must suffer yourself
to be lifted out of your own school of opinion or faith, and fall back
upon your own consciousness, an unsophisticated man. If you decline
this, _non tibi spirat_. From his earliest youth to this day, Mr.
Coleridge's poetry has been a faithful mirror reflecting the images of
his mind. Hence he is so original, so individual. With a little trouble,
the zealous reader of the "Biographia Literaria" may trace in these
volumes the whole course of mental struggle and self-evolvement narrated
in that odd but interesting work; but he will see the track marked in
light; the notions become images, the images glorified, and not
unfrequently the abstruse position stamped clearer by the poet than by
the psychologist. No student of Coleridge's philosophy can fully
understand it without a perusal of the illumining, and if we may so say,
_popularizing_ commentary of his poetry. It is the Greek put into the
vulgar tongue. And we must say, it is somewhat strange to hear any one
condemn those philosophical principles as altogether unintelligible,
which are inextricably interwoven in every page of a volume of poetry
which he professes to admire....

To this habit of intellectual introversion we are very much inclined to
attribute Mr. Coleridge's never having seriously undertaken a great
heroic poem. The "Paradise Lost" may be thought to stand in the way of
our laying down any general rule on the subject; yet that poem is as
peculiar as Milton himself, and does not materially affect our opinion,
that the pure epic can hardly be achieved by the poet in whose mind the
reflecting turn _greatly_ predominates. The extent of the action in such
a poem requires a free and fluent stream of narrative verse;
description, purely objective, must fill a large space in it, and its
permanent success depends on a rapidity, or at least a liveliness, of
movement which is scarcely compatible with much of what Bacon calls
_inwardness_ of meaning. The reader's attention could not be preserved;
his journey being long, he expects his road to be smooth and
unembarrassed. The condensed passion of the ode is out of place in
heroic song. Few persons will dispute that the two great Homeric poems
are the most delightful of epics; they may not have the sublimity of the
"Paradise Lost," nor the picturesqueness of the "Divine Comedy," nor the
etherial brilliancy of the "Orlando"; but, dead as they are in language,
metre, accent,--obsolete in religion,