ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS COLERIDGE BY H. D. TRAILL PREFATORY NOTE. In a tolerably well-known passage in one of his essays De Quinceyenumerates the multiform attainments and powers of Coleridge, and thecorresponding varieties of demand made by them on any one who shouldaspire to become this many-sided man's biographer. The description isslightly touched with the humorous hyperbole characteristic of itsauthor; but it is in substance just, and I cannot but wish that it werepossible, within the limits of a preface, to set out the whole of it inexcuse for the many inevitable shortcomings of this volume. Having thusmade an "exhibit" of it, there would only remain to add that thedifficulties with which De Quincey confronts an intending biographer ofColeridge must necessarily be multiplied many-fold by the conditionsunder which this work is here attempted. No complete biography ofColeridge, at least on any important scale of dimensions, is inexistence; no critical appreciation of his work _as a whole_, andas correlated with the circumstances and affected by the changes of hislife, has, so far as I am aware, been attempted. To perform either ofthese two tasks adequately, or even with any approach to adequacy, awriter should at least have the elbow-room of a portly volume. Toattempt the two together, therefore, and to attempt them within thelimits prescribed to the manuals of this series, is an enterprisewhich I think should claim, from all at least who are not offended byits audacity, an almost unbounded indulgence. The supply of material for a _Life_ of Coleridge is fairly plentiful, though it is not very easily come by. For the most part it needs to behunted up or fished up--those accustomed to the work will appreciatethe difference between the two processes--from a considerable varietyof contemporary documents. Completed biography of the poet-philosopherthere is none, as has been said, in existence; and the one volume ofthe unfinished _Life_ left us by Mr. Gillman--a name never to bementioned with disrespect, however difficult it may sometimes be toavoid doing so, by any one who honours the name and genius ofColeridge--covers, and that in but a loose and rambling fashion, nomore than a few years. Mr. Cottle's _Recollections of Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge_ contains some valuable information oncertain points of importance, as also does the _Letters, Conversations, etc. , of S. T. C. _ by Mr. Allsop. Miss Meteyard's _Group of EminentEnglishmen_ throws much light on the relations between Coleridge andhis early patrons the Wedgwoods. Everything, whether critical orbiographical, that De Quincey wrote on Coleridgian matters requires, with whatever discount, to be carefully studied. _The Life of Wordsworth, _by the Bishop of St. Andrews; _The Correspondence of Southey;_the Rev. Derwent Coleridge's brief account of his father's life andwritings; and the prefatory memoir prefixed to the 1880 edition ofColeridge's _Poetical and Dramatic Works_, have all had to beconsulted. But, after all, there remain several tantalising gaps inColeridge's life which refuse to be bridged over; and one cannot butthink that there must be enough unpublished matter in the possessionof his relatives and the representatives of his friends andcorrespondents to enable some at least, though doubtless not all, ofthese missing links to be supplied. Perhaps upon a fitting occasionand for an adequate purpose these materials would be forthcoming. CONTENTS. _POETICAL PERIOD. _ CHAPTER I. [1772-1794. ]Birth, parentage, and early years--Christ's Hospital--Jesus College, Cambridge. CHAPTER II. [1794-1797. ]The Bristol Lectures--Marriage--Life at Clevedon--The _Watchman_--Retirement to Stowey--Introduction to Wordsworth. CHAPTER III. [1797-1799. ]Coleridge and Wordsworth--Publication of the _Lyrical Ballads_--The_Ancient Mariner_--The first part of _Christabel_--Decline ofColeridge's poetic impulse--Final review of his poetry. _CRITICAL PERIOD. _ CHAPTER IV. [1799-1800. ]Visit to Germany--Life at Gottingen--Return--Explores the Lake country--London--The _Morning Post_--Coleridge as a journalist--Retirement toKeswick. CHAPTER V. [1800-1804. ]Life at Keswick--Second part of _Christabel_--Failing health--Resortto opium--The _Ode to Dejection_--Increasing restlessness--Visit toMalta. CHAPTER VI. [1806-1809. ]Stay at Malta--Its injurious effects--Return to England--Meeting with DeQuincey--Residence in London--First series of lectures. CHAPTER VII. [1809-1810. ]Return to the Lakes--From Keswick to Grasmere--With Wordsworth at AllanBank--The _Friend_--Quits the Lake country for ever. CHAPTER VIII. [1810-1816. ]London again--Second recourse to journalism--The _Courier_ articles--The Shakespeare lectures--Production of _Remorse_--At Bristol againas lecturer--Residence at Calne--Increasing ill health and embarrassments--Retirement to Mr. Gillman's. _METAPHYSICAL AND THEOLOGICAL PERIOD. _ CHAPTER IX. [1816-1818. ]Life at Highgate--Renewed activity--Publications and republications--The_Biographia Literaria_--The lectures of 1818--Coleridge as aShakespearian critic. CHAPTER X. [1818-1834. ]Closing years--Temporary renewal of money troubles--The _Aids toRefection_--Growing weakness-Visit to Germany with the Wordsworths--Last illness and death. CHAPTER XI. Coleridge's metaphysics and theology--_The Spiritual Philosophy_of Mr. Green. CHAPTER XII. Coleridge's position in his later years--His discourse--Hisinfluence on contemporary thought--Final review of his intellectualwork. INDEX. COLERIDGE. CHAPTER I. Birth, parentage, and early years--Christ's Hospital--Jesus College, Cambridge. [1772-1794. ] On the 21st of October 1772 there was added to that roll of famousEnglishmen of whom Devonshire boasts the parentage a new and not itsleast illustrious name. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE was the son of the Rev. John Coleridge, vicar of Ottery St. Mary in that county, and headmaster of Henry VIII. 's Free Grammar School in the same town. He wasthe youngest child of a large family. To the vicar, who had been twicemarried, his first wife had borne three children, and his second ten. Of these latter, however, one son died in infancy; four others, together with the only daughter of the family, passed away beforeSamuel had attained his majority; and thus only three of his brothers, James, Edward, and George Coleridge, outlived the eighteenth century. The first of these three survivors became the father of Henry NelsonColeridge--who married his cousin Sara, the poet's accomplisheddaughter, and edited his uncle's posthumous works--and of the late Mr. Justice Coleridge, himself the father of the present Lord Chief-Justiceof England. Edward, the second of the three, went, like his eldestbrother William, to Pembroke College, Oxford, and like him took orders;and George, also educated at the same college and for the sameprofession, succeeded eventually to his father's benefice and school. The vicar himself appears from all accounts to have been a man of moremark than most rural incumbents, and probably than a good manyschoolmasters of his day. He was a Hebrew scholar of some eminence, andthe compiler of a Latin grammar, in which, among other innovationsdesigned to simplify the study of the language for "boys justinitiated, " he proposed to substitute for the name of "ablative" thatof "quale-quare-quidditive case. " The mixture of amiable simplicity andnot unamiable pedantry to which this stroke of nomenclature testifieswas further illustrated in his practice of diversifying his sermons tohis village flock with Hebrew quotations, which he always commended totheir attention as "the immediate language of the Holy Ghost"--apractice which exposed his successor, himself a learned man, to thecomplaint of his rustic parishioners, that for all his erudition no"immediate language of the Holy Ghost" was ever to be heard from_him_. On the whole the Rev. John Coleridge appears to have been agentle and kindly eccentric, whose combination of qualities may havewell entitled him to be compared, as his famous son was wont in after-life to compare him, to Parson Adams. Of the poet's mother we know little; but it is to be gathered from suchinformation as has come to us through Mr. Gillman from Coleridgehimself that, though reputed to have been a "woman of strong mind, " sheexercised less influence on the formation of her son's mind andcharacter than has frequently been the case with the not remarkablemothers of remarkable men. "She was, " says Mr. Gillman, "an uneducatedwoman, industriously attentive to her household duties, and devoted tothe care of her husband and family. Possessing none even of the mostcommon accomplishments of her day, she had neither love nor sympathyfor the display of them in others. She disliked, as she would say, your'harpsichord ladies, ' and strongly tried to impress upon her sons theirlittle value" (that is, of the accomplishments) "in their choice ofwives. " And the final judgment upon her is that she was "a very goodwoman, though, like Martha, over careful in many things; very ambitiousfor the advancement of her sons in life, but wanting, perhaps, thatflow of heart which her husband possessed so largely. " Of Coleridge'sboyhood and school-days we are fortunate in being able to construct anunusually clear and complete idea. Both from his own autobiographicnotes, from the traditionary testimony of his family, and from the noless valuable evidence of his most distinguished schoolfellow, we knowthat his youthful character and habits assign him very conspicuously tothat perhaps somewhat small class of eminent men whose boyhood hasgiven distinct indications of great things to come. Coleridge is aspronounced a specimen of this class as Scott is of its opposite. Scotthas shown the world how commonplace a boyhood may precede a maturity ofextraordinary powers. In Coleridge's case a boy of truly extraordinaryqualities was father to one of the most remarkable of men. As theyoungest of ten children (or of thirteen, reckoning the vicar's familyof three by his first wife), Coleridge attributes the early bent of hisdisposition to causes the potency of which one may be permitted tothink that he has somewhat exaggerated. It is not quite easy to believethat it was only through "certain jealousies of old Molly, " his brotherFrank's "dotingly fond nurse, " and the infusions of these jealousiesinto his brother's mind, that he was drawn "from life in motion to lifein thought and sensation. " The physical impulses of boyhood, where theyexist in vigour, are not so easily discouraged, and it is probable thatthey were naturally weaker and the meditative tendency stronger thanColeridge in after-life imagined. But to continue: "I never played, " heproceeds, "except by myself, and then only acting over what I had beenreading or fancying, or half one, half the other" (a practice commonenough, it may be remarked, among boys of by no means morbidlyimaginative habit), "cutting down weeds and nettles with a stick, asone of the seven champions of Christendom. Alas! I had all thesimplicity, all the docility of the little child, but none of thechild's habits. I never thought as a child--never had the language of achild. " So it fared with him during the period of his home instruction, the first eight years of his life; and his father having, as scholarand schoolmaster, no doubt noted the strange precocity of his youngestson, appears to have devoted especial attention to his training. "In myninth year, " he continues, "my most dear, most revered father diedsuddenly. O that I might so pass away, if, like him, I were anIsraelite without guile. The image of my father, my revered, kind, learned, simple-hearted father, is a religion to me. " Before he had attained his tenth year a presentation to Christ'sHospital was obtained for him by that eminent judge Mr. Justice Buller, a former pupil of his father's; and he was entered at the school on the18th July 1782. His early bent towards poetry, though it displayeditself in youthful verse of unusual merit, is a less uncommon andarresting characteristic than his precocious speculative activity. Manya raw boy "lisps in numbers, for the numbers come;" but few discourseAlexandrian metaphysics at the same age, for the very good reason thatthe metaphysics as a rule do not "come. " And even among those youthwhom curiosity, or more often vanity, induces to dabble in suchstudies, one would find few indeed over whom they have cast such anirresistible spell as to estrange them for a while from poetryaltogether. That this was the experience of Coleridge we have his ownwords to show. His son and biographer, the Rev. Derwent Coleridge, hasa little antedated the poet's stages of development in stating thatwhen his father was sent to Christ's Hospital in his eleventh year hewas "already a poet, and yet more characteristically a metaphysician. "A poet, yes, and a precocious scholar perhaps to boot, but ametaphysician, no; for the "delightful sketch of him by his friend andschoolfellow Charles Lamb" was pretty evidently taken not at "thisperiod" of his life but some years later. Coleridge's own account ofthe matter in the _Biographia Literaria_ is clear. [1] "At a verypremature age, even before my fifteenth year, " he says, "I hadbewildered myself in metaphysics and in theological controversy. Nothing else pleased me. History and particular facts lost all interestin my mind. Poetry (though for a schoolboy of that age I was above parin English versification, and had already produced two or threecompositions which I may venture to say were somewhat above mediocrity, and which had gained me more credit than the sound good sense of my oldmaster was at all pleased with), --poetry itself, yea, novels andromance, became insipid to me. " He goes on to describe how highlydelighted he was if, during his friendless wanderings on leave-days, "any passenger, especially if he were dressed in black, " would enterwith him into a conversation, which he soon found the means ofdirecting to his favourite subject of "providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate; fixed fate, freewill, foreknowledge absolute. " Undoubtedly itis to this period that one should refer Lamb's well-known descriptionof "Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Logician, Metaphysician, Bard. " "How have I seen the casual passer through the cloisters stand still, entranced with admiration (while he weighed the disproportion betweenthe speech and the garb of the young Mirandula), to hear thee unfold inthy deep and sweet intonations the mysteries of Iamblichus or Plotinus(for even in those years thou waxedst not pale at such philosophicdraughts), or reciting Homer in the Greek, or Pindar, while the wallsof the old Grey Friars re-echoed with the accents of the _inspiredcharity-boy_. " It is interesting to note such a point as that of the "deep and sweetintonations" of the youthful voice--its most notable and impressivecharacteristic in after-life. Another schoolfellow describes the youngphilosopher as "tall and striking in person, with long black hair, " andas commanding "much deference" among his schoolfellows. Such wasColeridge between his fifteenth and seventeenth year, and suchcontinued to be the state of his mind and the direction of his studiesuntil he was won back again from what he calls "a preposterous pursuit, injurious to his natural powers and to the progress of his education, "by--it is difficult, even after the most painstaking study of itsexplanations, to record the phenomenon without astonishment--a perusalof the sonnets of William Lisle Bowles. Deferring, however, for thepresent any research into the occult operation of this convertingagency, it will be enough to note Coleridge's own assurance of itsperfect efficacy. He was completely cured for the time of hismetaphysical malady, and "well were it for me perhaps, " he exclaims, "had I never relapsed into the same mental disease; if I had continuedto pluck the flowers and reap the harvest from the cultivated surfaceinstead of delving in the unwholesome quicksilver mines of metaphysicdepths. " And he goes on to add, in a passage full of the peculiarmelancholy beauty of his prose, and full too of instruction for thebiographer, "But if, in after-time, I have sought a refuge from bodilypain and mismanaged sensibility in abstruse researches, which exercisedthe strength and subtlety of the understanding without awakening thefeelings of the heart, there was a long and blessed interval, duringwhich my natural faculties were allowed to expand and my originaltendencies to develop themselves--my fancy, and the love of nature, andthe sense of beauty in forms and sounds. " This "long and blessedinterval" endured, as we shall see, for some eleven or twelve years. His own account of his seduction from the paths of poetry by the wilesof philosophy is that physiology acted as the go-between. His brotherLuke had come up to London to walk the hospitals, and young Samuel'sinsatiable intellectual curiosity immediately inspired him with adesire to share his brother's pursuit. "Every Saturday I could make orobtain leave, to the London Hospital trudged I. O! the bliss if I waspermitted to hold the plaisters or attend the dressings. .. . I becamewild to be apprenticed to a surgeon; English, Latin, yea, Greek booksof medicine read I incessantly. Blanchard's _Latin MedicalDictionary_ I had nearly by heart. Briefly, it was a wild dream, which, gradually blending with, gradually gave way to, a rage formetaphysics occasioned by the essays on Liberty and Necessity in Cato's_Letters_, and more by theology. " [2] At the appointed hour, however, Bowles the emancipator came, as has been said, to his relief, and having opportunely fallen in love with the eldest daughter of awidow lady of whose son he had been the patron and protector at school, we may easily imagine that his liberation from the spell of metaphysicswas complete. "From this time, " he says, "to my nineteenth year, when Iquitted school for Jesus, Cambridge, was the era of poetry and love. " Of Coleridge's university days we know less; but the account of hisschoolfellow, Charles Le Grice, accords, so far as it goes, with whatwould have been anticipated from the poet's school life. Although "verystudious, " and not unambitious of academical honours--within a fewmonths of his entering at Jesus he won the Browne Gold Medal for aGreek Ode on the Slave Trade [3]--his reading, his friend admits, was"desultory and capricious. He took little exercise merely for the sakeof exercise, but he was ready at any time to unbend his mind inconversation, and for the sake of this his room was a constantrendezvous of conversation-loving friends. I will not call themloungers, for they did not call to kill time but to enjoy it. " From thesame record we gather that Coleridge's interest in current politics wasalready keen, and that he was an eager reader, not only of Burke'sfamous contributions thereto, but even a devourer of all the pamphletswhich swarmed during that agitated period from the press. The desultorystudent, however, did not altogether intermit his academical studies. In 1793 he competed for another Greek verse prize, this timeunsuccessfully. He afterwards described his ode _On Astronomy_ as"the finest Greek poem I ever wrote;" [4] but, whatever may have beenits merits from the point of view of scholarship, the Englishtranslation of it, made eight years after by Southey (in which formalone it now exists), seems hardly to establish its title to thepeculiar merit claimed by its author for his earlier effort. The longvacation of this year, spent by him in Devonshire, is also interestingas having given birth to one of the most characteristic of the_Juvenile Poems, _ the _Songs of the Pixies_, and the closingmonths of 1793 were marked by the most singular episode in the poet'searlier career. It is now perhaps impossible to ascertain whether the cause of thisstrange adventure of Coleridge's was, "chagrin at his disappointment ina love affair" or "a fit of dejection and despondency caused by somedebts not amounting to a hundred pounds;" but, actuated by some impulseor other of restless disquietude, Coleridge suddenly quitted Cambridgeand came up, very slenderly provided with money, to London, where, after a few days' sojourn, he was compelled by pressure of actual needto enlist, under the name of Silas Titus Comberback (S. T. C. ), [5] as aprivate in the 15th Light Dragoons. It may seem strange to say so, butit strikes one as quite conceivable that the world might have been againer if fate had kept Coleridge a little longer in the ranks than thefour months of his actual service. As it was, however, his militaryexperiences, unlike those of Gibbon, were of no subsequent advantage tohim. He was, as he tells us, an execrable rider, a negligent groom ofhis horse, and, generally, a slack and slovenly trooper; but beforedrill and discipline had had time to make a smart soldier of him, hechanced to attract the attention of his captain by having written aLatin quotation on the white wall of the stables at Reading. Thisofficer, who it seems was either able to translate the ejaculation, "Eheu! quam infortunii miserrimum est fuisse felicem, " [7] or, at anyrate, to recognise the language it was written in, interested himselfforthwith on behalf of his scholarly recruit. [6] Coleridge's dischargewas obtained at Hounslow on April 10, 1794, and he returned toCambridge. The year was destined to be eventful for him in more ways than one. InJune he went to Oxford to pay a visit to an old schoolfellow, where anaccidental introduction to Robert Southey, then an undergraduate ofBalliol, laid the foundation of a friendship destined largely toinfluence their future lives. In the course of the following August hecame to Bristol, where he was met by Southey, and by him introduced toRobert Lovell, through whom and Southey he made the acquaintance of twopersons of considerable, if not exactly equal, importance to any youngauthor--his first publisher and his future wife. Robert Lovell alreadyknew Mr. Joseph Cottle, brother of Amos Cottle (Byron's "O! AmosCottle! Phoebus! what a name"), and himself a poet of some pretensions;and he had married Mary Fricker, one of whose sisters, Edith, wasalready engaged to Southey; while another, Sara, was afterwards tobecome Mrs. Coleridge. As the marriage turned out on the whole an unhappy one, the present maybe a convenient moment for considering how far its future character wasdetermined by previously existing and unalterable conditions, and howfar it may be regarded as the result of subsequent events. De Quincey, whose acute and in many respects most valuable monograph on the poettouches its point of least trustworthiness in matters of this kind, declares roundly, and on the alleged authority of Coleridge himself, that the very primary and essential prerequisite of happiness waswanting to the union. Coleridge, he says, assured him that his marriagewas "not his own deliberate act, but was in a manner forced upon hissense of honour by the scrupulous Southey, who insisted that he hadgone too far in his attentions to Miss Fricker for any honourableretreat. " On the other hand, he adds, "a neutral spectator of theparties protested to me that if ever in his life he had seen a manunder deep fascination, and what he would have called desperately inlove, Coleridge, in relation to Miss F. , was that man. " One need not, Ithink, feel much hesitation in preferring this "neutral spectator's"statement to that of the discontented husband, made several years afterthe mutual estrangement of the couple, and with no great proprietyperhaps, to a new acquaintance. There is abundant evidence in his ownpoems alone that at the time of, and for at least two or three yearssubsequently to, his marriage Coleridge's feeling towards his wife wasone of profound and indeed of ardent attachment. It is of course quitepossible that the passion of so variable, impulsive, and irresolute atemperament as his may have had its hot and cold fits, and that duringone of the latter phases Southey may have imagined that his friendneeded some such remonstrance as that referred to. But this is notnearly enough to support the assertion that Coleridge's marriage was"in a manner forced upon his sense of honour, " and was not his owndeliberate act. It was as deliberate as any of his other acts duringthe years 1794 and 1795, --that is to say, it was as wholly inspired bythe enthusiasm of the moment, and as utterly ungoverned by anything inthe nature of calculation on the possibilities of the future. He fellin love with Sara Fricker as he fell in love with the French Revolutionand with the scheme of "Pantisocracy, " and it is indeed extremelyprobable that the emotions of the lover and the socialist may havesubtly acted and reacted upon each other. The Pantisocratic scheme wasessentially based at its outset upon a union of kindred souls, for itwas clearly necessary of course that each male member of the littlecommunity to be founded on the banks of the Susquehanna should takewith him a wife. Southey and Lovell had theirs in the persons of twosisters; they were his friends and fellow-workers in the scheme; andthey had a sympathetic sister-in-law disengaged. Fate therefore seemedto designate her for Coleridge and with the personal attraction whichshe no doubt exerted over him there may well have mingled a dash ofthat mysterious passion for symmetry which prompts a man to "completethe set. " After all, too, it must be remembered that, though Mrs. Coleridge did not permanently retain her hold upon her husband'saffections, she got considerably the better of those who shared themwith her. Coleridge found out the objections to Pantisocracy in a veryshort space of time, and a decided coolness had sprung up between himand Madame la Revolution before another two years had passed. The whole history indeed of this latter _liaison_ is mostremarkable, and no one, it seems to me, can hope to form an adequateconception of Coleridge's essential instability of character withoutbestowing somewhat closer attention upon this passage in hisintellectual development than it usually receives. It is not uncommonto see the cases of Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge lumped togetherindiscriminately, as interequivalent illustrations of the way in whichthe young and generous minds of that era were first fascinated and thenrepelled by the French Revolution. As a matter of fact, however, thelast of the three cases differed in certain very important respectsfrom the two former. Coleridge not only took the "frenzy-fever" in amore violent form than either Wordsworth or Southey, and uttered wilderthings in his delirium than they, but the paroxysm was much shorter, the _immediate_ reaction more violent in its effects and broughtabout by slighter causes in his case than in theirs. This will appearmore clearly when we come to contrast the poems of 1794 and 1795 withthose of 1797. For the present it must suffice to say that while thehistory of Coleridge's relations to the French Revolution isintellectually more interesting than that of Wordsworth's andSouthey's, it plainly indicates, even in that early period of the threelives, a mind far more at the mercy of essentially transitory sentimentthan belonged to either of the others, and far less disposed thantheirs to review the aspirations of the moment by the steady light ofthe practical judgment. This, however, is anticipating matters. We are still in the summer of1794, and we left Coleridge at Bristol with Southey, Lovell, and theMiss Frickers. To this year belongs that remarkable experiment inplaywriting at high pressure, _The Fall of Robespierre_. Itoriginated, we learn from Southey, in "a sportive conversation at poorLovell's, " when each of the three friends agreed to produce one act ofa tragedy, on the subject indicated in the above title, by thefollowing evening. Coleridge was to write the first, Southey thesecond, and Lovell the third. Southey and Lovell appeared the next daywith their acts complete, Coleridge, characteristically, with only apart of his. Lovell's, however, was found not to be in keeping with theother two, so Southey supplied the third as well as the second, bywhich time Coleridge had completed the first. The tragedy wasafterwards published entire, and is usually included in completeeditions of Coleridge's poetical works. It is an extremely immatureproduction, abounding in such coquettings (if nothing more serious)with bathos as "Now, Aloof thou standest from the tottering pillar, And like a frighted child behind its mother, Hidest thy pale face in the skirts of Mercy. " and "Liberty, condensed awhile, is bursting To scatter the arch-chemist in the explosion. " Coleridge also contributed to Southey's _Joan of Arc_ certainlines of which, many years afterwards, he wrote in this humorouslyexaggerated but by no means wholly unjust tone of censure:--"I wasreally astonished (1) at the schoolboy, wretched, allegoric machinery;(2) at the transmogrification of the fanatic Virago into a modernnovel-pawing proselyte of the Age of Reason--a Tom Paine inpetticoats; (3) at the utter want of all rhythm in the verse, themonotony and dead plumb-down of the pauses, and at the absence of allbone, muscle, and sinew in the single lines. " In September Coleridge returned to Cambridge, to keep what turned outto be his last term at Jesus. We may fairly suppose that he had alreadymade up his mind to bid adieu to the Alma Mater whose bosom he wasabout to quit for that of a more venerable and, as he then believed, agentler mother on the banks of the Susquehanna; but it is notimpossible that in any case his departure might have been expedited bythe remonstrances of college authority. Dr. Pearce, Master of Jesus, and afterwards Dean of Ely, did all he could, records a friend of asomewhat later date, "to keep him within bounds; but his repeatedefforts to reclaim him were to no purpose, and upon one occasion, aftera long discussion on the visionary and ruinous tendency of his laterschemes, Coleridge cut short the argument by bluntly assuring him, hisfriend and master, that he mistook the matter altogether. He wasneither Jacobin, [8] he said, nor Democrat, but a Pantisocrat. " And, leaving the good doctor to digest this new and strange epithet, Coleridge bade farewell to his college and his university, and wentforth into that world with which he was to wage so painful and variablea struggle. FOOTNOTES 1. He tells us in the _Biographia Literaria_ that he hadtranslated the eight hymns of Synesius from the Greek into Englishanacreontics "before his fifteenth year. " It is reasonable to suppose, therefore, that he had more scholarship in 1782 than most boys of tenyears. 