 Section 38, Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Volume 9. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Rita Boutros. Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Volume 9, Section 38. Samuel Taylor Colleridge, 1772 to 1834 by George E. Woodbury. Samuel Taylor Colleridge, the English poet and philosopher, was born at Ottery St. Mary in Devonshire, October 21, 1772. He was the ninth and youngest son of the Vicar of the Parish, a man characterized by learning and also by some of its foibles. Under whose care he passed his childhood, but on the death of his father he was sent up to London to be educated at Christ's hospital, and there spent, in companionship with Lamb, his school days from 1782 to 1791. He went in the latter year to Jesus College, Cambridge. His career as an undergraduate was marked by an escapade, his enlistment in the King's Regiment of Light Dragoons in the winter of 1793 to 94, from which he was released by the influence of his relatives, and in more important ways by his friendship with Southie, whom he found on a visit to Oxford, and his engagement to Sarah Fricker in the summer of 1794. He had already been attached to another young lady, Mary Evans, with whose family he had been intimate. In December 1794 he left Cambridge without taking a degree, and on October 21, 1795 he was married. His biography from this point is one of confused and intricate detail, which only a long story could set forth plainly and exactly. Its leading external events were a residence in Germany in 1798 to 99, and a voyage to Malta with travel in Sicily and Italy in 1804 to 6. In its inward development, the turning points of his life were his first intimacy with the Wordsworths in 1797, during which his best poems were composed, his subjection to the opium habit with increasing domestic unhappiness in 1801 to 2, and his retreat under medical control to Highgate in 1816. He was practically separated from his family from the time of his voyage to Malta. Troubles of many kinds filled all these years, but he had always a power to attract friends who were deeply interested in his welfare, and he was never without admirers and helpers. Before he withdrew to Highgate, he had resided first at Stowe in the neighborhood of Tompool, and later at Greta Hall near the Wordsworths. But he was often away from home, and after he ceased to be an inmate there, from 1806 to 1816 he led a wandering life, either in lodgings frequently changed or in visits to his friends. His resources were always small, and from the start his friends were his patrons making up subscriptions, loans, and gifts for him. In 1798 the Wedgewoods gave him a pension of £150 for life, which was soon secured for the support of his family, and in 1812 one half of this was withdrawn. In 1825 he was granted a royal pension of £100, and when this lapsed in 1830 Frère made it up to him. De Quincey had distinguished himself by an act of singular and impulsive generosity to him upon first acquaintance. He was always cared for, though his indulgence in opium made it difficult for those who knew the fact to assist him directly in a wise way. His pecuniary embarrassment, however, was constant and trying during a great part of his life. His own wretchedness of spirit under the painful conditions of his bodily state and his moral as well as material position was very great. But through all these sufferings and trials he maintained sufficient energy to leave behind him a considerable body of literary work. He died July 25, 1834. The poetic genius of Colleridge, the highest of his many gifts, found brilliant and fascinating expression. His poems, those in which his fame lives, are as unique as they are memorable, and though their small number, their confined range, and the brief period during which his faculty was exercised with full freedom and power, seem to indicate a narrow vein. Yet the remainder of his work in prose and verse leaves an impression of extraordinary and abundant intellectual force. In proportion, as his imaginative creations stand apart, the spirit out of which they came must have possessed some singularity. And if the reader is not content with simple aesthetic appreciation of what the gods provide, but has some touch of curiosity leading him to look into the source of such remarkable achievement and its human history, he is at once interested in the personality of the subtle sold psychologist as Shelley with his accurate critical insight first named him. In experiencing the fascination of the poetry, one remembers the charm which Colleridge had in life, that quality which arrested attention in all companies and drew men's minds and hearts with a sense of something marvelous in him. The most wonderful man said Wordsworth that I ever met. The mind and heart of Colleridge, his whole life, have been laid open by himself and his friends and acquaintances without reserve in many volumes of letters and memoirs. It is easy to figure him as he lived and to recover his moods and aspect, but in order to conceive his nature and define its traits, it is necessary to take account especially of his incomplete and less perfect work of his miscellaneous interests and those activities which filled and confused his life without having any important share in establishing his fame. The intellectual precocity which is the leading trait of Colleridge's boyhood in the familiar portrait of the inspired charity boy drawn by Lamb from schoolboy memories is not unusual in a youth of genius, but the omnivorousness of knowledge which he then displayed continued into his manhood. He consumed vast quantities of book learning. It is a more remarkable characteristic that from the earliest period in which he comes into clear view, he was accustomed to give out his ideas with freedom in an inexhaustible stream of talk. The activity of his mind was as phenomenal as its receptivity. In his college days too, he was fanatical in all his energies. The remark of Southie after Shelley's visit to him that here was a young man who was just what he himself had been in his college days is illustrative. For if Southie was then inflamed with radicalism, Colleridge was yet more deeply infected and mastered by that wild fever of the revolutionary dawn. The tumult of Colleridge's mind, its incessant action, the lack of discipline in his thought, of restraint in his expression, of judgment in his affairs are all important elements in his character at a time which in most men would be called the formative period of manhood, but which in him seems to have been intensely chaotic. What is most notable, however, is the volume of his mental energy. He expressed himself too in ways natural to such self-abundance. It was always a discursor if the name may be used from the London days at the salutation and the cat of which Lamb tells, saying that the landlord was ready to retain him because of the attraction of his conversation for customers. And as he went on to the more set forms of such monologue, he became a preacher without pay in Unitarian chapels, a journalist with unusual capacity for ready and sonorous writing in the press, a composer of whole periodicals such as his ventures The Watchman and The Friend, and a lecturer using only slight notes as the material of his remarks upon literature, education, philosophy, theology, or whatever the subject might be. In all these methods of expression which he took up one after the other, he merely talked in an ample way upon multifarious topics. In the conversation, sermon, leading article, written discourse, or flowing address, he was master of a swelling and often brilliant volubility. But he had neither the certainty of the orator nor the unfailing distinction of the author. There was an occasional and impromptu quality, a colloquial and episodical manner, the style of the irresponsible speaker. In his earlier days especially, the dominant note in Colleridge's whole nature was excitement. He was always animated, he was often violent, he was always without the principle of control. Indeed, a weakness of moral power seems to have been congenital, in the sense that he was not permanently bound by a practical sense of duty, nor apparently observant of what place duty has in real life. There was misdirection of his affairs from the time when they came into his own hands. There was impulsiveness, thoughtlessness, a lack of judgment which augured ill for him. And in its total effect, this amounted to folly. His intoxication with the scheme known as Pantysocracy, by which he with Southie and a few like-minded projectors were to found a socialistic community on the banks of the Susquehanna, is the most obvious comment on his practical sense. But his marriage with the anecdotes of its preliminaries, one of which was that in those colloquies with Lamb at the London Tavern, so charmingly described by his boon companion, he had forgotten his engagement or was indifferent to it. More strikingly exemplifies the irresponsible course of his life, more