clear, that the sentiments and language, as far as they can be conceived to have been really transferred from the minds and conversation of such persons, are attributable to causes and circumstances not necessarily connected with " their occupations and abode." The thoughts, feelings, language, and manners, of the shepherd-farmers in the vales of Cumberland and Westmoreland, as far as they are actually adopted in those poems, may be accounted for from causes, which will and do produce the same results in every state of life, whether in town or country. As the two principal I rank that independence, which raises a man above servitude, or daily toil for the profit of others, yet not above the necessity of industry and a frugal simplicity of domestic life; and the accompanying unambitious, but solid and religious education, which has rendered few books familiar, but the Bible, and the Liturgy or Hymn book. this latter cause, indeed, which is so far accidental, that it is the blessing of particular countries, and a particular age, not the product of particular places or employments, the poet owes the show of probability, that his personages might really feel, think, and talk with any tolerable resemblance to his representation. It is an excellent remark of Dr. Henry More's, that “ a man of confined education, but of good parts, by constant reading of the Bible will naturally form a more winning and commanding rhetoric than those that are learned; the intermixture of tongues and of artificial phrases debasing their style."

3 [Enthusiasmus Triumphatus, Sect. xxxv. "For a man illiterate, as he was, but of good parts, by constant reading of the Bible will naturally contract a more winning and commanding Rhetoric than those that are learned, the intermixture of tongues and of artificial phrases deforming their style, and making it sound more after the manner of men, though ordinarily there may be more of God in it than in that of the enthusiast." P. 34, Ed. London, 1656. Dr. Henry More, the friend and colleague of Cudworth, was born in 1614, died 1687. He was educated in Christ College, Cambridge, in which University he spent his life. His theological works, the chief of which are The Mystery of Godliness and a Modest Inquiry into the Mystery of Iniquity, a detailed argument against the Church of Rome,-fill one large folio volume, and his philosophical

* [This is spoken of the enthusiast, David George, who was born at Delph; died 1556. S. C.

It is, moreover, to be considered that to the formation of healthy feelings, and a reflecting mind, negations involve impediments not less formidable than sophistication and vicious intermixture. I am convinced, that for the human soul to prosper in rustic life a certain vantage-ground is pre-requisite. It is not every man that is likely to be improved by a country life or by country labors. Education, or original sensibility, or both, must pre-exist, if the changes, forms, and incidents of nature are to prove a sufficient stimulant. And where these are not sufficient, the mind contracts and hardens by want of stimulants; and the man becomes selfish, sensual, gross, and hard-hearted. Let the management of the Poor Laws in Liverpool, Manchester, or Bristol be compared with the ordinary dispensation of the poor rates in agricultural villages, where the farmers are the overseers and guardians of the poor. If my own experience have not been particularly unfortunate, as well as that of the many respectable country clergymen with whom I have conversed on the subject, the result would engender more than scepticism concerning the desirable influences of low and rustic life in and for itself. Whatever may be concluded on the other side, from the stronger local attachments and enterprising spirit of the Swiss, and other mountaineers, applies to a particular mode of pastoral life, under forms of property that permit and beget manners truly republican, not to rustic life in general, or to the absence of artificial cultivation. On the contrary the mountaineers, whose manners have been so often eulogized, are in general better educated and greater readers than men of equal rank elsewhere. But where this is not the case, as among the peasantry of North

writings are numerous. He studied Plotinus, and, rejecting the doctrines of Aristotle and the scholastics, sought the principles of divine philosophy in the writings of the Platonists. Their teaching and that of the ancient Cabbalists he traced to the same source, the Hebrew Prophets, whose doctrines he believes to have been transmitted to Pythagoras and from him to Plato. Though an opponent of mystics and enthusiasts, his own mind had a strong tendency to mysticism; he was profoundly learned and of a contemplative spirit. Cousin says that in combating the errors of Des Cartes and Spinoza he showed great respect for the genius of these two philosophers. S. C.]

Wales, the ancient mountains, with all their terrors and all their glories, are pictures to the blind, and music to the deaf.

I should not have entered so much into detail upon this passage, but here seems to be the point, to which all the lines of difference converge as to their source and centre ;—I mean, as far as, and in whatever respect, my poetic creed does differ from the doctrines promulgated in this preface. I adopt with full faith the principle of Aristotle, that poetry, as poetry, is essentially ideal, that it avoids and excludes all accident; that its apparent individualities of rank, character, or occupation, must be representative of a class: and that the persons of poetry must be clothed with generic attributes, with the common attributes of the class not with such as one gifted individual might possibly possess, but such as from his situation it is most probable beforehand that he would possess. If my premises are right and my

[Mr. Coleridge here quoted, in a foot note, from the first edition of The Friend the passage," Say not that I am recommending abstractions," to the end of the paragraph, which occurs in the Second of the Letters from Germany, placed near the end of this volume.]

