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cover a high tone of feeling, a power and energy of expression, particularly and strongly characteristic of the mind and the voice of a poet. It is from his poem entitled "The Vision," in which the genius of his native county, Ayrshire, is thus supposed to address him:

"With future hope, I oft would gaze,
Fond, on thy little early ways,
Thy rudely carolled, chiming phrase,
In uncouth rhymes,

Fired at the simple, artless lays

Of other times.

"I saw thee seek the sounding shore, Delighted with the dashing roar; Or, when the North his fleecy store

Drove through the sky,

I saw grim Nature's visage hoar

Strike thy young eye.

"Or when the deep-green mantled earth, Warm-cherished every floweret's birth, And joy and music pouring forth

In every grove,

I saw thee eye the general mirth

With boundless love.

"When ripened fields and azure skies Called forth the reapers' rustling noise, I saw thee leave their evening joys,

And lonely stalk,

To vent thy bosom's swelling rise

In pensive walk.

"When youthful love, warm-blushing strong, Keen-shivering, shot thy nerves along, Those accents, grateful to thy tongue,

The adored name,

I taught thee how to pour in song,
To soothe thy flame.

"I saw thy pulse's maddening play,
Wild, send thee Pleasure's devious way,
Misled by Fancy's meteor-ray,

By Passion driven;

But yet the light that led astray

Was light from heaven."

Of strains like the above, solemn and sublime, with that rapt and inspired melancholy in which the poet lifts his eye "above this visible diurnal sphere," the poems entitled "Despondency," "The Lament," "Winter: a Dirge," and the "Invocation to Ruin," afford no less striking examples. Of the tender and the moral, specimens equally advantageous might be drawn from the elegiac verses, entitled, "Man was made to Mourn," from "The Cottar's Saturday Night," the stanzas "To a Mouse," or those "To a Mountain Daisy, on turning it down with the plough in April 1786." This last poem I shall insert entire, not from its superior merit, but because its length suits the bounds of my paper:

"Wee, modest, crimson-tipped flower,
Thou's met me in an evil hour,
For I maun erush amang the stoure
Thy slender stem:
To spare thee now is past my power,

Thou bonnie gem.

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"Such is the fate of simple bard,

On life's rough ocean luckless starred !
Unskilful he to note the card

Of prudent lore,
Till billows rage, and gales blow hard,
And whelm him o'er

"Such fate to suffering worth is given,
Who long with wants and woes has striven,
By human pride or cunning driven

To misery's brink,
Till, wrenched of every stay but Heaven,
He ruined sink.

"Ev'n thou who mourn'st the daisy's fate,
That fate is thine-No distant date:
Stern Ruin's plough-share drives, elate,
Full on thy bloom,
Till crushed beneath the furrow's weight,
Shall be thy doom."

I have seldom met with an image more truly pastoral than that of the lark, in the second stanza. Such strokes as these mark the pencil of the poet, which delineates nature with the precision of intimacy, yet with the delicate colouring of beauty and of taste.

The power of genius is not less admirable in tracing the manners, than in painting the passions, or in drawing the scenery of nature. That intuitive glance with which a writer like Shakespeare discerns the characters of men, with which he catches the many changing hues of life, forms a sort of problem in the science of mind, of which it is easier to see the truth than to assign the cause. Though I am very far from meaning to compare our rustic bard to Shakespeare, yet

whoever will read his lighter and more humorous poems, his "Dialogue of the Dogs," his "Dedication to G H—, Esq.," his "Epistles to a Young Friend," and to "W. S-n," will perceive with what uncommon penetration and sagacity this heaven-taught ploughman, from his humble and unlettered station, has looked upon men and manners.

Against some passages of those last-mentioned poems, it has been objected, that they breathe a spirit of libertinism and irreligion. But if we consider the ignorance and fanaticism of the lower class of people in the country where these poems were written, a fanaticism of that pernicious sort which sets faith in opposition to good works, the fallacy and danger of which a mind so enlightened as our poet's could not but perceive; we shall not look upon his lighter muse as the enemy of religion (of which in several places he expresses the justest sentiments), though she has sometimes been a little unguarded in her ridicule of hypocrisy.