particularly as it proved to be ill-sorted, full of petty difficulties and makeshift expedience, and in the end a disastrous failure. A radical social scheme and an imprudent marriage might have fallen to his share of human folly, however, without exciting remark if in other ways or at a later time he had exhibited the qualities which would allow one to dismiss these matters as mere instances of immaturity. But wherever Coleridge's reasonable control over himself or his affairs is looked to, it appears to have been feeble. On the other hand the constancy of his excitement is plain. It was not only mental but physical. He was, as a young man, full of energy and capable of a good deal of hard exercise. He had animal spirits and Wordsworth describes him as noisy and gamesome as one who his limbs would toss about him with delight, like branches when strong winds the trees annoy. And from several passages of his own writing which are usually disregarded, the evidence of a spirit of rough humor and fun is easily obtained. The truth is that Coleridge changed a great deal in his life. He felt himself to be very different in later years from what he was in the time when, to his memory, even he was a sort of glorified spirit. And this earlier Coleridge had many traits which are ignored sometimes as Carlisle ignored them and are sometimes remembered rather as idealizations of his friends in their affectionate thoughts of him, but in any event are irreconcilable with the figure of the last period of his life. It has been suggested that there was something of disease or at least of ill health in Coleridge always and that it should be regarded as influencing his temperament. Whether it were so or not, the plea itself shows the fact. If excitement was the dominant note, as has been said in his whole nature, it could not exist without a physical basis and accompaniment. And his bodily state appears to have been often less one of animation than of agitation and his correspondence frequently discloses moods that seem almost frantic. In the issue, under stress of pain and trouble, he became an opium eater, but his physical nature may fairly be described as predisposed to such states as lead to the use of opium and also result from its use with the attendant mental moods. His susceptibility to sensuous impressions to a voluptuousness of the entire being together with a certain lassitude and languor lead to the same conclusion, which thus seems to be supported on all sides, that Coleridge was, in his youth and early manhood, fevered through all his intellectual and sensuous nature and deficient on the moral and practical sides in those matters that related to his personal affairs. It is desirable to bring this out in plain terms, because in Coleridge it is best to acknowledge at once that his character was, so far as our part, in the world's part, in him is concerned of less consequence than his temperament, a subtler and more profound thing than character, though without moral meaning. It is not unfair to say, since literature is to be regarded most profitably as the expression of human personality, that with Coleridge the modern literature of temperament, as it has been lately recognized in extreme phases, begins. Not that temperament is a new thing in the century now closing, nor that it has been without influence hitherto, but that now it is more often considered and has in fact more often been an exclusive ground of artistic expression. The temperament of Coleridge was one of the most confused sensuousness physically and of abnormal mental moods. Moods of weakness, langer, collapse of visionary imaginative life with a night atmosphere of the spectral, moonlit, swimming, scarcely substantial world and the poems he wrote, which are the contributions he made to the world's literature, are based on this temperament, from Fatta Morgana upon the sea. The apparent exclusion of reality from the poems in which his genius was most manifest finds its analog in the detachment of his own mind from the moral, the practical, the usual in life as he led it in his spirit and his work of the highest creative sort, which is all there is to his enduring fame, stands amid his prose and verse composition of a lower sort like an island in the waste of waters. This may be best shown perhaps by a gradual approach through his cruder to his more perfect compositions. The cardinal fact in Coleridge's genius is that notwithstanding his immense sensuous susceptibilities and mental receptivity and the continual excitement of his spirit, he never rose into the highest sphere of creative activity except for the brief period called his Anus Mirabilis when his great poems were written. And with this is the further related fact that in him we witness the spectacle of the imaginative instinct overborn and supplanted by the intellectual faculty exercising its speculative and critical functions. And in addition one observes in his entire work an extraordinary inequality, not only of treatment but also of subject matter. In general he was an egoistic writer. His sensitiveness to nature was twofold. In the first place he noticed in the objects and movements of nature evanescent and minute details. And as his sense of beauty was keen he saw and recorded truly the less obvious and less common loveliness in the phenomena of the elements and the seasons. And this gave distinction to his mere description and record of fact. In the second place he often felt in himself moods induced by nature but yet subjective. States of his own spirit which sometimes deepened the charm of night for example by his enjoyment of its placid aspects and sometimes imparted to the external world a despair reflected from his personal melancholy. In his direct treatment of nature however as Mr. Stopford Brook points out he seldom achieves more than a catalog of his sensations which though touched with imaginative detail are never lifted and harmonized into lyrical unity. Though he can moralize nature in Wordsworth's fashion when he does so the result remains Wordsworth's and is stamped with that poet's originality and in his own original work Colleridge never equaled either the genius of Shelley who can identify nature with himself or the charm of Tennyson who can at least parallel nature's phenomena with his own human moods. Colleridge would not be thought of as a poet of nature except in so far as he describes what he observes in the way of record or gives a metaphysical interpretation to phenomena. This is the more remarkable because he had to an eminent degree that intellectual power that overmastering desire of the mind to rationalize the facts of life. It was this quality that made him a philosopher an analyst, a critic on the great lines of Aristotle seeking to impose an order of ethics and metaphysics on all artistic productions but in those poems in which he describes nature directly and without metaphysical thought there is no trace of anything more than a sensuous order of his own perceptions. Beautiful and often unique as his nature poems are they are not creative. They are rather in the main autobiographic and it is surprising to notice how large a proportion of his verse is thus autobiographic not in those phases of his own life which may be or at least are thought of as representative of human life in the mass but which are personal such as the lines written after hearing Wordsworth read The Prelude or those entitled Dejection When his verse is not confined to autobiographic expression it is often a product of his interest in his friends or in his family. What is not personal in it of this sort is apt to be domestic or social. If we turn from the poems of nature to those concerned with man a similar shallowness either of interest or of power appears as in early years a radical he was stirred by the revolution in France and he was emotionally charged with the ideas of the time ideas of equality, fraternity and liberty but this interest died out as is shown by his political verse he had none but a social and a philosophical interest in any case then the individual did not at any time attract him there was nothing dramatic in his genius in the narrow and exact sense he did not engage his curiosity or his philosophy in individual fortunes it results from this limitation that his verse lacks a human interest of the dramatic kind the truth was that he was interested in thought rather than in deeds in human nature rather than in its concrete pity and terror thus he did not seize on life itself as the material of his imagination and reflection in the case of man as in the case of nature he gives us only an egoistic account telling us of his own private fortune his fears, pains and despairs but only as a diary gives them as he did not transfer his nature impressions into the world of creative art so he did not transfer his personal experiences into that world what has been said would perhaps be accepted were it not for the existence of those poems the ancient mariner Christabel Kubla Khan which