for criticism as the main phenomenon of Coleridge's poetic life,
is not, as with most true poets, the gradual development of a poetic
gift, determined, enriched, retarded, by the actual circumstances of
the poet's life, but the sudden blossoming, through one short season,
of such a gift already perfect in its kind, which thereafter
deteriorates as suddenly, with something like premature old age.
Connecting this phenomenon with the leading motive of his prose
writings, we might note it as the deterioration of a productive or
creative power into one merely metaphysical or discursive. In his
unambitious conception of his function as a poet, and in the very
limited quantity of his [88] poetical performance, as I have said, he
was a contrast to his friend Wordsworth. That friendship with
Wordsworth, the chief "developing" circumstance of his poetic life,
comprehended a very close intellectual sympathy; and in such
association chiefly, lies whatever truth there may be in the popular
classification of Coleridge as a member of what is called the "Lake
School." Coleridge's philosophical speculations do really turn on the
ideas which underlay Wordsworth's poetical practice. His prose works
are one long explanation of all that is involved in that famous
distinction between the Fancy and the Imagination. Of what is
understood by both writers as the imaginative quality in the use of
poetic figures, we may take some words of Shakespeare as an example.--

My cousin Suffolk,
My soul shall thine keep company to heaven
Tarry, sweet soul, for mine, then fly abreast.

The complete infusion here of the figure into the thought, so vividly
realised, that, though birds are not actually mentioned, yet the sense
of their flight, conveyed to us by the single word "abreast," comes to
be more than half of the thought itself:--this, as the expression of
exalted feeling, is an instance of what Coleridge meant by Imagination.
And this sort of identification of the poet's thought, of himself, with
the image or figure which serves him, is the secret, sometimes, [89] of
a singularly entire realisation of that image, such as makes these
lines of Coleridge, for instance, "imaginative"--

Amid the howl of more than wintry storms,
The halcyon hears the voice of vernal hours
Already on the wing.

There are many such figures both in Coleridge's verse and prose. He
has, too, his passages of that sort of impassioned contemplation on the