pursue the distress of Christabel, the mysterious warnings of Bracy the Bard, the assumed sorrow of Geraldine, or the indignation of Sir Leoline, at his daughter's seemingly causeless jealousy-what we have principally to remark with respect to the tale is, that, wild and romantic and visionary as it is, it has a truth of its own, which seizes on and masters the imagination from the beginning to the end. The poet unveils with exquisite skill the finer ties of imagination and feeling by which they are linked to the human heart.

"The elements of our sensibility, to all that concerns fair Christabel, are of the purest texture; they are not formally announced in a set description, but they accompany and mark her every movement throughout the piece-Incessu patuit Dea. She is the support of her noble father's declining age-sanctified by the blessing of her departed mother-the beloved of a valorous and absent knight-the delight and admiration of an inspired bard-she is a being made up of tenderness, affection, sweetness, piety! There is a fine discrimination in the descriptions of Christabel and Geraldine, between the lovely and the merely beautiful. There is a moral sensitiveness about Christabel, which none but a true poet could seize. It would be difficult to find a more delicate touch of this kind in any writer, than her anxious exclamation when, in

passing the hall with Geraldine, a gleam bursts from the dying embers.

"Next in point of merit to the power which Mr. Coleridge has displayed, in interesting us by the moral beauty of his heroine, comes the skill with which he has wrought the feelings and fictions of superstition into shape. The witchlike Geraldine lying down by the side of Christabel, and uttering the spell over her, makes the reader thrill with indefinable horror.

"We find another striking excellence of this poem, and which powerfully affects every reader, by placing, as it were before his eyes, a distinct picture of the events narrated, with all their appendages of sight and sound-the dim forestthe massive castle-gate-the angry moan of the sleeping mastiff the sudden flash of the dying embers-the echoing hall—the carved chamber, with its curious lamp-in short, all that enriches and adorns this tale, with a luxuriance of imagination seldom equalled.”

Whilst in the full enjoyment of his creative powers, Coleridge wrote in a letter to a friend the following critique on "the Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni," which is supposed to have been composed about the time of the Christabel, though not published till 1816, in the

* From an anonymous criticism published soon after the Christabel.

Sibylline Leaves. It will serve to shew how freely he assented to the opinions of his friends, and with what candour he criticised his own poems, recording his opinions whether of censure or of praise :

"In a copy of verses, entitled a Hymn be"fore Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni,' I de"scribe myself under the influence of strong de"votional feelings, gazing on the mountain, till "as if it had been a shape emanating from and sensibly representing her own essence, my soul "had become diffused through the mighty vision: " and there,

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'As in her natural form, swell'd vast to Heaven.'

Mr. Wordsworth, I remember, censured the passage as strained and unnatural, and con"demned the hymn in toto, (which, nevertheless, “I ventured to publish in my 'Sibylline Leaves,') "as a specimen of the mock sublime. It may be "so for others, but it is impossible that I should myself find it unnatural, being conscious that "it was the image and utterance of thoughts "and emotions in which there was no mockery.

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Yet, on the other hand, I could readily believe "that the mood and habit of mind out of which "the hymn rose, that differs from Milton's and "Thomson's and from the psalms, the source “of all three, in the author's addressing himself

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"to individual objects actually present to his senses, while his great predecessors apostrophize classes of things presented by the me"mory, and generalized by the understanding; "I can readily believe, I say, that in this there

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may be too much of what our learned meď "ciners call the idiosyncratic for true poetry.— "For, from my very childhood, I have been ac"customed to abstract, and as it were, unrealize "whatever of more than common interest my eyes dwelt on, and then by a sort of transfu“sion and transmission of my consciousness to identify myself with the object; and I have "often thought within the last five or six years, “that if ever I should feel once again the genial "warmth and stir of the poetic impulse, and "refer to my own experiences, I should venture

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on a yet stranger and wilder allegory than of yore-that I would allegorize myself as a rock, “with its summit just raised above the surface of some bay or strait in the Arctic Sea, while yet the stern and solitary night brooked no "alternate sway-all around me fixed and firm, "methought, as my own substance, and near "me lofty masses, that might have seemed to "hold the moon and stars in fee,' and often in "such wild play with meteoric lights, or with "the quiet shine from above, which they made "rebound in sparkles, or dispand in off-shoot, "and splinters, and iridiscent needle shafts of

keenest glitter, that it was a pride and a place "of healing to lie, as in an apostle's shadow, "within the eclipse and deep substance-seem

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ing gloom of these dread ambassadors from "earth to heaven, great hierarchs!" And though obscured, yet to think myself obscured by con"substantial forms, based in the same founda"tion as my own. I grieved not to serve themyea, lovingly and with gladsomeness I abased myself in their presence: for they are my brothers, I said, and the mastery is theirs by " right of older birth, and by right of the migh"tier strivings of the hidden fire that uplifted "them above me."

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This poem has excited much discussion, and many individuals have expressed different opinions as to its origin. Some assert that it is borrowed from our own great poets; whilst German readers say, that it is little more than a free translation from a poem of Frederica Brun. That it is founded on Frederica Brun's poem cannot be doubted; but those who compare the two poems must at once feel, that to call Coleridge's a translation, containing as it does new thoughts, exciting different feelings, and being in fact a new birth, a glorification of the original, would be a misuse of words. I insert the following note of Coleridge's, which appears applicable to the subject: