807 he
published a volume of poems, including the famous _Ode on the
Intimations of Immortality_ and several of his finest sonnets; but of
his later work only an occasional lyric deserves to be ranked beside the
poems published in 1800 and 1807. Coleridge, indeed, published two of
his finest poems, _Christabel_ and _Kubla Khan_, in 1816, but they were
written long before, _Christabel_, partly in 1797 and partly in 1801,
and _Kubla Khan_ in 1798. Even the new metre of _Christabel_, which is
not the least of Coleridge's contributions to English poetry, had, as
early as 1805, been borrowed in the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_ by Scott,
to whom Coleridge had recited the poem. Nevertheless, Coleridge
continued to exercise a great influence, partly through the charm of his
conversation and partly through his prose works, in which he introduced
to a British public, as yet unused to German literature, a vision of
that mystical German thought which finds its father in Kant, and was
represented at that day by Hegel in philosophy and Goethe in poetry. It
is uncertain how far the general ignorance of German literature in
England was responsible for the influence exercised in their own day by
the few English or Scottish thinkers, such as Coleridge, Hamilton, and
Carlyle, who had either fallen under the spell or learned the secret of
the German mystics. The most important of Coleridge's prose works was
_Aids to Reflection_, which appeared in 1828, and whatever be its
literary value, it deserves the notice of the historian, as the least
unsystematic treatise of an author who gave the principal philosophical
impetus to the Oxford movement.

Two other poets, eminently the product of their age, though not the
offspring of the French revolution, Scott and Byron, were equally in
revolt against conventional diction. Scott elevated ballad-poetry to a
level which it had never before attained, and composed some of the most
beautiful songs in the English language. If it be remembered that he was
cramped by the drudgery of legal offices during the best years of his
life, that he was nearly thirty when he made his first literary venture,
that he was crippled by financial ruin and broken health during his
later years, that his anonymous contributions to periodicals would fill
volumes, and that he died at the age of sixty-one, his fertility of
production must ever be ranked as unique in the history of English
literature. Already known as the author of