passion and emotion: it is what they themselves spoke and heard in moments of exultation, indignation, &c. But to hear an evolving roll, or a succession of leaves, talk continually the language of deliberate reason in a form of continued preconception, of a Z already possessed when A was being uttered-this must have appeared godlike. I feel myself in the same state, when in the perusal of a sober, yet elevated and harmonious succession of sentences and periods, I abstract my mind from the particular passage and sympathize with the wonder of the common people, who say of an eloquent man :-'He talks like a book!'

NOTES ON HERBERT'S TEMPLE AND HARVEY'S SYNAGOGUE.

G. HERBERT is a true poet, but a poet sui generis, the merits of whose poems will never be felt without a sympathy with the mind and character of the man. To appreciate this volume, it is not enough that the reader possesses a cultivated judgment, classical taste, or even poetic sensibility, unless he be likewise a Christian, and both a zealous and an orthodox, both a devout and a devotional Christian. But even this will not quite suffice. He must be an affectionate and dutiful child of the Church, and from habit, conviction, and a constitutional predisposition to ceremoniousness, in piety as in manners, find her forms and ordinances aids of religion, not sources of formality; for religion is the element in which he lives, and the region in which he moves.

The Church, say rather the Churchmen of England, under the two first Stuarts, has been charged with a yearning after the Romish fopperies, and even the papistic usurpations; but we shall decide more correctly, as well as more charitably, if for the Romish and papistic we substitute the patristic leaven. There even was (natural enough from their distinguished learning, and knowledge of ecclesiastical antiquities) an overrating of the Church and of the Fathers, for the first five or even six centuries; these lines on the Egyptian monks, "Holy Macarius and great Anthony" (p. 205) supply a striking instance and illustra

tion of this.

P. 10.

If thou be single, all thy goods and ground
Submit to love; but yet not more than all.

Give one estate as one life. None is bound
To work for two, who brought himself to thrall.
God made me one man; love makes me no more,
Till labor come, and make my weakness score.

I do not understand this stanza.

P. 41.

My flesh began unto my soul in pain,
Sicknesses clave my bones, &c.

Either a misprint, or a noticeable idiom of the word 'began?' Yes! and a very beautiful idiom it is the first colloquy or address of the flesh.

P. 46.

What though my body run to dust?

Faith cleaves unto it, counting every grain,
With an exact and most particular trust,
Reserving all for flesh again.

I find few historical facts so difficult of solution as the continuance, in Protestantism, of this anti-scriptural superstition. P. 54. Second poem on The Holy Scriptures.

This verse marks that, and both do make a motion

Unto a third that ten leaves off doth lie.

The spiritual unity of the Bible

the order and connection of

organic forms in which the unity of life is shown, though as widely dispersed in the world of sight as the text.

'Distinguished.' I understand this but imperfectly. Did they

the principle of Socrates: the consequence of it is, that virtue may be taught, and may be acquired: and that philosophy alone can point us out the way to it.

More than our word, Ignorance, is contained in the 'Aualia of Plato. I, however, freely acknowledge, that this was the point of view, from which Socrates did for the most part contemplate moral good and evil. Now and then he seems to have taken a higher station, but soon quitted it for the lower, more generally intelligible. Hence the vacillation of Socrates himself; hence, too, the immediate opposition of his disciples, Antisthenes and Aristippus. But that this was Plato's own principle I exceedingly doubt. That it was not the principle of Platonism, as taught by the first Academy under Speusippus, I do not doubt at all. See the xivth Essay, pp. 96-102 of The Friend. In the sense in which ἀμαθίας πάντα κακὰ ἐῤῥίζωται, κ. τ. λ. is maintained in that Essay, so and no otherwise can it be truly asserted, and so and no otherwise did ὡς εμοί γε δοκεῖ, Plato teach it.

BARRY CORNWALL.*

BARRY CORNWALL is a poet, me saltem judice: and in that sense of the term, in which I apply it to C. Lamb and W. Wordsworth. There are poems of great merit, the authors of which I should yet not feel impelled so to designate.

The faults of these poems are no less things of hope, than the beauties; both are just what they ought to be,—that is, new.

If B. C. be faithful to his genius, it in due time will warn him, that as poetry is the identity of all other knowledges, so a poet can not be a great poet, but as being likewise inclusively an historian and naturalist, in the light, as well as the life, of philosophy all other men's worlds are his chaos.

