Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (October 21, 1772 – July 25, 1834) was an English poet, critic and philosopher who was, along with his friend William Wordsworth, one of the founders of the Romantic Movement in England and one of the Lake Poets.

He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.

See also:

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1797–98; 1817)

Biographia Literaria (1817)

Table Talk (1835)

Quotes

• Ere sin could blight or sorrow fade,
  Death came with friendly care;
  The opening bud to heaven conveyed,
  And bade it blossom there.
  • "Epitaph on an Infant", l. 1 (1794)

• Poor little foal of an oppressèd race!
  I love the languid patience of thy face.
  • "To a Young Ass", l. 1 (1794)

• Blest hour! it was a luxury — to be!
  • "Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement", l. 43 (1795)

• O! the one Life, within us and abroad,
  Which meets all Motion, and becomes its soul,
  A Light in Sound, a sound-like power in Light,
  Rhythm in all Thought, and Joyance every where.
  • "The Eolian Harp", st. 2 (wr. 1795; pub. 1796)

• And what if all of animated nature
  Be but organic harps diversly fram'd,
  That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps
  Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
  At once the Soul of each, and God of All?
  • "The Eolian Harp", st. 3 (wr. 1795; pub. 1796)

• So for the mother’s sake the child was dear,
  And dearer was the mother for the child.
  • "Sonnet to a Friend Who Asked How I Felt When the Nurse First Presented My Infant to Me" (1797)

• "Most musical, most melancholy" bird!
  A melancholy bird! Oh! idle thought!
  In nature there is nothing melancholy.
  But some night-wandering man, whose heart was pierced
  With the remembrance of a grievous wrong,
  Or slow distemper, or neglected love,
  (And so, poor wretch! filled all things with himself,
  And made all gentle sounds tell back the tale
  Of his own sorrow) he, and such as he,
  First named these notes a melancholy strain.
  • The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem, ll. 13-22 (1798)

Bear witness for me, whereso'er ye be,
With what deep worship I have still adored
The spirit of divinest Liberty.

• Thou rising Sun! thou blue rejoicing Sky!
  Yea! every thing that is and will be free!
  Bear witness for me, whereso'er ye be,
  With what deep worship I have still adored
  The spirit of divinest Liberty.
  • "France: An Ode", st. 1 (1798)

• Yes, while I stood and gazed, my temples bare,
  And shot my being through earth, sea, and air,
  Possessing all things with intensest love,
  O Liberty! my spirit felt thee there.
  • "France: An Ode", st. 5 (1798)

• The frost performs its secret ministry,
  Unhelped by any wind.
  • "Frost at Midnight", l. 1 (1798)

•      Sea, and hill, and wood,
  With all the numberless goings-on of life,
  Inaudible as dreams!
  • "Frost at Midnight", l. 11 (1798)

• Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,
  Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
  • "Frost at Midnight", l. 15 (1798)

• Whether the eave-drops fall
  Heard only in the trances of the blast,
  Or if the secret ministry of frost
  Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
  Quietly shining to the quiet moon.
  • "Frost at Midnight", l. 70 (1798)

• Or if the secret ministry of frost
  Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
  Quietly shining to the quiet moon.
  • "Frost at Midnight", l. 72 (1798)

• Forth from his dark and lonely hiding place
  (Portentous-sight!) the owlet Atheism,
  Sailing an obscene wings athwart the noon,
  Drops his blue-fringèd lids, and holds them close,
  And hooting at the glorious sun in Heaven,
  Cries out, "Where is it?"
  • "Fears in Solitude", l. 81 (1798)

• ‘Alas!’ said she, ‘we ne’er can be
  Made happy by compulsion.’
  • The Three Graves, pt. 4, st. 12 (1798)

• Lingering he raised his latch at eve,
  Though tired in heart and limb:
  He loved no other place, and yet
  Home was no home to him.
  • The Three Graves, pt. 4, st. 16 (1798)

• He saw a Lawyer killing a viper
  On a dunghill hard by his own stable;
  And the devil smiled, for it put him in mind
  Of Cain and his brother, Abel.
  • "The Devil's Thoughts", st. 4 (1799)

• And the Devil did grin, for his darling sin
  Is pride that apes humility.
  • "The Devil's Thoughts", st. 6 (1799)

• Strongly it bears us along in swelling and limitless billows,
  Nothing before and nothing behind but the sky and the ocean.
  • "The Homeric Hexameter" (translated from Schiller) (c. 1799)

• In the hexameter rises the fountain's silvery column;
  In the pentameter aye falling in melody back.
  • "The Ovidian Elegiac Metre" (translated from Schiller) (c. 1799)

All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
All are but ministers of Love,
And feed his sacred flame.

