train of thought may be considered as the result of outward impressions, of accidental combinations, of fancy, or the associations of the memory, and on the other hand, that of internal causality, or of the energy of the will on the mind itself. Thought, therefore, might thus be regarded as passive or active; and the same faculties may in a popular sense be expressed as perception or observation, fancy or imagination, memory or recollection." The next section of the first volume contains notes on Browne's Religio Medici, and on Chapman's translation of Homer, communicated by Mr. Wordsworth; on Barclay's Argenis, an exceedingly interesting and instructive paper communicated by the Rev. Derwent Coleridge-notes on Junius, written in his copy of the letters in 1807-essays on Beauty and on Taste; the former written in 1818, the latter in 1810; and some notes written in the margin of his copy of Baxter's Life of Himself. The next division of the volume contains a few poems-one a spirited translation from Stolberg-like every one of Coleridge's translations, better than the original. It, however, has manifestly not had the last hand of the poet, and must be read with the indulgence due to a ballad no doubt hastily written, and, as it does not appear in his collected poems, probably forgotten altogether by the translator. THE STRIPLING'S WAR-SONG. My noble old warrior! this heart has beat high, As late through"the city with bannerets streaming, I sped to yon heath which is lonely and bare- arm. Yes, noble old warrior! this heart has beat high, Since you told of the deeds that our countrymen wrought; Ah! give me the falchion that hung by thy thigh, And I too will fight as my forefathers fought! We cannot give in a more appropriate place to the following remarks on the German language and ours, which occur in the next section of this agreeable miscellany: GERMAN LANGUAGE. For "The real value of melody in a language is considerable as subadditive; but when not jutting out into consciousness under the friction of comparison, the absence or inferiority of it is, as privative of pleasure, of little consequence. example, when I read Voss's translation of the Georgics, I am, as it were, reading the original poem, until something particularly well expressed occasions me to revert to the Latin; and then I find the superiority, or at least the powers, of the German in all other respects, but am made feelingly alive, at the same time, to its unsmooth mixture of the vocal and the organic, the fluid and the substance, of language. The fluid seems to have been poured in on the corpuscles all at once, and the whole has, therefore, curdled, and collected itself into a lumpy Since you told of the deeds that our countrymen soup full of knots of curds inisled by in wrought; Ah! give me the sabre which hung by thy thigh, And I too will fight as my forefathers fought. O, despise not my youth! for my spirit is steel'd, And I know there is strength in the grasp of my hand; Yea, as firm as thyself would I move to the field. terjacent whey at irregular distances, and the curd lumpets of various sizes. "It is always a question how far the apparent defects of a language arise from itself or from the false taste of the nation speaking_it. Is the practical inferiority of the English to the Italian in the And as proudly would die for my dear father. power of passing from grave to light sub land. In the sports of my childhood I mimick'd the fight, The shrill of a trumpet suspended my breath; And my fancy still wander'd by day and by night Amid tumult and perlis, 'mid conquest and death. My own eager shout in the heat of my trance, How oft it awakes me from dreams full of glory, When I meant to have leap'd on the hero of France, And have dash'd him to earth pale and deathless and gory! jects, in the manner of Ariosto, the fault of the language itself? Wieland in his Oberon, broke successfully through equal difficulties. It is grievous to think how much less careful the English have been to preserve than to acquire. Why have we lost, or all but lost, the ver or for as a prefix, fordone, forwearied, &c.; and the zer or to, zerreissen, torend, &c. Jugend, Jüngling: youth, youngling; why is that last word now lost to common use, and confined to sheep and other animals?" To affect any arrangement in our selections from a part of the work put together almost accidentally, is of course quite out of the question; but we interpose the following extract to make the transition from criticism on the powers of language, to the most awful subjects which can engage the mind, less startlingly abrupt than it would otherwise be: M. DUPUIS. "Among the extravagancies of faith which have characterized many infidel writers, who would swallow a whale to avoid believing that a whale swallowed Jonas, a high rank should be given to Dupuis, who, at the commencement of the French Revolution, published a work in twelve volumes, octavo, in order to prove that Jesus Christ was the sun, and all Christians, worshippers of Mithra. His