It is worth far more as an
earnest of future achievement than the very unequal _Monody on the
Death of Chatterton_ (for which indeed we ought to make special
allowance, as having been commenced in the author's eighteenth year),
and certainly than anything which could be quoted from the
_Effusions_, as Coleridge, unwilling to challenge comparison with
the divine Bowles, had chosen to describe his sonnets. It must be
honestly said indeed that these are, a very few excepted, among the
least satisfactory productions of any period of his poetic career. The
Coleridgian sonnet is not only imperfect in form and in marked contrast
in the frequent bathos of its close to the steady swell and climax of
Wordsworth, but, in by far the majority of instances in this volume, it
is wanting in internal weight. The "single pebble" of thought which a
sonnet should enclose is not only not neatly wrapped up in its envelope
of words, but it is very often not heavy enough to carry itself and its
covering to the mark. When it is so, its weight, as in the sonnet to
Pitt, is too frequently only another word for an ephemeral violence of
political feeling which, whether displayed on one side or the other,
cannot be expected to reproduce its effect in the minds of
comparatively passionless posterity.
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