years of his poetic prime. It consists of three poems, -two of which, at least, are among the most remarkable that he ever wrote,-Guilt and Sorrow (part of which survives, under its original form, in the Female Vagrant), written at intervals between 1791 and 1794, Lines left under a Yew-tree (1795), and The Borderers, his one excursion into the drama (1795-96). All these are full of the sense of mystery in nature, of the tears in human things, which form the groundwork of his later poetry. And they ring with an indignant pity for "what man has made of man," which, if it has not altogether faded out of his later work, has at least left little more than a softened echo. It is significant, moreover, that they have little or nothing of that exaggerated simplicity of diction, which was to raise the hue and cry against the poems of 1797 and 1798. Design of Thus, to the world at large, the Lyrical Ballads came as a revelation. The Ancient Mariner on the one hand, the Tintern poem, the Female Vagrant, the Yew-tree, and some of what Ballads. may fairly be called the "dramatic lyrics" on the other, struck notes which were entirely new to English poetry. It was inevitable that the first impression should be one of contrast between the two writers rather than of resemblance. The one is the incarnation of the romantic spirit; the other, to all appearance, was the most uncompromising of realists. It is well, therefore, to remember that what Coleridge rather insists upon is the essential unity of aim, which lay behind these divergences of method and manner; and that, while professedly describing the object he had proposed to himself in the Ancient Mariner, he insensibly uses the same terms which, in the next breath, he applies specifically to the poetry of Wordsworth. This is said without prejudice to the glaring differences which undoubtedly exist between the two poets. But it serves to recall a side of Wordsworth's genius which has too often been allowed to drop out of sight. The value of Wordsworth's contribution to the little volume has been hotly contested. About that Ancient of Coleridge there can be no manner of Mariner. doubt. Nor can there be any doubt about the particular quality of imagination which it displays. With the Ancient Mariner we are in the full tide of the romantic triumph. Scenery, colouring, supernatural motive, the rapidity of the action, the fiery touch with which the successive images are burnt into the brain of the wedding-guest-and which of us has not stood in his place ?-all these are of the quintessence of romance. Apart from certain passages of Keats, there is no poem in the language-there is none, perhaps, in the literature of Europe-so instinct with all that is deepest and truest in romance as this ballad. Compare it with such a poem as Bürger's Lenore or the Kehama of Southey; compare it even with the Isabella of Keats, and we see at once how Coleridge has instinctively turned away from all that is merely external or mechanical in the romantic armoury, and has thrown himself boldly 1 See Biographia Literaria, chap. xiv. (1817). upon the weapons of the spirit. Even the supernatural horror, poignant as it is, is in no sense an end in itself. The heart of the poem lies in the dramatic truth of the emotions" which an experience so unearthly could not fail to awaken, “supposing it to be real"; the experience of the "soul that hath been alone on a wide, wide sea," haunted by the curse of the spirit-world, surrounded by the bodies of those his own act had brought to death. The removal of the more material touches of horror in the later draft of the ballad is evidence, if further evidence were needed, of the true intention of the poet. Coleridge's other poems. The other romantic poems of Coleridge-Kubla Khan, Christabel, and The Dark Ladie with its prelude, Love-were written within a few years, for the most part within a few months, of the Ancient Mariner. The two former, and more characteristic, pieces may be said to sever the strands which are intertwined in the Ancient Mariner. Kubla Khan has all, and more than all, the vivid colouring and the haunting glamour of the great ballad. Christabel 1 refines still further upon the subtlety of its dramatic suggestion, and surrounds the supernatural theme with a haze of mystery which stands out in sharp contrast against the more direct and, as it has seemed to some, the cruder methods of the earlier poem. Moreover, in the verse of the earlier poem there is little or nothing of the calculated delicacy of movement, the 1 Part I., 1798. Part II., 1800. variation with each varying mood of thought or feeling, which runs from end to end of Christabel. It is inevitable that the latter should have the defects of its great qualities. The atmosphere throughout is more confined. The iron gate of the Gothic castle, the filigree work of the lady's chamber, are poor substitutes for the boundless horizon and the wide sea, of which the Mariner himself seemed to have become a living part. "I pass like night from land to land,"there is nothing in Christabel which strikes so deep as this. The supernatural theme, which forms the groundwork of both poems, is here presented under the narrower associations of time and place; and Coleridge approaches perilously near to the province which Scott and Southey were making, or soon to make, their own. It is perhaps needless to seek a reason why any work of Coleridge's was left unfinished; that was the normal fate of everything to which he set his hand. But in this case it may well be that the superhuman effort to escape from the trivial round of romance, as trodden by these and other writers, proved too great a burden even for the genius which had conceived and perfected the Ancient Mariner. Finished or unfinished, the second part of Christabel, if we except, as we are entitled to do, the great ode on Dejection (1802), was practically the swan - song of that marvellous genius. After 1802 a few fragments-some of them, truly, of supreme beauty were all that it gave forth. Of Wordsworth's contributions to the Lyrical Ballads it is necessary to distinguish three several Wordsworth's groups. The first of these, the two poems contributions. written prior to his meeting with Coleridge, has been noticed already. The second, the "lyrical ballads" properly so called, is that which gave discriminating colour to the whole volume, and, enforced as it was by the provocative Advertisement, excited the fury of Jeffrey and the later critics. The third, containing the Lines written above Tintern and some four or five other poems, is that which for the first time revealed Wordsworth as the "poet of nature." Poems of man. With the poems of the second group must be taken Peter Bell, which, though not published till more than twenty years later, was, like them, written in the early part of 1798. It has the honour of being one of the best abused poems in the language. But on Wordsworth's ideals in poetry, as they then were, it throws a searching light; for, as Professor Raleigh has justly pointed out, it is, and was clearly designed to be, the Words worthian counterpart to the Ancient Mariner of Coleridge. This group with one or two later pieces, such as Alice Fell-stands by itself in the poetry of Wordsworth. He here takes up the theme of human suffering and endurance which he had already handled in Guilt and Sorrow, and which, as he himself insisted, was always to remain "the haunt and the main region of his song." But he takes it up with too much of a set purpose; and he revels in limitations of diction, |