2. Footnote: Gillman, pp. 22, 23. 3. Of this Coleridge afterwards remarked with justice that its "ideaswere better than the language or metre in which they were conveyed. "Porson, with little magnanimity, as De Quincey complains, was severeupon its Greek, but its main conception--an appeal to Death to come, awelcome deliverer to the slaves, and to bear them to shores where "theymay tell their beloved ones what horrors they, being men, had enduredfrom men"--is moving and effective. De Quincey, however, wasundoubtedly right in his opinion that Coleridge's Greek scholarship wasnot of the exact order. No exact scholar could, for instance, have diedin the faith (as Coleridge did) that [Greek Text: epsilon-sigma-tau-eta-sigma-epsilon] (S. T. C. ) means "he stood, " and not "he placed. " 4. Adding "that which gained the prize was contemptible"--anexpression of opinion hardly in accordance with Le Grice's statement("Recollections" in _Gentleman's Magazine_ for 1836) that "no onewas more convinced of the propriety of the decision than Coleridgehimself. " Mr. Le Grice, however, bears valuable testimony toColeridge's disappointment, though I think he exaggerates its influencein determining his career. 5. It is characteristic of the punctilious inaccuracy of Mr. Cottle(_Recollections_, ii. 54) that he should insist that the assumedname was "Cumberbatch, not Comberback, " though Coleridge has himselffixed the real name by the jest, "My habits were so little equestrian, that my horse, I doubt not, was of that opinion. " This circumstance, though trifling, does not predispose us to accept unquestioningly Mr. Cottle's highly particularised account of Coleridge's experience withhis regiment. 6. Miss Mitford, in her _Recollections of a Literary Life_, interestingly records the active share taken by her father inprocuring the learned trooper's discharge. 7. "In omni adversitate fortunae, infelicissimum genus est infortuniifuisse felicem. "--_Boethius_. 8. Carrlyon's _Early Years and late Reflections_, vol. I. P. 27. CHAPTER II. The Bristol Lectures--Marriage--Life at Clevedon--The _Watchman_--Retirement to Stowey--Introduction to Wordsworth. [1794-1797. ] The reflections of the worthy Master of Jesus upon the strange reply ofthe wayward young undergraduate would have been involved in evengreater perplexity if he could have looked forward a few months intothe future. For after a winter spent in London, and enlivened by those_noctes conoque Deum_ at the "Cat and Salutation, " which Lamb hasso charmingly recorded, Coleridge returned with Southey to Bristol atthe beginning of 1795, and there proceeded to deliver a series oflectures which, whatever their other merits, would certainly not haveassisted Dr. Pearce to grasp the distinction between a Pantisocrat anda Jacobin. As a scholar and a man of literary taste he might possiblyhave admired the rhetorical force of the following outburst, but, considering that the "HE" here gibbeted in capitals was no less apersonage than the "heaven-born minister" himself, a plain man mightwell have wondered what additional force the vocabulary of Jacobinismcould have infused into the language of Pantisocracy. After summing upthe crimes of the Reign of Terror the lecturer asks: "Who, my brethren, was the cause of this guilt if not HE who supplied the occasion and themotive? Heaven hath bestowed on _that man_ a portion of itsubiquity, and given him an actual presence in the sacraments of hell, wherever administered, in all the bread of bitterness, in all the cupsof blood. " And in general, indeed, the _Conciones ad Populum_, asColeridge named these lectures on their subsequent publication, wererather calculated to bewilder any of the youthful lecturer's well-wishers who might be anxious for some means of discriminating hisattitude from that of the Hardys, the Horne Tookes, and the Thelwallsof the day. A little warmth of language might no doubt be allowed to ayoung friend of liberty in discussing legislation which, in theretrospect, has staggered even so staunch a Tory as Sir ArchibaldAlison; but Coleridge's denunciation of the Pitt and Grenville Acts, inthe lecture entitled _The Plot Discovered_, is occasionallystartling, even for that day of fierce passions, in the fierceness ofits language. It is interesting, however, to note the ever-active playof thought and reasoning amid the very storm and stress of politicalpassion. Coleridge is never for long together a mere declaimer onpopular rights and ministerial tyranny, and even this indignant addresscontains a passage of extremely just and thoughtful analysis of theconstituent elements of despotism. Throughout the spring and summer of1795 Coleridge continued his lectures at Bristol, his head stillsimmering--though less violently, it may be suspected, every month--with Pantisocracy, and certainly with all his kindred political andreligious enthusiasms unabated. A study of these crude but vigorous addresses reveals to us, as doesthe earlier of the early poems, a mind struggling with its half-formedand ever-changing conceptions of the world, and, as is usual at suchpeculiar phases of an intellectual development, affirming its temporarybeliefs with a fervour and vehemence directly proportioned to therecency of their birth. Commenting on the _Conciones ad Populum_many years afterwards, and invoking them as witnesses to his politicalconsistency as an author, Coleridge remarked that with the exception of"two or three pages involving the doctrine of philosophical necessityand Unitarianism, " he saw little or nothing in these outbursts of hisyouthful zeal to retract, and, with the exception of "some flame-coloured epithets" applied to persons, as to Mr. Pitt and others, "orrather to personifications"--for such, he says, they really were tohim--as little to regret. We now, however, arrive at an event, important in the life of everyman, and which influenced that of Coleridge to an extent not the lesscertainly extraordinary because difficult, if not impossible, to definewith exactitude. On the 4th of October 1795 Coleridge was married atSt. Mary Redcliffe Church, Bristol, to Sarah (or as he preferred tospell it Sara) Fricker, and withdrew for a time from the eagerintellectual life of a political lecturer to the contemplative quietappropriate to the honeymoon of a poet, spent in a sequestered cottageamid beautiful scenery, and within sound of the sea. No wonder thatamong such surroundings, and with such belongings, the honeymoon shouldhave extended from one month to three, and indeed that Coleridge shouldhave waited till his youthful yearnings for a life of action, andperhaps (though that would have lent itself less gracefully to his poemof farewell to his Clevedon cottage) his increasing sense of thenecessity of supplementing the ambrosia of love with the bread andcheese of mortals, compelled him to re-enter the world. No wonder heshould have delayed to do so, for it is as easy to perceive in hispoems that these were days of unclouded happiness as it is melancholyto reflect by how few others like them his life was destined to bebrightened. The _Aeolian Harp_ has no more than the moderatemerits, with its full share of the characteristic faults, of hisearlier productions; but one cannot help "reading into it" the poet'safter-life of disappointment and disillusion--estrangement from the"beloved woman" in whose affection he was then reposing; decay anddisappearance of those "flitting phantasies" with which he was then sojoyously trifling, and the bitterly ironical scholia which fate waspreparing for such lines as "And tranquil muse upon tranquillity. " One cannot in fact refrain from mentally comparing the _'olianHarp_ of 1795 with the _Dejection_ of 1803, and no one who hasthoroughly felt the spirit of both poems can make that comparisonwithout emotion. The former piece is not, as has been said, in aliterary sense remarkable. With the exception of the one point ofmetrical style, to be touched on presently, it has almost no note ofpoetic distinction save such as belongs of right to any simple recordof a mood which itself forms the highest poetry of the average man'slife; and one well knows whence came the criticism of that MS. Noteinscribed by S. T. C. In a copy of the second edition of his earlypoems, "This I think the most perfect poem I ever wrote. Bad may be thebest perhaps. " One feels that the annotator might just as well havewritten, "How perfect was the happiness which this poem recalls!" forthis is really all that Coleridge's eulogium, with its touching biasfrom the hand of memory, amounts to. It has become time, however, to speak more generally of Coleridge'searly poems. The peaceful winter months of 1795-96 were in alllikelihood spent in arranging and revising the products of those poeticimpulses which had more or less actively stirred within him from hisseventeenth year upwards; and in April 1797 there appeared at Bristol avolume of some fifty pieces entitled _Poems on Various Subjects, byS. T. Coleridge, late of Jesus College Cambridge_. It was publishedby his friend Cottle, who, in a mixture of the generous with thespeculative instinct, had given him thirty guineas for the copyright. Its contents are of a miscellaneous kind, consisting partly of rhymedirregular odes, partly of a collection of _Sonnets on EminentCharacters_, and partly (and principally) of a blank verse poem ofseveral hundred lines, then, and indeed for years afterwards, regardedby many of the poet's admirers as his masterpiece--the _ReligiousMusings_. [1] To the second edition of these poems, which was published in thefollowing year, Coleridge, at all times a candid critic (to the limitedextent to which it is possible even for the finest judges to be so) ofhis own works, prefixed a preface, wherein he remarks that his poemshave been "rightly charged with a profusion of double epithets and ageneral turgidness, " and adds that he has "pruned the double epithetswith no sparing hand, " and used his best efforts to tame the swell andglitter both of thought and diction. "The latter fault, however, had, "he continues, "so insinuated itself into my _Religious Musings_with such intricacy of union that sometimes I have omitted todisentangle the weed from fear of snapping the flower. " This is plain-spoken criticism, but I do not think that any reader who is competentto pronounce judgment on the point will be inclined to deprecate itsseverity. Nay, in order to get done with fault-finding as soon aspossible, it must perhaps be added that the admitted turgidness of thepoems is often something more than a mere defect of style, and that theverse is turgid because the feeling which it expresses is exaggerated. The "youthful bard unknown to fame" who, in the _Songs of thePixies_, is made to "heave the gentle misery of a sigh, " is onlydoing a natural thing described in ludicrously and unnaturally stiltedterms; but the young admirer of the _Robbers_, who informsSchiller that if he were to meet him in the evening wandering in hisloftier mood "beneath some vast old tempest-swinging wood, " he would"gaze upon him awhile in mute awe" and then "weep aloud in a wildecstasy, " endangers the reader's gravity not so much by extravagance ofdiction as by over-effusiveness of sentiment. The former of these twooffences differs from the latter by the difference between "fustian"and "gush. " And there is, in fact, more frequent exception to be takento the character of the thought in these poems than to that of thestyle. The remarkable gift of eloquence, which seems to have belongedto Coleridge from boyhood, tended naturally to aggravate that verycommon fault of young poets whose faculty of expression has outstrippedthe growth of their intellectual and emotional experiences--the faultof wordiness. Page after page of the poems of 1796 is filled with whatone cannot, on the most favourable terms, rank higher than rhetoricalcommonplace; stanza after stanza falls pleasantly upon the ear withoutsuggesting any image sufficiently striking to arrest the eye of theimagination, or awakening any thought sufficiently novel to lay holdupon the mind. The _Aeolian Harp_ has been already referred to as apleasing poem, and reading it, as we must, in constant recollection ofthe circumstances in which it was written, it unquestionably is so. Butin none of the descriptions either of external objects or of internalfeeling which are to be found in this and its companion piece, the_Reflections on having left a Place of Retirement_, is thereanything which can fairly be said to elevate them above the level ofgraceful verse. It is only in the region of the fantastic andsupernatural that Coleridge's imagination, as he was destined to showby a far more splendid example two years afterwards, seems to acquiretrue poetic distinction. It is in the _Songs of the Pixies_ thatthe young man "heaves the gentle misery of a sigh, " and the sympatheticinterest of the reader of today is chilled by the too frequentintrusion of certain abstract ladies, each preceded by her capitalletter and attended by her "adjective-in-waiting;" but, after alldeductions for the conventionalisms of "white-robed Purity, " "meek-eyedPity, " "graceful Ease, " etc. , one cannot but feel that the _Songs ofthe Pixies_ was the offspring not of a mere abundant and picturesquevocabulary but of a true poetic fancy. It is worth far more as anearnest of future achievement than the very unequal _Monody on theDeath of Chatterton_ (for which indeed we ought to make specialallowance, as having been commenced in the author's eighteenth year), and certainly than anything which could be quoted from the_Effusions_, as Coleridge, unwilling to challenge comparison withthe divine Bowles, had chosen to describe his sonnets. It must behonestly said indeed that these are, a very few excepted, among theleast satisfactory productions of any period of his poetic career. TheColeridgian sonnet is not only imperfect in form and in marked contrastin the frequent bathos of its close to the steady swell and climax ofWordsworth, but, in by far the majority of instances in this volume, itis wanting in internal weight. The "single pebble" of thought which asonnet should enclose is not only not neatly wrapped up in its envelopeof words, but it is very often not heavy enough to carry itself and itscovering to the mark. When it is so, its weight, as in the sonnet toPitt, is too frequently only another word for an ephemeral violence ofpolitical feeling which, whether displayed on one side or the other, cannot be expected to reproduce its effect in the minds ofcomparatively passionless posterity. Extravagances, too, abound, aswhen in _Kosciusko_ Freedom is made to look as if, in a fit of"wilfulness and sick despair, " she had drained a mystic urn containingall the tears that had ever found "fit channel on a Patriot's furrowedcheek. " The main difficulty of the metre, too--that of avoiding forcedrhymes--is rarely surmounted. Even in the three fine lines in the_Burke_--- "Thee stormy Pity and the cherished lure Of Pomp and proud precipitance of soul, Wildered with meteor fires"-- we cannot help feeling that "lure" is extremely harsh, while theweakness of the two concluding lines of the sonnet supplies a typicalexample of the disappointment which these "effusions" so often preparefor their readers. Enough, however, has been said of the faults of these early poems; itremains to consider their merits, foremost among which, as might beexpected, is the wealth and splendour of their diction in thesepassages, in which such display is all that is needed for the literaryends of the moment. Over all that wide region of literature, in whichforce and fervour of utterance, depth and sincerity of feeling avail, without the nameless magic of poetry in the higher sense of the word, to achieve the objects of the writer and to satisfy the mind of thereader, Coleridge ranges with a free and sure footstep. It is nodisparagement to his _Religious Musings_ to say that it is to thisclass of literature that it belongs. Having said this, however, it mustbe added that poetry of the second order has seldom risen to higherheights of power. The faults already admitted disfigure it here andthere. We have "moon blasted Madness when he yells at midnight;" weread of "eye-starting wretches and rapture-trembling seraphim, " and thereally striking image of Ruin, the "old hag, unconquerable, huge, Creation's eyeless drudge, " is marred by making her "nurse" an"impatient earthquake. " But there is that in Coleridge's aspirationsand apostrophes to the Deity which impresses one even more profoundlythan the mere magnificence, remarkable as it is, of their rhetoricalclothing. They are touched with so penetrating a sincerity; they are soobviously the outpourings of an awe-struck heart. Indeed, there isnothing more remarkable at this stage of Coleridge's poetic developmentthan the instant elevation which his verse assumes whenever he passesto Divine things. At once it seems to take on a Miltonic majesty ofdiction and a Miltonic stateliness of rhythm. The tender but low-lyingdomestic sentiment of the _Aeolian Harp_ is in a moment informed byit with the dignity which marks that poem's close. Apart too from itsliterary merits, the biographical interest of _Religious Musings_is very considerable. "Written, " as its title declares, but in reality, as its length would suggest and as Mr. Cottle in fact tells us, only_completed_, "on the Christmas eve of 1794, " it gives expressionto the tumultuous emotions by which Coleridge's mind was agitated atthis its period of highest political excitement. His revolutionaryenthusiasm was now at its hottest, his belief in the infant FrenchRepublic at its fullest, his wrath against the "coalesced kings" at itsfiercest, his contempt for their religious pretence at its bitterest. "Thee to defend, " he cries, "Thee to defend, dear Saviour of mankind! Thee, Lamb of God! Thee, blameless Prince of Peace! From all sides rush the thirsty brood of war-- Austria, and that foul Woman of the North, The lustful murderess of her wedded lord, And he, connatural mind! whom (in their songs, So bards of elder time had haply feigned) Some Fury fondled in her hate to man, Bidding her serpent hair in tortuous fold Lick his young face, and at his mouth imbreathe Horrible sympathy!" This is vigorous poetic invective; and the effect of such outbursts isheightened by the rapid subsidence of the passion that inspires themand the quick advent of a calmer mood. We have hardly turned the pageere denunciations of Catherine and Frederick William give place toprayerful invocations of the Supreme Being, which are in their turn theprelude of a long and beautiful contemplative passage: "In the prim'valage, a dateless while, " etc. , on the pastoral origin of human society. It is as though some sweet and solemn strain of organ music hadsucceeded to the blast of war-bugles and the roll of drums. In the_Ode to the Departing Year_, written in the last days of 1796, with its "prophecy of curses though I pray fervently for blessings"upon the poet's native country, the mood is more uniform in its gloom;and it lacks something, therefore, of those peculiar qualities whichmake the _Religious Musings_ one perhaps of the most pleasing ofall Coleridge's earlier productions. But it shares with the poemsshortly to be noticed what may be called the autobiographic charm. Thefresh natural emotion of a young and brilliant mind is eternallyinteresting, and Coleridge's youthful Muse, with a frankness of self-disclosure which is not the less winning because at times it provokes asmile, confides to us even the history of her most temporary moods. Itis, for instance, at once amusing and captivating to read in the latestedition of the poems, as a footnote to the lines-- "Not yet enslaved, not wholly vile, O Albion! O my mother isle!" the words-- "O doomed to fall, enslaved and vile--1796. " Yes; in 1796 and till the end of 1797 the poet's native country_was_ in his opinion all these dreadful things, but, directly themood changes, the verse alters, and to the advantage, one cannot butthink, of the beautiful and often-quoted close of the passage-- "And Ocean mid his uproar wild Speaks safety to his island child. Hence for many a fearless age Has social Quiet loved thy shore, Nor ever proud invader's rage, Or sacked thy towers or stained thy fields with gore. " And whether we view him in his earlier or his later mood there is acertain strange dignity of utterance, a singular confidence in his ownpoetic mission, which forbids us to smile at this prophet of four-and-twenty who could thus conclude his menacing vaticinations:-- "Away, my soul, away! I, unpartaking of the evil thing, With daily prayer and daily toil Soliciting for food my scanty soil, Have wailed my country with a loud lament. Now I recentre my immortal mind In the deep Sabbath of meek self-content, Cleansed from the vaporous passions which bedim God's image, sister of the Seraphim. " If ever the consciousness of great powers and the assurance of a greatfuture inspired a youth with perfect and on the whole well-warrantedfearlessness of ridicule it has surely done so here. Poetry alone, however, formed no sufficient outlet for Coleridge'sstill fresh political enthusiasm--an enthusiasm which now became tooimportunate to let him rest in his quiet Clevedon cottage. Was itright, he cries in his lines of leave-taking to his home, that heshould dream away the entrusted hours "while his unnumbered brethrentoiled and bled"? The propaganda of Liberty was to be pushed forward;the principles of Unitarianism, to which Coleridge had become a convertat Cambridge, were to be preached. Is it too prosaic to add that whatpoor Henri Murger calls the "chasse aux piece de cent sous" was in allprobability demanding peremptorily to be resumed? Anyhow it so fell out that in the spring of the year 1796 Coleridgetook his first singular plunge into the unquiet waters of journalism, instigated thereto by "sundry philanthropists and anti-polemists, "whose names he does not record, but among whom we may conjecturallyplace Mr. Thomas Poole of Stowey, with whom he had formed what wasdestined to be one of the longest and closest friendships of his life. Which of the two parties--the advisers or the advised--was responsiblefor the general plan of this periodical and for the arrangements forits publication is unknown; but one of these last-mentioned details isenough to indicate that there could have been no "business head" amongthem. Considering that the motto of the _Watchman_ declared theobject of its issue to be that "all might know the truth, and that thetruth might make them free, " it is to be presumed that the promoters ofthe scheme were not unwilling to secure as many subscribers as possiblefor their sheet of "thirty-two pages, large octavo, closely printed, price only fourpence. " In order, however, to exempt it from the stamp-tax, and with the much less practical object of making it "contributeas little as possible to the supposed guilt of a war against freedom, "it was to be published on every eighth day, so that the week-day of itsappearance would of course vary with each successive week--anarrangement as ingeniously calculated to irritate and alienate itspublic as any perhaps that the wit of man could have devised. So, however, it was to be, and accordingly with "a naming prospectus, 'Knowledge is Power, ' to cry the state of the political atmosphere, "Coleridge set off on a tour to the north, from Bristol to Sheffield, for the purpose of procuring customers, preaching Unitarian sermons bythe way in most of the great towns, "as an hireless volunteer in a bluecoat and white waistcoat that not a rag of the woman of Babylon mightbe seen on me. " How he sped upon his mission is related by him withinfinite humour in the _Biographia Literaria_. He opened thecampaign at Birmingham upon a Calvinist tallow-chandler, who, afterlistening to half an hour's harangue, extending from "the captivity ofthe nations" to "the near approach of the millennium, " and winding upwith a quotation describing the latter "glorious state" out of the_Religious Musings_, inquired what might be the cost of the newpublication. Deeply sensible of "the anti-climax, the abysmal bathos"of the answer, Coleridge replied, "Only fourpence, each number to bepublished every eighth day, " upon which the tallow-chandler observeddoubtfully that that came to "a deal of money at the end of the year. "What determined him, however, to withhold his patronage was not theprice of the article but its quantity, and not the deficiency of thatquantity but its excess. Thirty-two pages, he pointed out, was morethan he ever read all the year round, and though "as great a one as anyman in Brummagem for liberty and truth, and them sort of things, hebegged to be excused. " Had it been possible to arrange for supplyinghim with sixteen pages of the paper for twopence, a bargain might nodoubt have been struck; but he evidently had a business-like repugnanceto anything in the nature of "over-trading. " Equally unsuccessful was asecond application made at Manchester to a "stately and opulentwholesale dealer in cottons, " who thrust the prospectus into his pocketand turned his back upon the projector, muttering that he was "overrunwith these articles. " This, however, was Coleridge's last attempt atcanvassing. His friends at Birmingham persuaded him to leave that workto others, their advice being no doubt prompted, in part at least, bythe ludicrous experience of his qualifications as a canvasser which thefollowing incident furnished them. The same tradesman who hadintroduced him to the patriotic tallow-chandler entertained him atdinner, and, after the meal, invited his guest to smoke a pipe with himand "two or three other _illuminati_ of the same rank. " Theinvitation was at first declined on the plea of an engagement to spendthe evening with a minister and his friends, and also because, writesColeridge, "I had never smoked except once or twice in my lifetime, andthen it was herb-tobacco mixed with Oronooko. " His host, however, assured him that the tobacco was equally mild, and "seeing, too, thatit was of a yellow colour, " he took half a pipe of it, "filling thelower half of the bowl, " for some unexplained reason, "with salt. " Hewas soon, however, compelled to resign it "in consequence of agiddiness and distressful feeling" in his eyes, which, as he had drunkbut a single glass of ale, he knew must have been the effect of thetobacco. Deeming himself recovered after a short interval, he salliedforth to fulfil the evening's engagement; but the symptoms returnedwith the walk and the fresh air, and he had scarcely entered theminister's drawing-room and opened a packet of letters awaiting himthere than he "sank back on the sofa in a sort of swoon rather thansleep. " Fortunately he had had time to inform his new host of theconfused state of his feelings and of its occasion; for "here and thusI lay, " he continues, "my face like a wall that is whitewashing, deathly pale, and with the cold drops of perspiration running down itfrom my forehead; while one after another there dropped in thedifferent gentlemen who had been invited to meet and spend the eveningwith me, to the number of from fifteen to twenty. As the poison oftobacco acts but for a short time, I at length awoke from insensibilityand looked round on the party, my eyes dazzled by the candles, whichhad been lighted in the interim. By way of relieving my embarrassmentone of the gentlemen began the conversation with: 'Have you seen apaper to-day, Mr. Coleridge?' 