This volume—a collection of extracts from Coleridge’s pocket-books— appeared[405] more than sixty years after the poet’s death, and the notice taken of it was comparatively small. That it contains passages of ornate prose superior to anything in the previously published writings is interesting, but for our purpose almost irrelevant: it is not so that it gives the fullest and clearest side-lights on Coleridge’s criticism that we have. The earliest years (and pages) are not very fertile, though I subjoin some references[406] which will assist the reader in looking them up. But from p. 119 for some fifty pages onward (it is significant that the time of writing, 1805-8, corresponds with Coleridge’s absence in Malta, &c., from which we have little or no published work) the entries are “diamondiferous.” On French poetry (mistaken but so informingly!);[407] on Cowper;[408] on the absurdity of calling etymology (how much more philology!) a “science”;[409] on the attitude to poetry and to books;[410] on Leibnitz’s “profound sentence” that “men’s intellectual errors consist chiefly in _denying_”;[411] on the “instinctive passion in the mind for one word to express one act of feeling” (Flaubert fifty years before date); on pseudo-originality,— Coleridge is at his very acme. The _yeast_ of criticism—the reagent which, itself created by the contact of the critical with the creative, re-creates itself in all fit media—has never been more remarkably represented than here. And great as are these passages, there are many others (though not so many in close context) to match them. See the entry (which I venture to think has been wrongly side-headed as “A plea for poetic license” at the foot of p. 165) as to the desire of carrying things to a greater height of pleasure and admiration than they are susceptible of—the old “wish to write better than you can,” the “loss of sight between this and the other style.”[412] See the astonishing anticipation of the best side of Ruskinism in the note on architecture and climate;[413] and that on poetry and prose and on the “esenoplastic” power;[414] and that on somebody (Byron?) who was “splendid” everywhere, but nowhere poetical;[415] and that on scholastic terms;[416] and that on the slow comprehension of certain (in this case Dantean) poetry.[417] They are all _apices criticismi_—not easy reading, not for the running man, but for him who reads them fitly, certain to bear fruit if he reads them early, to coincide with his own painful and struggling attainments if he reads them late. [Sidenote: _The_ Letters.]