation. If the one 
 by the vastness of his objective work changed the whole 
 surface of society, not less widely or powerfully did the 
 other by his penetrating subjectivity leaven it in its 
 inmost depths. No really great man can be fully 
 represented by his books, but few great men have left 
 in their books so inadequate expressions of themselves 
 as Coleridge has done. The living presence with the 
 winged words, vivifying the minds of all hearers, has 
 long been gone, and of all that matchless discourse, no 
 trace remains but the few faint notices of those who 
 heard it. Therefore, from the living eloquence to the 
 silent books, we are forced reluctantly to turn, since 
 these, though but a moiety of what he was, are all the 
 permanent record of him that remains. 
 
 These works are but fragments of his speculation, 
 and this forms one difficulty in rightly estimating them. 
 Another, and perhaps greater, lies in the width over 
 which they range. Most original thinkers have devoted 
 themselves to but a few lines of inquiry. Coleridge s 
 thought may be almost said to have been as wide as 
 life. To apply to himself the word which he first 
 coined, or rather translated from some obscure Byzan- 
 tian, to express Shakespeare s quality, he was a " myr 
 iad-minded man." He touched being at almost every 
 point, and wherever he touched it, he opened up some 
 new shaft of truth, and his books contain some frag 
 ment of what he saw. He who would fully estimate 
 Coleridge s contributions to thought would have to con 
 sider him at least in these several aspects, as a poet, as 
 

 144 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 a critic, as a political philosopher, as a moralist, and as 
 a theologian. But without hazarding anything like so 
 large an attempt, a few brief remarks may be offered 
 on what he has done in some of these so widely differ 
 ent fields. 
 
 It was as a poet that Coleridge was first known, and 
 the wish has many times been expressed that he had 
 stuck to poetry, and never tried philosophy. No doubt 
 he had imagination enough, as some one has said, to 
 have furnished forth a thousand poets, and " Christabel " 
 will probably be read longer than any prose work he 
 has written. This, however, belongs both to the sub 
 stance and the form of all poetry that is perfect after its 
 kind. But vast and vivid as Coleridge s imagination 
 was, may not this power be as legitimately employed in 
 interpenetrating and quickening the reason, and revivify 
 ing domains of philosophy, which are apt to grow narrow 
 or dead through prosaic formalism, as in purely poetic 
 creation? Moreover, there were perhaps in Coleridge 
 some special powers of fine analysis and introvertive 
 speculation, which seem to have predestined him for 
 other work than poetry ; just as there were some spe 
 cial wants, arising either from natural temperament or 
 early education, which marred his poetic completeness. 
 He had never lived much in the open air ; he had no 
 large storehouse of facts or images, either drawn from 
 observation of outward nature, or from more than 
 common acquaintance with any modes of life or sides 
 of human character, such as Wordsworth and Scott in 
 different ways had. It was not the nature of his mind 
 to dwell lovingly on concrete things, but rather, from its 
 strong generalizing bias, to be borne off continually into 
 the abstract. Therefore I cannot think that Coleridge, 
 though he might have more delighted, would have done 
 better service to mankind, if he had stuck wholly to 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 145 
 
 poetry, or that he did otherwise than fulfill his destiny 
 by giving way to the philosophic impulse. 
 
 His daughter has said that he had four poetic epochs, 
 representing, more or less, boyhood, early manhood, 
 middle, and declining life. To trace these carefully is 
 not for this place. The juvenile poems, those of the 
 first epoch, though showing here and there hints of the 
 coming power, contain, as a whole, nothing which would 
 make them live, were it not for what came afterwards. 
 He himself has said that these poems are disfigured by 
 too great exuberance of double epithets, and by gen 
 eral turgidity. These mark, perhaps, the tumult of his 
 thick-thronging thoughts, struggling to utter themselves 
 with force and freshness, yet not quite disengaged from 
 the old commonplaces of poetic diction, " eve s dusky 
 car," and such like, and from those frigid personifica 
 tions of abstract qualities in which the former age de 
 lighted. Of these early poems, one of the most inter 
 esting is that on the death of Chatterton, in which, 
 though the form somewhat recalls the odes of Collins 
 and Gray, his native self here and there breaks through. 
 Some of them are pensive with his early sorrow, others 
 fierce and turbid with his revolutionary fervor. The 
 longest and most important, styled " Religious Mus 
 ings," though Bowles ranked it high, might easily, not 
 withstanding some fine thoughts, suggest one of his 
 rhapsodies- in a Unitarian chapel cut into blank verse. 
 The religious sentiments it contains are frigid and bom 
 bastic ; the politics denunciatory of existing things, of 
 
 " Warriors, lords, and priests, all the sore ills 
 That vex and desolate our mortal life." 
 
 They contain, however, some true thoughts, well put, 
 though tinged with his Revolution dreams, on the good 
 and evil that have sprung out of the institution of 
 10 
 
146 SAMUEL TAYLOR COL K RIDGE. 
 
 property, arid a fine apostrophe to all the sin-defiled 
 and sorrow-laden ones, whose day of deliverance yet 
 waits. 
 
 It had been well if the poems of the second period, 
 which were mostly written during the Bristol and 
 Nether Stowey periods, and now make up the chief 
 part of the " Sibylline Leaves," had been arranged in 
 the order in which they were composed. This would 
 have thrown much light on them, arising as they do 
 either out of the events of the time or of Coleridge s 
 personal circumstances. Compared with those of the 
 former period, the stream flows more even and un 
 broken. The crude philosophy has all but disappeared, 
 the blank verse is now more fused and melodious, the 
 rhythm of thought more mellow, the religious senti 
 ment, where it does appear, no longer reasoning, but 
 meditative, is more chastened and deep. These poems 
 it must have been, which were to De Quincey " the 
 ray of a new morning, a revealing of untrodden worlds, 
 till then unsuspected amongst men." Such Wilson 
 found them, and so in a measure they have been to 
 many since. In re-reading them, after an interval of 
 years, this is perhaps felt less vividly. Is it that time 
 has diminished the keen sense of their originality ; 
 that the new fragrance they once gave forth has so 
 filled the poetic atmosphere that it makes itself now 
 less distinctly felt ? However this may be, such acci 
 dents of personal feeling do not affect their real worth. 
 Of two fine poems written at Clevedon, the one on the 
 " .ZEolian Harp " contains a passage that may be com 
 pared with the well-known so-called Pantheistic pas 
 sage in Words worth s " Tin tern Abbey." The other, 
 " Reflections on leaving a place of Retirement," breathes 
 a beautiful though too brief spirit of happiness and 
 content. In the same gentle vein are the " Lines to 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 147 
 
 his Brother George," and " Frost at Midnight," in 
 finely balanced and beautifully modulated blank verse. 
 But higher and of wider compass are the three polit 
 ical poems, the ode on " The Departing Year," written 
 at the close of 1796, " France," an ode, written in 
 February, 1797, and "Tears in Solitude," in 1798. 
 The last of these opens and closes with some of his 
 best blank verses, full of lambent light and his own 
 exquisite music, though the middle is troubled with 
 somewhat intemperate politics, pamphleteeringly ex 
 pressed. The ode on " France," when his fond hopes 
 of the Revolution had ended in disappointment, is a 
 strain of noblest poetry. It opens with a call on the 
 clouds, the waves, the sun, the sky, all in nature that 
 is most free, to bear witness 
 
 u With what deep worship I have still adored 
 The spirit of divinest Liberty." 
 
 And closes with these grand lines : 
 
 " O Liberty ! with profitless endeavor 
 Have I pursued thee many a weary hour; 
 But thou nor swell st the victor s strain, nor ever 
 Didst breathe thy soul in forms of human power; 
 Alike from all, howe er they praise thee 
 (Nor prayer nor boastful name delays thee), 
 Alike from Priestcraft s harpy minions, 
 And factious Blasphemy s obscener slaves, 
 Thou speedest on thy subtle pinions, 
 The guide of homeless winds, the playmate of the waves ! 
 And there, I felt thee ! on that sea-cliffs verge, 
 Whose pines, scarce travelled by the breeze above, 
 Had made one murmur with the distant surge ! 
 Yes ! while I stood and gazed, my temples bare, 
 And shot my being through earth, sea, and air, 
 Possessing all things with intensest love, 
 O Liberty, my spirit felt thee there ! " 
 
 Equal, perhaps, to any of the above, are the lines 
 he addressed to Wordsworth, after hearing that poet 
 read aloud the first draft of " The Prelude : " 
 
148 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 " An Orphic song indeed, 
 A song divine, of high and passionate thoughts, 
 To their own music chanted ! . . . . 
 And when, O friend ! my comforter and guide ! 
 Strong in thyself, and powerful to give strength, 
 Thy long-sustained song finally closed, 
 And thy deep voice had ceased yet thou thyself 
 Wert still before my eyes, and round us both 
 That happy vision of beloved faces 
 Scarce conscious, and yet conscious of its close, 
 I sat, my being blended in one thought 
 (Thought was it? or aspiration? or resolve?) 
 Absorbed, yet hanging still upon the sound 
 And when I rose, I found myself in prayer." 
 
 Of the " Ancient Mariner " and " Christabel," the 
 two prime creations of the Nether Stowey period, 
 nothing need be said. Time has now stamped these 
 with the signet of immortality. The view with which 
 these two masterpieces were begun, as the brother 
 poets walked on the green heights of Quantock, has 
 been detailed elsewhere. Coleridge was to choose 
 supernatural or romantic characters, and clothe them 
 from his own imagination with a human interest and 
 a semblance of truth. It would be hard to analyze the 
 strange witchery that is in both, especially in " Chris 
 tabel ; " the language so simple and natural, yet so 
 aerially musical, the rhythm so original, yet so fitted 
 to the story, and the glamour over all, a glamour so 
 peculiar to this one poem. The first part belongs to 
 Quantock, the second was composed several years later 
 at the Lakes, yet still the tale is but half told. Would 
 it have gained or lost in power had it been completed ? 
 
 It has been asked whether there is in Coleridge s 
 poetry any trace of the peculiar vein of thought which 
 afterwards appeared in him as philosophy. There is 
 first a delicacy and subtlety of thought and imagery 
 strange to English poets for at least two centuries. It 
 is in him we find 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 149 
 
 " The stilly murmur of the distant sea 
 Tells us of silence." 
 
 His, too, is 
 
 " A dream remembered in a dream," 
 
 and his 
 
 " Her voice that even in its mirthful mood 
 Hath made me wish to steal away and weep." 
 
 In him too it is that the vision of Mont Blanc awakens 
 that idealism 
 
 " Most dread and silent mount ! I gazed upon thee 
 Till thou, still present to my bodily sense, 
 Hadst vanished from my thought; entranced in prayer, 
 I worshipped the Invisible alone." 
 
 But besides these separate subtleties, are they mis 
 taken who see in the unearthly weirdness of the u An 
 cient Mariner," and the mysterious witchery of " Chris- 
 tabel " those very mental elements in solution which, 
 condensed and turned inward, would find their most 
 congenial place in " the exhausting atmosphere of trans 
 cendental ideas ? " 
 
 His third poetic epoch includes his whole sojourn at 
 the Lakes, and the fourth the remainder of his life. 
 The poems of these two periods are few altogether, 
 and what there are, more meditative than formerly, 
 sometimes even hopelessly dejected. " Youth and 
 Age," written just before leaving the Lakes, with a 
 strangely aged tone for a man of only seven or eight 
 and thirty, has a quaint beauty ; to adapt its own 
 words, it is like sadness, that " tells the jest without 
 the smile." There are some pieces of this time, how 
 ever, in another strain, as the beautiful lines called 
 " The Knight s Tomb," and " Recollections of Love." 
 After the Lake time, there was still less poetry ; only 
 when, as in the " Visionary Hope " and the " Pains of 
 Sleep," the too frequent despondency or severe suffer- 
 
150 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 ing of his later years sought relief in brief verse. 
 Yet, belonging to the third or fourth periods, there are 
 short gnomic lines, in which, if the visionary has dis 
 appeared, the wisdom wrought by time and meditation 
 is excellently condensed. Such are these : 
 
 " Frail creatures are we all ; to be the best 
 
 Is but the fewest faults to have; 
 Look thou then to thyself, and leave the rest 
 To God, thy conscience, and the grave." 
 
 Or the Complaint and Reply : 
 
 " How seldom, friend ! a good great man inherits 
 
 Honors or wealth with all his toil and pains. 
 It sounds like stories from the land of spirits, 
 If any man obtain that which he merits, 
 Or any merit that which he obtains." 
 
 REPLY. 
 
 " For shame, dear friend ! forego this canting strain ; 
 What wouldst thou have the good great man obtain ? 
 Wealth, titles, salary, a gilded chain ; 
 Or throne of corses which his sword had slain ? 
 Goodness and greatness are not means, but ends ! 
 Hath he not always treasures, always friends, 
 The good great man ! Three treasures, life, and light, 
 
 And calm thoughts, regular as infants breath; 
 And three firm friends, more sure than day and night, 
 
 Himself, his Maker, and the Angel Death." 
 
 If from his own poetry we pass to his judgments on 
 the poetry of others, we shall see an exemplification 
 of the adapted adage, " Set a poet to catch a poet." 
 Here for once were fulfilled the necessary conditions 
 of a critic or judge, in the highest sense ; that is, a 
 man possessing in himself abundantly the originative 
 poetic faculty which he is to judge of in others, com 
 bined with that power of generalization and delicate, 
 patient analysis which, if poets possess, they but sel 
 dom express in prose. This is but another way of 
 saying, that before a man can pass worthy judgment 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 151 
 
 on a thing, he must know that thing at first and not at 
 second hand. The other kind of critic is he who, 
 though with little or none of the poetic gift in himself, 
 has yet, from a careful study of the great master-mod 
 els of the art, deduced certain canons by which to 
 judge of poetry universally. But a critic of this kind, 
 as the world has many a time seen, whenever he is 
 called upon to estimate some new and original work of 
 Art, like to which the past supplies no models, is 
 wholly at fault. His canons no longer serve him, and 
 the native sympathetic insight he has not. To judge 
 aright in such a case takes another order of critic ; one 
 who knows after another and more immediate manner 
 of knowing ; one who does not judge merely by what 
 the past has done, but who, by the poet s heart within 
 him, is made quick to welcome whatever new thing, 
 however seemingly irregular, the young time may 
 bring forth. Such a critic was Coleridge. An imag 
 ination richer and more penetrative than that of most 
 poets of his time ; a power of philosophic reflection 
 and of subtle discrimination, almost over-active ; a sym 
 pathy and insight of marvelous universality ; and a 
 learning " laden with the spoils of all times," these 
 things made him the greatest I had almost said 
 the only truly philosophic critic England had yet 
 seen. 
 
 Of his critical power, the two most eminent exam 
 ples are his chapters on Wordsworth s poetry in the 
 " Biographia Literaria," and his notes on Shakespeare 
 in the " Literary Remains." If a man wished to learn 
 what genuine criticism should be, where else in our 
 country s literature would he find so worthy a model as 
 in that dissertation on Wordsworth? An excellent 
 authority has lately said that the business of criticism 
 is " to know the best thing that is known or thought in 
 
152 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 the world, and to make this known to others." In 
 these chapters on Wordsworth, Coleridge has done 
 something more than this. In opposition to the blind 
 and utterly worthless criticism which Jeffrey then rep 
 resented, he thought out for himself, and laid down 
 the principles on which Wordsworth or any poet such 
 as he should be judged, and showed these principles to 
 be grounded, not on caprices of the hour, but on the 
 fundamental and permanent elements which human 
 nature contains. He gave definitions of poetry in its 
 essential nature, and showed more accurately than 
 Wordsworth in his preface, wherein poetry really dif 
 fers from prose. Let any one who wishes to see the 
 truth on these matters turn to Coleridge s description 
 of the poet and his work, as they are in their ideal 
 perfection. Then how truly and with what fine analy 
 sis he discriminates between the language of prose and 
 of metre ! How good is his account of the origin of 
 metre ! " This I would trace to the balance in the 
 mind, effected by that spontaneous effort which strives 
 to hold in check the workings of passion." There is 
 more to be learned about poetry from a few pages of 
 that dissertation, confined though it is to a specific 
 kind of poetry, than from all the reviews that have 
 been written in English on poets and their works from 
 Addison to the present hour. Nor is the result of the 
 whole a mere defense or indiscriminating eulogy on 
 Wordsworth, rudely as that poet was then assailed by 
 those who were also Coleridge s own revilers. From 
 several of Wordsworth s theories about poetry he dis 
 sents entirely, especially from the whole of his remarks 
 on the sameness of the language of prose and verse. 
 At times, too, he finds fault with his practice, and lays 
 his finger on faulty passages arid defective poems 
 here and there, in which he traces the influence of 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 153 
 
 false theory ; while the true merits of these poems he 
 places not on mere blind preference or individual taste, 
 but on a solid foundation of principles. These prin 
 ciples few or none at that time acknowledged, but they 
 have since won the assent of all competent judges. 
 Canons of judgment they are, not mechanical, but liv 
 ing. They do not furnish the reader with a set of 
 rules which he can take up and apply ready made. 
 But they require, before they can be used aright, to be 
 assimilated by thought made our own inwardly. 
 They open the eye to see, generate the power of 
 seeing for one s self, call forth from within a living 
 standard of judgment, which is based on truth and 
 nature. 
 
 Again, turning to his criticisms on Shakespeare and 
 the Drama. They are but brief notes, scattered leaves, 
 written by himself or taken down by others, from 
 lectures given mainly in London. His lectures were 
 in general wholly oral, and are said to have been best 
 when delivered with no scrap of paper before him. 
 But short as these notes are, the}- mark, and helped to 
 cause, a revolution in men s ways of thinking about 
 Shakespeare. First he taught, and himself exempli 
 fied, that he who would understand Shakespeare must 
 not, Dr. Johnson-wise, seat himself on the critical 
 throne, and thence deliver verdict, as on an inferior, 
 or at best a mere equal ; but that he has need to come 
 before all things with reverence, as for the poet of alJ 
 poets, and that, wanting this, he wants one of the 
 senses the "language of which he is to employ." 
 Again, Coleridge was the first who clearly saw through 
 and boldly denounced the nonsense that had been 
 talked about Shakespeare s irregularity and extrava 
 gance. Before his time it had been customary to 
 speak of Shakespeare as of some great abnormal 
 
154 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 creature, some fine but rude barbarian, full of all sorts 
 of blemishes and artistic solecisms, which were to be 
 tolerated for the sake of the beauties with which they 
 were interlaid. In the face of all this, he ventured to 
 ask, "Are then the plays of Shakespeare s works of 
 rude and uncultivated genius, in which the splendor of 
 the parts compensates for the barbarous shapelessness 
 and irregularity of the whole ? Or is the form equally 
 admirable with the matter, and the judgment of the poet 
 not less deserving our admiration than his genius ? " 
 The answer which he gave to his own question, and 
 which he enforced with manifold argument, is in effect 
 that the judgment of Shakespeare is as great as his 
 genius ; " nay, that its genius reveals itself in his judg 
 ment as in its most exalted form." In arguing against 
 those who at that time " were still trammeled with the 
 notion of the Greek unities, and who thought that 
 apologies were due for Shakespeare s neglect of them," 
 he showed how the form of Shakespeare s dramas was 
 suited to the substance, not less than the form of the 
 Greek dramas to their substance. He pointed out the 
 contrast between mechanical form superinduced from 
 without, and organic form growing from within ; that 
 if Shakespeare or any modern were to hold by the 
 Greek dramatic unities, he would be imposing on his 
 creations a dead form copied from without, instead of 
 letting them shape themselves from within, and clothe 
 themselves with their own natural and living form, as 
 the tree clothes itself with its bark. Another point 
 which Coleridge insists on in these lectures and 
 throughout his works, a point often unheeded, some 
 times directly denied, is the close connection between 
 just taste and pure morality, because true taste springs 
 out of the ground of the moral nature of man. I can 
 not now follow him into detail, and show the new 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 155 
 
 light which he has thrown on Shakespeare s separate 
 plays, and on his leading characters. But it may be 
 noticed in passing, that Hamlet was the character in 
 the exposition of which Coleridge first proved his 
 Shakespearean insight. In the " Table Talk " he says, 
 " In fact, I have a smack of Hamlet in myself." If 
 any one wishes to see what a really masterly elucida 
 tion of a subtle character is, let him turn to the 
 remarks on Hamlet in the second volume of the 
 "Literary Remains." This and other of Coleridge s 
 Shakespearean criticisms have been claimed for Schlegel. 
 But most of these had, I believe, been given to the 
 world in lectures before Schlegel s book appeared ; 
 and as to this exposition of Hamlet, Hazlitt bears 
 witness that he had heard it from Coleridge before his 
 visit to Germany in 1798. That view of Hamlet has 
 long since become almost a commonplace in literature, 
 but the idea of it was first conceived and expressed by 
 Coleridge. Some of the other criticisms May be more 
 subtle than many may care to follow. But any one 
 who shall master these notes on Shakespeare, taken as 
 a whole, will find in them more fine analysis of the 
 hidden things of the heart, more truthful insight into 
 the workings of passion, than are to be found in whole 
 treatises of psychology. 
 
 Any survey of Coleridge s speculations would be 
 incomplete if it did not include some account of his 
 political philosophy, which holds so prominent a place 
 among them. Not that he ever was a party politician, 
 his whole nature recoiled from that kind of work, 
 but his mind was too universal in its range, his sym 
 pathy with all human interests too strong, to have 
 allowed him to pass by these questions. But the thor 
 ough and comprehensive survey of this department of 
 Coleridge s thought, which occupies the greater part of 
 
156 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 Mr. Mill s well-known essay, makes any discussion of 
 this subject here superfluous. There is however one 
 important point to which this distinguished writer fails 
 to advert. He speaks of Coleridge as an original 
 thinker, but " within the bounds of traditional opinions," 
 and as looking at received beliefs merely from within 
 their pale. But it must surely have been known to 
 Mr. Mill that Coleridge, during his youth and early 
 manhood, stood as entirely outside of established opin 
 ions, and looked at existing institutions as purely from 
 without as it was possible to do. No extremest young 
 radical of the present hour, when intellectual radicalism 
 has once again become a fashion, can question received 
 beliefs more freely, or assail the established order more 
 fearlessly, than Coleridge did in his fervid youth. The 
 convictions on politics and religion, therefore, in which 
 he ultimately rested, are entitled to the weight, what 
 ever it be, of having been formed by one who all his 
 life long sought truth from every quarter, who for many 
 years of his life stood not within, but entirely outside 
 of traditionary beliefs ; and who, when his thought had 
 gone full circle, became conservative, if that word is to 
 be applied to him, not from self-interest or expediency, 
 or from weariness of thinking, but after ample experi 
 ence and mature reflection. With this one remark on 
 his political side I pass on. 
 
 Criticism, such as I have described above, presup 
 poses profound and comprehensive thought on questions 
 not lying within, but based on wider principles beyond, 
 itself. His critical studies, if nothing else, would have 
 driven Coleridge back on metaphysics. But it was the 
 same with whatever subject he took up, whether art or 
 politics, morals or theology. Everywhere he strove to 
 reach the bottom, to grasp the living idea which gave 
 birth to the system or institution, and kept it alive. 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 157 
 
 Even in those of his works, as the " Literary Life," 
 " The Friend," and the " Lay Sermons," which most 
 enter into practical details, the granite every here and 
 there crops out, the underlying philosophy appears. 
 But that searching for fundamental principles, which 
 seems to have been in him from the first an intellectual 
 necessity, was increased by the morbidly introvertive 
 turn of mind which, at some stages of his life, had 
 nearly overbalanced him. In an often quoted passage 
 from the " Ode to Dejection," written at Keswick in 
 1802, he laments the decay within himself of the shap 
 ing imagination, and says that 
 
 ..." By abstruse research to steal 
 From my own nature all the natural man ; 
 This was my sole resource, my only plan, 
 Till that which suits a part infects the whole, 
 And now is almost growu the habit of my soul." 
 
 This passage opens a far glimpse into his mental 
 history. It shows how metaphysics, for which he had 
 from the first an innate propension, became from cir 
 cumstances almost an unhealthy craving. What then 
 was his ultimate metaphysical philosophy? This is 
 not set forth systematically in any of his works, but we 
 are left to gather it, as best we can, from disquisitions 
 scattered through them all. And here, that unphilo- 
 sophical readers may more clearly see Coleridge s place 
 in the world of thought, I must recur to a few elemen 
 tary matters, which will seem trite enough to philo 
 sophical adepts. 
 
 Every one knows that from the dawn of thought 
 down to the present hour, the question as to the origin 
 of knowledge has been the Sphinx s riddle to philos 
 ophers. This strange thing named Thought, what is 
 it? This wondrous fabric we call Knowledge, whence 
 comes it ? It is a web woven out of something, but is 
 
158 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 it wholly or chiefly woven from outward materials, or 
 mainly wrought by self-evolving powers from within ? 
 Or, if due to the combined action of these, what part 
 does each contribute ? How much is due to the raw 
 material, how much to the weaver who fashions it ? 
 These questions, even if they be insoluble, will never 
 cease to provoke the curiosity of every new generation 
 of thoughtful men. There always has been a set of 
 thinkers who have regarded outward things as the fixed 
 reality which impresses representations of itself on mind 
 as on a passive recipient. There has always existed 
 also another set, which has held the mind to be a free 
 creative energy, evolving from itself the laws of its own 
 thinking, and stamping on outward things the forms 
 which are inherent in its own constitution. The one 
 school have held that outward things are genetic of 
 knowledge, and that what are called laws of thought 
 are wholly imposed on the mind by qualities which 
 belong primarily to outward things. The others have 
 maintained that it is the mind which is genetic, and that 
 it in reality makes what it sees. This great question, 
 as Mr. Mill has well said, " would not so long have 
 remained a question, if the more obvious arguments on 
 either side had been unanswerable." There must, how 
 ever, be a point of view, if we could reach it, from 
 which these opposing tendencies of thought shall be 
 seen to combine into one harmonious whole. But the 
 man who shall achieve this final synthesis, and the age 
 which shall witness it, are probably still far distant. 
 Philosophic thought in Great Britain has in the main 
 leaned towards the external side, towards that extreme 
 which makes the mind out of the senses, and maintains 
 experience to be the ultimate ground of all belief. 
 This way of thinking, so congenial to the prevailing 
 English temper, dates from at least as far back as 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 159 
 
 Hobbes, but was first fairly established, almost like a 
 part of the British Constitution, by the famous essay 
 of Locke. In his polemic against innate ideas he 
 asserted two sources of all knowledge. " Our observa 
 tion," he says, " employed either about external sensible 
 things, or about the internal operations of our minds 
 perceived and reflected on by ourselves, is that which 
 supplies our understandings with materials of thinking." 
 The latter of these two sources, here somewhat vaguely 
 announced, was never very strongly insisted on by 
 Locke himself, and was by his followers speedily dis 
 carded. The full development of Locke s system is 
 seen most clearly in Hume, who divided all the mind s 
 furniture into impressions or lively perceptions, as when 
 we see, hear, hate, desire, will ; and ideas or faint per 
 ceptions, which are copies of our sensible or lively im 
 pressions. So that with him all the materials of 
 thought are derived from outward sense, or inward 
 sentiment or emotion. 
 
 Contemporary with Hume, and like him a follower 
 of Locke, Hartley appeared at Cambridge, and carried 
 out the same views to still more definite issues. He 
 gathered up and systematized the materialistic views 
 which were at that time floating about his University. 
 Being, like Locke, a physician, he imported into his 
 system a much larger amount of his professional knowl 
 edge, and sought to explain the movements of thought 
 by elaborate physiological theories. He held that 
 vibrations in the white medullary substance of the 
 brain are the immediate causes of sensation, and that 
 these first vibrations give birth to vibratiuncles or min 
 iatures of themselves, which are conceptions, or the 
 simple ideas of sensible things. In another point he 
 differed from Locke, in that, discarding Reflection, he 
 brought more prominently forward Association, as the 
 
160 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 great weaving power of the mental fabric, which com 
 pounds all our ideas, and gives birth to all our faculties. 
 Such theories as these were the chief philosophical 
 aliment to be found in England when Coleridge was 
 a young man. At Cambridge, having entered Hart 
 ley s college, where the name of that philosopher was 
 still held in honor, Coleridge became his ardent dis 
 ciple. In the " Religious Musings," after Milton and 
 Newton, he speaks of Hartley as 
 
 " He of mortal kind 
 
 Wisest; the first who marked the ideal tribes 
 Up the fine fibres to the sentient brain." 
 
 Materialistic though his system was, Hartley was 
 himself a believer in Christianity, and a religious man. 
 His philosophical system came to be in high favor with 
 Priestley and the Unitarians towards the end of last 
 century ; so that when Coleridge became a Hartleian, 
 he adopted Necessitarian views of the will, and Uni 
 tarian tenets in religion. A Materialist, a Necessita 
 rian, a Unitarian, such was Coleridge during his Cam 
 bridge and Bristol sojourn. But it was not possible 
 that he should be permanently holden of these things. 
 There were ideal lights and moral yearnings within 
 him which these could never satisfy. The piece of 
 divinity that was in him would not always do homage 
 to Materialism. 
 
 Before he visited Germany he had begun to awake 
 out of his Hartleianism. It had occurred to him that 
 all association Hartley s " great instrument " pre 
 supposes the existence of the thought and images to 
 be associated." In short, association cannot account 
 for its own laws. All that association does is to use 
 these laws, or latent a priori forms, to wit, contiguity 
 of time and place, resemblance, contrast, so as to bring 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 161 
 
 particular things under them. When two things have 
 been thus brought together under one law say con 
 tiguity in time they may get so connected in thought 
 that it becomes difficult to conceive them apart. But 
 it never can be impossible so to conceive them ; that 
 is, to separate them in thought. Further, he began 
 to see that the hypothesis of all knowledge, being de 
 rived from sense, does not get rid of the need of a 
 living intellectual framework, which makes these copies 
 from sensible impressions. To take his own illustra 
 tion, the existence of an original picture, say Raphael s 
 Transfiguration, does not account for the existence of 
 a copy of it ; but rather the copyist must have put 
 forth the same powers, and gone through the same 
 process, as the first painter did when he made the 
 original picture. Or take that instance, which is a 
 kind of standing Hougoumont to sensational and ideal 
 istic combatants, I mean causality, or the belief that 
 every event must have a cause. Sensationalists, from 
 Hume to Mr. Mill, have labored to derive this, the 
 grand principle of all inductive reasoning, from invari 
 able experience. Mr. Mill s theory, the latest and 
 most accredited from that side, thus explains it. He 
 says that we arrive, by simple enumeration of individ 
 ual instances, first at one and then at another particu 
 lar uniformity, till we have collected a large number 
 of such uniformities, or groups of cases in which the 
 law of causation holds good. From this collection 
 of the more obvious particular uniformities, in all of 
 which the law of causation holds, we generalize the 
 universal law of causation, or the belief that all things 
 whatever have a cause ; and then we proceed to apply 
 this law so generalized as an inductive instrument to 
 discover those other particular laws which go to make 
 up itself, but which have hitherto eluded our investiga- 
 11 
 
162 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 tion. Thus, according to this philosopher, we arrive 
 at the universal law by generalizing from many laws 
 of inferior generality. But as these last do not rest 
 on rigid induction, but only on simple enumeration of 
 instances, the universal law cannot lay claim to any 
 greater cogency than the inferior laws on which it 
 rests. One authenticated instance in which the law 
 of causality does not hold may upset our belief in the 
 universal validity of that law. And Mr. Mill accepts 
 this consequence. He finds no difficulty in conceiving 
 that there may be worlds in which it is so upset in 
 which events succeed each other at random, and by no 
 fixed law. But this is really a reductio ad absurdum. 
 This world of causeless disorder, which Mr. Mill finds 
 no difficulty in conceiving, is simply inconceivable by 
 any intelligence. If such a world were proved ito 
 exist, w*e should be compelled to believe that for this 
 absence of order there is a cause, or group of causes ; 
 just as we know there is a cause, or group of causes, 
 for the presence of that order which we know to exist 
 as far as our knowledge extends. This necessity to 
 think a cause for every existence or event, a necessity 
 which we cannot get rid of, forms the essential pecul 
 iarity of the notion of causality ; marking it out as a 
 necessary form of thought, born from within, and not 
 gathered from experience. That which is created by 
 experience is strengthened by the same. But this 
 belief that every event must have a cause, is one 
 which, as soon as we have clearly comprehended the 
 terms, we feel to be inevitable. Experience, no doubt, 
 first brings this cognition out into distinct conscious 
 ness ; but as soon as we reflect on it, we discover that 
 it must have been present as a constituent element 
 of that very experience. Of causality, then, it may be 
 said, what an able young metaphysician has lately said 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 163 
 
 of time and space, "Themselves cognitions general 
 ized from experience, and, in that point of view, later 
 than experience ; they are discovered to have been 
 also elements of those very cognitions of experience 
 from which they have been generalized, present in 
 them as constituent elements, undistinguished before 
 analysis. .... They are elements of any and every 
 particular experience, entering into every one of them 
 as its necessary form." Or, as Coleridge put it, 
 " Though first revealed to us by experience, they must 
 yet have preexisted in order to make experience itself 
 possible ; even as the eye must exist previously to any 
 particular act of seeing, though by sight only can we 
 know that we have eyes." And again, " How can we 
 make bricks without straw, or build without cement ? 
 We learn things, indeed, by occasion of experience ; 
 but the very facts so learned force us inward on the 
 antecedents that must be presupposed in order to ren 
 der experience itself possible." 
 
 These and such like thoughts were sure to arise in a 
 mind naturally so open to the idealistic side of thought 
 as that of Coleridge, and to shake to pieces the mate 
 rialistic fabric in which he had for a time ensconced 
 himself. And not merely intellectual misgivings would 
 work this way, but the soul s deeper cravings. Driven 
 by hunger of heart, he wandered from the school of 
 Locke and Hartley, successively on through those of 
 Berkeley, Leibnitz, and, I believe, Spinoza, and finding 
 in them no abiding place, began to despair of philoso 
 phy. To this crisis of his history probably apply these 
 words : 
 
 " I found myself all afloat. Doubts rushed in, broke 
 upon me from the fountains of the great deep, and fell 
 from the windows of heaven. The fontal truths of 
 natural religion and the books of revelation alike con- 
 
164 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 tributed to the flood ; and it was long ere my ark 
 touched on an Ararat and rested. " 
 
 About this time he fell in with the works of the 
 German and other mystics Tauler, Bohmen, George 
 Fox, and William Law, and in them he found the 
 same kind of help which Luther had found in Tau 
 ler : 
 
 " The writings of these mystics acted in no slight 
 degree to prevent my mind from being imprisoned 
 within the outline of any single dogmatic system. 
 They helped to keep alive the heart within the head ; 
 gave me an indistinct yet stirring presentiment that all 
 the products of the mere reflective faculty partook of 
 death, and were as the rattling twigs and sprays in 
 winter, into which a sap was yet to be propelled from 
 some root to which I had not as yet penetrated, if they 
 were to afford my soul food or shelter. If they (the 
 mystics) were a moving cloud of smoke to me by day, 
 yet were they a pillar of fire throughout the night, 
 during my wanderings through the wilderness of doubt, 
 and enabled me to skirt, without crossing, the sandy 
 deserts of utter unbelief." 
 
 It was in the company of these men that he first 
 got clear of the trammels of the mere understanding, 
 and learned that there is higher truth than that faculty 
 can compass and circumscribe. The learned seemed to 
 him for several generations to have walked entirely by 
 the light of this mere understanding, and to have con 
 fined their investigations strictly within certain conven 
 tional limits, beyond which lay all that is most interest 
 ing and vital to man. To enthusiasts, illiterate and 
 simple men of heart, they left it to penetrate towards 
 the inmost centre, " the indwelling and living ground 
 of all things." And then he came to this conviction, 
 which he never afterwards abandoned, that if the in- 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 165 
 
 tellect will acknowledge a higher and deeper ground 
 than it contains within itself, if, making itself the cen 
 tre of its system, it seeks to square all things by its 
 own laws, it must, if it follows out fearlessly its own 
 reasoning, land in Pantheism or in some form of blank 
 unbelief. 
 
 While his mind was seething with these thoughts it 
 was that he first studied the works of Kant, and these 
 he says, took hold of him as with a giant s hand. 
 Henceforth his metaphysical creed was moulded mainly 
 by the Kantian principles. This is not the place to 
 attempt to enter on the slightest exposition of these. 
 But, to speak popularly, it may be said that the gist of 
 Kant s system is not to make the mind out of the 
 senses as Hume had done, but the senses out of the 
 mind. As Locke and Hume had started from without, 
 so he started from within, making the one fixed truth, 
 the only ground of reality, to consist, not in that which 
 the senses furnish, but in that which the understanding 
 supplies to make sensible knowledge possible. His 
 prime question was, How is experience possible ? And 
 this possibility he found in the a priori forms of the 
 sensory, time and space, and in the a priori forms or 
 categories of the understanding, which by their activity 
 bind together into one the multifarious and otherwise 
 unintelligent intimations of sense. It is sense that 
 supplies the understanding with the raw material ; this 
 the understanding passes through its machinery, and, 
 by virtue of its inherent concept-forms, reduces it to 
 order, makes it conceivable and intelligible. But the 
 understanding is limited in its operation to phenomena 
 of experience, and whenever it steps beyond these and 
 applies its categories to supersensible things, it lands 
 itself in contradictions. It cannot arrive at any other 
 truth than that which is valid within man s experience. 
 
166 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 Ultimate truths, valid for all intelligents, if such there 
 be, are beyond its reach. 
 
 Had Kant s philosophy stopped here, it would not 
 have done much more for Coleridge than Locke s and 
 Hartley s had done. It was because Kant asserted the 
 existence in man of another power, distinct from and 
 higher than understanding, namely Reason, that Cole 
 ridge found him so helpful. The term Reason Kant 
 employed in another than our ordinary sense, as the 
 faculty of ultimate truths or necessary principles. He 
 distinguished, however, between Reason in its specula 
 tive and in its practical use. Speculative Reason he 
 held to be exclusively a regulative faculty, having only 
 a formal and logical use. This use is to connect our 
 judgments together into conclusions, according to the 
 three forms of reasoning the categorical, the hypo 
 thetical, and the disjunctive. These three methods are 
 the ideas of Speculative Reason by which it strives to 
 produce unity and perfectness among the judgments of 
 the understanding. As long as the ideas of Specula 
 tive Reason are thus used to control and bring into 
 unity the conceptions of the discursive understanding, 
 they are used rightly, and within their own legitimate 
 sphere. But whenever Speculative Reason tries to 
 elevate these regulative ideas into objects of theoretical 
 knowledge, whenever it ascribes objective truth to 
 these ideas, it leads to contradiction and falsehood. In 
 other words, Speculative Reason Kant held to be true 
 in its formal or logical, but false in its material applica 
 tion. As the understanding, with its categories, has for 
 its object and only legitimate sphere the world of sense, 
 so Speculative Reason, with its ideas, has for its exclu 
 sive sphere of operation the conceptions of the under 
 standing, and beyond this these ideas have no truth or 
 validity. It was not, however, by these views, either 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 167 
 
 of Understanding or of Speculative Reason, that Kant 
 came to the help of the highest interests of humanity, 
 but by his assertion of the existence in man of the 
 Practical Reason which is the sufficient warrant for our 
 belief in moral and supersensuous truth. Some have 
 maintained this to be an afterthought added on some 
 what discordantly to the rest of Kant s system. But, 
 be this as it may, Kant held that the moral law re 
 vealed itself to man as a reality through his Practical 
 Reason a law not to be gathered from experience, 
 but to be received as a fundamental principle of action 
 for man, evidencing itself by its own light. This 
 moral law requires for its action the truth of three 
 ideas, that of the soul, of immortality, and of God. 
 These ideas are the postulates of the practical reason, 
 and are true and certain, because, if they are denied, 
 morality and free-will, man s highest certainties, become 
 impossible. They are, however, to man truths of 
 moral cogency of practical faith, though Kant did 
 not use this last expression, rather than objects of 
 scientific certitude. 
 