In this, as in other respects, it must be allowed, that there are exceptionable parts of the volume he has given to the public, which caution would have suppressed, or correction struck out; but poets are seldom cautious, and our poet had, alas! no friends or companions from whom correction could be obtained. When we reflect on his rank in life, the habits to which he must have been subject, and the society in which he must have mixed, we regret perhaps more than

wonder, that delicacy should be so often offended in perusing a volume in which there is so much to interest and to please us.

Burns possesses the spirit as well as the fancy of a poet. That honest pride and independence of soul which are sometimes the muse's only dower, break forth on every occasion in his works. It may be, then, I shall wrong his feelings, while I indulge my own, in calling the attention of the public to his situation and circumstances. That condition, humble as it was, in which he found content, and wooed the muse, might not have been deemed uncomfortable; but grief and misfortunes have reached him there; and one or two of his poems hint, what I have learned from some of his countrymen, that he has been obliged to form the resolution of leaving his native land, to seek under a West Indian clime that shelter and support which Scotland has denied him. But I trust means may be found to prevent this resolution from taking place; and that I do my country no more than justice, when I suppose her ready to stretch out her hand to cherish and retain this native poet, whose "woodnotes wild" possess so much excellence. To repair the wrongs of suffering or neglected merit; to call forth genius from the obscurity in which it had pined indignant, and place it where it may profit or delight the world; these are exertions which give to wealth an enviable superiority, to greatness and to patronage a laudable pride.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.

BORN 1772: DIED 1834.

(From the Friend, "Aids to Reflection," and "Table Talk.")

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municated by him; for we may suppose both the one and the other precluded by the shortness o our intercourse, and the triviality of the subjects. The difference will be impressed and felt, though the conversation should be confined to the state of the weather or the pavement. Still less will it arise from any peculiarity in his words and phrases. For if he be, as we now assume, a welleducated man as well as a man of superior Powers, he will not fail to follow the golden rule of Julius Cæsar, insolens verbum, tanquam scopu lum, evitare. Unless where new things necessitate new terms, he will avoid an unusual word as a rock. It must have been among the earliest lessons of his youth, that the breach of this precept, at all times hazardous, becomes ridiculous in the topics of ordinary conversation. There remains but one other point of distinction possible; and this must be, and in fact is, the true cause of the impression made on us. It is the unpremeditated and evidently habitual arrangement of his words, grounded on the habit of foreseeing, in each integral part, or (more plainly)

in every sentence, the whole that he then intends to communicate. However irregular and desultory his talk, there is method in the fragments. Listen, on the other hand, to an ignorant man, though perhaps shrewd and able in his particular calling, whether he be describing or relating. We immediately perceive, that his memory alone is called into action; and that the objects and events recur in the narration in the same order, and with the same accompaniments, however accidental or impertinent, in which they had first occurred to the narrator. The necessity of taking breath, the efforts of recollection, and the abrupt rectification of its failures, produce all his pauses; and with exception of the "and then," the "and there," and the still less significant, "and so," they constitute likewise all his connections.

standing, in relation to what we will now venture to call the science of method, is often and admirably exhibited by our great dramatist. I scarcely need refer my readers to the Clown's evidence, in the first scene of the second act of "Measure for Measure," or to the Nurse in "Romeo and Juliet." But not to leave the position, without an instance to illustrate it, I will take the easy-yielding Mrs Quickly's relation of the circumstances of Sir John Falstaff's debt to her:

"FALSTAFF. What is the gross sum that I owe thee?

