with a
purpose, whether she wrote a religious tract or an ethical essay, a
tragedy or a novel. She always strove to be a teacher, and the
intellectual gifts with which she had been endowed were only valued by
her in so far as they enabled her to serve the education and the moral
progress of humanity. "The rapt One of the godlike forehead, the
heaven-eyed creature," as Wordsworth described Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
died in 1834. Coleridge belonged to an order of intellect far higher
than that to which Crabbe or Hannah More had any claim. He was indeed a
man of genius in all but the very highest meaning of the word. He was
poet, philosopher, teacher, and critic, and in each department, had he
worked in that alone, he must have won renown. Perhaps if he had not
worked in so many fields he might have obtained even a more exalted
position than that which history must assuredly assign to him. His
influence as a philosopher is probably fading now, although he
unquestionably inspired whole schools of philosophic thought, and the
world remembers him rather as the author of "The Ancient Mariner" than as
the metaphysical student and teacher. As a critic, in the highest sense
of the word, he will always have the praise that should belong to the
first who aroused the attention of Englishmen to the great new school of
thoughtful criticism which was growing up in Germany under the influence
of Lessing and of Goethe. He would have deserved fame if only for his
translations of some of Schiller's noblest dramas. It has been justly
said that Coleridge by his successful efforts to spread over England the
influence of the higher German criticism did much to restore Shakespeare
to that position as head of the world's modern literature from which
English {284} criticism and English tastes had done so much to displace
him since the days of Dryden.

[Sidenote: 1775-1836--Mrs. Siddons and Edmund Kean]

The death of Coleridge was soon followed by that of Charles Lamb, and,
indeed, Coleridge's death may have had some effect in hastening that of
his dear and devoted friend. In the same poem from which we have just
quoted the lines that picture Coleridge, Wordsworth tells how "Lamb, the
frolic and the gentle, has vanished from his lonely hearth." Lamb was
the most exquisite of essayists and letter-writers, a man whose delicate
humor, playful irony, and happy gift of picturesque phrase claim for him
true poetic genius. The present gener