their early productions—much of that popular encouragement which induced them to labour upon more excellent compositions and to train themselves to write what they will be remembered by. But, dismissing these considerations, and returning to the minor poems of S. T. Coleridge, although we fearlessly assert that it is impossible for any sane man to set any value on—say the Religious Musings—an absurd attempt to versify an abstract theory, or the essay on the Pixies, who had more fun in them than the reader of it could suspect—it still is indisputable that scattered here and there through these poems, there are lines about himself (lines, as he said in later life, ‘in which the subjective object views itself subjectivo-objectively,’) which rank high in that form of art. Of this kind are the Tombless Epitaph, for example, or the lines,— ‘To me hath Heaven with bounteous hand assigned Energic Reason and a shaping mind, The daring ken of truth; the Patriot’s part, And Pity’s sigh, that breathes the gentle heart; Sloth-jaundiced all! and from my graspless hand Drop friendship’s priceless pearls, like hour-glass sand. I weep, yet stoop not! the faint anguish flows, A dreamy pang in morning’s fev’rish doze;’ and so on. In fact, it would appear that the tendency to, and the faculty for self-delineation are very closely connected with the dreaminess of disposition and impotence of character which we spoke of just now. Persons very subject to these can grasp no external object, comprehend no external being; they can do no external thing, and therefore they are left to themselves. Their own character is the only one which they can view as a whole, or depict as a reality; of every other they may have glimpses, and acute glimpses, like the vivid truthfulness of particular dreams; but no settled appreciation, no connected development, no regular sequence whereby they may be exhibited on paper or conceived in the imagination. If other qualities are supposed to be identical, those will be most egotistical who only know themselves; the people who talk most of themselves will be those who talk best.