ch, for instance,
would accept the results of M. Renan's investigations, he turns it
into a false security by anticipating the judgement of an undeveloped
criticism. Twenty-five years of that criticism have gone by, and have
hardly verified the anticipation.

The man of science asks, Are absolute principles attainable? What are
the limits of knowledge? The answer he receives from science itself is
not ambiguous. What the moralist asks is, Shall we gain or lose by
surrendering human life to the relative spirit? Experience answers,
that the dominant tendency of life is to turn ascertained truth into a
dead letter--to make us all the phlegmatic servants of routine. The
relative spirit, by dwelling constantly on the more fugitive
conditions or circumstances of things, breaking through a thousand
rough and brutal classifications, and giving elasticity to inflexible
principles, begets an intellectual finesse, of which the ethical
result is a delicate and tender justness in the criticism of human
life. Who would gain more than Coleridge by criticism in such a
spirit? We know how his life has appeared when judged by absolute
standards. We see him trying to apprehend the absolute, to stereotype
one form of faith, to attain, as he says, 'fixed principles' in
politics, morals, and religion; to fix one mode of life as the essence
of life, refusing to see the parts as parts only; and all the time his
own pathetic history pleads for a more elastic moral philosophy than
his, and cries out against every formula less living and flexible than
life itself.

'From his childhood he hungered for eternity.' After all, that is the
incontestable claim of Coleridge. The perfect flower of any elementary
type of life must always be precious to humanity, and Coleridge is the
perfect flower of the romantic type. More than Childe Harold, more
than Werther, more than Rene, Coleridge, by what he did, what he was,
and what he failed to do, represents that inexhaustible discontent,
languor, and home-sickness, the chords of which ring all through our
modern literature. Criticism may still discuss the claims of classical
and romantic art, or literature, or sentiment; and perhaps one day we
may come to forget the horizon, with full knowledge to be content with
what is here and now; and that is the essence of classical feeling.
But by us of the present moment, by us for whom the Greek spirit, with
its engaging naturalness, simple, chastened, debonair, [Gre