 This distinction between the Understanding and the 
 Reason Coleridge adopted from Kant, and made the 
 groundwork of all his teaching. But the distinction 
 between Speculative and Practical Reason, which was 
 with Kant radical, Coleridge did not dwell on, nor 
 bring into prominence. He knew and so far recog 
 nized Kant s distinction, that he spoke of Speculative 
 Reason as the faculty of concluding universal and nec 
 essary truths from particular and contingent appear 
 ances, and of Practical Reason as the power of pro 
 posing an ultimate end, that is, of determining the will 
 by ideas. He does not, however, seem to have held 
 by it firmly. Rather, he threw himself mainly on 
 Kant s view of Practical Reason, and carried it out 
 
168 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 with a boldness which Kant would have probably dis 
 allowed. Kant s strong assertion that there was at 
 least one region of his being in which man comes into 
 contact with supersensible truth, with the reality of 
 things, this, set forth not vaguely, but with the most 
 solid reasoning, was that which so attracted Coleridge. 
 But in the use which Coleridge made of this power, 
 and the range he assigned it, he went much beyond his 
 master. He speaks of Reason as an immediate be 
 holding of supersensible things, as the eye which sees 
 truths transcending sense. He identifies Reason in 
 the human mind, as Kant perhaps would have done, 
 with Universal Reason ; calls it impersonal ; indeed, 
 regards it as a ray of the Divinity in man. In one 
 place he makes it one with the light which lighteth 
 every man, and in another he savs that Reason is " the 
 presence of the Holy Spirit to the finite understanding, 
 at once the light and the inward eye." " It cannot be 
 rightly called a faculty," he says, " much less a per 
 sonal property of any human mind." We cannot be 
 said to possess Reason, but rather to partake of it ; for 
 there is but one Reason, which is shared by all intelli 
 gent beings, and is in itself the universal or Supreme 
 Reason. " He in whom Reason dwells can >as little 
 appropriate it as his own possession, as he can claim 
 ownership in the breathing air, or make an inclosure 
 in the cope of heaven." Again, he says of Reason, 
 that " it has been said to be more like to sense than to 
 understanding ; but in this it differs from sense : the 
 bodily senses have objects differing from themselves ; 
 Reason, the organ of spiritual apprehension, has ob 
 jects consubstantial with itself, being itself its own 
 object, that is, self-contemplative." And, again, 
 " Reason substantiated and vital, one only, yet mani 
 fold, overseeing all, and going through all understanding, 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 169 
 
 without being either the sense, the understanding, or 
 the imagination, contains all three within itself, even 
 as the mind contains its own thoughts, and is present 
 in and through them all ; or as the expression pervades 
 the different features of an intelligent countenance." 
 
 In much of the above, Coleridge has not only gone 
 beyond Kant s cautious handling of Practical Reason, 
 but has given to the German s philosophical language a 
 religious, and even a Biblical, coloring of his own. 
 Nay, in regarding Reason as the power of intuitive 
 insight into moral and spiritual truths, he has ap 
 proached nearer to some of the German philosophers 
 who came after Kant. Though Coleridge made so 
 much of this distinction between Reason and Under 
 standing, and of Reason as the organ of spiritual truth, 
 and though throughout his later works he is continually 
 insisting on it as a fundamental principle, yet he cannot 
 be said to have made it secure against the objections of 
 assailants. 
 
 It is a theory to account for certain great facts of 
 mental experience, and like every theory it must be 
 tested by its fitness to explain the facts, and to solve 
 the chief difficulties they present. The facts are these. 
 Amid the objects of thought we find a large number of 
 which we can form distinct, well-rounded conceptions, 
 and from these conceptions so formed, we can deduce 
 accurate trains of reasoning. Another portion of the 
 things which occupy our thoughts are of such a nature 
 that, if truths at all, they are transcendent truths. Ihe 
 best conceptions we can form of them we feel to be 
 defective and inadequate, not presenting to us the idea 
 as it truly is, but only hinting it through " feeble anal 
 ogies and approximations." Such objects of thought, 
 it is often said, we apprehend, but cannot comprehend. 
 To this latter category belong the fundamental truths 
 
170 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 of morals and religion, those primal faiths on which 
 man s spiritual nature rests. But the logical faculty 
 ever tends, if left to itself, to ignore or even deny the 
 reality of this whole order of truths, because they can 
 not be reduced to that clear-cut precision after which 
 this faculty ever strives. And philosophers, whose 
 vocation it is to exercise this faculty, and in all subjects 
 to seek for reasoned truth, are prone to become the 
 victims of the instrument which they use, and to deny 
 the existence, for us at least, of whatever cannot be 
 shaped into clear conceptions, and made fast in the grip 
 of conclusive logic. They ever tend to circumscribe 
 the orb of belief, and to narrow it within exactly the 
 same limits as the orb of logical conception. If this 
 tendency had full way, what place would be found for 
 all the higher side of man s being, for those truths by 
 which the spirit lives, those primal truths which, though 
 transcendent, and hard to grasp, 
 
 u Are yet the master light of all our seeing? " 
 
 It was to vindicate the validity of these truths, and to 
 show that though man s thought cannot fully compass 
 them, they are not less real, and far more vital, than 
 the conclusions of the most irrefragable logic, that 
 Coleridge insisted so earnestly on his doctrine of the 
 distinction between Reason and Understanding. 
 
 That in making this distinction he was striving to 
 utter a deep spiritual truth, which lies at the bottom of 
 all human thought, I fully believe. But whether he 
 has succeeded in uttering it in the best, most unassail 
 able shape, may well be made a question. It is not 
 easy to meet the old challenge, " Name a certain num 
 ber of propositions which are products to the Reason, 
 and as many more which belong to the Understanding, 
 that we may compare the two sets, and learn to ap- 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 171 
 
 predate the distinction." Since all truths, from what 
 ever source they come, must, before they can be re 
 duced to definite conceptions, and expressed in proposi 
 tions, first have passed through the moulds of the 
 understanding, it seems hardly possible to produce a 
 single truth, unless it be the law of contradiction, and 
 the other necessary laws of formal logic, which is the 
 pure mint of the reason, unalloyed by contact with the 
 understanding. A close examination would, I believe, 
 show that what Coleridge called truths of the reason 
 are mainly -those moral and spiritual faiths, the posses 
 sion of which makes man a moral being. Though they 
 are born undoubtedly in another region than the under 
 standing, yet before they can become distinct objects 
 of reflection, they must have been shaped by intellectual 
 moulds, and expressed in linguistic terms, which, as 
 regards the truths themselves, are but poor and in 
 adequate accommodations. Coleridge recognized the 
 necessity of this process, but maintained that it was to 
 him no argument against a truth of reason, if, after 
 passing through the logical process, it issued in proposi 
 tions which seem illogical and contradictory. To this, 
 one of the uninitiated might naturally reply, " It may 
 be so ; but if your truths of the reason when attempted 
 to be logically expressed issue in contradictious, by 
 what test am I to distinguish such a truth of reason 
 from absolute nonsense ? " A satisfactory reply to such 
 a querist I do not know that Coleridge has ever fur 
 nished. On the whole, it would seem that Reason, as 
 he used it, is but another and perhaps not better name 
 for what, in vague popular phrase, is known as man s 
 moral and spiritual nature. His truths of Reason are 
 that which is essential and primitive in this nature, 
 those elemental truths, which we cannot adequately 
 grasp, but on which we are in the last resort constrained 
 
172 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 to fall back, as the ultimate ground of all belief 
 indeed, as the very substratum of our being. If to 
 vindicate fully this transcendent side of being, to show 
 how it is cogitable, and in harmony with logical thought 
 and with all other truth, if this be the great aim of 
 philosophy, it cannot be said that Coleridge has fully 
 accomplished it. On the other hand, at a time when 
 philosophy had almost forgotten the problem, and dis 
 carded the higher truths as mere fanatical chimeras, to 
 have brought the question once more into court, to 
 have reasserted the reality and the preeminence of 
 the spiritual verities, to have pressed for their admit 
 tance into and reconciliation with men s ordinary ways 
 of thinking; this was good service, and this service 
 Coleridge did. 
 
 A good example of the way in which Coleridge ap 
 plied his metaphysical principles to philosophic ques 
 tions will be found in the Essays on Method, in the 
 third volume of " The Friend." He there attempts to 
 reconcile Plato s view of the Idea as lying at the 
 ground of all investigation with Bacon s philosophy of 
 induction, and to prove that, though they worked from 
 opposite ends of the problem, they are not really op 
 posed. In all inductive investigations, Coleridge con 
 tends, the mind must contribute something, the mental 
 initiative, the prudens qucestio, the idea ; and this, when 
 tested or proved by rigorous scientific processes, is 
 found to be a law of nature. What in the mind of the 
 discoverer is a prophetic idea, is found in nature to be 
 a law, and the one answers, and is akin to the other. 
 What Coleridge has there said of the mental initiative 
 which lies at the foundation of induction, Dr. Whewell 
 has taken up and argued out at length in his works on 
 Induction. Mr. Mill has as stoutly redargued it from 
 his own point of view, and their polemic still waits a 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 173 
 
 solution. But I must pass from these pure metaphysi 
 cal questions to notice some of the ways in which Cole 
 ridge applied his principles to moral and religious ques 
 tions. 
 
 In the " Literary Remains " there is a remarkable 
 essay on Faith, which contains a suggestive application 
 of these principles. Faith he defines to be fealty or 
 fidelity to that part of our being which cannot become 
 an object of the senses ; to that in us which is highest, 
 and is alone unconditionally imperative. What is 
 this ? Every man is conscious of something within 
 him which tells him he ought, which commands him, to 
 do to others as he would they should do to him. Of 
 this he is as assured as he is that he sees and hears ; 
 only with this difference, that the senses act independ 
 ently of the will ; whereas, the conscience is essen 
 tially connected with the will. We can, if we will, 
 refuse to listen to it. The listening or the not listen 
 ing to conscience is the first moral act by which a man 
 takes upon him or refuses allegiance to a power higher 
 than himself, yet speaking within himself. Now, what 
 is this in each man, higher than himself, yet speaking 
 within him ? It is Reason, supersensuous, impersonal, 
 the representative in man of the will of God ; and de 
 manding the allegiance of the individual will. Faith 
 then is fealty to this rightful superior ; " allegiance of 
 the moral nature to Universal Reason, or the will of 
 God ; in opposition to all usurpation whether of appe 
 tite, or of sensible objects, or of the finite understand 
 ing," or of affection to others, be it even the purest 
 love of the creature. And conscience is the inward 
 witness to the presence in us of the divine ray of rea 
 son, " which is the irradiative power, the representative 
 of the Infinite." An approving conscience is the sense 
 of harmony of the personal will of man with that im- 
 
/ kzr i*J\vh <rs<-^w 1 - r* 
 
 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 personal light which is in him, representative of the 
 will of God. A condemning conscience is the sense 
 of discord or contrariety between these two. Faith, 
 then, consists in the union and interpenetration of the 
 Reason and the individual will. Since our will and 
 moral nature enter into it, faith must be a continuous 
 and total energy of the whole man. Since Reason 
 enters into it, faith must be a light a seeing, a be 
 holding of truth. Hence faith is a spiritual act of the 
 whole being ; it is " the source and germ of the fidelity 
 of man to God, by the entire subjugation of the human 
 will to Reason, as the representative in Him of the 
 divine will." Such is a condensation, nearly in Cole 
 ridge s own words, of the substance of that essay. 
 Hard words and repulsive these may seem to some, 
 who feel it painful . to analyze the faith they live by. 
 And no doubt the simple childlike apprehension of the 
 things of faith is better and more blessed than all phi 
 losophizing about them. They who have good health 
 . and light breathing, whose system is so sound that they 
 know not they have a system, have little turn for dis- 
 r quisitions on health and respiration. But, just as sick 
 ness and disease have compelled men to study the 
 bodily framework, so doubt and mental entanglement 
 ^have forced men to go into these abstruse questions in 
 order to meet the philosophy of denial with a counter 
 philosophy of faith. The philosophy is not faith, but 
 it may help to clear away sophistications that stand in 
 .* the way of it. 
 
 For entering into speculations of this kind, Cole 
 ridge has been branded as a transcendentalist, a 
 word with many of hideous import. But abstruse and 
 wide of practice as these speculations may seem, it was 
 for practical behoof mainly that Coleridge undertook 
 them. " What are my metaphysics ? " he exclaims ; 
 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 175 
 
 " merely the referring of the mind to its own conscious 
 ness for truths which are indispensable to its own hap 
 piness." Of this any one may be convinced who shall 
 read with care his " Friend " or his " Lay Sermons." 
 One great source of the difficulty, or, as some might 
 call it, the confusedness of these works, is the rush and 
 throng of human interests with which they are filled. 
 If he discusses the ideas of Reason, or any other like 
 abstract subject, it is because he feels its vital bearing 
 on some truth of politics, morality, or religion, the 
 clear understanding of which concerns the common 
 weal. And here is one of his strongest mental pecul 
 iarities, which has made many censure him as unintel 
 ligible. His eye flashed with a lightning glance from 
 most abstract truth to the minutest practical detail, and 
 back again from this to the abstract principle. This 
 makes that, when once his mental powers begin to 
 work, their movements are on a vastness of scale, and 
 with a many-sidedness of view, which, if they render 
 him hard to follow, make him also stimulative and sug 
 gestive of thought beyond all other modern writers. 
 
 When Coleridge first began to speculate, the sover 
 eignty of Locke and his followers in English Metaphys 
 ics was not more supreme than that of Paley in Moral 
 Philosophy. Both were Englishmen of the round ro 
 bust English stamp, haters of subtleties, abhorrent of 
 idealism, resolute to warn off any ghost of scholasticism 
 from the domain of common-sense philosophy. And 
 yet both had to lay down dogmatic decisions on sub 
 jects into which, despite the burliest common sense, 
 things infinite and spiritual will intrude. How resolute 
 was Coleridge s polemic against Locke and all his 
 school, we have seen. Not less vigorous was his pro 
 test against Paley as a moralist, and that at a time 
 when few voices were raised against the common-sense 
 Dean. 
 
176 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 For completely rounded moral systems Coleridge 
 indeed professed little respect, ranking them for utility 
 with systems of casuistry or auricular confession. But 
 of vital principles of morality, penetrating to the quick, 
 few men s writings are more fruitful. A standing 
 butt for Coleridge s shafts was Paley s well-known 
 definition of virtue as " the doing of good to mankind, 
 in obedience to the will of God, and for the sake of 
 everlasting happiness." Or, as Paley has elsewhere 
 more broadly laid down the same principle, " we are 
 obliged to do nothing, but what we ourselves are to 
 gain or lose something by, for nothing else can be a 
 violent motive." Against this substitution, as he called 
 it, of a scheme of selfish prudence for moral virtue, 
 Coleridge was never weary of raising his voice. Mo 
 rality, as he contended, arises out of the Reason and 
 Conscience of man; prudence out of the Understand 
 ing, and the natural wants and desires of the individ 
 ual ; and though prudence is the worthy servant of 
 morality, the master and the servant must not be con 
 founded. The chapter in " The Friend," in which 
 he argues against the Utilitarian system of ethics, and 
 proves that general consequences cannot be the crite 
 rion of the right and wrong of particular actions, is 
 one of the best reasoned and most valuable which that 
 work contains. The following are some of the argu 
 ments with which he contends against " the inadequacy 
 of the principle of general consequences as a criterion 
 of right and wrong, and its utter uselessness as a moral 
 guide." Such a criterion is vague and illusory, for 
 it depends on each man s notion of happiness, and no 
 two men have exactly the same notion. And even 
 if men were agreed as to what constitutes the end, 
 namely, happiness, the power of calculating conse 
 quences, and the foresight needed to secure the means 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 177 
 
 to the end, are just that in which men most differ. 
 But morality ought to be grounded on that part of 
 their nature, namely, their moral convictions, in which 
 men are most alike, not on the calculating understand 
 ing, in which they most differ. Again, such a criterion 
 confounds morality, which looks to the inward motive, 
 with law, which regards only the outward act. Indeed, 
 the need of a judgment of actions according to the 
 inward motive, forms one of the strongest arguments 
 for a future state. For in this world our outward 
 actions, apart from their motives, must needs deter 
 mine our temporal welfare. But the moral nature 
 longs for, and Scripture reveals, a more perfect judg 
 ment to come, wherein not the outward act but -the 
 inward principle, the thoughts and intents of the heart, 
 shall be made the ground of judgment. Again, this 
 criterion is illusory, because evil actions are often 
 turned to good by that Providence which brings good 
 out of evil. If, then, consequences were the sole or 
 chief criterion, then these evil actions ought to be, 
 because of their results, reckoned good. Nero perse 
 cuted the Christians, and so spread Christianity : is he 
 to be credited with this good result ? Again, to form 
 a notion of the nature of an action multiplied indefi 
 nitely into the future, we must first know the nature 
 of the original action itself. And if we already know 
 this, what need of testing it by its remote consequences ? 
 If against these arguments it were urged that general 
 consequences are the criterion, not of the agent but of 
 the action, Coleridge would reply that all actions have 
 their whole worth and main value from the moral 
 principle which actuates the agent. So that if it could 
 be shown that two men, one acting from enlightened 
 self-love, the other from pure Christian principle, would 
 observe towards all their neighbors throughout life 
 12 
 
178 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 exactly the same course of outward conduct, yet these 
 two, measured by a true moral standard, would stand 
 <* wide apart in worth. By these and such like argu 
 ments Coleridge opposes the Paleyan and every other 
 form of Utilitarian ethics. Instead of confounding 
 morality with prudence, he everywhere bases morality 
 on religion. " The widest maxims of prudence," he 
 asserts, " are arms without hearts, when disjoined from 
 those feelings which have their fountain in a living 
 principle." That principle lies in the common ground 
 where morality and religion meet, and from which 
 neither can be sundered without destruction to both. 
 The moral law, every man feels, has a universality 
 and an imperativeness far transcending the widest 
 maxims of experience ; and this because it has its 
 origin in Reason, as described above, in that in each 
 man which is representative of the Divine Will, and 
 connects him therewith. Out of Reason, not from 
 experience, all pure principles of morality spring, and 
 in it they find their sanction. This is a truth which 
 Coleridge reiterated in every variety of form. 
 
 But while he is thus strong in placing the founda 
 tion of individual morality in Reason, in his sense of 
 that word, he repudiates those theories which would 
 draw from the same source the first principles of polit 
 ical government. In opposition to these theories, he 
 held that each form of government is sufficiently jus 
 tified, when it can be shown that it is suitable to the 
 circumstances of the particular nation. Therefore no 
 one form of government can lay claim to be the sole 
 rightful one. Thus to prudence or expediency Cole 
 ridge assigns a place in political questions which he 
 denies to it in moral ones. Full of power is his whole 
 argument against Rousseau, Paine, and others of that 
 day, who maintained the social contract and the rights 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 179 
 
 of man, and, laying the grounds of political right ex 
 clusively in Reason, held that nothing was rightful 
 in civil society which could not be deduced from the 
 primary laws of reason. " Who," asked Rousseau, 
 " shall dare prescribe a law of moral action for any 
 rational being, considered as a member of a state, 
 which does not flow immediately from that reason 
 which is the fountain of all morality ? " Whereto 
 Coleridge replies, Morality looks not to the outward 
 act, but to the internal maxim of actions. But politics 
 look solely to the outward act. The end of good gov 
 ernment is so to regulate the actions of particular 
 bodies of men, as shall be most expedient under given 
 circumstances. How then can the same principle be 
 employed to test the expediency of political rules and 
 the purity of inward motives ? He then goes on to 
 show that, when Rousseau asserted that every human 
 being possessed of Reason had in him an inalienable 
 sovereignty, he applied to actual man compassed 
 about witli passions, errors, vices, and infirmities what 
 is true of the abstract Reason alone ; that all he as 
 serted of " that sovereign will, to which the right of 
 legislation belongs, applies to no human being, to no 
 assemblage of human beings, least of all to the mixed 
 multitude that makes up the people ; but entirely and 
 exclusively to Reason itself, which, it is true, dwells 
 in every man potentially, but actually and in perfect 
 purity in no man, and in no body of men." And this 
 reasoning he clinches by an instance and an argument, 
 often since repeated, though we know not whether 
 Coleridge was the first to employ it. He shows that 
 the constituent assembly of France, whenever they 
 tried to act out these principles of pure Reason, were 
 forced to contravene them. They excluded from po 
 litical power children, though reasonable beings, be- 
 
180 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 cause in them Reason is imperfect; women, because 
 they are dependent. But is there not more of Reason 
 in many women, and even in some children, than in 
 men dependent for livelihood on the will of others, the 
 very poor, the infirm of mind, the ignorant, the de 
 praved ? Some reasonable beings must be disfran 
 chised. It comes then to a question of degrees. And 
 how are degrees to be determined? Not by pure rea 
 son, but by rules of expedience, founded on present 
 observation and past experience. But the whole of 
 Coleridge s reasoning against Rousseau and Cart- 
 wright s universal suffrage is well worth the attention 
 of those advanced thinkers of the present day, who 
 are beginning once again, after a lapse .of nearly a 
 century, to argue about political rights on grounds of 
 abstract reason. They will there find, if they care to 
 see it, the whole question placed not on temporary ar 
 guments, but on permanent principles. 
 
 But keen as was Coleridge s interest in political and 
 moral subjects, the full bent of his soul, and its deep 
 est meditations, were given to the truths of the Chris 
 tian revelation, as bearing most profoundly on the well- 
 being of man. From none of his works are these 
 thoughts absent ; but the fullest exposition of his relig 
 ious views is to be found in the " Aids to Reflection," 
 his maturest work, and in the third and fourth volumes 
 of the " Literary Remains." Before, however, advert 
 ing to these opinions, it may be well to remember, that, 
 much as Coleridge thought and reasoned on religion, it 
 was his firm conviction, founded on experience, that the 
 way to an assured faith, that faith which gives life and 
 peace, is not to be won by dint of argument. " Evidences 
 of Christianity ! " he exclaims, " I am weary of the word. 
 Make a man feel the want of it ; rouse him, if you 
 can, to the self-knowledge of the need of it, and you 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 181 
 
 may safely trust it to its own evidence, remembering 
 always the express declaration of Christ himself : No 
 man coinetli to me, unless the Father leadeth him. " 
 So it was with himself. Much as he philosophized, 
 philosophy was not his soul s haven ; not thence did 
 his help come. It may have cleared away outlying 
 hindrances, but it was not this that led him up to the 
 stronghold of hope. Through the wound made in his 
 own spirit, through the brokenness of a heart humbled 
 and made contrite by the experience of his own sin and 
 utter helplessness, entered in the faith which gave rest, 
 the peace which " settles where the intellect is meek." 
 Once his soul had reached the cidatel, his ever busy 
 eye and penetrating spirit surveyed the nature of the 
 bulwarks, and examined the foundations, as few before 
 had done. And the world has the benefit, whatever it 
 may be, of these surveys. But though Coleridge was 
 a religious philosopher, he discriminated clearly be 
 tween the philosophy and the religion. He knew well, 
 and often insisted, that religion is life rather than 
 science, and that there is a danger, peculiar to the in 
 tellectual man, of turning into speculation what was 
 given to live by. He knew that the intellect, busy 
 with ideas about God, may not only fail to bring a 
 man nearer the divine life, but may actually tend to 
 withdraw him from it. For the intellect takes in but the 
 image of the truth, and leaves the vital impression, the 
 full power of it, unappropriated. And hence it comes 
 that those truths which, if felt by the unlearned at all, 
 go straight to the heart and are taken in by the whole 
 man, are apt, in the case of the philosopher and the 
 theologian, to stop at the vestibule of the understand 
 ing, and never to get further. This is a danger pecul 
 iar to the learned, or to those who think themselves 
 such. The trained intellect is apt to eat out the child s 
 
182 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 heart, and yet the " except ye become as little chil 
 dren " stands unrepealed. Coleridge knew this well. 
 In his earliest interview with De Quincey, he said, 
 " that prayer with the whole soul is the highest energy 
 of which the human heart is capable, and that the 
 great mass of worldly men, and of learned men, are 
 absolutely incapable of prayer." And only two years 
 before his death, after a retrospect of his own life, to 
 his nephew, who sat by his bedside one afternoon, he 
 said, "I have no difficulty in forgiveness. . . . Neither 
 do I find or reckon the most solemn faith in God as a 
 real object the most arduous act of reason and will. 
 O no ! it is to pray, to pray as God would have us : 
 that is what at times makes me turn cold to my soul. 
 Believe me, to pray with all your heart and strength, 
 with the reason and the will, to believe vividly that 
 God will listen to your voice through Christ, and ver 
 ily do the thing He pleaseth thereupon this is the 
 last, the greatest achievement of a Christian s warfare 
 on earth." "And then he burst into tears, and 
 begged me to pray for him." 
 
 It has been said that the great object of his theo 
 logical speculations was to bring into harmony religion 
 and philosophy. This assertion would mislead if it 
 were meant to imply that he regarded these as two co 
 ordinate powers, which could be welded together into 
 one reasoned system. It would perhaps be more true 
 to say that his endeavor was, in his own words, to re 
 move the doubts and difficulties that cannot but arise 
 whenever the understanding, the mind of the flesh, is 
 made the measure of spiritual things. He labored to 
 remove religion from a merely mechanical or intellect 
 ual, and to place it on a moral and spiritual foundation. 
 His real aim was, notwithstanding that his love for 
 scholastic distinctions might seem to imply the con- 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 183 
 
 trary, to simplify men s thoughts on these things, to 
 show that spiritual truth is, like the light, self-evidenc 
 ing, that it is preconformed to man s higher nature, as 
 man s nature is preconformed to it. 
 
 As he had to contend against Lockeian metaphysics 
 and Paleyan ethics, so he had to do strenuous battle 
 against a theology mainly mechanical. He awoke 
 upon an age when the belief in God was enforced in 
 the schools as the conclusion of a lengthened argu 
 ment ; when revelation was proved exclusively by mir 
 acles, with little regard to its intrinsic evidence ; and 
 when both natural and revealed truths were superin 
 duced from without, as extraneous, extra-moral beliefs, 
 rather than taught as living faiths evidenced from 
 within. In opposition to this kind of teaching, which 
 had so long reigned, Coleridge taught that the founda 
 tion truth of all religion, faith in the existence of God, 
 was incapable of intellectual demonstration that as 
 all religion, so this corner-stone of religion, must have 
 a moral origin. To him that belief was inherent in 
 the soul, as Reason is inherent, indeed a part of Rea 
 son, in the sense he gave to that word, as moral in its 
 nature, and the fountain of moral truth. His creed on 
 this subject he thus expresses: 
 
 " Because I possess Reason, or a law of right and 
 wrong, which, uniting with the sense of moral respon 
 sibility, constitutes my conscience, hence it is my abso 
 lute duty to believe, and I do believe, that there is a 
 God, that is, a Being in whom supreme Reason and a 
 most holy will are one with infinite power ; and that 
 all holy will is coincident with the will of God, and 
 therefore secure in its ultimate consequences by his 
 omnipotence. The wonderful works of God in the 
 sensible world are a perpetual discourse, reminding me 
 of his existence, and a shadowing out to me his per- 
 
184 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 fections. But as all language presupposes, in the in 
 telligent hearer or reader, those primary notions which 
 it symbolizes, .... even so, I believe that the notion 
 of God is essential to the human mind ; that it is called 
 forth into distinct consciousness principally by the con 
 science, and auxiliarily by the manifest adaptation of 
 means to ends in the outward creation. It is therefore 
 evident to my Reason, that the existence of God is ab 
 solutely and necessarily insusceptible of a scientific 
 demonstration, and that Scripture so represents it. 
 For it commands us to believe in one God. Now all 
 commandment necessarily relates to the will ; whereas 
 all scientific demonstration is independent of the will, 
 and is demonstrative only in so far as it is compulsory 
 on the mind, volentem, nolentem" 
 
 Thus we see that with regard to the first truth of all 
 religion, Coleridge places its evidence in conscience and 
 the intuitive reason. Carrying the same manner of 
 thinking into revealed religion, he gave to its inherent 
 substance the foremost place as evidence, while to 
 historical proofs and arguments from miracles he as 
 signed the same subordinate place as, in reference to 
 the existence of God, he assigned to arguments from 
 design. 
 
 His view upon this subject also is better given in his 
 own language. It could hardly be expressed in fewer, 
 and certainly not in better words. The main evidence, 
 he thinks, are " the doctrines of Christainity, and the 
 correspondence of human nature to these doctrines, 
 illustrated, first, historically, as the production of a new 
 world, and the dependence of the fate of the planet 
 upon it; second, individually, from its appeal to an 
 ascertained fact, the truth of which every man possess 
 ing Reason has an equal power of ascertaining within 
 himself; namely, a will, which has more or less lost its 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 185 
 
 own freedom, though not the consciousness that it 
 ought to be and may become free ; the conviction that 
 this cannot be achieved without the operation of a prin 
 ciple co-natural with itself; the experience in his own 
 nature of the truth of the process described by Scrip 
 ture, as far as he can place himself within the process, 
 aided by the confident assurances of others as to the 
 effects experienced by them, and which he is striving to 
 arrive at. All these form a practical Christian. To 
 such a man one main test of the truth is his faith in its 
 accompaniment by a growing insight into the moral 
 beauty and necessity of the process which it comprises, 
 and the dependence of that process on the causes as 
 serted. Believe, and if thy belief be right, that insight 
 which changes faith into knowledge, will be the reward 
 of that belief." 
 
 Subordinate to the internal evidence in Coleridge s 
 view buttresses, but not corner-stones are the 
 facts of the existence and of the history of Christianity, 
 and also of the miracles which accompanied its first 
 appearance. These are necessary results, rather than 
 primary proofs of revelation. " As the result of the 
 above convictions, he will not scruple to receive the 
 particular miracles recorded, inasmuch as it is mirac 
 ulous that an incarnate God should not work what 
 must to mere men appear as miracles ; inasmuch as it 
 is strictly accordant with the ends and benevolent 
 nature of such a Being to commence the elevation of 
 man above his mere senses by enforcing attention first, 
 through an appeal to those senses." Thus, according 
 to him, miracles are not the adequate and ultimate 
 proof of religion, not the keystone of the arch, but 
 rather compacting stones in it, which give while they 
 receive strength." 
 
 It thus appears that Coleridge s theology was more 
 
186 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 or less a recoil from one in which miracles had been 
 pushed into undue, almost exclusive, prominence, one 
 in which the proof of religion was derived mainly from 
 the outward senses. In accordance with his pre 
 eminently subjective mode of thought, he was convinced 
 that to subjugate the senses to faith, the passive belief 
 to the moral and responsible belief, was one main end 
 of all religion. Whether Coleridge struck the balance 
 rightly between outward and inward evidence, whether 
 he gave to miracles that place which is their due ; 
 whether, in his zeal for the inward truths, he estimated 
 as they deserve the miraculous facts which, whatever 
 they may be to some over-subtilized intellects, have 
 been, and always must be, to the great mass of men, 
 the main objective basis on which the spiritual truths 
 repose, these are questions on which I shall not now 
 enter. My aim here is not so much to criticise, as to 
 set forth, as fairly as may be, what his views really 
 were. 
 
 We have seen then that Coleridge held the adapta 
 tion of Christianity to man s need, and to his whole 
 moral nature, to be the strongest evidence of its truth. 
 And this naturally suggests the question, How far did 
 he regard man s moral convictions to be the test of 
 revelation as a whole, or of any particular doctrine of 
 revelation ? Did he wish to square down the truths 
 of revelation to the findings of human conscience ? To 
 answer this question is the more necessary, because 
 Mr. Mill, in the few remarks on Coleridge s religious 
 opinions with which he closes his essay, has asserted 
 that he " goes as far as the Unitarians in making man s 
 reason and moral feelings a test of revelation ; but 
 differs toto ccelo from them in their rejection of its mys 
 teries, which he regards as the highest philosophical 
 truths." It would be strange, indeed, if Coleridge, who 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 187 
 
 certainly ought to have known both his own views and 
 those of the Unitarians, should have so far deluded 
 himself as to protest against them unweariedly for this 
 very fault, that they made man the measure of all 
 things, while in this matter he himself was substantially 
 at one with them. The truth is, that those who speak 
 most strongly about Reason being the measure of faith, 
 mean by the word Reason much the same as Coleridge 
 meant by Understanding the faculty of definite con 
 ceptions, the power of clearly comprehending truths. 
 And in their mouths the proposition means that nothing 
 is to be believed in religion, or in anything else, which 
 man s understanding cannot fully grasp, clearly con 
 ceive, definitely express, satisfactorily explain. Now 
 Coleridge used the term Reason in a sense different 
 from this, nay opposed to it. He held, whether rightly 
 or no I do not now inquire, but he held that there is a 
 power in man to apprehend spiritual truths which he 
 cannot comprehend, something that brings him into 
 close relation, I had almost said contact, with super 
 sensible reality, and to this- power he gave the name 
 of Reason. And the intimations of moral and spiritual 
 things, which he believed that he received through this 
 power, he accepted readily, though he could not under 
 stand nor explain them. Even with regard to the 
 first truth of religion, the existence, personality, and 
 moral nature of God, he held that this is to be received 
 on moral grounds, and regarded as a settled truth " not 
 by the removal of all difficulties, or by any such in 
 crease of insight as enables a man to meet all skeptical 
 objections with a full arid precise answer ; but because 
 he has convinced himself that it is folly as well as pre 
 sumption to expect it; and because the doubts and 
 difficulties disappear at the beam when tried against the 
 weight of the reasons in the other scale." Again, of 
 
188 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 the fall of man, he says that it is a mystery too pro 
 found for human insight ; and of the doctrine of the 
 Trinity, that it is an absolute truth transcending our 
 human means of understanding or demonstrating it. 
 These, and numerous other such like sayings, might be 
 adduced, not to speak of the whole scope of his philos 
 ophy, to show that it was no obstacle to his belief in 
 the truth, that it transcended his comprehension. Nay, 
 more, so far was he from desiring to bring down all 
 religious truths to the level of human comprehension, 
 that he everywhere enforced it as a thing antecedently 
 to be expected, that the fundamental truths should be 
 mysteries, and declared that he would have found it 
 hard to believe them if they had not been so. 
 
 What then did he mean when he maintained, as 
 he certainly did, that " in no case can true Reason 
 and a right faith oppose each other ? " We have seen 
 that Reason with Coleridge was the link by which man 
 is joined on to a higher order, the source whence he 
 draws in all of moral truth and of religious sentiment 
 which he possesses. It was the harmony of revelation 
 with this faculty of apprehending universal spiritual 
 truths which was to him the main ground for originally 
 believing in revelation, and therefore he held that no 
 particular doctrine of revelation can contradict the find 
 ings of that faculty on the evidence of which revela 
 tion as a whole is originally received. In other words, 
 no view of God s nature and of his dealings with men, 
 no interpretation of any doctrine, or of any text of 
 Scripture, can be true, which contradicts the clear 
 intimations of enlightened conscience. And the sub 
 stance of revelation and the dictates of conscience so 
 answer to each other, that the religious student, under 
 the guidance of the Divine Spirit, may expect to gain 
 an ever-growing insight into their harmony. Opposed 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 189 
 
 to this doctrine of Coleridge, on the one hand, .is the 
 teaching of those who, believing in revelation, deny 
 to man any power of apprehending spiritual truths, 
 and hold that the first truths of religion must be re 
 ceived simply as authoritative data from without. 
 Equally opposed, on the other hand, are the views of 
 those who, though admitting in some sense the truth 
 of revelation, yet make man s power of understanding 
 the entire measure of all that is to be received as 
 revealed. The creed which is bounded either theoret 
 ically or practically within this latter limit must needs 
 be a scanty one. 
 
 The truth seems to be that, both in the things of 
 natural arid revealed religion, the test that lies in man s 
 moral judgment seems more a negative than a positive 
 one. We are not to believe about God anything 
 which positively contradicts our first notions of right 
 eousness and goodness, for to do so would be to cut 
 away the original moral ground of our belief in his 
 existence and character. Thus far our moral judg 
 ments carry us, but not much further. No rational 
 man who believes in God at all will try to square all 
 the facts that meet him in the natural and the moral 
 world to his sense of right and wrong. Life is full of 
 inscrutable facts which cannot be made by us to fit into 
 any moral standard of ours. All that the moral judg 
 ment has a right to say with regard to them is to 
 refuse to believe any proposed interpretation of them 
 which contradicts the plain laws of right and wrong, 
 any interpretation which makes God unrighteous on 
 account of such facts, and to wait patiently in full faith 
 that a time will come when we shall see these now 
 inexplicable facts to have been fully consistent with 
 the most perfect righteousness. And the same use 
 which we make of our moral judgment in regard to 
 
190 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 the facts that meet us in life, we are bound to make 
 of it with regard to the doctrines of revelation. We 
 may not be able now to see moral light through all of 
 these, but we are to refuse any interpretation of them 
 which does violence to the moral judgment. In both 
 cases, however, we have reason to expect that, to those 
 who honestly and humbly use the light they have, 
 more light will be given, a growing insight into, or 
 at least a trustful acquiescence in, facts which at first 
 were too dark and perplexing. There are in this 
 region two extremes, equally to be shunned. One is 
 theirs, who in matters of religion begin by discredit 
 ing the natural light, by putting out the eye of 
 conscience, that they may the more magnify the 
 heavenly light of revelation, or rather their own inter 
 pretations thereof. The other is seen in those who, 
 enthroning on the judgment-seat the first off-hand 
 findings of their own, and that perhaps no very en 
 lightened conscience, proceed to arraign before this 
 bar the statements of Scripture, and to reject all which 
 does not seem to square with the verdicts of the self- 
 erected tribunal. There is a more excellent way than 
 either, a way not definable perhaps by criticism, but to 
 be found by spiritual wisdom. There are those who, 
 loath to do violence to the teachings either of Scripture 
 or of conscience, but patiently and reverently compar 
 ing them together, find that the more deeply they are 
 pondered, the more they do, on the whole, reflect light 
 one on the other. To such the words of Scripture, 
 interpreted by the experience of life, reveal things 
 about their own nature which once seemed incredible. 
 And the more they know of themselves and their own 
 needs, the more the words of Scripture seem to enlarge 
 their meaning to meet these. But as to the large 
 outlying region of the inexplicable that will still remain 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 191 
 
 in the world, in man, and in Holy Writ, they can leave 
 all this, in full confidence that when the solution, soon 
 or late, shall come, it will be seen to be in profound 
 harmony with our highest sense of righteousness, and 
 with that word which declares that " God is light, and 
 in him is no darkness at all." Such, though not ex 
 pressed in Coleridge s words, I believe to be the spirit 
 of his teaching. 
 
 What then is to be said of those passages in his 
 works in which he speaks of the mysteries of faith and 
 the highest truths of philosophy as coincident ; in which 
 he says that he received the doctrine of the Logos not 
 merely on authority, but because of its to him exceed 
 ing reasonableness ; in which he speaks as if he had an 
 intellectual insight into the doctrine of the Trinity, and 
 draws out formulas of it in strange words hard to un 
 derstand ? Whatever we may think of these sayings 
 and formulas, it is to be remembered that Coleridge 
 never pretended that he could have discovered the 
 truths apart from revelation. If after practically ac 
 cepting these truths, and finding in them the spiritual 
 supports of his soul, he employed his powers of thought 
 upon them, and drew them out into intellectual form 
 ulas more satisfactory to himself than they have for the 
 most part proved to others, yet these philosophizings, 
 made for the purpose of speculative insight, he neither 
 represented as the grounds of his own faith, never ob 
 truded on others as necessary for theirs. He ever kept 
 steadily before him the difference between an intellect 
 ual belief and a practical faith, and asserted that it was 
 solely in consequence of the historical fact of redemp 
 tion that the Trinity becomes a doctrine, the belief in 
 which as real is commanded by our conscience. 
 
 In the " Aids to Reflection," the earlier half of the 
 work is employed in clearing away preliminary hin- 
 
192 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 drances ; the latter part deals mainly with moral diffi 
 culties that are apt to beset the belief in the Original 
 Sin and in the Atonement. 
 