are the marvelous creations of his genius in these it will be said there is both a world of nature new created and a dramatic method and interest it is enough for the purpose of the analysis if it be granted that nowhere else in Colleridge's work except in these and less noticeably in a few other instances do these high characteristics occur the very point which is here to be brought out is that Colleridge applied that intellectual power that over mastering desire of the mind to rationalize the phenomena of life which has been mentioned as his great mental trait that he applied this faculty with different degrees of power at different times so that his poetry falls naturally into higher and inferior categories in the autobiographic verse in the political and dramatic verse which forms so large a part of his work it appears that he did not have sufficient feeling or exercised sufficient power to raise it out of the lower levels of composition in his great works of constructive and impersonal art of moral intensity or romantic beauty and fascination he did so exercise the creative imagination as to make these of the highest rank or at least one of them the ancient mariner apart from its many minor merits has this distinction in Colleridge's work it is a poem of perfect unity Christabel is a fragment Kubla Khan is a glimpse and though the ode to France love, youth and age and possibly a few other short pieces have this highest artistic virtue of unity yet in them it is of a simpler kind the ancient mariner on the other hand is a marvel of construction in that its unity is less complex than manifold it exists however the form be examined in the merely external sense the telling of the tale to the wedding guest with the fact that the wedding is going on gives it unity in the merely internal sense the moral lesson of the salvation of the slayer of the albatross by the medium of love felt toward living things subtly yet lucidly worked out as the notion is gives it unity but in still other ways as a story of connected and consequential incidents with a plot a change of fortune a climax and the other essentials of this species of tale telling it has unity and if its conception either of the physical or the ethical world be analyzed these two and these are the fundamental things are found consistent holes it nevertheless remains true that this system of nature as a vitalized but not humanized mode of life with its bird its spirit its magical powers is not the nature that we know or believe to be it is a modern presentation of an essentially primitive and animistic belief and similarly this system of human life if the word human can be applied to it with its dead men its skeleton ship its spirit sailors its whole miracle of spectral being is not the life we know or believe to be it is an incantation a simulacrum it may still be true therefore that the imaginative faculty of colleridge was not applied either to nature or human life in the ordinary sense and this it is that constitutes the uniqueness of the poem and its wonderful fascination colleridge fell air by the accidents of time and the revolutions of taste to the ballad style its simplicity, directness and narrative power he also was most attracted to the machinery of the supernatural the weird, the terrible almost to the grotesque and horrid as these literary motives came into fashion in the crude beginnings of romanticism in our time his subtle mind his fine senses his peculiar susceptibility to the mystic and shadowy in nature as shown by his preference of the moonlight dreamy or night aspects of real nature to its brilliant beauties in the waking world gave him ease and finesse in the handling of such subject matter and he lived late enough to know that all this eerie side of human experience and imaginative capacity inherited from primeval ages but by no means yet deprived of plausibility could be effectively used not only as an allegoric or scenic setting of what should be truth to the ethical sense he combined one of the highest lessons of advanced civilization one of the last results of spiritual perception the idea of love toward life in any form with the animistic beliefs and supernatural fancies of the crude ages of the senses this seems to be the substantial matter and in this he was to repeat Shelley's phrase the subtle sold psychologist the material of his imagination on the sensuous side was of the slightest it was the supernaturalism of the romantic movement somewhat modified by being placed in connection with the animal world and he put this to use the means of illustrating spiritual truth he thus became the first of those who have employed the supernatural in our recent literature without losing credence for it as an allegory of psychological states moral facts or illusions real to the eye that sees them and having some logical relation to the past of the individual of such writers Hawthorne and Poe are eminent examples and both of them it may be remarked are writers in whom temperament rather than character is the ground of their creative work the intimate kinship between imagination so directed and the speculative philosophical temper is plain to see in Christabel on the other hand the moral substance is not apparent the place filled by the moral ideas which are the centers of the narrative in the ancient mariner is taken here by emotional situations but the supernaturalism is practically the same in both poems and in both is associated with that mystery of the animal world to men most concentrated and vivid in the fascination as scribed traditionally to the snake which is the animal motive in Christabel as the goodness of the albatross in the ancient mariner in these poems the good and the bad omens that ancient augurs minded are made again dominant over men's imagination such are the signal and unique elements in these poems which have besides that wealth of beauty in detail of fine diction of liquid melody of sentiment, thought and image which belong only to poetry of the highest order and which are too obvious to require any comment Kubla Khan is a poem of the same kind in which the mystical effect is given almost wholly by landscape it is to the ancient mariner and Christabel is to highly organized cells if it be recognized then that the imagery of collage in the characteristic parts of these cardinal poems is as pure allegory is as remote from nature or man as is the machinery of fairyland and chivalry in Spencer for example and he obtains credibility by the psychological and ethical truth of this imagery it is not surprising that his work is small in amount for the method is not only a difficult one but the poetic machinery itself is limited and meager the poverty of the subject matter is manifest and the restrictions to its successful use are soon felt it may well be doubted whether Christabel would have gained in the ancient mariner the isolation of the man is a great advantage if there had been any companion for him the illusion could not have been entire as it is what he experiences has the wholeness and truth within itself of a dream or of a madman's world where there is no standard of appeal outside of his own senses and mind but in Christabel the serpentine fable goes on in a world of fact and action and as soon as the course of the story involved this fable in the probabilities and actual occurrences of life it might well be that the tale would have turned into one of simple enchantment and magic as seems likely from what has been told of its continuation certainly it could not have equalled the earlier poem or have been in the same kind with it unless the unearthly magic the spell were finally completely dissolved into the world of moral truth as is the case with the ancient mariner choleridge found it still more impossible to continue Kubla Khan it seems a fair inference to conclude that choleridge's genius however it suffered from the misfortunes and ills of his life was in these works involved in a field however congenial yet of narrow range and infertile in itself in poetic style it is to be observed that he kept what he had gained the turbid diction of the earlier period to trouble him and the cadences he had formed still gave their music to his verse the change, the decline was not in his power of style it was in his power of imagination if at all but the fault may have laid in the capacities of the subject matter a similar thing certainly happened in his briefer ballad poetry in that of which love, the three graces Alice du Clos and the dark lady are examples the matter there the machinery of the romantic ballad was no longer capable of use that sort of literature was dead from the exhaustion of its motives the great ode to France in which he reached his highest point of eloquent and passionate expression seems to mark the extinction in himself of the revolutionary impulse on the whole while the excellence of much of the remainder of his verse even in later years is acknowledged and its originality in several instances may it not