"All thoughts, all passions, all delights, Whatever stirs this mortal frame, All are but ministers of Love, And feed his sacred flame!"
Has Coleridge, then, ever written a Great Poem? No; for besides the Regions of the Fair, the Wild, and the Wonderful, there is another up to which his wing might not soar; though the plumes are strong as soft. But why should he who loveth to take "the wings of a dove that he may flee away" to the bosom of beauty, though there never for a moment to be at rest--why should he, like an eagle, soar into the storms that roll above this visible diurnal sphere in peals of perpetual thunder?
Wordsworth, somewhere or other, remonstrates, rather angrily, with the Public, against her obstinate ignorance shown in persisting to put into one class himself, Coleridge, and Southey, as birds of a feather, that not only flock together but warble the same sort of song. But he elsewhere tells us that he and Coleridge hold the same principles in the Art Poetical; and among his Lyrical Ballads he admitted the three finest compositions of his illustrious Compeer. The Public, therefore, is not to blame in taking him at his word, even if she had discerned no family likeness in their genius. Southey certainly resembles Wordsworth less than Coleridge does; but he lives at Keswick, which is but some dozen miles from Rydal, and perhaps with an unphilosophical though pensive Public that link of connection should be allowed to be sufficient, even were there no other less patent and material than the Macadamised turnpike road. But true it is and of verity, that Southey, among our living Poets, stands aloof and "alone in his glory;" for he alone of them all has adventured to illustrate, in Poems of magnitude, the different characters, customs, and manners of nations. "Joan of Arc" is an English and French story--"Thalaba," Arabian--"Kehama," Indian--"Madoc," Welsh and American--and "Roderick," Spanish and Moorish; nor would it be easy to say (setting aside the first, which was a very youthful work) in which of these noble poems Mr Southey has most successfully performed an achievement entirely beyond the power of any but the highest genius. In "Madoc," and especially in "Roderick," he has relied on the truth of nature--as it is seen in the history of great national transactions and events. In "Thalaba" and in "Kehama," though in them, too, he has brought to bear an almost boundless lore, he follows the leading of Fancy and Imagination, and walks in a world of wonders. Seldom, if ever, has one and the same Poet exhibited such power in such different kinds of Poetry--in Truth a Master, and in Fiction a Magician.