brilliant sections padded out with filler, sometimes lifted from other writers, in a desperate effort to meet a deadline. Many of his speculations Coleridge merely confided to his notebooks and the ears of his friends, incor
.
42 6 / SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
porated in letters, and poured out in the margins of his own and other people's books.
Even so, it is only when measured against his own potentialities that Coleridge's achievements appear limited. In an 1838 essay the philosopher John Stuart Mill hailed the recently deceased Coleridge as one of 'the two great seminal minds of England': according to Mill, Coleridge's conservatism had, along with the very different utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham (the other seminal mind identified in Mill's essay), revolutionized the political thought of the day. Coleridge was also one of the important and influential literary theorists of the nineteenth century. One of his major legacies is the notion that culture, the nation's artistic and spiritual heritage, represents a force with the power to combat the fragmentation of a modern, market-driven society and to restore a common, collective life. This was an idea that he worked out largely in opposition to Bentham's utilitarianism, the newly prestigious discipline of political economy, and the impoverished, soulless account of human nature that these systems of thought offered. And in Biogra-phia Literaria and elsewhere, Coleridge raised the stakes for literary criticism, making it into a kind of writing that could address the most difficult and abstract questions?questions about, for instance, the relations between literary language and ordinary language, or between poetry and philosophy, or between perception and imagination. Above all, Coleridge's writings in verse?whether we consider the poetry of Gothic demonism in Christabel or the meditative conversation poems like 'Frost at Midnight' or 'This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison'?are the achievements of a remarkably innovative poet.
The Eolian Harp1
Composed at Clevedon, Somersetshire
My pensive Sara! thy soft cheek reclined
Thus on mine arm, most soothing sweet it is
To sit beside our cot, our cot o'ergrown
With white-flowered jasmin, and the broad-leaved myrtle,
5 (Meet emblems they of Innocence and Love!)
And watch the clouds, that late were rich with light,
Slow saddening round, and mark the star of eve
Serenely brilliant (such should wisdom be)
Shine opposite! How exquisite the scents
io Snatched from yon bean-field! and the world so hushed!
The stilly murmur of the distant sea
Tells us of silence.
And that simplest lute,
Placed length-ways in the clasping casement, hark!
i. Named for Aeolus, god of the winds, the harp whom he married on October 4, 1795, and took to has strings stretched over a rectangular sounding a cottage (the 'cot' of lines 3 and 64) at Clevedon,
box. When placed in an opened window, the harp overlooking the Bristol Channel. He later several
(also called 'Eolian lute,' 'Eolian lyre,' 'wind times expanded and altered the original version;
harp') responds to the altering wind by sequences the famous lines 26?29, for example, were not
of musical chords. This instrument, which seems added until 1817. Originally it was titled 'Effusion
to voice nature's own music, was a favorite house-XXXV' and was one of thirty-six such effusions that
hold furnishing in the period and was repeatedly Coleridge included in a 1796 volume of verse;
alluded to in Romantic poetry. It served also as one revised and retitled, it became what he called a
of the recurrent Romantic images for the mind? 'conversation poem'?the designation used since
either the mind in poetic inspiration, as in the last his day for a sustained blank-verse lyric of descrip
stanza of Shelley's 'Ode to the West Wind' tion and meditation, in the mode of conversation
(p. 772), or else the mind in perception, respond-addressed to a silent auditor. This was the form ing to an intellectual breeze by trembling into con-that Coleridge perfected in 'Frost at Midnight'
sciousness, as in this poem, lines 44?48. and that Wordsworth adopted in 'Tintern Abbey.'
Coleridge wrote this poem to Sara Fricker,
.
THE EOLIAN HARP / 427
How by the desultory breeze caressed,
15 Like some coy maid half yielding to her lover,
It pours such sweet upbraiding,0 as must needs scolding
Tempt to repeat the wrong! And now, its strings
