The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: 1838Gillman, James
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The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: 1838
Gillman, James
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772-1834; Critics -- Great Britain -- Biography; Poets, English -- 19th century -- Biography
In these addresses he showed that the example of France was a warning to
Great Britain; but, because he did not hold opinions equally violent
with the Jacobin party of that day, he was put down as an anti-Jacobin;
for, he says, "the annals of the French revolution have been recorded in
letters of blood, that the knowledge of the few cannot counteract the
ignorance of the many; that the light of philosophy, when it is confined
to a small minority, points out its possessors as the victims, rather
than the illuminators of the multitude. The patriots of France either
hastened into the dangerous and gigantic error of making certain evils
the means of contingent good, or were sacrificed by the mob, with whose
prejudices and ferocity their unbending virtue forbade them to
assimilate. Like Samson, the people were strong, like Samson, they were
also blind:" and he admonishes them at the end of the third lecture to
do all things in the spirit of love.
"It is worthy of remark," says he, in a MS. note, "that we may possess
a thing in such fulness as to prevent its possession from being an
object of distinct consciousness. Only as it lessens or dims, we
reflect on it, and learn to value it. This is one main cause why young
men of high and ardent minds find nothing repulsive in the doctrines
of necessity, which, in after years, they (as I have) recoil from.
Thus, too, the faces of friends dearly beloved become distinct in
memory or dream only after long absence." Of the work itself he says,
"Except the two or three pages involving the doctrine of philosophical
necessity and Unitarianism, I see little or nothing in these
'outbursts' of my 'youthful' zeal to 'retract', and with the exception
of some flame-coloured epithets applied to persons, as to Mr. Pitt and
others, or rather to personifications (for such they really were to
'me') as little to regret. Qualis ab initio [Greek: estaesae] S.T.C.
[15] When a rifacimento of the 'Friend' took place, [1818] at vol. ii.
p. 240, he states his reasons for reprinting the lecture referred to,
one of the series delivered at Bristol in the year 1794-95, because,
says he, "This very lecture, vide p. 10, has been referred to in an
infamous libel in proof of the author's Jacobinism."
When the mind of Coleridge was more matured he did not omit this truth,
which has never been refuted, that the aristocratic system "had its
golden side, for the noblest minds; but I
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