be that in his greatest work choleridge came to an end because of an impossibility in the kind itself the supernatural would be necessary rather than a main element in the interpretation of life which literary genius undertakes choleridge so subordinates it here by making it contributory to a moral truth but such a practice would seem to be necessarily incidental to a poet who was also so intellectual as choleridge and not to be adopted as a permanent method of expression from whatever cause the fact was that choleridge ceased to create in poetry and fell back on that fluent manifold, voluminous faculty he possessed of absorbing and giving out ideas in vast quantities as it were by bulk he attended especially to the theory of art as he found it illustrated and he popularized among literary men a certain body of doctrine regarding criticism its growth and methods and in later years he worked out metaphysical theological views which he inculcated in ways which one for him recognition as a practical influence in contemporary church opinion in these last years of his lecturing and discoursing in private the figure he makes is pathetic though Carlisle describes it with a grim humor as anyone may read in the life of Sterling over against that figure should be set the descriptions of the young choleridge by Dorothy Wordsworth and Lamb and after these perhaps the contrast which choleridge the spirit and his body may enable a reader to fuse the two youth and age into one whatever were the weaknesses of his nature and the trials of his life of which one keeps silent he was deeply loved by friends of many different minds who if they grew cold had paid at least once this tribute to the charm, the gentleness and the delight of his human companionship end of section 38 section 39 of library of the world's best literature ancient and modern volume 9 this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by Larry Wilson library of the world's best literature ancient and modern volume 9 section 39 selected poems by Samuel Taylor choleridge Kubla Khan in Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree where alf the sacred river ran through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea so twice five miles of fertile ground with wall and towers were girdled round and there were gardens bright with sinuous rills where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree and here were forests ancient as the hills and folding sunny spots of greenery but oh that deep romantic chasm which slanted down the green hill a thwart a seed-armed cover a savage place as holy and enchanted as air beneath the waning moon was haunted by woman wailing for her demon lover and from this chasm with ceaseless turmoil seething as if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing a mighty fountain momentaly was forced amid who swift half-intermitted burst huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail or chaffy grain beneath the threshers flail amid these dancing rocks once and ever it flung up momentaly the sacred river five miles meandering with a mazy motion through wood and dale the sacred river ran then reached the caverns majorless to man and sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean amid this tumult Kubla heard from far ancestral voices prophesying war the shadow of the dome of pleasure floated midway on the waves where was heard the mingled major from the fountain and the caves it was a miracle of rare device a sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice a damsel with a dulcimer in a vision once I saw it was an Abyssinian maid and on her dulcimer she played singing of Mount Abora could I revive within me her symphony and song to such a deep delight that with music loud and long I would build that dome in air that sunny dome those caves of ice and all who heard should see them there and all should cry beware beware his flashing eyes his floating hair weave a circle round him thrice and close your eyes with holy dread for he on honeydew hath fed and drunk the milk of paradise the albatross from the rhyme of the ancient mariner with sloping masts and dripping pro as who pursued with yell and blow still treads the shadow of his foe and forward bends his head the ship drove fast loud roared the blast and southward I we fled and now there came both mist and snow and it grew wondrous cold and ice massed high came floating by as green as emerald and through the drifts the snowy cliffs did send a dismal sheen door shapes of men or beast we keen the ice was all between the ice was here the ice was there the ice was all around it cracked and growled and roared and howled like noises in a swound at length did cross an albatross through the fog it came as if it had been a Christian soul we held it in God's name it ate the food it near had the feet and round and round it flew the ice did split with the thunder feet the hellsmen steered us through and a good south wind sprung up behind the albatross did follow and every day for food or play came the mariner's hello in mister cloud on master shroud it perched for vespers nine whilst all the night through fog smoke white glimmered the white moonshine saved the ancient mariner from the fields that plagued the thus why looks thou so with my crossbow I shot the albatross the sun now rose upon the right out of the sea came he still hidden mist and on left went down into the sea and the good south wind still blew behind but no sweet bird did follow nor any day for food or play came the mariner's hello and I had done a hellish thing and it would work and woe for all a bird I had killed the bird that made the breeze to blow ah wretch they said the bird to slay that made the breeze to blow nor dim nor red like God's own head the glorious sun uprised then all a bird I had killed the bird that brought the fog and mist to as right said they such birds to slay that bring the fog and mist the fair breeze blew the white foam flew the furrows followed free we were the first that ever burst into that silent sea down dropped the breeze the sails dropped down to as sad as sad could be and we did speak only to break the silence of the sea all in a hot and copper sky the bloody sun at noon right up above the mast did stand the moon day after day we stuck nor breath nor motion as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean water water everywhere and all the boards did shrink water water everywhere nor any drop to drink the very deep did rot oh Christ that ever this should be yay slimy things did crawl with legs upon the slimy sea about about in real and route the deathfires danced at night the water like a witch's oils burnt green and blue and white and some in dreams assured were of the spirit that plagued his soul nine fathoms deep he had followed us from the land of mist and snow and every tongue through utter drought was withered at the root we could not speak no more we choked with soot ah well a day what evil looks had I from old and young instead of the cross the albatross about my neck was hung time real and imaginary on the wide level of a mountain's head I knew not where but was some fairy place their pinions ostrich-like for sails outspread two lovely children run an endless race a sister and a brother this far outstripped the other yet ever run she with reverted face and looks and listens for the boy behind for he alas is blind or rough and smooth with even step he passed and knows not whether he be first or last dejection and owed late late yes dream I saw the new moon with the old moon in her arms and I fear I fear my master dear we shall have a deadly storm ballad of Sir Patrick Spence well if the bard was weather wise who made the grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spence this night so tranquil now will not go hence unroused by winds that ply a busier trade than those which mold young cloud in lazy flakes or the dull sobbing draft that moans and rakes upon the strings of this Aeolian loot which better far were mute for low the new moon winter bright and over spread with phantom light with swimming phantom light or spread but rimmed and circled by a silver thread I see the old moon in her lap for telling that coming on of rain and squally blast and oh that even now the gust were swelling and the slant night-shower driving hard and fast those sounds which oft have raised me whilst they awed and sent my soul abroad might now perhaps their wanted impulse give might startle this dull pain and make it move and live a grief without a pang void dark and drear a stifled drowsy unimpassioned grief which finds no natural outlet no relief in word or sigh or tear oh lady in this wan and heartless mood to other thoughts by yonder throttle wound all this long eve so balmy and serene have I been gazing on the western sky and his peculiar tint of yellow green and still I gaze and with how blank an eye and those thin clouds above in flakes and bars that give away their motion to the stars those stars that glide behind them are between