The Sun.
London, England, 1836-01-14 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

4TT-&-r.:B,.CONVERSATIONS, and RECOL-
LiECTIONS.of-‘5.: T. COLERIDGE.
Vols. Moxon. . London, 1836.
Tkle greater portion of these volumes consists of
letters of the late Mr. Coleridge, which, whatever may
bfa the intellectual value of some few of them, will not, in
the
.aggregate, add much to the writer's reputation,
'whether, as 'critic or philosopher. Mr. Coleridge was
110 letter-writer—at least in the sense in which Madame
De Sevigne, Horace Walpole., Gray; Cowper, or .
Byron were letter-writers. He wants ease, grace, natu-
zalnes; and vivacity. Instead of saying things in the
'simplest and most intelligible manner possible, he piles
word Upon word, image upOn'image, till the meaning,
what he would desire to convey, is fairly .buried be-
neath a load of verbiage and metaphor. Then again;
ihe is perpetually running into metaphysics, and .mysti-
fying himself and his readers by a subtle jargon, which
10 us; who rank among the uninitiated, has neither
method nor meaning. Even on Such an every-day,
straightforward question as marriage, he cannot speak
without entering into a variety of abstruse speculations,
I'vhich have. have n 9 more bearing on the subject, thanthey
e.°ll that pedantic question of the hoznaousion, or the
--;641° °isiwi, which for so many ages divided the..theolo-
,
worl The truth is, Mr. Coleridge was less a man
of the'A ,
d than any author we ever heard of. He
appears to have had every sense, but common sense.
Ile possessed unrivalled powers of imagination ; but
we except his " Ancient Mariner" and his " Ge-
iievieve"—he knew not how to work the golden ore ;
knowledge, gathered from an infinite variety of
sources, was equally remarkable; but in his disas-
trous hand, so far from strengthening, it served only
.11° impede the faculties of his mind., What are
us " Friend" or his "Biographic, Literaria" but
ast store-houses of splendid but crude conceits,
without either' aim or purpose, which no one can read
without admiring the author's naturally fine faculties,
11-d- regretting the uses to which he has put them, and
the form in which he has developed them. From the
:trst page to the last, 'Mr. Coleridge's Autobiography
5s a mere book of apologies—a metaphysical, desultory
Ireface to some volume which he is about to write, but
which, as all the world knows, he never did write.
True, it is full of specious talk about systems, meta-
Aysical,.poetical, philosophical, and otherwise ; still
'..11 lays down uo rules (unless, perhaps, in the single
"instance of the
at no criticism on Wordsworth), and arrives
Conclusions. When you come to the word
m‘
Finis" you ate just about as wise as you were when
you perused the title-page. Your mind, throughout,
walks, as it were, in a haze, through which you now and
there get dim glimpses of objects, about which, how.:
ever, there is no certainty. We renember a year or
two since going to hear' a lecture on the death of Cole,
ridge, delivered by a Gentleman who has made stre-
nuous efforts to be a poet—without, however, suc-
teeding in the object of his laudable ambition—in
libieh the philosophic system of the " recluse of
Uighgate" was attempted to be elucidated. Not-nne
Ignoble, however, of the Lecturer's exposition could
we understand. All was a cloudy farrago of conceits,
crotchets, and absurdities, diligently wrapped up in
the most, misty verbiage ; so that, with every pos-
aible disposition to be pleased and instructed, we were
:compelled to say with Mr. Pia , in the Critic, " Egad,
thejntrpieter is the harder to be understood of the
two.' 'Why this
sy difficulty of interpretation, if the
ste" m to be explained were lucid and satisfactory ?
Tiv, plain fact is, Coleridge had no philosophical sys-
ything, even approaching to one, to inter-
ret ; and, in default of this, he took refuge in a cloud of
words, while his hearers sate listenitia to him in speech-
less astonishment, just as if' he were the Delphic
-Apollo, uttering his cloudy, oracular apothgems behind
Ike shrine of the temple. That we may not be sup-
Posed to.be doing injustice to Coleridge, we extract a
Passage from one of his letters, in which, if our
readers can discover the slightest meaning, they are far
more acute than ourselves
In reading an extract in the German Encylopcedia
from Dobrizhoffer's most interesting•account of the Abipo-
'Penses, a savage tribe in Paraguay, houseless, vet in ,per-
I and in morals the noblest of savage tribes ; who, when
'rat known by Europeans, amounted to 100,000 warriors,
Yft have a tradition that they were but a relic of a far
blore numerous community, and who by, wars with other
savage tribes, and by intestine feuds among themselves, are
hw dwindled to a thousand (men, women, and children do
tt exceed five thousand),-it- struck; .me with distinct re-
embrance—first, that this is the history of all savage
41'es ; and, second, that all tribes are savage that have not
Ickositivo religion defecated from witchcraft, and an estab-
;'„shed priesthood contra-distinguished from individual con-
mrers. Nay, the islands of the Pacific (the Polynesia,
ewhieh soouer or later the swift and silent masonry of the
Airal worms will compact into a rival continent, into afifth
quarter of the World) blest with all the plenties of nature,
sad enjoying an immunity from all the ordinary dangers of
4;r4lae life, were many of them utterly dispeopled since
their first discovery, and wholly by their own feuds and,
an ; Ilan that their bread fruit tree, and their delicious
4ed. healthful climate, had only made the process of mutual
struction and self destruction more hateful, more basely
sensual. This, therefore, I assume as an undoubted fact
rhf history ; and from this, as a portion of the history of
of
Veni I draw a new (to my knowledge, at least, a new) series
Proofs of several, I might, say of all, the positions of pre-
eminents. importance and interest more than vital ; a series
savrbaleh, f taken in harmonious counterpart to a prior series
rnentsortn interior history (the history of man), the docu-
indivia i. 13.141 pre to be found only in the archieves of each
"14 own consciousness, will form a complete whole
*--a system of evidence,i c.onsisting of two correspondent
as. it were:rid
worlds,
yet each integral cosrelatibve. and mutually i)otentioatninogr_,
relation, as the -asnu sistent:—having the s m
gee
taphysies and the Physics the observations, or the
astronomy If I can thus
me-
demonstrate the truth of tii Ise doactriue of existence afteri.the
present life, it is not
improbable that some rays. oflight
may fall on the question,
et state of existence it may be
detenni„
negatively,
not'
reasonably be supposed to be?
events, we shall I
trust, be enabled to
be for any; and for whom this or that,
I%.hlreliatd it cannot a-
Yet for then/ rl
}'ear nniversally precluded, is
precluded.
1. fn
Planner words, what can not- be, universAllyPseceakien(g • ce-
cond, what may be ; third, what the differenc-eps may be for
different individualS, within the limits prescribed in No. ;
fourth, what scheme of embodied representation of the' fu-
ture state (our reason not forbidding the same
\
c.,elTls re
it
mended by the truest analogies ; and fifth, what) s becom-
iB best to combine with our belief of a hereafter, as conducive to the growth.and cultivation of onr collectivemost
faculties in this life, or of each in the ordet-of
compara-
tive worth, value, and permanence."
~