and like a helping Lucina, brings it forth for us into distinct consciousness and common light. Who has not tried to get hold of some half-remembered name, mislaid as it were in the memory, and yet felt to be there? And who has not experienced, how at length it seems given to us, as if some other unperceived had been employed in the same search? And what are the objects last spoken of, which are in the subject, (i. e. the individual mind) yet not subjective, but of universal validity, no accidents of a particular mind resulting from its individual structure, no, nor even of the human mind, as a particular class or rank of intelligencies, but of imperishable subsistence; and though not things, (i. e. shapes in outward space,) yet equally independent of the beholder, and more than equally real—what, I say, are those but the names of nature? the nomina quasi vóvμɛva, opposed by the wisest of the Greek schools to phænomena, as the intelligible correspondents or correlatives in the mind to the invisible supporters of the appearances in the world of the senses, the upholding powers that cannot be seen, but the presence and actual being of which must be supposed-nay, will be supposed, in defiance of every attempt to the contrary by a crude materialism, so alien from humanity, that there does not exist a language on earth, in which it could be conveyed without a contradiction between the sense, and the words employed to express it!

Is this a mere random flight in etymology, hunt

ing a bubble, and bringing back the film? I cannot think so contemptuously of the attempt to fix and restore the true import of any word; but, in this instance, I should regard it as neither unprofitable, nor devoid of rational interest, were it only that the knowledge and reception of the import here given, as the etymon, or genuine sense of the word, would save Christianity from the reproach of containing a doctrine so repugnant to the best feelings of humanity, as is inculcated in the following passage, among a hundred others to the same purpose, in earlier, and in more recent works, sent forth by professed Christians. "Most of the men, who are now alive, or that have been living for many ages, are Jews, Heathens, or Mahometans, strangers and enemies to Christ, in whose name alone we can be saved. This consideration is extremely sad, when we remember how great an evil it is, that so many millions of sons and daughters are born to enter into the possession of devils to eternal ages."Taylor's Holy Dying, p. 28. Even Sir T. Brown, while his heart is evidently wrestling with the dogma grounded on the trivial interpretation of the word, nevertheless receives it in this sense, and expresses most gloomy apprehensions" of the ends of those honest worthies and philosophers," who died before the birth of our Saviour: "It is hard," says he, "to place those souls in hell, whose worthy lives did teach us virtue on earth. How strange to them will sound the history of Adam, when they

shall suffer for him they never heard of!" Yet he concludes by condemning the insolence of reason in daring to doubt or controvert the verity of the doctrine, or "to question the justice of the proceeding," which verity, he fears, the woeful lot of "these great examples of virtue must confirm." But here I must break off.

Your's most affectionately,

S. T. COLERIDGE.

Με

LETTER V.

To the Same.

Y DEAR D.—The philosophic poet, whom I quoted in my last, may here and there have stretched his prerogative in a war of offence on the general associations of his contemporaries. Here and there, though less than the least of what the Buffoons of parody, and the Zanies of anonymous criticism, would have us believe, he may be thought to betray a preference of mean or trivial instances for grand morals, a capricious predilection for incidents that contrast with the depth and novelty of the truths they are to exemplify. But still to the principle, to the habit of tracing the presence of the high in the humble, the mysterious Dii Cabiri, in the form of the dwarf Miner, with hammer and spade, and week-day apron, we must attribute Wordsworth's peculiar power, his leavening influence on the opinions, feelings, and pursuits of his

admirers, most on the young of most promise and highest acquirements; and that, while others are read with delight, his works are a religion. A case still more in point occurs to me, and for the truth of which I dare pledge myself. The art of printing alone seems to have been privileged with a Minerval birth, to have risen in its zenith; but next to this, perhaps, the rapid and almost instantaneous advancement of pottery from the state in which Mr. Wedgwood found the art, to its demonstrably highest practicable perfection, is the most striking fact in the history of modern improvements achieved by individual genius. In his early manhood, an obstinate and harassing complaint confined him to his room for more than two years; and to this apparent calamity Mr. Wedgwood was wont to attribute his after unprecedented success. For a while, as was natural, the sense of thus losing the prime and vigour of his life and faculties, preyed on his mind incessantly-aggravated, no doubt, by the thought of what he should have been doing this hour and this, had he not been thus severely visited. Then, what he should like to take in hand: and lastly, what it was desirable to do, and how far it might be done, till generalizing more and more, the mind began to feed on the thoughts, which, at their first evolution, (in their larva state, may I say?) had preyed on the mind. We imagine the presence of what we desire in the very act of regretting its absence, nay, in order to regret it the more live

lily; but while, with a strange wilfulness, we are thus engendering grief on grief, nature makes use of the product to cheat us into comfort and exertion. The positive shapings, though but of the fancy, will sooner or later displace the mere knowledge of the negative. All activity is in itself pleasure; and according to the nature, powers, and previous habits of the sufferer, the activity of the fancy will call the other faculties of the soul into action. The self-contemplative power becomes meditative, and the mind begins to play the geometrician with its own thoughts-abstracting from them the accidental and individual, till a new and unfailing source of employment, the best and surest nepenthe of solitary pain, is opened out in the habit of seeking the principle and ultimate aim in the most imperfect productions of art, in the least attractive products of nature; of beholding the possible in the real; of detecting the essential form in the intentional; above all, in the collation and constructive imagining of the outward shapes and material forces that shall best express the essential form, in its coincidence with the idea, or realize most adequately that power, which is one with its correspondent knowledge, as the revealing body with its indwelling soul.

Another motive will present itself, and one that comes nearer home, and is of more general application, if we reflect on the habit here recommended, as a source of support and consolation in circum