now sparkling now bedimmed but always seen young crescent moon as fixed as if it grew in its own cloudless starless lake of blue I see them all so excellently fair I see nor feel how beautiful they are my genial spirits fail and what can these avail to lift the smothering weight from off my breast it were a vain endeavor though I should gaze forever on that green light that lingers in the west I may not hope from outward forms to win the passion and the life whose fountains are within oh lady we receive but what we give and in our life alone does nature live ours is her wedding garment ours her shroud and would we ought behold of higher worth than that inanimate cold world allowed to the poor loveless ever anxious crowd ah from the soul at south must issue forth a light a glory a fair luminous cloud enveloping the earth and from the soul at south must there be sent a sweet and potent voice of its own birth of all sweet sounds the life and element oh pure of heart thou needs not ask of me what this strong music in the soul may be and where in it does exist this light this glory this fair luminous mist this beautiful and beauty making power joy virtuous lady joy that near was given saved to the pure and in their purest hour life and life's influence clouded once in shower joy lady is the spirit in the power which wedding nature to us gives in our a new earth in heaven dreamt of by the sensual and the proud joy is the sweet voice joy the luminous cloud we in ourselves rejoice and this flows all that charms our ear our sight all melodies the echoes of that voice all colors of suffusion from that light there was a time when though my path was rough this joy within me dallyed with distress and all misfortunes were but as the stuff whence he made me dreams of happiness for hope grew round me like the twining vine and fruits and foliage not my own seemed mine but now afflictions bound me down to earth nor care I that they robbed me of my mirth but oh each visitation suspends what nature gave me at my birth my shaping spirit of imagination for not to think of what I needs must feel but to be still and patient all I can and happily by obstruce research to steal from my own nature all the natural man this was my soul resource by only plan till that which suits apart infects the whole and now is almost grown the habit of my soul hence viper thoughts that coil round my mind realities dark dream I turn from you and listen to the wind has raved unnoticed what a scream of agony by torture lengthened out that loot sent forth thou wind that ravest without bear craig or mountain tern or blasted tree a pine grove wither woodman never cloned or lonely house long held the witches home we think were fitter instruments for thee mad lutinist who in this month of showers of dark brown gardens and peeping flowers makest devil's yule with worse than wintry song the blossoms, buds and timorous leaves among thou actor perfect in all tragic sounds, thou mighty poet in to frenzy bold what tells thou now about tis of the rushing of a host en route with groans of trampled men with smarting wounds at once they groan with pain and shudder with the cold but hush the pause of deepest silence and all that noise as of a rushing crowd with groans and tremulous shatterings all is over it tells another tale with sounds less deep and loud a tale of less affright and tempered with delight as outweigh south had framed the tender lay tis of a little child upon a lonesome wild not far from home but she hath lost her way and now moans low and bitter grief and fear and now screams loud and hopes to make her mother hear tis midnight but small thoughts have eye of sleep full seldom may my friend such vigils keep visit her gentle sleep with wings of healing and may this dorm be but a mountain birth may all the stars hang bright above her dwelling silent as though they watch the sleeping earth with light heart may she rise gay fancy cheerful eyes joy lift her spirit joy attune her voice to her may all things live from pole to pole their life the eddy enough her living soul oh simple spirit guided from above dear lady friend devoutest of my choice thus mayest thou ever ever more rejoice the three treasures complained how seldom friend a good great man inherits honor or wealth with all his worth and pains it sounds like stories from the land of spirits if any man obtain that which he merits or any merit that which he obtains reproof for shame dear friend renounce this canting strain what wouldst thou have a good great man obtain place titles, salary a gilded chain or thrones of courses which his sword has slain greatness and goodness are not means but ends heth he not always treasures always friends the good great man three treasures love and light and calm thoughts regular as infant's breath and three firm friends more sure than day and night his maker and the angel death to a gentleman composed on the night after his recitation of a poem on the growth of an individual mind friend of the wise the teacher of the good into my heart have I received that lay more than historic that prophetic lay wherein high theme by thee first sung a rite of the foundations and the building up of a human spirit thou hast dared to tell what may be told to the understanding mind revealable and what within the mind by vital breathing secret as the soul of vernal growth oft quickens in the heart thoughts all too deep for words theme hard as high of smiles spontaneous and mysterious fears the first born day of reason and twin birth of tides obedient to external force and currents self determined theme or by some inner power of moments awful now in thy inner life and now abroad when power streamed from thee and thy soul received the light reflected as a light bestowed of fancy's fairer and milder hours of youth hybalean murmurs of poetic thought industrious in its joy in veils and glens native or outland lakes and famous hills or on the lonely high road when the stars rising or by secret mountain streams the guides and the companions of thy way of more than fancy of the social sense distending wide the man beloved as man where France and all her town lay vibrating like some be calm bark beneath the burst of heaven's immediate thunder when no cloud is visible or shadow on the main for thou wert there thine own brows garlanded amid the trimmer of a realm aglow amid a mighty nation jubilant when from the general heart of humankind hope sprang forth like a full born deity of that dear hope afflicted and struck down so summoned homeward thenceforth calm and sure from the dread watchtower of man's absolute south with light unwinding on her eyes to look far on herself a glory to behold the angel of the vision then last drain of duty chosen laws controlling choice action and joy an orphic song indeed a song divine of high and passionate thoughts to their own music chanted oh great to bard ere yet that last drain dying of the air with steadfast eye I viewed thee in the choir of ever enduring men the truly great have all one age and from one visible space shed influence they both in power and act are permanent and time is not with them save as it worketh for them they in it nor less a sacred role than those of old and to be placed as they with gradual fame among the archives of mankind thy work makes audible a linked lay of truth of truth profound a sweet continuous lay not learnt but native own natural notes ah as I listened with a heart forlorn the pulses of my being beat anew and even as life returns upon the drowned life's joy rekindling roused a throng of pains keen pangs of love awakening as a babe turbulent with an outcry in the heart and fear self-will that shun the eye of hope and hope that scarce would know itself from fear sense of past and manhood come in vain and all which I had cold and woodwalks wild and all which patient toil had reared and all commune with thee had opened out but flowers strewed on my course and borne upon my beard in the same coffin for the south same grave that way no more and ill besiems at me who came a welcomeer in herald skies singing of glory and futurity to wander back on such unhelpful road fucking the poisons of south harm and ill such intertwined besiems triumphal wreaths strewed before thy advancing nor do thou sage bard impair the memory of that hour of my communion with thy nobler mind pity or grief already felt too long nor let my words import more blame than needs the tumble rose and ceased for peace is nigh where wisdom's voice has found a listening heart amid the howl of more than wintry storms the Halcyon hears the voice of vernal hours already on the wing Eve following Eve, dear tranquil time when the sweet sense of home is sweetest moments for their own sake hailed and more desired, more precious for thy song in silence listening like a devout child my soul lay passive by the various strain driven as insurgis now beneath the stars with momentary stars of my own birth fair constellated foam still darting off into the darkness now a tranquil sea