Poole and
his Friends", ii, 122). "You," said Coleridge, "are nobly employed--most
worthy of you. "You" are made to endear yourself to mankind as an
immediate benefactor: I must throw my bread on the waters" ("T. Poole
and his Friends", ii, 122).
While engaged in these argumentations with his best friend, Coleridge
was striving to think out in his deep philosophic and musing mind many
problems of the time; and there arose in his imagination the Idea of the
Permanent. He was henceforth no longer the Poet of Romanticism, whose
significance he had exhausted, but the philosopher of the Permanent,
which presented itself as a splendid possibility in all departments of
human knowledge and activity. In his prose works and letters we find a
continual reference to what Coleridge now calls "The Permanent"--the
permanent principles of Morals, Philosophy, and Religion, and of the
permanent principles of criticism as applied to Poetry and the Fine
Arts. Everything is now adjusted by Coleridge to this idea. Art, morals,
religion, and politics are tried by its standard, to find if they are
founded in the permanent principles of human nature.
It is in the light of this Idea, the ideal of Coleridge's later life,
that we must judge Coleridge and weigh him. To continue to see in opium
the sole or even the principal cause of his failure, is to misjudge him
altogether.
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