As a religious manual it
is easy to understand how this volume of Coleridge's should have
obtained many and earnest readers. What religious manual, which shows
traces of spiritual insight, or even merely of pious yearnings after
higher and holier than earthly things, has ever failed to win such
readers among the weary and heavy-laden of the world? And that
Coleridge, a writer of the most penetrating glance into divine
mysteries, and writing always from a soul all tremulous, as it were,
with religious sensibility, should have obtained such readers in
abundance is not surprising. But to a critic and literary biographer I
cannot think that his success in this respect has much to say. For my
own part, at any rate, I find considerable difficulty in tracing it to
any distinctively literary origin. There seems to me to be less charm
of thought, less beauty of style, less even of Coleridge's seldom-
failing force of effective statement, in the _Aids to Reflection_
than in almost any of his writings. Even the volume of some dozen short
chapters on the Constitution of the Church and State, published in
1830, as an "aid towards a right judgment in the late Catholic Kelief
Bill," appears to me to yield a more characteristic flavour of the
author's style, and to exhibit far more of his distinction of literary
workmanship than the earlier and more celebrated work.
Pages:
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246