'Sir, ' I replied, rubbing my eyes, 'I amfar from convinced that a Christian is permitted to read eithernewspapers or any other works of merely political and temporaryinterest. '" The incongruity of this remark, with the purpose for whichthe speaker was known to have visited Birmingham, and to assist him inwhich the company had assembled, produced, as was natural, "aninvoluntary and general burst of laughter, " and the party spent, we aretold, a most delightful evening. Both then and afterwards, however, they all joined in dissuading the young projector from proceeding withhis scheme, assuring him "in the most friendly and yet most flatteringexpressions" that the employment was neither fit for him nor he for theemployment. They insisted that at any rate "he should make no moreapplications in person, but carry on the canvass by proxy, " astipulation which we may well believe to have been prompted as much bypolicy as by good nature. The same hospitable reception, the samedissuasion, and, that failing, the same kind exertions on his behalf, he met with at Manchester, Derby, Nottingham, and every other place hevisited; and the result of his tour was that he returned with nearly athousand names on the subscription list of the _Watchman_, together with "something more than a half conviction that prudencedictated the abandonment of the scheme. " Nothing but this, however, wasneeded to induce him to persevere with it. To know that a given courseof conduct was the dictate of prudence was a sort of presumptive proofto him at this period of life that the contrary was the dictate ofduty. In due time, or rather out of due time, --for the publication ofthe first number was delayed beyond the day announced for it, --the_Watchman_ appeared. Its career was brief--briefer, indeed, thanit need have been. A naturally short life was suicidally shortened. Inthe second number, records Coleridge, with delightful _naivete_, "an essay against fast-days, with a most censurable application of atext from Isaiah [2] for its motto, lost me near five hundredsubscribers at one blow. " In the two following numbers he made enemiesof all his Jacobin and democratic patrons by playing Balaam to thelegislation of the Government, and pronouncing something almost like ablessing on the "gagging bills"--measures he declared which, "whateverthe motive of their introduction, would produce an effect to be desiredby all true friends of freedom, as far as they should contribute todeter men from openly declaiming on subjects the principles of whichthey had never bottomed, and from pleading to the poor and ignorantinstead of pleading for them. " At the same time the editor of the_Watchman_ avowed his conviction that national education and aconcurring spread of the Gospel were the indispensable conditions ofany true political amelioration. We can hardly wonder on the whole thatby the time the seventh number was published its predecessors werebeing "exposed in sundry old iron shops at a penny a piece. " And yet, like everything which came from Coleridge's hand, thisimmature and unpractical production has an interest of its own. Amidthe curious mixture of actuality and abstract disquisition of whicheach number of the _Watchman_ is made up, we are arrested againand again by some striking metaphor or some weighty sentence whichtells us that the writer is no mere wordy wielder of a facile pen. Thepaper on the slave trade in the seventh number is a vigorous and, inplaces, a heart-stirring appeal to the humane emotions. There arepassages in it which foreshadow Coleridge's more mature literarymanner--the manner of the great pulpit orators of the seventeenthcentury--in a very interesting way. [3] But what was the use of No. IVcontaining an effective article like this when No. III. Had opened withan "Historical Sketch of the Manners and Religion of the AncientGermans, introductory to a sketch of the Manners, Religion, andPolitics of present Germany"? This to a public who wanted to read aboutNapoleon and Mr. Pitt! No. III. In all probability "choked off" a goodproportion of the commonplace readers who might have been well contentto have put up with the humanitarian rhetoric of No. IV. , if only for itsconnection with so unquestionable an actuality as West Indian sugar. Itwas, anyhow, owing to successive alienations of this kind that on13th May 1796 the editor of the _Watchman_ was compelled to bidfarewell to his few remaining readers in the tenth number of hisperiodical, for the "short and satisfactory" reason that "the work doesnot pay its expenses. " "Part of my readers, " continues Coleridge, "relinquished it because it did not contain sufficient originalcomposition, and a still larger part because it contained too much;"and he then proceeds with that half-humorous simplicity of his toexplain what excellent reasons there were why the first of theseclasses should transfer their patronage to Flower's _CambridgeIntelligencer_, and the second theirs to the _New MonthlyMagazine_. It is not, however, for the biographer or the world to regret the shortcareer of the _Watchman_, since its decease left Coleridge's mindin undivided allegiance to the poetic impulse at what was destined tobe the period of its greatest power. In the meantime one result of theepisode had been to make a not unimportant addition to his friendships. Mention has already been made of his somewhat earlier acquaintance withMr. Thomas Poole of Nether Stowey, a man of high intelligence and markin his time; and it was in the course of his northern peregrinations insearch of subscribers that he met with Charles Lloyd. This young man, the son of an eminent Birmingham banker, was so struck with Coleridge'sgenius and eloquence as to conceive an "ardent desire to domesticatehimself permanently with a man whose conversation was to him as arevelation from heaven;" and shortly after the decease of the_Watchman_ he obtained his parents' consent to the arrangement. Early, therefore, in the year 1797 Coleridge, accompanied by CharlesLloyd, removed to Nether Stowey in Somersetshire, where he occupied acottage placed at his disposal by Mr. Poole. His first employment inhis new abode appears to have been the preparation of the secondedition of his poems. In the new issue nineteen pieces of the formerpublication were discarded and twelve new ones added, the mostimportant of which was the _Ode to the Departing Year_, which hadfirst appeared in the _Cambridge Intelligencer_, and had beenimmediately afterwards republished in a separate form as a thin quartopamphlet, together with some lines of no special merit "addressed to ayoung man of fortune" (probably Charles Lloyd), "who abandoned himselfto an indolent and causeless melancholy. " To the new edition were addedthe preface already quoted from, and a prose introduction to thesonnets. The volume also contained some poems by Charles Lloyd and anenlarged collection of sonnets and other pieces by Charles Lamb, thelatter of whom about the time of its publication paid his first visitto the friend with whom, ever since leaving Christ's Hospital, he hadkept up a constant and, to the student of literature, a mostinteresting correspondence. [4] In June 1797 Charles and Mary Lambarrived at the Stowey cottage to find their host disabled by anaccident which prevented him from walking during their whole stay. Itwas during their absence on a walking expedition that he composed thepleasing lines-- "The lime-tree bower my prison, " in which he thrice applies to his friend that epithet which gave suchhumorous annoyance to the "gentle-hearted Charles. " [5] But a greater than Lamb, if one may so speak without offence to thevotaries of that rare humorist and exquisite critic, had already madehis appearance on the scene. Some time before this visit of Lamb's toStowey Coleridge had made the acquaintance of the remarkable man whowas destined to influence his literary career in many ways importantly, and in one way decisively. It was in the month of June 1797, and at thevillage of Racedown in Dorsetshire, that he first met WilliamWordsworth. FOOTNOTES 1. The volume contained also three sonnets by Charles Lamb, one ofwhich was destined to have a somewhat curious history. 2. "Wherefore my bowels shall sound like an harp. "--Is. Xvi. 11. 3. Take for instance this sentence: "Our own sorrows, like the Princesof Hell in Milton's Pandemonium, sit enthroned 'bulky and vast;' whilethe miseries of our fellow-creatures dwindle into pigmy forms, and arecrowded in an innumerable multitude into some dark corner of theheart. " Both in character of imagery and in form of structure we havehere the germ of such passages as this which one might confidently defythe most accomplished literary "taster" to distinguish from JeremyTaylor: "Or like two rapid streams that at their first meeting withinnarrow and rocky banks mutually strive to repel each other, andintermix reluctantly and in tumult, but soon finding a wider channeland more yielding shores, blend and dilate and flow on in one currentand with one voice. "--_Biog. Lit. _ p. 155. 4. Perhaps a "correspondence" of which only one side exists may behardly thought to deserve that name. Lamb's letters to Coleridge arefull of valuable criticism on their respective poetical efforts. Unfortunately in, it is somewhat strangely said, "a fit of dejection"he destroyed all Coleridge's letters to him. 5. Lamb's Correspondence with Coleridge, Letter XXXVII. CHAPTER III. Coleridge and Wordsworth--Publication of the _LyricalBallads_--The _Ancient Mariner_--The first part of_Christabel_--Decline of Coleridge's poetic impulse-Final review of his poetry. [1797-1799. ] The years 1797 and 1798 are generally and justly regarded as theblossoming-time of Coleridge's poetic genius. It would be scarcely anexaggeration to say that they were even more than this, and that withinthe brief period covered by them is included not only the developmentof the poet's powers to their full maturity but the untimely beginningsof their decline. For to pass from the poems written by Coleridgewithin these two years to those of later origin is like passing fromamong the green wealth of summer foliage into the well-nigh naked woodsof later autumn. During 1797 and 1798 the _Ancient Mariner_, thefirst part of _Christabel_, the fine ode to France, the _Fearsin Solitude_, the beautiful lines entitled _Frost at Midnight_, the _Nightingale_, the _Circassian Love-Chant_, the piece knownas _Love_ from the poem of the _Dark Ladie_, and that strangefragment _Kubla Khan_, were all of them written and nearly allof them published; while between the last composed of these andthat swan-song of his dying Muse, the _Dejection_, of 1802, thereis but one piece to be added to the list of his greater works. Thistherefore, the second part of _Christabel_ (1800), may almost bedescribed by the picturesque image in the first part of the same poemas "The one red leaf, the last of its clan, Hanging so light and hanging so high, On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky. " The first to fail him of his sources of inspiration was hisrevolutionary enthusiasm; and the ode to France--the _Recantation_, as it was styled on its first appearance in the _Morning Post_--is therecord of a reaction which, as has been said, was as much speedier inColeridge's case than in that of the other ardent young minds which hadcome under the spell of the Revolution as his enthusiasm had been morepassionate than theirs. In the winter of 1797-98 the Directory hadplunged France into an unnatural conflict with her sister Republic ofSwitzerland, and Coleridge, who could pardon and had pardoned herfierce animosity against a country which he considered not so much hisown as Pitt's, was unable to forgive her this. In the _Recantation_he casts her off for ever; he perceives at last that true liberty is notto be obtained through political, but only through spiritual emancipation;that-- "The sensual and the dark rebel in vain, Slaves by their own compulsion! In mad game They burst their manacles, and wear the name Of Freedom graven on a heavier chain"; and arrives in a noble peroration at the somewhat unsatisfactoryconclusion, that the spirit of liberty, "the guide of homeless windsand playmate of the waves, " is to be found only among the elements, andnot in the institutions of man. And in the same quaintly ingenuousspirit which half touches and half amuses us in his earlier poems helets us perceive a few weeks later, in his _Fears in Solitude_, that sympathy with a foreign nation threatened by the invader maygradually develop into an almost filial regard for one's own similarlysituated land. He has been deemed, he says, an enemy of his country. "But, O dear Britain! O my mother Isle, " once, it may be remembered, "doomed to fall enslaved and vile, " butnow-- "Needs must them prove a name most dear and holy, To me a son, a brother, and a friend, A husband and a father! who revere All bonds of natural love, and find them all Within the limits of thy rocky shores. " After all, it has occurred to him, England is not only the England ofPitt and Grenville, and in that capacity the fitting prey of theinsulted French Republic: she is also the England of Sara Coleridge, and little Hartley, and of Mr. Thomas Poole of Nether Stowey. And so, to be sure, she was in 1796 when her downfall was predicted, and in thespirit rather of the Old Testament than of the New. But there issomething very engaging in the candour with which the young poethastens to apprise us of this his first awakening to the fact. _France_ may be regarded as the last ode, and _Fears inSolitude_ as the last blank-verse poem of any importance, that owetheir origin to Coleridge's early political sentiments. Henceforth, andfor the too brief period of his poetic activity, he was to derive hisinspiration from other sources. The most fruitful and important ofthese was unquestionably his intercourse with Wordsworth, from whom, although there was doubtless a reciprocation of influence betweenthem, his much more receptive nature took a far deeper impression thanit made. [1] At the time of their meeting he had already for some threeyears been acquainted with Wordsworth's works as a poet, and it speakshighly for his discrimination that he was able to discern the greatpowers of his future friend, even in work so immature in many respectsas the _Descriptive Sketches_. It was during the last year of hisresidence at Cambridge that he first met with these poems, of which hesays in the _Biographia Literaria_ that "seldom, if ever, was theemergence of an original poetic genius above the literary horizon moreevidently announced;" and the effect produced by this volume wassteadily enhanced by further acquaintance both with the poet and hisworks. Nothing, indeed, is so honourably noticeable and even touchingin Coleridge's relation to his friend as the tone of reverence withwhich, even in the days of his highest self-confidence and even almosthaughty belief in the greatness of his own poetic mission, he wasaccustomed to speak of Wordsworth. A witness, to be more fully citedhereafter, and whose testimony is especially valuable as that of onewho was by no means blind to Coleridge's early foible of self-complacency, has testified to this unbounded admiration of his brother-poet. "When, " records this gentleman, "we have sometimes spokencomplimentarily to Coleridge of himself he has said that he was nothingin comparison with Wordsworth. " And two years before this, at a timewhen they had not yet tested each other's power in literarycollaboration, he had written to Cottle to inform him of hisintroduction to the author of "near twelve hundred lines of blankverse, superior, I dare aver, to anything in our language which in anyway resembles it, " and had declared with evident sincerity that he felt"a little man" by Wordsworth's side. His own impression upon his new friend was more distinctively personalin its origin. It was by Coleridge's total individuality, by the sum ofhis vast and varied intellectual powers, rather than by the specificpoetic element contained in them, that Wordsworth, like the rest of theworld indeed, was in the main attracted; but it is clear enough thatthis attraction was from the first most powerful. On that point we havenot only the weighty testimony of Dorothy Wordsworth, as conveyed inher often-quoted description [2] of her brother's new acquaintance, butthe still more conclusive evidence of her brother's own acts. He gavethe best possible proof of the fascination which had been exercisedover him by quitting Racedown with his sister for Alfoxden near NetherStowey within a few weeks of his first introduction to Coleridge, achange of abode for which, as Miss Wordsworth has expressly recorded, "our principal inducement was Coleridge's society. " By a curious coincidence the two poets were at this time simultaneouslysickening for what may perhaps be appropriately called the "poeticmeasles. " They were each engaged in the composition of a five-acttragedy, and read scenes to each other, and to each other's admiration, from their respective dramas. Neither play was fortunate in itsimmediate destiny. Wordsworth's tragedy, the _Borderers_, wasgreatly commended by London critics and decisively rejected by themanagement of Covent Garden. As for Coleridge, the negligent Sheridandid not even condescend to acknowledge the receipt of his manuscript;his play was passed from hand to hand among the Drury Lane Committee;but not till many years afterwards did _Osorio_ find its way underanother name to the footlights. For the next twelvemonth the intercourse between the two poets wasclose and constant, and most fruitful in results of high moment toEnglish literature. It was in their daily rambles among the QuantockHills that they excogitated that twofold theory of the essence andfunctions of poetry which was to receive such notable illustration intheir joint volume of verse, the _Lyrical Ballads_; it was duringa walk over the Quantock Hills that by far the most famous poem of thatseries, the _Ancient Mariner_, was conceived and in part composed. The publication of the _Lyrical Ballads_ in the spring of the year1798 was, indeed, an event of double significance for English poetry. It marked an epoch in the creative life of Coleridge, and a no lessimportant one in the critical life of Wordsworth. In the _BiographiaLiteraria_ the origination of the plan of the work is thusdescribed:-- "During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours ourconversation turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithfuladherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interestof novelty by the modifying colours of the imagination. The suddencharm which accidents of light and shade, which moonlight or sunsetdiffused over a known and familiar landscape appeared to represent thepracticability of combining both. These are the poetry of nature. Thethought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that aseries of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one theincidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; andthe interest aimed at was to consist in the interesting of theaffections by the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturallyaccompany such situations, supposing them real. .. . For the secondclass, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life; the charactersand incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and itsvicinity where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek afterthem, or to notice them when they present themselves. In this ideaoriginated the plan of the _Lyrical Ballads_, in which it wasagreed that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characterssupernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from ourinward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient toprocure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension ofdisbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself, as hisobject, to give the charm of novelty to things of everyday, and toexcite a feeling analogous to the supernatural by awakening the mind'sattention from the lethargy of custom and directing it to theloveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustibletreasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity andselfish solicitude, we have eyes which see not, ears that hear not, andhearts which neither feel nor understand. " We may measure the extent to which the poetic teaching and practice ofWordsworth have influenced subsequent taste and criticism by noting howcompletely the latter of these two functions of poetry has overshadowedthe former. To lend the charm of imagination to the real will appear tomany people to be not one function of poetry merely but its veryessence. To them it is poetry, and the only thing worthy of the name;while the correlative function of lending the force of reality to theimaginary will appear at best but a superior kind of metricalromancing, or clever telling of fairy tales. Nor of course can there, from the point of view of the highest conception of the poet's office, be any comparison between the two. In so far as we regard poetry ascontributing not merely to the pleasure of the mind but to its healthand strength--in so far as we regard it in its capacity not only todelight but to sustain, console, and tranquillise the human spirit--there is, of course, as much difference between the idealistic and therealistic forms of poetry as there is between a narcotic potion and ahealing drug. The one, at best, can only enable a man to forget hisburdens; the other fortifies him to endure them. It is perhaps no morethan was naturally to be expected of our brooding and melancholy age, that poetry (when it is not a mere voluptuous record of the subjectiveimpressions of sense) should have become almost limited in its verymeaning to the exposition of the imaginative or spiritual aspect of theworld of realities; but so it is now, and so in Coleridge's time itclearly was _not_. Coleridge, in the passage above quoted, showsno signs of regarding one of the two functions which he attributes topoetry as any more accidental or occasional than the other; and thefact that the realistic portion of the _Lyrical Ballads_ so farexceeded in amount its supernatural element, he attributes not to anyinherent supremacy in the claims of the former to attention but simplyto the greater industry which Wordsworth had displayed in his specialdepartment of the volume. For his own part, he says, "I wrote the_Ancient Mariner_, and was preparing, among other poems, the_Dark Ladie_ and the _Christabel_, in which I should have morenearly realised my ideal than I had done in my first attempt. ButMr. Wordsworth's industry had proved so much more successful, and thenumber of the poems so much greater, that my compositions, instead offorming a balance, appeared rather an interpolation of heterogeneousmatter. " There was certainly a considerable disparity between theamount of their respective contributions to the volume, which, in fact, contained nineteen pieces by Wordsworth and only four by Coleridge. Practically, indeed, we may reduce this four to one; for, of the threeothers, the two scenes from _Osorio_ are without special distinction, and the _Nightingale_, though a graceful poem, and containingan admirably-studied description of the bird's note, is tooslight and short to claim any importance in the series. But the onelong poem which Coleridge contributed to the collection is alonesufficient to associate it for ever with his name. _Unum sedleonem. _ To any one who should have taunted him with the comparativeinfertility of his Muse he might well have returned the haughty answerof the lioness in the fable, when he could point in justification of itto the _Rime of the Ancient Marinere_. There is, I may assume, no need at the present day to discuss the trueplace in English literature of this unique product of the humanimagination. One is bound, however, to attempt to correlate and adjustit to the rest of the poet's work, and this, it must be admitted, is amost difficult piece of business. Never was there a poem so irritatingto a critic of the "pigeon-holing" variety. It simply defies him; andyet the instinct which he obeys is so excusable, because in fact souniversal, that one feels guilty of something like disloyalty to thevery principles of order in smiling at his disappointment. Complete andsymmetrical classification is so fascinating an amusement; it wouldsimplify so many subjects of study, if men and things would onlyconsent to rank themselves under different categories, and remainthere; it would, in particular, be so inexpressibly convenient to beable to lay your hand upon your poet whenever you wanted him by merelyturning to a shelf labelled "Realistic" or "Imaginative" (nay, perhaps, to the still greater saving of labour--Objective or Subjective), thatwe cannot be surprised at the strength of the aforesaid instinct inmany a critical mind. Nor should it be hard to realise its revoltagainst those single exceptions which bring its generalisations tonought. When the pigeon-hole will admit every "document" but one, thecase is hard indeed; and it is not too much to say that the _AncientMariner_ is the one document which the pigeon-hole in this instancedeclines to admit. If Coleridge had only refrained from writing thisremarkable poem, or if, having done so, he had written more poems likeit, the critic might have ticketed him with a quiet mind, and gone onhis way complacent. As it is, however, the poet has contrived in virtueof this performance not only to defeat classification but to defy it. For the weird ballad abounds in those very qualities in whichColeridge's poetry with all its merits is most conspicuously deficient, while on the other hand it is wholly free from the faults with which heis most frequently and justly chargeable. One would not have said inthe first place that the author of _Religious Musings_, still lessof the _Monody on the Death of Chatterton_, was by any means theman to have compassed triumphantly at the very first attempt theterseness, vigour, and _naivete_ of the true ballad-manner. Toattain this, Coleridge, the student of his early verse must feel, wouldhave rather more to retrench and much more to restrain than might bethe case with many other youthful poets. The exuberance of immaturity, the want of measure, the "not knowing where to stop, " are certainlyeven more conspicuous in the poems of 1796 than they are in mostproductions of the same stage of poetic development; and thesequalities, it is needless to say, require very stern chastening fromhim who would succeed in the style which Coleridge attempted for thefirst time in the _Ancient Mariner_. The circumstances of this immortal ballad's birth have been relatedwith such fulness of detail by Wordsworth, and Coleridge's ownreferences to them are so completely reconcilable with that account, that it must have required all De Quincey's consummate ingenuity as amischief-maker to detect any discrepancy between the two. In the autumn of 1797, records Wordsworth in the MS. Notes which heleft behind him, "Mr. Coleridge, my sister, and myself started fromAlfoxden pretty late in the afternoon with a view to visit Linton andthe Valley of Stones near to it; and as our united funds were verysmall, we agreed to defray the expense of the tour by writing a poem tobe sent to the _New Monthly Magazine_. Accordingly we set off, andproceeded along the Quantock Hills towards Watchet; and in the courseof this walk was planned the poem of the _Ancient Mariner_, founded on a dream, as Mr. Coleridge said, of his friend Mr. Cruikshank. Much the greatest part of the story was Mr. Coleridge'sinvention, but certain parts I suggested; for example, some crime wasto be committed which should bring upon the Old Navigator, as Coleridgeafterwards delighted to call him, the spectral persecution, as aconsequence of that crime and his own wanderings. I had been reading inShelvocke's _Voyages_, a day or two before, that while doublingCape Horn they frequently saw albatrosses in that latitude, the largestsort of sea-fowl, some extending their wings twelve or thirteen feet. 'Suppose, ' said I, 'you represent him as having killed one of thesebirds on entering the South Sea, and that the tutelary spirits of theseregions take upon them to avenge the crime. ' The incident was thoughtfit for the purpose, and adopted accordingly. I also suggested thenavigation of the ship by the dead men, but do not recollect that I hadanything more to do with the scheme of the poem. The gloss with whichit was subsequently accompanied was not thought of by either of us atthe time, at least not a hint of it was given to me, and I have nodoubt it was a gratuitous afterthought. We began the compositiontogether on that to me memorable evening. I furnished two or threelines at the beginning of the poem, in particular-- "'And listened like a three years' child: The Mariner had his will. ' "These trifling contributions, all but one, which Mr. C. Has withunnecessary scrupulosity recorded, [3] slipped out of his mind, as theywell might. As we endeavoured to proceed conjointly (I speak of thesame evening) our respective manners proved so widely different that itwould have been quite presumptuous in me to do anything but separatefrom an undertaking upon which I could only have been a clog. .. . The_Ancient Mariner_ grew and grew till it became too important forour first object, which was limited to our expectation of five pounds;and we began to think of a volume which was to consist, as Mr. Coleridge has told the world, of poems chiefly on supernaturalsubjects. " Except that the volume ultimately determined on was toconsist only "partly" and not "chiefly" of poems on supernaturalsubjects (in the result, as has been seen, it consisted "chiefly" ofpoems upon natural subjects), there is nothing in this account whichcannot be easily reconciled with the probable facts upon which DeQuincey bases his hinted charge against Coleridge in his _LakePoets_. It was not Coleridge who had been reading Shelvocke's_Voyages_, but Wordsworth, and it is quite conceivable, therefore, that the source from which his friend had derived the idea of thekilling of the albatross may (if indeed he was informed of it at thetime) have escaped his memory twelve years afterwards, when theconversation with De Quincey took place. Hence, in "disowning hisobligations to Shelvocke, " he may not by any means have intended tosuggest that the albatross incident was his own thought. Moreover, DeQuincey himself supplies another explanation of the matter, which weknow, from the above-quoted notes of Wordsworth's, to be founded uponfact. "It is possible, " he adds, "from something which Coleridge saidon another occasion, that before meeting a fable in which to embody hisideas he had meditated a poem on delirium, confounding its own dream-scenery with external things, and connected with the imagery of highlatitudes. " Nothing, in fact, would be more natural than thatColeridge, whose idea of the haunted seafarer was primarily suggestedby his friend's dream, and had no doubt been greatly elaborated in hisown imagination before being communicated to Wordsworth at all, shouldhave been unable, after a considerable lapse of time, to distinguishbetween incidents of his own imagining and those suggested to him byothers. And, in any case, the "unnecessary scrupulosity, " rightlyattributed to him by Wordsworth with respect to this very poem, isquite incompatible with any intentional denial of obligations. Such, then, was the singular and even prosaic origin of the _AncientMariner_--a poem written to defray the expenses of a tour; surelythe most sublime of "pot-boilers" to be found in all literature. It isdifficult, from amid the astonishing combination of the elements ofpower, to select that which is the most admirable; but, consideringboth the character of the story and of its particular vehicle, perhapsthe greatest achievement of the poem is the simple realistic force ofits narrative. To achieve this was of course Coleridge's main object:he had undertaken to "transfer from our inward nature a human interestand a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows ofimaginations that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment whichconstitutes poetic faith. " But it is easier to undertake this than toperform it, and much easier to perform it in prose than in verse--withthe assistance of the everyday and the commonplace than without it. Balzac's _Peau de Chagrin_ is no doubt a great feat of therealistic-supernatural; but no one can help feeling how much the authoris aided by his "broker's clerk" style of description, and by thefamiliar Parisian scenes among which he makes his hero move. It iseasier to compass verisimilitude in the Palais-Royal than on the SouthPacific, to say nothing of the thousand assisting touches, out of placein rhyme and metre, which can be thrown into a prose narrative. The_Ancient Mariner_, however, in spite of all these drawbacks, is asreal to the reader as is the hero of the _Peau de Chagrin_; we areas convinced of the curse upon one of the doomed wretches as upon theother; and the strange phantasmagoric haze which is thrown around theship and the lonely voyager leaves their outlines as clear as if we sawthem through the sunshine of the streets of Paris. Coleridge triumphsover his difficulties by sheer vividness of imagery and terse vigour ofdescriptive phrase--two qualities for which his previous poems did notprove him to possess by any means so complete a mastery. For among allthe beauties of his earlier landscapes we can hardly reckon that ofintense and convincing truth. He seems seldom before to have written, as Wordsworth nearly always seems to write, "with his eye on theobject;" and certainly he never before displayed any remarkable powerof completing his word-picture with a few touches. In the _AncientMariner_ his eye seems never to wander from his object, and againand again the scene starts out upon the canvas in two or three strokesof the brush. The skeleton ship, with the dicing demons on its deck;the setting sun peering "through its ribs, as if through a dungeon-grate;" the water-snakes under the moonbeams, with the "elfish light"falling off them "in hoary flakes" when they reared; the dead crew, whowork the ship and "raise their limbs like lifeless tools"--everythingseems to have been actually _seen_, and we believe it all as thestory of a truthful eye-witness. The details of the voyage, too, areall chronicled with such order and regularity, there is such a diary-like air about the whole thing, that we accept it almost as if it werea series of extracts from the ship's "log. " Then again the execution--agreat thing to be said of so long a poem--is marvellously equalthroughout; the story never drags or flags for a moment, its felicitiesof diction are perpetual, and it is scarcely marred by a single weakline. What could have been better said of the instantaneous descent ofthe tropical night than "The Sun's rim dips; the stars rush out: At one stride comes the dark;" what more weirdly imagined of the "cracks and growls" of the rendingiceberg than that they sounded "like noises in a swound"? And howbeautifully steals in the passage that follows upon the cessation ofthe spirit's song-- "It ceased; yet still the sails made on A pleasant noise till noon, A noise like to a hidden brook In the leafy month of June, That to the sleeping woods all night Singeth a quiet tune. " Then, as the ballad draws to its close, after the ship hasdrifted over the harbour-bar-- "And I with sobs did pray-- O let me be awake, my God; Or let me sleep alway, " with what consummate art are we left to imagine the physical traceswhich the mariner's long agony had left behind it by a method far moreterrible than any direct description--the effect, namely, which thesight of him produces upon others-- "I moved my lips--the Pilot shrieked And fell down in a fit; The holy Hermit raised his eyes, And prayed where he did sit. "I took the oars: the Pilot's boy, _Who now doth crazy go_, Laughed loud and long, and all the while His eyes went to and fro. 