these are in many ways.  His essay on Coleridge is very celebrated; but it deals, not with Coleridge’s place as a poet, but with his place as a thinker—­with Coleridge as the antagonistic power to Bentham in forming the opinions of the generation now passing away.  Still at such a time as this it is interesting to make some endeavor to estimate the value of what Mr. Mill has done in the way of criticism.  It is at least worth while to examine whether one who has shown himself capable of grappling effectively with the driest and most abstruse problems that vex the human intellect was versatile enough to study poetry with an understanding heart, and to be alive to the distinctive powers of individual poets.

It was in his earlier life, when his enthusiasm for knowledge was fresh, and his active mind, “all as hungry as the sea,” was reaching out eagerly and strenuously to all sorts of food for thought,—­literary, philosophical, and political,—­that Mr. Mill set himself, among other things, to study and theorize upon poetry and the arts generally.  He could hardly have failed to know the most recent efflorescence of English poetry, living as he did in circles where the varied merits of the new poets were largely and keenly discussed.  He had lived also for some time in France, and was widely read in French poetry.  He had never passed through the ordinary course of Greek and Latin at school and college, but he had been taught by his father to read these languages, and had been accustomed from the first to regard their literature as literature, and to read their poetry as poetry.  These were probably the main elements of his knowledge of poetry.  But it was not his way to dream or otherwise luxuriate over his favorite poets for pure enjoyment.  Mr. Mill was not a cultivator of art for art’s sake.  His was too fervid and militant a soul to lose itself in serene love and culture of the calmly beautiful.  He read poetry for the most part with earnest, critical eye, striving to account for it, to connect it with the tendencies of the age, or he read to find sympathy with his own aspirations after heroic energy.  He read De Vigny and other French poets of his generation, with an eye to their relations to the convulsed and struggling state of France, and because they were compelled by their surroundings to take life au serieux, and to pursue, with all the resources of their art, something different from beauty in the abstract.  Luxurious passive enjoyment or torpid half-enjoyment must have been a comparatively rare condition of his finely-strung, excitable, and fervid system.  I believe that his moral earnestness was too imperious to permit much of this.  He was capable indeed of the most passionate admiration of beauty, but even that feeling seems to have been interpenetrated by a certain militant apostolic fervor; his love was as the love of a religious soldier for a patron saint who extends her aid and countenance to him in his wars.  I do not mean to say that his mind was in a perpetual