being thwarted and enfeebled, if not wholly destroyed. For all influences which chain the mind in the prison-house of actuality (such are the cares of the world, physical ill-being, and the tyranny of the senses) deprive the imagination of its motive power, and render it, even in the presence of surroundings the most stimulative, wholly passive and impotent.

For attributing these or kindred views to Coleridge the weightiest evidence lies perhaps in the most characteristic poem of this period, the 'Dejection,' which was written in April of the year 1802. In this poem (in which, as in not many of Coleridge's, the lyric and the philosophic note is blended with consummate art) Coleridge laments his own experience and finds in it the type of a great spiritual truth. He feels that he has lost his 'shaping spirit of Imagination', and that henceforth he must be content with the prose of life, the investigation of the actual and the natural, considered strictly as such. For the spiritual in himself, if it be not dead, is yet lost to consciousness, and without it he lacks the key to the spiritual in nature.' To such a pass has he been brought by the deadening force of private affliction, ill-health and other materializing influences, all which, if not explicitly referred to in the personal lament, are yet implied in the reflections with which it is entwined :

2

There was a time, when, tho' my path was rough,
The youth within me dallied with distress,

1 Cp. letter to Godwin of March 1801, 'The poet is dead in me. My imagination... lies like the cold snuff on the circular rim of a candlestick';-and to Southey,' All my poetic genius... is gone,' July 1802. Letters, i. 388.

2 See Letters, i. 388, where he attributes his 'exceedingly severe metaphysical speculations... partly to ill health, and partly to private afflictions': and Allsopp, Letters and Conversations of S. T. Coleridge, ii. 136, 'My eloquence was most commonly exerted by the desire of running away and hiding myself from my personal feelings.'

And all misfortunes seemed but as the stuff,
Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness.
For Hope grew round me like the climbing vine,
And fruits and foliage, not my own, seemed mine.
But now afflictions bow me to the earth :

Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth :
But O! each visitation

Suspends what Nature gave me at my birth,
My shaping spirit of Imagination!

For not to think of what I needs must feel,
But to be still and patient, all I can,
And haply by abstruse research to steal
From my own nature all the natural man,
This was my sole resource, my only plan:
Till that which suits a part infects the whole,
And now is almost grown the habit of my soul.

In nothing does this loss of imaginative power exhibit itself more clearly than in the languor of his feelings in face of the beauties of nature. Even as he writes, he is gazing with indifference at the glories of the sunset :

And still I gaze-and with how blank an eye!
And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars,
That give away their motion to the stars:
Those stars that glide behind them and between,
Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen!
Yon crescent moon, as fixed as if it grew
In its own cloudless star-less lake of blue,
A boat becalmed, thy own sweet sky-canoe !
I see them all, how excellently fair!

I see, not feel, how beautiful they are.

And the cause of this apathy, as he feels, lies within himself-it springs from his own 'wan and heartless mood' :— My genial spirits fail:

And what can these avail

To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?
It were a vain endeavour

That I should gaze for ever

On that green light that lingers in the west :
I may not hope from outward forms to win

The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.

To his contemplative mood this mournful experience appears as emblematic of a profound truth. Nature reflects, but cannot determine, the emotional life: she but echoes the voice of the heart, and when the heart is untouched she too will remain mute :

O Wordsworth, we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone doth Nature live!1
Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud!
And would we ought behold of higher worth
Than that inanimate cold world allowed
To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd,
Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud
Enveloping the earth!

And from the soul itself thus must be sent
A sweet and powerful voice, of its own birth,
Of all sweet sounds the life and element!

What then is the precondition of this activity of the imagination, of that gift of insight which is so sparingly bestowed? To this question, too, his own experience supplies the answer :

O pure in heart, thou need'st not ask of me
What this strong music in the soul may be
What and wherein it doth exist,

This light, this glory, this fair luminous mist,
This beautiful and beauty-making Power?

Joy, blameless Poet! Joy, that ne'er was given
Save to the pure, and in their purest hour.

But this joy, which is indispensable to the perception of

1

Cp. the lines written at Elbingerode in 1799:

I had found

That grandest scenes have but imperfect charms
Where the eye vainly wanders, nor beholds
One spot with which the heart associates

Holy remembrances of child or friend, &c.

In these lines Coleridge is still an associationist. See the 'Essays on the Principles of Genial Criticism,' Biog. Lit. vol. ii, for his refutation of this theory of our delight in natural forms.

1

beauty, must not be confounded with the gaiety of transient moods. The sorrowful mood, as well as the cheerful, may find a response in nature. The joy which Coleridge speaks of is rather the permanent serenity underlying the changing affections of a soul which has either resolved, or has never known, the strife of opposing elements. This inward harmony of sense and spirit reflects itself in the outward forms of nature; but that harmony once lost, the vision which was its symbol also disappears; or, if it persist, it is now dissevered from the emotion which first engendered it. Thus only those who have both felt and seen the beauty of nature, may afterwards see yet not feel it; to the 'poor loveless, everanxious crowd,' even the sight of it is for ever denied.

In the apprehension of beauty, therefore, the soul projects itself into the outward forms of nature, and invests them with its own life. But it would be an unjustifiable conclusion that beauty is, in Coleridge's opinion, wholly subjective, an arbitrary creation of the mind. This 'beautiful and beauty-making power' is not, in its choice of symbols, entirely free. It is confined to specific forms for the expression of a specific ideal content. And thus arises the question: what is the ground of this sympathy between the natural symbol and the interpretative mind?

To this question one answer inevitably suggests itself. The symbol, and the mind that interprets it, must partake in a common spiritual life. The imaginative interpretation of nature is a heightened consciousness, though still only a mediate consciousness of the presence of that life. It is

1 Cp. Gillman's Life, p. 178, 'Happiness-the state of that person who in order to enjoy his nature in the highest manifestation of conscious feeling, has no need of doing wrong, and who in order to do right, is under no necessity of abstaining from judgment. This is also Schiller's definition of the 'schöne Seele'. In 1804 Coleridge wrote, 'I know not-I have forgotten-what the joy is of which the heart is full.'

to such a spiritual experience that the passage from the 'Lines before Sunrise' gives expression (lines inspired, as Coleridge affirmed, by the solemnity of the Scafell scenery) :

O dread and silent mount! I gazed upon thee,
Till thou still present to the bodily sense

Didst vanish from my thought: entranced in prayer
I worshipped the Invisible alone.

Yet, like some sweet beguiling melody,

So sweet, we knew not we were listening to it, Thou the meantime wert blending with my thought, Ay, with my life and life's own secret joy.1

Here we have recorded the same process of ascent through the symbol to the symbolized reality, to which the poems of an earlier period bear witness. But Coleridge does not conceive of the imagination as establishing our knowledge of that reality; it only illuminates a knowledge already gained, and gained, as we shall see, through other channels and in other ways.

The relationship of the symbol to the object which it symbolizes may, indeed, be variously conceived. It may have only the subjective validity of a purely accidental association, which points to nothing deeper: this is the symbolism of the fancy. Or the relationship may be objective indeed, but yet mechanical and external-the thing created standing for the creator: this is the symbolism of the intellect. Finally, the symbol, while remaining distinct from the thing symbolized, is yet in some mysterious way interpenetrated by its being, and partakes of its reality. Such symbolism is the work of imagination, and an example of it is found in the poetry of the Hebrews, in which 'all objects have a life of their own, and yet partake of our life. In God . . . they have their being'. And the capacity for such interpretation of

...

1 Written Sept. 1802. The poem is an adaptation of Frederika Brun's Hymn on Mt. Blanc', but it is none the less original.