adations and subtly linked conditions,
shifting intricately as we ourselves change; and bids us by constant
clearing of the organs of observation and perfecting of analysis to
make what we can of these. To the intellect, to the critical spirit,
these subtleties of effect are more precious than anything else. What
is lost in precision of form is gained in intricacy of expression. To
suppose that what is called 'ontology' is what the speculative
instinct seeks, is the misconception of a backward school of
logicians. Who would change the colour or curve of a roseleaf for that
[Greek: ousia achromatos, aschematistos, anaphes]. A transcendentalism
that makes what is abstract more excellent than what is concrete has
nothing akin to the leading philosophies of the world. The true
illustration of the speculative temper is not the Hindoo, lost to
sense, understanding, individuality; but such an one as Goethe, to
whom every moment of life brought its share of experimental,
individual knowledge, by whom no touch of the world of form, colour,
and passion was disregarded.

The literary life of Coleridge was a disinterested struggle against
the application of the relative spirit to moral and religious
questions. Everywhere he is restlessly scheming to apprehend the
absolute; to affirm it effectively; to get it acknowledged. Coleridge
failed in that attempt, happily even for him, for it was a struggle
against the increasing life of the mind itself. The real loss was,
that this controversial interest betrayed him into a direction which
was not for him the path of the highest intellectual success; a
direction in which his artistic talent could never find the conditions
of its perfection. Still, there is so much witchery about his poems,
that it is as a poet that he will most probably be permanently
remembered. How did his choice of a controversial interest, his
determination to affirm the absolute, weaken or modify his poetical
gift?

In 1798 he joined Wordsworth in the composition of a volume of
poems--the _Lyrical Ballads_. What Wordsworth then wrote is already
vibrant with that blithe _elan_ which carried him to final happiness
and self-possession. In Coleridge we feel already that faintness and
obscure dejection which cling like some contagious damp to all his
writings. Wordsworth was to be distinguished by a joyful and
penetrative conviction of the existence of certain latent affinities
between nature and the human mind, which r