• All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
  Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
  All are but ministers of Love,
  And feed his sacred flame.
  • "Love", st. 1 (c. 1799)

• Joy rises in me, like a summer's morn.
  • "A Christmas Carol", st. viii (1799)

• Well, they are gone, and here must I remain,
  This lime-tree bower my prison!
  • "This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison", st. 1 (1800)

•                                                  When the last rook
  Beat its straight path along the dusky air
  • "This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison", st. 3 (1800)

•                                                          A charm
  For thee, my gentle-hearted Charles, to whom
  No sound is dissonant which tells of life.
  • "This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison", st. 3 (1800)

• Tranquillity! thou better name
  Than all the family of Fame!
  • "Ode to Tranquillity", st. 1 (1801)

• Aloof with hermit-eye I scan
  The present works of present man —
  A wild and dreamlike trade of blood and guile,
  Too foolish for a tear, too wicked for a smile!
  • "Ode to Tranquillity", st. 4 (1801)

• But the Lark is so brimful of gladness and love,
  The green fields below him, the blue sky above,
  That he sings, and he sings; and for ever sings he—
  'I love my Love, and my Love loves me!'
  • "Answer to a Child's Question", l. 7 (1802)

• What is an Epigram? a dwarfish whole,
  Its body brevity, and wit its soul.
  • "What is an Epigram?", in The Morning Post (23 September 1802)

•                                I could not know,
  Whether I suffered, or I did:
  For all seemed guilt, remorse or woe,
  My own or others still the same
  Life-stifling fear, soul-stifling shame!
  • "The Pains of Sleep", st. 2 (wr. 1803; pub. 1816)

• Trochee trips from long to short;
  From long to long in solemn sort
  Slow Spondee stalks.
  • "Metrical Feet" (1806)

In Life’s noisiest hour,
There whispers still the ceaseless Love of Thee,
The heart’s Self-solace and soliloquy.

You mould my Hopes, you fashion me within.

• And in Life's noisiest hour,
  There whispers still the ceaseless Love of Thee,
  The heart's Self-solace and soliloquy.
  You mould my Hopes, you fashion me within.
  • "The Presence of Love" (1807), ll 1–4

• And looking to the Heaven, that bends above you,
  How oft! I bless the Lot, that made me love you.
  • "The Presence of Love" (1807), ll. 10–11

• I have heard of reasons manifold
  Why Love must needs be blind,
  But this the best of all I hold,—
  His eyes are in his mind. What outward form and feature are
  He guesseth but in part;
  But what within is good and fair
  He seeth with the heart.
  • "To a Lady, Offended by a Sportive Observation That Women Have No Souls", sts. 2–3 (1812)

• I stood in unimaginable trance
  And agony that cannot be remembered.
  • Remorse (1813), act IV, sc. iii

• The imagination ... that reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the reason in images of the sense and organizing (as it were) the flux of the senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of the reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths of which they are the conductors.
  • "The Statesman's Manual" (1816)

The knight’s bones are dust,
And his good sword rust;
His soul is with the saints, I trust.

In many ways doth the full heart reveal
The presence of the love it would conceal.

• The knight's bones are dust,
  And his good sword rust;
  His soul is with the saints, I trust.
  • "The Knight's Tomb" (c. 1817)

• Never, believe me,
  Appear the Immortals,
  Never alone.
  • "The Visit of the Gods" (Imitated from Schiller), l. 1 (1817)

• To know, to esteem, to love—and then to part,
  Makes up life's tale to many a feeling heart!
  • "On taking Leave of ————", l. 1 (1817)

• Be that blind bard who on the Chian strand,
  By those deep sounds possessed with inward light,
  Beheld the Iliad and the Odyssey
  Rise to the swelling of the voiceful sea.
  • "Fancy in Nubibus", l. 11 (1818)

• With Donne, whose muse on dromedary trots,
  Wreathe iron pokers into true-love knots;
  Rhyme's sturdy cripple, fancy's maze and clue,
  Wit's forge and fire-blast, meaning's press and screw.
  • "On Donne's Poetry" (c. 1818)

• The Eighth Commandment was not made for bards.
  • "The Reproof and Reply" (1823); the eighth commandment is "Thou shalt not steal".

• Nought cared this Body for wind or weather
  When Youth and I lived in't together.
  • "Youth and Age", st. 1 (1823–1832)

Flowers are lovely; love is flower-like;
Friendship is a sheltering tree.

• Flowers are lovely; love is flower-like;
  Friendship is a sheltering tree;
  Oh the joys that came down shower-like,
  Of friendship, love, and liberty,
  Ere I was old!
  • "Youth and Age", st. 2 (1823–1832)

• Like some poor nigh-related guest,
  That may not rudely be dismist;
  Yet hath outstayed his welcome while,
  And tells the jest without the smile.
  • "Youth and Age", st. 3 (1823–1832)

• In many ways doth the full heart reveal
  The presence of the love it would conceal.
  • Poems Written in Later Life, motto (1826)

• Summer has set in with its usual severity.
  • Quoted in letters from Charles Lamb to Vincent Novello (9 May 1826) and Bernard Barton (16 May 1826); variant: 'his' instead of 'its'

• My eyes make pictures, when they are shut.
  • "A Day-Dream", l. 1 (1828)

• I counted two and seventy stenches,
  All well defined, and several stinks!
  • "Cologne", l. 4 (1828)

• The river Rhine, it is well known,
  Doth wash your city of Cologne;
  But tell me, Nymphs, what power divine
  Shall henceforth wash the river Rhine?
  • "Cologne", l. 6 (1828)

If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke — Aye! and what then?

