Select poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Author:Samuel Taylor Coleridge Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: appreeiations " Nothing can surpass the melodious richness of words which he heaps around his images, — images not glaring in themselves, but which are always... more » affecting to the very verge of tears, because they have all been formed and nourished m the recesses of one of the most deeply musing spirits that ever breathed forth its inspirations in the majestic language of England." Prof. John Wilson. " Endowed with so glorious a gift of song, and only not fully master of his poetic means, because of the very versatility of his artistic power and the very variety and catholicity of his youthful sympathies, it is unhappily but too certain that the world has lost much by that perversity of conspiring accidents which so unhappily silenced Coleridge's muse. And the loss is the more trying to posterity because he seems, to a not, I think, too curiously considering criticism, to have once actually struck that very chord which would have sounded most movingly beneath his touch." H. D. Traill. " Coleridge's poetical performance is like some exotic plant, just managing to blossom a little m the somewhat un-English air of his southwestern birthplace, but never quite well there. What shapes itself for criticism as the main phenomenon of Coleridge's poetic life is not, as with most true poets, the gradual development of a poetic gift, determined, enriched, retarded, by the actual circumstances of the poet's life, but the sudden blossoming, through one short season, of such a gift already perfect in its kind, which thereafter deteriorates as suddenly, with something like premature old age." Walter Pater. " One is a little apt to forget that Coleridge's metaphysical bent was no less innate than his poetical; even at Christ's Hospital his spiritual potation was a half-and-half, i...« less