Page 504

Samuel Taylor Coleridge. (1772–1834) (continued)

5275

In the hexameter rises the fountain’s silvery column,
In the pentameter aye falling in melody back.

The Ovidian Elegiac Metre. (From Schiller.)

5276

I stood in unimaginable trance
And agony that cannot be remembered.

Remorse. Act iv. Sc. 3.

5277

The intelligible forms of ancient poets,
The fair humanities of old religion,
The power, the beauty, and the majesty
That had their haunts in dale or piny mountain,
Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring,
Or chasms and watery depths,—all these have vanished;
They live no longer in the faith of reason.

Wallenstein. Part i. Act ii. Sc. 4. (Translated from Schiller.)

5278

I ’ve lived and loved.

Wallenstein. Part i. Act ii. Sc. 6.

5279

Clothing the palpable and familiar
With golden exhalations of the dawn.

The Death of Wallenstein. Act i. Sc. 1.

5280

Often do the spirits
Of great events stride on before the events,
And in to-day already walks to-morrow. 1

The Death of Wallenstein. Act v. Sc. 1.

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Our myriad-minded Shakespeare. 2

Biog. Lit. Chap. xv.

5282

A dwarf sees farther than the giant when he has the giant’s shoulder to mount on. 3

The Friend. Sec. i. Essay 8.

5283

An instinctive taste teaches men to build their churches in flat countries, with spire steeples, which, as they cannot be referred to any other object, point as with silent finger to the sky and star. 4

The Friend. No. 14.

Note 1.
Sed ita a principio inchoatum esse mundum ut certis rebus certa signa præcurrerent (Thus in the beginning the world was so made that certain signs come before certain events).—Cicero: Divinatione, liber i. cap. 52.

Coming events cast their shadows before.—Thomas Campbell: Lochiel’s Warning.

Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.—Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Defence of Poetry. [back]

Note 2.
”A phrase,” says Coleridge, “which I have borrowed from a Greek monk, who applies it to a patriarch of Constantinople.” [back]

Note 3.
See Burton, Quotation 5. [back]

Note 4.
See Wordsworth, Quotation 163. [back]

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