rge one. If it represents what Coleridge
seriously expected from Wordsworth, it also suggests that he was
unconsciously wandering into an exposition of one of the gigantic but
constantly shifting schemes of a comprehensive philosophy, which he
was always proposing to execute. To try to speak of Coleridge
adequately would be hopeless and out of place. I must briefly mention
him, because he was undoubtedly the most conspicuous representative of
the tendencies opposed to Utilitarianism. The young men who found
Bentham exasperating imbibed draughts of mingled poetry and philosophy
from Coleridge's monologues at Hampstead. Carlyle has told us, in a
famous chapter of his _Life of Sterling_, what they went out to see:
at once a reed shaken by the wind and a great expounder of
transcendental truth. The fact that Coleridge exerted a very great
influence is undeniable. To define precisely what that influence was
is impossible. His writings are a heap of fragments. He contemplated
innumerable schemes for great works, and never got within measurable
distance of writing any. He poured himself out indefinitely upon the
margins of other men's books; and the piety of disciples has collected
a mass of these scattered and incoherent jottings, which announce
conclusions without giving the premises, or suggest difficulties
without attempting to solve them. He seems to have been almost as
industrious as Bentham in writing; but whereas Bentham's fragments
could be put together as wholes, Coleridge's are essentially
distracted hints of views never really elaborated. He was always
thinking, but seems always to be making a fresh start at any point
that strikes him for the moment. Besides all this, there is the
painful question of plagiarism. His most coherent exposition (in the
_Biographia Literaria_) is simply appropriated from Schelling, though
he ascribes the identity to a 'genial coincidence' of thought. I need
make no attempt to make out what Coleridge really thought for himself,
and then to try to put his thoughts together,--and indeed hold the
attempt to be impossible. The most remarkable thing is the apparent
disproportion between Coleridge's definite services to philosophy and
the effect which he certainly produced upon some of his ablest
contemporaries. That seems to prove that he was really aiming at some
important aspect of truth, incapable as he may have been of
definitively reaching it. I can only try to give a hint or two as to
i