Venice in 1819-The Bronze Horses of St. Mark's.

Ν

Extracted from Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, October 1819.
COLERIDGE.

IN the midst of the many new claim-
ants which have arisen on every
hand to solicit the ear and the favour of
the readers of poetry, we are not sure
that any one has had so much reason to
complain of the slowness and inadequa-
cy of the attention bestowed upon him
as this gentleman, who is, comparatively
speaking, a veteran of no inconsiderable
standing. It is not easy to determine
in what proportions the blame of his
misfortunes should be divided between
himself and his countrymen. That
both have conducted themselves very
culpably at least very unwisely-be-
gins at length, we believe, to be ac-
knowledged by most of those whose
opinion is of any consequence. As for
us, we can never suppose ourselves to
be ill employed when we are doing any
thing that may serve in any measure to
correct the errors of the public judg-
ment on the one hand, or to stimulate
the efforts of ill-requited, and thence,
perhaps, desponding or slumbering
genius on the other.

The exercise of those unfair, and indeed wicked arts, by which the superficial mass of readers are so easily swayed in all their judgments, was, in this instance, more than commonly easy, by reason of the many singular eccentricities observable in almost all the productions of Mr. Coleridge's

muse.

What was already fantastic, it could be no difficult matter for those practised wits to represent as utterly unmeaning, senseless, and absurd. But perhaps those who are accustomed to chuckle over the ludicrous analysis of serious poems, so common in our most popular reviews, might not be the worse for turning to the Dictionnaire Philosophique, and seeing with what success the same weapons have been employed there, (by much greater wits, it is true) to transform and degrade into subjects of vulgar merriment all the beautiful narratives of the sacred books their sublime simplicity and most deep tenderness. It is one of the most melancholy things in human

nature, to see how often the grandest mysteries of the meditative soul lie at the mercy of surface-skimming ridicule, and self-satisfied rejoicing ignorance.It is like seeing the most solemn gestures of human dignity mimicked into grotesque absurdities by monkeys. Now, to our mind, the impropriety of the treatment which has been bestowed upon Mr. Coleridge, is mightily increased by the very facilities which the peculiarities of the poet himself afforded for its infliction. It is a thing not to be denied, that, even under the most favourable of circumstances, the greater part of the readers of English poetry could never have been expected thoroughly and intimately to understand the scope of those extraordinary productionsbut this ought only to have acted as an additional motive with those who profess to be the guides of public opinion, to make them endeavour, as far as might in them lie, to render the true merits of those productions more visible to the eye of the less penetrating or less reflective. Unless such be the duty of professional critics on such occasionsand one, too, of the very noblest duties they can ever be called upon to discharge--we have erred very widely in all our ideas concerning such matters.

Our only wish for the present, is to offer a few remarks in regard to one or two of his individual productions, which may perhaps excite the attention of such of our readers as have never yet paid any considerable attention to any of them.

The longest poem in the collection of the Sibylline Leaves, is the Rime of the Ancient Mariner—and to our feeling, it is by far the most wonderful also the most original and the most touching of all the productions of its author. From it alone, we are inclined to think an idea of the whole poetical genius of Mr. Coleridge might be gathered, such as could scarcely receive any very important addition either of extent or of distinctness, from a perusal of the whole of his other works.

To

VOL. 6.]

Contemporary Poets-Coleridge.

413

speak of it at all is extremely difficult; In the beginning of the mariner's above all the poems with which we are narrative, the language has all the imacquainted in any language-it is a petus of a storm-and when the ship poem to be felt-cherished-mused is suddenly locked among the polar ice, upon-not to be talked about-not the change is as instantaneous as it is capable of being described-analyzed awful.

The ice was here, the ice was there,

The ice was all around :

It cracked and growled, and roared and howl'd,
Like noises in a swound!
At length did cross an Albatross :

Thorough the fog it came;
As if it had been a Christian soul,
We hailed it in God's name.

-or criticised. It is the wildest of all the creations of genius-it is not like a thing of the living, listening, moving world-the very music of its words is like the melancholy mysterious breath of something sung to the sleeping earits images have the beauty-the grandeur-the incoherence of some mighty It ate the food it ne'er had eat, vision. The loveliness and the terror glide before us in turns-with, at one moment, the awful shadowy dimness at another, the yet more awful distinctness of a majestic dream.

Dim and shadowy, and incoherent, however, though it be-how blind, how wilfully, or how foolishly blind must they have been who refused to see any meaning or purpose in the Tale of the Mariner! The imagery, indeed, may be said to be heaped up to superfluity—and so it is the language to be redundant-and the nar. rative confused. But surely those who cavilled at these things, did not consider into whose mouth the poet has put this ghastly story. A guest is proceeding to a bridal-the sound of the merry music is already in his ears-and the light shines clearly from the threshold to guide him to the festival. He is arrested on his way by an old man, who constrains him to listen-he seizes him by the hand-that he shakes free -but the old man has a more inevitable spell, and he holds him, and will not be silent.

He holds him with his glittering eye,
The wedding-guest stood still,
And listens like a three-years child:
The mariner hath his will.
The wedding-guest sat on a stone,
He cannot chuse but hear-
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright-eyed ariner.

*

*

*

*

The bride hath paced into the hall,
Red as a rose is she:

Nodding their heads before her goes
The merry minstrelsy.

