It is a poison-tree, that, pierced to the inmost,
Weeps only tears of blood."

The heart of Ordonio is "dark and gloomy;" and on his death, inflicted by retributive justice, his noble brother solemnly pronounces the valedictory moral:

"In these strange dread events,

Just Heaven instructs us with an awful voice,
That conscience rules us even against our choice.
Our inward monitress to guide or warn,
If listened to; but if repelled with scorn,
At length as dire Remorse she reappears,
Works on our guilty hopes and selfish fears!
Still bids remember! and still cries, Too late!
And while she scares us, goads us to our fate."

The play contains many passages of the most exquisite poetry-so very beautiful, indeed, that we care not for the impropriety of their introduction, considered dramatically-if there be impropriety in time or place and feel that they justify themselves by the delight they impart. Here is a Soliloquy which first met our eyes in the Lyrical Ballads, before the "Remorse" was performed-and miserably performed we remember it was, though the scenery was good, and the music not amiss-that mournful Miserere, so Shakespearean—and which may be chanted, without losing any of its holy charm, after the dirge sung by the spirit of air in Prospero's enchanted Island.

"Here, sweet spirit, hear the spell,
Lest a blacker charm compel !

So shall the midnight breezes swell
With thy deep long-lingering knell.

And at evening evermore,
In a chapel on the shore,

Shall the chanter, sad and saintly,
Yellow tapers burning faintly,
Doleful masses chant for thee,
Miserere, Domine !

Hark! the cadence dies away
On the quiet moonlight sea :
The boatmen rest their oars and say
Miserere, Domine !"

The Soliloquy is spoken by Alvar in a dungeon, in which he has been thrown by his wicked brother Ordonio.

"ALV. And this place my forefathers made for man!
This is the process of our love and wisdom

To each poor brother who offends against us-
Most innocent, perhaps-and what if guilty?
Is this the only cure? Merciful God!
Each pore and natural outlet shrivelled up
By ignorance and parching poverty,
His energies roll back upon his heart

And stagnate and corrupt, till, changed to poison,
They break out on him, like a loathsome plague-spot!
Then we call in our pampered mountebanks ;-
And this is their best cure! uncomforted

And friendless solitude, groaning and tears,
And savage faces, at the clanking hour,

Seen through the steam and vapours of his dungeon
By the lamp's dismal twilight! So he lies

Circled with evil, till his very soul

Unmoulds its essence, hopelessly deformed

By sights of evermore deformity!—
With other ministrations thou, O nature,
Healest thy wandering and distempered child:
Thou pourest on him thy soft influences,

Thy sunny hues, fair forms, and breathing sweets;
Thy melodies of woods, and winds, and waters!
Till he relent, and can no more endure

To be a jarring and dissonant thing
Amid this general dance and minstrelsy;
But, bursting into tears, wins back his way,
His angry spirit healed and harmonised

By the benignant touch of love and beauty."

"Most musical, most melancholy!" and melancholy because of the music-for all divine music is so-in which the loveliest images of rejoicing gladness are enshrined. In Wordsworth you may meet with some kindred strain as sweet and high-at once elegy and hymn; yet there are tones here indescribably touching, that characterise the beauty as an emanation, in its most celestial mood, of the genius of Coleridge.

Teresa, the tender and the true, and by her tenderness and truth sustained in her long distress, in that sorest of all trials, when a wild crazed hope will break in on what would else be

the stillness of despair, is invested throughout with a mournful interest; and the scene where her father, Valdez, vainly renews his persuasions, that she would marry Ordonio, seeing that Alvar must be dead, is a charming specimen of that mingled poetry and pathos, which reminds one, but without any thought of its being an imitation, of the style of Massinger.

"TER. I hold Ordonio dear; he is your son,

And Alvar's brother.

VAL.

Love him for himself,

Nor make the living wretched for the dead.

TER. I mourn that you should plead in vain, Lord Valdez ; But heaven hath heard my vow, and I remain

Faithful to Alvar, be he dead or living.

VAL. Heaven knows with what delight I saw your loves,
And could my heart's blood give him back to thee

I would die smiling. But these are idle thoughts!
Thy dying father comes upon my soul

With that same look with which he gave thee to me;
I held thee in my arms a powerless babe,

While thy poor mother, with a mute entreaty,
Fixed her faint eyes on mine. Ah! not for this,
That I should let thee feed thy soul with gloom
And with slow anguish wear away thy life,

The victim of a useless constancy.