 With regard to the former doctrine, he shows that 
 the belief of the existence of evil, as a fact, in man and 
 in the world, is not peculiar to Christianity, but is com 
 mon to it with every religion and every philosophy 
 that has believed in a personal God ; in fact, to all sys 
 tems but Pantheism and Atheism. The fact then 
 needs no proof, but the meaning of the fact does. As 
 to this, Coleridge rejected that interpretation of origi 
 nal sin, which makes " original " mean " hereditary," or 
 inherited like our bodily constitution from our fore 
 fathers. Such, he held, might be disease or calamity, 
 but could not be sin, the meaning of which is, the 
 choice of evil by a will free to choose between good 
 and evil. This fact of a law in man s nature which 
 opposes the law of God, is not only a fact, but a mys 
 tery, of which no other solution than the statement of 
 the fact is possible. For consider : Sin, to be sin, is 
 evil originating in, not outside of, the will. And what 
 is the essence of the will ? It is a self-determining 
 power, having the original ground of its own determi 
 nation in itsejf ; and if subject to any cause from with 
 out, such cause must have acquired this power of deter 
 mining the will, by a previous determination of the will 
 itself. This is the very essence of a will. And herein 
 it is contradistinguished from nature, whose essence it 
 is to be unable to originate anything, but to be bound 
 in the mechanism of cause and effect. If the will has 
 by its own act subjected itself to nature, has received 
 into itself from nature an alien influence which has cur 
 tailed its freedom, in so far as it has done this, it has 
 corrupted itself. This is original sin, or sin originating 
 in the only region in which it can originate the 
 Will. This is a fall of man. 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 193 
 
 You ask, When did this fall take place ? Has the 
 will of each man chosen evil for itself ; and, if so, 
 when ? To this Coleridge would reply that each indi 
 vidual will has so chosen ; but as to the when, the will 
 belongs to a region of being, is part of an order of 
 things in which time and space have no meaning ; that 
 " the subject stands in no relation to time, can neither 
 be called in time or out of time ; but that all relations 
 of time are as alien and heterogeneous in this question 
 as north or south, round or square, thick or thin, are in 
 the affections." 
 
 Again you ask, With whom did sin originate ? And 
 Coleridge replies, The grounds of will on which it is 
 true of any one man are equally true in the case of all 
 men. The fact is asserted of the individual, not be 
 cause he has done this or that particular evil act, but 
 simply because he is man. It is impossible for the in 
 dividual to say that it commenced in this or that act 
 at this or that time. As he cannot trace it back to 
 any particular moment of his life, neither can he state 
 any moment at which it did not exist. As to this fact, 
 then, what is true of any one man is true of all men. 
 For, " in respect of original sin, each man is the repre 
 sentative of all men." 
 
 Such, nearly in his own words, was the way in 
 which Coleridge sought, while fully acknowledging this 
 fact, to construe it to himself, so as to get rid of those 
 theories which make it an infliction from without, a 
 calamity, a hereditary disease; for which, however 
 much sorrow there might be, there could be no respon 
 sibility, and therefore no sense of guilt. And he 
 sought to show that it is an evil self-originated in the 
 will ; a fact mysterious, not to be explained, but to be 
 felt by each man in his conscience as his own deed. 
 Therefore, in the confession of his faith, he said : 
 13 
 
194 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 "I believe (and hold it a fundamental article of 
 jL Christianity) that I am a fallen creature ; that I am 
 myself capable of moral evil, but not of myself capable 
 of moral good ; and that an evil ground existed in my 
 will previously to any given act, or assignable moment 
 of time, in my own consciousness. I am born a child 
 of wrath. This fearful mystery I pretend not to under 
 stand. I cannot even conceive the possibility of it, but 
 I know that it is so. My conscience, the sole fountain 
 of certainty, commands me to believe it, and would it 
 self be a contradiction were it not so ; and what is real 
 must be possible." 
 
 And the sequel of the same confession thus goes 
 on: 
 
 " I receive, with full and grateful faith, the assur 
 ance of revelation that the Word, which is from eternity 
 with God, and is God, assumed our human nature, in 
 order to redeem me and all mankind from this our con 
 nate corruption. My reason convinces me that no 
 
 other mode of redemption is possible I believe 
 
 that this assumption of humanity by the Son of God 
 was revealed and realized to us by the Word made 
 flesh, and manifested to us in Jesus Christ, and that his 
 miraculous birth, his agony, his crucifixion, death, resur 
 rection, and ascension, were all both symbols of our re 
 demption, and necessary parts of the awful process." 
 
 Such was his belief in 1816, marking how great a 
 mental revolution he must have gone through since the 
 days when he was a Unitarian preacher. The steps 
 of that change he has himself but partially recorded. 
 But the abandonment of the Hartleian for a more ideal 
 philosophy, the blight that fell on his manhood, his suf 
 fering, and sense of inner misery, then the closer study 
 of the Bible in the light of his own need, and growing 
 intercourse with the works of the elder divines, all 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 195 
 
 these were steps at least in the transition. But what 
 ever may have wrought this change, no one who knows 
 anything of Coleridge can doubt that in this, as in 
 opinions of lesser import, he was influenced only by 
 the sincerest desire for truth. Great as may have 
 been his moral defects far as he may have fallen, in 
 some of the homeliest duties, even below common men, 
 this at least must be conceded to him, that he desired 
 the truth, hungered and thirsted for it, pursued it with 
 a life-long earnestness, rare even among the best men. 
 In this search for truth, and in his declaration of it 
 when found, self-interest, party feeling, friendship, had 
 no place with him. He had come to believe in some 
 sort in a Trinity in the Godhead, and admitted more 
 or less the personality of the Logos, for some time be 
 fore he returned fully to the Catholic faith. The be 
 lief in the Incarnation and Redemption by the Cross, as 
 historical facts, were the stumbling-blocks which last 
 disappeared. Therefore his final conviction on this 
 subject, as recorded in the " Aids to Reflection," is the 
 more worthy of regard, as being the last step taken by 
 one who had long resisted, and only after profound re 
 flection submitted himself to this faith. He there lays 
 down, that as sin is the ground or occasion of Chris 
 tianity, so Redemption is its superstructure ; that Re 
 demption and Christianity are equivalent terms. From 
 this he does not attempt to remove the awful mystery, 
 but only to clear away any objections which may 
 spring out of the moral instincts of man against the 
 common interpretation of the doctrine. These are the 
 only difficulties that deserve an answer. 
 
 In the Redemption, the agent is the Eternal Word 
 made flesh, standing in the place of man to God, and of 
 God to man, fulfilling all righteousness, suffering, dying, 
 and so dying as to conquer death itself, and for all who 
 
 
196 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 shall receive Him. The redemptive or atoning act 
 of this divine Agent has two sides one that looks 
 Godward, the other that looks manward. The side 
 it turns Godward that is, the essence of the aton 
 ing act, the cause of man s redemption is "a spir 
 itual and transcendent mystery which passeth all 
 understanding ; " its nature, mode, and possibility, 
 transcend man s comprehension. But the side that it 
 turns manward that is, the effect upon the re 
 deemed is most simply, and without metaphor, de 
 scribed, as far as it is comprehensible by man, in St. 
 John s words, as the being born anew ; as at first we 
 were born in the flesh to the world, so now born in the 
 Spirit of Christ. Christ was made a quickening, that 
 is a life-making Spirit. This, Coleridge believed to be 
 the nearest, most immediate effect on man of the trans 
 cendent redemptive act. Closely connected with this 
 first, most immediate effect, are other consequences, 
 which St. Paul has described by four principal meta 
 phors. These consequences, in reference to the sinner, 
 are either the taking away of guilt, as by a great sin- 
 offering, just as to the transgressor of the Mosaic law 
 his civil stain was cleared away by the ceremonial 
 offering of the priest ; or the reconciliation of the sin 
 ner to God, as the prodigal son is reconciled to the 
 parent whom he has injured ; or the satisfying of a 
 debt by the payment of the sum owed to the creditor; 
 or the ransoming of a slave, the bringing him back 
 from slavery, by payment of a price for him. These 
 four figures describe, each in a different way, the result 
 of the great redemptive act on sinful man. This is 
 their true meaning. They are figures intended to 
 bring home to man in a practical way the nature and 
 the greatness of the benefit. Popularly they are 
 transferred back to the mysterious cause, but they can- 
 
 7 
 
 ^ * *^**-9~J 
 
**- SAM 
 
 UEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 197 
 
 not be taken as if they really and adequately explained 
 the nature of that cause, without leading to confusions. 
 Debt, satisfaction, payment in full, are not terms by 
 which the essential nature of the atoning act, and its 
 necessity, can be literally and adequately expressed. 
 If, forgetting this, we take these expressions literally, 
 and argue from them, as if they gave real intellectual 
 insight into the nature and mode of that greatest of all 
 mysteries, we are straightway landed in moral contra 
 dictions. The nature of the redemptive act, as it is in 
 itself, is not to be compassed nor uttered by the lan 
 guage of the human understanding. Such, as nearly as 
 I can give it, was Coleridge s thought upon this great 
 mystery. Whatever may be the value of this view, 
 one thing is to be observed, that Coleridge did not pro 
 pound it with any hope of explaining a subject which 
 he believed to be beyond man s power of explanation, 
 but from the earnest desire to clear away moral hin 
 drances to its full acceptance. Such hindrances he be 
 lieved that human theologies, in their attempts to sys- 
 temize this and other doctrines of Scripture, were from 
 time to time piling up. It was his endeavor, whether 
 successful or not, in what he wrote on this and on 
 every other religious subject, to clear away these hin 
 drances, and to place the truth in a light which shall 
 commend itself to every man s conscience, a light which 
 shall be consistent with such fundamental Scriptures as 
 these, " I, the Lord, speak righteousness, I declare 
 things that are right ; " " God is light, and in Him is no 
 darkness at all." Since his day, men s thoughts have 
 been exercised on the nature of the atonement, as per 
 haps they never were before. There is one view, of 
 late years advocated in various forms, which regards 
 the atonement as merely such a declaration or exhibi 
 tion of God s love to sinners, as by the pure power of 
 
rtJ 
 
 198 SAMUEL 
 
 kv-- 
 
 TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 its clemency awakens them to repentance, and takes 
 away the estrangement of their hearts. This is no 
 doubt part of the truth, but it falls far short of satisfy 
 ing either man s deeper moral instincts, or those many 
 passages of Scripture which declare that forgiveness of 
 sins is one great need of the soul, and that Christ s 
 death is the means through which forgiveness is made 
 possible. Such interpretations, if taken for the whole, 
 leave out of account the "more behind," which Scrip 
 ture bears witness to, and man s conscience needs. 
 They take no account of that bearing which Christ s 
 death has toward God, and which Coleridge, while he 
 held it to be incomprehensible, fully believed to exist. 
 On this great question, the nature of the atoning act 
 in its relation to God, some meditations have since 
 Coleridge s time been given to the world, which, while 
 penetrating deeper, seem yet in harmony with that 
 which Coleridge taught. I allude to Mr. Campbell s pro 
 found work, " The Nature of the Atonement," in which, 
 though all the difficulties are not cleared up, the author 
 goes further toward satisfying at once many of the ex 
 
 pressions of Scripture and the requirements of conscience 
 than any other theological work I know of has done. 
 Such are a few samples of Coleridge s theological 
 
 ^d^xx c^v. , ^r, samples of Coleridge s theological 
 method and manner of thinking. In the wish to set 
 them forth in something of a systematic order, I have 
 done but scanty justice to the fullness and the practical 
 fervor which pervade the " Aids to Reflection," and I 
 have given no notion at all of the prodigality of 
 thought with which his other works run over. It were 
 vain to hope that any words could give an impression 
 of that marvellous range of vision, that richness, that 
 swing of thought, that lightning of genius. Besides 
 his works already noticed, his " Lay Sermons," with 
 their Appendices, and his " Literary Remains," are a 
 
 j* 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 199 
 
 very quarry of thought, from which young and reflect 
 ing readers may dig wealth of unexhausted ore. But 
 over these I cannot now linger. 
 
 Neither can I do more than merely allude to those 
 remarkable letters, published after his death, in which 
 Coleridge approaches the great question of the inspira 
 tion of Scripture. Arnold recognized their appearance 
 as marking an era in theology the most important that 
 had occurred since the Reformation ; and the interval 
 that has since passed has not diminished their historical 
 importance. On the views of Scripture there pro 
 pounded Coleridge himself laid great stress. In the 
 words of his nephew, " he pleaded for them so ear 
 nestly, as the only middle path of safety and peace 
 between a godless disregard of the unique and trans 
 cendent character of the Bible taken generally, and 
 that scheme of interpretation, scarcely less adverse to 
 the pure spirit of Christian wisdom, which wildly 
 arrays our faith in opposition to our reason, and incul 
 cates the sacrifice of the latter to the former, that to 
 suppress this important part of his solemn convictions, 
 would be to misrepresent arid betray him." 
 
 When these letters first appeared, they struck the 
 loudest, if not the earliest note, which till then had 
 been heard in England, of that way of thought which 
 has since become known as the Critical School. Rec 
 ognizing, as these letters did, in the different books of 
 Scripture, various degrees and diverse modes of inspira 
 tion, and in all the books the co-presence of the human 
 element with the Divine Word, they startled from 
 their " dogmatic slumbers " the many who had hitherto 
 held a merely mechanical view of the inspiring Spirit. 
 The Critical School, which in this country may be 
 almost said to date its rise from the appearance of 
 these letters, has since then parted into two widely 
 
200 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 divergent paths. One party have so busied themselves 
 with investigating the earthly accompaniments of time, 
 place, and character, that they seem ever less and less 
 to overhear the divine voice that speaks through these. 
 Those who have taken the other path, while examining 
 closely the " earthen vessel," and its historical forma 
 tion, have used this study only to enable them to pene 
 trate deeper into the true nature of the heavenly 
 treasure which it enshrines. That these last are the 
 legitimate representatives of the Coleridgean theology, 
 the true inheritors of the principles he taught, will, if 
 I have interpreted him aright, need no further proof. 
 
 Having given the fullest scope to his own inquiries 
 on all subjects, yet in a spirit of reverence, he wished 
 others to do the same, believing this to be a condition 
 of arriving at assured convictions of truth. He was 
 full of wise and large-hearted tolerance, not that 
 tolerance, so common and so worthless, which easily 
 bears with all opinions, because it earnestly holds none, 
 but that tolerance, attained but by few, which, 
 holding firmly by convictions of its own, and making 
 conscience of them, would neither coerce nor condemn 
 those who most strongly deny them. Heresy he be 
 lieved to be an error, not of the head, but of the heart. 
 He distinguished between that internal faith which lies 
 at the base of religious character, and can be judged 
 of only by God, and that belief with regard to facts 
 and doctrines, in which good men may err without 
 moral obliquity. His works abound with such maxims 
 as this : " Resist every false doctrine ; but call no man 
 heretic. The false doctrine does not necessarily make 
 the man a heretic ; but an evil heart can make any 
 doctrine heretical." 
 
 These are a few of the contemplations with which 
 Samuel Taylor Coleridge busied himself during the 
 
 
 
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 201 
 
 threescore years of his earthly existence. For more 
 than thirty years now he has been beyond them, but 
 these he has left behind for us to use as we may. 
 Those who remember what Coleridge was to their 
 youth, may fear lest in their estimate of him now they 
 should seem to be mere praisers of the past, and yet, 
 if they were to call him the greatest thinker whom 
 Britain has during this century produced, they would 
 be but stating the simple truth. For if any should 
 gainsay this, it might be asked, Whom would you place 
 by his side ? What one man would you name who has 
 thrown upon the world so great a mass of original 
 thinking, has awakened so much new thought on the 
 most important subjects ? His mind was a very treas 
 ure-house of ideas, of which many have gone to enrich 
 the various departments of thought, literary, philosoph 
 ical, political, and religious ; while others still lie im 
 bedded in his works, waiting for those who may still 
 turn them to use. And all he wrote was in the 
 interest of man s higher nature, true to his best aspira 
 tions. The one effort of all his works was to build up 
 truth from the spiritual side. He brought all his 
 transcendent powers of intellect to the help of the 
 heart, and soul, and spirit of man against the tyranny 
 of the understanding, that understanding which ever 
 strives to limit truth within its generalizations from 
 sense, and rejects whatever refuses to square with 
 these. This side of philosophy, as it is the deepest, is 
 also the most difficult to build up. Just as in bridging 
 some broad river, that part of the work which has to 
 be done by substructions and piers beneath the water, 
 is much more laborious and important, while it strikes 
 less upon the senses than the arches which are reared 
 in open daylight ; so the side of truth which holds by 
 the seen and the tangible, which never quits clear-cut 
 

 202 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 conceptions, and refuses to acknowledge whatever will 
 not come within these, is much more patent and 
 plausible, and, in this country at least, is more likely 
 to dommand the suffrages of the majority. Owing to 
 the impulse to thought which proceeded from Coleridge, 
 the Sensationalists experienced for a time a brief re 
 action ; for one generation he turned the tide against 
 them ; but again they are mustering in full force, and 
 bid fair to become masters of the position. Their 
 chief teachers have for some time by the merit, it 
 must be owned, of their works become all but para 
 mount in the most ancient seats of learning. In 
 Oxford, for instance, the only two living authors, a 
 knowledge of whose works is imperatively required of 
 candidates for highest honors, belong to this school. 
 And there is no counteracting authority speaking from 
 the opposite, that is, the spiritual side of philosophy, 
 because no such living voice is amongst us. Whenever 
 such a thinker shall arise, he will have to take up the 
 work which Coleridge left incomplete, and by more 
 patent analysis, and more systematic exposition of the 
 spiritual element which enters into all thought and all 
 objects of thought, to make good as reasoned truth, the 
 ground which Coleridge reached only by far-reaching, 
 but fragmentary intuition. One cannot but sometimes 
 wonder what his thoughts would have been, had he 
 been living now, and looking forth on the wide field 
 of modern speculation, where combatants, more numer 
 ous than ever, are, with voices mutually unintelligible, 
 shouting in confused night-battle. And not for the 
 philosophy only, but for the general literature and the 
 politics of our time, what words of admonition would 
 he have had, if . he had been still present with us ! In 
 his own day the oracle of the Whigs reserved for him 
 its bitterest raillery, while Toryism looked coldly on. 
 

 
 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 203 
 
 f^C- V" C_ -T.- T *-- 
 
 He would hardly, I imagine, have been more popular 
 with the dominant factions now, Liberal or Conserva 
 tive, for he would not have served the purposes of 
 either. Neither before the intellectual idols of the 
 hour, whatever names they bear, would he have 
 readily bowed down. Rather he would have shown 
 to them their own shortcomings, as seen in the light 
 of a more catholic and comprehensive wisdom. Who 
 can doubt this, when he regards either the spirit of his 
 works, so deep-thoughted and reverent, so little suited 
 for popularity, or the attitude in which he stood to 
 wards all the arbiters of praise in his own generation ? 
 But the best thing that can be said of him is, that he 
 was a great religious philosopher. And by this how 
 much is meant ? Not a religious man and a philoso 
 pher merely, but a man in whom these two powers met 
 and interpenetrated. There are instances enough in 
 which the two stand opposed, mutually denouncing each 
 other; instances too there are in which, though not 
 opposed, they live apart, the philosophy unleavened by 
 the religion. How rare have been the examples, at 
 least in modern times, in which the most original pow 
 ers of intellect and imagination, the most ardent search 
 for truth, and the largest erudition, have united with 
 reverence and simple Christian faith the heart of the 
 child with the wisdom of the sage ! He who has left 
 behind him a philosophy, however incomplete, in which 
 these elements combine, has done for his fellow- men 
 the highest service human thinker can, has helped to 
 lighten the burden of the mystery. 
 
KEBLE, 
 
 THE closing chapter of Lockhart s " Life of Scott " 
 begins with these words : " We read in Solomon, The 
 heart knoweth his own bitterness, and a stranger doth 
 not intermeddle with his joy ; and a wise poet of our 
 own time thus beautifully expands the saying 
 
 " Why should we faint and fear to live alone, 
 
 Since all alone, so Heaven has willed, we die, 
 Nor even the tenderest heart, and next our own, 
 Knows half the reasons why we smile or sigh ? " 
 
 On glancing to the footnote to see who the wise poet 
 of our own time might be, the reader saw, for the first 
 time perhaps, the name of KEBLE and " The Christian 
 Year." To many, in Scotland at least, this was the 
 earliest announcement of the existence of the poet, and 
 the work which has immortalized him. If some friend 
 soon afterwards happened to bring from England a 
 copy of " The Christian Year," and make a present of 
 it, the young reader could not but be struck by a lyric 
 here and there, which opened a new vein, and struck a 
 note of meditative feeling, not exactly like anything he 
 had heard before. But the little book contained much 
 that was strange and unintelligible, some things even 
 startling. Very vague were the rumors which at that 
 time reached Scotland of the author. Men said he be 
 longed to a party of Churchmen who. were making a 
 great stir in Oxford, and leavening the University with 
 
KEBLE. 205 
 
 a kind of thought which was novel, and supposed to be 
 dangerous. The most definite thingsdod was that the 
 new school had a general Romanizing tendency. But 
 this must be a mistake or strange exaggeration. Folly 
 and sentimentalism might no doubt go far enough at 
 Oxford. But as for Romanism, the revival of such an 
 tiquated nonsense was simply impossible in this en 
 lightened nineteenth century. If such an absurdity 
 were to show itself openly, was there not still extant 
 the " Edinburgh Review " ready to crush it ? To 
 many a like folly ere now it had administered the qui 
 etus. Would it not deal as summarily with this one too? 
 Such was the kind of talk that was heard when Scott s 
 "Life" appeared in 1838. For more exact information, 
 young men who were inquisitive had to wait, till a few 
 years later gave them opportunities of seeing for them 
 selves, and coming into personal contact with what was 
 actually going on in Oxford. 
 
 It was a strange experience for a young man trained 
 anywhere, much more for one born and bred in Scot 
 land, and brought up a Presbyterian, to enter Oxford 
 when the religious movement was at its height. He 
 found himself all at once in the midst of a system of 
 teaching which unchurched himself and all whom he 
 had hitherto known. In his simplicity he had believed 
 that spiritual religion was a thing of the heart, and that 
 neither Episcopacy nor Presbytery availeth anything. 
 But here were men able, learned, devout-minded 
 men maintaining that outward rites and ceremonies 
 were of the very essence, and that where these were 
 not, those was no true Christianity. How could men, 
 such as these were reported to be, really go back them 
 selves and try to lead others back to what were but the 
 beggarly elements ? It was all very perplexing, not 
 to say irritating. However, there might be something 
 
206 KEBLE. 
 
 more behind, which a young man could not understand. 
 So he would wait and see what he should see. 
 
 Soon he came to know that the only portions of 
 Oxford society unaffected by the new influence, were 
 the two extremes. The older dons, that is, the heads 
 of houses and the senior tutors, were unmoved by it, 
 except to opposition. The whole younger half of the 
 undergraduates generally took no part in it. But the 
 great body that lay between these extremes, that is, 
 most of the younger fellows of colleges, and most of 
 the scholars and elder undergraduates, at least those 
 of them who read or thought at all, were in some way 
 or other busy with the new questions. When in time 
 the new comer began to know some of the men who 
 sympathized with the movement, his first impression 
 was of something constrained and reserved in their 
 manners and deportment. High character and ability 
 many of them were said to have ; but to a chance 
 observer it seemed that, in as far as their system had 
 moulded them, it had made them the opposite of nat 
 ural in their views of things, and in their whole mental 
 attitude. You longed for some free breath of moun 
 tain air to sweep away the stifling atmosphere that 
 was about you. This might come partly, no doubt, 
 from the feeling with which you knew that these men 
 must from their system regard you, and all who had 
 the misfortune to be born outside of their sacred pale. 
 Not that they ever expressed such views in your hear 
 ing. Good manners, as well as their habitual reserve, 
 forbade this. But, though they did not say it, you 
 knew quite well that they felt it. And if at any time 
 the " young barbarian " put a direct question, or made 
 a remark which went straight at these opinions, they 
 would only look at him, astonished at his rudeness and 
 profanity, and shrink into themselves. 
 
KEBLE. 207 
 
 Now and then, however, it would happen that some 
 adherent, or even leading man of the movement, more 
 frank and outspoken than the rest, would deign to 
 speak out his principles, and even to discuss them with 
 undergraduates and controversial Scots. To him urg 
 ing the necessity of Apostolical Succession, and the 
 sacerdotal view of the Sacraments, some young man 
 might venture to reply, " Well ! if all you say be 
 true, then I never can have known a Christian. For 
 up to this time I have lived among people who were 
 strangers to all these things, which, you tell me, are 
 essentials of Christianity. And I am quite sure that, 
 if I have never known a Christian till now, I shall 
 never know one." The answer to this would probably 
 be, "There is much in what you say. No doubt high 
 virtues, very like the Christian graces, are to be found 
 outside of the Christian Church. But it is a remark 
 able thing, those best acquainted with Church history 
 tell me, that outside of the pale of the Church the 
 saintly character is never found." This naif reply was 
 not likely to have much weight with the young list 
 ener. It would have taken something stronger to 
 make him break faith with all that was most sacred 
 in his early recollections. Beautiful examples of Pres 
 byterian piety had stamped impressions on his memory 
 not to be effaced by sacerdotal theories or subtleties 
 of the schools. And the Church system which began 
 by disowning these examples placed a barrier to its 
 acceptance at the very outset. 
 
 But however unbelievable their theory, further ac 
 quaintance with the younger men of the new school, 
 whether junior fellows or undergraduate scholars, dis 
 closed many traits of character that could not but 
 awaken respect or something more. If there was 
 about many of them a constraint and reserve which 
 
208 KEBLE. 
 
 seemed unnatural, there was also in many an unworld- 
 liness and self-denial, a purity of life and elevation of 
 aim, in some a generosity of purpose and depth of 
 devotion, not to be gainsaid. Could the movement 
 which produced these qualities, or even attracted them 
 to itself, be wholly false and bad ? This movement, 
 moreover, . when at its height, extended its influence 
 far beyond the circle of those who directly adopted its 
 views. There was not, in Oxford at least, a reading 
 man who was not more or less indirectly influenced 
 by it. Only the very idle or the very frivolous were 
 wholly proof against it. On all others it impressed 
 a sobriety of conduct and a seriousness not usually 
 found among large bodies of young men. It raised 
 the tone of average morality in Oxford to a level which 
 perhaps it had never before reached. You may call 
 it over-wrought and too highly strung. Perhaps it 
 was. It was better, however, for young men to be so, 
 than to be doubters or cynics. 
 
 If such was the general aspect of Oxford society at 
 that time, where was the centre and soul from which 
 so mighty a power emanated? It lay, and had for 
 some years lain, mainly in one man a man in many 
 ways the most remarkable that England has seen dur 
 ing this century, perhaps the most remarkable whom 
 the English Church has produced in any century, 
 John Henry Newman. 
 
 The influence he had gained, apparently without 
 setting himself to seek it, was something altogether 
 unlike anything else in our time. A mysterious ven 
 eration had by degrees gathered round him, till now 
 it was almost as though some Ambrose or Augustine 
 of elder ages had reappeared. He himself tells how 
 one day, when he was an undergraduate, a friend with 
 
KEBLE. 209 
 
 whom he was walking in the Oxford street cried out 
 eagerly, " There s Keble ! " and with what awe he 
 looked at him ! A few years, and the same took 
 place with regard to himself. In Oriel Lane light- 
 hearted undergraduates would drop their voices and 
 whisper, " There s Newman ! " when, head thrust for 
 ward, and gaze fixed as though on some vision seen 
 only by himself, with swift, noiseless step he glided by. 
 Awe fell on them for a moment, almost as if it had 
 been some apparition that had passed. For his inner 
 circle of friends, many of them younger men, he was 
 said to have a quite romantic affection, which they re 
 turned with the most ardent devotion and the intensest 
 faith in him. But to the outer world he was a mys 
 tery. What were the qualities that inspired these 
 feelings ? There was of course learning arid refine 
 ment, there was genius, not indeed of a philosopher, 
 but of a subtle and original thinker, an unequaled 
 edge of dialectic, and these all glorified by the imagi 
 nation of a poet. Then there was the utter unworld- 
 liness, the setting at naught of all things which men 
 most prize, the tamelessness of soul, which was ready 
 to essay the impossible. Men felt that here was 
 
 " One of that small transfigured band 
 Which the world cannot tame." 
 
 It was this mysteriousness which, beyond all his gifts 
 of head and heart, so strangely fascinated and over 
 awed, that something about him which made it im 
 possible to reckon his course and take his bearings, 
 that soul-hunger and quenchless yearning which nothing 
 short of the eternal could satisfy. This deep and reso 
 lute ardor, this tenderness yet severity of soul, were 
 no doubt an offense not to be forgiven by older men, 
 especially by the wary and worldly-wise ; but in these 
 14 
 
210 KEBLE. 
 
 lay the very spell which drew to him the hearts of all 
 the younger and the more enthusiastic. Such was the 
 impression he had made in Oxford just before he re 
 linquished his hold on it. And if at that time it seemed 
 to persons at a distance extravagant and absurd, they 
 may since have learnt that there was in him who was 
 the object of this reverence enough to justify it. 
 
 But it may be asked, What actions or definite results 
 were there to account for so deep and wide- spread a 
 veneration ? There were no doubt the numerous prod 
 ucts of his prolific pen, his works, controversial, theo 
 logical, religious. But none of these were so deep in 
 learning as some of Dr. Pusey s writings, nor so widely 
 popular as " The Christian Year ; " and yet both Dr. 
 Pusey and Mr. Keble were at that time quite second in 
 importance to Mr. Newman. The centre from which 
 his power went forth was the pulpit of St. Mary s, 
 with those wonderful afternoon sermons. Sunday after 
 Sunday, month by month, year by year, they went on, 
 each continuing and deepening the impression the last 
 had made. As the afternoon service at St. Mary s 
 interfered with the dinner-hour of the colleges, most 
 men preferred a warm dinner without Newman s sermon 
 to a cold one with it, so the audience was not crowded 
 the large church little more than half filled. The 
 service was very simple, no pomp, no ritualism ; for 
 it was characteristic of the leading men of the move 
 ment that they left these things to the weaker brethren. 
 Their thoughts, at all events, were set on great ques 
 tions which touched the heart of unseen things. About 
 the service, the most remarkable thing was the beauty, 
 the silver intonation, of Mr. Newman s voice, as he read 
 the Lessons. It seemed to bring new meaning out of the 
 familiar words. Still lingers in memory the tone with 
 which he read, " But Jerusalem which is above is free, 
 
KEBLE. 211 
 
 which is the mother of us all." When he began to 
 preach, a stranger was not likely to be much struck, 
 especially if he had been accustomed to pulpit oratory 
 of the Boanerges sort. Here was no vehemence, no 
 declamation, no show of elaborated argument, so that 
 one who came prepared to hear a " great intellectual 
 effort" was almost sure to go away disappointed. 
 Indeed, I believe that if he had preached one of his 
 St. Mary s sermons before a Scotch town congregation, 
 they would have thought the preacher a " silly body." 
 The delivery had a peculiarity which it took a new 
 hearer some time to get over. Each separate sentence, 
 or at least each short paragraph, was spoken rapidly, 
 but with great clearness of intonation ; and then at its 
 close there was a pause, lasting for nearly half a min 
 ute ; then another rapidly but clearly spoken sentence, 
 followed by another pause. It took some time to get 
 over this, but, that once done, the wonderful charm 
 began to dawn on you. The look and bearing of the 
 preacher were as of one who dwelt apart, who, though 
 he knew his age well, did not live in it. From his 
 seclusion of study, and abstinence, and prayer, from 
 habitual dwelling in the unseen, he seemed to come 
 forth that one day of the week to speak to others of the 
 things he had seen and known. Those who never 
 heard him might fancy that his sermons would generally 
 be about apostolical succession or rights of the Church, 
 or against Dissenters. Nothing of the kind. You 
 might hear him preach for weeks without an allusion to 
 these things. What there was of High Church teach 
 ing was implied rather than enforced. The local, the 
 temporary, and the modern were ennobled by the pres 
 ence of the catholic truth belonging to all ages that 
 pervaded the whole. His power showed itself chiefly 
 in the new and unlooked-for way in which he touched 
 
212 KEBLE. 
 
 into life old truths, moral or spiritual, which all Chris 
 tians acknowledge, but most have ceased to feel when 
 he spoke of " Unreal Words," of " The Individuality of 
 the Soul," of " The Invisible World," of a " Particular 
 Providence ; " or again, of " The Ventures of Faith," 
 " Warfare the condition of Victory," " The Cross of 
 Christ the Measure of the World," " The Church a 
 Home for the Lonely." As he spoke, how the old 
 truth became new! how it came home with a meaning 
 never felt before ! He laid his finger how gently, 
 yet how powerfully ! on some inner place in the 
 hearer s heart, and told him things about himself he 
 had never known till then. Subtlest truths, which it 
 would have taken philosophers pages of circumlocution 
 and big words to state, were dropt out by the way in a 
 sentence or two of the most transparent Saxon. What 
 delicacy of style, yet what calm power! how gentle, yet 
 how strong ! how simple, yet how suggestive ! how 
 homely, yet how refined ! how penetrating, yet how 
 tender-hearted ! If now and then there was a forlorn 
 undertone which at the time seemed inexplicable, if he 
 spoke of " many a sad secret which a man dare not tell 
 lest he find no sympathy," of " secrets lying like cold 
 ice upon the heart," of " some solitary incommunicable 
 grief," you might be perplexed at the drift of what he 
 spoke, but you felt all the more drawn to the speaker. 
 To call these sermons eloquent would be no word for 
 them ; high poems they rather were, as of an inspired 
 singer, or the outpourings as of a prophet, rapt yet self- 
 possessed. And the tone of voice in which they were 
 spoken, once you grew accustomed to it, sounded like a 
 fine strain of unearthly music. Through the stillness 
 of that high Gothic building the words fell on the ear 
 like the measured drippings of water in some vast dim 
 cave. After hearing these sermons you might come 
 
KEBLE. 21& 
 
 away still not believing the tenets peculiar to the High 
 Church system ; but you would be harder than most 
 men, if you did not feel more than ever ashamed of 
 coarseness, selfishness, worldliness, if you did not feel 
 the things of faith brought closer to the soul. 
 
 There was one occasion of a different kind, when he 
 spoke from St. Mary s pulpit for the last time, not as 
 Parish minister, but as University preacher. It was 
 the crisis of the movement. On the 2d of February, 
 1843, the Feast of the Purification, all Oxford assem 
 bled to hear what Newman had to say, and St. Mary s 
 was crowded to the door. The subject he spoke of was 
 "The theory of Development in Christian Doctrine," 
 a subject which since then has become common prop 
 erty, but which at that time was new even to the 
 ablest men in Oxford. For an hour and a half he 
 drew out the argument, and perhaps the acutest there 
 did not quite follow the entire line of thought, or felt 
 wearied by the length of it, lightened though it was 
 by some startling illustrations. Such was the famous 
 " Protestantism has at various times developed into 
 Polygamy," or the still more famous " Scripture says the 
 sun moves round the earth, Science that the earth moves, 
 and the sun is comparatively at rest. How can we de 
 termine which of these opposite statements is true, till 
 we know what motion is ? " Few probably who heard it 
 have forgot the tone of voice with which he uttered 
 the beautiful passage about music as the audible em 
 bodiment of some unknown reality behind, itself 
 sweeping like a strain of splendid music out of the 
 heart of a subtle argument : 
 
 " Take another instance of an outward and earthly 
 form, or economy, under which great wonders unknown 
 seem to be typified; I mean musical sounds, as they 
 are exhibited most perfectly in instrumental harmony. 
 
214 KEBLE. 
 
 There are seven notes in the scale ; make them four 
 teen ; yet what a slender outfit for so vast an enter 
 prise ! What science brings so much out of so little ? 
 Out of what poor elements does some master create 
 his new world ! Shall we say that all this exuberant 
 inventiveness is a mere ingenuity or trick of art, like 
 some game or fashion of the day, without reality, with 
 out meaning ? We may do so ; and then, perhaps, we 
 shall also account the science of theology to be a mat 
 ter of words ; yet, as there is a divinity in the theology 
 of the Church, which those who feel cannot communi 
 cate, so there is also in the wonderful creation of sub 
 limity and beauty of which I am speaking. To many 
 men the very names which the science employs are 
 utterly incomprehensible. To speak of an idea or a 
 subject seems to be fanciful or trifling, and of the views 
 which it opens upon us to be childish extravagance ; 
 yet is it possible that that inexhaustible evolution and 
 disposition of notes, so rich yet so simple, so intricate 
 yet so regulated, so various yet so majestic, should be a 
 mere sound which is gone and perishes ? Can it be 
 that those mysterious stirrings of heart, and keen emo 
 tions, and strange yearnings after we know not what, 
 and awful impressions from we know not whence, 
 should be wrought in us by what is unsubstantial, and 
 comes and goes, and begins and ends in itself? It is 
 not so ! it cannot be. No ; they have escaped from 
 some higher sphere ; they are the outpourings of eter 
 nal harmony in the medium of created sound ; they 
 are echoes from our Home ; they are the voices of An 
 gels, or the Magnificat of Saints, or the living laws 
 of Divine governance, or the Divine attributes ; some 
 thing are they besides themselves, which we cannot 
 compass, which we cannot utter, though mortal man, 
 and he perhaps not otherwise distinguished above his 
 fellows, has the power of eliciting them." 
 
KEBLE. 215 
 
 This was preached in the winter of 1843, the last 
 time he appeared in the University pulpit. His paro 
 chial sermons had by this time assumed an uneasy tone 
 which perplexed his followers with fear of change. 
 That summer solved their doubt. In the quiet chapel 
 of Littlemore, which he himself had built, when all 
 Oxford was absent during the long vacation, he 
 preached his last Anglican sermon to the country peo 
 ple and only a few friends, and poured forth that 
 mournful and thrilling farewell to the Church of Eng 
 land. The sermon is entitled " The Parting of 
 Friends." The text was " Man goeth forth to his 
 work and his labor until the evening." He went 
 through all the instances which Scripture records of 
 human affection sorely tried, reproducing the incidents 
 almost in the very words of Scripture, Jacob, Ha- 
 gar, Naomi, Jonathan and David, St. Paul and the 
 elders of Ephesus, and last, the weeping over Jerusa 
 lem, and the " Behold, your house is left unto you deso 
 late," and then he bursts forth 
 
 " A lesson, surely, and a warning to us all, in everj 
 place where He puts his name, to the end of time, lest 
 we be cold towards his gifts, or unbelieving towards 
 his word, or jealous of his workings, or heartless to 
 wards his mercies mother of saints ! O 
 
 school of the wise ! O nurse of the heroic ! of whom 
 went forth, in whom have dwelt memorable names of 
 old, to spread the truth abroad, or to cherish and il 
 lustrate it at home ! thou, from whom surrounding 
 nations lit their lamps ! virgin of Israel ! where 
 fore dost thou now sit on the ground and keep si 
 lence, like one of the foolish women who were with 
 out oil on the coming of the Bridegroom ? Where 
 is now the ruler in Sion, and the doctor in the Tem 
 ple, and the ascetic on Carmel, and the herald in the 
 
216 KEBLE. 
 
 wilderness, and the preacher in the market-place? 
 Where are thy * effectual fervent prayers offered in 
 secret, and thy alms and good works coming up as a 
 memorial before God ? How is it, once holy place, 
 that " the land mourneth, for the corn is wasted, the 
 new wine is dried up, the oil languisheth, because joy 
 is withered away from the sons of men ? Alas for 
 the day ! how do the beasts groan ! the herds of cattle 
 are perplexed, because they have no pasture ; yea, the 
 flocks are made desolate. * Lebanon is ashamed and 
 hewn down ; Sharon is like a wilderness, and Bashaii 
 and Carmel shake off their fruits. O my mother, 
 whence is this unto thee, that thou hast good things 
 poured upon thee and canst not keep them, and bearest 
 children, yet darest not own them ? Why hast thou 
 not the skill to use their services, nor the heart to re 
 joice in their love ? How is it that whatever is gener 
 ous in purpose, and tender or deep in devotion, thy 
 flower and thy promise falls from thy bosom, and finds 
 no home within thine arms? Who hath put this note 
 upon thee, to have a miscarrying womb and dry 
 breasts, to be strange to thine own flesh, and thine 
 eye cruel to thy little ones ? Thine own offspring, the 
 fruit of thy womb, who would love thee and would 
 toil for thee, thou dost gaze upon with fear as though a 
 portent, or thou dost loathe as an offense ; at best thou 
 dost but endure, as if they had no claim but on thy 
 patience, self-possession, and vigilance, to be rid of 
 them as easily as thou mayest. Thou makest them 
 stand all the day idle as the very condition of thy 
 bearing with them ; or thou biddest them begone where 
 they will be more welcome ; or thou sellest them for 
 naught to the stranger that passes by. And what wilt 
 thou do in the end thereof? 
 
