he afterward disputed in the Biographia Literaria (Chaps. V. and VI.). But when he went to Germany, he made acquaintance with the transcendental philosophy of Kant and of his continuators, Fichte and Schelling, which had such power upon the general literature of Germany, but was known in England only by hearsay, until Coleridge-and in a much less degree, Carlyle-introduced some of its ideas in their writings. Coleridge was the electric spark which marked the contact of English and German thought. He originated nothing in this province, but his acute and sympathetic genius made itself the conductor of more systematic thinkers. Through him they reached the merely literary classes, and inspired men like Emerson and Carlyle. He was never weary of expounding the Kantian distinction between the Reason (Vernunft) and the Understanding (Verstand). In the Biographia Literaria, he affirms that his main object in starting The Friend was to establish this distinction, which became to him very much what Charles I. was to poor Mr. Dick and his memorial, and turns up constantly in the most unexpected places.

minds

But the transcendental idealism, or identity philosophy, of Schelling had, at one time, a specially strong fascination for Coleridge, as it has had for many in which reason has been colored by imagination. Schelling was himself a poet, and his system has a certain symmetry which gratifies the artistic instinct, while it flatters the reason by its promise to reduce all principles to one. The outside universe-nature-has no existence independent of the mind; nor has the mind -existence, independent of the universe. In

every act of knowledge, subject and object are identical; i. e., the mind knows only itself, perceives only its own states of consciousness, and yet instinctively distinguishes itself from its object. Nature and mind are one and yet are opposed to one another. They are the positive and negative ends of the same magnet. The subject becomes conscious of itself only through its recognition of the object. How can this at once identity and diversity be reconciled? Only in a higher unity, in God or the Absolute, which is the indifference point of the magnet, where subject and object become one. Nature is the dark side of mind. In man, the Absolute becomes conscious of itself, makes of itself, as nature, an object to itself, as mind. "The souls of men are but the innumerable individual eyes with which our infinite World-Spirit beholds himself. The finite soul exists only by the self-limitation of the infinite or absolute soul, which is God."

We are familiar enough in New England with this way of thinking; and that we are so is, in a great measure, due to Coleridge, who sifted Schelling's thought through the golden network of his own imagination. We have had the identity philosophy presented to us in beautiful forms, and in language that attracts by its poetic mysticism.* "His experience," says Emerson, of the transcendentalist, "inclines him to behold the procession of facts, you call the world, as flowing perpetually outward from an invisible, unsounded center in himself; center alike of him and of them, and necessitating him to regard all things as having a sub

* Schopenhauer defines mysticism as the soul's recognition of itself in nature.

jective or relative existence-relative to that aforesaid unknown center of him. There is no bar or wall in the soul where man, the effect, ceases, and God, the cause, begins." "I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and particle of God." "In me is the sucker that I see," exclaims Thoreau; and, of Walden Pond

nature.

"I am its stony shore,

And the breeze that passes o'er."

The logical outcome of Schelling's Natur-Philosophie is pantheism, or the identification of God with From this conclusion Coleridge shrank; and in his later utterances he affirmed an everlasting and essential difference between matter and spirit. In other words, he settled finally into theism and philosophical dualism.

Coleridge's expositions of German transcendentalism are found everywhere in his prose writings, but more particularly in the Biographia Literaria, Chapters V., VII, VIII., IX., and XII. In these chapters he incorporated many passages from Schelling's System des Transcendentalen Idealismus and other works.

For the facts of Coleridge's life, consult Mr. H. D. Traill's Coleridge, in the "English Men of Letters Series" Hall Caine's Life of Coleridge; and Alois Brandl's Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the English Romantic School. Original sources of value are the unfinished Life, in one volume, by Gillman; Cottle's Early Recollections, and De Quincey's Autobiographical Sketches.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE was born October 21, 1772, at Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire, of which parish his father was vicar. He was sent to school at Christ's Hospital, London, and in his nineteenth year entered Jesus College, Cambridge. In 1793 he suddenly quitted Cambridge, went to London, and enlisted in the Fifteenth Light Dragoons, under the name of Silas Titus Comberback. His friends obtained his discharge April 10, 1794, and he returned to the university, but left it without obtaining a degree. On October 24, 1795, he was married, at Bristol, to Miss Sara Fricker, whose sister Edith became Mrs. Robert Southey, on the 14th of November following. For the next three years Coleridge resided in the neighborhood of Bristol, first at Clevedon, and afterward at Nether Stowey, in intimate association with Wordsworth, who was living at Alfoxden, a few miles away. 1796 Coleridge undertook a weekly journal in the Liberal interest, The Watchman, which ran through only ten numbers. His first volume of poems was published at Bristol, in the same year. The Lyrical Ballads, containing nineteen poems by Wordsworth, and four by Coleridge-including The Ancient Mariner-were issued at Bristol in the spring of 1798. In

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In

January, 1798, Coleridge quitted Stowey for Shrewsbury, to fill the pulpit of a Unitarian chapel. But this position he soon resigned, in consequence of an annuity of £150, settled upon him by his friends Thomas and Josiah Wedgewood, on condition of his devoting himself exclusively to literature. In September, 1798, he went to Germany, with William and Dorothy Wordsworth, and devoted nearly a year to study, chiefly at Ratzeburg and Göttingen, returning to England in the summer of 1799. Toward the close of that year he became a regular contributor of political articles to the Morning Post; but in the summer of 1800 he quitted London, for Greta Hall, near Keswick, in the

Lake Country." Southey had settled at Keswick, and Wordsworth was living at Grasmere, twelve miles away. Greta Hall continued to be Coleridge's homeor at least the home of his wife and children-until 1810, but he was frequently absent from it. In 1801, while suffering from an attack of rheumatism, he began the use of narcotics, and his indulgence in them became a habit, which lasted until 1816. In April, 1804, he went to Malta, where he became secretary to the Governor, Sir Alexander Ball. He returned to England in August, 1806, and during the next few years engaged in various literary enterprises, residing partly in the "Lake Country," and partly in London, where he contributed to the Courier and delivered a course of lectures before the Royal Institution (1808). In 1809 he took up his residence with Wordsworth at Allan Bank, Grasmere, where he wrote and published his monthly serial, The Friend. The Friend expired in March, 1810, and shortly after its discontinuance,