• The happiness of life ... is made up of minute fractions — the little soon-forgotten charities of a kiss, a smile, a kind look, a heartfelt compliment in the disguise of playful raillery, and the countless other infinitesimals of pleasurable thought and genial feeling.
  • "The Improvisatore", in S. C. Hall (ed.) The Amulet, yr. 3 (1828), p. 44

• Beneath this sod
  A poet lies, or that which once seemed he —
  Oh, lift a thought in prayer for S.T.C!
  That he, who many a year, with toil of breath,
  Found death in life, may here find life in death.
  • "Epitaph", written for himself (1833)

• If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awake — Aye! and what then?
  • Reported in Ernest Hartley Coleridge (ed.) Anima Poetæ (1895), p. 282

Kubla Khan (1797 or 1798)

"Kubla Khan, or A Vision in a Dream" (wr. 1797 or 1798; pub. 1816 as "A Fragment") · Full text at Wikisource

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

• On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!
  • Preliminary note

• In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
  A stately pleasure-dome decree:
  Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
  Through caverns measureless to man
  Down to a sunless sea.

• So twice five miles of fertile ground
  With walls and towers were girdled round:
  And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
  Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
  And here were forests ancient as the hills,
  Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

• But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
  Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
  A savage place! as holy and enchanted
  As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
  By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
  And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
  As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
  A mighty fountain momently was forced:

• Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
  Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
  Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
  And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
  It flung up momently the sacred river.

• Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
  Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
  Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
  And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
  And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
  Ancestral voices prophesying war!

• The shadow of the dome of pleasure
  Floated midway on the waves;
  Where was heard the mingled measure
  From the fountain and the caves.

• It was a miracle of rare device,
  A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

• A damsel with a dulcimer
  In a vision once I saw:
  It was an Abyssinian maid,
  And on her dulcimer she played,
  Singing of Mount Abora.
  Could I revive within me
  Her symphony and song,
  To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
  That with music loud and long,
  I would build that dome in air,
  That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
  And all who heard should see them there,
  And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
  His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
  Weave a circle round him thrice,
  And close your eyes with holy dread,
  For he on honey-dew hath fed,
  And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Christabel (wr. 1797–1801; pub. 1816)

A sight to dream of, not to tell!

• Sir Leoline, the Baron rich,
  Hath a toothless mastiff bitch.
  • Part I, l. 6

• ’Tis a month before the month of May,
  And the spring comes slowly up this way.
  • Part I, l. 21

• There is not wind enough to twirl
  The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
  That dances as often as dance it can,
  Hanging so light, and hanging so high,
  On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky.
  • Part I, l. 48

• A lady so richly clad as she,
  Beautiful exceedingly!
  • Part I, l. 67

• Carv'd with figures strange and sweet,
  All made out of the carver's brain.
  • Part I, l. 179

• Her gentle limbs did she undress,
  And lay down in her loveliness.
  • Part I, l. 237

• Behold! her bosom and half her side—
  A sight to dream of, not to tell!
  • Part I, l. 251

• That saints will aid if men will call:
  For the blue sky bends over all!
  • Part II, l. 330

• Her face, oh call it fair, not pale!
  • Conclusion to Part I, l. 289

• Saints will aid if men will call:
  For the blue sky bends over all!
  • Conclusion to Part I, l. 330

• Each matin bell, the Baron saith,
  Knells us back to a world of death.
  • Part II, l. 332

• Alas! they had been friends in youth;
  But whispering tongues can poison truth;
  And constancy lives in realms above;
  And life is thorny; and youth is vain;
  And to be wroth with one we love
  Doth work like madness in the brain.
  • Part II, l. 408

• They stood aloof, the scars remaining,—
  Like cliffs which had been rent asunder:
  A dreary sea now flows between.
  • Part II, l. 421

• Alas! they had been friends in youth;
  But whispering tongues can poison truth,
  And constancy lives in realms above;
  And life is thorny; and youth is vain;
  And to be wroth with one we love
  Doth work like madness in the brain.
  • Part II, l. 408

• A little child, a limber elf,
  Singing, dancing to itself,
  A fairy thing with red round cheeks,
  That always finds, and never seeks,
  Makes such a vision to the sight
  As fills a father’s eyes with light.
  • Conclusion to Part II, l. 656

• Perhaps 'tis pretty to force together
  Thoughts so all unlike each other;
  To mutter and mock a broken charm,
  To dally with wrong that does no harm.
  • Conclusion to Part II, l. 666

Dejection: An Ode (1802)

O lady! we receive but what we give
And in our life alone does Nature live.

Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud…

• The grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spence.
  • St. 1

• Yon crescent Moon, as fixed as if it grew
  In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue;
  I see them all so excellently fair,
  I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!
  • St. 2

• O lady! we receive but what we give
  And in our life alone does Nature live.
  • St. 4

• A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud
  Enveloping the earth.
  • St. 4

• Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud —
  We in ourselves rejoice!
  And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight,
  All melodies the echoes of that voice,
  All colours a suffusion from that light.
  • St. 5

Wallenstein (1800)

Translated from Schiller

• The intelligible forms of ancient poets,
  The fair humanities of old religion,
  The Power, the Beauty, and the Majesty
  That had their haunts in dale, or piny mountain,
  Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring,
  Or chasms and wat'ry depths; all these have vanished.
  They live no longer in the faith of reason!
  • Part I: The Piccolimini, Act ii, scene 4

• But still the heart doth need a language, still
  Doth the old instinct bring back the old names
  • Part I: The Piccolimini, Act ii, scene 4

• I've lived and loved.
  • Part I: The Piccolimini, Act ii, scene 6

• The doing evil to avoid an evil
  Cannot be good.
  • Part I: The Piccolimini, Act iv, scene 6

• Clothing the palpable and the familiar
  With golden exhalations of the dawn.
  • Part II: The Death of Wallenstein, Act v, scene 1

• Often do the spirits
  Of great events stride on before the events,
  And in to-day already walks to-morrow.
  • Part II: The Death of Wallenstein, Act v, scene 1

Hymn before Sunrise, in the Vale of Chamouni (1802)

Hast thou a charm to stay the morning-star
In his steep course?