The wedding-guest he beat his breast,
Yet he cannot chuse but hear-
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright-eyed mariner.

And round and round it flew.
The ice did split with a thunder-fit;

The helmsman steered us through!
And a good south wind sprung up behind ;

The Albatross did follow,

And every day, for food or play,
Came to the Mariner's hollo!
In mist or cloud, or mast or shroud,
It perched for vespers nine;

Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white,
Glimmered the white Moon-shine.
"God save thee ancient Mariner!

From the fiends that plague thee thus!—
Why look'st thou so?"—With my cross bow
I shot the Albatross!

All the subsequent miseries of the crew
are represented by the poet as having
been the consequences of this violation
of the charities of sentiment; and these
are the same miseries which the critics
have spoken of, as being causeless and
unmerited! We have no difficulty in
confessing, that the ideas on which the
intent of this poem hinges, and which
to us seem to possess all beauty and
pathos, may, after all, have been select-
ed by the poet with a too great neglect
of the ordinary sympathies.
But if
any one will submit himself to the
magic that is around him, and suffer
his senses and his imagination to be
blended together, and exalted by the
melody of the charmed words, and the
splendour of the unnatural apparitions
with which the mysterious scene is
opened, surely he will experience no
revulsion towards the centre and spirit
of this lovely dream. There is the
very essence of tenderness in the
remorseful delight with which the Mar-
iner dwells upon the image of the
"pious bird of omen good," as it

Every day, for food or play,
Came to the Mariner's hollo!

And the convulsive shudder with which he narrates the treacherous issue, bespeaks to us no pangs more than seem to have followed justly on that inhospitable, crime. It seems as if the very spirit of the universe had been stunned by the wanton cruelty of the Mariner as if earth, sea, and sky, had all become dead and stagnans in the extinction of the moving breath of love and geatleness.

All in a hot and copper sky,
The bloody Sun, at noon,

Right up above the mast did stand,
No bigger than the moon.

Day after day, day after day,

We struck, nor breath nor motion,
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

The very deep did rot: O Christ!
That ever this should be!

Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.

About, about, in reel and rout,
The death-fires danced at night;
The water, like a witch's oils,
Burnt green, and blue, and white.

Ah! well a-day! what evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.
In the " weary time" which follows, a
spectre-ship sails between them and
the "broad bright sun" in the west.
This part of the poem is much improv-
ed in this last edition of it. The male
and the female skeleton in the spectre-
ship,or, as they are now called," DEATH
and LIFE-IN-DEATH," have diced for
the ship's crew-and she, the latter, has
won the ancient Mariner. These
verses are, we think, quite new. The
second of them is, perhaps, the most
exquisite in the whole poem.

The naked hulk alongside came,
And the twain were casting dice ;
"The game is done! I've won, I've won!"
Quoth she, and whistles thrice.

The Sun's rim dips; the stars rush out :
At one stride comes the dark;
With far-heard whisper, o'er the sea,
Off shot the spectre-bark.

We listened and looked sideways up!
Fear at my heart, as at a cup,

My life-blood seemed to sip!

The stars were dim, and thick the night,

The steersman's face by his lamp gleamed white;
From the sails the dews did drip-

Till clombe above the eastern bar
The horned Moon, with one bright star
Within the nether tip.

The crew, who had approved in calm

ness the sin that had been committed

in wantonness and madness, die,-and the Mariner alone is preserved by the rise of an expiatory feeling in his mind. Pain, sorrow, remorse, these are not enough ;-the wound must be healed by a heartfelt sacrifice to the same spirit of universal love which had been bruised in its infliction.

The moving Moon went up the sky,
And no where did abide :
Softly she was going up,

And a star or two beside

Her beams bemocked the sultry main,
Like April hoar-frost spread;

But where the ship's huge shadow lay,
The charmed water burnt alway

A still and awful red.

Beyond the shadow of the ship,

I watched the water-snakes:

They moved in tracks of shining white,
And when they reared, the elfish light
Fell off in hoary flakes.

Within the shadow of the ship

I watched their rich attire :

Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,
They coiled and swam; and every track
Was a flash of golden fire,

O happy living things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gusht from my heart,

And 1 blessed them unaware!
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,

And I blessed them unaware.
The self same moment I could pray;
The Albatross fell off, and sank
And from my neck so free
Like lead into the sea,

It is needless to proceed any longer in
this, for the principle of the poem is all
contained in the last of these extracts.
Had the ballad been more interwoven
with sources of prolonged emotion ex-
tending throughout-and had the re-
lation of the imagery to the purport and
essence of the piece been a little more
close-it does not seem to us that any
thing more could have been desired in
a poem such as this. As it is, the effect
of the wild wandering magnificence of
imagination in the details of the dream-
like story is a thing that cannot be for-
gotten. It is as if we had seen real
spectres, and were for ever to be haunt-

Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, &c.

To walk together to the kirk
With a goodly company!-
To walk together to the kirk,

And all together pray,

While each to his great Father bends,
Old men, and babes, and loving friends,
And youths and maidens gay!

Farewell, farewell! but this I tell
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man, and bird, and beast.

To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!

He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small :
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.

The Mariner, whose eye is bright,
Whose beard with age is hoar,

Is gone; and now the Wedding-guest
Turned from the bridegroom's door.

He went like one that hath been stunned.
And is of sense forlorn ;