 " Scripture is a refuge in any trouble ; only let us 
 
KEBLE. 217 
 
 be on our guard against seeming to use it further than 
 is fitting, or doing more than sheltering ourselves under 
 its shadow. Let us use it according to our measure. 
 It is fur higher and wider than our need, and it con 
 ceals our feelings while it gives expression to them. 
 It is sacred and heavenly ; and it restrains and purifies, 
 while it sanctions them ..... And O my brethren, O 
 kind and affectionate hearts, O loving friends, should 
 you know any one whose lot it has been, by writing or 
 by word of mouth, in some degree to help you thus to 
 act ; if he has ever told you what you knew about 
 yourselves, or what you did not know ; has read to you 
 your wants and feelings, and comforted you by the very 
 reading ; has made you feel that there was a higher 
 life than this daily one, and a brighter world than that 
 you see ; or encouraged you, or sobered you, or opened 
 a way to the inquiring, or soothed the perplexed, if 
 what he has said or done has ever made you take in 
 terest in him, and feel well- inclined towards him, re 
 member such a one in time to come, though you hear 
 him not, and pray for him, that in all things he may 
 know God s will, and at all times he may be ready to 
 fulfill it." 
 
 Then followed the resignation of his fellowship, the 
 retirement to Littlemore, the withdrawal even from the 
 intercourse of his friends, the unloosing of all the ties that 
 bound him to Oxford, the two years pondering of the 
 step he was about to take. And at last, when in 
 
 he wejit _away to, t^e ^Church of. Rome, he did it by 
 himself, making himself as much as possible responsible 
 only for his own act, and followed by but one or two 
 young friends who would not be kept back. Those 
 who witnessed these things, and knew that, if a large 
 following had been his object, he might, by leaving the 
 Church of England three years earlier, in the pleni- 
 
218 KEBLE. 
 
 tude of his power, have taken almost all the flower of 
 young Oxford with him, needed no " Apologia," to con 
 vince them of his honesty of purpose. 
 
 On these things, looking over an interval of five and 
 twenty years, how vividly comes back the remembrance 
 of the aching blank, the awful pause, which fell on 
 Oxford when that voice had ceased, and we knew that 
 we should hear it no more. It was as when, to one 
 kneeling by night, in the silence of some vast cathedral, 
 the great bell tolling solemnly overhead has suddenly 
 gone still. To many, no doubt, the pause was not of 
 long continuance. Soon they began to look this way 
 and that for new teachers, and to rush vehemently to 
 the opposite extreme of thought. But there were those 
 who could not so lightly forget. All the more these 
 withdrew into themselves. On Sunday forenoons and 
 evenings, in the retirement of their rooms, the printed 
 words of those marvelous sermons would thrill them 
 till they wept " abundant and most sweet tears." Since 
 then many voices of powerful teachers they may have 
 heard, but none that ever penetrated the soul like his. 
 
 Such was the impression made by that eventful time 
 on impartial but not uninterested spectators on those 
 who by early education and conviction were kept quite 
 aloof from the peculiar tenets of High Churchmen, but 
 who could not but acknowledge the moral quickening 
 which resulted from the movement, and the marvelous 
 character of him who was the soul of it. 
 
 Dr. Newman himself tells us that all the while the 
 true and primary author of that movement was out of 
 sight. The Rev. John Keble was at a distance from 
 Oxford, in his vicarage at Hursley, there living in his 
 own life, and carrying out in his daily services and par 
 ish ministry, those truths which he had first brought 
 forward, and Newman had carried out, in Oxford. But 
 
KEBLE. 219 
 
 though out of sight, he was not out of mind. " The 
 Christian Year" was in the hands of every one, even 
 the youngest undergraduate. Besides its more intrinsic 
 qualities, the tone of it blended well with the sentiment 
 which the venerable aspect of the old city awakened. 
 It used to be pleasing to try and identify amid the 
 scenery around Oxford some of the spots from which 
 were drawn those descriptions of nature with which the 
 poems are inlaid. During these years the poet-priest s 
 figure was but seldom seen in the streets of Oxford, 
 only when some great question affecting the Church, 
 some discussion of No. 90, or trial of Mr. Ward, had 
 summoned Convocation together. Once, if my memory 
 serves, I remember to have seen him in the University 
 pulpit at St. Mary s, but his voice was not strong, and 
 did not reach many of the audience. His service to his 
 party had lain in another direction. It was he who, 
 by his character, had first awakened a new tone of sen 
 timent in Oxford, and attracted to himself whatever else 
 was like-minded. He had sounded the first note which 
 woke that sentiment into action, and embodied it in a 
 party. He had kept up, though from a distance, sym 
 pathetic intercourse with the chief actors, counseled 
 and encouraged them. Above all, he gave poetry to 
 the movement, and a poetic aspect. Polemics by them 
 selves are dreary work. They do not touch the springs 
 of young hearts. But he who, in the midst of any line 
 of thought, unlocks a fountain of genuine poetry, does 
 more to humanize it and win for it a way to men s 
 affections, than he who writes a hundred volumes, how 
 ever able, of controversy. Without disparagement to 
 the patristic and other learning of the party, the two 
 permanent monuments of genius which it has be 
 queathed to England may be said to be Newman s 
 " Parochial Sermons," and Keble s " Christian Year." 
 
220 KEBLE. 
 
 All that was known of Keble at that time to the 
 outer world of Oxford was vague and scanty. The few 
 facts here added are taken from what has since been 
 made public by two of his most attached friends, Sir 
 John Coleridge and Dr. Newman, the former in his 
 beautiful letters, memorial of Keble, the latter in his 
 " Apologia." Yet these facts, though few, are well worthy 
 of attention, both because Keble s character is more 
 than his poetry, and because his poetry can only be 
 rightly understood in the light of his character. For 
 there is no poet whose poetry is more truly an image 
 of the man himself, both in his inner nature and in his 
 outward circumstances. 
 
 His father, whose name the poet bore, was a country 
 clergyman, vicar of Coin St. Aldwyns, in Gloucester 
 shire, but the house in which he lived, and in which 
 the poet was born, was at Fairford, three miles distant 
 from the cure. John was the second child and elder 
 son of a family which consisted of two sons and two 
 daughters. His mother, Sarah Maule, was, as I have 
 heard, of Scottish extraction. The father, who lived 
 till his ninetieth year, was a man of no common ability. 
 Of him his son, we are told, " always spoke not only 
 with the love of a son, but with the profoundest rever 
 ence for his goodness and wisdom." It would seem 
 that this was one of the few clerical homes in England 
 in which the opinions, traditions, and peculiar piety of 
 the Nonjurors lived on into the present century. Un 
 like most sons distinguished for ability, John Keble 
 never outgrew the period of absolute filial reverence, 
 never questioned a single opinion or prepossession 
 which he had imbibed from his father. Some of his 
 less reverential companions used to think that this was 
 an intellectual loss to him. 
 
 The father s ability and scholarship are proved by 
 
his having himself educated his son, anc 
 Oxford so well prepared, that at the age 
 gained a Corpus scholarship, an honor which seems to 
 have then held the same place in University estimation 
 that Balliol scholarships have long held and still hold. 
 This strictly home training, in the quiet of a Gloucester 
 shire parsonage, placed in the very heart of rural Eng 
 land, under a roof where the old High Church tradition 
 lived on, blending with what was best in modern piety, 
 makes itself felt in every line the poet wrote. On all 
 hands one hears it said that there is no education like 
 that of one of the old English public schools. For the 
 great run of ordinary boys, whether quick-witted and 
 competitive, or lazy and self-indulgent, it may be so ; 
 but for natures of finer texture, for all boys who have 
 a decided and original bias, how much is there that the 
 rough handling of a public school would ruthlessly 
 crush ? From all the better public schools coarse 
 bullying, I know, has disappeared ; but for peculiarity 
 of any kind, for whatever does not conform itself to the 
 " tyrant tradition " a manly arid straightforward one, 
 I admit they have still but little tolerance. If Keble 
 had once imbibed the public school spirit, " The Chris 
 tian Year " would either never have been written at 
 all, or it would have been written otherwise than it is. 
 
 If he was fortunate in having his boy-education at 
 home, he was not less happy in the college which he 
 entered and the companions he met there. It is the 
 happiness of college life that a young man can com 
 mand just as much retirement, and as much society as 
 he pleases, and of the kind that he pleases. All read 
 ers of Arnold s life will remember the picture there 
 drawn of the Scholars Common Room at Corpus, by 
 one of the last survivors, the venerable Sir J. Coleridge. 
 
222 KEBLE. 
 
 He tells us that, when Keble came into residence, early 
 in 1807, it was but a small society, numbering only 
 about twenty undergraduate scholars, and these rather 
 under the usual age, who lived on the most familiar 
 terms with each other. The Bachelor scholars resided 
 and lived entirely with the undergraduates. Two of 
 Keble s chief friends among the Corpus scholars, though 
 younger in academic standing than himself, were Cole 
 ridge (afterwards Judge Coleridge) and Arnold. Keble 
 indeed must have already graduated before Arnold 
 came into residence. Besides these were many other 
 men distinguished in their day in the University, but 
 less known to the outer world. It was a stirring time 
 when Keble was an undergraduate. Within the Uni 
 versity the first wakening after long slumber had be 
 gun, and competitions for honors had been just estab 
 lished. From without news of the great Peninsular 
 battles was from time to time arriving. Scott s trum 
 pet-blasts of poetry were stirring young hearts. In 
 Corpus Common Room, as elsewhere, the Peninsular 
 battles were fought over again, and the classical and 
 romantic schools of poetry were vehemently discussed. 
 And among these more exciting subjects, the young 
 scholar Coleridge would insinuate the stiller and deeper 
 tones of Wordsworth s lyrical ballads, which, then but 
 little known, he had heard of from his uncle the poet. 
 These two, Scott and Wordsworth, were to the end 
 Keble s first favorites of contemporary poets, and chiefly 
 moulded his taste and style. Most of the scholars were 
 high Tories in Church and State, great respecters of 
 things as they are : none, no doubt, more so than 
 Keble. The great questioner of the prevailing creed 
 was Arnold, who often brought down on his own head 
 the concentrated arguments of the whole Common 
 Room. But youth s genial warmth healed these under- 
 
KEBLE. 223 
 
 graduate disputes, as, alas ! the same controversies 
 could not be healed when taken up by the same com 
 batants at a later day. In that kindly atmosphere 
 Keble s affectionate nature expanded as a flower in the 
 sun. His was a temperament to drink in deeply what 
 ever there was of finest influence in Oxford. No doubt 
 the learning he there gained was something to him, but 
 far more was the vision of the fair city herself, "with 
 high aisle, and solemn cloister, seated among groves, 
 green meadows, and calm streams." These, and the 
 young friendships which they for a few years embosom, 
 are what made Oxford then, and make it even now, the 
 one spot in England wherein " the curled darlings of 
 the nation " find romance still realized. Keble seems 
 to have been much the same in character then as in 
 after years. His affection towards the friends he made 
 at Oxford was warm and deep, and lasted in most in 
 stances with his life. With what feelings they regarded 
 him may be gathered from the words of his brother 
 scholar at Corpus, who, when their fifty-five years 
 friendship had come to its earthly close, could say of 
 him, " It was the singular happiness of his nature, re 
 markable even in his undergraduate days, that love for 
 him was always sanctified, as it were, by reverence 
 reverence that did not make the love less tender, and 
 love that did but add intensity to the reverence." 
 
 In Easter term, 1810, Keble obtained double first 
 class honors, and this success was soon afterwards 
 followed by another still greater his election to an 
 Oriel fellowship. The Oriel Common Room numbered 
 among its Fellows, then and for some time afterwards, 
 all that was most distinguished in Oxford for mental 
 power and originality. Copleston, Davidson, Whately, 
 then belonged to it, and were among Keble s electors. 
 Arnold, Newman, Pusey, soon afterwards followed as 
 
 
 
 
 VrL ^\" 
 
C>t^> 
 
 224 KEBLE. 
 
 Fellows of the same college. " Round the fire of the 
 Oriel Common Room," we are told, " there were 
 learned and able, not rarely subtle and disputatious 
 conversations, in which this lad of nineteen was called 
 to take his part. Amid these he sometimes yearned 
 for the more easy, yet not unintellectual society of his 
 old friends at Corpus." He found, no doubt, that 
 undergraduate days are more congenial to warm friend 
 ships than the highly rarefied atmosphere of an intel 
 lectual Common Room. Where men touch chiefly by 
 the head, they find that this is the seat as frequently 
 of a repulsive as of an attractive force. While he was 
 an undergraduate, and during the early days of his 
 fellowship, he wrote a good many beautiful little poems, 
 which surviving friends still possess, and the year after 
 his election to Oriel he gained the University prizes 
 for the English and Latin essay. 
 
 The interval from 1810 to 1815 he spent in Oriel, 
 taking part in college tuition, and acting as an exam 
 iner in the Degree Schools. Was it some time during 
 these years, or at a later date, that the incident re 
 corded by Dr. Newman took place ? " When one day 
 I was walking in High Street, with my dear earliest 
 friend, with what eagerness did he cry out, There s 
 Keble ! and with what awe did I look at him ! Then 
 at another time I heard a Master of Arts of my col 
 lege give an account, how he had just then had occa 
 sion to introduce himself on some business to Keble, 
 and how gentle, courteous, and unaffected Keble had 
 been, so as almost to put him out of countenance. 
 Then, too, it was reported, truly or falsely, how a 
 rising man of brilliant reputation, the present Dean of 
 St. Paul s, Dr. Milman, admired and loved him, adding 
 that somehow he was strangely unlike any one else." 
 
 In 1815 he was ordained Deacon, the following year 
 
KEBLE. 225 
 
 Priest ; soon afterwards he left the University, and 
 never again permanently resided there. He had 
 chosen the calling of a clergyman, and though within 
 that field other paths more gratifying to ambition lay 
 open to him, he turned aside from them, and gave 
 himself to parochial work as the serious employment 
 of his life. He became his father s curate, and lived 
 with him at Fairford, engaged in this duty for twenty 
 years, more or less. This rare absence or restraint of 
 ambition, where it might have seemed natural or even 
 right to have gratified it, was quite in keeping with 
 Keble s whole character. " The Church," says Sir 
 J. Coleridge, " he had deliberately chosen to be his 
 profession, and he desired to follow out that in a 
 country cure. With this he associated, and scarcely 
 placed on a lower level, the affectionate discharge of 
 his duties as a son and brother. Calls, temporary calls 
 of duty to his college and University, for a time and at 
 intervals diverted him (he was again Public Examiner 
 from 1821 to 1823) ; but he always kept these outlines 
 in view, and as the occasion passed away, reverted to 
 them with the permanent devotion of his heart. 
 Traces of this feeling may be found again and again in 
 < The Christian Year. " 
 
 This book was first given to the world on the 23d 
 of June, 1827, when Keble was in his thirty -fifth year. 
 This, the great work of his life, which will keep his 
 name fresh in men s memory when all else that he has 
 done shall be forgotten, had been the silent gathering 
 of years. Single poems had been in his friends hands 
 at least as early as 1819. They had urged him to 
 complete the series, and by 1827 this was done. No 
 record of the exact time when each poem was written 
 has yet appeared. I should imagine that more of them 
 were composed at Fairford than at Oxford. The dis- 
 15 
 
226 KEBLE. 
 
 cussion and criticism natural to a University are not 
 generally favorable to poetic creation of any kind, 
 least of all to so meditative a strain as that of Keble. 
 But it may have been that in this, as in other things, 
 he was "unlike any one else." It was only at the 
 urgent entreaty of his friends that he published the 
 little book. He was not anxious about poetic fame, 
 and never thought that these poems would secure it. 
 His own plan was " to go on improving the series all 
 his life, and leave it to come out, if judged useful, only 
 when he should be fairly out of the way." Had this 
 plan been acted on, how many thousands would have 
 been defrauded of the soothing delight these poems 
 have ministered to them! But even those who most 
 strongly counseled the publication, little dreamt what 
 a destiny was in store for that little book. Of course, 
 if the author had kept it by him he might have 
 smoothed away some of its defects, but who knows 
 how much it might have lost too in the process ? " No 
 one," we are told, " knew its literary shortcomings 
 better than the author himself. Wisely, and not in 
 pride, or through indolence, he abandoned the attempt 
 at second-hand to amend this inharmonious line, or 
 that imperfect rhyme, or the instances here and there 
 in which his idea may be somewhat obscurely ex 
 pressed. Wordsworth s acute poetical sense recognized 
 such faults ; yet the book was his delight." Probably 
 it was a wise resolve. All emendation of poetry long 
 after its first composition runs the risk of spoiling it. 
 The author has to take up in one mood what was 
 originally conceived in another. His first warm feel 
 ing of the sentiment has gone cold, and he cannot at a 
 later time revive it. This is true of all poetry, more 
 especially of that which deals with subtle and evanes 
 cent emotions which can never perhaps recur exactly 
 
KEBLE. 227 
 
 in the same form. Once only in a lifetime may he 
 succeed in catching 
 
 " Those brief unisons which on the brain 
 One tone that never can recur has cast, 
 One accent never to return again." 
 
 In 1833 Keble was appointed Professor of Poetry 
 at Oxford. The Statutes then required the Professor 
 to give two or three lectures a year in Latin. The 
 ancient language was required to be spoken from this 
 chair longer than from any other, probably from fear 
 of the trash men might talk if fairly unmuzzled. 
 However prudent this may have been when a merely 
 average functionary held the chair, it is greatly to be 
 regretted that when it was filled by a true poet, who 
 was intent on speaking the secret of his own art, he 
 should have been so formidably weighted. The pres 
 ent 1 gifted occupant of that chair has fortunately been 
 set free, and has vindicated the newly acquired freedom 
 by enriching our literature with the finest poetical criti 
 cism it has received since the days of Coleridge. But 
 Keble had to work in trammels. He was the last man 
 to rebel against any limitations imposed by the wisdom 
 or unwisdom of our ancestors. Faithfully he buckled 
 himself to the task of translating into well-rounded 
 Latin periods his cherished thoughts on his own favor 
 ite subject. Of the theory of poetry embodied in the 
 two volumes of his published lectures, something may 
 yet be said. The Latin is easy and unconstrained, the 
 thought original and suggestive a great contrast to 
 the more than Ciceronian paragraphs of his predeces 
 sor Copleston, bristling as they do to a marvel with 
 epigrammatic Latinity, but underneath that containing 
 little that is not commonplace. 
 
 i This ought now to be " the late gifted occupant," as it refers to Mr. 
 Matthew Arnold. 
 
228 KEBLE. 
 
 There was another duty which fell to Keble as Pro 
 fessor of Poetry, to choose the subject for the an 
 nual Prize Poem at Oxford, to adjudicate along with 
 others the prize to the best of the poems given in, and 
 to look over and suggest corrections in the verses of 
 the successful competitor. Of all these winners of the 
 Newdigate Prize one only has described his interview 
 with Keble, but he one of the most distinguished. 
 Dean Stanley, who gained the Newdigate Prize in, I 
 think, 1837, with his beautiful poem on "The Gypsies," 
 thus describes his first meeting with Keble. By the 
 Dean s kind leave I give it in his own words, taken 
 from his paper on Keble, now published in " Essays on 
 Church and State : " " There are still living those 
 with whom his discharge of one of his duties left a far 
 livelier recollection than his Latin lectures. It was 
 part of his office to correct the poems which during 
 his tenure of it obtained the Newdigate Prize. One 
 of these young authors still retains so fresh and so 
 characteristic a remembrance of his intercourse with 
 the Professor, even then venerable in his eyes, that it 
 may be worth recording. He recalls, after the lapse 
 of more than thirty years, the quiet kindness of man 
 ner, the bright twinkling eye illuminating that other 
 wise inexpressive countenance, which greeted the 
 bashful student on his entrance into the Professor s 
 presence. One touch after another was given to the 
 juvenile verses, substituting for this or that awkward 
 phrase graceful turns of expression all his own : 
 " Is there a spot where earth s dim daylight falls, 
 
 has the delicate color of The Christian Year all 
 over. In adding the expression 
 
 " Where shade, air, waters 
 he dwelt with all the ardor of the keenest critic on the 
 
KEBLE. 229 
 
 curious subtlety of language, by which * water sug 
 gests all that is prosaic, and l waters all that is poet 
 ical. 
 
 " The heavens all gloom, the weaned earth all crime ; 
 
 how powerfully does this embody the exhaustion of 
 Europe in the fifteenth century ! l The storied Sphinx, 
 * India s ocean-floods ; how vivid are these glances a f 
 the phenomena of the East ! 
 
 The wandering Israelite, from year to year, 
 Sees the Redeemer s conquering wheels draw near ; " 
 
 how thoroughly here is Southey s language caught from 
 the * Curse of Kehama ; how thoroughly, too, the 
 Judaic as contrasted with the Christian Advent! And 
 it may be added, though not directly bearing on the 
 present topic, how delighted was his youthful hearer to 
 perceive the sympathetic warmth with which, at a cer 
 tain point in the poem, he said, Ah, surely this was 
 suggested by Dr. Arnold s sermon on " The Egyptians 
 whom ye have seen to-day, ye shall see no more again 
 forever." This allusion was the more felt as showing 
 his recollection of the friend from whom at that time 
 he was so strangely alienated." 
 
 In a foot-note Dean Stanley adds that " on glancing 
 at a note to this poem, which cited from Tennyson s 
 Palace of Art, but without naming the poet, the line 
 " Who shuts love out shall be shut out from love, 
 
 Keble remarked Shakespeare. The Laureate will 
 forgive this ignorance of his early fame in considera 
 tion of the grandeur of the comparison." 
 
 In this vivid description one thing Dean Stanley 
 has refrained from giving, the " certain point in his 
 poem" which Keble recognized as suggested by Dr. 
 Arnold s sermon. But the lines are too good to be 
 thus passed over. Taking the view of the Gypsies, 
 
230 KEBLE. 
 
 as having had their original home in Egypt, the 
 thought occurs to the young poet, that they and the 
 Jews during their Egyptian sojourn must have met. 
 And then he bursts into these fine lines, full of his 
 own pictorial genius : 
 
 " Long since ye parted by the Red Sea strand, 
 Now face to face ye meet in every land, 
 Aliens amidst a new-born world to dwell, 
 Egypt s lorn people, outcast Israel." 
 
 With slight interruptions Keble continued to live 
 with his father at Fairford, and to assist him as his 
 curate till 183.5. "In that year this tie was broken. 
 At the very commencement of it the venerable old 
 man, who to the last retained the full use of his facul 
 ties, was taken to his rest ; and before the end of it 
 Keble became the Vicar of Hursley, and the husband 
 of Miss Charlotte Clarke, second daughter of an old 
 college friend of his father s, who was incumbent of a 
 parish in the neighborhood of Fairford. This was 
 the happy settlement of his life. For himself he had 
 now no ungratified wish, arid the bonds then tied were 
 loosened only by death." 
 
 Only two years before Keble left Fairford, and at 
 the very time when he entered on his Poetry Profes 
 sorship, began what is called the Oxford Movement. 
 Of this, Dr. Newman tells us, Keble was the real 
 author. Let us cast a glance back, and see how it 
 arose, and what it aimed at. With what feelings New 
 man, when an undergraduate, looked at Keble, we 
 have seen. Some years afterwards, it must have been 
 in 1819 or 1820, Newman was elected to the Oriel 
 Fellowship which Arnold vacated. Of that time he 
 thus writes : " I had to hasten to the Tower to re 
 ceive the congratulations of all the Fellows. I bore 
 
KEBLE. 231 
 
 it till Keble took my hand, and then felt so abashed 
 and unworthy of the honor done me, that I seemed 
 quite desirous of sinking into the ground. His had 
 been the first name I had heard spoken of with rever 
 ence rather than admiration when I came up to Ox 
 ford." This was probably the first meeting of these 
 two. " When I was elected Fellow of Oriel," Dr. 
 Newman continues, " Keble was not in residence, and 
 he was shy of me for years, in consequence of the 
 marks I bore upon me of the evangelical and liberal 
 schools. Hurrell Froude brought us together about 
 1828. It is one of his sayings preserved in his Re 
 mains : If I was ever asked what good deed I had 
 ever done, I should say that I had brought Keble and 
 Newman to understand each other. " The friendship 
 thus cemented was to be fruitful of results for England. 
 It naturally occurs to ask, How far is " The Christian 
 Year " identified with the principles of the Tractarian 
 movement ? On the one hand, " The Christian Year " 
 was published in 1827 ; the movement did not begin 
 till 1833. The former, therefore, cannot be regarded 
 as in any way a child of the latter. And this accounts 
 for what has often been remarked, how little of the 
 peculiar Tractarian teaching appears in these poems. 
 On the other hand, it is easy to see how the same na 
 ture which, in a season of quiet, when controversy was 
 at a lull, shaped out of its own musings " The Chris 
 tian Year," would, when confronted with opposing 
 tendencies, and forced into a dogmatic attitude, find 
 its true expression in the Tractarian theory. Keble 
 was by nature a poet, living by intuition, not by rea 
 soning ; intuition born of, fed by, home affection, tra 
 dition, devout religion. His whole being leaned on 
 authority. " Keble was a man who guided himself," 
 says Dr. Newman, " and formed his judgments, not by 
 
232 KEBLE. 
 
 processes of reason, by inquiry or argument, but, to 
 use the word in a broad sense, by authority." And 
 by authority in its broad sense he means conscience, 
 the Bible, the Church, antiquity, words of the wise, 
 hereditary lessons, ethical truths, historical memories. 
 " It seemed to me as if he felt ever happier when he 
 could speak and act under some such primary and 
 external sanction ; and could use argument mainly as 
 a means of recommending or explaining what had 
 claims on his reception prior to proof. What he 
 hated instinctively was heresy, insubordination, resist 
 ance to things established, claims of independence, dis 
 loyalty, innovation, a critical or censorious spirit." 
 Keble then lived by authority, and hated the disposi 
 tions that oppose it. There is a temper of mind which 
 lives by denying authority a temper whose essence, 
 or at least whose bad side, is to foster these very dis 
 positions which he hated. With that tone of mind, 
 and the men possessed by it, sooner or later he must 
 needs have come into collision. For such a collision, 
 Oxford did not want materials. 
 
 During Keble s time of residence, and after he went 
 down, the University had been awakening from a long 
 torpor, and entering on a new era. " The march of 
 the mind," as it was called, was led by a number of 
 active-minded and able men, whose chief rallying point 
 was Oriel Common Room, whose best representative 
 was Whately. These men had set themselves to raise 
 the standard of teaching and discipline in the Colleges 
 and in the University. They were the University Re 
 formers of their day, and to them Oxford, when first 
 arousing itself from long intellectual slumber, owed 
 much. As they had a common aim, to raise the intel 
 lectual standard, they were naturally much thrown 
 together, and became the celebrities of the place. 
 
KEBLE. 233 
 
 Those who did not belong to their party thought them 
 not free from " pride of reason," an expression then, 
 as now, derided by those who think themselves intel 
 lectual, but not the less on that account covering a 
 real meaning. It is, as it has been called, " the moral 
 malady " which besets those who live mainly by intel 
 lect. Men who could not in heart go along with 
 them thought they carried liberty of thought into pre 
 sumption and rationalism. They seemed to submit 
 the things of faith too much to human judgment, and 
 to seek to limit their religious belief by their own pow 
 ers of understanding. They seemed then, as now, 
 " to halve the gospel of God s grace," accepting the 
 morality, and, if not rejecting, yet making little of the 
 supernatural truths out of which that morality springs. 
 Such at least was the judgment of their opponents. 
 In the presence of men of this stamp, energetic but 
 hard, upright but not over humble or reverent, a man 
 of deep religious seriousness, like Keble, instinctively 
 " shrank into himself." " He was young in years when 
 he became a University celebrity, and younger in 
 mind. He had the purity and simplicity of a child. 
 He had few sympathies with the intellectual party, 
 who sincerely welcomed him as a brilliant specimen 
 of young Oxford. He instinctively shut up before 
 literary display, and pomp, and donnishness, faults 
 which will always beset academical notabilities. He 
 did not respond to their advances. Poor Keble/ 
 Hurrell Froude used gravely to say, he was asked 
 to join the aristocracy of talent, but he soon found his 
 own level. He went into the country, but he did not 
 lose his place in the minds of men because he was out 
 of sight." It could not be that Keble and these men 
 could really be in harmony, they, " sons of Auf- 
 klarung," men of mere understanding, bringing all 
 
 $4* n zz^i v y^t^x A*. 
 
 <&4*3 * ^^ . 
 
234 KEBLE. 
 
 things to the one touchstone of logic and common 
 sense, and content with this ; he, a child of faith, with 
 more than half his nature in the unseen, and looking 
 at things visible mainly as they shadow forth and re 
 veal the invisible. They represented two opposite 
 sides of human nature, sides in all but some rare 
 instances antagonistic, and never seemingly more an 
 tagonistic that now. Dr. Arnold, indeed, though be 
 longing in the main to the school of liberalism, com 
 bined with it more religious warmth than was common 
 in his own party. It is this union of qualities, gener 
 ally thought incompatible, which perhaps was the main 
 secret of his great influence. But the combination 
 which was almost unique in himself, he can hardly be 
 said, by his example, to have rendered more easy for 
 his followers in the present day. 
 
 The Catholic Emancipation was a trying and per 
 plexing time for Keble. With the opponents of the 
 measure in Oxford, the old Tory party of Church and 
 State, he had no sympathy. He saw that they had no 
 principle of growth in them, that their only aim was to 
 keep things as they were. His sympathy for the old 
 Catholic religion, that feeling which had made him say 
 in " The Christian Year," 
 
 Speak gently of our sister s fall," 
 
 
 
 would naturally make him wish to see Catholic disabili 
 ties removed. But then he disliked both the men by 
 whom, and the arguments by which, Emancipation was 
 supported. He would rather have not seen the thing 
 done at all, than done by the hands of Whiggery. A 
 few years more brought on the crisis, the inevitable 
 collision. The Earl Grey Administration, flushed with 
 their great Reform victory, went on to lay hands on 
 the English Church, that Church which for centuries 
 
 
 VW 
 
KEBLE. 235 
 
 had withstood the Whigs. They made their attack on 
 the weakest point, the Irish Church, and suppressed 
 ten of its bishoprics. This might seem to be but a small 
 matter in itself, but it was an indication of more be 
 hind. Lord Grey had told the Bishops to set their 
 house in order, and his party generally spoke of the 
 Church as the mere creature of the State, which they 
 might do with as they pleased. The Church must be 
 liberalized, those last fangs must be pulled which had 
 so often proved troublesome to Whiggery. This was 
 too much for Keble. It touched him to the quick, and 
 made him feel that now the time was come when he 
 must speak and act. By nature he was no politician 
 nor controversialist. He disliked the strife of tongues. 
 But he was a man ; he had deep religious convictions ; 
 and to change what was ancient and catholic in the 
 Church was to touch the apple of his eye. When he 
 looked to the old Tory party he saw no help in them. 
 To the aggressive spirit they had nothing to oppose but 
 outworn Church and State theories. The Bishops too 
 were helpless, and spoke slightingly of apostolic succes 
 sion and the Nonjurors. Was the Establishment prin 
 ciple, then, the only rock on which the Church was 
 built? Keble and his young friends thought scorn of 
 that. This feeling first found utterance in the assize 
 sermon which Keble preached from the University pul 
 pit, on Sunday the 14th of July, 1833, and afterwards 
 published under the title of " National Apostasy." " I 
 have ever considered and kept the day," says Dr. New 
 man, " as the start of the religious movement of 1833." 
 That sermon itself I have not seen, but the tone of it 
 may be gathered from those lines in the " Lyra Apos- 
 tolica," in which Keble thus brands the spoliators : 
 
 " Is there no sound about our altars heard 
 Of gliding forms that long have watched in vain 
 
236 KEBLE. 
 
 For slumbering discipline to break her chain, 
 And aim the bolt by Theodosius feared ? 
 Let us depart; these English souls are seared, 
 Who for one grasp of perishable gold, 
 Would brave the curse by holy men of old 
 Laid on the robbers of the shrines they reared ; 
 Who shout for joy to see the ruffian band 
 Come to reform, where ne er they came to pray, 
 E en where, unbidden, seraphs never trod. 
 Let us depart, and leave the apostate land 
 To meet the rising whirlwind as she may, 
 Without her guardian Angels and her God." 
 
 " Robbers of the shrines," " the ruffian band, come 
 to reform, where ne er they came to pray," that was 
 the trumpet-note which rallied to the standard of the 
 Church whatever of ardor and devotion young Oxford 
 then contained. These virtues had never been greatly 
 countenanced in the Church of England. To staid 
 respectability it has always been, and still is, one of the 
 chief recommendations of that Church, that it is an 
 embodied protest against what one of its own Bishops 
 is said to have denounced as " that most dangerous of 
 all errors enthusiasm." In the last century she had 
 cast out enthusiasm in the person of Wesley ; at the 
 beginning of this, she had barely tolerated it in the 
 Newtons and Cecils, and other fathers of evangelicism. 
 But here was a fresh attempt to reintroduce it in a new 
 form. The young men who were roused by Keble s 
 note of warning able, zealous, resolute flung 
 aside with disdain timid arguments from expediency. 
 They longed to do battle with that most prosaic of all 
 political theories, Whiggery, and to smite to the ground 
 the spirit of compromise which had so long paralyzed 
 the Church of England. They set themselves to de 
 fend the Church with weapons of ethereal temper, and 
 they found them, as they believed, in reviving her 
 claims to a heavenly origin and a divine prerogative. 
 
KEBLE. 237 
 
 That these claims sounded strange to the ears even of 
 Churchmen at that time was to these men no stum 
 bling-block rather an incentive to more fearless ac 
 tion. True, such a course shut them out from prefer 
 ment, hitherto the one recognized aim of the abler 
 English Churchmen. But these younger men were 
 content to do without preferment. They had at least 
 got beyond that kind of worldliness. If self still 
 clung to them in any shape, it was in that enlarged and 
 nobler form in which it is one with the glory of the 
 Church Catholic in all ages. The views and aims of 
 the new party soon took shape, in the " Tracts for the 
 Times." If Keble was the starter of the movement, 
 John Henry Newman soon became its leader. In all 
 his conduct of it, one of his great aims was to give to 
 the sentiments and views which had originated with 
 Keble a consistent logical basis. The sequel all men 
 know. The inner working of the movement may be 
 read in the " Apologia." 
 
 But deeply as Keble s heart was in the Oxford 
 movement, his place of work was a quiet Hampshire 
 parish. When, in 1835, he left the home of his child 
 hood for the vicarage of Hursley, he found a church 
 there not at all to his mind. It seems to have been a 
 plain, not beautiful, building of flint and rubble. He 
 determined to have a new one built new all but the 
 tower and on this object he employed the profits of 
 the many editions of " The Christian Year ; " and when 
 the building was finished, his friends, in token of their 
 regard for him, filled all the windows with stained 
 glass. In the words of Sir J. P. Coleridge, " Here 
 daily for the residue of his life, until interrupted by 
 the failing health of Mrs. Keble and his own, did he 
 minister He had not, in the popular sense, great 
 
238 KEBLE. 
 
 jiifts of delivery ; his voice was not powerful, nor was 
 his ear perfect for harmony of sound; but I think it 
 was difficult not to be impressed deeply both by his 
 reading and his preaching; when he read, you saw that 
 he felt, and he made you feel, that he was the servant 
 of God, delivering his words ; or leading you, as one 
 of like infirmities and sins with your own, in your 
 prayer. When he preached it was with an affectionate 
 simplicity and hearty earnestness which were very 
 moving ; and the sermons themselves were at all times 
 full of that abundant Scriptural knowledge which was 
 the most remarkable quality in him as a divine ; it has 
 always seemed to me among the most striking charac 
 teristics of " The Christian Year." It is well known 
 what his belief and feelings were in regard to the 
 Sacraments. I remember on one occasion when I was 
 present at a christening as godfather, how much he 
 affected me, when a consciousness of his sense of the 
 grace conferred became present to me. As he kept 
 the newly-baptized infant for some moments in his 
 arms, he gazed on it intently and lovingly with a tear 
 in his eye, and apparently absorbed in the thought 
 of the child of wrath become the child of grace. 
 Here his natural affections gave clearness and intensity 
 to his belief; the fondest mother never loved children 
 more dearly than this childless man." 
 
 During the eventful years that followed the Assize 
 sermon, though his place was still in his country cure, 
 his sympathies and cooperation were with Newman and 
 other friends in Oxford. He contributed some of the 
 more important Tracts ; poems of his embodying the 
 sentiments of the party appeared from time to time, 
 and were republished in the " Lyra Apostolica." In 
 1841, when the famous No. 90 was published, to the 
 scandal of the whole religious world, Keble was one 
 
KEBLE. 239 
 
 of the few who stood by Newman. What then must 
 his feelings have been when that younger friend, by 
 whom he had so stood, with whom he had so often 
 taken counsel, abandoned the Church of England, and 
 sought refuge in that of Rome ? As late as 1863, a 
 friend of his, when walking with him near Hursley, 
 drew his attention to a broken piece of ground a 
 chalk-pit, as it turned out hard by. " Ah ! he 
 said, that is a sad place, connected with the most 
 painful event of my life. I began to fear that it had 
 been the scene of some terrible accident which I had 
 unwittingly recalled to his mind. < It was there, he 
 went on, * that I first knew for certain that J. H. N. 
 had left us. We had made up our mind that such an 
 event was all but inevitable ; arid one day I received a 
 letter in his handwriting. I felt sure of what it con 
 tained, and I carried it about with me through the day, 
 afraid to open it. At last I got away to that chalk 
 pit, and there, forcing myself to read the letter, I found 
 that my forebodings had been too true ; it was the an 
 nouncement that he was gone. " 
 
 It seems natural to ask how it came that, when 
 Newman left, Keble adhered to the Church of Eng 
 land. They were at one in their fundamental princi 
 ples. What, then, determined them to go different 
 ways ? Of many reasons that occur this one may be 
 given. The two friends, though agreeing in their 
 principles, differed widely in mental structure and in 
 natural temperament. They differed scarcely less in 
 training and circumstances. Keble, as we have seen, 
 cared little for reasoning, and rested mainly on feeling 
 and intuition. Newman, on the other hand, though 
 fully alive to these, added an unresting intellectual in 
 stinct which could not be satisfied without a defined 
 logical foundation for what it instinctively held. Not 
 
240 KEBLE. 
 
 that Keble was without a theory. Taking from But 
 ler the principle that probability is the guide of life, he 
 applied it to theological truth. Butler, by a very 
 questionable process, had employed the maxim of 
 worldly prudence, that probability is the guide of life, 
 as an argument for religion, but mainly in the natural 
 sphere. Keble tried to carry it on into the sphere of 
 revealed truth. The arguments which support relig 
 ious doctrine, he said, may be only probable arguments 
 judged intellectually ; but faith and love, being di 
 rected towards their divine Object, and living in the 
 contemplation of that Object, convert these probable 
 arguments into certainties. In fact, the inward assur 
 ance, which devout faith has of the reality of its Ob 
 ject,- makes doctrines practically certain which may 
 not be intellectually demonstrable. Newman tells us 
 that he accepted this view so far, but, not being fully 
 satisfied with it, tried, in his University sermons and 
 other works, to supplement it with considerations 
 of his own. In time, however, he felt it give way in 
 his hands, and either abandoned it, or allowed it to 
 carry him elsewhere. 
 
 But besides difference of mental structure, there 
 were other causes which perhaps determined the diver 
 gent courses of the two friends. In the case of Keble, 
 whatever is most sacred and endearing in the English 
 Church had surrounded his infancy and boyhood, and 
 gone with him into full manhood. With him loyalty 
 to Home was hardly less sacred than loyalty to the 
 Faith. These two influences were so intertwined in 
 the inner fibres of his nature that it would have been 
 to him very death to separate them. Of Dr. New 
 man s early associations I know no more than the little 
 he has himself disclosed. It would appear, however, 
 that the Anglican Church never had so invincible a 
 
KEBLE. 241 
 
 hold on him as it had on Keble. By few perhaps has 
 it been seen in so winning an aspect as it wore in the 
 rural quiet of that Gloucestershire parsonage which 
 was his early home. 
 
