feeling of ingratitude and cruelty over the very elements of heaven. Various
are the workings of this greatest faculty of the human mind?both passionate
and tranquil. In its tranquil and purely pleasurable operation, it acts chiefly
by producing out of many things, as they would have appeared in the descrip
tion of an ordinary mind, described slowly and in unimpassioned succession,
a oneness, even as nature, the greatest of poets, acts upon us when we open
our eyes upon an extended prospect. Thus the flight of Adonis from the enam
ored goddess in the dusk of evening? Look how a bright star shooteth from the sky?
So glides he in the night from Venus' eye.3 How many images and feelings are here brought together without effort and
without discord?the beauty of Adonis?the rapidity of his flight?the yearn
ing yet hopelessness of the enamored gazer?and a shadowy ideal character
thrown over the whole.?Or it acts by impressing the stamp of humanity, of
human feeling, over inanimate objects * * *
the text of T. M. Raysor's edition?based on Cole-2. Coleridge here applies the distinction between
ridge's manuscripts and on contemporary reports? fancy and imagination presented in Biographia Lit- of Coleridge's Shakespearean Criticism (1930); eraria, chap. 13, to a passage from the narrative four minor corrections in wording have been taken poem Venus and Adonis (lines 361?64). from R. A. Foakes's edition of Coleridge's Lectures 3. Venus and Adonis, lines 815?16. 1808-1819: On Literature (1987).
.
BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA / 48 7
Lo, here the gentle lark, weary of rest,
From his moist cabinet mounts up on high
And wakes the morning, from whose silver breast
The sun ariseth in his majesty; Who doth the world so gloriously behold
That cedar tops and hills seem burnished gold. And lastly, which belongs only to a great poet, the power of so carrying on the
eye of the reader as to make him almost lose the consciousness of words?to
make him see everything?and this without exciting any painful or laborious
attention, without any anatomy of description (a fault not uncommon in
descriptive poetry) but with the sweetness and easy movement of nature. Lastly, he previously to his dramas, gave proof of a most profound, energetic,
and philosophical mind, without which he might have been a very delightful
4,4
poet, but not the great dramatic poet. But chance and his powerful
instinct combined to lead him to his proper province?in the conquest
of which we are to consider both the difficulties that opposed him, and the
advantages.
1808
[MECHANIC VS. ORGANIC FORM] 4
The subject of the present lecture is no less than a question submitted to
your understandings, emancipated from national prejudice: Are the plays of
Shakespeare works of rude uncultivated genius, in which the splendor of the
parts compensates, if aught can compensate, for the barbarous shapelessness
and irregularity of the whole? To which not only the French critics, but even
his own English admirers, say [yes]. Or is the form equally admirable with the
matter, the judgment of the great poet not less deserving of our wonder than
his genius? Or to repeat the question in other words, is Shakespeare a great
dramatic poet on account only of those beauties and excellencies which he
possesses in common with the ancients, but with diminished claims to our
love and honor to the full extent of his difference from them? Or are these
very differences additional proofs of poetic wisdom, at once results and sym
bols of living power as contrasted with lifeless mechanism, of free and rival