Voice of sweet song! awake, my heart, awake!
Green vales and icy cliffs, all join my hymn.

Great hierarch! tell thou the silent sky,
And tell the stars, and tell yon rising sun,
Earth, with her thousand voices, praises God.

• Hast thou a charm to stay the morning-star
  In his steep course? So long he seems to pause
  On thy bald awful head, О sovran Blanc!
  • St. 1

• 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!
  • St. 1

• Risest from forth thy silent sea of pines.
  • St. 1

• 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 worshipped the Invisible alone.
  • St. 1

• Awake, my soul! not only passive praise
  Thou owest! not alone these swelling tears,
  Mute thanks and secret ecstasy. Awake,
  Voice of sweet song! awake, my heart, awake!
  Green vales and icy cliffs, all join my hymn.
  • St. 3

• O struggling with the darkness all the night,
  And visited all night by troops of stars.
  • St. 4

• Motionless torrents! silent cataracts!
  • St. 6

• Who made you glorious as the gates of heaven
  Beneath the keen full moon? Who bade the sun
  Clothe you with rainbows? Who, with living flower
  Of loveliest blue, spread garlands at your feet?
  'God!' let the torrents, like a shout of nations,
  Answer! and let the ice-plains echo, 'God!'
  'God!' sing, ye meadow-streams, with gladsome voice!
  Ye pine-groves, with your soft and soul-like sounds!
  And they too have a voice, yon piles of snow,
  And in their perilous fall shall thunder, 'God!'
  • St. 6

• Ye living flowers that skirt the eternal frost.
  • St. 7

• Ye lightnings, the dread arrows of the clouds!
  Ye signs and wonders of the element!
  Utter forth ' God,' and fill the hills with praise!
  • St. 7

• Solemnly seemest like a vapoury cloud
  To rise before me — Rise, oh, ever rise;
  Rise like a cloud of incense from the earth!
  Thou kingly spirit throned among the hills,
  Thou dread ambassador from earth to heaven,
  Great hierarch! tell thou the silent sky,
  And tell the stars, and tell yon rising sun,
  Earth, with her thousand voices, praises God.
  • St. 8

The Friend (1809–1810)

The Friend: A Series of Essays (London: Gale and Curtis, 1812)

• A mother is a mother still;
  The holiest thing alive.
  • No. 6 (September 21, 1809), p. 91

• An instinctive taste teaches men to build their churches in flat countries, with spire-steeples, which, as they cannot be referred to any other object, point as with silent finger to the sky and star.
  • No. 14 (November 23, 1809), p. 223

• The Dwarf sees farther than the Giant, when he has the Giant's shoulders to mount on.
  • No. 15 (November 30, 1809), p. 228
  • Cf. Isaac Newton, letter to Robert Hooke (15 February 1676): "If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants".

• How seldom, Friend! a good great man inherits
  Honour or wealth, with all his worth and pains!
  It sounds like stories from the land of spirits,
  If any man obtain that which he merits,
  Or any merit that which he obtains.
    reply.
  For shame, dear Friend! renounce this canting strain! …
  Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends!
  Hath he not always treasures, always friends,
  The good great man? Three treasures, Love and Light,
  And calm Thoughts, regular as infants' breath;
  And three firm friends, more sure than day and night,
  Himself, his Maker, and the Angel Death.
  • No. 19 (26 December 1809), p. 292

Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare and Other English Poets (1811–1818)

Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare and Other English Poets (London: George Bell and Sons, 1883)

• Reviewers are usually people who would have been poets, historians, biographers, etc., if they could; they have tried their talents at one or the other, and have failed; therefore they turn critics.
  • Part I: "Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton. 1811–1812", Lecture I, p. 36

• The poet is not only the man made to solve the riddle of the universe, but he is also the man who feels where it is not solved.
  • Part I: "Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton. 1811–1812", Lecture VIII, p. 105

• Poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science. Poetry is opposed to science, and prose to metre. The proper and immediate object of science is the acquirement, or communication, of truth; the proper and immediate object of poetry is the communication of immediate pleasure.
  • Part II: "The Lectures and Notes of 1818", Section I: "Poetry, the Drama, and Shakespeare", § "Definitions of Poetry", p. 183

• But alas! the exceptions prove the rule. For who will dare to force his way out of the crowd,—not of the mere vulgar,—but of the vain and banded aristocracy of intellect, and presume to join the almost supernatural beings that stand by themselves aloof?
  • Part II: "The Lectures and Notes of 1818", Section I: "Poetry, the Drama, and Shakespeare", § "The Drama generally and Public Taste", p. 214

• Iago's soliloquy—the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity—how awful it is!
  • Part II: "The Lectures and Notes of 1818", Section IV: "Notes on Some Other Plays of Shakespeare", § "Othello", p. 388

On the Principles of Genial Criticism (1814)

• Taste is the intermediate faculty which connects the active with the passive powers of our nature, the intellect with the senses; and its appointed function is to elevate the images of the latter, while it realizes the ideas of the former.