outspread and bright yet swelling to the moon and when, o friend my comforter and guide strong in thy self and powerful to give strength thy long sustain song finally closed and thy deep voice had ceased yet thou thyself were still before my eyes and roundest both that happy vision of beloved faces scarce conscious and yet conscious of its close I sate my being blended in one thought thought was it or aspiration or resolve absorbed yet hanging still upon the sound and when I rose I found myself in prayer O did Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire on the 24th stanza in her passage over Mount Gothard all held the chapel held the platform wild where Tell directed the avenging dart with well strung arm that first preserved his child then aimed the arrow at the tyrant's heart Splinter's fondly fostered child and did you held the platform wild where once the Austrian fell beneath the shaft of Tell O Lady nursed in pomp and pleasure whence learnt you that heroic measure Light as a dream your days their circlates ran from all that teaches brotherhood to man far far removed from want, from hope, from fear enchanting music lulled your infant ear Obescience praises soothed your infant heart emblazingments and old ancestral crests with many a bright approving form of art detains your eye from nature's stately vests that veiling strove to deck your charms divine rich vions and the pleasurable wine were yours unearned by toil nor could you see the unenjoying toiler's misery and yet free nature's uncorrupted child you held the chapel in the platform wild where once the Austrian fell beneath the shaft of Tell O Lady nursed in pomp and pleasure where learnt you that heroic measure there crowd your finely fibred frame all living faculties of bliss and genius to your cradle came his forehead wreathed with lambent flame and bending low with godlike kiss wreathed in a more celestial life but most not many a fair come peer a heart so sensitive to joy and fear and some perchance might wage an equal strife some few to nobler being wrought cold rivals in the nobler gift of thought yet these delight to celebrate laurel war in plumey state or inverse in music dress tales of rustic happiness pernicious tales insidious strains that steal the rich man's breast and mock the lot unblessed the sordid vices and the abject beings which evermore must be the doom of ignorance and pinury but you free nature's uncorrupted child you held the chapel in the platform wild where once the Austrian fell beneath the shaft of Tell O Lady nursed in pomp and pleasure where learnt you that historic measure you were a mother that most holy name which heaven and nature bless I may not vitally prostitute to those whose infants owe them less than the poor catapult or owes its godly parent to fly you were a mother at your bosom fed the babes that loved you, you with laughing eye each twilight thought each nascent feeling red which you yourself created oh delight a second time to be a mother without the mother's bitter groans another thought and yet another by touch or taste by looks or tones a role the mother of your infant soul the angel of the earth who while he guides his chariot planet round the goal of day all trembling gazes on the eye of god a moment turned his face away and as he viewed you from his aspect sweet new influences in your being rose bless intuitions and communions fleet with living nature in her joys and woes thence forth your soul rejoiced to see the shrine of social liberty oh beautiful oh nature's child to as thence you hailed the platform wild where once the Austrian fell beneath the shaft of tell oh lady nursed in pomp and pleasure thence learned to you that historic measure the pains of sleep ere on my bed my limbs I lay it hath not been my use to pray with moving lips or bended knees by silently by slow degrees my spirit I to love compose in humble trust mine eyelids close with reverential resignation no wish conceived no thought expressed only a sense of supplication a sense or all my soul impressed that I am weak yet not unblessed since in me round me everywhere eternal strength and wisdom are but yester night I prayed aloud in anguish and in agony up starting from the fiendish crowd of shapes and thoughts that tortured me a lurid light a trampling throng sense of intolerable wrong and whom I scorned those only strong thirst of revenge the powerless will still baffled and yet burning still desire with loathing strangely mixed unwild or hateful objects fixed fantastic passions maddening brawl and shame and terror overall needs to be hid which were not hid which all confused I could not know whether I suffered or I did for all seemed guilt remorse or woe my own or others still the same life stifling fear soul stifling shame so two nights past the nights dismay saddened and stunned the coming day sleep the wide blessing seemed to me distemper's worst calamity the third night when my own loud scream had waked me from the fiendish dream or come with suffering strange and wild I wept as I had been a child and having thus by tears subdued my anguish to a milder mood such punishments I said were due to nature's deeply astained with sin for I and tempestina knew the unfathomable hell within the horror of their deeds to view to know and loathe yet wished to do such griefs with such men will agree but wherefore wherefore fall on me to be beloved is all I need and whom I love whom I love I love indeed song by glycine a sunny shaft did I behold from sky to earth it slanted and poised therein a bird so bold sweet bird thou wert enchanted he sunk he rose he twinkled he trolled within that shaft a sunny mist his eyes a fire his beak of gold all else of amethyst and thus he sang adieu adieu love's dreams prove seldom true though blossoms they make no delay the sparkling dew drops will not stay sweet month of May we must away far far away today today youth and age verse a breeze mid-blossom strain where hope clung feeding like a bead both were mine life went amane with nature hope and posy when I was young when I was young ah woeful when ah for the change tweaks now and then this breathing house not built with hands this body that does me grievous wrong or airy cliffs and glittering sands how lightly death it flashed along like those trims gifts unknown of yore unwinding lakes and rivers wide that ask no aid of sail or oar that fear no spite of wind or tide not cared this body for wind or weather when youth and I lived in it together flowers are lovely love is flower-like friendship is a sheltering tree oh the joys that came down shower-like of friendship love and liberty ere I was old ere I was old ah woeful air which tells me youths no longer here oh youth for years so many and sweet tis known that thou and I were one I'll think it but a fond conceit it cannot be that thou art gone thy vesper bell has not yet told and thou word I a masquer bold what strange disguise has thou put on to make believe that thou art gone I see these locks and silvery slips this drooping gate this altered size but spring-tide blossoms on thy lips and tears take sunshine from thine eyes life is but thought so think I will that youth and I are housemates still phantom or fact author a lovely form there state beside my bed and such a feeding calm its presence shined a tender love so pure from Earthly Leaven that I, beneath the fancy my control, twas my own spirit newly come from Heaven wooing its gentle way into my soul but ah the change it had not stirred and yet alas that change how faint would I forget that shrinking back like one that had mistook that weary wandering disavowing look twas all another feature look and frame and still me thought I knew it was the same friend this riddling tale to what does it belong is it history, vision or an idle song or rather say it once within what space of time this wild disastrous change took place author call it a moment's work and such it seems this tales a fragment from the life of dreams but say that years matured the silent strife and is a record from the dream of life into section 39 section 40 of library of the world's best literature ancient and modern volume 9 this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by Nemo library of the world's best literature ancient and modern volume 9 section 40 selected poems by William Collins William Collins 1721 to 1759 there is much to inspire regretful sympathy in the short life of William Collins he was born a chichester and received his education at Winchester college and at Magdalen college Oxford a delicate bookish boy he had every stimulus toward a literary career with a fine appreciation of beauty in all forms of art and a natural talent for versification he wrote poems of much promise when very young his Persian eclogs was only 17 then Collins showed his impatient spirit and fickleness of purpose by deserting his work at Oxford and going to London with the intention of authorship his head was full of brilliant schemes too full for with him as with most people