“Christabel,” the entirely original utterance of a genius which, at first, was a child of the enlightenment of the eighteenth century. The early ideas of Coleridge were the ideas of Rousseau and of Bernardin de Saint Pierre, who was, like Coleridge, but more energetically, a seeker for an ideal land where pantisocracy might flourish and a clown might be the poet’s “brother.” In poetry, in poetic form, Coleridge was the real and daring innovator, inspired by the eighteenth century reaction against convention, and played on like an æolian harp by every wind of his mystic spirit. His reaction was too violent even for Lamb; his originality too extreme even for Wordsworth. In him, of all our later poets, the “unconscious self” was the strongest and the most free, and of all our poets he had the hardest battle with the dull Augustan survival in such critics as Jeffrey. To them all the ripened fruit of the blossoming time of the late eighteenth century, the poetry of Scott and of Wordsworth, was but dimly intelligible, but Coleridge was the most unintelligible of all. From the Germany of the late eighteenth century came one of Scott’s springs of poetic action; from the _Lenore_ of Bürger (a popular ballad rewritten) and from the _Götz von Berlichingen_ of Goethe. These were the days when Scott longed to possess a skull and cross-bones, and in a love-letter dilated on his choice of a sepulchre. But what came to Coleridge from Germany was the late eighteenth century’s reaction against the truly “common-sense” ideas of Hume, the philosophy of Kant, Schelling, and Fichte. In this field, too, he was unintelligible (and no wonder), but he was but adapting the ideas of 1770–1800, and the neo-Hegelians of Oxford are doing the same thing. A reaction against the materialism of common-sense was inevitable; Mesmer, Swedenborg, and Kant began what survives in the hands of the Master of Balliol and of Professor William James.