'Ha! ha!' quoth he, 'full plain I see, The Devil knows how to row. '" Perfect consistency of plan, in short, and complete equality ofexecution, brevity, self-restraint, and an unerring sense of artisticpropriety--these are the chief notes of the _Ancient Mariner_, asthey are _not_, in my humble judgment, the chief notes of any poemof Coleridge's before or since. And hence it is that this masterpieceof ballad minstrelsy is, as has been said, so confounding to the"pigeon-holing" mind. The next most famous poem of this or indeed of any period of Coleridge'slife is the fragment of _Christabel_, which, however, in spite ofthe poet's own opinion on that point, it is difficult to regard as "amore effective realisation" of the "natural-supernatural" idea. Beautifulas it is, it possesses none of that human interest with which, accordingto this idea, the narrator of the poetic story must undertake to investit. Nor can the unfinished condition in which it was left be fairly heldto account for this, for the characters themselves--the lady Christabel, the witch Geraldine, and even the baron Sir Leoline himself--are somewhatshadowy creations, with too little hold upon life and reality, and toomuch resemblance to the flitting figures of a dream. Powerful in theirway as are the lines descriptive of the spell thrown over Christabel byher uncanny guest--lines at the recitation of which Shelley is said tohave fainted--we cannot say that they strike a reader with such a sense ofhorror as should be excited by the contemplation of a real flesh-and-bloodmaiden subdued by "the shrunken serpent eyes" of a sorceress, andconstrained "passively to imitate" their "look of dull and treacheroushate. " Judging it, however, by any other standard than that of the poet'sown erecting, one must certainly admit the claim of _Christabel_ torank very high as a work of pure creative art. It is so thoroughlysuffused and permeated with the glow of mystical romance, the wholeatmosphere of the poem is so exquisitely appropriate to the subject, and so marvellously preserved throughout, that our lack of belief inthe reality of the scenes presented to us detracts but little from thepleasure afforded by the artistic excellence of its presentment. Itabounds, too, in isolated pictures of surpassing vividness and grace--word-pictures which live in the "memory of the eye" with all thewholeness and tenacity of an actual painting. Geraldine appearing toChristabel beneath the oak, and the two women stepping lightly acrossthe hall "that echoes still, pass as lightly as you will, " are picturesof this kind; and nowhere out of Keats's _Eve of St. Agnes_ isthere any "interior" to match that of Christabel's chamber, done as itis in little more than half a dozen lines. These beauties, it is true, are fragmentary, like the poem itself, but there is no reason tobelieve that the poem itself would have gained anything in itsentirety--that is to say, as a poetic narrative--by completion. Itsmain idea--that the purity of a pure maiden is a charm more powerfulfor the protection of those dear to her than the spells of the evil onefor their destruction--had been already sufficiently indicated, and themode in which Coleridge, it seems, intended to have worked would hardlyhave added anything to its effect. [4] And although he clung till verylate in life to the belief that he _could_ have finished it inafter days with no change of poetic manner--"If easy in my mind, " hesays in a letter to be quoted hereafter, "I have no doubt either of thereawakening power or of the kindling inclination"--there are fewstudents of his later poems who will share his confidence. Charles Lambstrongly recommended him to leave it unfinished, and Hartley Coleridge, in every respect as competent a judge on that point as could well befound, always declared his conviction that his father could not, atleast _qualis ab incepto_, have finished the poem. The much-admired little piece first published in the _Lyrical Ballads_under the title of _Love_, and probably best known by its(original) first and most pregnant stanza, [5] possesses a twofoldinterest for the student of Coleridge's life and works, as illustratingat once one of the most marked characteristics of his peculiartemperament, and one of the most distinctive features of his poeticmanner. The lines are remarkable for a certain strange fascination ofmelody--a quality for which Coleridge, who was not unreasonably proudof his musical gift, is said to have especially prized them; and theyare noteworthy also as perhaps the fullest expression of the almostwomanly softness of Coleridge's nature. To describe their tone aseffeminate would be unfair and untrue, for effeminacy in the work of amale hand would necessarily imply something of falsity of sentiment, and from this they are entirely free. But it must certainly be admittedthat for a man's description of his wooing the warmth of feeling whichpervades them is as nearly sexless in character as it is possible toconceive; and, beautiful as the verses are, one cannot but feel thatthey only escape the "namby-pamby" by the breadth of a hair. As to the wild dream-poem _Kubla Khan_, it is hardly more than apsychological curiosity, and only that perhaps in respect of thecompleteness of its metrical form. For amid its picturesque but vagueimagery there is nothing which might not have presented itself, and thelike of which has not perhaps actually presented itself, to many ahalf-awakened brain of far lower imaginative energy during its hours offull daylight consciousness than that of Coleridge. Nor possibly is itquite an unknown experience to many of us to have even a fully-writtenrecord, so to speak, of such impressions imprinted instantaneously onthe mind, the conscious composition of whole pages of narrative, descriptive, or cogitative matter being compressed as it were into amoment of time. Unfortunately, however, the impression made upon theordinary brain is effaced as instantaneously as it is produced; theabnormal exaltation of the creative and apprehensive power is quitemomentary, being probably indeed confined to the single moment betweensleep and waking; and the mental tablet which a second before wascovered so thickly with the transcripts of ideas and images, all farmore vivid, or imagined to be so, than those of waking life, and allapprehended with a miraculous simultaneity by the mind, is convertedinto a _tabula rasa_ in the twinkling of a half-opened eye. The wonder inColeridge's case was that his brain retained the word-impressionssufficiently long to enable him to commit them, to the extent at leastof some fifty odd lines, to paper, and that, according to his ownbelief, this is but a mere fraction of what but for an unluckyinterruption in the work of transcribing he would have been able topreserve. His own account of this curious incident is as follows:-- "In the summer of 1797 the author, then in ill health, had retired to alonely farmhouse between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines ofSomerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, ananodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleepin his chair at the moment that he was reading, the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in Purchas's _Pilgrimage_:--'Herethe Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately gardenthereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were enclosed by awall. ' The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the mostvivid confidence that he could not have composed less than from two tothree hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in whichall the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel productionof the corresponding expressions, without any sensation orconsciousness of effect. On awaking he appeared to himself to have adistinct recollection of the whole, and, taking his pen, ink, andpaper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are herepreserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a personon business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on hisreturn to his room found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of thegeneral purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight orten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like theimages on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter. " This poem, though written in 1797, remained, like _Christabel_, inMS. Till 1816. These were then published in a thin quarto volume, togetherwith another piece called the _Pains of Sleep_, a composition of manyyears' later date than the other two, and of which there will beoccasion to say a word or two hereafter. At no time, however, not even in this the high-tide of its activity, was the purely poetic impulse dominant for long together inColeridge's mind. He was born with the instincts of the orator, andstill more with those of the teacher, and I doubt whether he everreally regarded himself as fulfilling the true mission of his lifeexcept at those moments when he was seeking by spoken word to exercisedirect influence over his fellow-men. At the same time, however, suchwas the restlessness of his intellect, and such his instability ofpurpose, that he could no more remain constant to what he deemed histrue vocation than he could to any other. This was now to be signallyillustrated. Soon after the _Ancient Mariner_ was written, andsome time before the volume which was to contain it appeared, Coleridgequitted Stowey for Shrewsbury to undertake the duties of a Unitarianpreacher in that town. This was in the month of January 1798, [6] andit seems pretty certain, though exact dates are not to be ascertained, that he was back again at Stowey early in the month of February. In thepages of the _Liberal_ (1822) William Hazlitt has given a mostgraphic and picturesque description of Coleridge's appearance andperformance in his Shrewsbury pulpit; and, judging from this, one canwell believe, what indeed was to have been antecedently expected, thathad he chosen to remain faithful to his new employment he might haverivalled the reputation of the greatest preacher of the time. But hisfriends the Wedgwoods, the two sons of the great potter, whoseacquaintance he had made a few years earlier, were apparently muchdismayed at the prospect of his deserting the library for the chapel, and they offered him an annuity of L150 a year on condition of hisretiring from the ministry and devoting himself entirely to the studyof poetry and philosophy. Coleridge was staying at the house ofHazlitt's father when the letter containing this liberal offer reachedhim, "and he seemed, " says the younger Hazlitt, "to make up his mind toclose with the proposal in the act of tying on one of his shoes. "Another inducement to so speedy an acceptance of it is no doubt to befound in the fact of its presenting to Coleridge an opportunity for thefulfilment of a cherished desire--that, namely, of "completing hiseducation, " as he regarded it, by studying the German language, andacquiring an acquaintance with the theology and philosophy of Germanyin that country itself. This prospect he was enabled, through thegenerosity of the Wedgwoods, to put into execution towards the end of1798. But before passing on from this culminating and, to all intentsand purposes, this closing year of Coleridge's career as a poet it willbe proper to attempt something like a final review of his poetic work. Admirable as much of that work is, and unique in quality as it isthroughout, I must confess that it leaves on my own mind a strongerimpression of the unequal and imperfect than does that of any poet atall approaching Coleridge in imaginative vigour and intellectual grasp. It is not a mere inequality and imperfection of style like that whichso seriously detracts from the pleasure of reading Byron. Nor is itthat the thought is often _impar sibi_--that, like Wordsworth's, it is too apt to descend from the mountain-tops of poetry to the flatsof commonplace, if not into the bogs of bathos. In both these respectsColeridge may and does occasionally offend, but his workmanship is, onthe whole, as much more artistic than Byron's as the material of hispoetry is of more uniformly equal value than Wordsworth's. Yet, withalmost the sole exception of the _Ancient Mariner_, his work is ina certain sense more disappointing than that of either. In spite of histheory as to the twofold function of poetry we must finally judge thatof Coleridge, as of any other poet, by its relation to the actual. Ancient Mariners and Christabels--the people, the scenery, and theincidents of an imaginary world--may be handled by poetry once andagain to the wonder and delight of man; but feats of this kind cannot--or cannot in the Western world, at any rate--be repeated indefinitely, and the ultimate test of poetry, at least for the modern Europeanreader, is its treatment of actualities--its relations to the world ofhuman action, passion, sensation, thought. And when we try Coleridge'spoetry in any one of these four regions of life, we seem forced toadmit that, despite all its power and beauty, it at no moment succeedsin convincing us, as at their best moments Wordsworth's and evenByron's continually does, that the poet has found his true poeticvocation--that he is interpreting that aspect of life which he caninterpret better than he can any other, and which no other poet, savethe one who has vanquished all poets in their own special fields ofachievement, can interpret as well as he. In no poem of actuality doesColeridge so victoriously show himself to be the right man at the rightwork as does Wordsworth in certain moods of seership and Byron incertain moments of passion. Of them at such moods and moments we feelassured that they have discovered where their real strength lies, andhave put it forth to the utmost. But we never feel satisfied thatColeridge has discovered where _his_ real strength lies, and hestrikes us as feeling no more certainty on the point himself. Strong asis his pinion, his flight seems to resemble rather that of the eagletthan of the full-grown eagle even to the last. He continues "mewing hismighty youth" a little too long. There is a tentativeness of mannerwhich seems to come from a conscious aptitude for many poetic stylesand an incapacity to determine which should be definitively adopted andcultivated to perfection. Hence one too often returns from anyprolonged ramble through Coleridge's poetry with an unsatisfied feelingwhich does not trouble us on our return from the best literary countryof Byron or Wordsworth. Byron has taken us by rough roads, andWordsworth led us through some desperately flat and dreary lowlands tohis favourite "bits;" but we feel that we have seen mountain andvalley, wood and river, glen and waterfall at their best. ButColeridge's poetry leaves too much of the feeling of a walk through afine country on a misty day. We may have had many a peep of beautifulscenery and occasional glimpses of the sublime; but the medium ofvision has been of variable quality, and somehow we come home with anuneasy suspicion that we have not seen as much as we might. It isobvious, however, even upon a cursory consideration of the matter, thatthis disappointing element in Coleridge's poetry is a necessary resultof the circumstances of its production; for the period of hisproductive activity (at least after attaining manhood) was too short toenable a mind with so many intellectual distractions to ascertain itstrue poetic bent, and to concentrate its energies thereupon. If heseems always to be feeling his way towards the work which he could dobest, it is for the very good reason that this is what, from 1796 to1800, he was continually doing as a matter of fact. The various styleswhich he attempted--and for a season, in each case, with such brilliantresults--are forms of poetic expression corresponding, on the face ofthem, to poetic impulses of an essentially fleeting nature. Thepolitical or politico-religious odes were the offspring of youthfuldemocratic enthusiasm; the supernatural poems, so to call them for wantof a better name, had their origin in an almost equally youthful andmore than equally transitory passion for the wild and wondrous. Political disillusion is fatal to the one impulse, and mere advance inyears extinguishes the other. Visions of Ancient Mariners andChristabels do not revisit the mature man, and the Toryism of middlelife will hardly inspire odes to anything. With the extinction of these two forms of creative impulse Coleridge'spoetic activity, from causes to be considered hereafter, came almostentirely to an end, and into what later forms it might subsequentlyhave developed remains therefore a matter more or less of conjecture. Yet I think there is almost a sufficiency of _a priori_ evidenceas to what that form would have been. Had the poet in him surviveduntil years had "brought the philosophic mind, " he would doubtless havedone for the human spirit, in its purely isolated self-communings, whatWordsworth did for it in its communion with external nature. All thatthe poetry of Wordsworth is for the mind which loves to hold conversewith the world of things; this, and more perhaps than this--if more bepossible--would the poetry of Coleridge have been for the mind whichabides by preference in the world of self-originating emotion andintrospective thought. Wordsworth's primary function is to interpretnature to man: the interpretation of man to himself is with him asecondary process only-the response, in almost every instance, toimpressions from without. This poet can nobly brace the human heart tofortitude; but he must first have seen the leech-gatherer on the lonelymoor. The "presence and the spirit interfused" throughout creation isrevealed to us in moving and majestic words; yet the poet requires tohave felt it "in the light of setting suns and the round ocean and theliving air" before he feels it "in the mind of man. " But whatWordsworth grants only to the reader who wanders with him inimagination by lake and mountain, the Muse of Coleridge, had she lived, would have bestowed upon the man who has entered into his inner chamberand shut to the door. This, it seems to me, is the work for whichgenius, temperament, and intellectual habit would alike have fittedhim. For while his feeling for internal nature was undoubtedly lessprofound, less mystically penetrating than Wordsworth's, hissensibilities in general were incomparably quicker and more subtle thanthose of the friend in whom he so generously recognised a master; andthe reach of his sympathies extends to forms of human emotion, tosubjects of human interest which lay altogether outside the somewhatnarrow range of Wordsworth's. And, with so magnificent a furniture of those mental and moralqualities which should belong to "a singer of man to men, " it must notbe forgotten that his technical equipment for the work was of the mostsplendidly effective kind. If a critic like Mr. Swinburne seems tospeak in exaggerated praise of Coleridge's lyrics, we can wellunderstand their enchantment for a master of music like himself. Probably it was the same feeling which made Shelley describe_France_ as "the finest ode in the English language. " With all, infact, who hold--as it is surely plausible to hold--that the first dutyof a singer is to sing, the poetry of Coleridge will always be morelikely to be classed above than below its merits, great as they are. For, if we except some occasional lapses in his sonnets--a metricalform in which, at his best, he is quite "out of the running" withWordsworth--his melody never fails him. He is a singer always, asWordsworth is not always, and Byron almost never. The _'olianHarp_ to which he so loved to listen does not more surely respond inmusic to the breeze of heaven than does Coleridge's poetic utterance tothe wind of his inspiration. Of the dreamy fascination which Loveexercises over a listening ear I have already spoken; and there ishardly less charm in the measure and assonances of the _CircassianLove Chant. Christabel_ again, considered solely from the metricalpoint of view, is a veritable _tour de force_--the very model of ametre for romantic legend: as which, indeed, it was imitated withsufficient grace and spirit, but seldom with anything approaching toColeridge's melody, by Sir Walter Scott. Endowed therefore with so glorious a gift of song, and only not fullymaster of his poetic means because of the very versatility of hisartistic power and the very variety and catholicity of his youthfulsympathies, it is unhappily but too certain that the world has lostmuch by that perversity of conspiring accidents which so untimelysilenced Coleridge's muse. And the loss is the more trying to posteritybecause he seems, to a not, I think, too curiously consideringcriticism, to have once actually struck that very chord which wouldhave sounded the most movingly beneath his touch, --and to have struckit at the very moment when the failing hand was about to quit the keysfor ever. "Ostendunt terris hunc tantum fata neque ultra Esse sinunt. " I cannot regard it as merely fantastic to believe that the_Dejection_, that dirge of infinite pathos over the grave ofcreative imagination, might, but for the fatal decree which had by thattime gone forth against Coleridge's health and happiness, have been butthe cradle-cry of a new-born poetic power, in which imagination, notannihilated but transmigrant, would have splendidly proved its vitalitythrough other forms of song. FOOTNOTES 1. Perhaps the deepest impress of the Wordsworthian influence is to befound in the little poem _Frost at Midnight_, with its affectingapostrophe to the sleeping infant at his side--infant destined todevelop as wayward a genius and to lead as restless and irresolute alife as his father. Its closing lines-- "Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee Whether the summer clothe the general earth With greenness. .. . .. Whether the eave-drops fall, Heard only in the trances of the blast, Or if the secret ministry of frost Shall hang them up in silent icicles Quietly shining to the quiet moon"-- might have flowed straight from the pen of Wordsworth himself. 2. "You had a great loss in not seeing Coleridge. He is a wonderfulman. His conversation teems with soul, mind, and spirit. Then he is sobenevolent, so good tempered and cheerful, and, like William, interestshimself so much about every little trifle. At first I thought him veryplain, that is, for about three minutes; he is pale, thin, has a widemouth, thick lips, and not very good teeth, longish loose-growing half-curling rough black hair. But if you hear him speak for five minutesyou think no more of them. His eye is large and full, and not very darkbut gray, such an eye as would receive from a heavy soul the dullestexpression; but it speaks every emotion of his animated mind: it hasmore of the poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling than I ever witnessed. He has fine dark eyebrows and an overhanging forehead. " 3. The lines-- "And it is long, and lank, and brown, As is the ribbed sea-sand. " 4. Mr. Gillman (in his _Life_, p. 301) gives the followingsomewhat bald outline of what were to form the two concluding cantos, no doubt on the authority of Coleridge himself. The second canto ends, it may be remembered, with the despatch of Bracy the bard to the castleof Sir Roland:--"Over the mountains the Bard, as directed by SirLeoline, hastes with his disciple; but, in consequence of one of thoseinundations supposed to be common to the country, the spot only wherethe castle once stood is discovered, the edifice itself being washedaway. He determines to return. Geraldine, being acquainted with allthat is passing, like the weird sisters in _Macbeth_, vanishes. Reappearing, however, she awaits the return of the Bard, exciting inthe meantime by her wily arts all the anger she could rouse in theBaron's breast, as well as that jealousy of which he is described tohave been susceptible. The old bard and the youth at length arrive, andtherefore she can no longer personate the character of Geraldine, thedaughter of Lord Roland de Vaux, but changes her appearance to that ofthe accepted though absent lover of Christabel. Next ensues a courtshipmost distressing to Christabel, who feels--she knows not why--greatdisgust for her once favoured knight. This coldness is very painful tothe Baron, who has no more conception than herself of the supernaturaltransformation. She at last yields to her father's entreaties, andconsents to approach the altar with the hated suitor. The real loverreturning, enters at this moment, and produces the ring which she hadonce given him in sign of her betrothment. Thus defeated, thesupernatural being Geraldine disappears. As predicted, the castle-belltolls, the mother's voice is heard, and, to the exceeding great joy ofthe parties, the rightful marriage takes place, after which follows areconciliation and explanation between father and daughter. "5. "All thoughts, all passions, all delights, Whatever stirs this mortal frame, All are but ministers of Love, And feed his sacred flame. " 6. It may be suggested that this sudden resolution was forced uponColeridge by the _res angusta domi_. But I do not think that wasthe case. In the winter of 1797 he had obtained an introduction to andentered into a literary engagement with Mr. Stuart of the _MorningPost_, and could thus have met, as in fact he afterwards did meet, the necessities of the hour. CHAPTER IV. Visit to Germany--Life at Gottingen, --Return--Explores the Lake Country--London--The _Morning Post_--Coleridge as a journalist--Retirementto Keswick. [1799-1800. ] The departure of the two poets for the Continent was delayed only tillthey had seen their joint volume through the press. The _LyricalBallads_ appeared in the autumn of 1798, and on 16th September ofthat year Coleridge left Yarmouth for Hamburg with Wordsworth and hissister. [1] The purpose of his two companions' tour is not known tohave been other than the pleasure, or mixed pleasure and instruction, usually derivable from foreign travel; that of Coleridge was strictly, even sternly, educational. Immediately on his arrival in Germany heparted from the Wordsworths, who went on to Gozlar, [2] and took up hisabode at the house of the pastor at Ratzeburg, with whom he spent fivemonths in assiduous study of the language. In January he removed toGottingen. Of his life here during the next few months we possess aninteresting record in the _Early Years and Late Reflections_ ofDr. Carrlyon, a book published many years after the events which itrelates, but which is quite obviously a true reflection of impressionsyet fresh in the mind of its writer when its materials were firstcollected. Its principal value, in fact, is that it gives us Coleridgefrom the standpoint of the average young educated Englishman of theday, sufficiently intelligent, indeed, to be sensible of his fellow-student's transcendent abilities, but as little awed by them out ofyouth's healthy irreverence of criticism as the ordinary Englishundergraduate ever has been by the intellectual supremacy of any"greatest man of his day" who might chance to have been hiscontemporary at Oxford or Cambridge. In Dr. Carrlyon's reminiscencesand in the quoted letters of a certain young Parry, another of theEnglish student colony at Gottingen, we get a piquant picture of thepoet-philosopher of seven-and-twenty, with his yet buoyant belief inhis future, his still unquenched interest in the world of things, andhis never-to-be-quenched interest in the world of thought, his eventhen inexhaustible flow of disquisition, his generous admiration forthe gifts of others, and his _naive_ complacency--including, itwould seem, a touch of the vanity of personal appearance--in his own. "He frequently, " writes Dr. Carrlyon, "recited his own poetry, and notunfrequently led us further into the labyrinth of his metaphysicalelucidations, either of particular passages or of the originalconception of any of his productions, than we were able to follow him. At the conclusion, for instance, of the first stanza of_Christabel_, he would perhaps comment at full length upon such aline as 'Tu--whit!