By serious students,
however, the real worth of Coleridge will be differently estimated. For
them his peculiar value to English literature is not only undiminished
by the incompleteness of his work; it has been, in a certain sense,
enhanced thereby. Or, perhaps, it would be more strictly accurate to
say that the value could not have existed without the incompleteness. A
Coleridge with the faculty of concentration, and the habit of method
superadded--a Coleridge capable of becoming possessed by any one form
of intellectual energy to the exclusion of all others--might, indeed,
have left behind him a more enduring reputation as a philosopher, and
possibly (although this, for reasons already stated, is, in my own
opinion, extremely doubtful) bequeathed to his countrymen more poetry
destined to live; but, unquestionably, he would never have been able to
render that precise service to modern thought and literature which, in
fact, they owe to him. To have exercised his vivifying and fertilising
influence over the minds of others his intellect was bound to be of the
dispersive order; it was essential that he should "take all knowledge
to be his province," and that that eager, subtle, and penetrative mind
should range as freely as it did over subject after subject of human
interest;--illuminating each of them in turn with those rays of true
critical insight which, amid many bewildering cross-lights and some few
downright _ignes fatui,_ flash forth upon us from all Coleridge's
work.
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