• The most general definition of beauty ... Multeity in Unity.

• The Good consists in the congruity of a thing with the laws of the reason and the nature of the will, and in its fitness to determine the latter to actualize the former: and it is always discursive. The Beautiful arises from the perceived harmony of an object, whether sight or sound, with the inborn and constitutive rules of the judgment and imagination: and it is always intuitive.

On Poesy or Art (1818)

• Now Art, used collectively for painting, sculpture, architecture and music, is the mediatress between, and reconciler of, nature and man. It is, therefore, the power of humanizing nature, of infusing the thoughts and passions of man into everything which is the object of his contemplation.

• The artist must imitate that which is within the thing, that which is active through form and figure, and discourses to us by symbols.

• The heart should have fed upon the truth, as insects on a leaf, till it be tinged with the color, and show its food in every ... minutest fiber.

Aids to Reflection (1825)

Aids to Reflection, ed. Thomas Fenby (Liverpool: Edward Howell, 1873)

He, who begins by loving Christianity better than Truth, will proceed by loving his own Sect or Church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.

• There is one art, of which every man should be master, the art of reflection. If you are not a thinking man, to what purpose are you a man at all? In like manner, there is one knowledge, which it is in every man's interest and duty to acquire, namely, self-knowledge: or to what end was man alone, of all animals, endowed by the Creator with the faculty of self-consciousness?
  • The Author's Preface, pp. xvi–xvii

• In philosophy equally as in poetry it is the highest and most useful prerogative of genius to produce the strongest impressions of novelty, while it rescues admitted truths from the neglect caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission.
  • Aphorism 1, p. 1

• Truths … are too often considered as so true, that they lose all the power of truth, and lie bed-ridden in the dormitory of the soul, side by side with the most despised and exploded errors.
  • Aphorism 1, p. 1

• Manly energy … is the proper rendering [for αρετην], and not virtue, at least in the present and ordinary acceptation of the word.
  • Comment on Aphorism 12, pp. 6–7

• It is a dull and obtuse mind, that must divide in order to distinguish; but it is a still worse, that distinguishes in order to divide. In the former, we may contemplate the source of superstition and idolatry; in the latter of schism, heresy, and a seditious and sectarian spirit.
  • Aphorism 26, p. 17

• He, who begins by loving Christianity better than Truth, will proceed by loving his own Sect or Church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.
  • Aphorism 63, p. 89 [1]

• The anxiety to be admired is a loveless passion ... , loud on the hustings, gay in the ball-room, mute and sullen at the family fireside.
  • Comment on Aphorism 101, pp. 169–170 [2]

• “They did not like to retain God in their knowledge” (Rom. i. 28), and though they could not extinguish “the Light that lighteth every man,” and which “shone in the darkness;” yet because the darkness could not comprehend the Light, they refused to bear witness of it, and worshipped, instead, the shaping mist, which the Light had drawn upward from the ground (i.e., from the mere animal nature and instinct), and which that Light alone had made visible (i.e., by super-inducing on the animal instinct the principle of self-consciousness)
  • Footnote to Aphorism 106 pt. 14, p. 206

• In wonder all philosophy began, in wonder it ends. ... But the first wonder is the offspring of ignorance, the last is the parent of adoration.
  • Aphorism 107, p. 206

• As in respect of the first wonder we are all on the same level, how comes it that the philosophic mind should, in all ages, be the privilege of a few? The most obvious reason is this: The wonder takes place before the period of reflection, and (with the great mass of mankind) long before the individual is capable of directing his attention freely and consciously to the feeling, or even to its exciting causes. Surprise (the form and dress which the wonder of ignorance usually puts on) is worn away, if not precluded, by custom and familiarity.
  • Sequelae to Aphorism 107, pp. 206–207

Work without Hope (1825)

Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And Hope without an object cannot live.

• All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair —
  The bees are stirring — birds are on the wing —
  And Winter slumbering in the open air,
  Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!
  And I the while, the sole unbusy thing,
  Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.
  • l. 1

• Bloom, O ye Amaranths! bloom for whom ye may,
  For me ye bloom not! Glide, rich streams, away!
  With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll:
  And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul?
  Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve,
  And Hope without an object cannot live.
  • l. 9

Duty surviving Self-Love (1826)

Old Friends burn dim, like lamps in noisome air,
Love them for what they are; nor love them less,
Because to thee they are not what they were.

• Unchanged within, to see all changed without,
  Is a blank lot and hard to bear, no doubt.
  Yet why at others' Wanings should'st thou fret?
  Then only might'st thou feel a just regret,
  Hadst thou withheld thy love or hid thy light
  In selfish forethought of neglect and slight.

