Download File

48
MISS COLERIDGE
sit still nor launch out into rapturous, but
ill-bred, ecstasies, of the weakling who takes
refuge in slang or jocularity
for fear of becoming
natural and being thought ridiculous.
Miss Coleridge stood for Kensington and Culture,
so she smiled and shrugged her shoulders
at Medea, and called the Bacchae " Hallelujah
Lasses." She and Kensington admired Greek
literature and art, of course, with enthusiasm
tempered by taste but the ;
" glory that was
Greece," the merciless honesty and riotous
passions, the adventurous thought and feeling,
were meat too strong for a society whose
happiness depended on gazing at one half of
life with closed eyes and swallowing the other
in sugar-coated pills.
So we shall not turn again to " Gathered
we shall sometimes read the
Leaves," though
poems. Henceforth, they will conjure up a
less elusive figure. They will show us a pensive
lady, rather well dressed in the fashion
of five-and-twenty years ago, who sits in a
Morris drawing-room, the white walls of which
are spotted with Pre-Raphaelite pictures, and
muses on what her surroundings represent.
She is intelligent and graceful ;1 witty in
season,
fantastic in measure. Her mind is
ruffled by the perplexities appropriate to her
age and state ; she searches Canon Dixon's
latest poem for light on Holman Hunt's last