On one occasion Rossetti wrote, saying he had written a sonnet on Coleridge, and I was curious to learn what note he struck in dealing with so complex a subject. The keynote of a man’s genius or character should be struck in a poetic address to him, just as the expressional individuality of a man’s features (freed of the modifying or emphasising effects of passing fashions of dress), should be reproduced in his portrait; but Coleridge’s mind had so many sides to it, and his character had such varied aspects--from keen and beautiful sensibility to every form of suffering, to almost utter disregard of the calls of domestic duty--that it seemed difficult to think what kind of idea, consistent with the unity of the sonnet and its simplicity of scheme, would call up a picture of the entire man. It goes against the grain to hint, adoring the man as we must, that Coleridge’s personal character was anything less than one of untarnished purity, and certainly the persons chiefly concerned in the alleged neglect, Southey and his own family, have never joined in the strictures commonly levelled against him: but whatever Coleridge’s personal ego may have been, his creative ego was assuredly not single in kind or aim. He did some noble things late in life (instance the passage on “Youth and Age,” and that on “Work without Hope”), but his poetic genius seemed to desert him when Kant took possession of him as a gigantic windmill to do battle with, and it is now hard to say which was the deeper thing in him: the poetry to which he devoted the sunniest years of his young life, or the philosophy which he firmly believed it to be the main business of his later life to expound. In any discussion of the relative claims of these two to the gratitude of the ages that follow, I found Rossetti frankly took one side, and constantly said that the few unequal poems Coleridge had left us, were a legacy more stimulating, solacing, and enduring, than his philosophy could have been, even if he had perfected that attempt of his to reconcile all learning and revelation, and if, when perfected, the whole effort had not proved to be a work of supererogation. I doubt if Rossetti quite knew what was meant by Coleridge’s “system,” as it was so frequently called, and I know that he could not be induced by any eulogiums to do so much as look at the _Biographia Literaria_, though once he listened whilst I read a chapter from it. He had certainly little love of the German elements in Coleridge’s later intellectual life, and hence it is small matter for surprise that in his sonnet he chose for treatment the more poetic side of Coleridge’s genius. Nevertheless, I think it remains an open question whether the philosophy of the author of _The Ancient Mariner_ was more influenced by his poetry, or his poetry by his philosophy; for the philosophy is always tinged by the mysticism of his poetry, and his poetry is always adumbrated by the disposition, which afterwards become paramount, to