***

5 [See Poetic., s. 18. Φανερὸν δὲ ἐκ τῶν εἰρημένων, καὶ ὅτι οὐ τὸ τὰ γενόμενα λέγειν, τοῦτο ποιητοῦ ἔργον ἐστὶν, ἀλλ ̓ οἷα ἂν γένοιτο, καὶ τὰ δυνατὰ κατὰ τὸ εἰκὸς, ἢ τὸ ἀναγκαῖον. Διὸ καὶ φιλοσοφώτερον καὶ σπουδαιότερον ποίησις ἱστορίας ἐστιν. Η μὲν γὰρ ποίησις μᾶλλον τὰ καθόλου, ἡ δ ̓ ἱστορία τὰ καθ ̓ ἕκαστον λέγει. Ἔστι δὲ καθόλου μὲν, τῷ ποίῳ τὰ ποῖ ̓ ἅττα συμβαίνει λέγειν, ἢ πράττειν, κατὰ τὸ εἰκὸς, ἢ τὸ ἀναγκαῖον, οὗ στοχάζεται ἡ ποίησις, ονόματα επιτιθεμένη τὰ δὲ καθ' ἕκαστον, τί 'Αλκιβιάδης ἔπραξεν, ἢ τί ἔπαθεν. Ed.

"It appears from what has been said, that the object of the poet is not to relate what has actually happened, but what may possibly happen, either with probability or from necessity. The difference between the poet and the historian does not arise from one writing in verse and the other in prose; for if the work of Herodotus were put into verse, it would be no less a history than it is in prose. But they differ in this, that one relates what has actually been done, the other, what may be done. Poetry, therefore, is more philosophical and instructive than history. Poetry speaks more of general things, and history of particular. By general things I mean what any person of such a character would probably and naturally say or do in such a situation; and this is what poetry aims at even in giving names to the characters. By particular things I mean what any individual, as Alcibiades, for instance, either acted or suffered in reality." Pye's translation. S. C.]

["It is Shakspeare's peculiar excellence, that throughout the whole of his splendid picture gallery-(the reader will excuse the acknowledged

deductions legitimate, it follows that there can be no poetic medium between the swains of Theocritus and those of an imaginary golden age.

8

The characters of the vicar and the shepherd mariner, in the poem of THE BROTHERS,' and that of the shepherd of Green-head Ghyll in the MICHAEL, have all the verisimilitude and representative quality, that the purposes of poetry can require. They are persons of a known and abiding class, and their manners and sentiments the natural product of circumstances common to the class. Take Michael for instance:

An old man stout of heart, and strong of limb,
His bodily frame had been from youth to age
Of an unusual strength: his mind was keen,
Intense, and frugal, apt for all affairs,
And in his shepherd's calling he was prompt
And watchful more than ordinary men.
Hence he had learned the meaning of all winds,

Of blasts of every tone; and oftentimes
When others heeded not, He heard the South
Make subterraneous music, like the noise
Of bagpipers on distant Highland hills.
The Shepherd, at such warning, of his flock
Bethought him, and he to himself would say,
The winds are now devising work for me!'
And, truly, at all times, the storm, that drives
The traveller to a shelter, summoned him
Up to the mountains: he had been alone
Amid the heart of many thousand mists,
That came to him and left him on the heights.
So lived he till his eightieth year was past.
And grossly that man errs, who should suppose

inadequacy of this metaphor)—we' find individuality everywhere, mere portrait nowhere. In all his various characters we still feel ourselves communing with the same nature, which is everywhere present as the vegetable sap in the branches, sprays, leaves, buds, blossoms, and fruits, their shapes, tastes, and odors. Speaking of the effect, that is, his works themselves, we may define the excellence of their method as consisting in that just proportion, that union and interpenetration of the universal and the particular, which must ever pervade all works of decided and true science." The Friend, iii., pp. 121-2. Ed.]

[P. W., i., p. 109. Ed.]

8 [Ib., p. 222. Ed.]

That the green valleys, and the streams and rocks,
Were things indifferent to the Shepherd's thoughts.
Fields, where with cheerful spirits he had breathed
The common air; the hills, which he so oft

Had climbed with vigorous steps;9 which had impressed
So many incidents upon his mind

Of hardship, skill or courage, joy or fear;
Which, like a book, preserved the memory
Of the dumb animals, whom he had saved,
Had fed or sheltered, linking to such acts,
So grateful in themselves, the certainty
Of honorable gain; these fields, these hills
Which were his living Being, even more

Than his own blood-what could they less? had laid
Strong hold on his affections, 10 were to him

A pleasurable feeling of blind love,

The pleasure which there is in life itself.

On the other hand, in the poems pitched in a lower key, as the HARRY GILL," and THE IDIOT Boy," the feelings are those of human nature in general; though the poet has judiciously laid the scene in the country, in order to place himself in the vicinity of interesting images, without the necessity of ascribing a sentimental perception of their beauty to the persons of his drama. In the IDIOT Box, indeed, the mother's character is not so much the real and native product of a "situation where the essential passions of the heart find a better soil, in which they can attain their maturity and speak a plainer and more emphatic language,” as it is an impersonation of an instinct abandoned by judgment. Hence the two following charges seem to me not wholly groundless at least they are the only plausible objections which I have heard to that fine poem. The one is, that the author has not, in the poem itself, taken sufficient care to preclude from the reader's fancy the disgusting images of ordinary morbid idiocy,

9 ["

hills, which with vigorous step

He had so often climbed."-Last edition. Ed.]

10 ["

linking to such acts

The certainty of honorable gain;

Those fields, those hills-what could they less? had laid
Strong hold on his affections."-Last edition. Ed.]

11 [P. W., ii., p. 135. Ed.]

is [Ib., i., p. 203. Ed.]