 When Newman was gone, on Keble, along with Dr. 
 Pusey, was thrown the chief burden of the toil and 
 responsibility arising out of his position in the Church. 
 Naturally there was great searching of hearts amongst 
 all the followers of the Oxford theology. Keble had 
 to give himself to counsel the perplexed, to strengthen 
 the wavering, and, as far as might be, to heal the 
 breaches that had been made. Throughout the eccle 
 siastical contests of the last twenty years, though never 
 loud or obtrusive, he yet took a resolute part in main 
 taining the principles with which his life had been 
 identified. One last extract from Sir J. T. Coleridge s 
 beautiful sketch of his friend, will give all that need 
 here be said of this portion of Keble s life : " Cir 
 cumstances had now placed him in a position which he 
 would never have desired for himself, but from which a 
 sense of duty compelled him not to shrink. Questions 
 one after another arose touching the faith or the disci 
 pline of the Church, and affecting, as he believed, the 
 morals and religion of the people. I need not specify 
 the decisions of courts or the proceedings in Parlia 
 ment to which I allude ; those whose consciences were 
 disturbed, but who shrank from public discussion, and 
 those who stirred themselves in canvassing their pro 
 priety, or in counteracting their consequences, equally 
 turned to him as a comforter and adviser in private 
 and in public, and he could not turn a deaf ear to such 
 applications. It is difficult to say with what affection 
 ate zeal and industry he devoted himself to such cares, 
 how much, and at length it is to be feared how injuri 
 ously to his health, he spent his time and strength in 
 16 
 
242 KEBLE. 
 
 the labor these brought on him. Many of these in 
 volved, of course, questions of law, and it was not 
 seldom that he applied to me and thus I can testify 
 with what care and learning and acuteness he wrote 
 upon them. Many of his fugitive pieces were thus 
 occasioned ; and should these be, as they ought to be, 
 collected, they will be found to possess even more than 
 temporary interest. I had occasion but lately to 
 refer to his tract on Marriage with the -Wife s Sister, 
 and I can only hope that the question will soon be 
 argued in Parliament with the soundness arid clearness 
 which are there employed. But even all this does not 
 represent the calls made on his time by private cor 
 respondence, by personal visits, or, where it was nec 
 essary, by frequent, sometimes by long journeys, taken 
 for the support of religion. I need hardly say that his 
 manner of doing all this concurred in raising up for 
 him that immense personal influence which he pos 
 sessed ; people found in their best adviser the most 
 unpresuming, unwearied, affectionate friend, and they 
 loved as well as venerated him." 
 
 The appearance of Dr. Newman s "Apologia" in 
 1864 was to Keble a great joy. Not that he had ever 
 ceased to love Dr. Newman with his old affection, but 
 the separation of now nearly twenty years, and the 
 cause of it, had been to Keble the sorest trial of his 
 life. If the book contained some things regarding the 
 Church of England which must have pained Keble, 
 there was much more in it to gladden him ; not only 
 the entire human-heartedness of its tone, which made 
 its way to the hearts even of strangers, but the deep 
 and tender affection which it breathes to Dr. Newman s 
 early friends, and the proof it gave that Rome had 
 made no change either in his heart or head which 
 could hinder their real sympathy. The result was 
 
KEBLE. 243 
 
 that in September, 1865, these three, Dr. Newman, Dr. 
 Pusey, and Mr. Keble, met under the roof of Hursley 
 vicarage, and after an interval of twenty years looked 
 on each others altered faces. One evening they 
 passed together, no more. It happened, however, that 
 at the very time of this meeting, Mrs. Keble had an 
 alarming attack of illness. Keble writes : " He (Dr. 
 Pusey) and J. H. N. met here the very day after my 
 wife s attack. Pusey indeed was present when the 
 attack began. Trying as it all was, I was very glad to 
 have them here, and to sit by them and listen." 
 
 Soon after this, in October, Mr. and Mrs. Keble left 
 Hursley for Bournemouth, not to return. Since the 
 close of 1864, symptoms of declining health had shown 
 themselves in him also. The long strain of the duties 
 that accumulated on him in his later years, with the 
 additional anxiety caused by Mrs. Keble s precarious 
 health, had been gradually wearing him. After only a 
 few days illness he was taken to his rest on the day 
 before Good Friday, 1866. In a few weeks Mrs. 
 Keble followed, and now they are laid side by side in 
 Hursley churchyard. 
 
 The picture of this saintly life will of course in time 
 be given to the world. It is much to be hoped that 
 the task will be intrusted to some one able to do justice 
 to it. There are two kinds of biographies, and of each 
 kind we have seen examples in our own time. One is 
 as a golden chalice, held up by some wise hand, to 
 gather the earthly memory ere it is spilt on the ground. 
 The other kind is as a millstone, hung by a partial, yet 
 ill-judging friend, round the hero s neck, to plunge him 
 as deep as possible in oblivion. In looking back on the 
 eminent men of last generation, we have seen one or 
 two lives of the former stamp, many more of the latter. 
 Let us indulge the hope that he who writes of Keble 
 
244 KEBLE. 
 
 will take for his model the one or two nearly faultless 
 biographies we possess, and above all that he will con 
 dense his work within such limits as shall commend it 
 not only to partial friends, but also to all thoughtful 
 readers. 
 
 By his character and influence, Keble did more than 
 perhaps any other man to bring about the most wide 
 spread quickening of religious life which has taken place 
 within the English Church during the present century. 
 To him, and the party to which his very name was a 
 tower of strength, England owes two great services. 
 First, they, and they preeminently, have turned, and 
 are still turning, a resolute front against the rationaliz 
 ing spirit, which would pare down revelation to the 
 measure of the human understanding cut away its 
 foundation in the supernatural, and virtually reduce it 
 to a moral system, encased perhaps in a few historic 
 facts. Secondly, they have introduced into the English 
 Church a higher order of character, and taught it, one 
 might almost say, new virtues. They have diffused 
 widely through the clergy the contagion of their own 
 zeal and resoluteness, their self-devotion and Christian 
 chivalry. These are high services to have rendered to 
 any country in any age. But with these acknowledg 
 ments two regrets must mingle: one, that with their 
 defense of Christian truth they should have mixed up 
 positions which are untenable, identifying with the 
 simple faith doctrines which are no part of it, but rather 
 alien accretions gathered by the Church in its progress 
 down the ages. The result of this intermingling with 
 Christianity things that seem superstitious, has been to 
 drive many back into dislike and denial of that which 
 is truly supernatural. The other cause of regret is, that 
 they should have impaired the practical power of their 
 example by the exclusive and unsympathetic side they 
 
KEBLE. 245 
 
 have turned towards their fellow- Christians in other 
 Reformed communions. This exclusiveness kept back 
 from the Oxford theologians the sympathies of man" 
 who, but for this, would have been strongly drawn t< 
 them by their unworldliness, fervor, and self-devotion. 
 Both errors have one source, the confounding the 
 Church with the clergy, or rather, perhaps I should 
 say, the attempt to place the essence of the Church in 
 a priestly organization. But though these things must 
 be said, it is not as of a partisan that one would like 
 most to think of Keble. The circumstances of his time 
 forced him to take a side, but his nature was too pure 
 and holy to find fit expression in polemics ; and the 
 memory of his rare and saintly character will long sur 
 vive in the hearts of his countrymen the party strifes 
 in which it was his lot to mingle. 
 
 Of his two prose books, his edition of Hooker s 
 works, which has, I believe, superseded every other, 
 and his Life of the good Bishop Wilson of Sodor and 
 Man, the author of the " Sacra Privata," this is not the 
 place to speak. But before turning to " The Christian 
 Year," one word must be said about his later book of 
 poetry, the " Lyra Innocentium." It appeared in 1846, 
 at an interval of nearly twenty years after " The Chris 
 tian Year." This collection of poems he speaks of in 
 May, 1845, as " a set of things which have been ac 
 cumulating on me for the last three or four years. It 
 has been a great comfort to me in the desolating 
 anxiety of the last two years, and I wish I could settle 
 at once on some other such work." Children, as we 
 have seen, had always been peculiarly dear to this 
 childless man, and he had at first wished to have made 
 these poems a Christian Year for teachers and nurses, 
 and others much employed about children. In time it 
 
? 
 
 246 KEBLE. y\A~+ ^^V 
 
 took a different shape, and it is perhaps to be regretted 
 that he had not made it what he first intended. Chil 
 dren, their thoughts and ways, and the feelings which 
 they awaken in their elders, are themes of quite ex- 
 haustless interest. And yet how seldom has any poet 
 of adequate tenderness and depth approached that 
 mysterious world of childhood! Wordsworth, indeed, 
 has felt it deeply, and expressed it in some of his most 
 exquisite poems : 
 
 " dearest, dearest boy, my heart 
 
 For better lore would seldom yearn, 
 Could I but teach the hundredth part 
 Of what from thee I learn." 
 
 This verse from Wordsworth is indeed the motto chosen 
 by Keble for his " Lyra Innocentium." 
 
 Of the poems on children which the " Lyra " contains, 
 I am free to confess that they approach their subject 
 too exclusively from the Church side for general in 
 terest. " Looking Westward," " The Bird s Nest," 
 " Bereavement," " The Manna Gatherers," are fine 
 lyrics, equal perhaps to most in " The Christian Year." 
 But there is no thought in the " Lyra Innocentium " 
 about childhood that comes near that earlier strain in 
 which the poet, as he looks on children ranged to re 
 ceive their first lessons in religion, bursts forth 
 
 u ! say not, dream not, heavenly notes 
 
 To childish ears are vain, 
 That the young mind at random floats, 
 And cannot reach the strain. 
 
 " Dim or unheard, the words may fall, 
 
 And yet the heaven-taught mind 
 May learn the sacred air, and all 
 The harmony unwind. 
 
 Was not our Lord a little child, 
 
 Taught by degrees to pray, 
 
 By father dear and mother mild 
 
 Instructed day by day? " 
 
KEBLE. 247 
 
 Then, after an interval, he goes on 
 
 " Each little voice in turn 
 Some glorious truth proclaims, 
 What sages would have died to learn, 
 Now taught by cottage dames. 
 
 " And if some tones be false or low, 
 
 What are all prayers beneath 
 But cries of babes that cannot know 
 Half the deep thought they breathe? " 
 
 Whatever the reason may be, certainly the later 
 book does not strike home to the universal heart as 
 " The Christian Year " did, and it never has attained 
 anything like the same popularity. 
 
 The reference to ecclesiastical usages, not known to 
 the many, and the more pronounced High Church feel 
 ing which it embodies, will partly account for this. It 
 is certainly much more restricted and less catholic in 
 its range. Partly also it may be that the fountain of 
 inspiration did not flow so fully as in earlier years. It 
 may not have been that time had chilled it ; but other 
 duties and cares had come thick upon him since his po 
 etic spring-time. Especially the polemical stir in which 
 his share in the Oxford movement had involved him, 
 and the anxiety in the midst of which the " Lyra Inno- 
 centium" was composed, must have left little of that 
 leisure either of time or heart which is necessary for a 
 free-flowing minstrelsy. 
 
 It may help to the fuller understanding of " The 
 Christian Year," if we turn for a moment to Keble s 
 theory of poetry. He has set it forth at large in 
 " Preelections on- Poetry," more shortly in his review of 
 the " Life of Scott," which, once famous in Oxford, is al 
 most unknown to the present generation. That review, 
 which first appeared in the " British Critic," is well wor 
 thy of being republished, both from the insight it gives 
 
248 KEBLE. 
 
 into Keble s character, and views on poetry, and also as 
 a study of Scott by a reverential admirer, in many things 
 very unlike himself. The theory is that poetry is the 
 natural relief of minds burdened by some engrossing 
 idea, or strong emotion, or ruling taste, or imaginative 
 regret, which from some cause or other they are kept 
 from directly indulging. Rhythm and metrical form 
 serve to regulate arid restrain, while they express those 
 strong or deep emotions, " which need relief, but cannot 
 endure publicity." They are at once " vent for eager 
 feelings and a veil to draw over them. For the utter 
 ance of high or tender feeling controlled and modified 
 by a certain reserve is the very soul of poetry." 
 
 On this principle Keble founds what he regards as 
 an essential distinction between primary and secondary 
 poets. Primary poets are they who are driven by some 
 overmastering enthusiasm, by passionate devotion to 
 some range of objects, or line of thought, or aspect of 
 life or nature, to utter their feelings in song. They 
 sing, because they cannot help it. There is a melody 
 within them which will out, a fire in their blood which 
 cannot be suppressed. This is the true poetic pavia. of 
 which Plato speaks. Secondary poets are not urged 
 to poetry by any such overflowing sentiment ; but 
 learning, admiration of great masters, choice, and a cer 
 tain literary turn, have made them poetic artists. They 
 were not born, but being possessed of a certain ev<^vta, 
 have made themselves poets. Of the former kind are 
 Homer, Lucretius, Shakespeare, Burns, Scott ; of the 
 latter, Euripides, Dryden, Milton. This view, if it be 
 somewhat too narrow a basis on which to found a com 
 prehensive theory of poetry, certainly does lay hold of 
 one side of the truth generally overlooked. In our 
 own day, how many are there ! possessed of a large 
 measure of artistic faculty, able to treat poetically any- 
 
KEBLE. 249 
 
 thing they take up, wanting only in one thing, a 
 subject which absorbs their interest. There is nothing 
 in human life, or history, or nature, which they have 
 made peculiarly their own, nothing about which they 
 know more intimately, than the host of educated men. 
 And so, though with a " skill in composition and felicity 
 of language " greater than many poets possess, they 
 are still felt to be literary men rather than poets, be 
 cause they have no overmastering impulse, no divine 
 enthusiasm, driving them to seek relief in song. 
 
 If we apply to himself the author s own canon, " The 
 Christian Year " would place him in the rank of pri 
 mary poets. Not that it displays anything like the high 
 est artistic faculty, but because it evidently flows from 
 a native spring of inspiration. As far as it goes, it is 
 genuine poetry. Tho author sings, in a strain of his 
 own, of the things he has known and felt and loved. 
 Beneath all the layers that early education and Oxford 
 training have superimposed, there is felt to be a glow 
 of internal heat not derived from these. 
 
 To English Church people without number ." The 
 Christian Year" has long been not only a cherished 
 classic, but a sacred book, which they place beside their 
 Bible and their Prayer-Book. On the other hand, a 
 generation of literary young men has grown up, who, 
 having had their tastes formed on a newer, more highly 
 spiced style of poetry, scarcely know " The Christian 
 Year," and, if they knew it, would turn away from 
 what seemed to them its meagre literary merit. It 
 would be impossible to say anything regarding it which 
 would not seem faint praise to the one class, and exag 
 geration to the other. But without trying to meet the 
 views of either, it is worth while to study the poem for 
 ourselves. 
 
250 KEBLE. 
 
 It cannot be too clearly kept in view that Keble 
 is not a hymn writer, and that " The Christian Year " 
 is not a collection of hymns. Those who have come 
 to it expecting to find genuine hymns, will turn away 
 in disappointment. They will seek in vain for any 
 thing of the directness, the fervor, the simplicity, the 
 buoyancy of devotion which have delighted them in 
 Charles Wesley. But to demand this is to mistake 
 the nature and form of Keble s poems. There is all 
 the difference between them and Charles Wesley s, 
 that there is between meditation on the one hand, and 
 prayer, or thanksgiving, or praise on the other. Indeed, 
 so little did Keble s genius fit him for hymn writing, 
 that in his two poems which are intended to be hymns 
 those for the morning and the evening the open 
 ing in either case is a description of natural facts, 
 wholly unsuited to hymn purposes. And so when 
 these two poems are adopted into hymn collections, as 
 they often are, a mere selection of certain stanzas from 
 each is all that has been found possible. Besides these 
 two, there is no other poem in the book, any large 
 part of which can be used as a hymn. For they are 
 all lyrical religious meditations, not hymns at all. Yet 
 true though this is, every here and there, out of the 
 midst of the reflections, there does flash a verse of 
 fervid emotion and direct heart-appeal to God, which 
 is quite hymnal in character. These occasional bursts 
 are among the highest beauties of " The Christian 
 Year." Yet they are neither so frequent nor so long- 
 sustained as to change the prevailingly meditative cast 
 of the whole book. It is owing perhaps to this preva 
 lence of meditation, and that often of a refined and 
 subtle kind, that " The Christian Year " is not, as we 
 have often heard said, so well adapted as some simpler, 
 less poetical collections, to be read by the sick-bed to 
 
KEBLE. 251 
 
 the faint and weak. Unless long familiarity has made 
 it easy, it requires more thought and mental elasticity 
 to follow it, than the sick for the most part can supply. 
 Yet it contains single verses, many, though not whole 
 poems, which will come home full of consolation to 
 any, even the weakest spirit. On the whole, however, 
 it is not with Charles Wesley, or any of the hymn 
 writers of this or the past century, nor even with 
 Cowper in his hymns or his larger poems, that Keble 
 should be compared. In outward form, and not a 
 little in inward spirit, the religious poets to whom he 
 bears the strongest likeness are Henry Vaughan and 
 George Herbert, both of the seventeenth century. A 
 comparison with these would be interesting, were this 
 the place for it, but at present I must confine myself 
 to the consideration of the special characteristics of 
 The Christian Year." 
 
 These seem to be, first, a tone of religious feel 
 ing, fresh, deep, and tender, beyond what was common 
 even among religious men in the author s day, perhaps 
 in any day ; secondly, great intensity and tenderness 
 of home affection ; thirdly, a shy and delicate reserve, 
 which loved quiet paths and shunned publicity ; 
 fourthly, a pure love of nature, and a spiritual eye to 
 read nature s symbolism. 
 
 " He sang of love, with quiet blending, 
 Slow to begin, and never ending, 
 Of serious faith, and inward glee." 
 
 1. Its peculiar tone of religious feeling. 
 
 It embodies deep and tender religious sentiment in 
 a form which is old, and yet new. Our best critic has 
 lately told us that "the inevitable business for the 
 modern poet, as it was for the Greek poet in the days 
 of Pericles, is to interpret human life afresh, and find 
 a new spiritual basis for it." Keble did not think so. 
 
252 KEBLE. 
 
 He was content with the interpretation which Chris 
 tianity has put on human life, and wished only to read 
 man and nature as far as he might, in this light. 
 Goethe, I suppose, is the great modern instance of a 
 poet who has tried " to give a moral interpretation of 
 man and the world from an independent point of view." 
 Of course it would be simply ridiculous for a moment 
 to place Keble for poetic power in comparison with 
 such an one as Goethe. But, disparate as their powers 
 are, Keble with limited faculty, just by virtue of his 
 having accepted the Christian interpretation, while the 
 other rejected it, has spoken, if one may venture to 
 say so, more words that satisfy man s deepest yearn 
 ings, that sink into those simple places of the heart 
 which lie beneath all culture, than , Goethe with all his 
 world-width has done. The religion which Keble laid 
 to heart, and lived by, would not seem to have come 
 to him through prolonged spiritual conflicts, as did 
 that of the great Puritans ; neither had he reached it 
 by laborious critical processes, as modern philosophers 
 would have us do. He had learned it first at his 
 mother s knee. Then it was confirmed and system 
 atized by the daily teaching of the Church he so de 
 voutly loved. Time brought to it additions from va 
 rious quarters, but no break. The powerful influences 
 of his University, direct and indirect, chivalry reawak 
 ening in Scott s poetry, meditative depth in Words 
 worth, these all melted naturally into his primal faith, 
 and combined with the general tendencies of the time 
 to carry him in spirit back to those older ages where 
 his imagination found ampler range, his devotion se 
 verer, more self-denying virtues than modern life en 
 genders. Out of that great past he brought some of 
 the sterner stuff of which the martyrs were made, and 
 introduced it like iron into the blood of modern relig- 
 
KEBLE. 253 
 
 ious feeling. A poet who received all these influ 
 ences into himself, and vitalized them, could not but 
 make the old new. For not till the authoritative had 
 been inwardly transfused into the moral and spiritual 
 did it for the most part find vent in his poetry. There 
 are exceptions to this, which form what may be set 
 down as the shortcomings of " The Christian Year." 
 But in all its finer, more vital poems, the catholic faith 
 has become personal, rests frankly on intuition and 
 experience, as frankly as the vaguer, more impersonal 
 meditations of greater poets. 
 
 " The eye in smiles may wander round, 
 
 Caught by earth s shadows as they fleet, 
 But for the soul no home is found, 
 Save Him who made it, meet." 
 
 Or again, the well-known 
 
 " Abide with me from morn till eve, 
 For without Thee I cannot live; 
 Abide with me when night is nigh, 
 For without Thee I dare not die." 
 
 Or again 
 
 " Who loves the Lord aright, 
 No soul of man can worthless find 
 All will be precious in his sight, 
 Since Christ on all hath shined." 
 
 It is the many words, simple yet deep, devoutly 
 Christian yet intensely human, like these, scattered 
 throughout its pages, that have endeared " The Chris 
 tian Year " to countless hearts ( within the English 
 Church, and to many a heart beyond it. The new 
 elements in the book are perhaps these first, it 
 translates religious sentiment out of the ancient and 
 exclusively Hebrew dialect into the language of modern 
 feeling. Hitherto English devotional poets, with the 
 exception perhaps of Cowper, in some passages, had 
 adhered rigorously to the Scriptural imagery and 
 

 254 KEBLE. 
 
 phraseology. This, besides immensely limiting their 
 range, made their words often fall wide of modern 
 experience. Keble took the thoughts and sentiments 
 of which men at the present day are conscious, ex 
 pressed them in fitting modern words, and transfused 
 into them the Christian spirit. Secondly, there is 
 visible in him, first perhaps of his contemporaries, 
 that which seems the best characteristic of modern 
 religion, combined with devout reverence for the 
 person of our Lord, a closer, more personal love to 
 Him as to a living friend. There were no doubt rare 
 exceptions here and there, but, generally speaking, 
 religious men before spoke of our Lord in a more 
 distant way, as one holding the central place rather in 
 a dogmatic system than in the devout affections. The 
 best men of our own time have gone beyond this. 
 The Lord of the Gospels, in his Divine humanity, has 
 come closer to their hearts, and made Himself known 
 in a more intimate and endearing way. In none 
 perhaps was this change of feeling earlier seen, or 
 more strongly marked, than in Keble. Thirdly, there 
 is the close and abundant knowledge of Scripture, with 
 a fine and delicate feeling for the beauty of its language. 
 Without confining himself to the imagery or language 
 of the Bible, he everywhere shows his intimacy with it, 
 and interweaves its words and half sentences, its scenes 
 and imagery naturally and gracefully with his own. 
 
 These are some of the more catholic notes of the 
 book which have won for it a place in the affections 
 of Christians of every communion. This depth of 
 catholic religious sentiment, it is, no doubt, which is its 
 chief and most valuable characteristic. From this 
 some may be ready to draw an argument for Christian 
 morality disjoined from Christian doctrine, or for some 
 all-embracing religion which would comprehend what- 
 
KEBLE. 255 
 
 ever the various churches agree in, discarding all in 
 which they differ. What that residuum exactly is, no 
 one has yet stated. But before drawing such an 
 argument from " The Christian Year," it may be as 
 well to ask whether that book would have been so 
 charged with devout Christian sentiment if its author 
 had not held with all his heart those doctrinal truths 
 which were in him the roots out of which that senti 
 ment grew, but which many now wish to get rid of ? 
 If we love the consummate flower, it might be as well 
 not to begin by cutting away the root. 
 
 There is, however, another side on which " The 
 Christian Year " is less catholic in its character. This, 
 which may be called its ecclesiastical side, is inherent 
 in the very form of the book. A poem for each Sun 
 day in the year would be welcome to very many, but 
 then what is to determine the subject of each Sunday s 
 poem? A chance verse or phrase in the Gospel for 
 the day, as this is given in the Prayer-Book, is hardly 
 a catholic or universal ground for fixing the subject. 
 Again, Christmas, Good Friday, Easter-day, Whitsun 
 day, have of course a catholic meaning, because these 
 days, though not observed by all churches, are yet 
 memorials of the sacred facts by which all Christians 
 live. But the lesser Saints Days, Circumcision, Puri 
 fication, as well as the occasional services, have a local 
 and temporary, not a universal import. Accordingly, a 
 perusal of the poems suggests what the preface to them 
 confirms, that they did not all flow off from a free 
 spontaneous inspiration, awakened by the thought 
 natural to each day, but that a good number were 
 either poems previously composed and afterwards 
 adapted to some particular Sunday, or written as it 
 were to order after the thought of rounding " The 
 Christian Year " had arisen. So clear does this seem 
 
 
256 KEBLE. 
 
 that it would not be hard to go through the several 
 poems and lay finger here on the spontaneous effusions, 
 there on those of more labored manufacture. The 
 former flow from the first verse to the last lucid in 
 thought, simple and almost faultless in diction ; no 
 break in the sense, no obscurity ; seldom any harsh 
 ness or poverty in the diction. The others are imper 
 fect in rhythm and language, defaced by the conven 
 tionalities of poetic diction, frequently obscure or 
 artificial, the thread of thought broken or hard to 
 catch. The one set are like mountain streams, that 
 run down the hillside in sunshine, clear and bright 
 from end to end, the other are like streams that find 
 their way through difficult places, often hidden under 
 ground or buried in heaps of stones. Yet even the 
 most defective of them come forth to light in some 
 single verse of profound thought or tender feeling, so 
 well expressed as to make the reader willingly forgive 
 for that one gleam the imperfection of the rest. 
 
 2. Home-feeling. 
 
 The next quality I would notice is the deep tone 
 of home affection which pervades these poems. This, 
 perhaps as much as anything, has endeared them to his 
 home-loving countrymen. Such is that feeling for an 
 ancient home breathed in 
 
 " Since all that is not Heaven must fade, 
 Light be the hand of Ruin laid 
 
 Upon the home I love: 
 With lulling spell let soft Decay 
 Steal on, and spare the giant sway 
 
 The crash of tower and grove. 
 
 " Far opening down some woodland deep 
 In their own quiet glade should sleep 
 
 The relics dear to thought, 
 And wild-flower wreaths from side to side 
 Their waving tracery hang, to hide 
 
 What ruthless Time has wrought." 
 
KEBLE. 257 
 
 Again, the hymn for St. Andrew s Day is so well 
 known arid loved as hardly to need quoting. Everj 
 line of it is instinct with simple pure affection, yet 
 never, one might think, so deeply felt or so well ex 
 pressed as here : 
 
 " When brothers part for manhood s race, 
 What gift may most endearing prove 
 To keep fond memory in her place, 
 And certify a brother s love ? 
 
 " No fading frail memorial give 
 
 To soothe his soul when thou art gone, 
 But wreaths of hope for aye to live, 
 
 And thoughts of good together done." 
 
 Besides the more obvious allusions to the household 
 charities, there are many delicate, more reserved 
 touches on the same chord. Such is the 
 
 " I cannot paint to Memory s eye 
 
 The Scene, the glance, I dearest love 
 Unchanged themselves, in me they die, 
 Or faint, or false, their shadows prove. 
 
 Meanwhile, if over sea or sky 
 
 Some tender lights unnoticed fleet, 
 Or on loved features dawn and die, 
 Unread, to us, their lesson sweet ; 
 
 Yet are there saddening sights around, 
 Which Heaven, in mercy, spares us too." 
 
 But there is no need to go on with quotations. Many 
 more such passages will occur to every reader. High 
 education and refined thought in him had not weakened, 
 but only made more pure and intense, natural affection. 
 Yet in all the tenderness there is no trace of effemi 
 nacy. True, the woman s heart everywhere shows itself. 
 But as it has been said that in the countenance of most 
 men of genius there is something of a womanly ex 
 pression not seen in the faces of other men, so it is 
 IT 
 
258 KEBLE. 
 
 distinctive of true poetic temper that it ever carries the 
 woman s heart within the man s. And certainly, of no 
 poet s heart does this hold more truly than of Keble s. 
 They, however, must be but blind critics, insensible 
 to the finer pathos of human life, who have on this 
 account called Keble s poetry " effeminate." The 
 woman s heart in him is blended with the martyr s 
 courage. Hardly any modern poetry breathes so firm 
 self-control, so fixed yet calm resolve, so stern self- 
 denial. If these be qualities that can consist with 
 effeminacy, then Keble s poetry may be allowed to 
 pass for effeminate. But those who bring this charge 
 against it, misled, it may be, by the loud bluster that 
 passes with many for manliness, seem to forget that the 
 bravest and most high-souled manhood is also the gen 
 tlest and most tender hearted ; that, according to the 
 saying, " A man is never so much a man as when he 
 becomes most in heart a child." 
 
 3. Reserve. 
 
 This naturally leads on to the notice of another 
 characteristic of this poetry the fine reserve, which 
 does not publish aloud, but only delicately hints, its 
 deeper feelings. It was an intrinsic part of Keble s 
 nature to shrink from obtruding himself, to dislike dis 
 play, 
 
 To love the sober shade 
 More than the laughing light." 
 
 And one object he had in publishing " The Christian 
 Year " was the hope that it might supply a sober stand 
 ard of devotional feeling, in unison with that presented 
 by the Prayer-Book. The time, he thought, was one 
 of unbounded curiosity and morbid craving for excite 
 ment, symptoms which have not abated during the 
 forty years since Keble so wrote. He wished, as far 
 as might be, to supply some antidote to these tend- 
 
KEBLE. 259 
 
 encies. Again, modern thought has, as all know, 
 turned in upon itself, and discovered a whole internal 
 world of reflections and sensibilities hardly expressed 
 in the older literature. Keble so far shared this tend 
 ency with his contemporaries. But he set himself 
 not to feed and pamper it, but to direct, to sober, and 
 to brace it, by bringing it into the presence of realities 
 higher than itself. 
 
 This feeling of delicate reserve, sobered and strength 
 ened by Christian thought, comes out in many of the 
 poems, in none perhaps more than in the one which 
 contains these stanzas : 
 
 " E en human Love will shrink from sight 
 
 Here in the coarse rude earth : 
 How then should rash intruding glance 
 Break in upon her sacred trance 
 
 Who boasts a heavenly birth ? 
 
 " So still and secret is her growth, 
 
 Ever the truest heart, 
 Where deepest strikes her kindly root 
 For hope or joy, for flower or fruit, 
 
 Least knows its happy part. 
 
 " God only, and good angels, look 
 Behind the blissful screen 
 As when, triumphant o er his woes, 
 The Son of God by moonlight rose, 
 By all but Heaven unseen." 
 
 I would not pause on verbal criticisms, only the last 
 line of the second stanza here is one of many instances 
 in which the beauty of the finest thoughts is marred 
 by the admission of some hackneyed conventional 
 phrase. Otherwise, these stanzas, as well as the whole 
 poem in which they occur, are in Keble s finest and 
 most native vein. In keeping with the feeling breathed 
 by these lines is another which should be noted. As 
 he keeps his own deepest feelings under a close veil of 
 
260 KEBLE. 
 
 reserve, so he loves best the virtues and the characters 
 which are least obtrusive, and generally get least praise. 
 Things which the world least recognizes, for these he 
 reserves his heart s best sympathy. For the loud, the 
 successful, the caressed, he has no word but perhaps 
 one of admonition. It is the poor, the bowed down, 
 the lonely, the forsaken, who draw out his deepest ten 
 derness. And what makes this the nobler in Keble is, 
 that it does not seem to come from the principle of 
 haud ignarus mali, but rather from pure strength of 
 Christian sympathy. The traits of character for which 
 he has the keenest eye, the virtues on which he dwells 
 most lovingly, are those which men in general take 
 least note of. Those who belong to " the nameless 
 family of God " kindle in him a deep enthusiasm, such 
 as most poets have reserved for the earth s great he 
 roes. Thus, in one of his finest passages, after con 
 trasting those Christians who live in the " green earth " 
 and under the " open sky " of the country, with those 
 whose lot is cast in the streets and stifling alleys of the 
 crowded city, he bursts forth 
 
 " But Love s a flower that will not die 
 
 For lack of leafy screen, 
 And Christian Hope can cheer the eye 
 
 That ne er saw vernal green ; 
 Then be ye sure that Love can bless 
 E en in this crowded loneliness, 
 Where ever-moving myriads seem to say, 
 Go thou art nought to us, nor we to thee away I 
 
 " There are in this loud stunning tide 
 
 Of human care and crime, 
 With whom the melodies abide 
 
 Of th everlasting chime; 
 Who carry music in their heart 
 Through dusty lane and wrangling mart, 
 Plying their daily task with busier feet, 
 Because their secret souls a holy strain repeat." 
 
KEBLE. 261 
 
 And as is the inward tone of feeling, so is its out 
 ward expression, chastened and subdued. There is no 
 gorgeousness of coloring, no stunning sound, no highly 
 spiced phrase or metaphor. From what have been the 
 chief attractions of much poetry popular since his day, 
 scarlet hues and blare of trumpets, staring metaphors 
 and metaphysical enigmas, he turned instinctively. He 
 seemed to say to these, 
 
 "Farewell: for one short life we part: 
 I rather woo the soothing art, 
 Which only souls in sufferings tried 
 Bear to their suffering brethren s side." 
 
 Those who have called other parts of Keble effeminate, 
 might perhaps call this ascetic. If it is so, it is an 
 asceticism in harmony with true Christianity, and with 
 the sober wisdom that comes from life s experience. 
 
 4. Descriptions of Nature. 
 
 Much has been said of Keble s eye for nature. His 
 admirers perhaps exaggerate it, his depreciators as much 
 underrate it. He certainly shared largely in that feel 
 ing about the visible world, so identified with Words 
 worth that it is now called Wordsworthian, that 
 feeling which more than any other marks the direction 
 in which modern imagination has enlarged and deep 
 ened. The appearances of \ature furnish Keble with 
 the framework in which most of his lyrics are set, the 
 mould in which they are cast. Some whole poems, as 
 the one beginning 
 
 " Lessons sweet of spring returning," 
 
 are little more than descriptions of some scene in 
 nature. Many more take some natural appearance 
 and make it the symbol of a spiritual truth. Two 
 small rills, born apart and afterwards blending in one 
 large stream, are likened to two separate prayers unit- 
 
262 KEBLE. 
 
 ing to bring about some great result. The autumn 
 clouds, mantling round the sun for love, suggest that 
 love is life s only sign. The robin singing unweariedly 
 in the bleak November wind, suggests a lesson of con 
 tent 
 
 " Rather in all to be resigned than blest." 
 
 These and many more are the natural appearances 
 which, some by resemblance, some by contrast, furnish 
 him with key-notes to religious meditation. In many 
 you feel at once that the poet has struck a true note, 
 one which will be owned by the universal imagination, 
 wherever that faculty is sufficiently cultivated to be 
 alive to it. In some you feel more doubtful, the 
 analogy appears to be somewhat more faint or far 
 fetched. In others you seem to see clearly that the 
 resemblance is arbitrary and capricious, a work of the 
 mere fancy, not of the genuine imagination. An in 
 stance of the last kind has been severely commented on 
 by a contemporary critic who, on the strength of some 
 doubtful analogies which occur in Keble s poems, has 
 voted him no poet. This critic specially comments on 
 one poem, in which -the moon is made a symbol of the 
 Church, the stars are made symbols of saints in heaven, 
 and the trees in Eden of saints on earth. This, if it 
 be not some remote allusion to passages of Scripture, 
 must be allowed to be a mere ecclesiastical reading of 
 nature s symbols, repudiated by the universal heart of 
 man, and therefore by true poetry. But if this and 
 some other instances, pitched on a false key, can be 
 pointed out, how many more are there where the chord 
 struck answers with a genuine tone ? Even in the 
 very poem which contains the symbolism condemned, 
 is there not the following : 
 
 " The glorious sky embracing all 
 Is like the Maker s love, 
 
KEBLE. 263 
 
 Wherewith encompassed great and small 
 In peace and order move." 
 
 Here Keble has christianized an analogy, acknowl 
 edged not only by the Greek conception of Zeus, but 
 more or less, we believe, by the primeval faith of the 
 whole Aryan race. 
 
 Of the many instances that might easily be gathered 
 from these poems, in which that mysterious chord of 
 analogy that binds together human feeling and the out 
 ward world is truly touched, one more must be given. 
 It is from the poem on All Saints Day. As that day 
 falls on the 1st of November, a time so often beautiful 
 with the bright calm of St. Luke s summer, the follow 
 ing lines serve well to harmonize the feeling of the 
 season with the thoughts which the Church Festival is 
 meant to awaken : 
 
 "How quiet shows the woodland scene! 
 
 Each flower and tree, its duty done, 
 Reposing in decay serene, 
 
 Like weary men when age is won, 
 Such calm old age as conscience pure 
 And self-commanding hearts insure, 
 Waiting their summons to the sky, 
 Content to live, but not afraid to die. 
 
 As might be looked for in a real lover of nature, 
 Keble s imagery is that which he had lived in the midst 
 of, and knew. The shady lanes, the more open hursts 
 and downs, such as may be seen near Oxford, and 
 further west and south, " England s primrose meadow 
 paths," the stiles worn by generations, and the gray 
 church-tower embowered in elm-trees, with these his 
 habitual thoughts and sentiments suit well. Even in 
 this familiar landscape his eye and ear have caught facts 
 and aspects of nature, which, as far as I know, have 
 never before been put down in books. Take that 
 instance from the poem on the Fifth Sunday after 
 Easter 
 
264 KEBLE. 
 
 " Deep is the silence of the summer noon, 
 When a soft shower 
 Will trickle soon, 
 
 A gracious rain, freshening the weary bower 
 O sweetly then far off is heard 
 The clear note of some lonely bird." 
 
 Many an ear before Keble s must have heard a soli 
 tary thrush singing in the distant fields amid the deep 
 hush that preludes the thunder-storm ; but no poet be 
 fore Keble, as far as I know, had seized that impress 
 ive image and embalmed it in verse. Not a few such 
 images or aspects of the quiet English landscape will 
 be found reclaimed from the fields for the first time in 
 "The Christian Year." With this kind of scenery, 
 which was familiar to him all his life, he is for the most 
 part content, and seldom travels beyond it. Indeed, a 
 very true test of the genuineness of a poet s inspira 
 tion would seem to be, whether his imagery is mainly 
 gathered from the scenes amidst which he has lived, or 
 is borrowed from the writings of former poets or other 
 artificial sources. Seldom does Keble visit mountain 
 lands, only once or twice in " The Christian Year." 
 But the poem for the 20th Sunday after Trinity, though 
 good, might have been written by one who had never 
 seen mountains, if only he had read descriptions of 
 them. 
 
 Besides the English there is another kind of land 
 scape in which Keble has shown himself at home. 
 Dean Stanley has noted the fidelity with which he has 
 pictured scenes in the Holy Land. This shows not 
 only a close study of the hints that are to be found in 
 the Bible and in the modern books about Palestine, 
 it proves how quick must have been the insight into 
 nature of one who, though he had never himself be 
 held that country, could from such materials call up 
 pictures true enough to satisfy the eye of the most 
 
KEBLE. 265 
 
 graphic of modern travellers even while he gazed on 
 those very scenes. 
 
 There are two sides which nature turns towards the 
 imagination. One is that which the poet can read fig 
 uratively, in which he can see symbols and analogies 
 of the spiritual world. This side Keble, as we have 
 seen, felt and read, in the main I think truly, though 
 sometimes he may have missed it. What the true 
 reading is, and how it is to be discerned, is a weighty 
 matter to be entered on here. One thing, however, is 
 certain, that the correspondency between the natural 
 object and the spiritual, between nature and the soul, is 
 there existing independently of the individual man. 
 He did not make the correspondency ; his part is to 
 see and interpret truly what was there beforehand, not 
 to read into nature his own views or moods waywardly 
 and capriciously. The truest poet is he who reads na 
 ture s hieroglyphics most truly and most widely ; and 
 the test of the true reading is that it is at once wel 
 comed by the universal imagination of man. This 
 universal or catholic imagination of man is far different 
 from the universal suffrage of men. It means the im 
 agination of those in whom that faculty exists in the 
 highest degree, cultivated to the finest sensibility. The 
 imagination is the faculty which reads truly, the fancy 
 that which reads capriciously, and so falsely. The 
 former seizes true and really existing analogies be 
 tween nature and spirit; the latter makes arbitrary and 
 fictitious ones. In the school of imagination, as op 
 posed to fancy, Keble was a faithful and devout stu 
 dent. It was the music of his pious spirit to read 
 aright the symbolical side which nature turns towards 
 man. 
 
 But nature has another side, of which there is no 
 indication in Keble s poetry. I mean her infinite and 
 
266 KEBLE. 
 
 nnhuman side, which yields no symbols to soothe man s 
 yearnings. Outside of and far beyond man, his hopes 
 and fears, his strivings and aspirations, there lies the 
 vast immensity of nature s forces, which pays him no 
 homage, and yields him no sympathy. This aspect of 
 nature may be seen even amid the tamest landscape, if 
 we look to the clouds or the stars above us, or to the 
 ocean roaring around our shores. But nowhere is it 
 borne in on man as in the midst of the vast deserts 
 of the earth, or in the presence of the mountains, 
 which seem so impressive and unchangeable. Their 
 strength and permanence so contrast with man of 
 few years and full of trouble ; they are so indifferent 
 to his feelings or his destiny. He may smile or weep, 
 he may live or die ; they care not. They are the 
 same in all their ongoings, happen what will to him. 
 They respond to the sunrises and the sunsets, but not 
 to his sympathies. All the same they fulfill their 
 mighty functions careless though no human eye should 
 ever look on them. So it is in all the great move 
 ments of nature. Man holds his festal days, and na 
 ture frowns; he goes forth from the death-chamber, 
 and nature affronts him with sunshine and the song of 
 birds. Evidently, it seems, she marches on, having a 
 purpose of her own inaccessible to man ; she keeps her 
 own secret, and drops no hint to him. This mysteri 
 ous silence, this inhuman indifference, this inexorable 
 deafness, has impressed the imagination of the greatest 
 poets, with a vague yet sublime awe. The sense of it 
 lay heavy on Lucretius, Shelley, Wordsworth, and 
 drew out their soul s profoundest music. This side of 
 things, whether philosophically or imaginatively re 
 garded, seems to justify the saying, that " the visible 
 world still remains without its divine interpretation." 
 But it was not on thoughts of this kind that Keble 
 
KEBLE. 267 
 
 loved to dwell. If they ever occurred to him, he has 
 nowhere expressed them. He was content with that 
 other side of nature, of which I spoke first, the side 
 which allows itself to be humanized, that is, to be in 
 terpreted by man s faith and devout aspirations. This 
 was the side that suited his religious purpose, and to 
 this he limited himself. Within this range few have 
 ever interpreted nature more soothingly and beauti 
 fully. 
 
 These are a few of the qualities that would strike 
 any one on first opening " The Christian Year." They 
 are not, however, enough to account for its unparalleled 
 popularity. Indeed, popularity is no word to express 
 the fact, that this book has been for years the cherished 
 companion of numbers of the best men, in their best 
 moods men too of the most diverse characters and 
 schools who have lived in our time. The secret of 
 this power is a compound of many influences hard to 
 state or explain. It has not been hindered by the blem 
 ishes obvious on the surface to every one, inharmonious 
 rhythms, frequent obscurity, here and there poverty and 
 conventionality of diction. In spite of these it has won 
 its way to the hearts of the highly educated and refined, 
 as no book of poetry, sacred or secular, in our time has 
 done. "Will it continue to do so ? Will its own im 
 perfections, and the changing currents of men s feelings 
 not alienate from it a generation rendered fastidious by 
 poetry of more artistic perfection, more highly colored, 
 more richly flavored? Without speaking too confi 
 dently, it may be expected to live on, if not in so won 
 derful esteem, yet widely read and deeply felt ; for it 
 makes its appeal to no temporary or accidental feelings, 
 but mainly to that which is permanent in man. It can 
 hardly be that it should lose its hold on the affections 
 of English-speaking men as long as Christianity retains 
 
2G8 KEBLE. 
 
 it. For if we may judge from the past, it will be long 
 ere another character of the same rare and saintly 
 beauty shall again concur with a poetic gift and power 
 of poetic expression, which, if not of the highest, are 
 still of a very high order. Broader and bolder imagi 
 nation, greater artistic faculty, many poets who were 
 his contemporaries possessed. But in none of them did 
 there burn a spiritual light so pure and heavenly, to 
 transfigure these gifts from within. It is because 
 " The Christian Year " has succeeded in conveying to 
 the outer world some effluence of that character which 
 his intimate friends loved and revered in Keble, that, 
 as I believe, it will not cease to hold a quite peculiar 
 place in the affections of posterity. 
 
THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 
 
 WHY is Ethical Science, as pursued in this country, 
 of late years, even to reflecting men, so little attractive 
 and so little edifying? The cognate study of meta 
 physics has, after long neglect, recently, in a wonderful 
 way, renewed its youth, but to moral science no such 
 revival has as yet come. And yet human character, 
 the subject it deals with, is one, it would seem, of no 
 inconsiderable interest. Physical science has no doubt 
 drained off the current of men s thoughts, and left 
 many subjects which once engaged them high and dry. 
 But man, his spiritual being, and the light which is to 
 enlighten it, his possibilities here, his destiny hereafter, 
 these still remain, amid all the absorption of external 
 things, the one highest marvel, the permanent centre 
 of interest to men. It cannot be said that modern lit 
 erature the great exponent of what men are think 
 ing circles less than of old round the great human 
 problems. Rather with the circuit of the suns, not 
 only have the thoughts of men widened, but also their 
 moral consciousness, I will not say their heart, has 
 deepened. Modern literature, as compared with that 
 of last century, has nothing more distinctive in it than 
 this, that it has broken into deeper ground of senti 
 ment and reflection, ground which had hitherto lain 
 fallow, non-existent, or unperceived. About the deeper 
 soul secrets, literary men of last century either did not 
 
270 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 
 
 greatly trouble themselves, or they practiced a very 
 strict reserve. But our own and the preceding age 
 has seen an unveiling of the most inward often of 
 the most sacred feelings which has sometimes gone 
 beyond the limits of manliness and self-respect. This 
 bringing to light of layers of consciousness hitherto con 
 cealed, if at times carried too far, has certainly enriched 
 our literature with new wealth of moral content. In the 
 best modern poetry it has shown itself by greater inten 
 sity and spirituality ; in the highest modern novels, by 
 delicacy of analysis, discrimination of the finer tints of 
 feeling, variety and fine shading of character hitherto 
 unknown ; in the modern essay, by a subtleness and 
 penetrative force which make the most perfect papers 
 of Addison seem almost trivial. It further manifests 
 itself in the growing love and keener appreciation of 
 * the few great world poets, who are after all the finest 
 embodiments of moral wisdom. It may be that so much 
 ethical thought has been turned off into these channels 
 that it has left less to be expended in the more sys 
 tematic form of ethical science. It may be too, that, as 
 the field of moral experience widens, and the meaning 
 of life deepens, and its problems become more complex, 
 it demands proportionably stronger and rarer powers 
 to gather up all this wealth, and illumine it with the 
 light of reason. Certain it is that the modern time 
 produces no such masters of moral wisdom for our day, 
 as Aristotle and Marcus Aurelius were to the old 
 
 | . world, or even as Bishop Butler was to his generation. 
 Wide, many-sided, sensitive, deep, complex, as is the 
 
 i/ *tnoral life in which we now move, if we would seek 
 any philosophic guidance through its intricacies, any 
 thinking which is at once solid, clear, practical, and in- 
 
 1^ \stinct with life, we must turn, not to any modern trea 
 tise, but to the pages of these by-gone worthies. What 
 
THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 271 
 
 help ardent spirits, looking for guidance in our day, 
 have found, has been won not from the philosophers, 
 but from some living poet, some giant of literature with 
 no pretension to philosophy, or some inspired preacher./ 
 Wordsworth, Coleridge, Carlyle, Newman, Frederick 
 Robertson, these, not the regular philosophers, have 
 been the moral teachers of our generation, and to these 
 young men have turned, to get from them what help 
 they might. And now it seems that in these last days 
 many, wearied out with straining after their impalpable 
 spiritualities, and baffled for lack of a consistent spirit 
 ual theory, have betaken themselves to a style of think 
 ing which, if it promises less, offers, as they think, 
 something more systematic and more certain. In de 
 spair of spiritual truth, they are fain to fill their hunger 
 with the husks of a philosophy which would confine all 
 men s thoughts within the phenomenal world, and deny 
 all knowledge that goes beyond the co-existences and 
 successions of phenomena. 
 
 From aberrations like this perhaps no moral philos 
 ophy would have delivered men. But it would be 
 well if, warned by such signs, it were to return closer 
 to life and fact, deal more with things which men 
 really feel, if, leaving general sentiments and moral 
 theories, it would attempt some true diagnosis of the 
 very complex facts of human nature, of the moral 
 maladies from which men suffer, the burdens they 
 need to have removed, the aspirations which they can 
 practically live by. Instead of this, instead of deal 
 ing with the actual and the ideal, which co-exist in man, 
 and out of which, if at all, a harmony of life is to be 
 woven, philosophers have been content to repeat a 
 meagre and conventional psychology, taken mostly 
 from books, not fresh from living hearts ; or they have 
 lost themselves in the metaphysical problems which 
 
272 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 
 
 no doubt everywhere underlie moral life, but which, 
 pursued too exclusively, distract attention from the 
 vital realities. These two causes have exhausted the 
 strength and the interest of moral study either a 
 cut-and-dried conventional psychology, or absorbing 
 metaphysical discussion. The former, in which moral 
 truths appeared shriveled up, like plants in a botanist s 
 herbarium, is the style of thing you find in the most 
 approved text-books of the last generation. 
 
 " Never before," as one has smartly said, " had hu 
 man nature been so neatly dissected, so handily sorted, 
 or so ornamentally packed up. The virtues and vices, 
 the appetites, emotions, affections, and sentiments stood 
 each in their appointed corner, and with their appro 
 priate label, to wait in neat expectation for the season 
 of the professorial lectures, and the literary world only 
 delayed their acquiescence in a uniform creed of moral 
 philosophy till they should have arranged to their 
 satisfaction whether the appetites should be secreted 
 in the cupboard or paraded on the chimney-piece ; or 
 whether certain of the less creditable packets ought 
 in law and prudence, or ought not in charity, to be 
 ticketed * Poison. Everything was as it should be, 
 or was soon to be so differences were not too dif 
 ferent, nor unanimity too unanimous opinion did 
 not degenerate into certainty, nor interest into ear 
 nestness, moral philosophy stood apart, like a literary 
 gentleman of easy circumstances, from religion and 
 politics, and truth itself was grateful for patronage, 
 instead of being clamorous for allegiance. Types were 
 delicate, margins were large, publishers were attentive, 
 the intellectual world said it was intellectual, and the 
 public acquiesced in the assertion. What more could 
 scientific hearts desire ? " 
 
 This description may contain something of carica- 
 
THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 273 
 
 ture, and yet there are books enough on moral science 
 which justify it books which have no doubt suc 
 ceeded in disgusting many with the subject of which 
 they treat. Nor has moral philosophy suffered less 
 from those deeper and more abstract discussions which 
 have often in modern times been substituted for itself. 
 Men of a profounder turn have so busied themselves 
 with investigations of the nature of right, the law of 
 duty, freedom, and necessity, and such like hard matters, 
 that these have absorbed all their interest and energy, 
 and left none for the treatment of those concrete real 
 ities which make up the moral life of man. Not that 
 such discussions can be dispensed with. They are 
 always necessary, never more so than now, when the 
 spiritual ground of man s moral being is so often denied 
 by materialistic or by merely phenomenal systems. 
 It would perhaps, however, be well that they should 
 be made a department by themselves, under the title 
 of Metaphysic of Ethics, to be entered on by those 
 who have special gifts for such inquiries. For when 
 substituted for the whole or chief part of moral inquiry, 
 they become " unpractical discussions of a practical 
 subject," and as such alienate many from a study 
 which, rightly treated, would deepen their thought and 
 elevate their character. 
 
 For what is the real object with which moral science 
 deals ? Every science has some concrete entity, some 
 congeries of facts, which is called in a general way its 
 subject-matter. Botany, we say, deals with plants or 
 herbs, geology with the strata which form the earth s 
 crust, astronomy with the stars and their motions, psy 
 chology with all the states of human consciousness. 
 What, then, is the concrete entity with which moral 
 science deals ? It is not the active powers of man, 
 nor the emotions, nor the moral faculty not these, 
 18 
 
274 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 
 
 each or all. It is simply human character. This is 
 the one great subject it has ever before it. About this 
 it asks what is character, its nature, its elements ; what 
 influences make it, what mar it; in what consists its 
 perfection, what is its destiny ? This may seem a 
 very elementary statement, but it is quite needful to 
 recur to it, and even to reiterate it, so much has it 
 been lost sight of in the pursuit of side questions 
 branching out of it. At the outset, before any anal 
 ysis is begun, the student cannot too deeply take in 
 and ponder the impression of character as a great and 
 substantive reality. Some vague perception of char 
 acter all men, of course, have. They are aware, 
 whether they dwell on it or not, that men differ not 
 only in face and form and outward appearance, but in 
 something more inward, they cannot exactly tell what. 
 But further than this confused notion most persons do 
 not go. Others there are who see much more than 
 this, who have a keen penetrating glance into every 
 man they meet, apprehend his bias, know what manner 
 of man he is, and deal with him accordingly. This 
 gift, so useful in practice, we call an eye to character ; 
 those who possess it, good judges of character. It is 
 the same gift of discerning the quality of men which 
 some persons have of judging of horses and other 
 cattle. JEschylus spoke of a good judge of character 
 as Trpo^aroyj/w/ucov. But this practical insight, so use 
 ful in business, and it may be to a certain extent 
 in speculation, is something distinct from a fine and 
 deep perception of the higher moralities of character. 
 Shrewd observers of human nature are often keen to 
 discern the weaknesses and foibles of men, and even 
 to exaggerate them, but slow to perceive those finer 
 traits of heart which lie deeper. The apprehension 
 of character with which the student should begin, and 
 
THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 275 
 
 which his moral studies ought to deepen, is something 
 very different from this. It is an eye open to see, a 
 heart sensitive to feel, the higher excellences of human 
 nature, as they have existed, and still exist in the best 
 of the race. It is a spirit the very opposite of that 
 of the cynic, one which, while it looks steadily at the 
 moral maladies and even basenesses into which men 
 fall, yet, without being sentimental, loves more to con 
 template the nobler than the baser side, which, behind 
 the commonplaces and trivialities, can seize life s 
 deeper import, and look up, and aspire towards the 
 heights which have been attained and are still attain 
 able by man. To call out and strengthen in young 
 minds such perceptions is one main end of moral 
 teaching. No doubt there are influences which can 
 do this more powerfully than any teaching. To have 
 seen and known lives which have embodied these fair 
 qualities, to have felt the touch of their human good 
 ness, to have companioned with those 
 
 " Whose soul the holy forms 
 Of young imagination hath kept pure; " 
 
 to have fed on high thoughts, and been familiar with 
 the examples of the heroes, the sages, the saints of 
 all time, so as to believe that such lives were once on 
 earth, and are not impossible even now, these are, 
 beyond all teaching, the " virtue-making " powers. 
 But moral philosophy, though subordinate to these, is 
 useless if it does not supplement them ; if it does not 
 at once justify the heart s aspiration on grounds of 
 reason, and strengthen, by enlightening, the will to 
 pursue them. Character, then, in the concrete, truth 
 ful, solid, pure, high, as " better than gold, yea than 
 fine gold, its revenue than choice silver," as the best 
 thing we meet with in all our experience, the one 
 
276 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 
 
 thing needful for a man, which to have got is to get 
 all, to have missed is to miss all, this cannot be too 
 fully set before the learner at the outset, as the goal 
 to which all his inquiries must tend, which alone 
 gives his inquiries any value. If this is not seen and 
 grasped broadly and deeply at first, and its presence felt 
 throughout all our reasoning, the discussion and anal 
 ysis that follow become mere words hair-splitting 
 and logomachy. 
 
 To observe moral facts, and retain them steadily, 
 requires a moral perception innate or trained, or both. 
 Every reader of Aristotle s Ethics will remember his 
 saying, that " he should have been well trained in his 
 habits who is to study aright things beautiful and just, 
 and in short all moral subjects. For facts are the 
 starting-point." Quickness and tenacity of moral per 
 ception is not so much an intellectual as a moral gift. 
 Nay, it is easy to overdo the intellectual part of the 
 process. Too rigid logic, too exact defining and sub 
 dividing of that which often can be but inadequately 
 defined, kills it. It is like trying to hold a sunbeam 
 in an iron vice. The faculty that will best catch the 
 many aspects and finer traits of character must be a 
 nice combination, an even balance between mental 
 keenness and moral emotion. It is the heart within 
 the head which makes up that form of philosophic 
 imagination most needed by the moralist. If moral 
 character, in its higher aspects, were set thus truly and 
 strongly before young minds, it would require little 
 else to counteract materialism. Such elevating views 
 might be left, almost without reasonings, to work their 
 natural effect on all who were susceptible of them. 
 
 Character has been defined as "a completely fash 
 ioned will." This, as has been said, is to be kept 
 continually before us in all moral inquiry as its prac- 
 
 
THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 277 
 
 u/u 
 
 tical end, that which gives it solidity. But when 14 
 once we have looked at it steadily, whether as it has 
 existed actually in the best men, or in the ideal, the 
 question at once arises, How is this right character to 
 be attained ? How is the good that is within to be 
 made ascendant, the less good to be subordinated, 
 the evil to be cast out ? Of the numerous questions 
 which this practically suggests, as to the standard by f 
 which character is to be tested, the foundation of moral 
 goodness, and many more, the simplest and most 
 obvious is to ask, What is in man ? What are the 
 , % various elements of man s nature? Thus we are at 
 , once landed in psychology. And so it has happened, 
 that almost all great ethical thinkers, whatever their 
 method, even when it depends mainly on certain great 
 a priori conceptions, have attempted some enumeration 
 of the various parts or elements which make up human 
 nature. Begun by Plato and Aristotle, carried on by 
 the Stoics, revived in modern times by Hobbes, not 
 neglected even by demonstrative Spinoza, this way of 
 proceeding by observation of living men, and of our 
 own minds, formed the whole staple of Bishop Butler s 
 method. It is strange, as we read the first fetches into 
 human nature of those early thinkers, with how much 
 more living power they come home to us than modern 
 psychologies. This comes probably of their having 
 read their facts straight off their own hearts, or from 
 observation of other men. There is something in the ^ &-t>t 
 first thoughts of the world which can never recur, 
 something in having been the first utterer of those 
 words, the first noter of those distinctions, which 
 thenceforth were to become the common inheritance 
 of all men. Compared with theirs, the moral psychol 
 ogy of recent times has for the most part become stale 
 and conventional, because, the first main outlines 
 
278 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 
 
 having been already laid down, the moderns have but 
 repeated with slight alterations the old analysis, pre 
 senting us with tabulated lists of appetites, desires, 
 passions, affections, and so forth, at which men only 
 yawn. In fairness, however, I must allow, although 
 with an entire dissent from the fundamental principles 
 of Professor Bain s philosophy, that I have found in 
 his elaborate work on the " Emotions and the Will " 
 many facts which are either new, or at least which I 
 have not before seen registered in systematic treatises. 
 Certainly if psychology is to interest and instruct once 
 more, it must leave the stereotyped forms, and enrich 
 itself with new and hitherto unnoted facts, gathered 
 partly from the more subtle and varied shades of 
 feeling, partly from the wider survey of human history, 
 - and the deepened human experience which the latest 
 civilization has opened up. The surest method then 
 for ethical science, is to begin with moral psychology ; 
 that is, with a close study of the phenomena which 
 make up man s moral nature. This is its beginning, 
 but not its end. From observation of these, it will 
 be led down to fundamental ideas which underlie 
 them ; belonging to that border land where morality 
 
 fand religion meet. 
 Whatever be the method most applicable to system 
 atic moral treatises, there can be little doubt that for 
 the learner and the careful investigator alike, the sure 
 path is from the known to the unknown, starting from 
 the concrete facts of which all may be conscious, to 
 work thence backward towards the hidden principles 
 which these facts embody. To say this is but to say 
 that moral science should adhere to the method which 
 
 \jJ 1 ^I*F* 
 
 has been found best in all other sciences. This is no 
 new view, but at least as old as Aristotle. The words 
 in which he insists on it, early in his Ethics, are famil- 
 
THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 279 
 
 iar enough. But the old truth has been lately so well 
 stated in an essay by Mr. Wilson of Rugby, on " Teach 
 ing Natural Science," that I cannot do better than give 
 in his own words his admirable statement. Substitute 
 the word u moral " for u natural," and every word he 
 says of physical science will apply with still stronger 
 force to ethical, in proportion as the facts which the 
 latter deals with are more dim and hard to grasp, and 
 therefore more liable to pass into mere phrases and 
 formulae. Mr. Wilson observes, " There are two differ 
 ent methods of teaching science : one the method of 
 investigation, the other the method of authority. The 
 first starts with the concrete and works up to the ab 
 stract ; starts with facts, and ends with laws ; begins 
 with the known, and ends with the unknown. The 
 second starts with what we call the principles of the 
 science ; announces laws and includes the facts under 
 them; declares the unknown, and applies it to the 
 known." Of " the two, the latter is the easier, the 
 former is by far the better." Again, why the former 
 is the better he thus shows : " 1st, Because knowl 
 edge must precede science, which is only systematized 
 experience and knowledge. A certain broad array of 
 facts must preexist and be known, before scientific 
 methods can be applied. 2d, Whatever new facts you 
 give the learner they must not be purely foreign facts, 
 but must fit on to his already existing stock. It is to 
 this existing knowledge, and to that alone, you must 
 dig down to get a sure foundation, and the facts of 
 your science must reach continuously down, and rest 
 securely thereon. Otherwise you will be building a 
 castle in .the air." These observations are as applica 
 ble to the learner of moral as of physical science. Nor 
 less worthy of the moralist s attention are Mr. Wilson s 
 further remarks, showing how easily scientific teaching 
 
280 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 
 
 passes from things to words. If strange terms and 
 formulae are presented to the learner before he has 
 realized the ideas and laws which these express, he is 
 at once landed in " cram." No scientific name should 
 ever be given for a fact or idea, before there is a real 
 need for it ; that is, before the fact or idea is clearly 
 grasped, and the want of a name to fix it is really felt. 
 Then, and not till then, the new name may be safely 
 given. No principle of classification should be an 
 nounced before we have fairly climbed by steps of 
 reasoning up to it. Any one who has observed young 
 students in philosophy knows how readily they catch 
 up technical words, which have a high sound, but are 
 for them almost meaningless. And this danger is much 
 greater in moral than in physical subjects, because from 
 the very nature of the former, unmeaning words so 
 much more easily take the place of thoughts, and the 
 substitution is so much more harder to detect. Many 
 feel this so keenly that they consider it a fatal objection 
 against mental philosophy being made a study for the 
 young. It fills the young head, they say, with windy 
 abstractions merely, which have under them no solid 
 content. When Watt of Harden lifted the cover off 
 the dish which his fair Flower of Yarrow now and 
 then served up to him, he found at least a pair of clean 
 spurs, which told him it was time to rise and ride. 
 But when you lift the cover off these abstractions, they 
 say, you find not even cold hard spurs, but only empty 
 wind. The only way to counterwork this danger, to 
 which, I admit, young philosophers are exposed, is to 
 begin with the facts of consciousness that lie at our feet. 
 We may not be able to climb thence to the upper 
 heights, but we shall at all events make sure of possess 
 ing the near, if we do not reach the far. 
 
 Let it not be said that, by thus insisting on a broad, 
 
THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 281 
 
 sure basis of fact to begin with, I condemn moral 
 science to pure empiricism, and confound it with mere 
 physical science. This might be true if I confined its 
 aim, as has sometimes been done, to observing and clas 
 sifying successive "states of mind," and of emotion. 
 But when we remember that the facts it has to take 
 account of are no mere passive states, but such facts as ]{j^ 
 personality, will, conscience, though the method we 
 start with is the same as the physical, our very obser 
 vations soon transport us into a very different region, 
 in which the thought most forced on us is not the like 
 ness, but the contrast, to physical phenomena. As for** 
 staying at home, confined to mere empiricism, we shall 
 soon find that these home-facts, so near us, are close in 
 kin and neighborhood to whatever is highest in being. 
 From the facts of moral consciousness, fully realized, fl^ 
 pathways strike off that lead to the remotest distances of 
 history, and down to the profoundest depths of thought. 
 We shall not less surely trace the evolution of moral 
 systems, and the growth of moral ideas, because we 
 have begun with grasping the concrete facts which, in 
 their complex state, have first met us in every-day ex 
 perience. Nor shall we thus be in a worse position to 
 investigate the fundamental idea of right which lies 
 under all morality, and to inquire whether there is 
 righteousness which pertains not to man only, but in 
 which all rational beings alike are sharers. 
 
 There are two ways in which moral psychology may 
 go to work. It may begin at the core of man s being, 
 at the central creative energy, the mysterious con 
 scious " I," the fully formed personal will, and then 
 show how the several powers and feelings stand related 
 to this free centre of spontaneity. But the easier, if 
 less scientific way is, beginning at the outside, to follow 
 what we may conceive to be the historical growth of 
 
282 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 
 
 the individual, as well as of the race, and to show how 
 each of the phases of our being successively rises into 
 prominence. Such a survey would place before us 
 man in his earliest stage as a mass of natural appeten 
 cies or instinctive tendencies, each seeking blindly its 
 appropriate end, the reaching of which is necessary to 
 continued existence. Accompanying these primitive 
 desires, we should find certain faculties which are the 
 instruments by which the former read their end, the 
 executive as it were of the blind impulses. During 
 this stage, the spontaneous action of these appetencies 
 engenders certain secondary passions, such as love of 
 things which help the attainment of their ends, hatred 
 of things which thwart them. Of these primitive out 
 goings, some we can see have reference to the good of 
 self, some to the good of others, long before self-grati 
 fication is set before us as a conscious object. Such is 
 the earliest stage of our existence, the appetitive, 
 the spontaneous or semi-conscious, as we see it in in 
 fants, or in uncivilized tribes. This is the raw mate 
 rial, as it were, out of which character is to be formed. 
 The aggregate amount of all these primitive ele 
 ments, and the relative proportions in which the higher 
 and the lower are mingled in each man, will go far to 
 determine what he will ultimately become. 
 
 But out of the midst of this blind congeries expe 
 rience develops new powers. Very early in the appe 
 titive life the desires must meet with obstacles, and the 
 faculties that purvey for them are thwarted, driven in 
 ward, and forced to concentrate themselves for a more 
 conscious effort to remove the hindrance. Here, then, 
 is the first dawning, the earliest consciousness of will, 
 within us. Again, out of the appetitive life, when ex 
 perienced long enough, there rises ever more clearly 
 a power of intelligence or reflection which, observing 
 
 f 
 
THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 283 
 
 that each desire has its own end, and that the attain 
 ment of that end brings pleasure, generalizes from 
 these separate goods the idea of a general good for our 
 whole nature, a satisfaction arising from the permanent 
 gratification of all our desires, or at least of as many 
 of them as may be possible. Reflection soon perceives 
 that desire left to act blindly our nature swayed 
 now by this, now by that impulse does not attain to 
 any stable happiness. Some kinds of action, it ob 
 serves, make towards this happiness, others thwart it ; 
 the former it calls useful actions, the latter hurtful. 
 From these observations it generalizes the idea of a 
 total personal good or self-interest as an end to be 
 aimed at, and forms subordinate rules of conduct with 
 a view to attain that end. Self-interest, thus intelli 
 gently conceived, may become an end of life, or what 
 is called motive an ever present motive to guide the 
 will. Governed by this motive, the will can control 
 anarchic passion and introduce order into a man s de 
 sires and conduct. In doing this, the will, besides the 
 power of reflection, is fortified by the emotions also ; 
 because by a law of our nature, self-interest, when 
 once conceived as an end, is eagerly embraced as a 
 new object for the affections. This is the second or 
 prudential stage of our nature. Some men remain all 
 their lives in the former or appetitive stage, and these 
 we call impulsive men. Others regulate their actions 
 by well-calculated self-interest, and these we call pru 
 dent, or it may be, if self-interest is too absorbing, self 
 ish men. But though the two types of character are 
 clear, yet so infinitely diversified are these simple ele 
 ments in themselves, and in their degrees of strength, 
 that perhaps no two men ever lived in whom they 
 were compounded exactly alike, in no two men was the 
 same physiognomy of character ever reproduced. 
 
284 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 
 
 But not any or all of the elements yet noticed, how 
 ever mingled, would make what is called a moral be 
 ing ; they do not yet rise above the life of nature. 
 To do this, there needs to dawn another and higher 
 consciousness. Reflection cannot stop at the idea of 
 merely personal good, for it sees that there are other 
 beings of the same nature and desires as ourselves, 
 who have each a self-interest of their own as well as 
 we. But as the personal good of others often collides 
 with ours, and as one or other must give way, we begin 
 to see that the good of others deserves as much re 
 spect, ought to be as sacred in our eyes, as our own. 
 So we rise to feel that, above our sensitive and individ 
 ual life, there is a higher, more universal order to 
 which we and all individual souls even now belong, 
 that this higher order secures and harmonizes the ulti 
 mate good of all rational beings, and that the particu 
 lar good of each, though in harmony with this order, 
 and an element of it, must be subordinated to it. To 
 realize this spiritual order, and be a fellow-worker with 
 it, is felt to be the absolute, the moral good, an end in 
 itself, higher and more ultimate than all other ends. 
 This idea, this end, this impersonal good, once con 
 ceived, comes home to us with a new and peculiar con 
 sciousness. In its presence we for the first time be 
 come aware of a law which has a right to command us, 
 which is obligatory on us, which to obey is a duty. 
 Seen in the light of this law, the good of others, we 
 feel, has a right to determine our choice equally with 
 our own, and our own good loses its merely temporary 
 and finite, and assumes an impersonal and eternal 
 character. This consciousness it is which makes us 
 moral agents. Only in the idea of such a transcend 
 ent law above us, independent of us, universal, and of 
 a will determined by it, does morality begin. All 
 
THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 285 
 
 other elements of our nature are called moral, only as 
 they bear on this, the overruling moral principle. The 
 consciousness just described constitutes the third or moral 
 stage of human nature. Not that the second and the 
 third stages occur in every man in the order now laid 
 down. A man may become alive to the moral law, and 
 to its obligation over him, before he has conceived of 
 self-interest as an end of action. But the order here 
 given marks the relative worth of the respective prin 
 ciples, and the culmination of our nature in that one 
 which is its proper end. 
 
 It would be easy to show how all the moral systems 
 have taken their character from giving to one or other 
 of these three principles of action, the emotional, the 
 prudential, and the moral, a special prominence, invest 
 ing some one element or some particular disposition of 
 all the elements, with paramount sovereignty. But I 
 must pass on to notice a defect inherent in this and 
 every attempt to map out human nature into various 
 compartments, a defect which, when unperceived, as 
 it mostly is, distorts, if it does not falsify, the whole 
 work of the analysts. Even if the most exact enumer 
 ation, the most minute analysis could be made, would 
 this give all that makes up character ? It is a common 
 mistake with psychologists to suppose that it does. 
 They fancy they can grasp life by victorious analysis. 
 There can be no greater, though there is no more com 
 mon delusion. What is it that analysis, the most per 
 fect, accomplishes? It gives the various elements 
 which go to make up a moral fact, or it may be said to 
 give the various points of view which a phenomenon or 
 group of phenomena presents. But is this all ? Is 
 there nothing more than what is found in the analyst s 
 crucible ? The analysis, that is, the unloosing, the tak 
 ing down into pieces of the bundle, may be complete ; 
 
286 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 
 
 but where is the power of synthesis, the bond which 
 held the bundle together ? Where is the life which 
 pervaded the several elements, and made of them one 
 entire power ? It is gone, it has escaped your touch. 
 Can the botanist after he has divided a flower into its 
 component parts, pistil, stamen, anther, petals, calyx, 
 put them together once more, and restore the life and 
 beauty that were there? This is the main error of 
 psychologists. They fancy that when they have com 
 pleted their analysis they have done all, not consider 
 ing that it is just the most unique and mysterious part 
 of the problem which has eluded them. What the late 
 Professor Ferrier shows so well against the psychol 
 ogists, that the " ego," the one great mystery, ever 
 escapes them, the same takes place in the analysis of 
 every other living entity. In a human character, when 
 you have done your best to exhaust it, to give its whole 
 contents, that which is its finer breath, has it not es 
 caped you ? must not you be content to own that there 
 remains behind a something " which no language may 
 declare ? " What end then serves analysis ? By 
 bringing out, separately and in detail, each side, aspect, 
 or element in any problem, and fixing the eye on each 
 successively, it helps to give distinctness and exactness 
 to our whole conception of it. But it is only the mul 
 tiplicity that is thus given ; the unity or rather the 
 unifying power still remains ungrasped. And if we are 
 to see character in its truth, we must, after analysis has 
 done its work, by an act of philosophic imagination re 
 make the synthesis, put the elements together again. 
 If we do this rightly, something will reappear in the 
 synthesis which had disappeared in the analysis, and 
 that something will be just the idiosyncratic element 
 the central creative energy which individualizes the 
 whole man. To a moral philosophy which shall give 
 
THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 287 
 
 the truth, this synthesis is even more essential than the 
 analysis. 
 
 Of the many questions which have been, and may 
 still be asked respecting virtuous character, there is 
 one, not the least important, and certainly the most 
 practical of any, which has received less attention from 
 moralists than it deserves. Tt is this : Supposing 
 that we have settled rightly what the true ideal of char 
 acter is, how are we to attain to it ? what is the dy 
 namic power in the moral life ? what is that which shall 
 impel a man to persevere in aiming at this ideal, shall 
 carry him through all that hinders him outwardly and 
 inwardly, and enable him, in some measure at least, 
 to realize it ? Other questions, it would seem, more 
 stimulate speculation, none has more immediate bearing 
 on man s moral interests. For confused and imperfect 
 as men s notions of right may be, it is not knowledge 
 that they lack, it is the will and the power to do. 
 Change one word, and all men will make the apostle s 
 confession their own : " To know is present with me, 
 but how to perform that which is good I find not." 
 
 It is to this subject, then, the dynamic or motive 
 power in moral life, that I would turn attention in the 
 sequel. Under the word motive three things are in 
 cluded, which are usually distinguished thus, the 
 objective truth or reality, which, when apprehended and 
 desired, determines to action ; the mental act of appre 
 hending this object ; and the desire or affection which 
 is awakened by the object so apprehended. To this 
 last step, which immediately precedes the act of will, 
 and is said to determine it, the term " motive " is often 
 exclusively applied. But in the present inquiry into 
 the dynamic or motive power, I shall use the word in a 
 wider sense, including all the three elements in the pro 
 cess, and applying it more especially to that one which 
 
288 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 
 
 is the starting point, namely, the objective truth or 
 reality which, addressing the understanding, and stirring 
 the affections, ultimately sways the will. And the 
 question I ask is, What is that objective truth, or class 
 of truths, which determines the will in a way which 
 can rightly be called moral ? What are those truths 
 which, apprehended and entering into a man, enable 
 him to rise into that state of being which is truly virtu 
 ous or moral ? 
 
 In doing so it will be well to ask first, what answers 
 to this question may be found in the works of some of 
 the great masters of moral wisdom. In his survey of 
 moral systems, Adam Smith remarks that there are two 
 main questions with which moralists have to deal. The 
 first is, What is virtue ? or, more concretely, In what 
 consists the virtuous character, that temper and con 
 duct in a man which deserves to win the esteem of his 
 fellow-men ? The second is, What is the faculty in us 
 by which we discern and approve the virtuous char 
 acter? in other words, By what power do we dis 
 tinguish between right actions and praise them, and 
 wrong actions and blame them ? Of the question which 
 I propose now to consider, the dynamic power which 
 enables us to do the right, it is remarkable that Smith 
 makes no mention. In discussing this, which I may 
 call the third main question of morals, I shall have 
 occasion to advert to the former two, but shall do so no 
 further than as they bear on the third, which is our 
 more immediate concern. 
 
 Smith has classified philosophers mainly by the 
 answers they give to the first of the three questions. 
 Some, he remarks, place virtue in the proper balance 
 and harmony of all the faculties and affections which 
 make up our human nature, some in the judicious pur 
 suit of our own happiness, a third set in benevolence, 
 
THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 289 
 
 that is, in the affections which seek the happiness of 
 others. The first of these three answers to the great 
 question, What is the virtuous character ? has been 
 sanctioned by the greatest names of past time, by 
 Plato, by Aristotle, by the Stoics, and by Bishop 
 Butler. Let us glance at their theories, with a view 
 to find what help there is in them as to the dynamic 
 power we are in search of. 
 
 With Plato originated the idea that virtue is a 
 proper balance or harmony of the various powers of 
 the soul ; and though it has often since been elaborated 
 into detail, it has never been put in a form so beautiful 
 and attractive. It is one of those great though simple 
 thoughts first uttered by that father of philosophy which 
 have taken hold of the world, and which it will never 
 let go. Repeated in our ordinary language, it sounds 
 a commonplace ; but in the Greek of " The Republic " 
 it stands fresh with unfading beauty. He divides the 
 soul, as is well known, into three elements, desire, 
 passion or courage, and intellect ; and this division, 
 variously modified, has held its ground in philosophy 
 till now. The fiwowxrvwy, or righteousness of the in 
 dividual soul, he places in a proper balance or harmony 
 of these three elements, in which each holds that posi 
 tion which rightfully belongs to it. The state is the 
 counterpart of the individual soul, and its SIKCUOO-WT?, or 
 right condition, is attained when the three orders of 
 guardians, auxiliaries, and producers, answering to 
 reason, passion, appetite respectively, stand in their 
 proper order of precedence. This is the philosophy 
 which Shakespeare makes Ulysses speak. " In the 
 observance of degree, priority, and place," stands 
 
 " The unity and married calm of states." 
 
 " How could communities, 
 Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities, 
 J9 
 
290 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 
 
 Peaceful commerce from dividable shores, 
 
 The primogenitive and due of birth, 
 
 Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels, 
 
 But by degree, stand in authentic place? 
 
 Take but degree away, untune that string, 
 
 And, hark, what discord follows ! each thing meets 
 
 In mere oppugnancy." 
 
 The man is righteous in whom each of the three ele 
 ments holds its proper place, and does its proper work ; 
 and this inward harmony expresses itself in an outward 
 life which is every way righteous. The power which 
 discerns the right and orders all the elements of the 
 soul, is intellect or reason, whose right it is to rule. 
 But how is this harmony of soul, once discerned, to be 
 reached, maintained, made energetic ? Plato, of philos 
 ophers the least mechanical, the most dynamic, the 
 most full of powers of life, cannot have left this ques 
 tion wholly untouched, though he has not dealt with it 
 systematically. His hope was that this may be done 
 in the state by educating the guardians, who are philos 
 ophers ; in the individual, by educating the reason, 
 which is the sovereign principle, through continual 
 study of real truth, continual contemplation of the ideal 
 good. The highest object of all is the Essential Form 
 or Idea of the Good which imparts to the objects 
 known the truth that is in them, and to the knowing 
 mind the faculty of knowing truth. This idea of the 
 good is the cause of science and of truth. It gives to 
 all objects of knowledge not only the power of being 
 known, but their being and existence. The good is not 
 existence, but is above and beyond existence in dignity 
 and power. " The purpose of education," he says, " is 
 to turn the whole soul round, in order that the eye of 
 the soul, or reason, may be directed to the right quarter. 
 But education does not generate or infuse any new 
 principle ; it only guides or directs a principle already 
 in existence." So far in " The Republic." 
 

 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 291 
 
 Again, in the famous myth of the Phaedrus where 
 reason is imaged by a charioteer driving a chariot 
 drawn by two horses, one high-spirited and aspiring, 
 the other earthward groveling, Plato makes the char 
 ioteer able just to raise his head, and look out for a 
 moment on that super-celestial place, which is above 
 heaven s vault, and to catch a glimpse of the realities 
 that are there, the colorless, formless, intangible 
 substance on which the gods gaze without let or 
 hindrance. The glimpse, which the better human 
 souls thus get, fills them with love of the reality. 
 They see and feast on it, and are nourished by it. It 
 is this idea or essence of the good, the cause of exist 
 ence and knowledge, the vital centre in the world of 
 thought, as the sun is in the world of sight, which is 
 the object of contemplation to the reason. "And 
 reason," Plato says, " looking upwards, and carried to 
 the true Above, realizes a delight in wisdom, unknown 
 to the other parts of our nature." This idea of good 
 is the centre at once of morals and politics, the right 
 ful, influencing power in human action. It should be 
 ever present to the mind ; a full philosophic conscious 
 ness of it should be the ruling power in everything. 
 Nor is it an object merely for the pure reason, but for 
 the imagination also, and an attractive power for the 
 higher affections which side with reason. This glimpse, 
 then, vouchsafed to none but the purest in their purest 
 hour, may be supposed to be to them an inspiration 
 that will not desert them all their lives after. It will 
 make them hunger and thirst after truth and righteous 
 ness, and despise, in comparison of these, all lower 
 goods. So far this intuition of the good will be a 
 dynamic power. But this master- vision, if it be pos 
 sible at rare intervals, for the select souls of earth, and 
 if it were adequate to sustain them in the pursuit of 
 
292 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 
 
 goodness, is at best a privilege for the few, not an 
 inheritance for mankind. And Plato did not dream 
 of it as more. From the mass of men he turns in 
 despair, and leaves them to their swine-troughs. He 
 did not conceive that for all men there was an ideal, 
 or any power sufficient to raise them towards it. In 
 Plato, then, the moral dynamic force we are seeking is 
 in small measure, if at all to be found. 
 