--Tu--whoo!' that we might not fall into the mistakeof supposing originality to be its sole merit. " The example is not veryhappily chosen, for Coleridge could hardly have claimed "originality"for an onomatopoeia which occurs in one of Shakspeare's best knownlyrics; but it serves well enough to illustrate the fact that he "veryseldom went right to the end of any piece of poetry; to pause andanalyse was his delight. " His disappointment with regard to his tragedyof _Osorio_ was, we also learn, still fresh. He seldom, we aretold, "recited any of the beautiful passages with which it aboundswithout a visible interruption of the perfect composure of his mind. "He mentioned with great emotion Sheridan's inexcusable treatment of himwith respect to it. At the same time, adds his friend, "he is a severecritic of his own productions, and declares" (this no doubt withreference to his then, and indeed his constant estimate of_Christabel_ as his masterpiece) "that his best poems have perhapsnot appeared in print. " Young Parry's account of his fellow-student is also fresh and pleasing. "It is very delightful, " he tells a correspondent, "to hear him sometimesdiscourse on religious topics for an hour together. His fervour isparticularly agreeable when compared with the chilling speculations ofGerman philosophers, " whom Coleridge, he adds, "successively forced toabandon all their strongholds. " He is "much liked, notwithstanding manypeculiarities. He is very liberal towards all doctrines and opinions, and cannot be put out of temper. These circumstances give him theadvantage of his opponents, who are always bigoted and often irascible. Coleridge is an enthusiast on many subjects, and must therefore appearto many to possess faults, and no doubt he has faults, but he has agood heart and a large mass of information with, " as his fellow-studentcondescendingly admits, "superior talents. The great fault which hisfriends may lament is the variety of subjects which he adopts, and theabstruse nature of his ordinary speculations, _extra homines podtas_. They can easily, " concludes the writer, rising here to the fullstateliness of youth's epistolary style, "they can easily excuse hisdevoted attachment to his country, and his reasoning as to the means ofproducing the greatest human happiness, but they do not universallyapprove the mysticism of his metaphysics and the remoteness of histopics from human comprehension. " In the month of May 1799 Coleridge set out with a party of his fellow-students on a walking tour through the Harz Mountains, an excursionproductive of much oral philosophising on his part, and of thecomposition of the _Lines on ascending the Brocken_, not one of thehappiest efforts of his muse. As to the philosophising, "he never, " saysone of his companions on this trip, "appeared to tire of mental exercise;talk seemed to him a perennial pastime, and his endeavours to inform andamuse us ended only with the cravings of hunger or the fatigue of a longmarch, from which neither his conversational powers nor his stoicismcould protect himself or us. " It speaks highly for the matter ofColeridge's allocutions that such incessant outpourings during amountaineering tramp appear to have left no lasting impression ofboredom behind them. The holiday seems to have been thoroughly enjoyedby the whole party, and Coleridge, at any rate, had certainly earnedit. For once, and it is almost to be feared for the last time in hislife, he had resisted his besetting tendency to dispersiveness, andconstrained his intelligence to apply itself to one thing at a time. He had come to Germany to acquire the language, and to learn what ofGerman theology and metaphysics he might find worth the study, and hisfive months' steady pursuit of the former object had been followed byanother four months of resolute prosecution of the latter. He attendedthe lectures of Professor Blumenbach, and obtained through a fellow-student notes from those of Eichhorn. He suffered no interruption inhis studies, unless we are to except a short visit from Wordsworthand his sister, who had spent most of their stay abroad in residenceat Gozlar; and he appears, in short, to have made in every way the bestuse of his time. On 24th June 1799 he gave his leave-taking supper atGottingen, replying to the toast of his health in fluent German butwith an execrable accent; and the next day presumably he started on hishomeward journey. His movements for the next few months are incorrectly stated in most ofthe brief memoirs prefixed to the various editions of the poet's works, --their writers having, it is to be imagined, accepted withoutexamination a misplaced date of Mr. Gillman's. It is not the fact thatColeridge "returned to England after an absence of fourteen months, andarrived in London the 27th of November. " His absence could not havelasted longer than a year, for we know from the evidence of MissWordsworth's diary that he was exploring the Lake country (very likelyfor the first time) in company with her brother and herself in the monthof September 1799. The probability is that he arrived in England earlyin July, and immediately thereupon did the most natural and proper thingto be done under the circumstances--namely, returned to his wife andchildren at Nether Stowey, and remained there for the next two months, after which he set off with the Wordsworths, then still at Alfoxden, tovisit the district to which the latter had either already resolved upon, or were then contemplating, the transfer of their abode. The 27th ofNovember is no doubt the correct date of his arrival in London, though not"from abroad. " And his first six weeks in the metropolis were spent in avery characteristic fashion--in the preparation, namely, of a work whichhe pronounced with perfect accuracy to be destined to fall dead from thepress. He shut himself up in a lodging in Buckingham Street, Strand, and by the end of the above-mentioned period he had completed hisadmirable translation of _Wallenstein_, in itself a perfect, andindeed his most perfect dramatic poem. The manuscript of this Englishversion of Schiller's drama was purchased by Messrs. Longman under thecondition that the translation and the original should appear at thesame time. Very few copies were sold, and the publishers, indifferentto Coleridge's advice to retain the unsold copies until the book shouldbecome fashionable, disposed of them as waste paper. Sixteen yearsafterwards, on the publication of _Christabel_, they were eagerlysought for, and the few remaining copies doubled their price. It waswhile engaged upon this work that he formed that connection withpolitical jouralism which lasted, though with intermissions, throughoutmost of the remainder of his life. His early poetical pieces had, as wehave seen, made their first appearance in the _Morning Post_, buthitherto that newspaper had received no prose contribution from hispen. His engagement with its proprietor, Mr. Daniel Stuart, to whom hehad been introduced during a visit to London in 1797, was to contributean occasional copy of verses for a stipulated annual sum; and somedozen or so of his poems (notably among them the ode to _France_and the two strange pieces _Fire Famine and Slaughter_ and _TheDevil's Thoughts_) had entered the world in this way during theyears 1798 and 1799. Misled by the error above corrected, the writers of some of the briefmemoirs of Coleridge's life represent him as having sent versecontributions to the _Morning Post_ from Germany in 1799; but asthe earliest of these only appeared in August of that year there is noreason to suppose that any of them were written before his return toEngland. The longest of the serious pieces is the well-known _Ode toGeorgiana, Duchess of Devonshire_, which cannot be regarded as oneof the happiest of Coleridge's productions. Its motive is certainly alittle slight, and its sentiment more than a little overstrained. Thenoble enthusiasm of the noble lady who, "though nursed in pomp andpleasure, " could yet condescend to "hail the platform wild where oncethe Austrian fell beneath the shaft of Tell, " hardly strikes a readerof the present day as remarkable enough to be worth "gushing" over; andwhen the poet goes on to suggest as the explanation of Georgiana'shaving "learned that heroic measure" that the Whig great lady hadsuckled her own children, we certainly seem to have taken the fatalstep beyond the sublime! It is to be presumed that Tory great ladiesinvariably employed the services of a wet-nurse, and hence failed towin the same tribute from the angel of the earth, who, usually, whilehe guides "His chariot-planet round the goal of day, All trembling gazes on the eye of God, " but who on this occasion "a moment turned his awful face away" to gazeapprovingly on the high-born mother who had so conscientiouslyperformed her maternal duties. Very different is the tone of this poem from that of the two best knownof Coleridge's lighter contributions to the _Morning Post_. Themost successful of these, however, from the journalistic point of view, is in a literary sense the less remarkable. One is indeed a littleastonished to find that a public, accustomed to such admirable politicalsatire as the _Anti-Jacobin_, should have been so much taken as itseems to have been by the rough versification and somewhat clumsy sarcasmof the _Devil's Thoughts_. The poem created something like a_furore_, and sold a large reissue of the number of the _MorningPost_ in which it appeared. Nevertheless it is from the metrical pointof view doggerel, as indeed the author admits, three of its most smoothly-flowing stanzas being from the hand of Southey, while there is nothing inits boisterous political drollery to put its composition beyond the reachof any man of strong partisan feelings and a turn for street-humour. _Fire Famine and Slaughter_, on the other hand, is literary inevery sense of the word, requiring indeed, and very urgently, to insiston its character as literature, in order to justify itself against thecharge of inhuman malignity. Despite the fact that "letters four doform his name, " it is of course an idealised statesman, and not thereal flesh and blood Mr. Pitt, whom the sister furies, Fire, Famine, and Slaughter, extol as their patron in these terrible lines. The poemmust be treated as what lawyers call an "A. B. Case. " Coleridge must besupposed to be lashing certain alphabetical symbols arranged in acertain order. This idealising process is perfectly easy and familiarto everybody with the literary sense. The deduction for "poeticlicense" is just as readily, though it does not, of course, require tobe as frequently, made with respect to the hyperbole of denunciation aswith respect to that of praise. Nor need we doubt that this deductionhad in fact been made by all intelligent readers long before thatagitating dinner at Mr. Sotheby's, which Coleridge describes with suchanxious gravity in his apologetic preface to the republication of thelines. On the whole one may pretty safely accept De Quincey's view ofthe true character of this incident as related by him in his owninimitable fashion, namely, that it was in the nature of an elaboratehoax, played off at the poet's expense. [3] The malice of the piece is, as De Quincey puts it, quite obviously a "malice of the understandingand fancy, " and not of the heart. There is significance in the merefact that the poem was deliberately published by Coleridge two yearsafter its composition, when the vehemence of his political animositieshad much abated. Written in 1796, it did not appear in the _MorningPost_ till January 1798. He was now, however, about to draw closer his connection with thenewspaper press. Soon after his return from Germany he was solicitedto "undertake the literary and political department in the _MorningPost_, " and acceded to the proposal "on condition that the papershould thenceforward be conducted on certain fixed and announcedprinciples, and that he should be neither obliged nor requested todeviate from them in favour of any party or any event. " Accordingly, from December 1799 until about midsummer of 1800, Coleridge became aregular contributor of political articles to this journal, sometimesto the number of two or three in one week. At the end of the periodof six months he quitted London, and his contributions becamenecessarily less frequent, but they were continued (though with twoapparent breaks of many months in duration) [4] until the close ofthe year 1802. It would seem, however, that nothing but Coleridge'sown disinclination prevented this connection from taking aform in which it would have profoundly modified his whole futurecareer. In a letter to Mr. Poole, dated March 1800, he informs hisfriend that if he "had the least love of money" he could "make sure ofL2000 a year, for that Stuart had offered him half shares in his twopapers, the _Morning Post_ and the _Courier_, if he would devotehimself to them in conjunction with their proprietor. But I toldhim, " he continues, "that I would not give up the country and the lazyreading of old folios for two thousand times two thousand pounds, --inshort, that beyond L350 a year I considered money as a real evil. "Startlingly liberal as this offer will appear to the journalist, itseems really to have been made. For, writing long afterwards to Mr. Nelson Coleridge, Mr. Stuart says: "Could Coleridge and I placeourselves thirty years back, and he be so far a man of business as towrite three or four hours a day, there is nothing I would not pay forhis assistance. I would take him into partnership, and I would enablehim to make a large fortune. " Nor is there any reason to think that thebargain would have been a bad one for the proprietor from the strictlycommercial point of view. Coleridge in later years may no doubt haveoverrated the effect of his own contributions on the circulation of the_Morning Post_, but it must have been beyond question considerable, and would in all likelihood have become far greater if he could havebeen induced to devote himself more closely to the work of journalism. For the fact is--and it is a fact for which the current conception ofColeridge's intellectual character does not altogether prepare one--thathe was a workman of the very first order of excellence in this curiouscraft. The faculties which go to the attainment of such excellence arenot perhaps among the highest distinctions of the human mind, but, suchas they are, they are specific and well marked; they are by no means thenecessary accompaniments even of the most conspicuous literary power, and they are likely rather to suffer than to profit by association withgreat subtlety of intellect or wide philosophic grasp. It is not to theadvantage of the journalist, as such, that he should see too manythings at a time, or too far into any one thing, and even the gifts ofan active imagination and an abundant vocabulary are each of themlikely to prove a snare. To be wholly successful, the journalist--atleast the English journalist--must not be too eloquent, or too witty, or too humorous, or too ingenious, or too profound. Yet the Englishreader likes, or thinks he likes, eloquence; he has a keen sense ofhumour, and a fair appreciation of wit; and he would be much hurt if hewere told that ingenuity and profundity were in themselves distastefulto him. How, then, to give him enough of these qualities to please andnot enough to offend him--as much eloquence as will stir his emotions, but not enough to arouse his distrust; as much wit as will carry homethe argument, but not enough to make him doubt its sincerity; as muchhumour as will escape the charge of levity, as much ingenuity as can bedisplayed without incurring suspicion, and as much profundity as mayimpress without bewildering? This is a problem which is fortunatelysimplified for most journalists by the fact of their possessing thesequalities in no more than, if in so much as, the minimum required. ButColeridge, it must be remembered, possessed most of them inembarrassing superfluity. Not all of them indeed, for, though he couldbe witty and at times humorous, his temptations to excess in theserespects were doubtless not considerable. But as for his eloquence, hewas from his youth upwards _Isoo torrentior_, his dialecticalingenuity was unequalled, and in disquisition of the speculative orderno man was so apt as he to penetrate more deeply into his subject thanmost of his readers would care to follow him. _A priori_, therefore, one would have expected that Coleridge's instincts wouldhave led him to rhetorise too much in his diction, to refine too muchin his arguments, and to philosophise too much in his reflections, tohave hit the popular taste as a journalist, and that at the age ofeight-and-twenty he would have been unable to subject these tendencieseither to the artistic repression of the maturer writer or to thetactical restraints of the trained advocate. This eminently naturalassumption, however, is entirely rebutted by the facts. Nothing is moreremarkable in Coleridge's contributions to the _Morning Post_ thantheir thoroughly workmanlike character from the journalistic point ofview, their avoidance of "viewiness, " their strict adherence to the oneor two simple points which he is endeavouring at any particularjuncture in politics to enforce upon his readers, and the steadinesswith which he keeps his own and his readers' attention fixed on thespecial political necessities of the hour. His articles, in short, belong to that valuable class to which, while it gives pleasure to thecultivated reader, the most commonplace and Philistine man of businesscannot refuse the to him supreme praise of being eminently "practical. "They hit the nail on the head in nearly every case, and they take theplainest and most direct route to their point, dealing in rhetoric andmetaphor only so far as the strictly "business" ends of the argumentappear to require. Nothing, for instance, could have been better done, better reasoned and written, more skilfully adapted throughout to theEnglish taste, than Coleridge's criticism (3lst Dec. 1799) on the newconstitution established by Bonaparte and Sieyes on the foundation ofthe Consulate, with its eighty senators, the "creatures of a renegadepriest, himself the creature of a foreign mercenary, its hundredtribunes who are to talk and do nothing, and its three hundredlegislators whom the constitution orders to be silent. " What aludicrous Purgatory, adds he, "for three hundred Frenchmen!" Veryvigorous, moreover, is he on the ministerial rejection of the Frenchproposals of peace in 1800, arguing against the continuance of the waron the very sound anti-Jacobin ground that if it were unsuccessful itwould inflame French ambition anew, and, if successful, repeat theexperience of the results of rendering France desperate, and simplyreanimate Jacobinism. Effective enough too, for the controversial needs of the moment, was the argument that if France were known, as Ministers pretended, to be insincere in soliciting peace, "Ministers would certainly treatwith her, since they would again secure the support of the Britishpeople in the war, and expose the ambition of the enemy;" and that, therefore, the probability was that the British Government knewFrance to be sincere, and shrank from negotiation lest it shouldexpose their own desire to prosecute the war. [5] Most happy, again, is his criticism of Lord Grenville's note, with its referencesto the unprovoked aggression of France (in the matter of the opening ofthe Scheldt, etc. ) as the sole cause and origin of the war. "If thiswere indeed true, in what ignorance must not Mr. Pitt and Mr. Windhamhave kept the poor Duke of Portland, who declared in the House of Lordsthat the cause of the war was the maintenance of the Christianreligion?" To add literary excellence of the higher order to the peculiarqualities which give force to the newspaper article is for ajournalist, of course, a "counsel of perfection;" but it remains to beremarked that Coleridge did make this addition in a most conspicuousmanner. Mrs. H. N. Coleridge's three volumes of her father's _Essayson his own Times_ deserve to live as literature apart altogetherfrom their merits as journalism. Indeed among the articles in the_Morning Post_ between 1799 and 1802 may be found some of thefinest specimens of Coleridge's maturer prose style. The character ofPitt, which appeared on 19th March 1800, is as remarkable for itsliterary merits as it is for the almost humorous political perversitywhich would not allow the Minister any single merit except that whichhe owed to the sedulous rhetorical training received by him from hisfather, viz. "a premature and unnatural dexterity in the combination ofwords. " [6] The letters to Fox, again, though a little artificialisedperhaps by reminiscences of Junius, are full of weight and dignity. Butby far the most piquant illustration of Coleridge's peculiar power isto be found in the comparison between his own version of Pitt's speechof 17th February 1800, on the continuance of the war, with the reportof it which appeared in the _Times_ of that date. With theexception of a few unwarranted elaborations of the arguments here andthere, the two speeches are in substance identical; but the effect ofthe contrast between the minister's cold state-paper periods and thelife and glow of the poet-journalist's style is almost comic. Mr. Gillman records that Canning, calling on business at the editor's, inquired, as others had done, who was the reporter of the speech forthe _Morning Post_, and, on being told, remarked drily that thereport "did more credit to his head than to his memory. " On the whole one can well understand Mr. Stuart's anxiety to secureColeridge's permanent collaboration with him in the business ofjournalism; and it would be possible to maintain, with less of paradoxthan may at first sight appear, that it would have been better not onlyfor Coleridge himself but for the world at large if the editor's effortshad been successful. It would indeed have been bowing the neck to theyoke; but there are some natures upon which constraint of that sortexercises not a depressing but a steadying influence. What, after all, would the loss in hours devoted to a comparatively inferior class ofliterary labour have amounted to when compared with the gain in much-needed habits of method and regularity, and--more valuable than all toan intellect like Coleridge's, --in the constant reminder that humanlife is finite and the materials of human speculation infinite, andthat even a world-embracing mind must apportion its labour to its day?There is, however, the great question of health to be considered--_the_ question, as every one knows, of Coleridge's whole career andlife. If health was destined to give way, in any event--if itscollapse, in fact, was simply the cause of all the lamentable externalresults which followed it, while itself due only to predeterminedinternal conditions over which the sufferer had no control--then to besure _cadit qu'stio_. At London or at the Lakes, among newspaperfiles or old folios, Coleridge's life would in that case have run thesame sad course; and his rejection of Mr. Stuart's offer becomes amatter of no particular interest to disappointed posterity. But be thatas it may, the "old folios" won the day. In the summer of 1800 Coleridgequitted London, and having wound up his affairs at his then place ofresidence, removed with his wife and children to a new and beautifulhome in that English Lake country with which his name was destined, like those of Southey and Wordsworth, to be enduringly associated. FOOTNOTES 1. De Quincey's error, in supposing that Coleridge's visit to Germanyto "complete his education" was made at an earlier date than thisjourney with the Wordsworths, is a somewhat singular mistake for one sowell acquainted with the facts of Coleridge's life. Had we not his ownstatement that this of 1798 was the first occasion of his quitting hisnative country, it so happens that we can account in England for nearlyevery month of his time from his leaving Cambridge until this date. 2. It has only within a comparatively recent period been ascertainedthat the visit of the Wordsworths to Germany was itself another resultof Thomas Wedgwood's generous appreciation of literary merit. Itappears, on the incontrovertible testimony of the Wedgwoods' accountswith their agents at Hamburg, that the expenses of all three travellerswere defrayed by their friend at home. The credits opened for themamounted, during the course of their stay abroad, to some L260. --MissMeteyard's _A Group of Englishmen_, p. 99. 3. After quoting thetwo concluding lines of the poem, "Fire's" rebuke of her inconstantsisters, in the words "I alone am faithful, I Cling to him everlastingly, " De Quincey proceeds: "The sentiment is diabolical; and the questionargued at the London dinner-table (Mr. Sotheby's) was 'Could the writerhave been other than a devil?'. .. Several of the great guns among theliterary body were present--in particular Sir Walter Scott, and he, webelieve, with his usual good nature, took the apologetic side of thedispute; in fact, he was in the secret. Nobody else, barring theauthor, knew at first whose good name was at stake. The scene must havebeen high. The company kicked about the poor diabolic writer's head asthough it had been a tennis-ball. Coleridge, the yet unknown criminal, absolutely perspired and fumed in pleading for the defendant; thecompany demurred; the orator grew urgent; wits began to smoke the caseas an active verb, the advocate to smoke as a neuter verb; the 'fungrew fast and furious, ' until at length the delinquent arose, burningtears in his eyes, and confessed to an audience now bursting withstifled laughter (but whom he supposed to be bursting with fieryindignation), 'Lo, I am he that wrote it. '" 4. _Sic_ in _Essays on his own Times_ by S. T. C. , thecollection of her father's articles made by Mrs. Nelson (Sara)Coleridge; but without attributing strange error to Coleridge's ownestimate (in the _Biographia Literaria_) of the amount of hisjournalistic work, it is impossible to believe that this collection, forming as it does but two small volumes, and a portion of a third, isanything like complete. 