The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 3Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Religion
The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 3
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Literature -- History and criticism
'Die vorzüglichsten Bekenner Jesu sollen auferstehen, die übrigen
Menschen sollen es nicht. Hiesse jenes, sie sollen noch nach ihrem
Tode fortwürken, so wäre das letztere falsch: denn auch die übrigen
würken nach ihrem Tode durch ihre schriften, ihre Andenken, ihre
Beispiel.'
'Euge! Heinrichi'. O, the sublime bathos of thy prosaism--the muddy
eddy of thy logic! Thou art the only man to understand a poet!
I have too clearly before me the idea of a poet's genius to deem myself
other than a very humble poet; but in the very possession of the idea, I
know myself so far a poet as to feel assured that I can understand and
interpret a poem in the spirit of poetry, and with the poet's spirit.
Like the ostrich, I cannot fly, yet have I wings that give me the
feeling of flight; and as I sweep along the plain, can look up toward
the bird of Jove, and can follow him and say:
"Sovereign of the air,--who descendest on thy nest in the cleft of the
inaccessible rock, who makest the mountain pinnacle thy perch and
halting-place, and, scanning with steady eye the orb of glory right
above thee, imprintest thy lordly talons in the stainless snows, that
shoot back and scatter round his glittering shafts,--I pay thee
homage. Thou art my king. I give honor due to the vulture, the falcon,
and all thy noble baronage; and no less to the lowly bird, the
sky-lark, whom thou permittest to visit thy court, and chant her matin
song within its cloudy curtains; yea the linnet, the thrush, the
swallow, are my brethren:--but still I am a bird, though but a bird of
the earth.
"Monarch of our kind, I am a bird, even as thou; and I have shed
plumes, which have added beauty to the beautiful, and grace to terror,
waving over the maiden's brow and on the helmed head of the war-chief;
and majesty to grief, drooping o'er the car of death!"
[Footnote 1: Göttingen, 1821. The few following notes are, something out
of order, inserted here in consequence of their connection with the
immediately preceding remarks in the text.--Ed.]
LIFE OF BISHOP HACKET. [1]
Ib. p. 8.
Yet he would often dispute the necessity of a country living for a
London minister to retire to in hot summer time, out of the sepulchral
air of a churchyard, where most of them are housed in the city, and
found for his own part that by Whitsuntide he did 'rus anhelare', and
unless he took fresh air in the vacation, he was stopt in his lungs
and could not speak clear after Michaelmas.
A plausible reason certainly why A. and B. should occasionally change
posts, but a very weak one, methinks, for A.'s having both livings all
the year through.
Ib. p. 42-3.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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