toil, and that gathered about them the halo of glory, in all its lustre, which brought the admiration and intoxicating praise of the world, the humble respect of friends, the envy and animosity of enemies, seems to them but a rapid sketch, thrown off as a pastime, rather than the full force of a mind, that all acknowledged to be impelled by a mighty genius. In the superiority of their present power, in the newly acquired compass of their minds, their career seems an idle hour, their life a distant spot in the vast ocean of the past, and to have gone by like a dream,-all unsubstantial and devoid of action. Of course, it can only be the greatest intellects who leave the world with this feeling of inferiority. It is they alone who ever aspire beyond the measure of their intelligence, who are ever following, with eager and daring impetuosity, the wide grasp of their conceptions. But we can conceive Shakspeare, who has left less of himself than the usual vanity of men of genius generally dictates, folding his hands with despair, over the works that men now regard as wrought by inspiration :--we can fancy him, weighing the full value of life, and asking himself whether he had acted up to the real spirit and meaning of existence, whether he had performed all that the consciousness of possessing a great mind, should have directed,-whether his influence had found its way to the hearts of his cotemporaries, and given them the inclination towards the useful and the good,-whether future generations should record him, as one to whose voice they listened, to whose instruction they bowed, who had become the impelling principle of their conduct, and interwoven his own feelings and excellence with the flow of their thoughts, and the current of their being.

We can bring before us Dante, on his death-bed, sighing over broken hopes, and the unfulfilled desires ambition led him to entertain, taking a gloomy view of all parts of his life, save the portion where a generous disposition urged him, in the cause of freedom, to enter the warring factions of his country, and battle on the side of that he deemed the right. But he holds in his hand his Commedia, and laughs at his own invention. The torments of his Inferno, the coming punishments of his Purgatorio, the pleasures of his Paradise, though wrought with all the power and sublimity genius can bring, are then to him only emblems of idleness, of time misspent, of opportunity neglected. Though the rest of mankind are held in amazement at the wonderful creations of his imagination; though they sigh over the syren song of Francesca, in her wo, and listen until they almost seem realities, to the shrieks and curses of Ugolino in his agony, yet a voice within, that becomes stronger as time closes over us, upbraids him, and declares his career to have been useless and void, save the portion where

he engaged in the active duties of life, and made man the object of his thoughts,--where he warred for the rights and interests of his country, and put aside the selfish ambition of present or future renown.

And Tasso, the mild and melancholy Tasso, with the scar of thought upon his brow, and whose brain, in its workings, had fed upon itself till his days became engulfed in the vortex of derangement, perhaps he did not look with contempt upon the results of his labour. The struggle with him, even to bear existence, had been too constant and agonising; his misery had been too acute and too crushing to allow of his marring his last hours, which may be considered only as an interval of returning reason, with utter despair. Hope had been, through life, his sole star of joy--and to fancy it withered, at the moment when it is most wanted, and when it is all that is left, would be imagining a scene of too great horror. Yet it may have been so; and he who had done nothing but contend with that bitterest of enemies, the agony of one's own bosom, and the fierce hostility of rivalry and envy from without, did, as he was dying, look back upon the past, and trace but his footstep's empty tread, no mark, not even a shadow of his existence, for the future to know. Tasso's life differs from most of the other great poets'. He seems to have busied himself very little in the things about him, either from the morbidness of his nature, or a refined fastidiousness that shrank from the approach or contact of common things. All was poetical, feeling, and sensitive; a character that envenomed the barbed points that penetrated his soul, and gave a double triumph to the malice of his foes; and his history, from his woes, madness, imprisonment, forms one of the most interesting chapters in the book of human life.

We can conceive Milton the happiest, at the last, of all who pursue this shadow of ideal perfection. It is a singular fact in his history, that he was able to control the vivacity and ardour that belong to the poet's temperament, and forego the intoxicating pleasure that poetry seems to create, for the barren and uncongenial struggles of political strife. But there is an intense innate zeal in the poet's character that imparts itself to all he undertakes, and there is a love of and necessity for excitement, and a facility of being excited, that impels him to share and become a part of all that is acted near him. He is like the harp that every breath of air makes vibrate; and it is this sensitiveness, this facility of receiving impressions, that is perhaps the source of greatness in him, by the constant vigilance with which the mind is kept active, and the deep feeling with which he imbibes every thing till it becomes a portion of his nature: but it is, at the same time, his source of misfortune and ruin, in making him give way easily to the current, on which he

finds a pleasure in being borne, till he is thrown aside, the victim of circumstance. But with Milton the attainment of poetic fame seems to have been secondary to that of great learning and universal knowledge. We therefore find him casting aside the beautiful illustrations of fancy, the glowing splendour of imagination, and the radiant panoply of thought, which his young mind wore, for the coarser simplicity of dry utility, the duller, but more difficult glory of erudition. All his life, from his juvenile poems to his last immortal labour, where he made himself the cotemporary of all future time, seems to us a waste. And yet it is but a proof how little we are able to judge of the workings of a great mind, or determine what will be the results of its internal efforts. Before we can say how unfortunate that Milton ever entered the political arena of his country, we must decide whether it was not an improvement to his intellectual energy; and whether the knowledge he displays of the fiercest of human passions, and the tortures of a proud and guilty soul, was not gathered from observing the scenes and the men about him.

