Vain prayer! Empty adjuration! Profitless rebellion against the laws which season all things for the inexorable grave! Yet not the less we rebel again and again; and, though wisdom counsels resignation, yet our human passions, still cleaving to their object, force us into endless rebellion. Feelings the same in kind as these attach themselves to our mental power, and our vital energies. Phantoms of lost power, sudden intuitions, and shadowy restorations of forgotten feelings, sometimes dim and perplexing, sometimes by bright but furtive glimpses, sometimes by a full and steady revelation, overcharged with light--throw us back in a moment upon scenes and remembrances that we have left full thirty years behind us. In solitude, and chiefly in the solitudes of nature, and, above all, amongst the great and _enduring_ features of nature, such as mountains, and quiet dells, and the lawny recesses of forests, and the silent shores of lakes, features with which (as being themselves less liable to change) our feelings have a more abiding association--under these circumstances it is that such evanescent hauntings of our past and forgotten selves are most apt to startle and to waylay us. These are _positive_ torments from which the agitated mind shrinks in fear; but there are others _negative_ in their nature--that is, blank mementoes of powers extinct, and of faculties burnt out within us. And from both forms of anguish--from this twofold scourge--poor Coleridge fled, perhaps, in flying from the beauty of external nature. In alluding to this latter, or negative form of suffering--that form, I mean, which presents not the too fugitive glimpses of past power, but its blank annihilation--Coleridge himself most beautifully insists upon and illustrates the truth that all which we find in Nature must be created by ourselves; and that alike whether Nature is so gorgeous in her beauty as to seem apparelled in her wedding-garment or so powerless and extinct as to seem palled in her shroud. In either case, "O, Lady, we receive but what we give, And in _our_ life alone does nature _live_; Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud. It were a vain endeavour, Though I should gaze for ever On that green light that lingers in the west: I may not hope from _outward_ forms to win The passion and the life whose fountains are _within_."