nded with being what we call an agnostic, whose
pure poetic spirit carried him far into the realm of the highest
idealism. The existence of a conscious will within the universe is not
quite thinkable. Yet immortal love pervades the whole. Immortality is
improbable, but his highest flights continually imply it. He is sure
that when any theology violates the primary human affections, it
tramples into the dust all thoughts and feelings by which men may become
good. The men who, about 1840, stood paralysed between what Strauss
later called 'the old faith and the new,' or, as Arnold phrased it, were
'between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born,' found
their inmost thoughts written broad for them in Arthur Clough. From the
time of the opening of Tennyson's work, the poets, not by destruction
but by construction, not in opposition to religion but in harmony with
it, have built up new doctrines of God and man and aided incalculably in
preparing the way for a new and nobler theology. In the latter part of
the nineteenth century there was perhaps no one man in England who did
more to read all of the vast advance of knowledge in the light of higher
faith, and to fill such a faith with the spirit of the glad advance of
knowledge, than did Browning. Even Arnold has voiced in his poetry not a
little of the noblest conviction of the age. And what shall one say of
Mrs. Browning, of the Rossettis and William Morris, of Emerson and
Lowell, of Lanier and Whitman, who have spoken, often with consummate
power and beauty, that which one never says at all without faith and
rarely says well without art?

COLERIDGE

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in 1772 at his father's vicarage,
Ottery St. Mary's, Devonshire. He was the tenth child of his parents,
weak in frame, always suffering much. He was a student at Christ's
Hospital, London, where he was properly bullied, then at Jesus College,
Cambridge, where he did not take his degree. For some happy years he
lived in the Lake region and was the friend of Wordsworth and Southey.
He studied in Goettingen, a thing almost unheard of in his time. The
years 1798 to 1813 were indeed spent in utter misery, through the opium
habit which he had contracted while seeking relief from rheumatic pain.
He wrote and taught and talked in Highgate from 1814 to 1834. He had
planned great works which never took shape. For a brief period he
severed his connexion with the English Church, coming unde