 Shall we find it in Aristotle ? Although the " Eth 
 ics " contains more than one division of human nature, 
 which helped forward psychological analysis, yet the 
 whole system is not determined by any such division, 
 but by certain leading objective ideas. Foremost 
 among these is that of an end of action. There is an 
 absolute end of all action, an end in itself, and man s 
 constitution is framed conformably to this end, and in 
 realizing it lies the total satisfaction of his nature, his 
 well-being. Everything in nature has its end, and 
 fulfills it unconsciously, but a moral being must fulfill 
 his end not blindly, but with conscious purpose. The 
 end in itself consciously chosen and pursued, this is 
 Aristotle s fundamental ethical idea. 
 
 The end or the good for man is a vivid conscious 
 ness of life, according to its highest excellence, or in 
 the exercise of its highest powers. Sir Alexander 
 Grant, in his very able dissertation on wepyeia, shows, 
 with great felicity, how Aristotle regarded man s chief 
 good as " nothing external to him, but as existing in 
 man and for man ; existing in the evocation, the vivid 
 ness, and the fruition of his powers. It is the con 
 scious vitality of the life and the mind in the exercise 
 of its highest faculties. This, however, not as a per 
 manent condition, but one that arises in us, oftenest 
 like a thrill of joy, a momentary intuition. Were it 
 abiding, we should be as God." In order to find in 
 
THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 293 
 
 which part of man this highest excellence is to be 
 found, Aristotle has recourse to a psychological division, 
 not of his own making, but apparently well known at 
 the time. He divides the internal principle (^xn) mt o 
 the physical or vegetative part, the semi-rational or 
 appetitive, and the purely rational. The first has no 
 share in human excellence, in the second lies moral 
 excellence or virtue, in the third lies intellectual excel 
 lence. Aristotle here founds the distinction between 
 moral and intellectual, beyond which we have not yet 
 got. Practical moral excellence has its seat in the 
 second division of our nature, in the passions which, 
 though not purely rational, have communion with rea 
 son. And though Aristotle, in the end, gives to the 
 purely intellectual excellence, which consists in philo 
 sophical contemplation, a higher place than he assigns 
 to the exercise of the moral virtues, yet it is of these 
 he chiefly treats, and with these we have now to do. 
 Moral virtue, then, he defines as consisting in a de 
 veloped state of the moral purpose, in a balance rela 
 tive to ourselves, which is determined by reason. This 
 is Aristotle s famous doctrine, that virtue is a mean, an 
 even balance, a harmony of man s powers. It is a 
 mean as exhibited in particular actions, and also a mean 
 or balance struck between opposite excesses of feeling. 
 Feelings, passions, actions, are the raw materials out 
 of which character is to be wrought by aiming at a 
 balance. Right reason is the power which determines 
 what the mean or balance is. It reviews the whole 
 circumstances of the case, strikes the balance, appre 
 hends the rule by which the irregular feelings may be 
 reduced to that regularity in which virtue consists, 
 virtue as well in particular acts as in habits, and in 
 the whole character. The mean is not a " hard and 
 fast line," but a balance struck anew in each particular 
 
294 TEE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 
 
 case, from a consideration of all the circumstances. 
 The virtuous character is slowly elaborated by a rep 
 etition of virtuous acts ; acts, that is, midway between 
 extremes. And then as to knowing what the real 
 mean is, man must begin and act from his own percep 
 tions, such as they are. His own individual reason 
 must be the guide he starts with, but he is not therefore 
 shut up in subjectivity. He has a surer standard than 
 individual judgment to appeal to, even the universal 
 moral sentiment of men. Or rather in the wise man, 
 the ideally perfect man, he has a kind of objective con 
 science, an embodiment of moral law ; and he judges 
 according as he knows that this ideally wise man 
 would judge. Here, then, we have a theory of virtue 
 and the virtuous character, but no answer to the ques 
 tion, What is the motive power which shall propel men 
 towards this ideal ? Indeed, full though his treatise is 
 of wise and penetrating practical remarks on character, 
 this subject is nowhere discussed by Aristotle ; but if 
 one were to gather from him an answer for one s self, 
 it might perhaps be something like this : 
 
 Reason of itself cannot reach the will and mould 
 the choice. Yet reason and those emotions which are 
 most obedient to it, act and react on each other. In 
 time, by the law of habit, they blend together and 
 make up a moral habit of soul, which restrains and 
 directs all the lower impulses. When intellect and the 
 more generous emotions combine in seeking one end, 
 and by repeated acts form a habit, the result is the 
 perfected moral judgment or practical wisdom, which 
 itself is both a guide and a sufficient motive power to 
 impel the soul steadily to good. Qpovrjarts is with 
 Aristotle the perfection of the moral intellect. He 
 does not say that it is an interpenetration of the moral 
 with the intellectual side of human nature, but that 
 
THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 295 
 
 there is an inseparable connection between this prac 
 tical wisdom (<$>p6vr)(TL<s) and moral virtue. In his 
 view, these two sides, if not blended in one habit, are 
 brought much closer together than in Plato, and that, 
 both in the discerning and in the ruling moral fac 
 ulty. 
 
 The elaboration of the virtuous character by the 
 formation of good habits is a long and slow process. 
 Does Aristotle point to any spring of inspiration which 
 may carry a man through it? Plato after his own 
 fashion does. Far off and inaccessible as his idea of 
 the good may be, there is something in it, and in his 
 enthusiasm for it, which must kindle, as by contagion, 
 all but the dullest. But in Aristotle, though at every 
 turn you meet insights into human nature which you 
 feel to be penetratingly true, you are, after all, left 
 to evolve the virtuous habit out of your own inward 
 resources. There is in him no hint of anything which 
 may come home to a man inwardly, and supplement 
 his moral weakness by a strength beyond his own. 
 All that he suggests is of a merely external kind. 
 Besides moral teaching, such as himself and other mor 
 alists give, he bids men look for help to such institu 
 tions, either domestic or political, as may assist them 
 in the cultivation of virtue. 
 
 Amongst moderns, Bishop Butler, as is well known, 
 has been the chief expounder of the idea which origi 
 nated with Plato, that the virtuous character consists 
 in a harmony of the different powers of man. This, 
 the leading idea of his sermons, has so worked itself 
 through his teaching into modern thought, that it need 
 not now be dwelt on. A system, a constitution, an 
 economy, in which the various parts appetites, pas 
 sions, particular affections are all ranged in due gra 
 dation under the supreme conscience ; this is his doc- 
 
296 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 
 
 trine of man. In working .out this idea, while the 
 great Bishop has contributed much of his own, espe 
 cially the masterly analysis by which he proves the 
 existence in man of originally unselfish, as well as of 
 self-regarding affections, he recalls here the teaching 
 of Plato, there that of Aristotle. Though he deals 
 entirely with individual man, he illustrates his idea of 
 gradation and moral harmony by Plato s image of a 
 civil constitution, with its various ranks subordinated 
 under one supreme authority. On the other hand, 
 his idea of conscience comes much nearer to that of 
 Aristotle s ^po^o-ts than that of Plato s reason. But 
 in Butler s " conscience," there is a much more dis 
 tinct presence of the emotional or moral element, 
 while the notion of an obligatory power or right to 
 command, so characteristic of modern as distinguished 
 from ancient thought, comes strongly out. But para 
 mount as is this idea with Butler, it is strange that 
 whenever we go beyond it, and ask for a reason why 
 conscience should be supreme, he fails us. Entrenched 
 within his psychological facts, he refuses to go beyond 
 them. Ask what is the rule of right, the canon by 
 which conscience decides, he replies, Man is a law to 
 himself; every plain honest man who wishes it, will 
 find the rule of right within himself, and will decide 
 agreeably to truth and virtue. This is like saying 
 that conscience decides by the rule of conscience. If 
 asked, Why should I obey conscience ? Butler can 
 but assume that conscience " carries its own authority 
 with it, that it is our natural guide," that it belongs 
 to our condition of being, and therefore it is our duty 
 to obey it. If a further sanction is sought, he seems 
 to find it in the fact of experience, that the path of 
 duty and that of interest coincide, " meaning by interest 
 happiness and satisfaction." If there be exceptions, 
 
THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 297 
 
 these will be set right in the final distribution of things. 
 " Duty and interest are perfectly coincident, for the 
 most part here, entirely hereafter ; this being implied 
 in the very notion of a good and perfect administration 
 of things." In this coincidence of duty and interest, 
 so far fulfilled in our present experience, and ultimately 
 made sure by the existence of a Moral Governor of 
 the world, seems to lie a great part of the dynamic 
 power in Butler s system. To this may be added his 
 remark, in the spirit of Aristotle, that obedience to 
 conscience, when it has grown into a habitual temper, 
 becomes a choice and a delight. 
 
 But in the sermons on the Love of God he strikes 
 another strain. He there demonstrates to an unbe 
 lieving age that the affection he speaks of is no dream, 
 but a most sober certainty. For as we have certain 
 lower affections which find sufficing objects in the 
 world around us, so we have higher faculties and moral 
 emotions, which find but inadequate objects in the 
 scattered rays of created wisdom, power, and goodness 
 which this world contains. To these faculties and 
 affections God himself is the only adequate supply. 
 They can find their full satisfaction only in the con 
 templation of that righteousness which is an everlast 
 ing righteousness, of that goodness in the sovereign 
 mind which gave birth to the universe. This is But 
 ler s highest doctrine, which he sets forth with a calm 
 suppressed enthusiasm almost too deep for words. 
 This contemplation can create the highest form of 
 happiness, but it is not for this that it is sought. 
 It would cease to be the ultimate end that it is, if \ 
 sought for the sake of happiness, or for any end but 
 itself. There can be no doubt that if once realized, 
 this would be, as we shall see, in the highest measure, 
 the dynamic of the soul. 
 
298 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 
 
 Butler s search for virtue is wholly through psychol 
 ogy. Plato and Aristotle, though they do not begin 
 with it, very soon have recourse to it. Kant, on the 
 other hand, when seeking for principles of morality, 
 disdains to fumble after them among the debris of ob 
 servation arid experience, but searches for them wholly 
 a priori among the pure ideas of the reason. We find 
 nothing in him about the virtuous character consisting 
 in a harmony of the mental elements, although it might 
 be said that his idea of virtue is a will in harmony with 
 the moral universe. Laying his hand at once on the 
 individual will, and intensifying to its highest power the 
 idea of responsibility, he starts with the assertion that 
 the only real and absolute good in the whole world is a 
 good will. And a good will is one purely and entirely 
 determined by the moral law. This law is not a law 
 generalized out of human experience, binding therefore 
 only within the range of that experience, but a law 
 which transcends it ; is wide as the universe, and ex 
 tends in its essential principle to all beings who can 
 think it. Man, according to Kant, shut in on every 
 side of his being to a merely relative knowledge, in the 
 moral law for the first time escapes out into absolute 
 truth, truth valid not only for all men, but for all intel- 
 ligents. Human conscience is nothing but the entering 
 into the individual of this objective law the witness, 
 as it has been called, that the will or self has come into 
 subjection to, and harmony with, the universal reason, 
 which is the will of God. 
 
 From the reality of this law Kant deduces three 
 great moral ideas. First, since it commands impera 
 tively, unconditionally, we must be able to obey it. 
 Freedom, therefore, as a necessary consequence, follows 
 from the consciousness of an imperative law of duty. 
 Again, in this phenomenal life, we see the will that 
 
 > i 
 
 
THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 299 
 
 would obey duty hindered by many obstacles, crushed 
 by many miseries, unrewarded with that happiness 
 which rightfully belongs to it. There must, therefore, 
 be a life beyond this phenomenal one, where the hin 
 drances shall be removed, where duty and the will to 
 obey it shall have full play, where virtue and happi 
 ness, here often sundered, shall at last meet. That is, 
 there must be an immortality. Lastly, reason repre 
 sents to us the moral will as worthy of happiness. But 
 we see that here they do coincide. Nature does not 
 effect such a meeting ; man cannot constrain it. There 
 must be somewhere a power above nature, stronger 
 than man, who will uphold the moral order, will bring 
 about the union between virtue and happiness, between 
 guilt and misery. And this being is God. Such is 
 Kant s practical proof of the great triad of moral truths 
 in which the morally-minded man believes, Freedom, 
 Immortality, and God. The necessity for the belief in 
 these arises out of the reality of the moral law. 
 
 To Kant s ideal of duty it matters nothing, though 
 it is contradicted by experience, though not one in 
 stance could be shown of a character which acted on, 
 or even of a single action which emanated from, the 
 pure unmingled moral law. The question is not what 
 experience shows, but what reason ordains. And 
 though this ideal of moral excellence may never yet 
 have been actualized, yet none the less it remains a 
 true ideal the one standard which the moral judg 
 ment of man approves, however in practice he may fall 
 beneath it. On this pure idea of the moral law Kant 
 would build a science of ethics, valid not for man only, 
 but for all intelligent beings. Applied to man, it would 
 need to be supplemented by an anthropology, and would 
 then stand to pure ethics, as mixed stand to pure math 
 ematics. 
 
300 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 
 
 As to the relation in which, according to Kant, the 
 objective moral law stands to the human conscience, 
 there is a very ingenious speculation of the late Pro 
 fessor Ferrier, which may illustrate it. He asks the 
 question whether it is the existence of our minds which 
 generates knowledge, or the entering of knowledge into 
 us which constitutes our minds ? Is the radical and 
 stable element Mind, and is Intelligence the secondary 
 and derivative one ? Professor Ferrier s reply is, that 
 " It is not man s mind which puts him in possession of 
 ideas, but it is ideas, that is knowledge, which first puts 
 him in possession of a mind." The mind does not 
 make ideas, but ideas make mind. In like manner, ap 
 plying the same principle to poetic inspiration, he shows 
 that it is not the poetic mind which creates the ideas 
 of beauty and sublimity which it utters, but those ideas 
 which, entering into a man, create the poetic mind. 
 And so in moral truth, it is not our moral nature which 
 makes the distinction between right and wrong, but the 
 existence of right and wrong, apprehension of them by 
 us, which create our moral nature. " I have no moral 
 nature," he says, " before the distinction between right 
 arid wrong is revealed to me. My moral nature exists 
 subsequently to this revelation. At any rate, I acquire 
 a moral nature, if not after, yet in the very act which 
 brings me the distinction. The distinction exists as an 
 immutable institution of God prior to the existence of 
 our minds. And it is the knowledge of this distinction 
 which forms the prime constituent, not of our moral ac 
 quisitions, but of our moral existence." This very in 
 genious speculation, which is in the very spirit of the 
 Platonic philosophy, may serve to illustrate Kant s view 
 of the priority and independence of the moral law to 
 our apprehension of it. 
 
 Where, then, is the motive power in the Kantian 
 
THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 301 
 
 ethics ? Kant s answer is plain. It is the naked rep 
 resentation of duty, the pure moral law. And this, ac 
 cording to Kant, exerts so strong a motive power over 
 the will, that it is only when a man has acknowledged 
 its obligatory force, and obeyed it, that he learns for 
 the first time his own free causal power, his inde 
 pendence of all merely sensitive determinators. The 
 naked moral law, defecated, as he speaks, of all emo 
 tions of the sensory, is the one only dynamic which he 
 admits as truly moral. This acting on the will, with 
 no emotion interposed, will alone, he insists, place 
 morality on a true foundation, will create a higher 
 speculative ethics, and a higher practical morality, and 
 will awaken deeper moral sentiments, than any system 
 of ethics compounded now of ideal, now of actual ele 
 ments, can do. 
 
 In the rigidity with which he holds that in pure < 
 moral action the law shall alone sway the will, that all 
 emotion, love the purest, pity the tenderest, shall have , 
 no place, Kant is ultra-stoical. The representation of 
 duty, when embraced, will awaken reverence for the law, 
 and this is a pure moral emotion. But in determining 
 the act, the stern imperative must stand alone, and re- t ^ <r>, 
 fuse all aid from emotion or affection. For these there 
 is no room in a pure morality, except as the submissive 
 slaves of duty. 
 
 In making this high demand it should be remembered 
 that Kant is setting forth, not an actual state which he -\ t ^ 
 expects to find in human nature, but an ideal, which 
 nevertheless, because it is an ideal, affects human nature 
 more powerfully than any maxim merely generalized ; v , 
 from experience. And perhaps if the moral idea is to 
 be set forth in its native strength and dignity, it is well 
 that it should be exhibited thus nakedly. It does come 
 shorn of much of its power, when so largely mingled, as 
 
 it is in Butler, with considerations of mere prudence. 
 
 r 
 
302 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 
 
 As has been remarked, however, even Kant, much as 
 he desired to get rid of experience in constructing his 
 morality, was not able to do so. He was obliged to 
 come to experience before he could give content to his 
 moral law " So act, that thou couldst consistently will 
 the principle of thy action to become law universal for 
 all intelligents." So Kant shaped his imperative. This 
 is not very unlike Austin s utilitarian question, " What 
 would be the probable effect on the general happiness or 
 good, if similar acts were general or frequent ? " Again, 
 as we saw, he is obliged to supplement his moral life 
 here with the belief of a future life, where virtue and 
 happiness shall be one, where the ideal shall become act 
 ual ; thus proving that human feelings cannot to the end 
 be banished from a moral system, that of happiness some 
 account must be taken. And yet Kant is right in giv 
 ing to such considerations a subordinate, not a primary, 
 place. 
 
 From this brief survey of the motive power as it ap 
 pears in the systems of some of the most famous " Intu 
 itive Moralists," it would have been interesting, had 
 space allowed, to have turned to the Utilitarian theorists, 
 and examined at length the answers they give to the 
 same question. As it is, however, a few remarks must 
 suffice. This school of philosophers, as is well known, 
 maintains that utility, or the tendency to promote pleas 
 ure or to cause pain, is the only quality in actions which 
 makes them good or bad. They hold, moreover, that 
 pleasure and pain are the only possible objects of choice, 
 the only motives which can determine the will. These 
 are the fundamental tenets of that school of philosophers 
 represented by Epicurus in the ancient world, and by 
 Bentham and his followers, Mr. Mill and Professor 
 Bain, in our own day. If by the happiness which is 
 said to be the end of action is meant merely the happi- 
 
TEE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 30; 
 
 /y 
 
 ness of one s self, the system is one of the plainest and 
 most intelligible, the dynamic force is the most obvious, 
 and the most surely operating, that can well be imagined. 
 But then the course of action dictated by the desire of ; 
 exclusive self-interest is not, according to the view of ; 
 most men, a moral one at all, and the motive is not 
 moral, but selfish. The aim of all morality, truly con-" " 
 ceived, is to furnish men with a standard of action, and 
 a motive to work by, which shall not intensify each 
 man s selfishness, but raise him ever more and more 
 above it. If, on the other hand, it is said that it is not 
 my own private interest, but the general interest, which 
 I am to aim at, this may be said in two distinct senses : 
 Either I am to seek the greatest happiness of all men, 
 the sum total of human interests, because an enlightened 
 experience tells me that my happiness is in many ways 
 bound up with theirs. But the good of others thus pur 
 sued is only a means to my own private good, and I am 
 still acting on a selfish motive a strong but not a 
 moral one. Or I am to aim at the general happiness 
 for its own sake, and not merely as a means to my own. 
 But then I am carried beyond the range of self-interest, 
 and acknowledge as binding other motives which lie 
 outside of the utilitarian theory. To the question, Why 
 am I to act with a view to the happiness of others ? the 
 utilitarian can, on his own principles, give no other an 
 swer than this, Because it is your own interest to do so. 
 If we are to find another, we must leave the region of 
 personal pleasure and pain, and acknowledge the power 
 of some other motive which is impersonal. With Ben- 
 tham it is a fundamental principle that the desire of per 
 sonal goo$ is the only motive which governs the will. 
 This is the one exclusive mode of volition which he rec 
 ognizes. He denies the other two, unselfish regard for 
 others, and the moral law or the abstract sense of right, 
 
 | 
 
304 r*^THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 
 
 and yet these two exist as really as self-love. It is just 
 as certain a fact that men do sometimes act from gener 
 ous impulses, or from respect to what they feel to be 
 right in itself, apart from all consequences, as that they 
 do often act merely with an eye to their own happiness. 
 In the naked form, therefore, in which Bentham puts it, 
 utilitarianism is founded on a psychological mistake. 
 But the utilitarian system takes many forms. Yet, as 
 Jouffroy, who has discriminated between the varieties 
 with great acuteness, observes, " Whether a man pur 
 sues the gratification of impulse, or the accompanying 
 pleasure, or the different objects fitted to produce it; 
 whether he prefers, as most fitted to promote his highest 
 good, the satisfaction of certain tendencies and pleasures ; 
 or finally, whether for the attainment of his end he 
 adopts the circuitous means of general interest, or the 
 direct pursuit of his own, is of little consequence to de 
 termine : he is impelled to act, in every instance, by cal 
 culations of what is best for himself. Self-love remains 
 essentially the same under all its forms, and impresses a 
 similar character upon the various schemes of conduct to 
 which it leads." 
 
 In Mr. Mill s treatise on " Utilitarianism " there is in 
 words no departure from the fundamentals of the utili 
 tarian creed, though ingenuity is strained to the utmost 
 to make that creed include principles and sentiments 
 which are really alien to it. Indeed, in this treatise 
 one prominent characteristic of all the author s writings 
 is more than usually conspicuous. On the one hand, 
 with an amiable obstinacy he adheres to the sensational 
 and utilitarian tenets which formed his original philo 
 sophic outfit. On the other hand, he employs a re 
 dundance of argument, sometimes verging on special 
 pleading, to reconcile to his favorite hypothesis views 
 and feelings gathered in alien regions, with which his 
 
THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 305 
 
 widened experience has made him familiar. The effort 
 continued throughout his " Utilitarianism " has occa 
 sioned, if one may venture to hint it, a want of clear 
 statement and of precise thought, with sometimes a 
 straining of the meaning of terms, which one hardly 
 expects to meet with in so trained a logician. This 
 comes no doubt from the fact, that in order to adapt 
 the utilitarian theory to the primary moral perceptions 
 of men, it is necessary to go counter to the natural 
 current of thought, and to give a twist to forms of 
 speech, which have interwoven themselves into the 
 very texture of language. One of these strange con 
 tortions is the following opinion : that it is the idea of 
 the penal sanction which makes men feel certain acts 
 to be wrong ; not that they are wrong in themselves, 
 and therefore visited with punishment. Or, as Mr. Mill 
 otherwise expresses it, " the deserving or not deserv 
 ing punishment lies at the bottom of the notions of 
 right and wrong." This doctrine, which Mr. Mill seems 
 to hesitate to state in all its breadth, else instead of 
 " deserving " he would probably have written " imposi 
 tion of punishment," has been stated more explicitly by 
 Professor Bain, who maintains that " the imposition of 
 punishment is the distinctive property of acts held to 
 be morally wrong ; " and again, that " the primary germ 
 and commencement of conscience is the dread of punish- 
 ment." Another equally startling position maintained 
 by Mr. Mill, is that virtue is pursued primarily only as a 
 means to an end, namely happiness., just as money is ; 
 but that in time it comes to be regarded as part of tha 
 end, happiness, and as such is pursued for its own sake, 
 just as misers come to love money for itself, and not 
 for its uses. He holds that in man originally there is 
 no desire of virtue, or motive to it, save as a means to 
 gain pleasure or avoid pain. But even when desired 
 20 
 

 306 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 
 
 irv 
 
 for its own sake, which he grants it conies to be, its 
 worth arises, not from its own intrinsic excellence, but 
 from its being the most important of all means to the 
 general happiness. 
 
 But what it more concerns us to remark at present 
 is the answer which Mr. Mill gives to the question, 
 What is the sanction of the utilitarian ethics, what the 
 motive to conform to this standard ? It is of two 
 kinds, the external and the internal. The external 
 motive is the hope of favor or the fear of punishment 
 from our fellow-men or from the Supreme Ruler. The 
 internal motive is primarily the desire of our own hap 
 piness, which, however, when enlarged by intelligence, 
 expands into a desire for the good of others. It does 
 so because the more we are enlightened the more 
 clearly we perceive that our own good is inextricably 
 bound up with theirs ; because there is in us a natural 
 desire to be in unity with others ; lastly, because an 
 unselfish regard for our neighbors springs, by the prin 
 ciple of association, out of intercourse begun at first 
 merely from self-regard. It is observable, however, 
 that Mr. Mill, though he stretches to the utmost the 
 motive of self-regard, combining with it as much as 
 possible of what is otherwise admirable in human na 
 ture, and though he seems to allow the existence, in a 
 certain subordinate degree, of purely unselfish sympa 
 thies, yet in the last resort makes self-regard the cen 
 tre to which all the other feelings, as accretions, cling, 
 and around which they are woven into " a complete 
 web of corroborative association." In this ground-plan 
 of human nature, the unselfish sympathies and the 
 moral principle are not made to occupy what I be 
 lieve they in reality do occupy as substantial and in 
 dependent a place as the feeling of self-interest. Hence 
 neither the standard of action, nor the motive power 
 
THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. vjBO? 
 
 he sets forth, however much transformed by the ^ajjntiO*. 
 touch of association, ever gets clear of the origin^ 
 
 taint of self-reference. Mr. Mill s utilitarianism does 
 not, any more than other forms of the same doctrine, 
 give either a really moral standard, or a self-forgetting 
 and moral motive. As water cannot rise above the 
 level from which it springs, no more can moral theo 
 ries. Self-love may be, and as a fact often is, the first 
 impulse that drives a man to seek to become morally and 
 religiously better. And there is a measure of self-regard 
 which is right, wherein the individual self is identified 
 with the universal self. But before a man can become 
 either truly moral or religious, private self-regard must 
 have been wholly subordinated to, if not entirely cast out 
 by a higher principle of action and a purer affection. 
 
 In the opening chapter of his work on " Jurispru 
 dence," Austin sets forth the utilitarian doctrine with 
 a distinctness of outline which far surpasses Mr. Mill s 
 exhibition of it. He does not, like the latter, assert 
 that conduciveness to general happiness is the essence, 
 but only that it is the index of right action. The 
 Tightness and wrongness of all acts Austin grounds pri 
 marily on the Divine will or command. God designs 
 the happiness of all his creatures ; and as He has given 
 us faculties to perceive what actions tend to produce 
 this, and what actions tend to thwart it, He has given 
 us therein a criterion by which to know what his will 
 is, that is, what actions we ought to do, what to avoid. 
 This representation of the theory furnishes a lever 
 above and independent of utility, namely, the will of 
 God and therefore, in one point of view, a motive 
 which, if once realized, is every way adequate to engen 
 der moral action. But still it does not rise above the 
 utilitarian subjection to pleasure and pain. For Aus 
 tin sums up the Divine will in pure benevolence, and 
 
308 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 
 
 grounds obedience to it solely on the fact that God can 
 reward and punish to the uttermost. But to obey God 
 chiefly or entirely for such a reason, does not amount to 
 moral obedience, nor is such a motive a moral motive. 
 
 There may perhaps be held a view which, differing in 
 other respects from the utilitarian theory, agrees with it 
 in regarding pleasure as the universal motive power in 
 moral as well as in all other action. It may be said 
 that in all cases where a choice is made, pleasure, or, as 
 it is sometimes phrased, interest, is the determinator of 
 the choice ; that in all conscious actions, thoughts, feel 
 ings, where a preference is made, it is because the pleas 
 ure of the one preferred is felt by the agent to be 
 greater than the pleasure of those not preferred. The 
 maintainer of such a theory would say that the com 
 monly received distinction between pleasure and duty is 
 a misleading one. For whenever any act is preferred, 
 this itself proves that act, however painful it seems, to 
 be not only pleasurable, but the most pleasurable. Let 
 there be two acts, it would be said, one a gratification 
 of sense, and as such pleasurable, the other a denial of 
 this gratification, and so far painful, yet if the latter is 
 done from what is called a sense of duty, the fact that 
 it has been preferred proves that it was not only pleas 
 ant, but the most pleasant to him who preferred it. 
 For that which in the event is chosen to be done is 
 thereby proved to be the most pleasurable. To this it 
 may be replied that to make the pleasurable synony 
 mous with that which is actually preferred, is to give 
 the term a quite new meaning. So to stretch the idea 
 of pleasure is to change it entirely, and to render it 
 wholly vague and empty of meaning. 
 
 It may be true that in most, perhaps in all, moral 
 acts, there is present more or less a conscious pleasure, 
 but it is present as a consequence, not as an antecedent 
 
 
THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 309 
 
 of the choice. It is also true that virtue and pleasure 
 are so far from being incompatible, that the higher a 
 man advances in virtue the greater is his delight in it ; 
 indeed, that the measure of his delight is in some sort a 
 gauge of his moral progress. But, on the other hand, 
 it is no less true that while man remains in the present 
 state of moral struggle, in some of his acts of purest 
 duty the ingredient of pleasure must be so faintly pres 
 ent as to be inappreciable. To all theories of virtue 
 which give pleasure or self-love a foremost place in it, 
 whether as entering into its nature, or operating as its 
 moving spring, it is enough to answer that they with 
 draw from moral action that which is a main constituent 
 of it, namely, its unselfish character, and so reduce it to 
 the level of at least mere prudence. They fail to recog 
 nize what Dr. Newman has so well described as " a re 
 markable law of ethics, which is well known to all who 
 have given their minds to the subject. All virtue and 
 goodness tend to make men powerful in this world ; but 
 they who aim at the power have not the virtue. Again, 
 virtue is its own reward, and brings with it the truest 
 and highest pleasures ; but they who cultivate it for the 
 pleasure-sake are selfish, not religious, and will never 
 have the pleasure, because they never can have the vir 
 tue." There is no truth of ethics more certain than 
 this. And it is not merely an abstract principle, but 
 one which embodies itself in practice every day before 
 our eyes. How continually do we see that the pleasure- 
 seeker is not the pleasure-finder; that those are the 
 happiest men who think least about happiness ! Be 
 cause, in order to attain to that serene and harmonious 
 energy, that inward peace, which is the only true happi 
 ness, a man must cease to seek pleasure, and apprehend 
 some higher object to live for. So true is it that, as has 
 been said, the abandoning of some lower end in obedi- 
 
310 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 
 
 ence to a higher aim, is often made the very condition 
 of securing the lower one. Or, as the author of " Ecce 
 Homo " writes, " It is far from universally true that to 
 get a thing you must aim at it. There are some things 
 which can only be gained by renouncing them." And 
 such a thing moral pleasure is. Does not this charac 
 teristic, that when you make the pleasure your conscious 
 aim, it is gone, at least the purer essence, the finer 
 bloom of it, prove that it is merely a subsidiary ac 
 companiment of moral action, the attendant shadow, not 
 the substance, and cannot therefore be its propelling 
 power ? 
 
 The foregoing survey of systems, ancient and modern, 
 has been long, perhaps even to weariness, and yet it has 
 not given us the thing we seek. In what have been 
 called the intuitive theories, the motive presented, if 
 high, has been remote and impalpable, not such as 
 would naturally come home to the hearts of ordinary 
 men. The narrower forms of utilitarianism offer a mo 
 tive near and strong enough self-love ; but then it is 
 one which men of moral aspiration most long to rise 
 above. When the endeavor is made to combine with 
 it benevolence, and to take in the whole human race, 
 the motive is no doubt elevated, but at the expense of 
 its power ; it is emptied of the strength which self-love 
 peculiarly possesses. On the whole, then, from this 
 want of practical help in many ways, and especially 
 from their lack of a moral dynamic, it is no wonder 
 that most men turn from ethical theories with weariness 
 and even disgust. Young students, and older men pro 
 fessionally interested in these subjects, can hardly imag 
 ine how widely this is the case, not only with those so 
 immersed in transitory interests as to have no time or 
 heart for higher matters, but also with the devoutly re 
 ligious, with men of ideal longings, with those who have 
 
THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 311 
 
 been much exercised with earnest questionings. Men 
 who are simply religious turn from theories of virtue, as 
 not only useless, but as cold, hard, unloving obstruc 
 tions that come between them and that their heart most 
 loves to commune with. Morality seems to draw all its 
 help from man s own. internal resources, and they feel 
 too keenly that not in these is help to be found, but in 
 a strength out from and above themselves. The inmost 
 breathing of the devout heart is, " Lead me to the rock 
 that is higher than I." And the deep-hearted poet, 
 weary of abstractions, and longing for life, more life, and 
 fuller, turns from moral theories with a passionate 
 
 a Away, haunt not thou me, 
 Thou vain Philosophy ! 
 Little hast thou bestead, 
 Save to perplex the head 
 And leave the spirit dead. 
 Unto thy broken cisterns wherefore go, 
 While from the secret treasure depths below, 
 Fed by the skyey shower, 
 
 And clouds that sink and rest on hill-tops high, 
 Wisdom at once, and Power 
 Are welling, bubbling forth, unseen, incessantly? 
 
 Why labor at the dull mechanic oar, 
 When the fresh breeze is blowing, 
 And the strong current flowing 
 Right onward to the eternal shore? " 
 
 Broken cisterns ! this was all one of the deepest- 
 minded men and most thoughtful poets of our time 
 found in our moral systems after long enough study of 
 them. 
 
 Again, when we read the lives of those men who 
 have had the deepest spiritual experience, to whom, on 
 the one hand, the infinity of duty, the commandment 
 exceeding broad, and, on the other, the depth of their 
 own spiritual poverty, has been most laid bare we 
 find them confessing that the seventh chapter of Romans 
 
312 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 
 
 describes their condition more truly than any philos 
 opher has done. With their whole hearts they have 
 felt St. Paul s " O wretched man that I am ! who shall 
 deliver me ? " Such are the men who, having them 
 selves come out of great deeps, become the spirit-quick- 
 eners of their fellow-men, the. revivers of a deeper 
 morality. To all such there is a grim irony in the 
 philosophic ideas when confronted with their own 
 actuals. So hopelessly wide seems the gap between 
 their own condition and the " Thou shalt " of the com 
 mandment. Not dead diagrams of virtue such men 
 want, but living powers of righteousness. They do not 
 quarrel with the moralist s ideal, though it is neither 
 the saint s nor the poet s. They find no fault with his 
 account of the faculty which discerns that ideal, though 
 it is not exactly theirs. But what they ask is not the 
 faculty to know the right, but the power to be right 
 eous. It is because this they find not, because what 
 reason commands, the will cannot be or do, that they 
 are filled with despair. As well, they say, bid us lay 
 our hand upon the stars because we see them, as realize 
 your ideal of virtue because we discern it. 
 
 But is there no outlet by which, from the mere forms 
 of moral thought, a man may climb upward to the 
 treasure-house of its power? Let us turn and look 
 once more at the moral law, as exhibited in its purest 
 form by Kant. In this view the moral law is not a 
 higher self, but an independent reality, which, entering 
 into a man, evokes the higher self within him. To the 
 truth, as well as the sublimity of Kant s conception, all 
 hearts bear witness, by the reverence they must feel in 
 its presence. And yet we know that, when we lay this 
 bare law to heart, it engenders not strength, but despair. 
 A few there may have been who have been able to 
 dispense with all tender feelings, and to live high lives 
 
THE MORAL MOTIVE POWKR. 313 
 
 by dint of the law of duty alone. All honor to such 
 hardy spirits ! no word shall be said in their disparage 
 ment. However imperfect their principle may be, 
 their face is set in the right direction ; they are on the 
 way, who but must believe it ? to all good. Yet their 
 lives, upright though they may be, will be stern and 
 unrejoicing, wanting in much that hearts set free should 
 have. But for most men, and among these for many 
 even in the nobler sort, such a life would be impossible. 
 Under such an iron rule, a large, and that the finer 
 part of man s being, would have no place ; the soul s 
 gentler but more animating forces would be starved 
 for lack of nutriment. Still, as this law contains so 
 much of highest truth, let us keep fast hold of it, and 
 see whence it comes, and whither it leads. 
 
 On reflection we find that there are many facts of 
 human nature and of the world, many separate lines of 
 thought, all leading upward and converging on one 
 spiritual centre. These are like so many mountain 
 paths, striking upward in diverse directions, but leading 
 all at last to one great summit. Of these the moral 
 law is the loftiest, the directest, the most inward, the 
 most awe-inspiring. 
 
 But to begin with the outward world, there is, I 
 shall not say so much the mark of design on all out 
 ward things, as an experience forced in upon the mind 
 of the thoughtful naturalist, that, penetrate into nature 
 wherever he may, thought has been there before him ; 
 that, to quote the words of one of the most distin 
 guished, " there is really a plan, a thoughtful plan, a 
 plan which may be read in the relations which you and 
 I, and all living beings scattered over the surface of our 
 earth, hold to one another." The work of the natural 
 ist, as he goes on to say, " consists only in an attempt 
 to read more and more accurately a work in which he 
 

 314 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 
 
 has had no part, a work which displays the thought 
 of a mind more comprehensive than his own ; his task 
 is to read the thoughts of that mind as expressed in the 
 living realities that surround us ; and the more we give 
 up our own conceit in this work, the less selfish we be 
 come, the more shall we discern, the deeper we shall 
 read, and the nearer we shall come to nature ; " and, it 
 may be added, to Him whose thought nature is. 
 
 Again, when we look within, there is " the causal 
 instinct of the intellect," as it has been called, the 
 mental demand for a cause of every event, or rather 
 the ineradicable craving for a Power behind all phe 
 nomena, of which they are but the manifestations, a 
 craving which no form of Comtean philosophy will ever 
 exercise. 
 
 Again, there is the passionate longing of the imagina 
 tion, aspiring after an ideal perfection for ourselves and 
 others, apprehending a beauty more than eye has seen 
 or ear heard. 
 
 Again, there is " the unsufficingness of self for self," 
 the dependency of the affections, feeling the need of 
 an object like themselves ; yet higher, more enduring, 
 all-perfect, on which they can lean, in which they may 
 find refuge. 
 
 Again, another avenue upward is a feeling of the 
 derivative nature, not of our affections merely, but of 
 our whole being. We are here a little while, each 
 a small rill of life, containing many qualities. We 
 feel, think, fear, love ; no facts are more certain to me 
 than these. Yet it is just as certain that I am here 
 not by my own will. I did not place myself here ; 
 cannot keep myself here. My life is in the grasp of 
 powers which I cannot, except in the smallest measure, 
 and for only a little while, control. There must be a 
 source whence this life, and all the other similar lives 
 
THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 315 
 
 around me, come. And that source cannot be anything 
 lower, or possessed of lower qualities, than myself, but 
 rather something containing, in infinite abundance, all 
 the qualities which I and all other beings like to me, in 
 finite measure, have. There must be some exhaustless 
 reservoir of being from which my small rill, and these 
 numberless like rills of being, come, a fountain that 
 contains in itself the all of soul that has been diffused 
 through the whole human race, and infinitely more. 
 This is no elaborate argument, but almost an instinctive 
 perception. Call it anthropomorphic, if you please ; 
 it is none the less a natural and true way of thinking, 
 and as old as the Stoics. Cicero puts it in the mouth 
 of his Stoic Balbus, and has supplied him with no bet 
 ter argument. 
 
