heaths overlooking the Channel," the happy youth, thus admitted into the poet's confidence, "pointed out to Coleridge's notice the bare masts of a vessel on the very edge of the horizon, and within the red-orbed disk of the setting sun, like his own spectre ship in the Ancient Mariner.” ” Who can doubt that the poet had seen it already, and many a wonder more?

In the meantime Southey had come home, and had begun the course of industry and continuous work from which he never deviated all his after-life. He got employment on the Reviews and newspapers, he wrote and published "Letters from Portugal," he planned innumerable works. Complaining of his dislike to "desultory topics," he reveals his own love of the gigantic with curious simplicity and the same absence of all critical perception in respect to his own works which we have noted in his greater brethren. "Joan of Arc," he says, 66 was a whole —it was something to think of at every moment of solitude, and to dream of at night: my heart was in the poem; I threw my own feelings into it in my own language, ay, and out of one part of it and another you may find my own character. Seriously, to go on with Madoc is almost necessary to my happiness; I had rather leave off eating than poetising." But now these big works had no longer the assistance of Coleridge's enthusiasm and co-operation. There was not apparently any severance of friendship; they had quarrelled, but had been reconciled; and the transference of Charles Lloyd, a young man of wealth and weakness, a poet in his way, who had for some time lived at Nether Stowey with Coleridge, helping to keep the house by the allowance. made for his board-to Southey's household instead, was not an element of harmony; but there seems to have been no positive breach. However, Southey expunged the portion written by Coleridge from his "Joan of Arc,”

and Coleridge threw himself entirely into the society of Wordsworth, publishing conjointly with him. He had a tendency always to unite his friends with himself in his books. Poems, both by Charles Lloyd, his temporary companion, and by his old and faithful friend Charles Lamb, whose delicate and delightful personality ought to have come into this sketch ere now, were mingled, to the confusion of editors, in his second volume of poetry. His conjunction with Wordsworth went so far as interlineation. It seems to have been a necessity of his nature to weave himself in with some more steady, more deeplyrooted being.

CHAPTER VII.

THE LYRICAL BALLADS.

A

THIS Conjoint volume was published in September 1798. It was the product of those wonderful roamings over "smooth Quantock's airy ridge," and all the long intercourse of the endless summer days, when Coleridge wove the most wonderful dream-tissues of his genius, and Wordsworth produced so much that was immortal— and something, too, that was not worthy of immortality. The book was received by the world not as the revelation of two new poets, but as something like an insult to its own fine taste and lofty standards of excellence. shout of derision rose from all the critics; and England in general can scarcely be said to have been less than personally offended by this serious and almost solemn attempt to impose a new poetical creed upon her. Few abortive publications have ever raised so great a ferment —for it could not at first be called anything but abortive. The book was so badly received, and sold so poorly, that when Cottle-always generous, who had given Wordsworth thirty guineas for it, his usual measure of what poetic genius was worth-sold his copyrights to Longman in London shortly after, he found that this was considered as of no value at all, and restored it to its original owners. Yet this was the volume which contained the "Ancient Mariner," a poem in which there was no insult

ing assault upon poetic diction, or selection of the prosaic and colloquial in language, but which seems to have been passed over in the ferment raised about Alice Fell's torn cloak, and the other familiarities of the volume. We cannot venture to say now that the critics had not some excuse. The book was a challenge and a defiance. The young writer was bent not only upon instructing mankind, which was a legitimate aim, by the real message which he had to deliver, but on revolutionising the very form and fashion under which poetry had hitherto addressed the world. It was a fantastic as well as a presumptuous attempt; and though one poet was the chief offender, the system had been settled upon after numberless discussions between the two, who combined with the fervour of their personal convictions a contempt for the opinion of the public, which was heightened by confidence in its inevitable docility and submission, one time or another, to themselves, its natural leaders. They knew, and were rather pleased to think, that the critics would be puzzled and startled; but they did not perceive how likely such an attempt was to run into extravagance, or how good taste and good sense might both be sacrificed to the polemics of the effort. Coleridge has given us, in his Biographia Literaria, an elaborate description of their scheme. It was to be " a series of poems, of two sorts."

“In the one the incidents and agents were to be in part at least supernatural, and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency. For the second class subjects were to be chosen from actual life; the characters and incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and its vicinity where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after them, or to notice them when they present themselves. In this idea originated the plan of the Lyrical Ballads, in which it was agreed that my endea

vours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object to give the charm of novelty to the things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural by awakening the mind's attention to the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and wonders of the world before us-an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes and see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand."

These ostentatiously simple means of awakening the public suffered the fate of all that is artificial and factitious. To begin a serious and affecting poem thus

"A little child, dear brother Jim,"

which was, as originally written, the first line (afterwards left incomplete) of "We are Seven;" to concentrate the interest of a first volume of poetry in a long-winded production like the "Idiot Boy;" to introduce into serious

verse

"A household tub, like one of those
Which women use to wash their clothes,"

and which

were sins for which there is very little excuse, mere rebellion against the hackneyed medium of poetic diction, of which Cowper and Burns had already broken the spell, does not justify. And when we see that this was not done accidentally but with serious intention, and from a height of superiority, as if something sacred and sublime was in the narrative of Johnny's ride and Harry Gill's shivering, the indignation of the public strikes us as not without reason. This foolish and quite unnecessary attempt was insisted upon as the very essence and soul of his mission by Wordsworth himself, until maturing years improved his perceptions and his taste. Nothing