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28 INTEODUCTORY ESSAY,

again he has the student's imagination, which does
not feel great events in the present, but needs dis-
tance and some obscurity to make them seem majestic.
On whatever times he might have fallen, if he had
attempted to sing of contemporary kings and battles,
Apollo would have twitched his ear. We may be
sure that he would have read and praised any im-
mortal song; but his own soul would have rested
with I/Allegro and II Penseroso and would never
have migrated into Samson Agonistes; and he might
admire, through his fine critical and artistic sense,
the insight and grand impartiality of MarvelFs
Horatian Ode, and see with MarvelTs eyes, the
tragedy at Whitehall, but he would be disposed to
rival the same Marvell only in the garden at Nun-
appleton

* Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade.'

We hjave been looking backward, now let us look
forward from Gray's time. Coleridge, like Gray, pro-
duced too little poetry; but we agree to find the
explanation of this, not in the age, but in the man.
The age, we say, is inspiring; perhaps whatever of
enthusiasm there is in Coleridge is caught from it.
In his case a want of physical and moral energy
accounts for everything; a vis inertice which prevails
over the momentum which he has received from with-
out. Gray's momentum comes from within; he writes



	28 INTEODUCTORY ESSAY, again he has the student's imagination, which does not feel great events in the present, but needs dis- tance and some obscurity to make them seem majestic. On whatever times he might have fallen, if he had attempted to sing of contemporary kings and battles, Apollo would have twitched his ear. We may be sure that he would have read and praised any im- mortal song; but his own soul would have rested with I/Allegro and II Penseroso and would never have migrated into Samson Agonistes; and he might admire, through his fine critical and artistic sense, the insight and grand impartiality of MarvelFs Horatian Ode, and see with MarvelTs eyes, the tragedy at Whitehall, but he would be disposed to rival the same Marvell only in the garden at Nun- appleton * Annihilating all that's made To a green thought in a green shade.' We hjave been looking backward, now let us look forward from Gray's time. Coleridge, like Gray, pro- duced too little poetry; but we agree to find the explanation of this, not in the age, but in the man. The age, we say, is inspiring; perhaps whatever of enthusiasm there is in Coleridge is caught from it. In his case a want of physical and moral energy accounts for everything; a vis inertice which prevails over the momentum which he has received from with- out. Gray's momentum comes from within; he writes