I must not see thee wretched.

Ill bartered for the garishness of joy!

If it be wretched with an untired eye

To watch those skiey tints, and this green ocean;
Or in the sultry hour beneath some rock,
My hair dishevelled by the pleasant sea-breeze,
To shape sweet visions, and live o'er again
All past hours of delight! If it be wretched
To watch some bark, and fancy Alvar there,
To go through each minutest circumstance
Of the blest meeting, and to frame adventures
Most terrible and strange, and hear him tell them;
(As once I knew a crazy Moorish maid
Who dress'd her in her buried lover's clothes,
And o'er the smooth spring in the mountain cleft
Hung with her lute, and played the selfsame tune
He used to play, and listened to the shadow
Herself had made)-if this be wretchedness,

And if indeed it be a wretched thing

To trick out mine own deathbed, and imagine
That I had died, died just ere his return!
Then see him listening to my constancy,
Or hover round, as he at midnight oft
Sits on my grave, and gazes at the moon ;
Or haply in some more fantastic mood,
To be in Paradise, and with choice flowers
Build up a bower where he and I might dwell,
And there to wait his coming! O my sire!
My Alvar's sire! if this be wretchedness

That eats away the life, what were it, think you,
If in a most assured reality

He should return, and see a brother's infant
Smile at him from my arms?

Oh what a thought!"

In early youth Coleridge conceived the highest idea of the genius of Schiller, and one of the finest of his sonnets was composed after his first perusal of The Robbers. But what can we say of his Translation of Wallenstein? That it is the best translation ever made; and that in it, the poem appears only somewhat more majestic-like the image of the noble hero himself reflected in a perfect mirror that, without distorting, magnifies.

But though we have now been enriching our pages (why will good people say that Maga is too sparing of poetry?) with specimens of compositions that would of themselves have given Coleridge a high place among the poets, we have scarcely spoken at all, and quoted not one word, of those that set him among the highest; nor need we surely at this day, at any length either speak of, or quote from, Christabel and the Ancient Mariner; yet while tens of thousands on tens of thousands of copies of poems, of far inferior excellence, in pamphlet shape and size, were fluttering far and wide over all the fashionable and unfashionable world, and Byron-Byron -Byron was in all literary and illiterary parties, morning, noon, and night, the catchword and reply-when Medora, and the names of other interesting lemans of pirates and robbers, were sighed or whispered from all manner of mouths-how seldom was heard the name of Coleridge-and then as if it belonged to some man "in a far countree!" and how rarely, though both sounds are beautiful-Christabel and Geraldine

-were they murmured by maid or matron! Yet maids and matrons all were devoted to romance, and so sensitive to the preternatural, that they wept to see the moonlight through the ghostlike hand of a heroine who held it up for no other reason in the world than to show that she had died a natural death of love! Byron himself—the idol of the hour-rejoiced to declare Christabel singularly wild and beautiful; Scott, that it had inspired the "Lay;" all our true poets delighted in the vision which they loved too well to loudly praise for admiration is mute, or speaks in its trance but with uplifted eyes. But the sweet, soft, still breath of praise, like that of purest incense, arose from many a secret place, where genius and sensibility abided, and Coleridge, amidst the simpers of the silly, and the laughter of the light, and the scorn of the callous, and the abuse of the brutal, and the blackguardism of the beggar-poor-received the laurel crown woven by the hands of all the best of his brother bards-and wore it ever after cheerfully but without pride-round his lofty forehead -and it was green as ever the day he died.

Christabel is indeed, what Byron said it was, a singularly wild and original poem. No other words could so well characterise it. It did not appear in a dearth, but at a time when a flush of poetry overspread the land. Genius as high, as various, and as new as had ever adorned any era, was then exultingly running its victorious career-taking its far-sweeping aerial flights over its native seas and mountains—or bringing within the dominion of its wings the uttermost ends of the earth. All our best living poets had done their greatest— they had all achieved fame-some universal; and each bard had his own band of more devoted worshippers. The poets themselves knew right well, and so did almost all the poetical minds in England, that there was not within the four seas a brighter genius than Coleridge. But why had the sweet singer so long been mute? We know not—and it is far better for us all that we know not-much of what is always happening in one another's hearts; nor do we always distinctly understand-even while we feel it most-what is happening in our own. Perhaps Coleridge was not ambitious -perhaps the love of fame was not one of the most active principles of his nature-perhaps despondency too often dimmed the visions that were for ever passing before the