• O wiselier then, from feeble yearnings freed,
  While, and on whom, thou may'st — shine on! nor heed
  Whether the object by reflected light
  Return thy radiance or absorb it quite:
  And tho' thou notest from thy safe recess
  Old Friends burn dim, like lamps in noisome air,
  Love them for what they are; nor love them less,
  Because to thee they are not what they were.

Notebooks

• I lay too many Eggs in the hot Sands of this Wilderness, the World! with Ostrich Carelessness & Ostrich Oblivion. The greater part, I trust, are trod underfoot, & smashed; but yet no small number crawl forth into Life, some to furnish Feathers for the Caps of others, & still more to plume the Shafts in the Quivers of my Enemies, of them that lie in wait against my Soul.
  • Notebooks, September/early October 1802

Letters

Thomas Allsop (ed.) Letters and Conversations of S. T. Coleridge (London: Edward Moxon, 1836), vols. 1, 2

Earl Leslie Griggs (ed.) Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–1959), vols. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

• I have often been surprised that Mathematics, the quintessence of Truth, should have found admirers so few and so languid. Frequent consideration and minute scrutiny have at length unravelled the cause: viz. that though Reason is feasted, Imagination is starved; whilst Reason is luxuriating in its proper Paradise, Imagination is wearily travelling on a dreary desert.
  • Letter to his brother (1791)

• My next shall be a more sober & chastised Epistle — but you see I was in the humour for metaphors — and to tell thee the Truth, I have so often serious reasons to quarrel with my Inclination, that I do not chuse to contradict it for Trifles.
  • Letter to Robert Southey (6 July 1794)

• Your Sensibilities are tempestuous — you feel Indignation at Weakness — Now Indignation is the handsome Brother of Anger & Hatred — His looks are "lovely in terror" — yet still remember, who are his Relations.
  • Letter to Robert Southey (29 December 1794)

From my early reading of Faery Tales, & Genii &c &c — my mind had been habituated to the Vast — & I never regarded my senses in any way as the criteria of my belief.

• From my early reading of Faery Tales, & Genii &c &c — my mind had been habituated to the Vast — & I never regarded my senses in any way as the criteria of my belief. I regulated all my creeds by my conceptions not by my sight — even at that age. Should children be permitted to read Romances, & Relations of Giants & Magicians, & Genii? — I know all that has been said against it; but I have formed my faith in the affirmative. — I know no other way of giving the mind a love of "the Great," & "the Whole." — Those who have been led by the same truths step by step thro' the constant testimony of their senses, seem to me to want a sense which I possess — They contemplate nothing but parts — and all parts are necessarily little — and the Universe to them is but a mass of little things. It is true, the mind may become credulous and prone to superstition by the former method; — but are not the experimentalists credulous even to madness in believing any absurdity, rather than believe the grandest truths, if they have not the testimony of their own senses in their favor? I have known some who have been rationally educated, as it is styled. They were marked by a microscopic acuteness; but when they looked at great things, all became a blank, and they saw nothing, and denied that any thing could be seen, and uniformly put the negative of a power for the possession of a power, and called the want of imagination judgment, and the never being moved to rapture philosophy.
  • Letter to Thomas Poole (16 October 1797); ed. Griggs (1956), vol. 1, p. 354

• I shall attack Chemistry, like a Shark.
  • Letter to Sir Humphry Davy (15 July 1800)

• God knows, it is as much as I can do to put meat and bread on my own table; & hourly some poor starving wretch comes to my door, to put in his claim for a part of it.
  • Letter to Thomas Poole (23 March 1801)

• Metaphisics is a word that you, my dear Sir! are no great friend to / but yet you will agree, that a great Poet must be, implicitè if not explicitè, a profound Metaphysician. He may not have it in logical coherence, in his Brain & Tongue; but he must have it by Tact / for all sounds, & all forms of human nature he must have the ear of a wild Arab listening in the silent Desart, the eye of a North American Indian tracing the footsteps of an Enemy upon the Leaves that strew the Forest — ; the Touch of a Blind Man feeling the face of a darling Child.
  • Letter to William Sotheby (13 July 1802)

• But metre itself implies a passion, i.e. a state of excitement, both in the Poet's mind, & is expected in that of the Reader.
  • Letter to William Sotheby (13 July 1802)

• Never to see or describe any interesting appearance in nature, without connecting it by dim analogies with the moral world, proves faintness of Impression. Nature has her proper interest; & he will know what it is, who believes & feels, that every Thing has a life of it's own, & that we are all one Life.
  • Letter to William Sotheby (10 September 1802)

• He has no native Passion, because he is not a Thinker — & has probably weakened his Intellect by the haunting Fear of becoming extravagant.
  • Letter to William Sotheby (10 September 1802)

• Moral obligation is to me so very strong a Stimulant, that in 9 cases out of ten it acts as a Narcotic. The Blow that should rouse, stuns me.
  • Letter to Henry Crabb Robinson (12 March 1811)

• The age seems sore from excess of stimulation, just as a day or two after a thorough Debauch and long sustained Drinking-match a man feels all over like a Bruise. Even to admire otherwise than on the whole and where "I admire" is but a synonyme for "I remember, I liked it very much when I was reading it," is too much an effort, would be too disquieting an emotion!
  • Letter to Thomas Allsop (30 March 1820)

• Humour is consistent with pathos, whilst wit is not.
  • Letter to a friend (c. 1821); ed. Allsop (1836), vol. 1, p. 137

It is a flat'ning Thought, that the more we have seen, the less we have to say.

