Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/279

 THE POEMS OF WILLIAM BLAKE 263 Coleridge had much of this simpHcity. In the "Ancient Mariner" it is supreme; in " Christabel" it does not lack, but already shows signs of getting maudlin ; afterwards, " Lay Sermons " with Schelling and the Noetic Pentad, almost or quite extinguished it. He was conscious of the loss, as witness the lines in his great Ode : — " And haply by abstruse research to steal From my own nature all the natural man." Scott, a thoroughly objective genius, lived and wrote altogether out of the sphere of this simplicity. He had a simplicity of his own, the simplicity of truthfulness and power in his "magnificent and masculine grasp of men and things." Expansive not intensive, he developed no interior life, but diffused himself over the exterior life. His poetry is of action, not of thought ; he is as a mighty and valiant soldier, whom we seek on the field of battle, not in the school of the prophets. Byron had it not at all. He is great, exceedingly great; but great as the expression of intense life, and of such thought only as is the mere tool and weapon of life, never great as the expression of thought above and beneath life commanding and sustaining it. He had just ideality enough to shed a poetic glow upon powers and passions all essen- tially commonplace, but very uncommonly vigorous, overflowing with the energy of daemonic possession — an energy most mysterious, but in itself most impatient of mysticism. Keats, who shall dare to judge? I doubt not that everything pure and beautiful would have had