Coleridge

Among the great writers whose activity is associated with the closing years of the eighteenth and the opening of the nineteenth centuries, are several who claim more respect than popularity. If they were poets, their works find a place in a thousand libraries, but the dust gathers upon covers long unopened, and only the stray enthusiast removes it. Southey, Cowper, and Coleridge, for example, are authors of well-nigh universal acceptance, but who, outside the ranks of professed students of poetry, could claim an intimate acquaintance with their work? In An Anthology of Longer Poems published at Oxford two years ago and prepared by two Professors of English Literature, Southey, for all his great gifts, is not represented at all, and William Cowper is responsible for nothing more than the familiar lines to his mother's picture.