conception was always easier than execution but finding it far more difficult to win fame than he anticipated he had not courage to persevere and fell into dissipated extravagant ways which soon exhausted his small means in 1746 he published The Ode's Descriptive and Allegorical his most characteristic work they were never widely read and it took the public some time to appreciate their lyric fervor their exquisite imagery and their musical verse in spite of occasional obscurities induced by careless treatment they are among the finest of English Ode's his love for nature and sympathy with its calmer aspects is very marked speaking of The Ode to Evening Hazlet says that the sounds steal slowly over the ear like the gradual coming of Evening itself according to Swinburne the Ode's do not contain a single false note its grace and vigor its vivid, implying dexterity of touch he says of The Ode to the Passions are worthy of their long inheritance of praise but the inheritance did not come at once although Collins has always received generous praise from fellow poets his modified self-love resented lack of success with a legacy bequeathed by an uncle he bought his book back from the publisher and the unsold impressions he burned in angry despair meantime he went on planning works quite beyond his power of execution he advertised proposals for a history of the revival of learning which he never wrote he began several tragedies but his indolent genius would not advance beyond devising the plots as he was always wasteful and dissipated he was continually in debt in spite of his unusual gifts he had not the energy and self-control necessary for adequate literary expression Dr. Johnson who admired and tried to befriend him found a bailiff prowling around the premises when he went to call his instigation a bookseller advanced money to get Collins out of London for which in return he was to translate Aristotle's poetics and to write a commentary probably he never fulfilled the agreement indeed he had some excuse a man doubtful of his dinners or trembling at a creditor is not disposed to abstract meditation or remote inquiries as he went, Dr. Johnson Collins was always weak of body and when still a young man was seized by mental disease wary months of despondency were succeeded by madness until he was as Dr. Wharton describes it with every spark of imagination extinguished and with only the faint traces of memory and reason left then the unhappy poet was taken to Chichester and cared for by his sister there he who had loved music so passionately hated the cathedral organ in his madness and when he heard it howled in distress among the best examples of his verse besides the poems already mentioned are the dirge dissembling ode to fear and the ode on the poetical character which Haslick calls the best of all the dirge is sung there honor comes a pilgrim gray to bless the turf that wraps their clay and freedom shall a while repair to dwell a weeping hermit there the passions when music heavenly made was young while yet in early Greece she sung the passions offed to hear her shell exulting trembling raging fainting possessed beyond the muses painting by turns they felt the glowing mind disturbed delighted raised refined to once to said when all were fired filled with fury wrapped inspired from the supporting myrtles round they snatched her instruments of sound and as they often heard apart the lessons of her forceful art each for madness ruled the hour would prove his own expressive power first fear his hand it's skill to try amid the cords bewiltered laid and back recoiled he knew not why in at the sound himself had made next anger rushed his eyes on fire and lightnings owned his secret strings and one rude clash struck the lyre and swept with hurried hand the strings with a woeful measures wand despair low solemn sounds his grief beguiled a sullen strange and mingled air twas sad by fits by starts twas wild but thou oh hope with eye so fair what was thy delighted measure still it whispered promised pleasure and bade the lovely scenes at distant tale still would her touch the strain pull on and from the rocks the wood the veil she called on echo still through all the song and where her sweetest theme she chose a soft responsive voice was heard at every close and hope enchanted smiled and waved her golden hair and longer had she sung but with a frown impatient rose he threw his bloodstained sword and thunder down and with a withering look the war denouncing trumpet took and blew a blast so loud and dread where nare prophetic sounds so full of woe and ever an anon he beat the doubling drum with furious heat and those sometimes each jury pause between dejected pity at his side her souls of doing voice applied yet still he kept his wild unaltered mean while each strained ball of sight seemed bursting from his head thy numbers jealousy to not were fixed sad proof of thy distressful state of differing themes the varying song was mixed and now accorded love now raving called on hate with eyes upraised as one inspired pale melancholy sat retired and from her wild sequestered seat in notes by distance made more sweet poured through the mellow horn her pensive soul and dashing soft from rocks around bubbling runnels joined the sound through blades and glooms the mingled pleasure stole or or some haunted streams with fond delay round and holy calm diffusing love of peace and lonely musing and hallow murmurs died away but oh how altered was it's spritly or tone when cheerfulness a nymph of healthiest hue her bow across her shoulders flung her buskins gemmed with morning dew blew an inspiring air that dale and thicket rung the hunter's call to fawn in dry ed known the oak crown sisters in their chased eyed queen satyrs and sylvan boys were seen peeping from forth their alleys green brown exercise rejoiced to hear and sport leapt up and seized his beech and spear last game joys ecstatic trial he with a viney crown advancing first to the lively pipe his hand addressed but soon he saw the brisk awakening vile whose sweet and trancing voice he loved the best they would have thought who heard the strain they saw in tempies veil her native maids omits the festal sounding shades to some unwirried minstrel dancing while as his flying fingers kissed the strings love framed with mirth a gay fantastic round loose were her tresses seen her zone unbound and he omits his frolic play as if he would the charming air repay shook thousand odours from his dewy wings oh music sphere descended made friend of pleasure wisdom's aid why goddess why to us denied layest thou thy ancient liar aside as in that loved Athenian bower you learned in all commanding power by mimic soul oh nymph endeared can well recall what then it heard where is that native simple heart devote to virtue fancy art arise as in that elder time warm energetic chaste sublime thy wonders and that godlike age fill thy recording sister's page to said and I believe the tale thy humblest read could more prevail had more of strength diviner rage than all which charms this laggard age e'en all at once together found Cecilia's mingled world of sound oh bid our vain endeavour cease revive the just designs of grease return in all thy simple state confirm that tales her sons relate to evening if ought to vote and stop a pastoral song may hope chase the to sue thy modest ear like thy own solemn springs thy springs and dying gales oh nymph reserved while now the bright haired son sits in yon western tent whose cloudy skirts with breed ethereal wove or hang his wavy bed now heirs hushed save where the weak-eyed bat with a short shrill shriek flits by on leather and wing or where the beetle winds is small but sullen horn as oft he rises midst the twilight path against the pilgrim born in heedless hum teach me made composed to breathe some softened strain whose numbers stealing through thy darkening veil may not unseemly with its stillness suit as musing slow I hail thy genial loved return for when thy folding star rising shows his palae circlet at his warning lamp the fragrant hours and elves who slept and buds the day many a nymph who reads her brows with sedge and sheds the freshening dew and lovelier still the pensive pleasure sweet prepare thy shadowy year then let me rove some wild and healthy scene or find some ruin midst its dreary dels whose walls more awful nod by thy religious gleams or if chill blustering winds or driving rain prevent my willing feet be mine the hut that from the mountainside use wilds and swelling floods and Hamlet's brown and dim discovered spires and hears their simple bell and marks or all the dewy fingers draw the gradual dusky veil while spring shall pour his showers as oft he want and bathe thy breathing tresses meek as eve while summer loves to sport beneath thy lingering light while sallow autumn fills thy lap with leaves or winter yelling through the troublous air affrights thy shrinking train and rudely rins thy robes so long regardful of thy quiet rule shall fancy friendship