So it seems to be with the new school, or, as
they may be termed, the wild or lawless poets. After we had been
admiring their extravagance for many years, and marvelling at the ease
and rapidity with which one exceeded another in the unmeaning or
infantine, until not an idea was left in the rhyme--or in the insane,
until we had reached something that seemed the untamed effusion of an
author whose thoughts were rather more free than his actions--forth
steps Mr Coleridge, like a giant refreshed with sleep, and as if to
redeem his character after so long a silence, ('his poetic powers having
been, he says, from 1808 till very lately, in a state of suspended
animation,' p. v.) and breaks out in these precise words--
''Tis the middle of night by the castle clock,
And the owls have awaken'd the crowing cock;
Tu ---- whit! ---- Tu ---- whoo!
And hark, again! the crowing cock,
How drowsily it crew.'
'Sir Leoline, the Baron rich,
Hath a toothless mastiff bitch;
From her kennel beneath the rock
She makes answer to the clock,
Four for the quarters, and twelve for the hour:
Ever and aye, moonshine or shower,
Sixteen short howls, not over loud;
Some say she sees my lady's shroud.
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