arguments, if arguments they can be called, consist chiefly of metaphors quoted from the Fathers. What irresistible conviction would not the following passage from South's sermons (vol. v. p. 165.) have flashed on his fancy, had it occurred in the writings of Origen or Tertullian! and how complete a confutation of all his grounds does not the passage afford to those humble souls, who, gifted with common sense alone, can boast of no additional light received through a crack in their upper apartments:— "Christ the great sun of righteousness and saviour of the world, having by a glorious rising, after a red and bloody setting, proclaimed his deity to men and angels; and by a complete triumph over the two grand enemies of mankind, sin and death, set up the everlasting gospel in the room of all false religions, has now changed the Persian superstition into the Christian doctrine, and without the least approach to the idolatry of the former, made it henceforward the duty of all nations, Jews and Gentiles, to worship the rising sun.' "This one passage outblazes the whole host of Dupuis' evidences and extracts. In the same sermon, the reader will meet with Hume's argument against miracles anticipated, and put in Thomas's mouth." The passage which follows was written in the year 1816. In it are anticipated some of the views afterwards exhibited in detail in the Aids to Reflection. We think the statement as here given more striking than in the expanded form which it assumed in Mr. Coleridge's own publication. Our copy of the Aids to Reflection is of the first edition; but we believe there are few alterations in the after editions. A fault of the work is occa sioned by so much of it being comments on passages of the old divines whom it was Mr. Coleridge's delight to quote, altering their language occasionally so as to make it more easily fall in with his views. The necessity of communicating to his readers these changes gives to the book a disputatious air, and makes the eloquent expositions of Coleridge's own faith, which these discussions interrupt, seem accidental additions to the work, like the noble bursts of something more than poetry, that every now and then burn through Miltons' controversial writings. The humble yet elevated tone of the confessions of faith which we transcribe is, that natural to a man kneeling in prayer, alone with his own soul, and with God. We know nothing like it in human language. There is a passage in one of the Catholic Mystic writers, which we are reminded of when we read this and such passages. 'Speak," said the pious man of whom we think, "in your conversation, as if you were addressing those, to whom you speak, in the presence of their guardian angels." CONFESSIO FIDEI. NOV. 3, 1816. 1. 1. "I believe that I am a free-agent, inasmuch as, and so far as, I have a will, which renders me justly responsible for my actioas, omissive as well as commissive. Likewise that I possess reason, or a law of right and wrong, which, uniting with my sense of moral responsibility, constitutes the voice of conscience. II. "Hence it becomes my absolute duty to believe, and I do believe, that there is a God, that is, a Being, in whom supreme reason and a most holy will are one with an infinite power; and that all holy will is coincident with the will of God, and therefore secure in its ultimate consequences by His omnipotence ;having, if such similitude be not unlawful, such a relation to the goodness of the Almighty, as a perfect time-piece will have to the sun. COROLLARY. "The wonderful works of God in the sensible world are a perpetual discourse, reminding me of his existence, and shadowing out to me his perfections. But ligent hearer or reader those primary as all language presupposes in the intelnotions, which it symbolizes; as well as the power of making those combinations of these primary nations, which it represents and excites us to combine,-even so I believe, that the notion of God is essential to the human mind; that it is and, as did Socrates, would have yearned after the Redeemer, though it would not dare expect so wonderful an act of divine love, except only as an effort of my mind to conceive the utmost of the infinite greatness of that love. called forth into distinct consciousness other mode of redemption is conceivable, principally by the conscience, and auxiliary by the manifest adaptation of means to ends in the outward creation. It is, therefore, evident to my reason, that the existence of God is absolutely and necessarily insusceptible of a scientific demonstration, and that Scripture has so represented it. For it commands us to believe in one God. I am the Lord thy God: thou shalt have none other gods but me. Now all commandment necessarily relates to the will; whereas all scientific demonstration is independent of the will, and is apodictic or demonstrative only as far as it is compulsory on the mind, volentem, nolentem. III. "My conscience forbids me to propose to myself the pains and pleasures of this life, as the primary motive, or ultimate