5. Alas, that the facts should be so merciless to the most excellentarguments! Coleridge could not foresee that Napoleon would, yearsafterwards, admit in his own Memoirs the insincerity of hisovertures. "I had need of war; a treaty of peace. .. Would havewithered every imagination. " And when Mr. Pitt's answer arrived, "it filled me with a secret satisfaction. " 6. The following passage, too, is curious as showing how polemics, likehistory, repeat themselves. "As his reasonings were, so is hiseloquence. One character pervades his whole being. Words on words, finely arranged, and so dexterously consequent that the whole bears thesemblance of argument and still keeps awake a sense of surprise; but, when all is done, nothing rememberable has been said; no onephilosophical remark, no one image, not even a pointed aphorism. Not asentence of Mr. Pitt's has ever been quoted, or formed the favouritephrase of the day--a thing unexampled in any man of equal reputation. "With the alteration of one word--the proper name--this passage mighthave been taken straight from some political diatribe of to-day. CHAPTER V. Life at Keswick--Second part of _Christabel_--Failing health--Resortto opium--The _Ode to Dejection_--Increasing restlessness--Visit to Malta. [1800-1804. ] We are now approaching the turning-point, moral and physical, ofColeridge's career. The next few years determined not only his destinyas a writer but his life as a man. Between his arrival at Keswick inthe summer of 1800 and his departure for Malta in the spring of 1804that fatal change of constitution, temperament, and habits whichgoverned the whole of his subsequent history had fully establisheditself. Between these two dates he was transformed from the Coleridgeof whom his young fellow-students in Germany have left us so pleasing apicture into the Coleridge whom distressed kinsmen, alienated friends, and a disappointed public were to have before them for the remainder ofhis days. Here, then, at Keswick, and in these first two or three yearsof the century--here or nowhere is the key to the melancholy mystery tobe found. It is probable that only those who have gone with someminuteness into the facts of this singular life are aware how great wasthe change effected during this very short period of time. WhenColeridge left London for the Lake country he had not completed hiseight-and-twentieth year. Before he was thirty he wrote that _Ode toDejection_ in which his spiritual and moral losses are sopathetically bewailed. His health and spirits, his will and habits, maynot have taken any unalterable bent for the worse until 1804, the yearof his departure for Malta--the date which I have thought it safest toassign as the definitive close of the earlier and happier period of hislife; but undoubtedly the change had fully manifested itself more thantwo years before. And a very great and painful one it assuredly was. Weknow from the recorded evidence of Dr. Carrlyon and others thatColeridge was full of hope and gaiety, full of confidence in himselfand of interest in life during his few months' residence in Germany. The _annus mirabilis_ of his poetic life was but two years behindhim, and his achievements of 1797-98 seemed to him but a mere earnestof what he was destined to accomplish. His powers of mentalconcentration were undiminished, as his student days at Gottingensufficiently proved; his conjugal and family affections, as Dr. Carrlyon notes for us, were still unimpaired; his own verse gives signsof a home-sickness and a yearning for his own fireside which were inmelancholy contrast with the restlessness of his later years. Nay, evenafter his return to England, and during the six months of his regularwork on the _Morning Post_, the vigour of his political articlesentirely negatives the idea that any relaxation of intellectual energyhad as yet set in. Yet within six months of his leaving London forKeswick there begins a progressive decline in Coleridge's literaryactivity in every form. The second part of _Christabel_, beautifulbut inferior to the first, was composed in the autumn of 1800, and forthe next two years, so far as the higher forms of literature areconcerned, "the rest is silence. " The author of the prefatory memoir inthe edition of Coleridge's _Poetical and Dramatic Works_ (1880), enumerates some half-dozen slight pieces contributed to the _MorningPost_ in 1801, but declares that Coleridge's poetical contributionsto this paper during 1802 were "very rich and varied, and included themagnificent ode entitled _Dejection_. " Only the latter clause ofthis statement is entitled, I think, to command our assent. Variedthough the list may be, it is hardly to be described as "rich. " Itcovers only about seven weeks in the autumn of 1802, and, with theexception of the _Lovers' Resolution_ and the "magnificent ode"referred to, the pieces are of the shortest and slightest kind. Nor isit accurate to say that the "political articles of the same period werealso numerous and important. " On the contrary, it would appear from anexamination of Mrs. H. N. Coleridge's collection that her father'scontributions to the _Post_ between his departure from London andthe autumn of 1802 were few and intermittent, and in August 1803 theproprietorship of that journal passed out of Mr. Stuart's hands. It is, in short, I think, impossible to doubt that very shortly after hismigration to the Lake country he practically ceased not only to writepoetry but to produce any mentionable quantity of _complete_ workin the prose form. His mind, no doubt, was incessantly activethroughout the whole of the deplorable period upon which we are nowentering; but it seems pretty certain that its activity was not poeticnor even critical, but purely philosophical, and that the products ofthat activity went exclusively to _marginalia_ and the pages ofnote-books. Yet unfortunately we have almost no evidence, personal orother, from which we can with any certainty construct thepsychological--if one should not rather say the physiological, orbetter still, perhaps, the pathological--history of this cardinal epochin Coleridge's life. Miss Wordsworth's diary is nearly silent about himfor the next few years; he was living indeed some dozen miles from herbrother at Grasmere, and they could not therefore have been in dailyintercourse. Southey did not come to the Lakes till 1803, and therecords of his correspondence only begin therefore from that date. Mr. Cottle's _Reminiscences_ are here a blank; Charles Lamb'scorrespondence yields little; and though De Quincey has plenty to sayabout this period in his characteristic fashion, it must have beenbased upon pure gossip, as he cites no authorities, and did not himselfmake Coleridge's acquaintance till six years afterwards. This, however, is at least certain, that his gloomy accounts of his own health beginfrom a period at which his satisfaction with his new abode was still asfresh as ever. The house which he had taken, now historic as theresidence of two famous Englishmen, enjoyed a truly beautiful situationand the command of a most noble view. It stood in the vale ofDerwentwater, on the bank of the river Greta, and about a mile from thelake. When Coleridge first entered it, it was uncompleted, and anarrangement was made by which, after completion, it was to be dividedbetween the tenant and the landlord, a Mr. Jackson. As it turned out, however, the then completed portion was shared by them in common, theother portion, and eventually the whole, being afterwards occupied bySouthey. In April 1801, some eight or nine months after his takingpossession of Greta Hall, Coleridge thus describes it to its futureoccupant:-- "Our house stands on a low hill, the whole front of whichis one field and an enormous garden, nine-tenths of which is a nurserygarden. Behind the house is an orchard and a small wood on a steepslope, at the foot of which is the river Greta, which winds round andcatches the evening's light in the front of the house. In front we havea giant camp--an encamped army of tent-like mountains which, by aninverted arch, gives a view of another vale. On our right the lovelyvale and the wedge-shaped lake of Bassenthwaite; and on our leftDerwentwater and Lodore full in view, and the fantastic mountains ofBorrowdale. Behind is the massy Skiddaw, smooth, green, high, with twochasms and a tent-like ridge in the larger. A fairer scene you have notseen in all your wanderings. " There is here no note of discontent withthe writer's surroundings; and yet, adds Mr. Cuthbert Southey in his_Life and Correspondence_ of his father, the remainder of thisletter was filled by Coleridge with "a most gloomy account of hishealth. " Southey writes him in reply that he is convinced that hisfriend's "complaint is gouty, that good living is necessary and a goodclimate. " In July of the same year he received a visit from Southey atGreta Hall, and one from Charles and Mary Lamb in the following summer, and it is probable that during such intervals of pleasurable excitementhis health and spirits might temporarily rally. But henceforward anduntil his departure for Malta we gather nothing from any source as toColeridge's _normal_ condition of body and mind which is notunfavourable, and it is quite certain that he had long before 1804enslaved himself to that fatal drug which was to remain his tyrant forthe rest of his days. When, then, and how did this slavery begin? Whatwas the precise date of Coleridge's first experiences of opium, andwhat the original cause of his taking it? Within what time did its usebecome habitual? To what extent was the decline of his health theeffect of the evil habit, and to what, if any, extent its cause? Andhow far, if at all, can the deterioration of his character and powersbe attributed to a decay of physical constitution, brought about byinfluences beyond the sufferer's own control? Could every one of these questions be completely answered, we should bein a position to solve the very obscure and painful problem before us;but though some of them can be answered with more or less approach tocompleteness, there is only one of them which can be finally disposedof. It is certain, and it is no doubt matter for melancholysatisfaction to have ascertained it, that Coleridge first hadrecourse to opium as an anodyne. It was Nature's revolt from pain, andnot her appetite for pleasure, which drove him to the drug; and thoughDe Quincey, with his almost comical malice, remarks that, thoughColeridge began in the desire to obtain relief "there is no proof thathe did not end in voluptuousness, " there is on the other hand no proofwhatever that he did so end--_until the habit was formed_. It isquite consistent with probability, and only accords with Coleridge'sown express affirmations, to believe that it was the medicinal efficacyof opium, and this quality of it alone, which induced him to resort toit again and again until his senses contracted that well-known andinsatiable craving for the peculiar excitement, "voluptuous" only tothe initiated, which opium-intoxication creates. But let Coleridgespeak on this point for himself. Writing in April 1826 he says:-- "I wrote a few stanzas three-and-twenty years ago, soon after my eyeshad been opened to the true nature of the habit into which I had beenignorantly deluded by the seeming magic effects of opium, in thesudden removal of a supposed rheumatic affection, attended withswellings in my knees and palpitation of the heart and pains all overme, by which I had been bed-ridden for nearly six months. Unhappilyamong my neighbours' and landlord's books were a large number ofmedical reviews and magazines. I had always a fondness (a common case, but most mischievous turn with reading men who are at all dyspeptic)for dabbling in medical writings; and in one of these reviews I met acase which I fancied very like my own, in which a cure had beeneffected by the Kendal Black Drop. In an evil hour I procured it: itworked miracles--the swellings disappeared, the pains vanished. I wasall alive, and all around me being as ignorant as myself, nothingcould exceed my triumph. I talked of nothing else, prescribed thenewly-discovered panacea for all complaints, and carried a littleabout with me not to lose any opportunity of administering 'instantrelief and speedy cure' to all complainers, stranger or friend, gentleor simple. Alas! it is with a bitter smile, a laugh of gall andbitterness, that I recall this period of unsuspecting delusion, andhow I first became aware of the Maelstrom, the fatal whirlpool towhich I was drawing, just when the current was beyond my strength tostem. The state of my mind is truly portrayed in the followingeffusion, for God knows! that from that time I was the victim of painand terror, nor had I at any time taken the flattering poison as astimulus or for any craving after pleasurable sensation. " The "effusion" in question has parted company with the autobiographicalnote, and the author of the prefatory memoir above quoted conjecturesit to have been a little poem entitled the _Visionary Hope_; but I ammyself of opinion, after a careful study of both pieces, that it ismore probably the _Pains of Sleep_, which moreover is known tohave been written in 1803. But whichever it be, its date is fixed inthat year by the statement in the autobiographical note of 1826 thatthe stanzas referred to in it were written "twenty-three years ago. "Thus, then, we have the two facts established, that the opium-takinghabit had its origin in a bodily ailment, and that at some time in1803 that habit had become confirmed. The disastrous experiment inamateur therapeutics, which was the means of implanting it, could nothave taken place, according to the autobiographical note, until atleast six months after Coleridge's arrival at Keswick, and perhaps notfor some months later yet. At any rate, it seems tolerably certainthat it was not till the spring of 1801, when the climate of theLake country first began to tell unfavourably on his health, thatthe "Kendal Black Drop" was taken. Possibly it may have been aboutthe time (April 1801) when he wrote the letter to Southey which hasbeen quoted above, and which, it will be remembered, contained "sogloomy an account of his health. " How painfully ailing he was at thistime we know from a variety of sources, from some of which we alsogather that he must have been a sufferer in more or less seriousforms from his boyhood upwards. Mr. Gillman, for instance, who speakson this point with the twofold authority of confidant and medicalexpert, records a statement of Coleridge's to the effect that, as aresult of such schoolboy imprudences as "swimming over the New Riverin my clothes and remaining in them, full half the time from seventeento eighteen was passed by me in the sick ward of Christ's Hospital, afflicted with jaundice and rheumatic fever. " From theseindiscretions and their consequences "may be dated, " Mr. Gillmanthinks, "all his bodily sufferings in future life. " That he was amartyr to periodical attacks of rheumatism for some years before hismigration to Keswick is a conclusion resting upon something more thanconjecture. The _Ode to the Departing Year_ (1796) was written, ashe has himself told us, under a severe attack of rheumatism in thehead. In 1797 he describes himself in ill health, and as forced toretire on that account to the "lonely farmhouse between Porlock andLondon on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire, " where_Kubla Khan_ was written. [1] Thus much is, moreover, certain, that whatever were Coleridge's health and habits during the first twoyears of his residence at Keswick, his career as a poet--that is tosay, as a poet of the first order--was closed some months before thatperiod had expired. The ode entitled _Dejection_, to whichreference has so often been made, was written on the 4th of April 1802, and the evidential importance which attaches, in connection with thepoint under inquiry, to this singularly pathetic utterance has beenalmost universally recognised. Coleridge has himself cited its mostsignificant passage in the _Biographia Literaria_ as supplying thebest description of his mental state at the time when it was written. De Quincey quotes it with appropriate comments in his _Coleridge andOpium-Eating_. Its testimony is reverently invoked by the poet's sonin the introductory essay prefixed by him to his edition of hisfather's works. The earlier stanzas are, however, so necessary to thecomprehension of Coleridge's mood at this time that a somewhat longextract must be made. In the opening stanza he expresses a longing thatthe storm which certain atmospheric signs of a delusively calm eveningappear to promise might break forth, so that "Those sounds which oft have raised me, whilst they awed, And sent my soul abroad, Might now perhaps their wonted impulse give, Might startle this dull pain, and make it move and live. " And thus, with ever-deepening sadness, the poem proceeds: "A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear, A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief, Which finds no natural outlet, no relief, In word, or sigh, or tear-- O Lady! in this wan and heartless mood, To other thoughts by yonder throstle woo'd, All this long eve, so balmy and serene, Have I been gazing on the western sky, And its peculiar tint of yellow green: And still I gaze--and with how blank an eye! And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars, That give away their motion to the stars; Those stars, that glide behind them or between, Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen: Yon crescent Moon as fixed as if it grew In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue; I see them all so excellently fair, I see, not feel how beautiful they are! "My genial spirits fail, And what can these avail To lift the smothering weight from off my breast? It were a vain endeavour, Though I should gaze for ever On that green light that lingers in the west: I may not hope from outward forms to win The passion and the life, whose fountains are within. "O Lady! we receive but what we give, And in our life alone does nature live: Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud! And would we aught behold, of higher worth, Than that inanimate cold world allowed To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd, Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth, A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud Enveloping the earth-- And from the soul itself must there be sent A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth, Of all sweet sounds the life and element! "O pure of heart! thou need'st not ask of me What this strong music in the soul may be! What, and wherein it doth exist, This light, this glory, this fair luminous mist, This beautiful and beauty-making power. Joy, virtuous Lady! Joy that ne'er was given, Save to the pure, and in their purest hour, Life, and Life's effluence, cloud at once and shower, Joy, Lady! is the spirit and the power, Which, wedding Nature to us, gives in dower A new Earth and new Heaven, Undreamt of by the sensual and the proud-- Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud-- We in ourselves rejoice! And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight, All melodies the echoes of that voice, All colours a suffusion from that light. " And then follows the much quoted, profoundly touching, deeply significantstanza to which we have referred:-- "There was a time when, though my path was rough, This joy within me dallied with distress, And all misfortunes were but as the stuff Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness: For hope grew round me, like the twining vine, And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seemed mine. But now afflictions how me down to earth: Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth, But O! each visitation Suspends what nature gave me at my birth, My shaping spirit of Imagination. For not to think of what I needs must feel, But to be still and patient, all I can; And haply by abstruse research to steal From my own nature all the natural Man-- This was my sole resource, my only plan: Till that which suits a part infects the whole, And now is almost grown the habit of my Soul. " Sadder lines than these were never perhaps written by any poet indescription of his own feelings. And what gives them their peculiarsadness--as also, of course, their special biographical value--is thatthey are not, like Shelley's similarly entitled stanzas, the mereexpression of a passing mood. They are the record of a life change, averitable threnody over a spiritual death. For there can be no doubt--his whole subsequent history goes to show it--that Coleridge's "shapingspirit of Imagination" was in fact dead when these lines were written. To a man of stronger moral fibre a renascence of the poetical instinctin other forms might, as I have suggested above, been possible; but thepoet of _Christabel_ and the _Ancient Mariner_ was dead. Themetaphysician had taken his place, and was striving, in abstruseresearch, to live in forgetfulness of the loss. Little more, that is tosay, than a twelvemonth after the composition of the second part of_Christabel_ the impulse which gave birth to it had passed awayfor ever. Opium-taking had doubtless begun by this time--mayconceivably indeed have begun nearly a year before--and the mere_mood_ of the poem, the temporary phase of feeling which directedhis mind inwards into deeper reflections on its permanent state, is nodoubt strongly suggestive, in its excessive depression, of the terriblereaction which is known to follow upon opium-excitement. But, Iconfess, it seems to me improbable that even the habitual use of thestimulant for so comparatively short a time as twelve months could haveproduced so profound a change in Coleridge's intellectual nature. Icannot but think that De Quincey overstates the case in declaring that"opium killed Coleridge as a poet, " though it may well be that, afterthe collapse of health, which appears to me to have been the real_causa causans_ in the matter, had killed the poet as we know him, opium prevented his resurrection in another and it may be but littleinferior form. On the whole, in fact, the most probable account of thisall-important era in Coleridge's life appears to me to be this: that inthe course of 1801, as he was approaching his thirtieth year, adistinct change for the worse--precipitated possibly, as Mr. Gillmanthinks, by the climate of his new place of abode--took place in hisconstitution; that his rheumatic habit of body, and the dyspeptictrouble by which it was accompanied became confirmed; and that thesevere attacks of the acute form of the malady which he underwentproduced such a permanent lowering of his vitality and animal spiritsas, _first_, to extinguish the creative impulse, and _then_to drive him to the physical anodyne of opium and to the mentalstimulant of metaphysics. From the summer of 1801, at any rate, his _malaise_, both of mindand body, appears to have grown apace. Repeated letters from Southeyallow us to see how deeply concerned he was at this time about hisfriend's condition. Plans of foreign travel are discussed betweenthem, and Southey endeavours in vain to spur his suffering anddepressed correspondent to "the assertion of his supremacy" in somenew literary work. But, with the exception of his occasionalcontributions to the press, whatever he committed to paperduring these years exists only, if at all, in a fragmentary form. Andhis restlessness, continually on the increase, appears by the end of1802 to have become ungovernable. In November of that year he eagerlyaccepted an offer from Thomas Wedgwood to become his companion on atour, and he spent this and the greater part of the following month inSouth Wales with some temporary advantage, it would seem, to his healthand spirits. "Coleridge, " writes Mr. Wedgwood to a friend, "is allkindness to me, and in prodigious favour here. He is quite easy, cheerful, and takes great pains to make himself pleasant. He iswilling, indeed desirous, to accompany me to any part of the globe. ""Coll and I, " he writes on another occasion, the abbreviation of namehaving been suggested to him by Coleridge himself, "harmoniseamazingly, " and adds that his companion "takes long rambles, and writesa great deal. " But the fact that such changes of air and scene producedno permanent effect upon the invalid after his return to his own homeappears to show that now, at any rate, his fatal habit had obtained afirm hold upon him. And his "writing a great deal resulted" only in thefilling of many note-books, and perhaps the sketching out of many ofthose vast schemes of literary labour of which he was destined to leaveso remarkable a collection at his death. One such we find himforwarding to Southey in the August of 1803--the plan of a BibliothecaBritannica, or "History of British Literature, bibliographical, biographical, and critical, " in eight volumes. The first volume was tocontain a "complete history of all Welsh, Saxon, and Erse books thatare not translations, but the native growth of Britain;" to accomplishwhich, writes Coleridge, "I will with great pleasure join you inlearning Welsh and Erse. " The second volume was to contain the historyof English poetry and poets, including "all prose truly poetical. " Thethird volume "English prose, considered as to style, as to eloquence, as to general impressiveness; a history of styles and manners, theircauses, their birthplace and parentage, their analysis. " The fourthvolume would take up "the history of metaphysics, theology, medicine, alchemy; common, canon, and Roman law from Alfred to Henry VII. " Thefifth would "carry on metaphysics and ethics to the present day in thefirst half, and comprise in the second half the theology of all thereformers. " In the sixth and seventh volumes were to be included "allthe articles you (Southey) can get on all the separate arts andsciences that have been treated of in books since the Reformation; andby this time, " concludes the enthusiastic projector, "the book, if itanswered at all, would have gained so high a reputation that you neednot fear having whom you liked to write the different articles--medicine, surgery, chemistry, etc. ; navigation, travellers' voyages, etc. , etc. " There is certainly a melancholy humour in the formulationof so portentous a scheme by a man who was at this moment wanderingaimlessly among the lakes and mountains, unable to settle down to anydefinite piece of literary work, or even to throw off a fatal habit, which could not fail, if persevered in, to destroy all power of steadyapplication in the future. That neither the comic nor the patheticelement in the situation was lost upon Southey is evident from hishalf-sad, half-satirical, wholly winning reply. "Your plan, " he writes, "is too good, too gigantic, quite beyond my powers. If you had mytolerable state of health and that love of steady and productiveemployment which is now grown into a necessary habit with me, if youwere to execute and would execute it, it would be beyond all doubt themost valuable work of any age or any country; but I cannot fill up suchan outline. No man can better feel where he fails than I do, and torely upon you for whole quartos! Dear Coleridge, the smile that comeswith that thought is a very melancholy one; and if Edith saw me now shewould think my eyes were weak again, when in truth the humour thatcovers them springs from another cause. " A few weeks after thisinterchange of correspondence Coleridge was once again to prove how farhe was from possessing Southey's "tolerable state of health. "Throughout the whole of this year he had been more restless than ever. In January 1803 we find him staying with Southey at Bristol, "sufferingterribly from the climate, and talking of going abroad. " A week laterhe is at Stowey, planning schemes, not destined to be realised, offoreign travel with Wedgwood. Returning again to Keswick, he started, after a few months' quiescence, on 15th August, in company withWordsworth and his sister, for a tour in Scotland, but after afortnight he found himself too ill to proceed. The autumn rains set in, and "poor Coleridge, " writes Miss Wordsworth, "being very unwell, determined to send his clothes to Edinburgh, and make the best of hisway thither, being afraid to face much wet weather in an opencarriage. " It is possible, however, that his return to Keswick may havebeen hastened by the circumstance that Southey, who had paid a briefvisit to the Lake country two years before, was expected in a few daysat the house which was destined to be his abode for the longest portionof his life. He arrived at Greta Hall on 7th September 1803, and fromtime to time during the next six months his correspondence gives usoccasional glimpses of Coleridge's melancholy state. At the end ofDecember, his health growing steadily worse, he conceived the projectof a voyage to Madeira, and quitted Keswick with the intention, afterpaying a short visit to the Wordsworths, of betaking himself to Londonto make preparations. His stay at Grasmere, however, was longer than hehad counted on. "He was detained for a month by a severe attack ofillness, induced, if his description is to be relied on, by the use ofnarcotics. [2] Unsuspicious of the cause, Mrs. And Miss Wordsworthnursed him with the tenderest affection, while the poet himself, usually a parsimonious man, forced upon him, to use Coleridge's ownwords, a hundred pounds in the event of his going to Madeira, and hisfriend Stuart offered to befriend him. " From Grasmere he went toLiverpool, where he spent a pleasant week with his old Unitarianfriend, Dr. Crompton, and arrived in London at the close of 1803. Here, however, his plans were changed. Malta was substituted for Madeira, inresponse to an invitation from his friend Mr. , afterwards Sir John, Stoddart, then resident as judge in the Mediterranean island. By 12thMarch, as we gather from the Southey correspondence, the change ofarrangements had been made. Two days afterwards he receives a letter ofvalediction from his "old friend and brother" at Greta Hall, and on 2dApril 1804, he sailed from England in the _Speedwell_, droppinganchor sixteen days later in Valetta harbour. FOOTNOTES 1. Were it not for Coleridge's express statement that he first tookopium at Keswick, one would be inclined to attribute the gorgeous butformless imagery of that poem to the effects of the stimulant. It iscertainly very like a metrical version of one of the pleasant varietyof opium-dreams described in De Quincey's poetic prose. 2. See Miss Meteyard (_A Group of Englishmen_, p. 223). Herevidence, however, on any point otherwise doubtful in Coleridge'shistory should be received with caution, as her estimate of the poetcertainly errs somewhat on the side of excessive harshness. CHAPTER VI Stay at Malta--Its injurious effects--Return to England--Meetingwith De Quincey--Residence in London--First series of lectures. [1806-1809. ] Never was human being destined so sadly and signally to illustrate the_coelum non animum_ aphorism as the unhappy passenger on the_Speedwell_. Southey shall describe his condition when he leftEngland; and his own pathetic lines to William Wordsworth will picturehim to us on his return. "You are in great measure right aboutColeridge, " writes the former to his friend Rickman, "he is worse inbody than you seem to believe; but the main cause lies in his ownmanagement of himself, or rather want of management. His mind is in aperpetual St. Vitus's dance--eternal activity without action. At timeshe feels mortified that he should have done so little, but this feelingnever produces any exertion. 