The expressions "the sorrow of human years," "wild despair," "the years
of life below," of a person who is not yet dead and in heaven, do not
seem to me, _as they stand in the lines_, to be in Coleridge's manner;
but especially I do not think the couplet--
"Who felt all grief, all wild despair,
That the race of man may ever bear,"
is one which Coleridge would have penned, reading as I do in the _Aids
to Reflection_, vol. i. p. 255. (edit. Pickering, 1843) his protest
against the doctrine
"holden by more than one of these divines, that the agonies
suffered by Christ were equal in amount to the sum total of the
torments of all mankind here and hereafter, or to the infinite
debt which in an endless succession of instalments we should have
been paying to the divine justice, had it not been paid in full by
the Son of God incarnate!"
There are one or two other expressions of which I entertain doubt, but
not in sufficient degree to make it worth while to dwell upon them.
Are we ever likely to receive from any member of Coleridge's family, or
from his friend Mr. J. H. Green, the fragments, if not the entire work,
of his _Logosophia_? We can ill afford to lose a work the conception of
which engrossed much of his thoughts, if I am rightly informed, towards
the close of his life.