 Lastly, and chief of all, there is the law of duty, com 
 ing home to the morally awakened man more inti 
 mately, affecting him more profoundly, than anything 
 else he knows. What is it whence comes it this 
 law, which lies close to all his thoughts, an ever-pres 
 ent, though often latent consciousness, haunting him 
 like his very being ? Mr. Mill speaks slightingly, as it 
 seems, of " the sort of mystical character which is apt 
 to be attributed to the idea of moral obligation," but 
 he has not as yet been able in any measure to remove 
 the mystery. If instead of trying to resolve it unsat 
 isfactorily into lower elements, as the analyst is apt to 
 do, or to shrink from it as the sensual nature always 
 will do, or to act out merely the letter of it, as the 
 legalist will try to do, we can but get ourselves to look 
 at it steadily, and with open heart, the mystery of its 
 nature and origin will not grow less to us, ,but more. 
 What is it ; is it mere abstraction ? That which rea 
 son apprehends, and the personal will bows to, as an 
 authority superior to themselves, cannot be a mere ab- 
 
316 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 
 
 straction, but something which is congenerous with 
 themselves. The moral law must be either a self- 
 existing entity, like to our highest nature, or must in 
 here in one who possesses all that we have of reason 
 and will, only in an infinitely greater degree. That 
 which our inner self, our personality, feels to have 
 rightful supremacy over it, must be either in personal 
 ity, or something more excellent than personality, if 
 that is possible. Lower than a personality it cannot 
 be, and lower all mere laws and abstractions undoubt 
 edly are. To some such conviction as this we are led 
 up, by asking what is this moral law which we appre 
 hend, and whence does it come? Here, if anywhere, 
 we find the golden link which connects the human na 
 ture with the Divine. 
 
 Putting then all these converging lines of thought to 
 gether, we see that they meet in the conviction that 
 there is behind ourselves, and all the things we see and 
 know, a Mind, a Reason, a Will, like to our own, only 
 incomprehensibly greater, of which will and reason the 
 moral law is the truest and most adequate exponent we 
 have. Not that these lines, any or all of them, are to 
 be taken as proofs demonstrating the existence of God. 
 That is a truth, I believe, incapable of scientific demon 
 stration. The notion of God seems to be, as Coleridge 
 has well expressed it, essential to the human mind, not 
 derived from reasonings, but as a matter of fact actually 
 called forth into distinct consciousness mainly by the 
 conscience. When, however, we come to reflect on 
 that belief afterwards, we find hints and confirmations 
 of it, mainly in the existence of our moral nature and 
 of the law of duty, and secondarily in those other lines 
 of thought which, as we have seen, converge towards 
 the same centre. But these are dim tracts of thought 
 hard to tread with firm step. Yet though the lines as 
 
THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 317 
 
 here traced are imperfect and broken, they may be 
 taken for what they are meant to be, hints for 
 thought on an exhaustless subject. 
 
 In this discussion I have taken for granted that the 
 morality of man is in its essence identical with the mo 
 rality of God that when we use the word righteous 
 of man and of God, we do not use it in two different 
 senses, but in the same sense. This position, implicitly 
 held before by all, both philosophers and ordinary men, 
 has been more explicitly brought out and established 
 by the polemic which the late Dean Hansel s denial of 
 it called forth. The result of a real faith not merely 
 in an abstract moral law, but in a Personal Being, 
 in whom dwells the moral law and whatever of highest 
 is in ourselves, of whose moral Being our moral nature 
 is a faint but true image, will be to let in on the soul 
 a new motive power, a new centre of existence. This 
 is the first condition of a living morality as well as of 
 vital religion, that the soul shall find a true centre out 
 from and above itself, round which it shall revolve. 
 The essence of all immorality, of sin, is the making self 
 the centre to which we subordinate all other beings 
 and interests. To be delivered from this, the condition 
 of the natural man is the turning-point of moral prog 
 ress, and of spiritual renewal. The new and rightful 
 centre which shall draw us out of our self-centre, and 
 by its attraction make us revolve round itself, must be 
 that which contains the moral law, and whatever is best 
 in ourselves, and in all other created selves. He only 
 in whose image we are made can be such a centre to 
 ouc. creaturely wills. But further, neither the God 
 whom mere science hints of, nor the God whom the 
 bare unrelenting moral law sets forth, is capable of being 
 a real resting-place for the heart of man. There are 
 warm emotions within it, which, before representations 
 
318 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 
 
 of a God of mere law, whether natural or moral, die 
 down like herbs beneath an arctic winter. To call 
 forth these, it requires the unveiling of a Living and a 
 Personal Will, in sympathy not only with whatever 
 moral principle is in us, but also with whatever is most 
 pure and tender in our affections. When we come to 
 conceive thus of God, then there becomes possible a 
 going forth towards Him of the tenderer and devouter 
 emotions, as well as of the more purely moral senti 
 ments. Such a Being becomes to man the centre and 
 the end for his reason, affections, and conscience alike 
 a foundation on which his whole being can perma 
 nently repose. 
 
 But few, and these only the most favored of the 
 sons of men, have, apart from revelation, ever attained 
 so to conceive of God. A pure-minded sage here and 
 there Plato, when he drops his dialectics and gives 
 vent to his devouter mind, as in the well-known pas 
 sage of the " Theaetetus," Marcus Aurelius here and 
 there in his meditations may have in some measure, 
 though far off, so caught a glimpse of Him. To most 
 men who have sought Him at all, outside of Chris 
 tianity, it has been at best but a dim feeling after Him, 
 if haply they might find Him. It required the ap 
 pearance of Christ on earth to bring close to the hearts 
 of any number of men the power of moral inspiration 
 which is laid up in the very thought of God. Till 
 then He seemed too high, too remote for this. But 
 when Christ in human form came near to them, his 
 presence touched the moral springs in men, hitherto 
 dormant, and made new forces of spiritual life stir 
 within them. Christ henceforth, both by his own 
 personal teaching and example, and also by the new 
 light of God s character which He let in on men s 
 hearts, Himself the channel through which that light 
 
THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 319 
 
 was let in, became a new dynamic power of virtue, 
 an inspirer of goodness. The virtue-making power 
 which He used was different from that which had been 
 employed by the philosophers. They addressed the 
 reason ; He touched the whole man by his words, by 
 his deeds, above all by contact with Himself. The 
 two methods are well contrasted in the following pas 
 sage of " Ecce Homo " : 
 
 " Who is the philosophic good man ? He is one 
 who has considered all the objects and consequences 
 of human action ; he has, in the first place, perceived 
 that there is in him a principle of sympathy, the due 
 development of which demands that he should habitu 
 ally consider the advantage of others ; he has been led 
 by reflection to perceive that the advantage of one 
 individual may often involve the injury of several ; he 
 has therefore concluded that it is necessary to lay 
 down systematic rules for his actions, lest he should be 
 led into such miscalculations, and he has in this rea 
 sonable and gradual manner arrived at a system of 
 morality. This is the philosophic good man. Do we 
 find the result satisfactory ? Do we not find in him a 
 languid, melancholic, dull, and hard temperament of 
 virtue ? He does right, perhaps, but without warmth 
 or promptitude. Arid no wonder ! The principle of 
 sympathy was feeble in him at the beginning for want 
 of contact with those who might have called it into 
 play, and it has been made feebler still by hard brain- 
 work and solitude. On the other hand, who is the 
 good man that we admire and love? How do men 
 become for the most part pure, generous, and humane ? 
 By personal, not by logical influences. They have 
 been reared by parents who had these qualities, they 
 have lived in society which had a high tone, they have 
 been accustomed to see just acts done, to hear gentle 
 
320 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 
 
 words spoken, and the justness and the gentleness have 
 passed into their hearts and slowly moulded their 
 habits, and made their moral discernment clear ; they 
 remember commands and prohibitions which it is a 
 pleasure to obey for the sake of those who gave them ; 
 they think of those who may be dead, and say, How 
 would this action appear to him ? Would he approve 
 that word, or disapprove it ? .... They are never 
 alone, because the absent Examples, the Authorities 
 they still revere, rule not their actions only, but their 
 inmost hearts ; because their conscience is indeed 
 awake and alive, representing all the nobleness with 
 which they stand in sympathy, and reporting their 
 most hidden indecorum before a public opinion of the 
 absent and the dead." 
 
 It was this last mode of appeal, one not wholly 
 unknown before his day, that Christ adopted. But 
 though the channel was familiar, the use He made of 
 it was not ; for the influence He poured through it 
 was not only the purest human, but the Divine. The 
 philosophers had addressed the reason, and failed. 
 Christ laid hold of a passion which was latent in every 
 man, and prevailed. What was this passion ? It was 
 the love, not of man, " not of all men, nor yet of every 
 man, but of the man in the man." But this in all men 
 is naturally a weak principle ; how did He make it 
 a powerful one, make it " a law-making power, a root 
 of morality in human nature ? " He gave a command 
 to love all men without exception, even our enemies. 
 Now a command cannot create love ; but with the 
 commandment He gave Himself to love, and to awake 
 the love that lies dormant in every man. This, which 
 is the central teaching of " Ecce Homo," must be given 
 in the author s own words, so full of beauty and 
 power : 
 
THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 321 
 
 " Did the command to love go forth to those who 
 had never seen a human being they could revere? 
 Could his followers turn upon him and say, How can 
 we love a creature so degraded ? .... Of this race 
 Christ Himself was a member, and to this day is it not 
 the best answer to all blasphemers of the species, the 
 best consolation when our sense of its degradation is 
 keenest, that a human brain was behind his forehead, 
 and a human heart beating in his breast, and that 
 within the whole creation of God nothing more ele 
 vated or more attractive has yet been found than He ? 
 .... It was because the edict of universal love 
 went forth to men whose hearts were in no cynical 
 mood, but possessed with a spirit of devotion to a man, 
 that words which, at any other time, however grandly 
 they might sound, would have been but words, pene 
 trated so deeply, and along with the law of love the 
 power of love was given. Therefore, also, the first 
 Christians were enabled to dispense with philosophical 
 phrases, and instead of saying that they loved the ideal 
 of man, could simply say and feel that they loved 
 
 Christ in every man Christ believed it possible 
 
 to bind men to their kind" (and to all goodness), "but 
 on one condition, that they were first bound fast to 
 Himself." 
 
 To his followers who walked with Him on earth, 
 his presence, and to many in every age since, his 
 image has been the strongest of all levers to lift them 
 out of selfishness, and to new-create into goodness. 
 They have found in his life and character an objective 
 conscience better than all other ideals of perfection; 
 in their sympathy with Him they have had the most 
 unerring test by which to discern what was right and 
 what was wrong to do ; and in their love and venera 
 tion for Him, a motive power beyond all powers, ena- 
 21 
 
322 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 
 
 bling them to do what was right from the love of it, 
 a power of loving God and of loving man, because 
 they loved both in Him. To such the law of love 
 absorbed into itself and transfigured the law of duty, 
 and became, in a new and preeminent way, the fulfill 
 ing of the law. Morality to them was no longer sub 
 jection and obedience to a dead abstract law, which 
 they might revere but could not love, but an inspira 
 tion caught by contagion with Him who contained 
 the moral law and all the springs of morality in Him 
 self. This is that central truth, long tacitly recognized, 
 but enforced with such power in " Ecce Homo " as 
 almost to appear new. 
 
 If we were to go no further, we have enough to 
 prove that Christ introduced into the moral heart of 
 man that which all philosophers have been unable to 
 find, a new dynamic force, which not only told them 
 what was good, but inspired them with the love and 
 the power of being good. In short, He was the living 
 centre of a new moral and spiritual creation. But if 
 we go thus far, we cannot stop here, it would seem 
 we must go further than the author of " Ecce Homo " 
 does. For Christ claimed for Himself, and all who 
 had followed Him most closely have acknowledged, that 
 there are other powers and truths in Him, which in 
 that able survey are either left in the background or 
 altogether passed by. Those more transcendent doc 
 trines, Christ s atonement, his resurrection, the in 
 dwelling of his Spirit, are as much part of the testi 
 mony about Christ and of the agencies by which 
 He has changed the world, as anything that we know 
 of his character. Indeed they are part, and a large 
 part, of what makes his character. You cannot cut 
 off the one without shaking the foundations of the 
 other ; and these doctrines are, if true at all, not 
 
THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 323 
 
 merely in conformity with the purest moral and spir 
 itual principles, but must be their very essence, must 
 lie at their very root. Those who have most laid to 
 heart and lived by these doctrines, have found in the 
 Atonement the obliterating of all past sin, the lifting 
 off the whole load of guilt. This is not the place to 
 enlarge on these things. But no fact in man s moral 
 history is more certain than this, that the simple state 
 ment of Scripture, " Christ has appeared to put away 
 sin by the sacrifice of Himself," has been found effica 
 cious to reach down to the lowest depths of men s 
 souls beyond any other truth ever uttered on this 
 earth. In the Resurrection, they have found the as 
 surance that what conscience prophesies will in the 
 end come true, that, though experience often seems 
 against it, " right is stronger than wrong, truth is bet 
 ter than falsehood, purity shall prevail over sensual 
 indulgence, meekness shall inherit the earth ; for right, 
 truth, and purity are summed up in their champion 
 Christ, and He has conquered death, the one uncon 
 querable champion of the enemy." In the promise of 
 the indwelling Spirit, and its fulfillment, they have 
 found a surety that the impulse which Christ first gave 
 will not fail nor grow old, but will overcome all ob 
 stacles and outlast time. One great practical result 
 of these truths is the animating confidence they give 
 that " God is for us." There is nothing so crushing 
 to moral effort as the suspicion that however we may 
 strive to live rightly, the great forces of the universe 
 may be after all against us. But here the Atonement 
 and the Resurrection come in. They tell us that this 
 suspicion is groundless, that God is not against us, 
 but on our side, that the faintest desire to be better 
 He sympathizes with, and will help ; that even on the 
 heart where no such desire is yet stirring, He still 
 
324 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 
 
 looks tenderly, that lie wills its salvation, and Las 
 proved that He really and deeply wills it by a self- 
 1 sacrificing love greater than we can conceive. Can 
 \ any strength for moral improvement go beyond this ? 
 Nor is it merely a one-sided view of the love of 
 God which thus comes to our aid. His righteousness 
 too since we must speak of these two things sepa 
 rately, though in reality they are one his righteous 
 ness, if it turns on our selfish and sinful nature a side 
 that is fearful, turns also on all our better longings a 
 side that is full of hope. A righteousness that is per 
 fect, that is, a Divine righteousness, cannot be fully 
 satisfied with merely apportioning reward and punish 
 ment according to desert. This, though one aspect 
 of righteousness, is its lower and incomplete work. 
 The righteousness which is perfect, or rather the per 
 fectly Righteous One, must long to bring all his intel 
 ligent creatures in sympathy with his own righteous 
 ness, to make them partakers of it, and cannot be fully 
 satisfied with any other result. As it has been ex 
 pressed, " Righteousness in God is craving for right 
 eousness in man, with a craving which the realization 
 of righteousness in man alone can satisfy." So also 
 of holiness. In one view it repels the sinner, and 
 would banish him to outer darkness, because of its 
 repugnance to sin. In another it is pained by the 
 continued existence of sin and unholiness, and must 
 desire that the sinner should cease to be sinful. So 
 that the sinner, awakening to his own evil state, and 
 saying to himself, " By sin I have destroyed myself ; 
 is there yet hope for me in God ? " may hear an en 
 couraging answer, not only from the love and mercy 
 of God, but also from his very righteousness and holi 
 ness. When he meditates on the character of the 
 Lord his consolation will be, " Surely the Divine right- 
 
THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 325 
 
 eousness desires to see me righteous the Divine ho 
 liness desires to see me holy ; my continuing unright 
 eous and unholy is as grieving to God s righteousness 
 and holiness as my misery through sin is to his pity 
 arid love ? " It is in such faiths as these, such glances 
 upward to God, that the soul finds the only true re 
 storative. 
 
 The result of all that has been said is this, that only 
 in vital Christianity, or rather, to speak plainly, in God 
 revealed in Christ, lies the adequate and all-sufficient 
 moral motive power for man. For in Him thus re 
 vealed all the principles of man s composite nature find 
 their object. The natural desire for happiness, the 
 yearning of the affections, the moral needs of con 
 science, the aspiration to be perfect, all are satisfied. 
 And these diverse principles so centered are turned into 
 motive powers, or rather into one composite motive 
 power, in which the lower, more self-regarding ele 
 ments, are gradually subordinated and absorbed by the 
 higher. 
 
 But you say, perhaps, that these things, if true, are 
 things of faith, and morality stands on grounds of rea 
 son. Is it so ? Is it, then, certain that morality is in 
 dependent of faith ? To prefer an unseen duty because 
 it is right, to a seen pleasure because it is pleasant, 
 what "is this but an act of faith ? It requires faith to 
 do the simplest moral act, if it is to be done morally. 
 And the highest religious truths, if once they are appre 
 hended vitally and spiritually from within, and not 
 merely taken passively on authority from without, will 
 be found to require but an expansion of that same prin 
 ciple of faith by which, in its more elementary form, 
 we realize the simplest moral truths. 
 
 There can be no mariner of doubt that the promise, 
 
326 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 
 
 " I will put my laws into their hearts, and in their 
 minds will I write them," is the one great work which 
 philosophy could not do, which the gospel has to some 
 extent done. It has brought in that which moralists 
 in vain sought after, and without which their schemes 
 were vain a living " virtue-making power." This 
 was held forth as a hope in the Old Testament, " All 
 my fresh springs are in thee ; " " In thy light shall we 
 see light ; " " Then shall I run in the way of thy com 
 mandments, when thou shalt enlarge my heart." 
 When Christianity was first preached, it was in large 
 measure fulfilled. To St. Paul and the first Christians 
 the law became no longer a stern commandment, stand 
 ing outside of them, threatening them from above ; but 
 a warm law of love within them not only a higher 
 discernment of the good, but a new and marvelous 
 power to do it, cheerfully, and with joy. And down 
 all the ages, whatever obscurations Christianity has un 
 dergone, this, the true apostolic succession, coming 
 straight from the Divine Source to each individual re 
 cipient anew, has never failed. In such as Augustine, 
 A Kempis, Luther, Pascal, Leighton, Fenelon, Henry 
 Martyn, the pure and sacred fire has been relit from 
 age to age. They, by what they were, and what they 
 did, became, each to their generation, the renewers of a 
 deeper, more substantive morality. For the Christian 
 light in them was not a tradition or an orthodoxy, but 
 a living flame, enlightening and warming themselves, 
 and passing from them to others. And so to this day 
 their works are storehouses of moral and spiritual 
 quickening, more than all the books of all the moral 
 ists. When you read Leighton, for instance, you feel 
 yourself breathing a spiritual air, compared with which 
 the atmosphere of the moral systems is dull and de 
 pressing. For in Leighton, and such as he, morality 
 
THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 327 
 
 is, as Mr. Arnold finely expresses it, " lighted up with 
 the emotion and inspiration needful for carrying the 
 sage along the narrow way perfectly, for carrying the 
 ordinary man along it at all." The saintly Archbishop 
 was speaking of what few have a right to speak of, but 
 what he had seen and known when he said, " One 
 glance of God, a touch of his love, will free arid en 
 large the heart, so that it can deny all, and part with 
 all, and make an entire renouncing of all to follow 
 Him." Again, " It is in his power to do it for thee. 
 He can stretch and expand thy straitened heart, can 
 hoist and spread the sails within thee, and then carry 
 thee on swiftly ; filling them, not with the vain air of 
 men s applause, but with the sweet breathings and soft 
 gales of his own Spirit, which carry it straight to the 
 desired haven." 
 
 This is the language of those who, like Leighton, 
 have known most immediately, to use again his own 
 words, " the sensible presence of God, and shining of 
 his clear-discovered face on them." Perhaps ordinary 
 men had better speak little of these things, they are 
 so far beyond their experience. But language like 
 this, because it has been often repeated as a mere hear 
 say by those who had no experience of it, has come to 
 be regarded by many as merely a decorous tradition 
 among religious people, which other men nauseate. 
 Still, however overlaid it has been with words, and 
 however remote from it most men must confess them 
 selves to be, the thing here spoken of remains none the 
 less a reality towards which end not only the relig 
 ious, but even the uprightly moral heart, must look 
 and aspire. 
 
 In the light of these thoughts regarding the spiritual 
 springs of morality, how vain appears that cry so often 
 heard in this day, " Give us Christian morality without 
 
328 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 
 
 the dogmas ! " In as far as any dogmas may be the 
 mere creations of churches, or may be truths crusted 
 over with human accretions, by all means let them be 
 either swept away or purified. There is much need 
 that all doctrines taught should be adjusted fittingly to 
 the moral nature of men, so as, by manifestation of the 
 truth, to commend themselves to every man s conscience 
 in the sight of God. It is also true that as men ad 
 vance in spiritual insight, their view of doctrine be 
 comes more simple, more natural, more transparent 
 with moral light. But still it is no less true that love 
 to a transcendent object, to a living person, is the one 
 root of Christian virtue, and that to expect Christian 
 well-doing without a soul based on Christian faith, is to 
 expect fruit from a tree which has no root. As was 
 often said by one whose long life of Christian wisdom 
 and love gave weight to his words : " Renan and oth 
 ers admire the morality of the Sermon on the Mount, 
 but reject altogether the doctrines or transcendent 
 truths of Christianity. They would divide the one 
 from the other as with a knife, preserving this, throw 
 ing away that. Now only think of it in this way. 
 Take that one precept, " Love your enemies, do good 
 to them that hate yon." How am I really to fulfill 
 this ? If the law of my country gives me a command, 
 bids me do this or not do that overt act, I can give it 
 an outward mechanical obedience, and with this human 
 law is satisfied. But the divine precept commands not 
 an outward act, but an inward spiritual condition of 
 being. How am I to attain to this ? By my force of 
 will ? My will can rule my outward acts, but cannot 
 change my inward dispositions. What shall avail to 
 turn the whole tide of feeling, and change the natural 
 hatred of enemies into love for them ? Nothing short 
 of the forgiveness and the love of God in Christ to me 
 
THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 329 
 
 and to all men felt to be a reality. This has power to 
 change the natural hatred into a forgiving love. Noth 
 ing else can." This seems clear as demonstration. And 
 in like manner it might be shown that there is not one 
 Christian precept which has not its root, its motive 
 spring, directly in some transcendent truth of God s 
 nature, and of the soul s relation to Him. Deny these 
 and the precepts fall. Vain, therefore, is the dream 
 of a Christian morality without a true Christian theol 
 ogy supporting and inspiring it from beneath. 
 
 But this tendency to seek the fruits of Christianity 
 while rejecting its root, is as nothing compared with the 
 extravagance of that modern system, which teaches that 
 " the service of humanity " may be raised to the level of 
 a practical and all-powerful moral motive, while all be 
 lief in a personal immortality and in the existence of 
 God is denied, and a vague something, called the " spirit 
 of humanity," is made the only object of worship. This 
 strange persuasion has at this time its devotees, some of 
 them men of great parts, and, I believe, of benevolent 
 lives. That there should be some such men pos 
 sessed by fanaticism for a creed which parodies Chris 
 tianity while it rejects it is not more to be wondered 
 at than any other form of fanaticism. The causes that 
 have produced this strange phenomenon might not be 
 difficult to find. But it is a thing to be wondered at 
 that a cool-headed philosopher like Mr. Mill, who has 
 never showed much tendency to fanaticism for this or 
 any form of religion, should have thrown over it the 
 shield of his patronage. Yet so it is. While professing 
 that he entertains the strongest objections to M. Comte s 
 system of politics and morals, he still thinks that that 
 system has " superabundantly shown the possibility of 
 giving to the service of humanity, even without the aid 
 of a belief in Providence, both the psychological power 
 
330 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 
 
 and the social efficacy of a religion ; making it take 
 hold of human life, and color all thought, feeling, and 
 action, in a manner of which the greatest ascendancy 
 ever exercised by any religion may be but a type and 
 foretaste." Mr. Mill may have thrown all the more 
 strength into this statement of opinion, that he was ad 
 vocating a mode of thought which he knew to be unpop 
 ular. For certainly it is one of his characteristics, that 
 whether from the desire to help the weaker party, or 
 from the love of paradox, he loves to cut prejudice 
 against the grain. Can it be that to the same reason is 
 to be attributed that other strange statement of his, that 
 the ideal of Christian morality is negative rather than 
 positive, passive rather than active, abstinence from evil 
 rather than energetic pursuit of good ? If this is not to 
 be put down to the love of paradox, it is an instance of 
 ignorance in a writer of high repute, to which it would 
 be hard to find a parallel. To refute it there is no need 
 to turn to the New Testament, though, if one did so, one 
 should have to quote nearly the half of it ; neither need 
 one point to the lives of the most eminent Christians, 
 and the extent to which philanthropy purely Christian 
 has changed the world. For a sufficient refutation I 
 need only refer to a modern authoress, who plainly 
 enough shows that she is as free as Mr. Mill is from any 
 weakness for orthodoxy. In her essay on Christian 
 Ethics, Miss Cobbe sets forth with great force how 
 Christ changed the negative law of the Jews into a posi 
 tive, and thereby transformed the whole spirit of moral 
 ity, giving to men the being good, and doing good for 
 their aim. And then she contrasts with this what she 
 thinks the unmanly ethics of the modern churches, 
 the mere refraining from evil and leading harmless lives. 
 But to return to Mr. Mill s assertion, that " the service 
 of humanity " may probably be found to be a motive 
 
THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 331 
 
 force as powerful, or even more powerful, than any 
 hitherto known. Is it not a fact of history that it was 
 Christ, who by his character, his teaching, his whole rev 
 elation, for the first time so enlarged men s narrow 
 hearts as to make some of them at least conceive an uni 
 versal love for their kind ? How He did this we have 
 partly seen already, and cannot dwell more on it now. 
 Is it not also a fact of history, that since his sojourn on 
 earth a new virtue, philanthropy, has come into being, 
 and that of the great benefactors of mankind by far the 
 largest number, and those the noblest and most self- 
 denying, have been men who have confessed that they 
 drew their inspirations to well-doing directly from Him ? 
 Have these not declared that the power which enabled 
 them to overcome natural shrinking, and to seek out 
 their fallen fellow-creatures, even under the most un 
 lovely and revolting circumstances, was the simple faith 
 that God and Christ .have had pity on themselves, and 
 on all men, even the most degraded ? This worth of 
 human nature, the most degraded, in the eyes of Christ, 
 has for his true followers invested it, even when most 
 marred, with a new sacredness. In saying this it is no 
 mere feeling or fancy I speak of, but one of the soberest, 
 best attested facts. If for eighteen centuries this has 
 been proved to be the strongest motive power in the 
 breasts of great philanthropists, will men s devotion to 
 the good of their kind become wider or more intense if 
 you remove those beliefs which have hitherto fed it ? 
 Permanent devotion to any object is exactly in propor 
 tion to the belief in the worth of that object. Will 
 men s sense of the worth of the race be greater when 
 you have removed from their minds all thought of an 
 eternal destiny, and convinced them that their yearnings 
 towards God are a delusion ? Would human life seem 
 more lovely or more sublime, if you could take Christ 
 
332 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 
 
 out of the heart of the race, and obliterate all sense of 
 the relation in which we stand to God ? Would the 
 music of humanity sound more grand and deep if you 
 could silence these, its tenderest, profoundest tones? 
 Nothing that we know of the past or of the nature of 
 things makes it in the least probable that by withdraw 
 ing what has hitherto proved the chief creative power of 
 philanthropy, you will increase its volume. And if we 
 are to wait till trial can be made of the new panacea, 
 the suspense will be long, and the result disastrous to the 
 best interests of mankind. It will, I suspect, require 
 something more than the mere assertion of any philoso 
 pher to make sober-minded men hazard the experiment. 
 Not to Christian morality, without the faith which 
 underlies it, still less to the Comtean " service of 
 humanity," can we look with hope for the moving force 
 which shall make man fulfill his moral end. There is 
 still another agency, which is so ably recommended that 
 it must not be passed without a word. There are some 
 at this day who look to Culture, taken in its largest 
 sense, as the remedy for all our ills, the solvent to 
 break the horny crust that hardens round men s hearts, 
 the leavening power which shall transform all that is 
 coarse, and low, and selfish into purity and light. Cul 
 ture, in this large sense, is made to include not only 
 the usual intellectual and esthetic elements, but also 
 moral, and even religious ones. The aim, it is said, 
 which the widest culture sets before itself, is to train 
 man not only to an aesthetic but to a spiritual perfec 
 tion. And since man has religious needs, true culture 
 will take account of these and set itself to supply them. 
 Thus religion becomes a large ingredient in culture, 
 a means, perhaps the highest means, toward perfection, 
 yet still a means. For culture, in its ideal of " a 
 harmonious expansion of all the human powers," goes 
 
THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 333 
 
 beyond religion and subordinates religion to itself. So 
 conceived, culture, it is said, " adding to itself the re 
 ligious idea of a devout energy, is destined to transform 
 and govern " religion. According to this view, culture 
 is the end, religion but the means. 
 
 There are, however, things which, because they are 
 ultimate ends in themselves, refuse to be employed as 
 means, and if attempted to be so employed, lose their 
 essential character. Religion is one, and the foremost 
 of these things. Obedience, conformity of the finite 
 and the imperfect will of man to the infinite and perfect 
 will of God, this, which is the essence of religion, is an 
 end in itself, the highest end which we can conceive. 
 It cannot be sought as a means to an ulterior end with 
 out being at once destroyed. This is an end, or rather 
 the end in itself, which culture and all other ends by 
 right subserve. And here in culture, as we saw in 
 pleasure, the great ethic law will be found to hold, that 
 the abandoning of it as an end, in obedience to a higher, 
 more supreme aim, is the very condition of securing it. 
 Stretch the idea of culture and of the perfection it aims 
 at wide as you will, you cannot, while you make it your 
 last end, rise clear of the original self-reference that 
 lies at its root ; this you cannot get rid of, unless you 
 go out of culture, and beyond it, abandoning it as the 
 end, and sinking it into what it really is, a means 
 towards the perfection of human nature. No one ever 
 really became beautiful by aiming at beauty. Beauty 
 comes, we scarce know how, as an emanation from 
 sources deeper than itself. If culture, or rather the 
 ends of culture, are to be healthy and natural growths, 
 they must come unconsciously, as results of conformity 
 to the will of God, sought not for any end but itself. 
 On the other hand, culture, making its own idea of per 
 fection the end and religion the means, would degener- 
 
334 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 
 
 ate into an unhealthy artificial plant, open to the 
 charges urged against it by its enemies. 
 
 It cannot indeed be denied that these two, culture or 
 the love of beauty, religion or the love of godliness, ap 
 pear in individuals, in races, in ages, as rival, often as 
 conflicting forces. In themselves, and essentially, it 
 cannot be that they are opposed ; but when either 
 enters the human spirit, so absorbing is the attraction, 
 that it for the most part casts out the other. The 
 votary of beauty shrinks from religion as something 
 stern and ungenial, the devout Puritan discards beauty 
 as a seductive snare, and even those who have hearts 
 susceptible of both, find that a practical crisis will come 
 when a choice must be made whether of the two they 
 will serve. The consciousness of this disunion has of 
 late years been felt deeply in the most gifted minds. 
 Painful often has the conflict been, when the natural 
 love of beauty was leading one way, loyalty to that 
 which is higher than beauty called another, and no 
 practical escape was possible, except by the sacrifice of 
 feelings which in themselves were innocent and beau 
 tiful. This discord has doubtless been intensified by 
 the fact that ever since the Reformation men have 
 taken the one or the other definite road, not dreaming 
 that the two might be reconciled, or that it was desir 
 able to reconcile them. Only in recent times have we 
 begun to feel strongly that both are good, that each 
 without the other is so far imperfect, and that some 
 reconciliation, if it were possible, is a thing to be de 
 sired. Violent has been the reaction which this new 
 consciousness has created. In the recoil from what 
 they call Puritanism, or religion without culture, many 
 have given themselves up to culture without religion, 
 or, at best, with a very diluted form of religion. They 
 have set up for worship the golden calf of art, and 
 
THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 335 
 
 danced round it to the pipe which the great Goethe 
 played. They have promulgated what they call the 
 gospel of art, as Carlyle says, the windiest gospel 
 ever yet preached, which never has saved and never 
 will save any man from moral corruption. Not that 
 way lies the true solution. It is but a vain attempt to 
 build up culture on the denial of man s first and deepest 
 need. That need is still what it ever has been, that 
 his will be brought into contact with a Will higher, 
 purer, stronger, than itself, on which it can hang, from 
 which, as an ever-present " Personal Inspirer," it can 
 draw all it needs of purifying strength. Set right by 
 allegiance to the All-righteous Will, in dependence not 
 in self-centered perfection, in service not in culture, 
 in a higher self than itself, the soul finds its true 
 well-being. This centre once found Christ as the 
 life of individual hearts, as the cementing bond of all 
 humanity culture may be added without stint. In 
 subservience to Him, used as an instrumentality in 
 building up his kingdom, culture has a beneficent work 
 to do. Apart from this, setting up for itself, it can 
 never clear itself of the original taint of self-reference. 
 But if it will understand its true calling to be the means 
 not the end, the servant not the master, large service 
 lies ready before it. To adjust the claims, and deter 
 mine the place of culture in reference to religion, is, I 
 know, a hard problem ; and it were a useful work, for 
 those who can, to help to adjust it. But the first con 
 dition of success is, that we recognize the true centre, 
 and look for harmony by seeing the other elements 
 held in their places by the force of the central attrac 
 tion. 
 
 I have attempted to show how a new and more vital 
 force is imported into morality, when we regard the ab 
 stract moral law of ethical science as absorbed into the 
 
336 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 
 
 All-righteous, All-loving Personal Will which Christian 
 ity reveals. In doing so I have touched, and that very 
 imperfectly, I am well aware, but one side of a many- 
 sided, indeed of an exhaustless problem. When man s 
 natural moral sentiments are confronted with the Chris 
 tian revelation, many other questions arise, some of 
 them more fundamental, though none perhaps more 
 practical, than the one here discussed. Of these funda 
 mental inquiries one of the foremost is, how far man 
 naturally possesses within himself certain moral senti 
 ments which serve as criteria by which the truth of a 
 revelation may be judged. On this grave question I 
 cannot even enter at the close of this discussion. Only 
 I would remark, that the moral nature in man must be 
 that to which any objective religion, which claims to be 
 universal, must mainly make its appeal. Else man has 
 no internal standard at all by which to try any religion 
 which claims to be received ; and on purely external 
 grounds, it is conceivable that a religion, teaching im 
 morality, might have much to say for itself. Christian 
 ity, at first, though it came with external signs and 
 wonders, yet rested its claim mainly on its adaptation to 
 man s moral nature, and must do so more and more, as 
 the moral perceptions it has itself quickened become 
 deeper and purer. It must be so, if revelation be in 
 deed the appeal which God makes through facts of his 
 tory to the witness of Himself which He has left in con 
 science. In this view, Christian faith receiving revealed 
 truth is the leaping up of like to like, the exile recog 
 nizing once more a voice from his home. 
 
 The appeal to a power of judging in man is made in 
 many different forms by our Lord Himself : " Why 
 even of yourselves judge ye not what is right ? " St. 
 Paul, too, says that he strove in all he taught, to com 
 mend himself to every man s conscience. And the 
 
* <*- . *^*iH 
 /j 
 
 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 337 
 
 more either individuals or the race advance in spiritual 
 intelligence, the more readily will they respond to this 
 appeal in preference to all others. Morality and Chris 
 tianity have for eighteen centuries acted and reacted on 
 each other, the outward truth quickening the inward- 
 perceptions, and these, when quickened, purifying men s 
 apprehensions of the outward truth. And these two " 
 have become so interwoven that it is now impossible to 
 separate them, and to say, this was drawn from the one 
 source, and that from the other. Christianity, from the 
 first, appealing partly to men s natural desire to escape 
 from the dreaded consequences of sin, partly to the 
 moral longings for righteousness, never wholly dead in 
 the race, has, through this mingling of prudential and 
 moral motives, elevated the best of mankind, and made 
 their moral perceptions what they now are. And these 
 moral perceptions, thus refined, react on the objective 
 religion, and require ever more stringently that the 
 truths presented by it shall be not moral only, that is, 
 conformable to all that is best in man, but that they 
 shall complement this, strengthen, elevate it. They re 
 quire not only that nothing which is un-moral shall be 
 taught as true of God and his dealings with man, but 
 that all which is taught concerning Hun shall be in the 
 highest conceivable degree righteous, shall be such as to 
 lay hold of and to cherish whatever susceptibility of 
 righteousness there is in man, and carry it on to perfec 
 tion. This is so obvious that it seems a truism. It is 
 so readily assented to that no one would think of deny 
 ing it when stated in this general way. Yet it is pain 
 ful to think how much and how persistently it has often 
 been lost sight of in popular religious teaching, and 
 with how disastrous consequences. I am quite aware 
 of the difficulties which this principle has to meet when 
 turned to certain points hi the elder and more rudimen- 
 
338 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 
 
 tary forms of revelation. To solve these fairly would 
 require a combination of moral and historical insight, 
 with various kinds of knowledge, such as few possess. 
 But when this principle is applied to the latest and 
 completed revelation, Christianity can meet its require 
 ments in their most exacting form. If precept or truth 
 can elevate, what height of morality can be conceived 
 which shall go beyond such precepts as this : " Be ye 
 perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect " ? or 
 such announcements as these : " God is love ; " " God 
 is light, and in Him is no darkness at all " ? Indeed, 
 it is only when the inner moral eye has been clarified 
 that the meaning of these statements comes out at all, 
 and evermore as the moral nature rises these great 
 truths rise above it infinitely. And if it be said that 
 after all these are but general announcements, void of 
 content, and we still need to know what perfection, 
 light, love, are, then there remains our Lord s own life, 
 with his teaching, actions, character, to fill these general 
 words with living substance. 
 
 It were well that those who have to teach religion 
 should consider these matters more closely, make a 
 study more searching than is commonly made of what 
 there is in moral man, what this longs for, with what 
 alone it will be satisfied. The most thoughtful teach 
 ers know this, know that for want of thus meeting the 
 moral needs of men, thus grappling with the higher 
 moral side of questions, there is danger lest the pur 
 est morality of modern time part company with the 
 received religion. Men who are to teach cannot see 
 too clearly or seize too firmly the distinction between 
 that which is really moral and that which is merely 
 prudential in man ; and though they may not alto 
 gether pass by motives drawn from the latter region, 
 on the former mainly they must throw themselves, to it 
 
THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 339 
 
 must be their chief appeal. They must cease to be 
 content if they can raise men merely to the prudential 
 level of a desire for safety, they must feel that their 
 work is hardly begun till those they teach have come 
 to desire righteousness for the love of itself. They 
 must refuse to meet moral yearnings by un-moral doc 
 trines or expedients, for bread giving men a stone. 
 They must keep steadily before them that nothing can 
 permanently satisfy the moral being in man, but some 
 thing not less, but more moral, more spiritual than it 
 self. They must feel themselves, and make others feel, 
 that in the Divine economy, though there is much 
 which is now dark and mysterious, there is nothing 
 which is not supremely moral, and which will not at 
 last be clearly seen to be so. In ceasing to use so ex 
 clusively the weapons of merely earthly, and wielding 
 more confidently those of pure spiritual temper, they 
 need not fear that the old armory of Christianity will 
 fail them. In the old words, the old truths, the old 
 facts, more vitally and spiritually apprehended, because 
 brought closer to the moral heart of man, they will 
 find all they need. This close contact between Chris 
 tian truths and the highest moral thought of the time, 
 while it vitalizes and makes real the former, will react 
 no less powerfully on the latter. There is no moral 
 truth which is not deepened when seen in the light of 
 God. That which, regarded from the side of man, is 1 
 felt merely as a yielding to his own sensual nature, 
 when seen from the side of God becomes disobedience \ 
 to a loving and righteous will to which he owes every 
 thing, and is deepened into a sense of sin. Character, 
 which when regarded from a merely moral point of 
 view almost inevitably becomes a building up from our 
 own internal resources, takes altogether another aspect 
 when it is seen that true character is in the last resort 
 
340 THE MORAL MOTIVE POWER. 
 
 determined by the attitude in which the spirit stands to 
 God. Then it comes to be felt that the Tightness men 
 search for cannot be self-evolved from within, that they 
 must cease from attempting this, must go beyond self, 
 must fall back on a simple receptivity, receiving the 
 Tightness and the right-making power, which they have 
 not in themselves, from out of the great reservoir of 
 righteousness which is in God. Only on thus falling 
 back on God, and feeling himself to be, as of every 
 thing else, so of righteousness, a recipient, is a man 
 truly Tightened. Thus the last moral experience and 
 the first upward look of religion agree in one, "A 
 man can receive nothing^ except it be given himjfrom 
 above." 
 
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