and smiling peace thy gentlest influence own and love thy favorite name Ode on the death of Thompson and yonder grave a druid lies where slowly winds the stealing wave the years best sweets shall doodious rise to decades poet's Sylvan Grave and yon deep bed of whispering leaves his airy harp shall now be laid that he whose heart and sorrow bleeds may love through life the soothing shade then maids and youth shall linger here and while it sounds at distance swell shall sadly seem in pity's ear to hear the woodland pilgrims now remembrance of shall haunt the shore when Thames in summer wreaths is dressed and off suspend the dashing oar to bid his gentle spirit rest and oft is ease in health retire to breezy lawn or forest deep the fringe of you yon whitening spire in mid the varied landscape weep but thou who ownst that earthly bed what will every dirge avail or tears which love and pity shed that mourn beneath the gliding sail yet lives there one whose heedless eye shall scorn thy pale shrine glimmering near with him sweet bard may fancy die and joy desert the blooming year but thou Lawrence stream whose sullen tide no sedge crowned sisters now attend now waft me from the green hillside whose cold turf hides the varied friend and see the fairy valleys fade done night has veiled the solemn view yet once again dear parted shade meek nature's child again adieu the genial meads assign to bless thy life shall mourn thy early doom their hinds and shepherd girl shall dress with simple hands thy rural tomb long long thy stone in pointed clay shall melt the musing Britain's eyes o veils in wild woods shall he say in yonder grave your druid lies end of section 40 section 41 of library of the world's best literature ancient and modern volume 9 section 41 William Wilkie Collins 1824 to 1889 by Charles Dudley Warner Wilkie Collins has proved that the charm of a story does not necessarily depend upon the depiction of character or an appeal to the sympathies as he said, I have always held the old fashioned opinion that the primary object of a work of fiction should be to tell a story. He also aspired to draw living men and women in which he was less successful. Count Fosco, Miss Guilt, Armadale Lara Fairley and others are indeed distinct, but the interest centers not on them but on the circumstances in which they are involved. This is the main reason why the critics, even in admiring his talent speak of Collins with faint depreciation as certainly not one of the greatest novelists of the century, although holding a place of his own which forces recognition. For novel readers have delighted in his many volumes in spite of the critics and there is a steady demand for the old favorites translated into French, Italian, Danish and Russian many of them continue to inspire the same interest in foreign lands. Wilkie Collins, born January 8th, 1824 did not show any special precocity in boyhood and youth. He probably learned much more from his self-guided reading than from his schooling at Highbury, especially after his acquisition of French and Italian during two years in Italy in his early teens. The influences about him were strongly artistic. His father, William Collins was distinguished as a landscape painter. The well-known portrait painter, Mrs. Carpenter, was his aunt and the distinguished Scotch artist, David Wilkie his godfather. But human action and emotion interested him more in art. He was very young when he expressed a desire to write and perpetrated blank verse which justified his father in vigorous opposition to his adoption of authorship as a profession. So his school days ended. He presented the not unusual figure of a bright young Englishman who must earn his bread for doing it. He tried business first and became article clerk with a city house in the tea trade. But the work was uncongenial and after a few unsatisfactory years he fell in with his father's views and was entered at Lincoln's inn and in due time admitted to the bar although he never practiced law. He continued writing for amusement however producing sketches and stories valuable as training. On his father's death he prepared a biography of that artist in two volumes 1848 which was considered a just as well as a loving appreciation. His first novel however was rejected by every publisher to whom he submitted it. His second and to Nina a story of the fall of Rome was mediocre. He was about 26 when he met Charles Dickens then a man of 40 at the height of his fame and with the kindliest feeling for younger writers still struggling for recognition. Dickens whose own work was always prompted by sympathetic intuition and to whom character development came more easily than ingenious plots cordially admired Collins' skill in devising and explaining the latter. He invited the younger man to become collaborator upon household words and thus initiated a warm friendship which lasted until his own death. Encouraged by him Collins essayed drama and wrote The Lighthouse played at Gads Hill by distinguished amateurs Dickens himself among them at first thought his would seem an essentially dramatic talent and several of his novels have been successfully dramatized but the very cleverness and intricacy of his situations make them unsuited to the stage. They are too difficult of comprehension to be taken in at a glance by an average audience in the swift passage of stage action. It was also the influence of Dickens which inspired Collins to attempt social reform. In Man and Wife he tries to show the injustice of scotch marriage laws in the new Magdalene the possible regeneration of fallen women in heart and science the abuses of vivisection and other stories are encumbered with didactic purpose. Mr. Swineburn comments upon this aspect of his career in a jocular couplet what brought good Wilkie's genius nigh perdition some demon whispered Wilkie have a mission but in all tendency novels it is not the discussion of problems that makes them live and Wilkie Collins like others survives by purely literary qualities. Soon after his death the critic of the spectator gave the following capable summary of his peculiar method he was a literary chess player of the first force with power of carrying his plan right through the game and making every move tell. His method was to introduce a certain number of characters set before them a well-defined object such as the discovery of a secret the re-vindication of a fortune the tracking of a crime or the establishment of a doubted marriage and then bring in other characters to resist or counter-plot their efforts each side makes moves almost invariably well considered and promising moves the counter moves are equally good the interest goes on accumulating till the looker on the reader is always placed in that attitude is wrapped out of himself by strained attention and then there is a sudden and totally unexpected mate it is chess which is being played and in the best of all his stories the one which will live for years the moonstone the pretense that it is anything else is openly disregarded this analysis however must not be too narrowly construed as petty critics often do to mean that the only interest in Mr. Collins's novels is that of disentangling the plot if this were so no one would read them more than once while in fact the best of them are eminently readable again and again this shallow judgment evidently galled the novelist himself and the new Magdalene in one aspect was a throwing down of the gauntlet to the critics for in it he tells the plot page by page almost paragraph by paragraph as he goes along and even far in advance of the story yet it is one of the most fascinating of his novels he proved that he could do admirably what they said he could not do at all make people read his story with breathless absorption when they knew it's end long before they came to it and it was as interesting backward as forward no name is in some sort a combination of the two methods a revelation of the end with perpetual interest in the discovery of means the moonstone and the woman in white are unquestionably masterpieces in both he throws light upon a complex plot by means of his favorite expedient of letters and diaries written by different characters who thus take the reader into their confidence and bewilder him with conflicting considerations until the author comes forward with an ingenious and lucid solution the moonstone however is immensely superior in matter even to its fellow its plot is better in one place the woman in white comes to a dead wall which the author calmly ignores and goes on and some passages are worth reading over and over for pure pathos or description Mr. Collins was in fact aside from his special gift a literary artist of no mean power even if not the highest with an eye for salient effects a skill in touching the more obvious chords of emotion a knowledge of life and books that enrich his stories with enough extraneous wealth to prolong their life for many years and some of them perhaps for generations end of section 41