its length would suggest and as Mr. Cottle in fact tells us, only _completed_, "on the Christmas eve of 1794," it gives expression to the tumultuous emotions by which Coleridge's mind was agitated at this its period of highest political excitement. His revolutionary enthusiasm was now at its hottest, his belief in the infant French Republic at its fullest, his wrath against the "coalesced kings" at its fiercest, his contempt for their religious pretence at its bitterest. "Thee to defend," he cries, "Thee to defend, dear Saviour of mankind! Thee, Lamb of God! Thee, blameless Prince of Peace! From all sides rush the thirsty brood of war-- Austria, and that foul Woman of the North, The lustful murderess of her wedded lord, And he, connatural mind! whom (in their songs, So bards of elder time had haply feigned) Some Fury fondled in her hate to man, Bidding her serpent hair in tortuous fold Lick his young face, and at his mouth imbreathe Horrible sympathy!" This is vigorous poetic invective; and the effect of such outbursts is heightened by the rapid subsidence of the passion that inspires them and the quick advent of a calmer mood. We have hardly turned the page ere denunciations of Catherine and Frederick William give place to prayerful invocations of the Supreme Being, which are in their turn the prelude of a long and beautiful contemplative passage: "In the prim'val age, a dateless while," etc., on the pastoral origin of human society. It is as though some sweet and solemn strain of organ music had succeeded to the blast of war-bugles and the roll of drums. In the _Ode to the Departing Year_, written in the last days of 1796, with its "prophecy of curses though I pray fervently for blessings" upon the poet's native country, the mood is more uniform in its gloom; and it lacks something, therefore, of those peculiar qualities which make the _Religious Musings_ one perhaps of the most pleasing of all Coleridge's earlier productions. But it shares with the poems shortly to be noticed what may be called the autobiographic charm. The fresh natural emotion of a young and brilliant mind is eternally interesting, and Coleridge's youthful Muse, with a frankness of self-disclosure which is not the less winning because at times it provokes a smile, confides to us even the history of her most temporary moods. It is, for instance, at once amusing and captivating to read in the latest edition of the poems, as a footnote to the lines-- "Not yet enslaved, not wholly vile, O Albion! O my mother isle!" the words-- "O doomed to fall, enslaved and vile--1796." Yes; in 1796 and till the end of 1797 the poet's native country _was_ in his opinion all these dreadful things, but, directly the mood changes, the verse alters, and to the advantage, one cannot but think, of the beautiful and often-quoted close of the passage--