! Bard tremendous in sublimity!
Could I behold thee in thy loftier mood,
Wand'ring at eve, with finely frenzied eye,
Beneath some vast old tempest-swinging wood!
Awhile, with mute awe gazing, I would brood,
Then weep aloud in a wild ecstasy."

His Tragedy, entitled _Remorse_, is full of beautiful and striking
passages, but it does not place the author in the first rank of dramatic
writers. But if Mr. Coleridge's works do not place him in that rank, they
injure instead of conveying a just idea of the man, for he himself is
certainly in the first class of general intellect.

If our author's poetry is inferior to his conversation, his prose is
utterly abortive. Hardly a gleam is to be found in it of the brilliancy
and richness of those stores of thought and language that he pours out
incessantly, when they are lost like drops of water in the ground. The
principal work, in which he has attempted to embody his general view of
things, is the FRIEND, of which, though it contains some noble passages
and fine trains of thought, prolixity and obscurity are the most frequent
characteristics.

XII

MR. SOUTHEY

Perhaps the most pleasing and striking of all Mr. Southey's poems are not
his triumphant taunts hurled against oppression, are not his glowing
effusions to Liberty, but those in which, with a mild melancholy, he seems
conscious of his own infirmities of temper, and to feel a wish to correct
by thought and time the precocity and sharpness of his disposition. May
the quaint but affecting aspiration expressed in one of these be
fulfilled, that as he mellows into maturer age, all such asperities may
wear off, and he himself become

"Like the high leaves upon the holly-tree!"

Mr. Southey's prose-style can hardly be too much praised. It is plain,
clear, pointed, familiar, perfectly modern in its texture, but with a
grave and sparkling admixture of _archaisms_ in its ornaments and
occasional phraseology. He is the best and most natural prose-writer of
any poet of the day; we mean that he is far better than Lord Byron, Mr.
Wordsworth, or Mr. Coleridge, for instance. The manner is perhaps superior
to the matter, that is, in his Essays and Reviews. There is rather a want
of originality and even of _impetus_: but there is no want of playful or
biting satire, of ingenuity, of casuistry, of learning and of information.
He is "full of wise saws and modern" (as well as ancient) "instances." Mr.
Southe