regarded by Mr.
Coleridge as worthy of study and observation. We do not, of course, mean
that rules of this kind were always in his mind while composing, any
more than that an expert disputant is always thinking of the
distinctions of mood and figure, whilst arguing; but we certainly
believe that Mr. Coleridge has almost from the commencement of his
poetic life looked upon versification as constituting in and by itself a
much more important branch of the art poetic than most of his eminent
contemporaries appear to have done. And this more careful study shows
itself in him in no technical peculiarities or fantastic whims, against
which the genius of our language revolts; but in a more exact adaptation
of the movement to the feeling, and in a finer selection of particular
words with reference to their local fitness for sense and sound. Some of
his poems are complete models of versification, exquisitely easy to all
appearance, and subservient to the meaning, and yet so subtle in the
links and transitions of the parts as to make it impossible to produce
the same effect merely by imitating the syllabic metre as it stands on
the surface. The secret of the sweetness lies within, and is involved in
the feeling. It is this remarkable power of making his verse musical
that gives a peculiar character to Mr. Coleridge's lyric poems. In some
of the smaller pieces, as the conclusion of the "Kubla Khan," for
example, not only the lines by themselves are musical, but the whole
passage sounds all at once as an outburst or crash of harps in the still
air of autumn. The verses seem as if _played_ to the ear upon some
unseen instrument. And the poet's manner of reciting verse is similar.
It is not rhetorical, but musical: so very near recitative, that for any
one else to attempt it would be ridiculous; and yet it is perfectly
miraculous with what exquisite searching he elicits and makes sensible
every particle of the meaning, not leaving a shadow of a shade of the
feeling, the mood, the degree, untouched. We doubt if a finer rhapsode
ever recited at the Panathenaic festival; and the yet unforgotten Doric
of his native Devon is not altogether without a mellowing effect in his
utterance of Greek. He would repeat the

[Greek: autar Achilleus dakrusas, etaron aphar ezeto. k. t. l.]

with such an interpreting accompaniment of look, and tone and gesture,
that we believe any commonly-educated person might understand the import
of the passage