Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1885 edition. Excerpt: ... critical, but, as we must judge, superficial estimate has been lately given by Mr. Traill in the series of 'English Men of Letters.' Our business is not" so much to attempt any criticism of the value of Coleridge's thought as to describe it as a new power. That it was such a power is beyond all question. It is not merely the testimony of such men as Archdeacon Hare and John Sterling, of Newman and of John Stuart Mill, but it is the fact that the later streams of religious thought in England are all more or less coloured by his influence. They flow in deeper and different channels since he lived. Not only are some of those streams directly traceable to him, and said to derive all their vitality from his principles, but those which are most opposed to him have been moulded more or less by the impress of his religious genius. There was much in the man Coleridge himself to provoke animadversion; there may have been aspects of his teaching that lend themselves to ridicule; but if a genius, seminal as his has been in the world of thought and 61 cnticTsfia as well as poetry, is not to excite our reverence, there is little that remains for us to reverence in the intellectual world. And when literature regains the higher tone of our earlier national life, the tone of Hooker and of Milton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge will be again acknowledged, in Julius Mr. Froude's biographic labours, 'It may be found when the secrets of another Sanctuary are unveiled, that if there was not much "pious" or "partly courteous snuffle" in the discourse there, there was yet in plenty "a confused unintelligible flood of utterance threatening to swamp all known land-marks of thought and drown the world and us" --a vast vituperative commotion which made noise in the ear...
