BOYHOOD AT CHRIST CHURCH HOSPITA L.

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long friend, Charles Lamb, recalling the days spent many years before in that famous London school, the noble foundation of good King Edward VI., thus apostrophizes the "inspired charity-boy." "Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Logician, Metaphysician, Bard:-how often have I seen the casual passer through the cloisters stand still, entranced with admiration to hear thee unfold in thy deep and sweet intonations the mysteries of Iamblicus or Plotinus, or reciting Homer in his Greek, or Pindar, while the walls of the old Grey-Friars' echoed to the accents of the inspired charity-boy." The day-dreams that filled so large a portion of the visionary Coleridge's existence,-they too began in early life. The story is told of him when quite a child, going down the Strand, (a crowded London thoroughfare,) he was very earnestly thrusting his hands out, so as to come in contact with a person walking before him, who seized him and accused him of an attempt to pick his pocket. The little dreamer sobbed out his protestations. of innocence, and, to the astonishment of the bystanders, explained how he thought himself Leander swimming across the Hellespont.

I may cite an instance of the early force of Coleridge's imagination from his monody on the death of Chatterton. The wondrous career of that young poet, and the melancholy close of it by suicide in boyhood, were then fresh recollections. Nature had beautifully endowed him, and the world by a wicked harshness extinguished all light in a spirit already darkened with somewhat of the gloom of hereditary insanity. This earth was no home for him ; and it is a fine stroke of imagination when Coleridge associates the chance knell from any distant steeple with the

mother-voice of nature calling back the young and earth

hapless poet.

"Oh, what a wonder seems the fear of death,
Seeing how gladly we all sink to sleep,

Babes, children, youths, and men,

Night following night, for threescore years and ten.
But doubly strange where life is but à breath

To sigh and pant with up Want's rugged steep.

"Lo! by the grave I stand of one for whom
A prodigal nature and a niggard doom
(That all bestowing, this withholding all)

*

Made each chance knell, from distant spire or dome,
Sound like a seeking mother's anxious call:-

Return, poor child! home, weary truant, home!"

When Coleridge's genius was developing itself, he avowed a high admiration and gratitude to a poet somewhat his senior, though still surviving him,-one whose reputation has never been a general one, the poet Bowles, -perhaps chiefly known by his controversy with Lord Byron on the subject of the poetry of Pope. Coleridge's admiration of Bowles's poems is not to be accounted for by any of that intensity of imagination which was eminently his own characteristic, but because he found in them something more real, more true and manly, than in most of the poetry then in fashion,-a combination of natural thoughts with natural diction. I can digress from my main subject no longer than to give one short specimen of Bowles's poetry,-what strikes me as a well-told recollection of childhood, and what all who have experienced it will recognise as truly recording the impression made on the imagination on the occasion of a first approach to the ocean:—

"I was a child when first I heard the sound

Of the Great Sea. 'Twas night, and, journeying far,
We were belated on our road, 'mid scenes
New and unknown,-a mother and her child,
Now first in this wide world a wanderer.
My father came, the pastor of the church
That crowns the high hill-crest above the sea;—
When, as the wheels went slow and the still night
Came down, a low, uncertain sound was heard,
Not like the wind. 'Listen!' my mother said,
'It is the sea! Listen! it is the sea!

My head was resting on her lap; I woke;
I heard the sound, and closer prest her side.
Much of the sea, in tearful wonderment,
I oft had heard, and of the shipwrecked man
Who sees, on some lone isle, day after day,
The sun sink o'er the solitude of waves,
Like Crusoe; and the tears would start afresh,
Whene'er my mother kissed my hair and told
The story of that desolate wild man,

And how the talking bird, when he returned,
After long absence, to his forlorn cave,
Spoke as in tones of human sympathy,
'Poor Robin Crusoe.'

Thoughts like these aruse

When first I heard at night the distant sound,
Old ocean, of thy everlasting voice !”

There are no passages of Coleridge's poetry in which the peculiar traits of his genius are more distinct than those of a descriptive cast. He shared that which belongs to all poetic minds,-a genuine and unaffected love of nature. In the lines of one of his poems,

"I know

That nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure.

No plot so narrow, be but nature there,

No waste so vacant, but may well employ

Each faculty of sense, and keep the heart
Awake to love and beauty!"

But the predominant habit of his genius was self-communion, in-looking rather than out-looking, so wrapt in meditation as perhaps often to preclude that open submissive susceptibility to impressions from the outward world of sense. This, however, led him finely to proclaim that great tenet of the poetic creed, that the influences of inanimate nature are dependent on the shaping faculty of imagination :

"That outward forms the loftiest still receive

Their finer influences from the life within."

Unhappily, Coleridge did not steadily possess that genial mood of imagination by which the poet's song

"Should make all nature lovelier, and itself

Be loved like nature."

He tells of this very unhappiness-this morbid torpor of the imagination-in some of the stanzas in his ode on "Dejection:"

"A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,

A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,

Which finds no natural outlet, no relief

In word, or sigh, or tear.

O lady, in this wan and heartless mood,

To other thoughts by yonder throstle wooed,
All this long eve, so balmy and serene,
Have I been gazing on the western sky
And its peculiar tint of yellow green.

And still I gaze; and with how blank an eye!
And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars,

That give away their motion to the stars;

Those stars, that glide behind them or between,
Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen;
Yon crescent moon, as fixed as if it grew

In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue:

I see them all so excellently fair;

I see, not feel, how beautiful they are.

"My genial spirits fail;

And what can these avail

To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?
It were a vain endeavour,

Though I should gaze forever

On that green light that lingers in the west.

I may not hope from outward forms to win

The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.”

In another strain of the same ode the important imaginative truth is set forth:

"From the soul itself must issue forth
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud
Enveloping the earth.

And from the soul itself must there be sent
A sweet and potent voice of its own birth,

Of all sweet sounds the life and element."

When Coleridge's poetry gives forth

"This light, this glory, this fair, luminous mist,
This beautiful and beauty-making power,"

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the purport of his descriptions is to discover "religious musings in the forms of nature." "Let me," he exclaims in an admirable passage of his prose, digress for a few moments from the written word to another book, likewise a revelation of God,-the great book of his servant nature. That in its obvious sense and literal interpretation