"HOST. Marry, if thou wert an honest man, thyself and the money too. Thou didst swear to me upon a parcel-gilt goblet, sitting in my Dolphin chamber, at the round table, by a seacoal fire, upon Wednesday in Whitsun week, when the prince broke thy head for liking his father to a singing-man of Windsor; thou didst swear to me then, as I was washing thy wound, to marry me and make me my lady thy wife. Canst thou deny it? Did not goodwife Keech, the butcher's wife, come in then and call me gossip Quickly?-coming in to borrow a mess of vinegar; telling us she had a good dish of prawns; whereby thou didst desire to eat some; whereby I told thee they were ill for a green wound,” etc.*

Our discussion, however, is confined to method as employed in the formation of the understanding, and in the constructions of science and literature. It would indeed be superfluous to attempt a proof of its importance in the business and economy of active or domestic life. From the cotter's hearth or the workshop of the artisan to the palace or the arsenal, the first merit, that which admits neither substitute nor equivalent, is, that everything be in its place. Where this charm is wanting, every other merit either loses And this, be it observed, is so far from being its name, or becomes an additional ground of carried beyond the bounds of a fair imitation, that accusation and regret. Of one, by whom it is the poor soul's thoughts and sentences are more eminently possessed, we say proverbially, he is closely interlinked than the truth of nature like clock-work. The resemblance extends be- would have required, but that the connections yond the point of regularity, and yet falls short and sequence, which the habit of method can of the truth. Both do, indeed, at once divide and alone give, have in this instance a substitute in announce the silent and otherwise indistinguish- the fusion of passion. For the absence of method, able lapse of time. But the man of methodical which characterises the uneducated, is occasioned industry and honourable pursuits does more; he by an habitual submission of the understanding realises its ideal divisions, and gives a character to mere events and images as such, and indeand individuality to its moments. If the idle pendent of any power in the mind to classify or are described as killing time, he may be justly appropriate them. The general accompaniments said to call it into life and moral being, while he of time and place are the only relations which makes it the distinct object not only of the con- persons of this class appear to regard in their sciousness, but of the conscience. He organises statements. As this constitutes their leading the hours, and gives them a soul; and that, the feature, the contrary excellence, as distinguishvery essence of which is to fleet away, and ever-ing the well-educated man, must be referred to more to have been, he takes up into his own per- the contrary habit. Method, therefore, becomes manence, and communicates to it the imperish- natural to the mind which has been accustomed ableness of a spiritual nature. Of the good and to contemplate not things only, or for their own faithful servant, whose energies, thus directed, sake alone, but likewise and chiefly the relations are thus methodised, it is less truly affirmed, of things, either their relations to each other, or that he lives in time, than that time lives in him. to the observer, or to the state and apprehension His days, months, and years, as the stops and of the hearers. To enumerate and analyse these punctual marks in the records of duties perform- relations, with the conditions under which alone ed, will survive the wreck of worlds, and remain they are discoverable, is to teach the science of extant when time itself shall be no more. method.

But as the importance of method in the duties of social life is incomparably greater, so are its practical elements proportionably obvious, and such as relate to the will far more than to the understanding. Henceforward, therefore, we contemplate its bearings on the latter.

The difference between the products of a welldisciplined and those of an uncultivated under

The enviable results of this science, when knowledge has been ripened into those habits which at once secure and evince its possession, can scarcely be exhibited more forcibly as well as more pleasingly, than by contrasting with the former extract from Shakespeare the narration

* Henry IV., Part II., act ii., sc. A.

given by Hamlet to Horatio of the occurrences during his proposed transportation to England, and the events that interrupted his voyage:

"HAM. Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting
That would not let me sleep; methought, I lay
Worse than the mutines in the bilboes. Rashly,
And praised be rashness for it-Let us know,
Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well,

When our deep plots do fail: and that should teach us,
There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.

HOR. That is most certain.

HAM. Up from my cabin,

My sea-gown scarfed about me, in the dark
Groped I to find out them; had my desire;
Fingered their packet; and, in fine, withdrew
To my own room again: making so bold,
My fears forgetting manners, to unseal
Their grand commission; where I found, Horatio,
A royal knavery; an exact command-
Larded with many several sorts of reasons,
Importing Denmark's health, and England's too,
With, ho such bags and goblins in my life-
That on the supervise, no leisure bated,

No, not to stay the grinding of the axe,

My head should be struck off!

