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Of majesty, and beauty, and repose,
A blended holiness of earth and sky,
Something that makes this individual spot,
This small abiding-place of many men,
A termination, and a last retreat,
A centre, come from wheresoe'er you will,
A whole without dependence or defect,
Made for itself, and happy in itself,
Perfect contentment, Unity entire.
59. *Henry Vaughan, in The Retreat.
62. *See an interesting paper, by Mr. John Morley, on "The Death of
Mr. Mill," Fortnightly Review, June 1873.
COLERIDGE*
[65] FORMS of intellectual and spiritual culture sometimes exercise
their subtlest and most artful charm when life is already passing
from them. Searching and irresistible as are the changes of the human
spirit on its way to perfection, there is yet so much elasticity of
temper that what must pass away sooner or later is not disengaged all
at once, even from the highest order of minds. Nature, which by one
law of development evolves ideas, hypotheses, modes of inward life,
and represses them in turn, has in this way provided that the earlier
growth should propel its fibres into the later, and so transmit the
whole of its forces in an unbroken continuity of life. Then comes the
spectacle of the reserve of the elder generation exquisitely refined
by the antagonism of the new. That current of new life chastens them
while they contend against it. Weaker minds fail to perceive the
change: the clearest minds abandon themselves to it. To [66] feel
the change everywhere, yet not abandon oneself to it, is a situation
of difficulty and contention. Communicating, in this way, to the
passing stage of culture, the charm of what is chastened, high-
strung, athletic, they yet detach the highest minds from the past, by
pressing home its difficulties and finally proving it impossible.
Such has been the charm of many leaders of lost causes in philosophy
and in religion. It is the special charm of Coleridge, in connexion
with those older methods of philosophic inquiry, over which the
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