And, with so magnificent a furniture of those mental and moral qualities which should belong to "a singer of man to men," it must not be forgotten that his technical equipment for the work was of the most splendidly effective kind. If a critic like Mr. Swinburne seems to speak in exaggerated praise of Coleridge's lyrics, we can well understand their enchantment for a master of music like himself. Probably it was the same feeling which made Shelley describe _France_ as "the finest ode in the English language." With all, in fact, who hold--as it is surely plausible to hold--that the first duty of a singer is to sing, the poetry of Coleridge will always be more likely to be classed above than below its merits, great as they are. For, if we except some occasional lapses in his sonnets--a metrical form in which, at his best, he is quite "out of the running" with Wordsworth--his melody never fails him. He is a singer always, as Wordsworth is not always, and Byron almost never. The _'olian Harp_ to which he so loved to listen does not more surely respond in music to the breeze of heaven than does Coleridge's poetic utterance to the wind of his inspiration. Of the dreamy fascination which Love exercises over a listening ear I have already spoken; and there is hardly less charm in the measure and assonances of the _Circassian Love Chant. Christabel_ again, considered solely from the metrical point of view, is a veritable _tour de force_--the very model of a metre for romantic legend: as which, indeed, it was imitated with sufficient grace and spirit, but seldom with anything approaching to Coleridge's melody, by Sir Walter Scott. Endowed therefore with so glorious a gift of song, and only not fully master of his poetic means because of the very versatility of his artistic power and the very variety and catholicity of his youthful sympathies, it is unhappily but too certain that the world has lost much by that perversity of conspiring accidents which so untimely silenced Coleridge's muse. And the loss is the more trying to posterity because he seems, to a not, I think, too curiously considering criticism, to have once actually struck that very chord which would have sounded the most movingly beneath his touch,--and to have struck it at the very moment when the failing hand was about to quit the keys for ever. "Ostendunt terris hunc tantum fata neque ultra Esse sinunt." I cannot regard it as merely fantastic to believe that the _Dejection_, that dirge of infinite pathos over the grave of creative imagination, might, but for the fatal decree which had by that time gone forth against Coleridge's health and happiness, have been but the cradle-cry of a new-born poetic power, in which imagination, not annihilated but transmigrant, would have splendidly proved its vitality through other forms of song. FOOTNOTES