And the signs of that sympathy are cruelly asserted to be these arid woodland ruins—cruelly, because the common sight of the day blossoming over the agonies of animals and birds is made less tolerable by such fictions. We have to shut our ears to the benign beauty of this stanza especially— ‘The Being that is in the clouds and air, That is in the green leaves among the groves, Maintains a deep and reverential care For the unoffending creature whom He loves.’ We must shut our ears because the poet offers us, as a proof of that ‘reverential care,’ the visible alteration of nature at the scene of suffering—an alteration we are obliged to dispense with every day we pass in the woods. We are tempted to ask whether Wordsworth himself believed in a sympathy he asks us—upon such grounds!—to believe in? Did he think his faith to be worthy of no more than a fictitious sign or a false proof? To choose from Wordsworth is to draw close a net with very large meshes—so that the lovely things that escape must doubtless cause the reader to protest; but the poems gathered here are not only supremely beautiful but exceedingly Wordsworthian. YOUTH AND AGE.—Page 256. Close to the marvellous _Kubla Khan_—a poem that wrests the secret of dreams and brings it to the light of verse—I place _Youth and Age_ as the best specimen of Coleridge’s poetry that is quite undelirious—to my mind the only fine specimen. I do not rate his undelirious poems highly, and even this, charming and nimble as it is, seems to me rather lean in thought and image. The tenderness of some of the images comes to a rather lamentable close; the likeness to ‘some poor nigh-related guest’ with the three lines that follow is too squalid for poetry, or prose, or thought. THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER.—Page 258. This poem is surely more full of a certain quality of extreme poetry—the simplest ‘flower of the mind,’ the most single magic—than any other in our language. But the reader must be permitted to call the story silly. Page 265. Coleridge used the sun, moon, and stars as a great dream uses them when the sleeping imagination is obscurely threatened with illness. All through _The Ancient Mariner_ we see them like apparitions. It is a pity that he followed the pranks also of a dream when he impossibly placed a star _within_ the tip of the crescent. Page 266. The likeness of ‘the ribbed sea sand’ is said to be the one passage actually composed by Wordsworth,—who according to the first plan should have written _The Ancient Mariner_ with Coleridge—‘and perhaps the most beautiful passage in the poem,’ adds one critic after another. It is no more than a good likeness, and has nothing whatever of the indescribable Coleridge quality.