end, of my actions; -on the contrary, it makes me perceive an utter disproportionateness and heterogeneity between the acts of the spirit, as virtue and vice, and the things of the sense, such as all earthly rewards and punishments must be. : Its hopes and fears, therefore, refer me to a different and spiritual state of being and I believe in the life to come, not through arguments acquired by my understanding or discursive faculty, but chiefly and effectively, because so to believe is my duty, and in obedience to the commands of my conscience. Here ends the first table of my creed, which would have been my creed, had I been born with Adam; and which, therefore, constitutes what may in this sense be called natural religion, that is, the religion of all finite rational beings. The second table contains the creed of revealed religion, my beliet as a Christian. II. IV. "I believe, and hold it as the fundamental article of Christianity, that I am a fallen creature; that I am of myself capable of moral evil, but not of myself capable of moral good, and that an evil ground existed in my will, previously to any given act, or assignable moment of time, in my consciousness. I am born a child of wrath. This fearful mystery I pretend not to understand. I cannot even conceive the possibility of it, -but I know that it is so. My conscience, the sole fountain of certainty, commands me to believe it, and would itself be a contradiction, were it not soand what is real must be possible. V. "I receive with full and grateful faith the assurance of revelation, that the Word, which is from all eternity with God, and is God, assumed our human nature in order to redeem me, and all mankind from this our connate corruption. My reason convinces me, that no VI. "I believe, that this assumption of humanity by the Son of God, was revealed and realized to us by the Word made flesh, and manifested to us in Christ Jesus; and that his miraculous birth, his agony, his crucifixion, death, resurrection, and ascension, were all both symbols of our redemption (φαινόμενα τῶν νουμένων) and necessary parts of the awful process. VII. "I believe in the descent and sending of the Holy Spirit, by whose free grace obtained for me by the merits of my Redeemer, I can alone be sanctified and restored from my natural inheritance of sin and condemnation, be a child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of God. COROLLARY. "The Trinity of persons in the Unity of the God would have been a necessary idea of my speculative reason, deduced from the necessary postulate of an intelligent creator, whose ideas being anterior to the things, must be more actual than those things, even as those things are more actual than our images derived from them; and who, as intelligent, must have had co-eternally an adequate idea of himself, in and through which he created all things both in heaven and earth. But this would only have been a speculative idea, like those of circles and other mathematical figures, to which we are not authorized by the practical reason to attribute reality. Solely in consequence of our Redemption does the Trinity become a doctrine, the belief of which as real is commanded by our conscience. But to Christians it is commanded, and it is false candour in a Christian, believing in original sin and redemption therefrom, to admit that any man denying the divinity of Christ can be a Christian. The true language of a Christian, which reconciles humility with truth would be ;-God and not man is the judge of man; which of the two is the Christian, he will determine; but this is evident, that if the theanthropist is a Christian, the psilanthropist cannot be so; and vice versa. Suppose, that two tribes used the same written characters, but attached different and opposite meanings to them, so that niger, for instance, was used by one tribe to convey the notion black, by the other; white;-could they, without absurdity, be said to have the same language? Even so, in the instance of the crucifixion, the same image is present to the theanthropist and to the psilanthropist or Socinian but to the latter it represents a mere man, a good man indeed and divinely in spired, but still a mere man, even as Moses or Paul, dying in attestation of the truth of his preaching, and in order by his resurrection to give a proof of his mission, and inclusively of the resurrection of all men :-to the former it represents God incarnate taking upon himself the sins of the world, and himself thereby redeeming us, and giving us life everlasting, not merely teaching it. The same difference, that exists between God and man, between giving and the declaration of a gift, exists between the Trinitarian and the Unitarian. This might be proved in a few moments, if we would only conceive a Greek or Roman, to whom two persons relate their belief, each calling Christ by a different name. It would be impossible for the Greek even guess, that they both meant the same person, or referred to the same facts." to How impossible it is through the works of