Though only hints and suggestions, they are, perhaps, the most
penetrative and helpful Shaksperian criticisms in English. He was always
forming projects and abandoning them. He projected a great work on
Christian philosophy, which was to have been his _magnum opus_, but he
never wrote it. He projected an epic poem on the fall of Jerusalem. "I
schemed it at twenty-five," he said, "but, alas! _venturum expectat_."
What bade fair to be his best poem, _Christabel_, is a fragment. Another
strangely beautiful poem, _Kubla Khan_--which came to him, he said, in
sleep--is even more fragmentary. And the most important of his prose
remains, his _Biographia Literaria_, 1817, a history of his own
opinions, breaks off abruptly.
It was in his suggestiveness that Coleridge's great service to posterity
resided. He was what J.S. Mill called a "seminal mind," and his thought
had that power of stimulating thought in others which is the mark and
the privilege of original genius. Many a man has owed to some sentence
of Coleridge's, if not the awakening in himself of a new intellectual
life, at least the starting of fruitful trains of reflection which have
modified his whole view of certain great subjects. On every thing that
he left is set the stamp of high mental authority.
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