'I will begin to-morrow, ' he says, andthus he has been all his lifelong letting to-day slip. He has had noheavy calamities in life, and so contrives to be miserable abouttrifles. Poor fellow, there is no one thing which gives me so much painas the witnessing such a waste of unequalled powers. " Then, afterrecalling the case of a highly promising schoolfellow, who had madeshipwreck of his life, and whom "a few individuals only remember with asort of horror and affection, which just serves to make them melancholywhenever they think of him or mention his name, " he adds: "This willnot be the case with Coleridge; the _disjecta membra_ will befound if he does not die early: but having so much to do, so manyerrors to weed out of the world which he is capable of eradicating, ifhe does die without doing his work, it would half break my heart, forno human being has had more talents allotted. " Such being his closestfriend's account of him, and knowing, as we now do (what Southeyperhaps had no suspicion of at the time), the chief if not the sole ororiginal cause of his morally nerveless condition, it is impossible notto feel that he did the worst possible thing for himself in taking thisjourney to Malta. In quitting England he cut himself off from thoselast possibilities of self-conquest which the society and counsels ofhis friends might otherwise have afforded him, and the consequenceswere, it is to be feared, disastrous. After De Quincey's incrediblycool assertion that it was "notorious that Coleridge began the use ofopium, not as a relief from any bodily pain or nervous irritations, since his constitution was strong and excellent(!), but as a source ofluxurious sensations, " we must receive anything which he has to say onthis particular point with the utmost caution; but there is only toomuch plausibility in his statement that, Coleridge being necessarilythrown, while at Malta, "a good deal upon his own resources in thenarrow society of a garrison, he there confirmed and cherished . .. Hishabit of taking opium in large quantities. " Contrary to hisexpectations, moreover, the Maltese climate failed to benefit him. Atfirst, indeed, he did experience some feeling of relief, butafterwards, according to Mr. Gillman, he spoke of his rheumatic limbsas "lifeless tools, " and of the "violent pains in his bowels, whichneither opium, ether, nor peppermint combined could relieve. " Occupation, however, was not wanting to him, if occupationcould have availed in the then advanced stage of his case. He earlymade the acquaintance of the governor of the island, Sir AlexanderBall, who, having just lost his secretary by death, requested Cole-ridge to undertake that official's duties until his successor should beappointed. By this arrangement the governor and the public service inall likelihood profited more than the provisional secretary; forColeridge's literary abilities proved very serviceable in thedepartment of diplomatic correspondence. The dignities of the office, Mr. Gillman tells us, no doubt on Coleridge's own authority, "he neverattempted to support; he was greatly annoyed at what he thought itsunnecessary parade, and he petitioned Sir Alexander Ball to be relievedfrom it. " The purely mechanical duties of the post, too, appear to havetroubled him. He complains, in one of the journals which he kept duringthis period, of having been "for months past incessantly employed inofficial tasks, subscribing, examining, administering oaths, auditing, etc. " On the whole it would seem that the burden of his secretarialemployment, though doubtless it would have been found light enough byany one accustomed to public business, was rather a weariness to theflesh than a distraction to the mind; while in the meantime a newsymptom of disorder--a difficulty of breathing, to which he was alwaysafterwards subject--began to manifest itself in his case. Probably hewas glad enough--relieved, in more than one sense of the word--when, inthe autumn of 1805, the new secretary arrived at Malta to take hisplace. On 27th September Coleridge quitted the island on his homewardjourney _via_ Italy, stopping for a short time at Syracuse on hisway. At Naples, which he reached on the 15th of December, he made alonger stay, and in Rome his sojourn lasted some months. Unfortunately, for a reason which will presently appear, there remains no writtenrecord of his impressions of the Eternal City; and though Mr. Gillmanassures us that the gap is "partly filled by his own verbal account, repeated at various times to the writer of this memoir, " the public ofto-day is only indebted to "the writer of this memoir" for the not verystartling information that Coleridge, "while in Rome, was activelyemployed in visiting the great works of art, statues, pictures, buildings, palaces, etc. Etc. , observations on which he minuted downfor publication. " It is somewhat more interesting to learn that he madethe acquaintance of many literary and artistic notabilities at thattime congregated there, including Tieck, the German poet and novelist, and the American painter Alston, to whose skill we owe what is reputedto be the best of his many not easily reconcilable portraits. The lossof his Roman memoranda was indirectly brought about by a singularincident, his account of which has met with some undeserved ridicule atthe hands of Tory criticism. When about to quit Rome for England_via_ Switzerland and Germany he took the precaution of inquiringof Baron von Humboldt, brother of the traveller, and then PrussianMinister at the Court of Rome, whether the proposed route was safe, andwas by him informed that he would do well to keep out of the reach ofBonaparte, who was meditating the seizure of his person. According toColeridge, indeed, an order for his arrest had actually beentransmitted to Rome, and he was only saved from its execution by theconnivance of the "good old Pope, " Pius VII. , who sent him a passportand counselled his immediate flight. Hastening to Leghorn, hediscovered an American vessel ready to sail for England, on board ofwhich he embarked. On the voyage she was chased by a French vessel, which so alarmed the captain that he compelled Coleridge to throw hispapers, including these precious MSS. , overboard. The wrath of theFirst Consul against him was supposed to have been excited by hiscontributions to the _Morning Post_, an hypothesis which DeQuincey reasonably finds by no means so ridiculous as it appeared to acertain writer in _Blackwood_, who treated it as the "veryconsummation of moonstruck vanity, " and compared it to "John Dennis'sfrenzy in retreating from the sea-coast under the belief that LouisXIV. Had commissioned commissaries to land on the English shore andmake a dash at his person. " It must be remembered, however, that Mr. Fox, to whose statement on such a point Napoleon would be likely toattach especial weight, had declared in the House of Commons that therupture of the Peace of Amiens had been brought about by certain essaysin the _Morning Post_, and there is certainly no reason to believethat a tyrant whose animosity against literary or quasi-literaryassailants ranged from Madame de Stael down to the bookseller Palmwould have regarded a man of Coleridge's reputation in letters asbeneath the stoop of his vengeance. After an absence of two years and a half Coleridge arrived in Englandin August 1806. That his then condition of mind and body was aprofoundly miserable one, and that he himself was acutely consciousof it, will be seen later on in certain extracts from his correspondence;but his own _Lines to William Wordsworth_--lines "composed on thenight after his recitation of a poem on the growth of an individualmind"--contain an even more tragic expression of his state. It wasWordsworth's pensive retrospect of their earlier years together whichawoke the bitterest pangs of self-reproach in his soul, and wrung fromit the cry which follows:-- "Ah! as I listened with a heart forlorn The pulses of my being beat anew: And even as life returns upon the drowned, Life's joy rekindling roused a throng of pains-- Keen pangs of Love, awakening as a babe Turbulent, with an outcry in the heart; And fears self-willed, that shunned the eye of hope; And hope that scarce would know itself from fear; Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain, And genius given, and knowledge won in vain; And all which I had culled in wood-walks wild, And all which patient toil had reared, and all, Commune with thee had opened out--but flowers Strewn on my corse, and borne upon my bier, In the same coffin, for the self-same grave!" A dismal and despairing strain indeed, but the situation unhappily wasnot less desperate. We are, in fact, entering upon that period ofColeridge's life--a period, roughly speaking, of about ten years--whichno admirer of his genius, no lover of English letters, no one, it mighteven be said, who wishes to think well of human nature, can evercontemplate without pain. His history from the day of his landing inEngland in August 1806 till the day when he entered Mr. Gillman's housein 1816 is one long and miserable story of self-indulgence and self-reproach, of lost opportunities, of neglected duties, of unfinishedundertakings. His movements and his occupation for the first year afterhis return are not now traceable with exactitude, but his time wasapparently spent partly in London and partly at Grasmere and Keswick. When in London, Mr. Stuart, who had now become proprietor of the_Courier_, allowed him to occupy rooms at the office of thatnewspaper to save him expense; and Coleridge, though his regularconnection with the _Courier_ did not begin till some yearsafterwards, may possibly have repaid the accommodation by occasionalcontributions or by assistance to its editor in some other form. Itseems certain, at any rate, that if he was earning no income in thisway he was earning none at all. His friend and patron, Mr. ThomasWedgwood, had died while he was in Malta; but the full pension of L150per annum bestowed upon him by the two brothers jointly continued to bepaid to him by Josiah, the senior. Coleridge, however, had landed inEngland in ignorance of his patron's death. He had wholly neglected tokeep up any correspondence with the Wedgwoods during his stay in Malta, and though "dreadfully affected" by it, as Mr. Poole records, he seemsto have allowed nearly a year to elapse before communicating with thesurviving brother. The letter which he then wrote deserves quotation, not only as testimony to his physical and pecuniary condition on hisarrival in England, but as affording a distressing picture of themorbid state of his emotions and the enfeebled condition of his will. "As to the reasons for my silence, they are, " he incoherently begins, "impossible, and the numbers of the _causes_ of it, with thealmost weekly expectation for the last eight months of receiving mybooks, manuscripts, etc. From Malta, has been itself a cause ofincreasing the procrastination which constant ill health, despondency, domestic distractions, and embarrassment from accidents, equallyunconnected with my will or conduct" [every cause mentioned, it will beseen, but the true one], "had already seated deep in my very muscles, as it were. I do not mean to accuse myself of idleness--I have enoughof self-crimination without adding imaginary articles--but in allthings that affect my moral feelings I have sunk under such a strangecowardice of pain that I have not unfrequently kept letters frompersons dear to me for weeks together unopened. After a most miserablepassage from Leghorn of fifty-five days, during which my life was twicegiven over, I found myself again in my native country, ill, penniless, and worse than homeless. I had been near a month in the country beforeI ventured or could summon courage enough to ask a question concerningyou and yours, and yet God Almighty knows that every hour the thoughthad been gnawing at my heart. I then for the first time heard of thatevent which sounded like my own knell, without its natural hope orsense of rest. Such shall I be (is the thought that haunts me), but O!not such; O! with what a different retrospect! But I owe it to justiceto say, Such good I truly can do myself, etc. , etc. " The rest of thispainfully inarticulate letter is filled with further complaints of illhealth, with further protestations of irresponsibility for the neglectof duties, and with promises, never to be fulfilled, of composing orassisting others to compose a memoir of Thomas Wedgwood, who, inaddition to his general repute as a man of culture, had made a specialmark by his speculations in psychology. The singular expression, "worse than homeless, " and the reference todomestic distractions, appear to indicate that some estrangement hadalready set in between Coleridge and his wife. De Quincey's testimonyto its existence at the time (a month or so later) when he madeColeridge's acquaintance may, subject to the usual deductions, beaccepted as trustworthy; and, of course, for aught we know, it maythen have been already of some years' standing. That the provocationto it on the husband's part may be so far antedated is at least areasonable conjecture. There may be nothing--in all likelihood thereis nothing--worth attention in De Quincey's gossip about the younglady, "intellectually very much superior to Mrs. Coleridge, whobecame a neighbour and daily companion of Coleridge's walks" atKeswick. But if there be no foundation for his remarks on "themischiefs of a situation which exposed Mrs. Coleridge to an invidiouscomparison with a more intellectual person, " there is undoubtedlyplenty of point in the immediately following observation that "itwas most unfortunate for Coleridge himself to be continuallycompared with one so ideally correct and regular in his habits as Mr. Southey. " The passion of female jealousy assuredly did not need to becalled into play to account for the alienation of Mrs. Coleridge fromher husband. Mrs. Carlyle has left on record her pathetic lament overthe fate of a woman who marries a man of genius; but a man of genius ofthe coldly selfish and exacting type of the Chelsea philosopher wouldprobably be a less severe burden to a woman of housewifely instinctsthan the weak, unmethodical, irresolute, shiftless being that Coleridgehad by this time become. After the arrival of the Southeys, Mrs. Coleridge would indeed have been more than human if she had not lookedwith an envious eye upon the contrast between her sister Edith's lotand her own. For this would give her the added pang of perceiving thatshe was specially unlucky in the matter, and that men of genius could("if they chose, " as she would probably, though not perhaps quitejustly have put it) make very good husbands indeed. If one poet couldfinish his poems, and pay his tradesmen's bills, and work steadily forthe publishers in his own house without the necessity of periodicalflittings to various parts of the United Kingdom or the Continent, why, so could another. With such reflections as these Mrs. Coleridge's mindwas no doubt sadly busy during the early years of her residence at theLakes, and, since their causes did not diminish but rather increased inintensity as time went on, the estrangement between them--or rather, todo Coleridge justice, her estrangement from her husband--had, by 1806, no doubt become complete. The fatal habit which even up to this timeseems to have been unknown to most of his friends could hardly havebeen a secret to his wife, and his four or five years of slavery to itmay well have worn out her patience. This single cause indeed, namely, Coleridge's addiction to opium, isquite sufficient, through the humiliations, discomfort, and privations, pecuniary and otherwise, for which the vice was no doubt mediately orimmediately responsible, to account for the unhappy issue of a unionwhich undoubtedly was one of love to begin with, and which seems tohave retained that character for at least six years of its course. We have noted the language of warm affection in which the "belovedSara" is spoken of in the early poems, and up to the time ofColeridge's stay in Germany his feelings towards his wife remainedevidently unchanged. To his children, of whom three out of the fourborn to him had survived, he was deeply attached; and the remarkablepromise displayed by the eldest son, Hartley, and his youngest childand only daughter, Sara, made them objects of no less interest to hisintellect than to his heart. "Hartley, " he writes to Mr. Poole in1803, "is a strange, strange boy, exquisitely wild, an uttervisionary; like the moon among thin clouds, he moves in a circleof light of his own making. He alone is a light of his own. " And of hisdaughter in the same poetic strain: "My meek little Sara is aremarkably interesting baby, with the finest possible skin, and largeblue eyes, and she smiles as if she were basking in a sunshine as mildas moonlight of her own quiet happiness. " Derwent, a less remarkablebut no less attractive child than his brother and sister (whom he wasdestined long to survive), held an equal place in his father'saffections. Yet all these interwoven influences--a deep love of hischildren and a sincere attachment to his wife, of whom, indeed, henever ceased to speak with respect and regard--were as powerless as inso many thousands of other cases they have been, to brace an enfeebledwill to the task of self-reform. In 1807 "respect and regard" hadmanifestly taken the place of any warmer feeling in his mind. Later onin the letter above quoted he says, "In less than a week I go down toOttery, with my children and their mother, from a sense of duty"(_i. E. _ to his brother, the Rev. George Coleridge, who hadsucceeded his father as head master of the Ottery St. Mary GrammarSchool) "as far as it affects myself, and from a promise made to Mrs. Coleridge, as far as it affects her, and indeed of a debt of respect toher for her many praiseworthy qualities. " When husbands and wives taketo liquidating debts of this kind, and in this spirit, it is prettyconclusive evidence that all other accounts between them areclosed. The letter from which these extracts have been taken waswritten from Aisholt near Bridgewater, where Coleridge was thenstaying, with his wife and children, as the guest of a Mr. Price; andhis friend Poole's description to Josiah Wedgwood of his state at thattime is significant as showing that some at least of his intimateacquaintances had no suspicion of the real cause of his bodily andmental disorders. "I admire him, " Poole writes, "and pity him more thanever. His information is much extended, the _great_ qualities ofhis mind heightened and better disciplined, but alas! his health ismuch weaker, and his great failing, procrastination, or theincapability of acting agreeably to his wish and will, muchincreased. " Whether the promised visit to Ottery St. Mary was ever paid there isno record to show, but at the end of July 1807 we again hear of theColeridges at the house of a Mr. Chubb, a descendant of the Deist, atBridgewater; and here it was that De Quincey, after having endeavouredin vain to run the poet to earth at Stowey, where he had been stayingwith Mr. Poole, and whence he had gone to pay a short visit to LordEgmont, succeeded in obtaining an introduction to him. Thecharacteristic passage in which the younger man describes theirfirst meeting is too long for quotation, and it is to be hoped too wellknown to need it: his vivid and acute criticism of Coleridge'sconversation may be more appropriately cited hereafter. His evidence asto the conjugal relations of Coleridge and his wife has been alreadydiscussed; and the last remaining point of interest about thismemorable introduction is the testimony which it incidentally affordsto De Quincey's genuine and generous instinct of hero-worship, and tothe depth of Coleridge's pecuniary embarrassments. The loan of L300, which the poet's enthusiastic admirer insisted on Cottle's conveying tohim as from an unknown "young man of fortune who admired his talents, "should cover a multitude of De Quincey's subsequent sins. It was indeedonly upon Cottle's urgent representation that he had consented toreduce the sum from L500 to L300. Nor does there seem any doubt of hishaving honestly attempted to conceal his own identity with the namelessbenefactor, though, according to his own later account, he failed. [1] This occurred in November 1807, and in the previous month DeQuincey had been able to render Coleridge a minor service, while at thesame moment gratifying a long cherished wish of his own. Mrs. Coleridgewas about to return with her children to Keswick, but her husband, notyet master of this L300 windfall, and undoubtedly at his wits' end formoney, was arranging for a course of lectures to be delivered at theRoyal Institution early in the ensuing year, and could not accompanythem. De Quincey offered accordingly to be their escort, and dulyconducted them to Wordsworth's house, thus making the acquaintance ofthe second of his two great poetical idols within a few months ofpaying his first homage to the other. In February 1808 Coleridge againtook up his abode in London at his old free quarters in the_Courier_ office, and began the delivery of a promised series ofsixteen lectures on Poetry and the Fine Arts. "I wish you could seehim, " again writes Poole to Wedgwood, "you would pity and admire. He ismuch improved, but has still less voluntary power than ever. Yet he isso committed that I think he must deliver these lectures. " Consideringthat the authorities of the Royal Institution had agreed to pay him onehundred guineas for delivering the lectures, he undoubtedly was more orless "committed;" and his voluntary power, however small, might besafely supposed to be equal to the task of fulfilling a contract. Butto get the lecturer into the lecture-room does not amount to much morethan bringing the horse to the water. You can no more make the onedrink than you can prevent the other from sending his audience awaythirsty. Coleridge's lectures on Poetry and the Fine Arts wereconfused, ill arranged, and generally disappointing to the last degree. Sometimes it was not even possible to bring the horse to the water. Charles Lamb writes to Manning on the 20th of February 1808 (early daysindeed) that Coleridge had only delivered two lectures, and that though"two more were intended, he did not come. " De Quincey writes of"dismissals of audience after audience, with pleas of illness; and onmany of his lecture-days I have seen all Albemarle Street closed by alock of carriages filled with women of distinction, until the servantsof the Institution or their own footmen advanced to the carriage-doorswith the intelligence that Mr. Coleridge had been suddenly taken ill. "Naturally there came a time when the "women of distinction" began totire of this treatment. "The plea, which at first had been receivedwith expressions of concern, repeated too often began to rouse disgust. Many in anger, and some in real uncertainty whether it would not betrouble thrown away, ceased to attend. " And what De Quincey has to sayof the lectures themselves when they did by chance get delivered is noless melancholy. "The lecturer's appearance, " he says, "was generallythat of a man struggling with pain and over-mastering illness. " "His lips were baked with feverish heat, and often black in colour; andin spite of the water which he continued drinking through the wholecourse of the lecture, he often seemed to labour under an almost paralyticinability to raise the upper jaw from the lower" [_i. E. _ I supposeto move the lower jaw]. "In such a state it is clear that nothing couldsave the lecture itself from reflecting his own feebleness andexhaustion except the advantage of having been precomposed in somehappier mood. But that never happened: most unfortunately, he relied onhis extempore ability to carry him through. Now, had he been inspirits, or had he gathered animation and kindled by his own emotion, no written lecture could have been more effectual than one of hisunpremeditated colloquial harangues. But either he was depressedoriginally below the point from which reascent was possible, or elsethis reaction was intercepted by continual disgust from looking backupon his own ill success; for assuredly he never once recovered thatfree and eloquent movement of thought which he could command at anytime in a private company. The passages he read, moreover, inillustrating his doctrines, were generally unhappily chosen, becausechosen at haphazard, from the difficulty of finding at a moment'ssummons these passages which his purpose required. Nor do I rememberany that produced much effect except two or three which I myself putready marked into his hands among the _Metrical Romances_, editedby Ritson. Generally speaking, the selections were as injudicious andas inappropriate as they were ill delivered, for among Coleridge'saccomplishments good reading was not one. He had neither voice (so atleast I thought) nor management of voice. This defect is unfortunate ina public lecturer, for it is inconceivable how much weight andeffectual pathos can be communicated by sonorous depth and melodiouscadence of the human voice to sentiments the most trivial; [2] nor, onthe other hand, how the grandest are emasculated by a style of readingwhich fails in distributing the lights and shadows of a musicalintonation. However, this defect chiefly concerned the immediateimpression; the most afflicting to a friend of Coleridge's was theentire absence of his own peculiar and majestic intellect; no heart, nosoul, was in anything he said; no strength of feeling in recallinguniversal truths, no power of originality or compass of moralrelations in his novelties, --all was a poor, faint reflection frompearls once scattered on the highway by himself in the prodigality ofhis early opulence--a mendicant dependence on the alms dropped from hisown overflowing treasury of happier times. " Severe as is this censure of the lectures, there is unhappily no goodground for disputing its substantial justice. And the inferences whichit suggests are only too painfully plain. One can well understandColeridge's being an ineffective lecturer, and no failure in thisrespect, however conspicuous, would necessarily force us to thehypothesis of physical disability. But a Coleridge who could no morecompose a lecture than he could deliver one-a Coleridge who couldneither write nor extemporise anything specially remarkable on asubject so congenial to him as that of English poetry--mustassuredly have spent most of his time, whether in the lecture-room orout of it, in a state of incapacity for sustained intellectual effort. De Quincey's humorous account of the lecturer's shiftless untidy lifeat the Courier office, and even the Rabelaisian quip which CharlesLamb throws at it in the above-quoted letter to Manning, aresufficient indications of his state at this time. "Oh, Charles, "he writes to Lamb, early in February, just before the course oflectures was to begin, "I am very, very ill. _Vixi. _" The sadtruth is that, as seems to have been always the case with him whenliving alone, he was during these months of his residence in Londonmore constantly and hopelessly under the dominion of opium than ever. FOOTNOTES 1. "In a letter written by him (Coleridge) about fifteen years afterthat time, I found that he had become aware of all the circumstances, perhaps through some indiscretion of Mr. Cottle's. " Perhaps, however, no very great indiscretion on Mr. Cottle's part was needed to enableColeridge to trace the loan to so ardent a young admirer and disciple. 2. The justice of this criticism will be acknowledged by those manypersons whom Mr. Bright's great elocutionary skill has occasionallydeluded into imagining that the very commonplace verse which the famousorator has been often known to quote with admiration is poetry of ahigh order. CHAPTER VII. Return to the Lakes--From Keswick to Grasmere--With Wordsworth at AllanBank--The _Friend_--Quits the Lake country for ever. [1809-1810. ] From the close of this series of lectures in the month of May 1808until the end of the year it is impossible to trace Coleridge'smovements or even to determine the nature of his occupation with anyapproach to exactitude. The probability is, however, that he remainedin London at his lodgings in the _Courier_ office, and that hesupported himself by rendering assistance in various ways to Mr. DanielStuart. We know nothing of him, however, with certainty until we findhim once more at the Lakes in the early part of the year 1809, but notin his own home. Wordsworth had removed from his former abode atGrasmere to Allan Bank, a larger house some three-quarters of a miledistant, and there Coleridge took up his residence, more, it wouldseem, as a permanent inmate of his friend's house than as a guest. Thespecific cause of this migration from Greta Hall to Allan Bank does notappear, but all the accessible evidence, contemporary and subsequent, seems to point to the probability that it was the result of a definitebreak-up of Coleridge's own home. He continued, at any rate, to residein Wordsworth's house during the whole seven months of his editorshipof the _Friend_, a new venture in periodical literature which heundertook at this period; and we shall see that upon its failure he didnot resume his residence at Greta Hall, but quitted the Lake country atonce and for ever. We need not take too literally Coleridge's declaration in the _BiographiaLiteraria_ that one "main object of his in starting the _Friend_was to establish the philosophical distinction between the Reason andthe Understanding. " Had this been so, or at least had the periodicalbeen actually conducted in conformity with any such purpose, even thechagrined projector himself could scarcely have had the face tocomplain, as Coleridge did very bitterly, of the reception accorded toit by the public. The most unpractical of thinkers can hardly haveimagined that the "general reader" would "take in" a weekly metaphysicaljournal published at a town in Cumberland. The _Friend_ was notquite so essentially hopeless an enterprise as that would have been;but the accidents of mismanagement and imprudence soon made it, forall practical purposes, sufficiently desperate. Even the forlorn_Watchman_, which had been set on foot when Coleridge had fourteenyears' less experience of the world, was hardly more certainlyforedoomed. The first care of the founder of the _Friend_ was toselect, as the place of publication, a town exactly twenty-eight milesfrom his own abode--a distance virtually trebled, as De Quinceyobserves, "by the interposition of Kirkstone, a mountain only to bescaled by a carriage ascent of three miles, and so steep in parts thatwithout four horses no solitary traveller can persuade the neighbouringinnkeepers to convey him. " Here, however, at Penrith, "by way ofpurchasing intolerable difficulties at the highest price, " Coleridge wasadvised and actually persuaded to set up a printer, to buy and lay in astock of paper, types, etc. , instead of resorting to some printer alreadyestablished at a nearer place--as, for instance, Kendal, which was tenmiles nearer, and connected with Coleridge's then place of residence bya daily post, whereas at Penrith there was no post at all. Having thusstudiously and severely handicapped himself, the projector of the newperiodical set to work, upon the strength of what seems to have been ingreat measure a fancy list of subscribers, to print and, so far as hisextraordinary arrangements permitted, to circulate his journal. With_naive_ sententiousness he warns the readers of the _BiographiaLiteraria_ against trusting, in their own case, to such a guaranteeas he supposed himself to possess. "You cannot, " he observes, "be certainthat the names on a subscription list have been put down by sufficientauthority; or, should that be ascertained, it still remains to be knownwhether they were not extorted by some over-zealous friend'simportunity; whether the subscriber had not yielded his name merelyfrom want of courage to say no! and with the intention of dropping thework as soon as possible. " Thus out of a hundred patrons who had beenobtained for the _Friend_ by an energetic canvasser, "ninety threwup the publication before the fourth number without any notice, thoughit was well known to them that in consequence of the distance and theslowness and irregularity of the conveyance" [it is amusing to observethe way in which Coleridge notes these drawbacks of his own creation asthough they were "the act of God"] "I was compelled to lay in a stockof stamped paper for at least eight weeks beforehand, each sheet ofwhich stood me in fivepence previous to its arrival at my printer's;though the subscription money was not to be received till the twenty-first week after the commencement of the work; and, lastly, though itwas in nine cases out of ten impracticable