• It is a flat'ning Thought, that the more we have seen, the less we have to say.
  • Letter to James Gillman (9 October 1825)

• Nature is a wary wily long-breathed old Witch, tough-lived as a Turtle and divisible as the Polyp, repullulative in a thousand Snips and Cuttings, integra et in toto! She is sure to get the better of Lady Mind in the long run, and to take her revenge too — transforms our To Day into a Canvass dead-colored to receive the dull featureless Portrait of Yesterday.
  • Letter to James Gillman (9 October 1825)

• How many of our virtues originate in the fear of Death — & that while we flatter ourselves that we are melting in Christian Sensibility over the sorrows of our human Brethren and Sisteren, we are in fact, tho' perhaps unconsciously, moved at the prospect of our own End — for who sincerely pities Sea-sickness, Toothache, or a fit of the Gout in a lusty Good-liver of 50?
  • Letter to James Gillman (9 October 1825)

Misattributed

• Above all things I entreat you to preserve your faith in Christ. It is my wealth in poverty, my joy in sorrow, my peace amid tumult. For all the evil I have committed, my gracious pardon; and for every effort, my exceeding great reward. I have found it to be so. I can smile with pity at the infidel whose vanity makes him dream that I should barter such a blessing for the few subtleties from the school of the cold-blooded sophists.
  • Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 235, and various other sources beginning no earlier than 1880; actually an elaboration and modification of a quote by D.W. Clark, The Mount of Blessing (1854), p. 56: "It shall be my wealth in poverty, my joy in sorrow, and its promised rewards shall cheer me in all trials, and sustain me in all sufferings".

Quotes about Coleridge

The author of Biographia Literaria was already a ruined man. Sometimes, however, to be a "ruined man" is itself a vocation. ~ T. S. Eliot

• And Coleridge, too, has lately taken wing,
  But, like a hawk encumber'd with his hood,
  Explaining metaphysics to the nation –
  I wish he would explain his Explanation.
  • Lord Byron, Don Juan (1819-24), Canto 1, Dedication, line 13

• He is a kind, good soul, full of religion and affection and poetry and animal magnetism. His cardinal sin is that he wants will. He has no resolution. He shrinks from pain or labour in any of its shapes. His very atti- tude bespeaks this. He never straightens his knee-joints. He stoops with his fat, ill-shapen shoulders, and in walking he does not tread, but shovel and slide. My father would call it "skluffing." He is also always busied to keep, by strong and frequent inhalations, the water of his mouth from over-flowing, and his eyes have a look of anxious impotence. He would do with all his heart, but he knows he dares not. The conversation of the man is much as I anticipated — a forest of thoughts, some true, many false, more part dubious, all of them ingenious in some degree, often in a high degree. But there is no method in his talk; he wanders like a man sailing among many currents, whithersoever his lazy mind directs him; and, what is more unpleasant, he preaches, or rather soliloquises. He cannot speak, he can only tal-k (so he names it). Hence I found him unprofitable, even tedious; but we parted very good friends, I promising to go back and see him some evening a promise which I fully intend to keep. I sent him a copy of Meister, about which we had some friendly talk. I reckon him a man of great and useless genius: a strange, not at all a great man.
  • Thomas Carlyle, in a letter to his brother (24 June 1824)

• Less active a politician, but a deeper philosopher, Coleridge continually reminds us of Burke. If the mantle of the author of the Reflections descended on anyone it was on the former young Pantisocrat. The political philosophy of Coleridge is that of Burke modified and developed on all sides, and, we may claim, not altogether losing in value in the process.
  • Alfred Cobban, Edmund Burke and the Revolt against the Eighteenth Century: A Study of the Political and Social Thinking of Burke, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey (1929), p. 186

• It was a great revolution in ideas when Coleridge and his friends began to talk not about the rights of property but about its social duties, to criticize the economic operation of individualism from the point of view of the whole community, and to suggest that the State had sometimes the duty of interfering in economic matters and even of limiting unrestricted rights of property... The economists' doctrines, Coleridge concludes, are simply a cover for the self-interest of the rich, to be ignored whenever it suits their purpose.
  • Alfred Cobban, Edmund Burke and the Revolt against the Eighteenth Century: A Study of the Political and Social Thinking of Burke, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey (1929), pp. 203-204

• His championship of the cause of factory children was an interesting result of his belief in the sanctity of individuality, and the right of the individual in a civilized community to a certain minimum standard of civilized existence. Making all allowances for the by no means idyllic conditions existing under the domestic system, it still remains true that the exploitation of child labour under the most appalling conditions is one of the darkest pages in the history of the industrial revolution. Coleridge says that he had been "an eye-witness of the direful effects", and that they had "weighed on his feelings from earliest manhood" ... Coleridge took an active part in the agitation on behalf of Peel's Factory Children Bill of 1818.
  • Alfred Cobban, Edmund Burke and the Revolt against the Eighteenth Century: A Study of the Political and Social Thinking of Burke, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey (1929), pp. 213-214

