Fate is usually kind to aged Tories of this sort; it takes them off the stage of life before the failure of their hopes is too apparent. Imagine the shock to this chivalrous old soul if he could come out of his grave today, and visit the House of Parliament, and hear the “left wing” members, elected from his beloved highlands, shouting for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat! Now indeed would he say: “The country is mined below our feet!” CHAPTER LIV THE MEANING OF MAGIC The effect of the French revolution upon poets is a subject of especial interest to us, because the period is so nearly identical with our own. There were several English poets whose reactions to the great event it will pay us to consider. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a clergyman’s son, born in 1772, so that he was twenty-one years old when King Louis’ head fell into the basket of the guillotine. At that time Coleridge was traveling about giving Unitarian lectures, a most revolutionary occupation. He met another young enthusiast, Robert Southey, and they had a Utopian dream of a free community on the banks of the Susquehanna River. It was to be called the Pantisocracy, and to get funds Coleridge set out to canvass for his Unitarian paper. The dream ended when the two poets married sisters. At the age of twenty-eight we find Coleridge in the full tide of the reaction against France. One of the organs of the Tory party, the London “Morning Post,” is paying him a salary to write articles clamoring for renewal of the war on the French republic; it was said in Parliament that the rupture of the peace was brought about by these articles. For the balance of his days the one-time Unitarian was a pillar of the Anglican church, and of every form of reaction. He had become a devotee of German metaphysics, also of opium; a wanderer and a wreck, living on charity, and planning colossal literary labors which came to nothing. He was sent to a nursing-home under the charge of a physician, where he died at the age of sixty-two. So much for the life; and now for the poetry. There are only a few hundred lines of it, all written before the poet entered the Tory service. A study of it makes clear the spiritual tragedy; it is poetry of emotion and music, with a total absence of judgment and will. From only one of the poems, “The Ancient Mariner,” can you extract a human meaning; that if one man commits an act of cruelty against a bird, the moral forces of the universe will punish a shipload of innocent men, sparing only the one who is guilty! It is the poetry of opium. Indeed, the most famous of all the verses, “Kubla Khan,” was actually an opium dream, transferred to paper after return to consciousness-- “Now, hold on a moment,” says Mrs. Ogi. “Here is a letter from a Poet. You are going to have a lot of them reading this book, and wanting to pull your hair out; so you might as well have it out with them now. This Poet names ‘Kubla Khan’ as the perfect type of the ‘pure’ poem.”