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MISS COLERIDGE 45
Here is the first " detached thought " in the
book :
" ' Whom the gods love die young '
and
whom they hate die old, but whom they
honour, these they take up to their eternal
habitations in the ripe summer time of existence."
One wonders how it came there.
The suspicions which this volume helps to
confirm, the melancholy guesses it answers,
are that Miss Coleridge, with all her imagination,
had not the constructive imagination of
an artist, and that, in spite of her gaiety and
spirits, fundamentally she was feeble. The
imagination of an artist, if we may be allowed
a seeming paradox, works logically. Not
fortuitously, but by some mysterious necessity,
does one vision follow another. There
is a rational, if unconscious, order in the
pageantry of images ; there is an inevitableness
in their succession closely allied to the
logical necessity by
which one idea follows
another in a well-reasoned argument. In
Miss Coleridge's mind images arranged themselves
in no progressive order ; one bears no
particular relationship to another ; they are
disconnected, sporadic.
Great imagination is
architectural ; it sets fancy upon fancy until
it has composed a splendid and intelligible