" But what
Wordsworth grants only to the reader who wanders with him in
imagination by lake and mountain, the Muse of Coleridge, had she lived,
would have bestowed upon the man who has entered into his inner chamber
and shut to the door. This, it seems to me, is the work for which
genius, temperament, and intellectual habit would alike have fitted
him. For while his feeling for internal nature was undoubtedly less
profound, less mystically penetrating than Wordsworth's, his
sensibilities in general were incomparably quicker and more subtle than
those of the friend in whom he so generously recognised a master; and
the reach of his sympathies extends to forms of human emotion, to
subjects of human interest which lay altogether outside the somewhat
narrow range of Wordsworth's.
And, with so magnificent a furniture of those mental and moral
qualities which should belong to "a singer of man to men," it must not
be forgotten that his technical equipment for the work was of the most
splendidly effective kind. If a critic like Mr. Swinburne seems to
speak in exaggerated praise of Coleridge's lyrics, we can well
understand their enchantment for a master of music like himself.
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