refusing to accompany the Whigs in their almost perfidious demeanor towards Napoleon Bonaparte. Antiministerial they affect to style their policy, but in the' most eminent sense it was anti-national. It was thus far -viz., exclusively, or almost exclusively, in relation to our great feud with Napoleon - that Coleridge adhered to the Tories. But because this feud was so capital and so earth-shaking a quarrel, that it occupied all hearts and all the councils of Christendom, suffering no other question almost to live in its neighborhood, hence it happened that he who acceded to the Tories in this one chapter of their policy, was regarded as an ally in the most general Domestic politics were then, in fact, forgotten; no question, in any proper sense a Tory one, ever arose in that era; or, if it had, the public attention would not have settled upon it; and it would speedily have been dismissed.

sense.

Hence I deduce as a possibility, and, from my knowledge of Coleridge, I deduce it as a fact, that his adhesion to the Tories was bounded by his approbation of their foreign policy; and even of that rarely in its executive details, rarely even in its military plans, (for these he assailed with more keenness of criticism than to me the case seemed to justify,) but solely in its animating principle its moving and sustaining force, viz., the doctrine. and entire faith that Napoleon Bonaparte ought to be resisted, was not a proper object of diplomacy or negotiation, and could be resisted hopefully and triumphantly. Thus far he went along with the Tories: in all else he belonged quite as much to other parties so far as he belonged to any. And that he did not follow any bias of private interest in connecting himself with, Tories, or rather in allowing Tories to connect themselves with him, appears (rather more indeed than it ought to have

appeared) on the very surface of his life. From Tory munificence he drew nothing at all, unless it should be imputed to his Tory connections that George IV. selected him for one of his academicians. But this slight mark of royal favor, he owed, I believe, to other considerations; and I have reason to think that his way of treating political questions, so wide of dogmatism, and laying open so vast a field to scepticism that might else have gone unregarded, must have been held as evidence of too latitudinarian a creed to justify a title to Toryism. And, upon the whole, I am of opinion, that few events of Mr. Coleridge's life were better calculated to place his disinterested pursuit of truth in a luminous aspect. In fact, his carelessness of all worldly interests was too notorious to leave him open to suspicions of that nature: nor was this carelessness kept within such limits as to be altogether meritorious. There is no doubt that his indolence concurred, in some degree, to that line of conduct and to that political reserve which would, at all events, have been pursued, in a degree beyond what honor the severest, or delicacy the most nervous, could have enjoined.

It is a singular anecdote, after all, to report of Coleridge, who incurred the reproach of having ratted solely by his inability to follow the friends of his early days into what his heart regarded as a monstrous and signal breach of patriotism, that in any eminent sense he was not a patriot. His understanding in this, as in many instances, was too active, too restless, for any abiding feelings to lay hold of him, unless when they coincided with some palpable command of nature. Parental love, for instance, was too holy a thing to be submitted for an instant to any scrutiny or any jealousy of his hair-splitting understanding. But it must be something as sacred and as profound as that which with Coleridge could long support the

endless attrition of his too active intellect. In this instance, he had the same defect, derived in part from the same cause, as a contemporary, one of the idols of the day, more celebrated, and more widely celebrated, than Coleridge, but far his inferior in power and compass of intellect. I speak of Goethe: he also was defective, and defective under far stronger provocations and excitement, in patriotic feeling. He cared little for Weimarand less for Germany. And he was, thus far, much below Coleridge—that the passion, which he could not feel, Coleridge yet obliged himself practically to obey in all things which concerned the world; whereas, Goethe disowned this passion equally in his acts his words and his writings. Both are now gone · Goethe and Coleridge; both are honored by those who knew them, and by multitudes who did not. But the honors of Coleridge are perennial, and will annually grow more verdant: whilst from those of Goethe every generation will see something fall away, until posterity will wonder at the subverted idol, whose basis being hollow and unsound, will leave the worship of their fathers an enigma to their descendants.

CHAPTER X.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.

IN 1807 it was, at the beginning of winter, that I first saw William Wordsworth. I have already mentioned that I had introduced myself to his notice by letter as early as the spring of 1803. To this hour it has continued, I believe, a mystery to Wordsworth, why it was that I suffered an interval of four and a half years to slip away before availing myself of the standing invitation with which I had been honored to the poet's house. Very probably he accounted for this delay by supposing that the new-born liberty of an Oxford life, with its multiplied enjoyments, acting upon a boy just emancipated from the restraints of a school, and, in one hour, elevated into what we Oxonians so proudly and so exclusively *

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* At the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, where the town is viewed as a mere ministerial appendage to the numerous colleges - the civic Oxford, for instance, existing for the sake of the academic Oxford, and not vice versa — it has naturally happened that the students honor with the name of a man,' him only who wears a cap and gown. The word is not used with any reference to physical powers, or to age; but simply to the final object for which the places are supposed to have first arisen, and to maintain themselves. There is, however, a ludicrous effect produced, in some instances, by the use of this term in contradistinguishing parties. Was he a man?' is a frequent question; and as frequent in the mouth of a stripling under nineteen, speaking, perhaps, of a huge, elderly tradesman - 'Oh, no! not a man at all.'

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denominate a 'man,' might have tempted me into pursuits alien from the pure intellectual passions which had so powerfully mastered my youthful heart some years before. Extinguished such a passion could not be; nor could he think, if remembering the fervor with which I had expressed it, the sort of nympholepsy' which had seized upon me, and which, in some imperfect way, I had avowed with reference to the very origin of lakes and mountains, amongst which the scenery of this most original poetry had chiefly grown up and moved. The very names of the ancient hills - Fairfield, Seat Sandal, Helvellyn, Blencathara, Glaramara; of the sequestered glens such as Borrowdale, Martindale, Mardale, Wasdale, and Ennerdale; but, above all, the shy pastoral recesses, not garishly in the world's eye, like Windermere or Derwentwater, but lurking half unknown to the traveller of that day - Grasmere, for instance, the lovely abode of the poet himself, solitary, and yet sowed, as it were, with a thin diffusion of humble dwellings - here a scattering, and there a clustering, as in the starry heavens sufficient to afford, at every turn and angle, human remembrances and memorials of time-honored affections, or of passions, (as the Churchyard amongst the Mountains' will amply demonstrate) —not wanting even in scenic and tragical interest: these were so many local spells upon me, equally poetic and elevating with the Miltonic names of Valdarno and Vallombrosa, whilst, in addition to that part of their power, they had a separate fascination, under the anticipation that very probably I might here form personal ties which would for ever connect me with their sweet solitudes by powers deep as life and awful as death.

Oh! sense of mysterious pre-existence, by which, through years in which as yet a stranger to these valleys