um expectat_."
What bade fair to be his best poem, _Christabel_, is a fragment. Another
strangely beautiful poem, _Kubla Khan_--which came to him, he said, in
sleep--is even more fragmentary. And the most important of his prose
remains, his _Biographia Literaria_, 1817, a history of his own
opinions, breaks off abruptly.

It was in his suggestiveness that Coleridge's great service to posterity
resided. He was what J.S. Mill called a "seminal mind," and his thought
had that power of stimulating thought in others which is the mark and
the privilege of original genius. Many a man has owed to some sentence
of Coleridge's, if not the awakening in himself of a new intellectual
life, at least the starting of fruitful trains of reflection which have
modified his whole view of certain great subjects. On every thing that
he left is set the stamp of high mental authority. He was not, perhaps,
primarily, he certainly was not exclusively, a poet. In theology, in
philosophy, in political thought and literary criticism he set currents
flowing which are flowing yet. The terminology of criticism, for
example, is in his debt for many of those convenient distinctions--such
as that between genius and talent, between wit and humor, between fancy
and imagination--which are familiar enough now, but which he first
introduced or enforced. His definitions and apothegms we meet
every-where. Such are, for example, the sayings: "Every man is born an
Aristotelian or a Platonist." "Prose is words in their best order;
poetry, the best words in the best order." And among the bits of subtle
interpretation that abound in his writings may be mentioned his
estimate of Wordsworth, in the _Biographia Literaria_, and his sketch of
Hamlet's character--one with which he was personally in strong
sympathy--in the _Lectures on Shakspere_.

The Broad Church party, in the English Church, among whose most eminent
exponents have been W. Frederic Robertson, Arnold of Rugby, F.D.
Maurice, Charles Kingsley, and the late Dean Stanley, traces its
intellectual origin to Coleridge's _Aids to Reflection_, to his writings
and conversations in general, and particularly to his ideal of a
national clerisy, as set forth in his essay on _Church and State_. In
politics, as in religion, Coleridge's conservatism represents the
reaction against the destructive spirit of the 18th century and the
French Revolution. To this root-and-branch democracy he opposed the view
that every old be