Yet unlike the other great men we have named, he could point to other records than those in which he followed the vanity-but the beautiful, the intensely beautiful vision-of ideal perfection. There was not with him the deep scorn we supposed to exist with the rest of his own exertions; though he might regret the train of circumstances which drove him from literature, or rather the department of poetry and history, yet he could look back with some pride and gratification at the view of no part of his life being thrown away. He had encouraged no dreams of power or false hope, but kept before him the one great object which he felt conscious he was able to secure, and which he had set out in life with the determination to obtainimmortality of fame. He had been useful, and though the outline of thought that he had sketched in the early part of his career, before he knew the difficulties with which a student must contend, was not altogether filled, yet enough had been done to show the spirit with which he wrought, and that all his powers had been exerted to influence men's minds, and impress their vigour on the times.

We have thus attempted to express our admiration of the philosophic mind as it exists among the higher order of intelligences, and we have hazarded the opinion that the only true greatness is to be found in that class of intellect. We also think, that so far from being speculative, in the invidious sense with which the word is generally used, we regard it as the most practical, and the most useful, if utility be measured and valued according to the elevation of our nature, the only true VOL. XVIII.-No. 37.

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standard of the importance of any event or circumstance, and not by the baser and more limited usefulness of the improvement of our personal interests, or facilitating the business of life, and making success in its common things more easily achieved. Where then shall we place Coleridge? Among those who have enlarged the sphere of thought, who have given a finer tact to human feeling, and fitted men for their duties by imparting a greater moral energy? or shall we degrade him to the rank of those who have effected nothing-attempted nothing but suffered their powers to moulder in indolent disuse? In due justice to his merits, we can place him in neither class. We respect his qualities as a man, and admire those of his mind-but we do not rank him high as a philosopher. We honour him as a man of genius, and as a virtuous man; as one who sacrificed himself, so far as worldly reward goes, to give to men the principles he thought for their advantage now and for ever, but we are not sure that he was gifted with the capacity to attain all the proud glory that we attach to that name. In saying this, we are aware that we directly oppose the opinions of others. We therefore hazard the assertion with diffidence-but still, having formed the decision after some study of his works, and some reflection on his mind, we must express it. Our verdict is not given in a spirit of depreciation or contemptuous disregard for the estimation with which many value him, nor to detract from his real worth-but merely and simply because the calm conclusion of our judgment is against him. Our remarks can extend no farther than to assign to him his just rank, for we do not wish to lower him-but on the contrary, from our admiration, which is great, if not overweening, we would elevate him as far as that feeling, balanced and corrected by conscience, will allow.

We would wish to see his works universally read-as from none can be gathered more purity of thought, more refinement of feeling, a more delicate or nobler moral tone; though at the same time we feel they are not for the many, and that the large portion of those whom curiosity, or even a better motive, might induce to their perusál, would throw them by as unintelligible, denounce them as absurd, or, if of a modest or generous nature, look with pity and despair on themselves or the author. But all should remember, that it would be great weakness to pass a hasty condemnation on the labours of such a man. The difficulty in discovering a meaning, may be in themselves; for great minds do not often pass off in vapour. They generally labour with strength and fidelity, and are not apt to allow the chain of thought to become disunited, or their subject to disappear in the obscure rambling of remote association, and fade like a dream. They grasp firmly, and pursue

ardently, and wish not, by conceding to difficulty, to bring on themselves the deep rebuke of incapacity.

We will here quote Coleridge's remarks on understanding the sense of an author.

"In the perusal of philosophical works, I have been greatly benefited by a resolve which, in the antithetic form, and with the allowed quaintness of an adage or maxim, I have been accustomed to word thus:'Until you understand a writer's ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding.""

This maxim he applies to the Timæus of Plato.

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-"Whatever I comprehend, impresses me with a reverential sense of the author's genius; but there is a considerable portion of the work to which I can attach no consistent meaning."

"Therefore, utterly baffled in all my attempts to understand the ignorance of Plato, I concluded myself ignorant of his understanding."

Such modesty, on the part of such a man, should moderate the rash decisions of his inferiors. The charges brought against his writings, are obscurity and vagueness; but we see little of either, as some link can always be found, by those sufficiently interested in the topics he discusses to give their attention, even though it be exacting and painful. No one but a madman can talk or write, unless his mind moves in a current of regular and coherent thought; but even this may not make him easily understood--the subjects may not be genial; the associations, which with all men are peculiar, may be indistinct, and the leading idea may at last seem lost in the multitude of its suggestions and analogies, till each thought, instead of being bound by clear, though attenuated fibres, seems like the stars, to be held in their places by no common bond or law, but to roll through space unchecked and unguided. This appears to have been the case with Coleridge, and the editor in the preface to the Table Talk, gives an account of the effect on himself of some of the far-off wanderings of his relative's mind.

"So I can well remember occasions in which, after listening to Mr. Coleridge for several delightful hours, I have gone away with divers splendid masses of reasoning in my head, the separate beauty and coherency of which, I deeply felt; but how they had produced, or how they bore upon each other, I could not then perceive. In such cases, I have mused sometimes even for days afterwards upon the words, until at length, spontaneously as it seemed, the fire would kindle,' and the association, which had escaped my utmost efforts of comprehension before, flashed itself all at once upon my mind with the clearness of noon-day light."

Of course, one with whom a mode of thinking so peculiar as these passages would indicate, had become habitual, was unfitted for popularity. The mass of people would not take the trouble to toil through long processes of reasoning to discover a meaning; and this difficulty, if there were no others, would