It is remarked, by the writers upon the Bathos, that the true _profound_ is surely known by one quality--its being wholly bottomless; insomuch, that when you think you have attained its utmost depth in the work of some of its great masters, another, or peradventure the same, astonishes you, immediately after, by a plunge so much more vigorous, as to outdo all his former outdoings. So it seems to be with the new school, or, as they may be termed, the wild or lawless poets. After we had been admiring their extravagance for many years, and marvelling at the ease and rapidity with which one exceeded another in the unmeaning or infantine, until not an idea was left in the rhyme--or in the insane, until we had reached something that seemed the untamed effusion of an author whose thoughts were rather more free than his actions--forth steps Mr Coleridge, like a giant refreshed with sleep, and as if to redeem his character after so long a silence, ('his poetic powers having been, he says, from 1808 till very lately, in a state of suspended animation,' p. v.) and breaks out in these precise words--
''Tis the middle of night by the castle clock, And the owls have awaken'd the crowing cock; Tu ---- whit! ---- Tu ---- whoo! And hark, again! the crowing cock, How drowsily it crew.' 'Sir Leoline, the Baron rich, Hath a toothless mastiff bitch; From her kennel beneath the rock She makes answer to the clock, Four for the quarters, and twelve for the hour: Ever and aye, moonshine or shower, Sixteen short howls, not over loud; Some say she sees my lady's shroud.' 'Is the night chilly and dark? The night is chilly, but not dark.' p. 3, 4.
It is probable that Lord Byron may have had this passage in his eye, when he called the poem 'wild' and 'original;' but how he discovered it to be 'beautiful,' is not quite so easy for us to imagine.
Much of the art of the wild writers consists in sudden transitions--opening eagerly upon some topic, and then flying from it immediately. This indeed is known to the medical men, who not unfrequently have the care of them, as an unerring symptom. Accordingly, here we take leave of the Mastiff Bitch, and lose sight of her entirely, upon the entrance of another personage of a higher degree,