“This is very grand. Who but a mighty poet, one seeing with ‘the vision and the faculty divine’—what, but a transfusing, all-conquering imagination—would have dared the attempt to compose another poem on the same subject, or to carry this to a greater hight of sublimity, by melting it down anew, so to speak, and pouring it out into a vaster, more glorious mold? The more one thinks of it, the more he will see, in the poem so produced, a proof most remarkable, of the spontaneous, deep-seated, easily exerted, and almost exhaustless power and originality of Coleridge’s genius. Now let us peruse, ‘with mute thanks and secret ecstacy,’ his own solemn and stupendous lines. HYMN BEFORE SUNRISE, IN THE VALE OF CHAMOUNY. [Besides the rivers Arve and Arveiron, which have their sources in the foot of Mont Blanc, five conspicuous torrents rush down its sides; and, within a few paces of the glaciers, the Gentiana Major grows in immense numbers, with its ‘flowers of loveliest blue.’] “Hast thou a charm to stay the Morning Star In his steep course? so long he seems to pause On thy bald, awful head, O Sovran Blanc? The Arve and Arveiron at thy base Rave ceaselessly; but thou, most awful form! Risest from forth thy silent sea of pines, How silently! Around thee and above, Deep is the air, and dark, substantial, black; An ebon mass: methinks thou piercest it As with a wedge! But when I look again, It is thine own calm home, thy crystal shrine, Thy habitation from Eternity! “O dread and silent Mount! I gazed upon thee, Till thou, still present to the bodily sense, Didst vanish from my thought: entranced in prayer I worshiped the Invisible alone. “Yet, like some sweet, beguiling melody, So sweet, we know not we are listening to it, Thou, the meanwhile, wast blending with my thought, Yea, with my life, and life’s own secret joy, Till the dilating Soul, enrapt, transfused, Into the mighty vision passing,—there, As in her natural form, swelled vast to heaven! “Awake my Soul! not only passive praise Thou owest! not alone these swelling tears, Mute thanks and secret ecstacy! Awake, Voice of sweet song! Awake, my heart, awake! Green vales and icy cliffs, all join my hymn. “Thou first and chief, sole sovran of the vale Oh, struggling with the darkness all night long, And all night visited by troops of stars, Or when they climb the sky, or when they sink! Companion of the morning star at dawn, Thyself earth’s rosy star, and of the dawn Coherald: wake, oh wake, and utter praise! Who sank thy sunless pillars deep in earth? Who filled thy countenance with rosy light? Who made thee parent of perpetual streams?