p. 9O. _Fears in Solitude_. Coleridge, who was so often his own best critic, especially when the criticism was to remain inactive, wrote on an autograph copy of this poem now belonging to Professor Dowden: "N.B.--The above is perhaps not Poetry,--but rather a sort of middle thing between Poetry and Oratory--_sermoni propriora_.--Some parts are, I am conscious, too tame even for animated prose." It is difficult to say whether, in such poems as this, Coleridge is overtaken by his besetting indolence, or whether he is deliberately writing down to the theories of Wordsworth. Another criticism of his own on his early blank verse, where he speaks of "the utter want of all rhythm in the verse, the monotony and dead _plumb down_ of the pauses, and the absence of all bone, muscle and sinew in the single lines," applies only too well to the larger part of his work in this difficult metre, so apt to go to sleep by the way.
p. 1O7. _Hymn before Sun-rise_. Coleridge was never at Chamouni, and the suggestion of his poem is to be found in a poem of twenty lines by a German poetess, Frederike Brun. Some of the rhetoric of his poem Coleridge got from the German poetess; the imagination is all his own. It is perhaps a consequence of its origin that the imagination and the rhetoric never get quite clear of one another, and that, in spite of some magical lines (wholly Coleridge's) like:
"O struggling with the darkness all the night, And visited all night by troops of stars:"
the poem remains somewhat external, a somewhat deliberate heaping up of hosannas.
p. 114. _The Nightingale_. The persons supposed to take part in this "conversation poem" are of course William and Dorothy Wordsworth.
p. 134. _A Day-Dream_. "There cannot be any doubt, I think, that the 'Asra' of this poem is Miss Sarah Hutchinson; 'Mary,' her sister (Mrs. Wordsworth); 'our sister and our friend,' Dorothy and William Wordsworth." (DYKES CAMPBELL.)
p. 142. _Work without Hope_. "What could be left to hope for when the man could already do such work?" asks Mr. Swinburne. With this exquisite poem, in which Coleridge's style is seen in its most faultless union of his finest qualities, compare this passage from a letter to Lady Beaumont, about a year earlier: "Though I am at present sadly below even _my_ par of health, or rather unhealth, and am the more depressed thereby from the consciousness that in this yearly resurrection of Nature from her winter sleep, amid young leaves and blooms and twittering nest-building birds, the sun so gladsome, the breezes with such healing on their wings, all good and lovely things are beneath me, above me, and everywhere around me, and all from God, while my incapability of enjoying, or, at best, languor in receiving them, is directly or indirectly from myself, from past procrastination, and cowardly impatience of pain." It was always upon some not less solid foundation that Coleridge built these delicate structures.