Hints obiter are:-not to permit delicacy and exquisiteness to seduce into effeminacy. Not to permit beauties by repetition to become mannerisms. To be jealous of fragmentary composition, -as epicurism of genius, and apple-pie made all of quinces, Item, that dramatic poetry must be poetry hid in thought and passion,-not thought or passion disguised in the dress of poetry.

* Written in Mr. Lamb's copy of the 'Dramatic Scenes.'-Ed.

Lastly, to be economic and withholding in similes, figures, &c. They will all find their place, sooner or later, each as the luminary of a sphere of its own. There can be no galaxy in poetry, because it is language,―ergo processive, ergo every the smallest star must be seen singly.

There are not five metrists in the kingdom, whose works are known by me, to whom I could have held myself allowed to have spoken so plainly. But B. C. is a man of genius, and it depends on himself (competence protecting him from gnawing or distracting cares)—to become a rightful poet,—that is, a great

man.

Oh! for such a man worldly prudence is transfigured into the highest spiritual duty! How generous is self-interest in him, whose true self is all that is good and hopeful in all ages, as far as the language of Spenser, Shakspeare, and Milton shall become the mother-tongue!

A map of the road to Paradise, drawn in purgatory, on the confines of Hell, by S. T. C. July 30, 1819.

ON THE MODE OF STUDYING KANT.

EXTRACT FROM A LETTER OF MR. COLERIDGE TO J. GOODEN, ESQ.*

ACCEPT my thanks for the rules of the harmony. I perceive that the members are chiefly merchants; but yet it were to be wished, that such an enlargement of the society could be brought about as, retaining all its present purposes, might add to them the ground-work of a library of northern literature, and by bringing together the many gentlemen who are attached to it to be the means of eventually making both countries better acquainted with the valuable part of each other; especially, the English with the German, for our most sensible men look at the German Muses through a film of prejudice and utter misconception.

With regard to philosophy, there are half a dozen things, good and bad, that in this country are so nicknamed, but in the only accurate sense of the term, there neither are, have been, or ever will be but two essentially different schools of philosophy, the Platonic, and the Aristotelian. To the latter but with a some

* This letter and the following notes on Jean Paul were communicated by Mr. H. C. Robinson.-S. C.

what nearer approach to the Platonic, Emanuel Kant belonged; to the former Bacon and Leibnitz, and, in his riper and better years, Berkeley. And to this I profess myself an adherent-nihil novum, vel inauditum audemus; though, as every man has a face of his own, without being more or less than a man, so is every true philosopher an original, without ceasing to be an inmate of Academus or of the Lyceum. But as to caution, I will just tell you how I proceeded myself twenty years and more ago, when I first felt a curiosity about Kant, and was fully aware that to master his meaning, as a system, would be a work of great labor and long time. First, I asked myself, have I the labor and the time in my power? Secondly, if so, and if it would be of adequate importance to me if true, by what means can I arrive at a rational presumption for or against? I inquired after all the more popular writings of Kant-read them with delight. I then read the Prefaces of several of his systematic works, as the Prolegomena, &c. Here too every part, I understood, and that was nearly the whole, was replete with sound and plain, though bold and to me novel truths; and I followed Socrates' adage respecting Heraclitus: all I understand is excellent, and I am bound to presume that the rest is at least worth the trouble of trying whether it be not equally so. In other words, until I understand a writer's ignorance, I presume myself ignorant of his understanding. Permit me to refer you to a chapter on this subject in my Literary Life.*

Yet I by no means recommend to you an extension of your philosophic researches beyond Kant. In him is contained all that can be learned, and as to the results, you have a firm faith in God, the responsible Will of Man and Immortality; and Kant will demonstrate to you, that this faith is acquiesced in, indeed, nay, confirmed by the Reason and Understanding, but grounded on Postulates authorized and substantiated solely by the Moral Being. They are likewise mine: and whether the Ideas are regulative only, as Aristotle and Kant teach, or constitutive and actual, as Pythagoras and Plato, is of living interest to the philosopher by profession alone. Both systems are equally true, if only the former abstain from denying universally what is denied individually. He, for whom Ideas are constitutive, will in effect be a Platonist; and in those for whom they are regulative only, Biographia Literaria, chap. xii, p. 322.—S. C.

*