HOR. Is't possible?

HAM. Here's the commission; read it at more leisure."

If any

Here the events, with the circumstances of time and place, are all stated with equal compression and rapidity, not one introduced which could have been omitted without injury to the intelligibility of the whole process. tendency is discoverable, as far as the mere facts are in question, it is the tendency to omission: and, accordingly, the reader will observe in the following quotation that the attention of the narrator is called back to one material circumstance, which he was hurrying by, by a direct question from the friend to whom the story is communicated, "How was this sealed?" But by a trait which is indeed peculiarly characteristic of Hamlet's mind, ever disposed to generalise, and meditative if to excess (but which, with due abatement and reduction, is distinctive of every powerful and methodising intellect), all the digressions and enlargements consist of reflections, truths, and principles of general and permanent interest, either directly expressed or disguised in playful satire.

"I sat me down;
Devised a new commission; wrote it fair.
I once did hold it, as our statists do,
A baseness to write fair, and laboured much
How to forget that learning; but, sir, now
It did me yeoman's service. Wilt thou know
The effect of what I wrote ?

HOR. Ay, good my lord.

HAM. An earnest conjuration from the king,-
As England was his faithful tributary;

As love between them, like the palm, might flourish:
As peace should still her wheaten garland wear,
And stand a comma 'tween their amities,

* Act v., sc. 2.

And many such like asses of great charge

That on the view and knowing of these contents,
Without debatement further, more or less,
He should the bearers put to sudden death,
No shriving time allowed.

HOR. How was this sealed

HAM. Why, even in that was heaven ordinant. I had my father's signet in my purse, Which was the model of that Danish seal; Folded the writ up in the form of the other: Subscribed it; gave't the impression; placed it safely. The changeling never known. Now, the next day Was our sea-fight; and what to this was sequent, Thou knowest already.

HOR. So Guildenstern and Rosencrantz go to't? HAM. Why, man, they did make love to this employment.

They are not near my conscience; their defeat

Doth by their own insinuation grow.

'Tis dangerous when the baser nature comes
Between the pass and fell incensed points
Of mighty opposites."*

It would, perhaps, be sufficient to remark of the preceding passage, in connection with the humorous specimen of narration,

"Fermenting o'er with frothy circumstance,"

in Henry IV., that if, overlooking the different value of the matter in each, we considered the form alone, we should find both immethodical. Hamlet from the excess, Mrs Quickly from the want, of reflection and generalisation; and that method, therefore, must result from the due mean or balance between our passive impressions and the mind's own re-action on the same. Whether this re-action do not suppose or imply a primary act positively originating in the mind

itself, and prior to the object in order of nature, though co-instantaneous with it in its manifestation, will be hereafter discussed. But I had a from our myriad-minded bard, μvpiovoûs ǎvmp. further purpose in thus contrasting these extracts I wished to bring forward, each for itself, these two elements of method, or, to adopt an arithmetical term, its two main factors.

Instances of the want of generalisation are of no rare occurrence in real life: and the narrations of Shakespeare's Hostess and the Tapster differ from those of the ignorant and unthinking in general by their superior humour, the poet's own gift and infusion, not by their want of method, which is not greater than we often meet with in that class, of which they are the dramatic representatives. Instances of the opposite fault, arising from the excess of generalisation and reflection in minds of the opposite class, 'will, like the minds themselves, occur less frequently in the course of our own personal experience. Yet they will not have been wanting to our readers, nor will they have passed unobserved, though the great poet himself (ỏ Th ἑαυτοῦ ψυχὴν ὥσει ὕλην τινα ἀσώματον μορφαῖς

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ποικιλαῖς μορφώσας*) las more conveniently supplied the illustrations. To complete, therefore, the purpose aforementioned, that of presenting each of the two components as separately as possible, I choose an instance in which, by the surplus of its own activity, Hamlet's mind disturbs the arrangement, of which that very activity had been the cause and impulse.

