oem--nay, not a Poem at all--nor ever to be so esteemed,
till the principles on which Great Poets build the lofty rhyme are
exploded, and the very names of Art and Science smothered and lost in
the bosom of Nature from which they arose.

Let the dullest clod that ever vegetated, provided only he be alive and
hear, be shut up in a room with Coleridge, or in a wood, and subjected
for a few minutes to the ethereal influence of that wonderful man's
monologue, and he will begin to believe himself a Poet. The barren
wilderness may not blossom like the rose, but it will seem, or rather
feel to do so, under the lustre of an imagination exhaustless as the
sun. You may have seen perhaps rocks suddenly so glorified by sunlight
with colours manifold, that the bees seek them, deluded by the show of
flowers. The sun, you know, does not always show his orb even in the
daytime--and people are often ignorant of his place in the firmament.
But he keeps shining away at his leisure, as you would know were he to
suffer eclipse. Perhaps he--the sun--is at no other time a more
delightful luminary than when he is pleased to dispense his influence
through a general haze, or mist--softening all the day till meridian is
almost like the afternoon, and the grove, anticipating gloaming, bursts
into "dance and minstrelsy" ere the god go down into the sea. Clouds too
become him well--whether thin and fleecy and braided, or piled up all
round about him castle-wise and cathedral-fashion, to say nothing of
temples and other metropolitan structures; nor is it reasonable to find
fault with him, when, as naked as the hour he was born, "he flames on
the forehead of the morning sky." The grandeur too of his appearance on
setting, has become quite proverbial. Now in all this he resembles
Coleridge. It is easy to talk--not very difficult to speechify--hard to
speak; but to "discourse" is a gift rarely bestowed by Heaven on mortal
man. Coleridge has it in perfection. While he is discoursing, the world
loses all its commonplaces, and you and your wife imagine yourself Adam
and Eve listening to the affable archangel Raphael in the Garden of
Eden. You would no more dream of wishing him to be mute for a while,
than you would a river that "imposes silence with a stilly sound."
Whether you understand two consecutive sentences, we shall not stop too
curiously to inquire; but you do something better, you feel the whole
just like any other divine music. And 'tis your own