The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: 1838Gillman, James
General
The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: 1838
Gillman, James
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772-1834; Critics -- Great Britain -- Biography; Poets, English -- 19th century -- Biography
Imaginary situations in an imaginary state of things rise up in minds
that possess a power and facility in combining images. Mr. Pitt's
ambition was conversant with old situations in the old state of
things, which furnish nothing to the imagination, though much to the
wishes. In his endeavours to realise his father's plan of reform, he
was probably as sincere as a being, who had derived so little
knowledge from actual impressions, could be. But his sincerity had no
living root of affection; while it was propped up by his love of
praise and immediate power, so long it stood erect and no longer. He
became a member of the Parliament, supported the popular opinions, and
in a few years, by the influence of the popular party, was placed in
the high and awful rank in which he now is. The fortunes of his
country, we had almost said the fates of the world, were placed in his
wardship--we sink in prostration before the inscrutable dispensations
of Providence, when we reflect in whose wardship the fates of the
world were placed!
The influencer of his country and of his species was a young man, the
creature of another's predetermination, sheltered and weather-fended
from all the elements of experience; a young man, whose feet had never
wandered; whose very eye had never turned to the right or to the left;
whose whole track had been as curveless as the motion of a fascinated
reptile! It was a young man, whose heart was solitary, because he had
existed always amid objects of futurity, and whose imagination too was
unpopulous, because those objects of hope to which his habitual wishes
had transferred, and as it were 'projected', his existence, were all
familiar and long-established objects! A plant sown and reared in a
hot-house, for whom the very air, that surrounded him, had been
regulated by the thermometer of previous purpose; to whom the light of
nature had penetrated only through glasses and covers; who had had the
sun without the breeze; whom no storm had shaken; on whom no rain had
pattered; on whom the dews of Heaven had not fallen! A being who had
had no feelings connected with man or nature, no spontaneous impulses,
no unbiassed and desultory studies, no genuine science, nothing that
constitutes individuality in intellect, nothing that teaches
brotherhood in affection! Such was the man--such, and so denaturalized
the spirit, on whose wisdom and philanthropy the lives and living
enjoyments of so many millions of human beings were made unavoidably
dependent.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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