Thus exuberance of mind, on the one hand, interferes with the forms of method; but sterility of mind, on the other, wanting the spring and impulse to mental action, is wholly destructive of method itself. For in attending too exclusively to the relations which the past or passing events and objects bear to general truth, and the moods of his own thought, the most intelligent man is sometimes in danger of overlooking that other relation, in which they are likewise to be placed to the apprehension and His discourse apsympathies of his hearers. pears like soliloquy intermixed with dialogue. But the uneducated and unreflecting talker overlooks all mental relations, both logical and psychological; and consequently precludes all method which is not purely accidental. Hence the nearer the things and incidents in time and place, the more distant, disjointed, and impertinent to each other, and to any common purpose, will they appear in this narration: and this from the want of a staple, or starting-post, in the narrator himself; from the absence of the leading thought, which, borrowing a phrase from the nomenclature of legislation, I may not inaptly call the initiative. On the contrary, where the habit of method is present and effective, things the most remote and diverse in time, place, and outward circumstance, are brought into mental contiguity and succession, the more striking as the less expected. But while I would impress the necessity of this habit, the illustrations adduced give proof that in undue preponderance, and when the prerogative of the mind is stretched into despotism, the discourse may degenerate into the grotesque or fantastical.

With what a profound insight into the constitution of the human soul is this exhibited to us in the character of the Prince of Denmark, where flying from the sense of reality, and seeking a reprieve from the pressure of its duties in that ideal activity, the overbalance of which, with consequent indisposition to action, in his disease, he compels the reluctant good sense of the high yet healthful-minded Horatio to follow him in his wayward meditation amid the graves!

"HAM. To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till he find it stopping a bung-hole?

"HOR. "Twere to consider too curiously to consider so.

"He that moulded his own soul, as some incorporeal material, into various forms."-Themistius.

"HAM. No, 'faith, not a jot; but to follow him thither with modesty enough, and likelihood to lead it: As thus; Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth to dust; the dust is earth; of earth we make loam: And why of that loam whereto he was converted, might they not stop a beer-barrel?

"Imperious Cæsar, dead, and turned to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away!"

But let it not escape our recollection, that when the objects thus connected are proportionate to the connecting energy, relatively to the real, or at least to the desirable, sympathies of mankind; it is from the same character that we derive the genial method in the famous soliloquy, "To be, or not to be"+-which, admired as it is, and has been, has yet received only the firstfruits of the admiration due to it.

We have seen that from the confluence of innumerable impressions in each momont of time the mere passive memory must needs tend to confusion; a rule, the seeming exceptions to which (the thunder-bursts in Lear, for instance) are really confirmations of its truth. For, in many instances, the predominance of some mighty passion takes the place of the guiding thought, and the result presents the method of nature, rather than the habit of the individual. For thought, imagination (and I may add, passion), are, in their very essence, the first, connective, the latter co-adunative: and it has been shown, that if the excess lead to method misapplied, and to connections of the moment, the absence, or marked deficiency, either precludes method altogether, both form and substance; or (as the following extract will exemplify) retains the outward form only.

My liege and Madam, to expostulate
What majesty should be, what duty is,
Why day is day, night night, and time is time,
Were nothing but to waste night, day, and time.
Therefore since brevity is the soul of wit,
And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,-
I will be brief. Your noble son is mad:
Mad call I it; for to define true madness,
What is't, but to be nothing else but mad!
But let that go.

QUEEN. More matter with less art.

:

POL. Madam, I swear, I use no art at all.
That he is mad, 'tis true: 'tis true, 'tis pity;
And pity 'tis, 'tis true: a foolish figure;
But farewell it, for I will use no art.
Mad let us grant him then and now remains,
That we find out the cause of this effect,
Or rather say the cause of this defect:
For this effect defective comes by cause.
Thus it remains, and the remainder thus
Perpend."

Does not the irresistible sense of the ludicrous in this flourish of the soul-surviving body of

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