ed, a kind
of credulity or superstition exercised upon abstract words. Like
Clifford, in Hawthorne's beautiful romance--the born Epicurean, who by
some strange wrong has passed the best of his days in a prison--he is
the victim of a division of the will, often showing itself in trivial
things: he could never choose on which side of the garden path he
would walk. In 1803, he wrote a poem on 'The Pains of Sleep'. That
unrest increased. Mr. Gillman tells us 'he had long been greatly
afflicted with nightmare, and when residing with us was frequently
aroused from this painful sleep by any one of the family who might
hear him'.

That faintness and continual dissolution had its own consumptive
refinements, and even brought, as to the 'Beautiful Soul' in _Wilhelm
Meister_, a faint religious ecstasy--that 'singing in the sails' which
is not of the breeze. Here, again, is a note of Coleridge's:

'In looking at objects of nature while I am thinking, as at
yonder moon, dim-glimmering through the window-pane, I seem
rather to be seeking, as it were asking, a symbolical
language for something within me that already and for ever
exists, than observing anything new. Even when that latter
is the case, yet still I have always an obscure feeling, as
if that new phenomenon were the dim awaking of a forgotten
or hidden truth of my inner nature.' Then, 'while I was
preparing the pen to write this remark, I lost the train of
thought which had led me to it.'

What a distemper of the eye of the mind! What an almost bodily
distemper there is in that!

Coleridge's intellectual sorrows were many; but he had one singular
intellectual happiness. With an inborn taste for transcendental
philosophy he lived just at the time when that philosophy took an
immense spring in Germany, and connected itself with a brilliant
literary movement. He had the luck to light upon it in its freshness,
and introduce it to his countrymen. What an opportunity for one reared
on the colourless English philosophies, but who feels an irresistible
attraction towards metaphysical synthesis! How rare are such occasions
of intellectual contentment! This transcendental philosophy, chiefly
as systematized by Schelling, Coleridge applies, with an eager,
unwearied subtlety, to the questions of theology and art-criticism. It
is in his theory of art-criticism that he comes nearest to true and
important principles; that is the leas