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42
MISS COLERIDGE
Elkin Mathews produced a more or less com-
plete edition, excited us, not because, as verse,
they were particularly good, but because they
discovered, or seemed to discover, an attractive
character. Indeed, Miss Coleridge's art
was anything but exciting : her diction was
not beautiful, her rhythms pleased the ear
but moderately, one looked in vain for that
magic of expression which transmutes thought
and feeling into poetry. But if the expression
wanted magic, that which was expressed
seemed an enchantment almost. The gentle
spirit, with its vein of tender pessimism, in
puzzled revolt against the wrongness and
cruelty of a shadowy world, the brooding
thought too whimsical to be bitter, the fancy
too refined to be boisterously merry all these
conspired to fascinate us as we came to perceive
and appreciate them beneath the rather
stiff little verses. To read Miss Coleridge's
poems was to make acquaintance with a
charming and delicate soul that wished to be
understood and was willing to be intimate.
Life astonished her, and her comments on
life are her poems. They are often mystical,
not to say obscure ; and the obscurity, as a
rule, is caused by vagueness rather than profundity,
by the fact that she hardly knows
herself what she feels, or thinks, or believes.
But from so gracious a spirit one accepts