• Coleridge was perhaps the most celebrated of all drinkers of laudanum, and splendid studies have been written of its influence on his Muse. Nobody seems to have paid attention to its influence on his bowels, for laudanum was a rare constipator. How much of The Ancient Mariner was the result of intestinal stasis?
  • Robertson Davies, Murther and Walking Spirits (1991), part II, section 19

• The author of Biographia Literaria was already a ruined man. Sometimes, however, to be a "ruined man" is itself a vocation.
  • T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), p. 69

• Coleridge...became indeed the greatest of Burke's followers. Like Burke, he was intensely religious. Religion, he believed, was always "the centre of gravity in a realm, to which all other things must and will accommodate themselves". Though a metaphysician, he thought metaphysics had no place in politics; and he was as hostile as Burke to abstract political systems allegedly based on pure reason... Hence for Coleridge Jacobinism was a monstrous hybrid, "made up in part of despotism and in part of abstract reason misapplied to objects that belong entirely to experience and the understanding". Jacobinism pandered to the brute passions of the mob in order to erect a society and government based on abstract reason instead of on established institutions and experience. England, in contrast, had the good fortune to possess social institutions that had "formed themselves out of our proper needs and interests..."
  • Ian Gilmour, Inside Right: A Study of Conservatism (1977), p. 69

• For Coleridge, the principle of the British constitution was the harmonious balance between permanence and progression or law and liberty. The landed interest and the House of Lords provided permanence and stability, the mercantile classes and the House of Commons ensured progression and personal freedom, and the Monarch supplied unity and cohesion. But all this depended upon a continuing improvement in civilization which was the responsibility of the national Church, "the third great venerable estate of the realm". The Church had a vital educational duty and function. It should through education provide everyone with the chance of bettering their children and impart the knowledge necessary to qualify "every nature" to be "the free subject of a civilised realm".
  Coleridge pointed out that for nearly 150 years Englishmen had been freer than the citizens of any other known country. This was due to our "insular privilege of a self-evolving constitution".
  • Ian Gilmour, Inside Right: A Study of Conservatism (1977), p. 70

• He was the first poet I ever knew. His genius at that time had angelic wings, and fed on manna. He talked on for ever; and you wished him to talk on for ever. His thoughts did not seem to come with labour and effort; but as if borne on the gusts of genius, and as if the wings of his imagination lifted him from off his feet.
  • William Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Poets (1818).

• The genius of Coleridge is like a sunken treasure ship, and Coleridge a diver too timid and lazy to bring its riches to the surface.
  • Hugh Kingsmill, The Progress of a Biographer (1949) p. 94

• His face when he repeats his verses hath its ancient glory, an Arch angel a little damaged ... Coleridge is absent but 4 miles, & the neighbourhood of such a man is as exciting as the presence of 50 ordinary Persons.
  • Charles Lamb, in a letter to William Wordsworth (26 April 1816)

• The name of Coleridge is one of the few English names of our time which are likely to be oftener pronounced, and to be symbolical of more important things, in proportion as the inward workings of the age manifest themselves more and more in outward facts.
  • John Stuart Mill, 'Coleridge', London and Westminster Review (March 1840), quoted in John Stuart Mill, Dissertations and Discussions Political, Philosophical, and Historical. Vol. I (1859), p. 393

• He has been the great awakener in this country of the spirit of philosophy, within the bounds of traditional opinions.
  • John Stuart Mill, 'Coleridge', London and Westminster Review (March 1840), quoted in John Stuart Mill, Dissertations and Discussions Political, Philosophical, and Historical. Vol. I (1859), p. 393

• The peculiarity of the Germano-Coleridgian school is, that they saw beyond the immediate controversy, to the fundamental principles involved in all such controversies. They were the first (except a solitary thinker here and there) who inquired with any comprehensiveness or depth, into the inductive laws of the existence and growth of human society.
  • John Stuart Mill, 'Coleridge', London and Westminster Review (March 1840), quoted in John Stuart Mill, Dissertations and Discussions Political, Philosophical, and Historical. Vol. I (1859), p. 425

• While history in prose and verse was thus made the instrument of Church feelings and opinions, a philosophical basis for the same was under formation in England by a very original thinker, who, while he indulged a liberty of speculation which no Christian can tolerate, and advocated conclusions which were often heathen rather than Christian, yet after all instilled a higher philosophy into inquiring minds, than they had hitherto been accustomed to accept. In this way he made trial of his age, and found it respond to him, and succeeded in interesting its genius in the cause of Catholic truth. It has indeed been only since the death of Coleridge that these results of his writings have fully shown themselves; but they were very evident when they were once seen, and discovered the tendencies which had been working in his mind from the first.
  • John Henry Newman, 'Prospects of the Anglican Church', Essays Critical and Historical (1871), pp. 267-268

• Most of the great critics of English poetry have also been poets: Sir Philip Sidney, Samuel Johnson, Coleridge, Shelley, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, to name a few.
  • Alicia Ostriker Interview

External links

• Works by Samuel Taylor Coleridge at Project Gutenberg
• The Coleridge Archive
• Poems by Coleridge from the Poetry Foundation
• Coleridge archive at the Victoria University
• Works of Coleridge at the University of Toronto
• Friends of Coleridge Society
• Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge from the Internet Archive
• The re-opening of Coleridge Cottage near Exmoor