Lectures On The English Poets William Hazlitt

185
Ancient Mariner is his most remarkable performance, and the only one
that I could point out to any one as giving an adequate idea of his
great natural powers. It is high German, however, and in it he seems to
"conceive of poetry but as a drunken dream, reckless, careless, and
heedless, of past, present, and to come." His tragedies (for he has
written two) are not answerable to it; they are, except a few poetical
passages, drawling sentiment and metaphysical jargon. He has no genuine
dramatic talent. There is one fine passage in his Christobel, that which
contains the description of the quarrel between Sir Leoline and Sir
Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine, who had been friends in youth.
"Alas! they had been friends in youth,
But whispering tongues can poison truth;
And constancy lives in realms above;
And life is thorny; and youth is vain;
And to be wroth with one we love,
Doth work like madness in the brain:
And thus it chanc'd as I divine,
With Roland and Sir Leoline.
Each spake words of high disdain
And insult to his heart's best brother,
And parted ne'er to meet again!
But neither ever found another
To free the hollow heart from paining--
They stood aloof, the scars remaining,
Like cliffs which had been rent asunder:
A dreary sea now flows between,
But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder,
Shall wholly do away I ween
The marks of that which once hath been.
Sir Leoline a moment's space
Stood gazing on the damsel's face;
And the youthful lord of Tryermaine
Came back upon his heart again."
It might seem insidious if I were to praise his ode entitled Fire,
Famine, and Slaughter, as an effusion of high poetical enthusiasm, and
strong political feeling. His Sonnet to Schiller conveys a fine
compliment to the author of the Robbers, and an equally fine idea of the