The mead and the mountain, the flower and the tree,What is their pomp, but a vision of Thee,

Wonderful Lord?

8.

Praise ye the Lord!

Not in the square-hewn, many-tiered pile,

Not in the long-drawn, dim-shadowed aisle,

But where the bright world, with age never hoary,
Flashes His brightness and thunders His glory,

Praise ye the Lord!

John Stuart Blackie.

II.-Nature's Temple.

1.

Talk not of temples-there is one, built without hands, to mankind given:

Its lamps are the meridian sun, and all the stars of heaven. Its walls are the cerulean sky, its floor the earth, serene

and fair;

The dome is vast immensity-all Nature worships there!

2.

The Alps arrayed in stainless snow,

untrod,

the Andean ranges yet

At sunrise and at sunset glow, like altar-fires to God!

A thousand fierce volcanoes blaze, as if with hallowed vic

tims rare;

And thunder lifts its voice in praise-all Nature worships

there!

3.

The cedar and the mountain pine, the willow on the foun

tain's brim,

The tulip and the eglantine, in reverence bend to Him; The song-birds pour their sweetest lays, from tower, and tree, and middle air;

The rushing river murmurs praise-all Nature worships there!-David Vedder.

CHAPTER XXXV.—SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.—

1772-1834.

I.-Biographical.

1. A lofty dreamer and a man of unfinished achievements, Coleridge passed his life in alternations of dejection and enthusiasın. He was a critic, a philosopher, a poet; and, since Dr. Johnson's time, no other man in England has been so great an oracle in company or at the table, or so admired by able men for brilliant conversational powers.

2. He passed through many vicissitudes. The son of a poor Devonshire vicar, he became head-scholar at Christ's Hospital, an educational institution, and entered Cambridge in his nineteenth year, whence he was driven in 1793, on account of his attachment to the principles of the French Revolution. He was successively a dragoon, a journalist, a Unitarian preacher, a colonial secretary, and a lecturer. In 1798 the generosity of the Wedgwoods, of Staffordshire, enabled Coleridge to proceed to Germany, where he resided more than a year, and at Batzburg and Göttingen confirmed his taste for metaphysical study.

3. On his return to England, Coleridge followed Southey, his brother-in-law, into the Lake country, where the two enjoyed the friendship of Wordsworth, and where the three, confederates in building up a new school of poetic art, also became partners in the project of forming, on the banks of the Susquehanna, in America, an ideal community that should be free from "kings and priests," and all else that could mar its felicity. But funds were wanting, and, as they could not be obtained, the scheme was abandoned.

4. Coleridge was the victim of the opium-eating habit, and this indulgence increased his disposition to reveries, and impaired his energy of action. His brilliant thoughts were often intrusted to a blank leaf, a letter, or the memory of listening admirers, and his real influence on the men

of his time is best known from the sayings which his children and friends preserved and published after his death. He began poems of exquisite beauty and left them incomplete. He contemplated a great philosophical work on Christianity, but never had the energy to begin it; and he talked eloquently of an epic on the Destruction of Jerusalem, which should be to Christendom what the Iliad was to Greece; but the poem remained only a glorious dream. Seldom have rarer and more varied talents met in one man, and more seldom still in one so incapable of turning them to action. Conscious of this loss arising from his procrastinating habit, he sent to Wordsworth the following lines. They were composed after the latter had recited to him a poem "on the growth of the individual mind."

5. Ah! as I listened with a heart forlorn,

The pulses of my being beat anew:

And, even as life returns upon the drowned,
Life's joy rekindling roused a throng of pains-
Keen pangs of love, awakening as a babe

Turbulent, with an outcry in the heart;

And fears self-willed, that shunned the eye of hope;
And hope that scarce would know itself from fear;
Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain ;
And genius given and knowledge won in vain;
And all which I had culled in wood-walks wild,
And all which patient toil had reared, and all
Commune with thee had opened out-but flowers
Strewed on my corse, and borne upon my bier,
In the same coffin, for the self-same grave!

6. The principal prose works of Coleridge were his Aids to Reflection, his Biographia Literaria, and some essays on theological and political topics. In poetry he disregarded the precise standards of the correct schools, and founded what he called a new principle of irregular harmony,—

"namely, that of counting in each line the number of accentuated words, not the number of syllables." This innovation has since been often imitated, especially by Scott and Byron. His Ode to the Departing Year, and his Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni, are marked by stately rhythm, force, and deep religious feeling; but he is best known by a poem on "Love" in his Genevieve, which describes how he won Genevieve by reciting the story of a scorned knight; by his Christabel, a highly imaginative but unfinished story; and by his Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

7. In both of the last-mentioned pieces preternatural influences play freely back and forth in the story, which lies wholly in the realm of imagination. There is a weird, subtile fancy in them, combined with musical versification, which give them a strange fascination. But the latter is especially preternatural, and exquisitely tender. According to De Quincey, its germ was found in the account of an old sea-captain, who, at a time of prolonged foul weather, shot an albatross that had followed the ship several days, hoping thus to end his ill fortune. But the act only served to increase the horrors of the situation, which the "ancient mariner" thus describes :

II.—From the Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

1. "Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down,
'Twas sad as sad could be;

And we did speak only to break

The silence of the sea!

2. "All in a hot and copper sky,
The bloody sun at noon

Right up above the mast did stand,
No bigger than the moon.

3. "Day after day, day after day,

We stuck, nor breath nor motion;

As idle as a painted ship

Upon a painted ocean.

4. "Water, water everywhere,

And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water everywhere,

Nor any drop to drink."

One by one, as the days wore on, and the scorching sun burned more and more fiercely, the crew of "four times fifty living men" dropped down lifeless, and the "ancient mariner" was left alone!

5. "Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.

6. "The many men so beautiful!
And they all dead did lie;

And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on, and so did I.

7. "I looked upon the rotting sea,
And drew my eyes away;
I looked upon the rotting deck,
And there the dead men lay.

8. "I looked to heaven, and tried to pray;
But or ever a prayer had gushed,

A wicked whisper came, and made
My heart as dry as dust.

9. "I closed my lids, and kept them close,

And the balls like pulses beat;

For the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky,

Lay like a load on my weary eye,

And the dead were at my feet.