"O Lady! we receive but what we give, And in our life alone does nature live; Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud,"
with the passage which follows, contain more vividly, perhaps, than anything which Coleridge has written, the expression of the shaping and colouring function which he assigns, in the _Biographia Literaria_, to imagination. _Christabel_ and the _Ancient Mariner_ have so completely taken possession of the highest place, that it is needless to do more than allude to them. The supernatural has never received such treatment as in these two wonderful productions of his genius, and though the first of them remains a torso, it is the loveliest torso in the gallery of English literature. Although Coleridge had, for many years before his death, almost entirely forsaken poetry, the few fragments of work which remain, written in later years, show little trace of weakness, although they are wanting in the unearthly melody which imparts such a charm to _Kubla Khan_, _Love_ and _Youth and Age_. (G. D. B.; H. CH.)
In the latter part of his life, and for the generation which followed, Coleridge was ranked by many young English churchmen of liberal views as the greatest religious thinker of their time. As Carlyle has told in his _Life of Sterling_, the poet's distinction, in the eyes of the younger churchmen with philosophic interests, lay in his having recovered and preserved his Christian faith after having passed through periods of rationalism and Unitarianism, and faced the full results of German criticism and philosophy. His opinions, however, were at all periods somewhat mutable, and it would be difficult to state them in any form that would hold good for the whole even of his later writings. He was, indeed, too receptive of thought impressions of all kinds to be a consistent systematizer. As a schoolboy, by his own account, he was for a time a Voltairean, on the strength of a perusal of the _Philosophical Dictionary_. At college, as we have seen, he turned Unitarian. From that position he gradually moved towards pantheism, a way of thought to which he had shown remarkable leanings when, as a schoolboy, he discoursed of Neo-Platonism to Charles Lamb, or--if we may trust his recollection--translated the hymns of Synesius. Early in life, too, he met with the doctrines of Jacob Behmen, of whom, in the _Biographia Literaria_, he speaks with affection and gratitude as having given him vital philosophic guidance. Between pantheism and Unitarianism he seems to have balanced till his thirty-fifth year, always tending towards the former in virtue of the recoil from "anthropomorphism" which originally took him to Unitarianism. In 1796, when he named his first child David Hartley, but would not have him baptized, he held by the "Christian materialism" of the writer in question, whom in his _Religious Musings_ he terms "wisest of mortal kind."