Coleridge ever to forget the man! Never surely was there one who, with more singleness of heart, pursued, through a life, which his very selflessness rendered peculiarly help. less a life, too, disturbed by sad visitations from without-the objects, which must be the appropriate ones of the human mind in life and after life. His earliest poetry-his last thoughtful meditations still breathe every where the same spirit-the same yearning for love-the same instinctive longing for truth-the same recognition of every thing heavenly that still lingers in a world, which was once the garden of God. We close our selections from the first volume of his Literary Remains with a few lines from his poetry, chiefly because though we knew the poems before, we first learned VOL. X. LITERE ORIENTALES. PERSIAN AND TURKISH POETRY.-FIRST ARTICLE. I. "Ce n'est pas la route ordinaire de l' esprit humain de voyager vers le nord," observed Count Segur, when Napoleon's troops caught cold and died off in Russia. Looking at the disastrous result of the Russian expedition, no intelligent person will dissent from the Count. In reality, the great art of securing a triumph in reasoning is to make your conclusions wait upon your facts. A conjuror who jumps down his own throat sets no heads shaking except the very woodenest; all the philosophers proceed immediately to prove the possibility of the Impossible. It is well to be ingenuous, but better to be ingenious. Of all begetters of theories, commend us to events a mere hypothesis wants bulk, muscle, marrow; it is an impalpability, an ens rationis, a ghost that one may evoke, and again lay in the Red or Black Sea of his inkstand at his leisure or pleasure; but a principle grounded on a fact is Pelion based upon Ossa, is a fixture in the great Warehouse of Argument, a Cheops' Pyramid stereotyped. The safest of all inferences deducible from the occurrence of a circumstance is the antecedent necessity of that occurrence. If a million Frenchmen march into Russia, conquer the country, and come home again laden with trophies and triumphs, this is natural; cold, according to Beaupré, renders men capable of extraordinary exertion. If the same million are killed by the Cossacks, this also is natural; frost destroys French enthusiasm as infallibly as Irish potatoes. To shew, when any thing is, that it should be as a consequence of course, is the business of the theorist. So in Candide, when the academician is asked why the Eldoradian sheep was red, and why it had died on leaving Eldorado, he is considered as giving a praiseworthy and prizeworthy explication in demonstrating by a+b-cz that the animal must have been of that color, and could not have lived in Europe. The Count's opinion, however, chances to be right in the abstract; and we should have said so at once. Warm and bright climes are preferable to chilly and cloudy. Poussin thought it essential to the effective development of his Arcadia to represent the sunset as illumining the looks of his shepherds. We even bury our dead with their faces towards the Orient. The Greater and Lesser Lights of Dante's Paradiso were never borrowed from Northern skies. "The savage loves his native shore ;" so at least saith the ballad; but nationality is not always rationality, and taste is confessedly questionable where its canons cannot be made answerable. Some difference may be presumed to exist between Italy and Iceland. No soil not classic is consecrated ground; we may believe the contrary when we are satisfied to refer the question to the arbitration of the Houzouana or the Troglodyte, for a tedious and excellent account of whom, consult, inquisitive reader, the pages of that respectable traveller, La Vaillant. The mind, to be sure, properly to speak, is without a home on the earth. Ancestral glories, genealogical charts, and the like imprescriptible indescriptibles are favorite subjects with the composite being Man, who also goes now and then the length of dying in idea for his fatherland-but for Mindit is restless, rebellious-a vagrant whose barren tracts are by no means confined to the space between Dan and Beersheba. It lives rather out of the world. As the stranger said at the sermon, when asked why he did not weep with the rest of the congregation, it "belongs to another parish." It is apt, when in quest of its origin, to remount quite as far as the Welshman who across the middle of his pedigree wrote, About this time the earth was created. It is a Cain that may build cities, but can abide in none of them. It repudiates every country on the map; it must do so; it should; it would not be Mind if it did otherwise. But, all this notwithstanding, matters as they regard the general truth advocated by Segur and ourself remain where they were. No private principle worth preserving is interfered with by reason of the dominance of a certain great catholic feeling in the human spirit. Abstract in its nature, such a feeling is ever compatible with the coexistence of particular and temporary preferences and prejudices. We do |