e out by the more personal utterances
to be found in Coleridge's poems. Looking through them with this idea in
view, we are surprised at the deposit left in them by this conscious
experience on Coleridge's part. Not to dwell at all on what might be
very legitimately regarded as _indirect_ expressions of the sentiment,
we shall present here, in order to add emphasis to De Quincey's
position, some of the extracts which have most impressed us. From the
poem in the Early Poems 'To an Infant,' are these lines:

'Man's breathing miniature! thou mak'st me sigh--
A babe art thou--and such a thing am I,
To anger rapid and as soon appeased,
For trifles mourning and by trifles pleased,
Break friendship's mirror with a tetchy blow,
Yet snatch what coals of fire on pleasure's altar glow.'

Still more emphatic is this passage from the poem, 'Frost at Midnight':

'My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart
With tender gladness thus to look at thee,
And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,
And in far other scenes! For I was reared
In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags; so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all and all things in Himself.
Great Universal Teacher! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.'

In another place, when speaking of the love of mother for child and that
of child for mother, awakened into life by the very impress of that love
in voice and touch, he concludes with the line:

'Why was I made for Love and Love denied to me?'

And, most significant of all, is that Dedication in 1803 of his Early
Poems to his brother, the Rev. George Coleridge of Ottery St. Mary, when
he writes, after having dwelt on the bliss this brother had enjoyed in
never having been really removed from the place of his early nurture:

'To me the Eternal Wisdom hath dispensed
A different fortune, and more different mind--
Me, from the spot where first I sprang to light
Too soon transplanted, ere my soul had fixed
Its first domestic loves