for me to receive the moneyfor two or three numbers without paying an equal sum for the postage. " Enough appears in this undesignedly droll account of theventure to show pretty clearly that, even had the _Friend_obtained a reasonable measure of popularity at starting, the flagrantdefects in the methods of distributing and financing it must haveinsured its early decease. But, as a matter of fact, it had no chanceof popularity from the outset. Its first number appeared on 1st August1809, and Coleridge, writing to Southey on 20th October of the sameyear, speaks of his "original apprehension" that the plan and executionof the _Friend_ is so utterly unsuitable to the public taste as topreclude all rational hopes of its success. "Much, " he continues, "might have been done to have made the former numbers less so, by theinterposition of others written more expressly for general interest;"and he promises to do his best in future to "interpose tales and wholenumbers of amusement, which will make the periods lighter and shorter. "Meanwhile he begs Southey to write a letter to the _Friend_ in alively style, rallying its editor on "his Quixotism in expecting thatthe public will ever pretend to understand his lucubrations or feel anyinterest in subjects of such sad and unkempt antiquity. " Southey, evergood-natured, complied, even amid the unceasing press of his work, withthe request; and to the letter of lightly-touched satire which hecontributed to the journal he added a few private lines of friendlycounsel, strongly urging Coleridge to give two or three amusingnumbers, and he would hear of admiration on every side. "Insert too, "he suggested, "a few more poems--any that you have, except _Christabel_, for that is of too much value. And write _now_ that character ofBonaparte, announced in former times for 'to-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow. '" It was too late, however, for good advice to be ofany avail: the _Friend_ was past praying for. It lingered ontill its twenty-eighth number, and expired, unlike the Watchman, without any farewell to its friends, in the third week of March 1810. The republication of this periodical, or rather selectionsfrom it, which appeared in 1818, is hardly perhaps described withjustice in De Quincey's words as "altogether and absolutely a newwork. " A reader can, at any rate, form a pretty fair estimate from itof the style and probable public attractions of the original issue; anda perusal of it, considered in its character as a bid for the patronageof the general reader, is certainly calculated to excite anastonishment too deep for words. We have, of course, to bear in mindthat the standard of the readable in our grandfathers' days was a moreliberal and tolerant one than it is in our own. In those days ofleisurely communications and slowly moving events there was relativelyat least a far larger public for a weekly issue of moral andphilosophical essays, under the name of a periodical, than it would befound easy to secure at present, when even a monthly discourse uponthings in general requires Mr. Euskin's brilliancy of eloquence, vivacity of humour, and perpetual charm of unexpectedness to carry itoff. Still the _Spectator_ continued to be read in Coleridge'sday, and people therefore must have had before them a perpetual exampleof what it was possible to do in the way of combining entertainmentwith instruction. How, then, it could have entered into the mind of themost sanguine projector to suppose that the _longueurs_ and thedifficulty of the _Friend_ would be patiently borne with for thesake of the solid nutriment which it contained it is quite impossibleto understand. Even supposing that a weekly, whose avowed object was"to aid in the formation of fixed principles in politics, morals, andreligion, " could possibly be floated, even "with literary amusementsinterspersed, " it is evident that very much would depend upon thecharacter of these "amusements" themselves. In the republication of1817 they appear under the heading of "landing-places. " One of themconsists of a parallel between Voltaire and Erasmus, and betweenRousseau and Luther, founded, of course, on the respective attitudes ofthe two pairs of personages to the Revolution and the Reformation. Another at the end of the series consists of a criticism of, andpanegyric on, Sir Alexander Ball, the governor of Malta. Such are thelanding-places. But how should any reader, wearied with "for everclimbing up the climbing wave" of Coleridge's eloquence, have foundrest or refreshment on one of these uncomfortable little sandbanks? Itwas true that the original issue of the _Friend_ containedpoetical contributions which do not appear in the republication; butpoetry in itself, or, at any rate, good poetry, is not a relief to theoverstrained faculties, and, even if it were, the relief would havebeen provided at too infrequent intervals to affect the general result. The fact is, however, that Coleridge's own theory of his duty as apublic instructor was in itself fatal to any hope of his ventureproving a commercial success. Even when entreated by Southey to lightenthe character of the periodical, he accompanies his admission of theworldly wisdom of the advice with something like a protest against sucha departure from the severity of his original plan. His object, as heputs it with much cogency from his own unpractical point of view--hisobject being to teach men how to think on politics, religion, andmorals, and thinking being a very arduous and distasteful business tothe mass of mankind, it followed that the essays of the _Friend_(and particularly the earlier essays, in which the reader required tobe "grounded" in his subject) could hardly be agreeable reading. Withperfect frankness indeed does he admit in his prospectus that he must"submit to be thought dull by those who seek amusement only. " He hoped, however, as he says in one of his earlier essays, to become livelier ashe went on. "The proper merit of a foundation is its massiveness andsolidity. The conveniences and ornaments, the gilding and stucco-work, the sunshine and sunny prospects, will come with the superstructure. "But the building, alas! was never destined to be completed, and thearchitect had his own misgivings about the attractions even of thecompleted edifice. "I dare not flatter myself that any endeavours ofmine, compatible with the duty I owe to the truth and the hope ofpermanent utility, will render the _Friend_ agreeable to themajority of what is called the reading public. I never expected it. Howindeed could I when, etc. " Yet, in spite of these professions, it isclear from the prospectus that Coleridge believed in the possibility ofobtaining a public for the _Friend_. He says that "a motive forhonourable ambition was supplied by the fact that every periodicalpaper of the kind now attempted, which had been conducted with zeal andability, was not only well received at the time, but has becomepopular;" and he seems to regard it as a comparatively unimportantcircumstance that the _Friend_ would be distinguished from "itscelebrated predecessors, the _Spectator_ and the like, " by the"greater length of the separate essays, by their closer connection witheach other, and by the predominance of one object, and the commonbearing of all to one end. " It was, of course, exactly this _plus_of prolixity and _minus_ of variety which lowered the sum of the_Friend's_ attractions so far below that of the _Spectator_as to deprive the success of Addison of all its value as aprecedent. Nor is it easy to agree with the editor of the reprint of1837 that the work, "with all its imperfections, is perhaps the mostvigorous" of its author's compositions. That there are passages in itwhich impress us by their force of expression, as well as by subtletyor beauty of thought, must of course be admitted. It was impossible toa man of Coleridge's literary power that it should be otherwise. But"vigorous" is certainly not the adjective which seems to me to suggestitself to an impartial critic of these too copious disquisitions. Making every allowance for their necessary elasticity of scope as beingdesigned to "prepare and discipline the student's moral andintellectual being, not to propound dogmas and theories for hisadoption, " it must, I think, be allowed that they are wanting in thatcontinuity of movement and co-ordination of parts which, as it seems tome, enters into any intelligible definition of "vigour, " as attributedto a work of moral and political exposition considered as a whole. Thewriter's discursiveness is too often and too vexatiously felt by thereader to permit of the survival of any sense of theorematic unity inhis mind; he soon gives up all attempts at periodical measurement ofhis own and his author's progress towards the prescribed goal of theirjourney; and he resigns himself in this, as in so many other ofColeridge's prose works, to a study of isolated and detached passages. So treated, however, one may freely admit that the _Friend_ isfully worthy of the admiration with which Mr. H. N. Coleridge regardedit. If not the most vigorous, it is beyond all comparison the mostcharacteristic of all his uncle's performances in this field of hismultiform activity. In no way could the peculiar pregnancy ofColeridge's thoughts, the more than scholastic subtlety of hisdialectic, and the passionate fervour of his spirituality be moreimpressively exhibited than by a well-made selection of _loci_from the pages of the _Friend_. CHAPTER VIII. London again--Second recourse to journalism--The _Courier_articles--The Shakespeare lectures--Production of _Remorse_--AtBristol again as lecturer--Residence at Calne--Increasing ill healthand embarrassment--Retirement to Mr. Gillman's. [1810-1816. ] The life led by Coleridge during the six years next ensuing isdifficult to trace, even in the barest outline; to give a detailed andcircumstantial account of it from any ordinarily accessible source ofinformation is impossible. Nor is it, I imagine, very probable thateven the most exhaustive search among whatever imprinted records mayexist in the possession of his friends would at all completely supplythe present lack of biographical material. For not only had it becomeColeridge's habit to disappear from the sight of his kinsmen andacquaintances for long periods together; he had fallen almost whollysilent also. They not only ceased to see him, but they ceased to hearof him. Letters addressed to him, even on subjects of the greatestimportance, would remain for months unnoticed, and in many instanceswould receive no answer at all. His correspondence during the nexthalf-dozen years must have been of the scantiest amount and the mostintermittent character, and a biographer could hope, therefore, forbut little aid in bridging over the large gaps in his knowledge ofthis period, even if every extant letter written by Coleridge duringits continuance were to be given to the world. Such light, too, as is retrospectively thrown upon it by Coleridge'scorrespondence of a later date is of the most fitful description, --scarcely more than serves, in fact, for the rendering of darknessvisible. Even the sudden and final departure from the Lakes it leavesinvolved in as much obscurity as ever. Writing to Mr. Thomas Allsop[1] from Ramsgate twelve years afterwards (8th October 1822) he saysthat he "counts four grasping and griping sorrows in his past life. "The first of these "was when" [no date given] "the vision of a happyhome sank for ever, and it became impossible for me longer even tohope for domestic happiness under the name of husband. " That is plainenough on the whole, though it still leaves us in some uncertainty asto whether the "sinking of the vision" was as gradual as theestrangement between husband and wife, or whether he refers to someviolent rupture of relations with Mrs. Coleridge, possiblyprecipitating his departure from the Lakes. If soothe second "gripingand grasping sorrow" followed very quickly on the first, for he saysthat it overtook him "on the night of his arrival from Grasmere withMr. And Mrs. Montagu;" while in the same breath and paragraph, and asthough undoubtedly referring to the same thing, he speaks of the"destruction of a friendship of fifteen years when, just at the momentof Tenner and Curtis's (the publishers) bankruptcy" (by whichColeridge was a heavy loser, but which did not occur till seven yearsafterwards), somebody indicated by seven asterisks and possessing anincome of L1200 a-year, was "totally transformed into baseness. " Thereis certainly not much light here, any more than in the equallyenigmatical description of the third sorrow as being "in some sortincluded in the second, " so that "what the former was to friendshipthe latter was to a still more inward bond. " The truth is, that allColeridge's references to himself in his later years are shrouded in adouble obscurity. One veil is thrown over them by his deliberatepreference for abstract and mystical forms of expression, and anotherperhaps by that kind of shameful secretiveness which grows upon allmen who become the slaves of concealed indulgences, and which oftendisplays itself on occasions when it has no real object to gain of anykind whatever. Thus much only we know, that on reaching London in the summer of 1810Coleridge became the guest of the Montagus, and that, after somemonths' residence with them, he left as the immediate result of somedifference with his host which was never afterwards composed. Whetherit arose from the somewhat trivial cause to which De Quincey has, admittedly upon the evidence of "the learned in literary scandal, "referred it, it is now impossible to say. But at some time or other, towards the close probably of 1810, or in the early months of 1811, Coleridge quitted Mr. Montagu's house for that of Mr. John Morgan, acompanion of his early Bristol days, and a common friend of his andSouthey's; and here, at No. 7 Portland Place, Hammersmith, he wasresiding when, for the second time, he resolved to present himself tothe London public in the capacity of lecturer. His services were onthis occasion engaged by the London Philosophical Society, at CraneCourt, Fleet Street, and their prospectus announced that on Monday, 18th November, Mr. Coleridge would commence "a course of lectures onShakspeare and Milton, in illustration of the principles of poetry andtheir application, on grounds of criticism, to the most popular worksof later English poets, those of the living included. After anintroductory lecture on false criticism (especially in poetry) and onits causes, two-thirds of the remaining course, " continues theprospectus, "will be assigned, 1st, to a philosophical analysis andexplanation of all the principal characters of our great dramatists, as Othello, Falstaff, Richard the Third, Lago, Hamlet, etc. , and to acritical comparison of Shakspeare in respect of diction, imagery, management of the passions, judgment in the construction of hisdramas--in short, of all that belongs to him as a poet, and as adramatic poet, with his contemporaries or immediate successors, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ford, Massinger, and in the endeavourto determine which of Shakespeare's merits and defects are common tohim, with other writers of the same age, and what remain peculiar tohis genius. " A couple of months before the commencement of this course, viz. InSeptember 1811, Coleridge seems to have entered into a definitejournalistic engagement with his old editor, Mr. Daniel Stuart, thenthe proprietor of the _Courier_. It was not, however, his firstconnection with that journal. He had already published at least onepiece of verse in its columns, and two years before, while the_Friend_ was still in existence, he had contributed to it aseries of letters on the struggle of the Spaniards against theirFrench invaders. In these, as though to show that under the ashes ofhis old democratic enthusiasm still lived its wonted fires, and thatthe inspiration of a popular cause was only needed to reanimate them, we find, with less of the youthful lightness of touch and agility ofmovement, a very near approach to the vigour of his early journalisticdays. Whatever may be thought of the historic value of the parallelwhich he institutes between the struggle of the Low Countries againsttheir tyrant, and that of the Peninsula against its usurpingconqueror, it is worked out with remarkable ingenuity of completeness. Whole pages of the letters are radiant with that steady flame ofhatred which, ever since the hour of his disillusionment, had glowedin his breast at the name and thought of Bonaparte; and whenever hespeaks of the Spaniards, of Spanish patriotism, of the Spanish Cortes, we see that the names of "the people, " of "freedom, " of "popularassembly, " have some of their old magic for him still. The followingpassage is almost pathetic in its reminder of the days of 1792, beforethat modern Leonidas, the young French Republic, had degenerated intothe Xerxes of the Empire. "The power which raised up, established, and enriched the Dutchrepublic, --the same mighty power is no less at work in the presentstruggle of the Spanish nation, a power which mocks the calculationsof ordinary statecraft too subtle to be weighed against it, and mereoutward brute force too different from it to admit of comparison. Apower as mighty in the rational creation as the element of electricityin the material world; and, like that element, infinite in itsaffinities, infinite in its mode of action, combining the mostdiscordant natures, fixing the most volatile, and arming the sluggishvapour of the marsh with arrows of fire; working alike in silence andin tempest, in growth and in destruction; now contracted to anindividual soul, and now, as in a moment, dilating itself over a wholenation! Am I asked what this mighty power may be, and wherein itexists? If we are worthy of the fame which we possess as thecountrymen of Hampden, Russell, and Algernon Sidney, we shall find theanswer in our own hearts. It is the power of the insulted free-will, steadied by the approving conscience and struggling against bruteforce and iniquitous compulsion for the common rights of human nature, brought home to our inmost souls by being, at the same time, therights of our betrayed, insulted, and bleeding country. " And as this passage recalls the most striking characteristics of hisearlier style, so may its conclusion serve as a fair specimen of thecalmer eloquence of his later manner:-- "It is a painful truth, sir, that these men who appeal most to facts, and pretend to take them for their exclusive guide, are the verypersons who most disregard the light of experience when it refers themto the mightiness of their own inner nature, in opposition to thoseforces which they can see with their eyes, and reduce to figures upona slate. And yet, sir, what is history for the greater and more usefulpart but a voice from the sepulchres of our forefathers, assuring us, from their united experience, that our spirits are as much strongerthan our bodies as they are nobler and more permanent? The historicmuse appears in her loftiest character as the nurse of Hope. It is herappropriate praise that her records enable the magnanimous to silencethe selfish and cowardly by appealing to actual events for theinformation of these truths which they themselves first learned fromthe surer oracle of their own reason. " But this reanimation of energy was but a transient phenomenoa It didnot survive the first freshness of its exciting cause. The Spanishinsurrection grew into the Peninsular war, and though the gloriousseries of Wellington's victories might well, one would think, havesustained the rhetorical temperature at its proper pitch, it failed todo so. Or was it, as the facts appear now and then to suggest, thatColeridge at Grasmere or Keswick-Coleridge in the inspiring (andrestraining) companionship of close friends and literary compeers--wasan altogether different man from Coleridge in London, alone with histhoughts and his opium? The question cannot be answered withconfidence, and the fine quality of the lectures on Shakespeare issufficient to show that, for some time, at any rate, after his finalmigration to London, his critical faculty retained its full vigour. But it is beyond dispute that his regular contributions to the_Courier_ in 1811-12 are not only vastly inferior to his articlesof a dozen years before in the _Morning Post_ but fall sensiblyshort of the level of the letters of 1809, from which extract has justbeen made. Their tone is spiritless, and they even lack distinction ofstyle. Their very subjects, and the mode of treating them, appear toshow a change in Coleridge's attitude towards public affairs if not inthe very conditions of his journalistic employment. They have muchmore of the character of newspaper hack-work than his earliercontributions. He seems to have been, in many instances, set to writea mere report, and often a rather dry and mechanical report of this orthe other Peninsular victory. He seldom or never discusses thepolitical situation, as his wont had been, _au large_; and inplace of broad statesmanlike reflection on the scenes and actors inthe great world-drama then in progress, we meet with too much of thatsort of criticism on the consistency and capacity of "ourcontemporary, the _Morning Chronicle_, " which had less attraction, it may be suspected, even for the public of its own day thanfor the journalistic profession, while for posterity, of course, it possesses no interest at all. The series of contributions extendsfrom September of 1811 until April of the following year, and appearsto have nearly come to a premature and abrupt close in theintermediate July, when an article written by Coleridge in strongopposition to the proposed reinstatement of the Duke of York in thecommand-in-chief was, by ministerial influence, suppressed beforepublication. This made Coleridge, as his daughter informs us on theauthority of Mr. Crabb Kobinson, "very uncomfortable, " and he wasdesirous of being engaged on another paper. He wished to be connectedwith the _Times_, and "I spoke, " says Mr. Eobinson, "with Walteron the subject, but the negotiation failed. " With the conclusion of the lectures on Shakespeare, and the loss ofthe stimulus, slight as it then was to him, of regular duties andrecurring engagements, Coleridge seems to have relapsed once more intothoroughly desultory habits of work. The series of aphorisms andreflections which he contributed in 1812 to Southey's _Omniana_, witty, suggestive, profound as many of them are, must not of course bereferred to the years in which they were given to the world. Theybelong unquestionably to the order of _marginalia_, the scatterednotes of which De Quincey speaks with not extravagant admiration, andwhich, under the busy pencil of a commentator always indefatigable inthe _strenua inertia_ of reading, had no doubt accumulated inconsiderable quantities over a long course of years. The disposal, however, of this species of literary material couldscarcely have been a source of much profit to him, and Coleridge'sdifficulties of living must by this time have been growing acute. Hispension from the Wedgwoods had been assigned, his surviving son hasstated, to the use of his family, and even this had been in theprevious year reduced by half. "In Coleridge's neglect, " observes MissMeteyard, "of his duties to his wife, his children, and his friends, must be sought the motives which led Mr. Wedgwood in 1811 to withdrawhis share of the annuity. An excellent, even over-anxious father, hewas likely to be shocked at a neglect which imposed on the generosityof Southey, himself heavily burdened, those duties which every man offeeling and honour proudly and even jealously guards as his own. .. . The pension of L150 per annum had been originally granted with theview to secure Coleridge independence and leisure while he effectedsome few of his manifold projects of literary work. But ten years hadpassed, and these projects were still _in nubibus_--even the lifeof Leasing, even the briefer memoir of Thomas Wedgwood; and gifts sowell intentioned, had as it were, ministered to evil rather than togood. " We can hardly wonder at the step, however we may regret it; andif one of the reasons adduced in defence of it savours somewhat of thefallacy known as _. .. Non cause, pro cause_, we may perhapsattribute that rather to the maladroitness of Miss Meteyard's advocacythan to the weakness of Mr. Wedgwood's logic. The fact, however, thatthis "excellent, even over-anxious father" was shocked at a neglectwhich imposed a burden on the generosity of Southey, is hardly a justground for cutting off one of the supplies by which that burden waspartially relieved. As to the assignment of the pension to the family, it is impossible to question what has been positively affirmed by anactual member of that family, the Rev. Derwent Coleridge himself;though, when he adds that not only was the school education of both thesons provided from this source, but that through his (Coleridge's)influence they were both sent to college, his statement is at variance, as will be presently seen, with an authority equal to his own. In 1812, at any rate, we may well believe that Coleridge's necessitieshad become pressing, and the timely service then rendered to him byLord Byron may have been suggested almost as much by a knowledge ofhis needs as by admiration for the dramatic merits of his long-sincerejected tragedy. _Osorio's_ time had at any rate come. Thewould-be fratricide changed his name to Ordonio, and ceased to standsponsor to the play, which was rechristened _Remorse_, andaccepted at last, upon Byron's recommendation, by the committee ofDrury Lane Theatre, the playhouse at whose doors it had knocked vainlyfifteen years before it was performed there for the first time on the23d of January 1813. The prologue and epilogue, without which in thosetimes no gentleman's drama was accounted complete, was written, theformer by Charles Lamb, the latter by the author himself. It obtaineda brilliant success on its first representation, and was honoured withwhat was in those days regarded as the very respectable run of twentynights. The success, however, which came so opportunely for his materialnecessities was too late to produce any good effect upon Coleridge'smental state. But a month after the production of his tragedy we findhim writing in the most dismal strain of hypochondria to Thomas Poole. The only pleasurable sensation which the success of _Remorse_ hadgiven him was, he declares, the receipt of his friend's "heart-engendered lines" of congratulation. "No grocer's apprentice, afterhis first month's permitted riot, was ever sicker of figs and raisinsthan I of hearing about the _Remorse_. The endless rat-a-tat-tatat our black-and-blue bruised doors, and my three master-fiends, proof-sheets, letters, and--worse than these--invitations to largedinners, which I cannot refuse without offence and imputation ofpride, etc. , oppress me so much that my spirits quite sink under it. Ihave never seen the play since the first night. It has been a goodthing for the theatre. They will get eight or ten thousand pounds byit, and I shall get more than by all my literary labours put together--nay, thrice as much. " So large a sum of money as this must haveamounted to should surely have lasted him for years; but theparticular species of intemperance to which he was now hopelesslyenslaved is probably the most costly of all forms of such indulgence, and it seems pretty evident that the proceeds of his theatrical_coup_ were consumed in little more than a year. Early in 1814, at any rate, Coleridge once more returned to his oldoccupation of lecturer, and this time not in London, but in the sceneof his first appearance in that capacity. The lectures which heproposed to deliver at Bristol were, in fact, a repetition of thecourse of 1811-12; but the ways of the lecturer, to judge from anamusing story recorded by Cottle, more nearly resembled hisproceedings in 1808. A "brother of Mr. George Cumberland, " whohappened to be his fellow-traveller to Bristol on this occasion, relates that before the coach started Coleridge's attention wasattracted by a little Jew boy selling pencils, with whom he enteredinto conversation, and with whose superior qualities he was soimpressed as to declare that "if he had not an important engagement atBristol he would stay behind to provide some better condition for thelad. " The coach having started, "the gentleman" (for his name wasunknown to the narrator of the incident) "talked incessantly and in amost entertaining way for thirty miles out of London, and, afterwards, with little intermission till they reached Marlborough, " when hediscovered that a lady in the coach with him was a particular friendof his; and on arriving at Bath he quitted the coach declaring that hewas determined not to leave her till he had seen her safe to herbrother's door in North Wales. This was the day fixed for the deliveryof Coleridge's first lecture. Two or three days afterwards, havingcompleted his _detour_ by North Wales, he arrived at Bristol:another day was fixed for the commencement of the course, andColeridge then presented himself an hour after the audience had takentheir seats. The "important engagement" might be broken, it seems, fora mere whim, though not for a charitable impulse--a distinctiontestifying to a mixture of insincerity and unpunctuality not pleasantto note as an evidence of the then state of Coleridge's emotions andwill. Thus inauspiciously commenced, there was no reason why the Bristollectures of 1814 should be more successful than the London Institutionlectures of 1808; nor were they, it appears, in fact. They are said tohave been "sparsely attended, "--no doubt owing to the naturalunwillingness of people to pay for an hour's contemplation of an emptyplatform; and their pecuniary returns in consequence were probablyinsignificant. Coleridge remained in Bristol till the month of August, when he returned to London. The painful task of tracing his downward course is now almostcompleted. In the middle of this year he touched the lowest point ofhis descent. Cottle, who had a good deal of intercourse with him byspeech and letter in 1814, and who had not seen him since 1807, wasshocked by his extreme prostration, and then for the first timeascertained the cause. "In 1814, " he says in his _Recollections_, "S. T. C. Had been long, very long, in the habit of taking from twoquarts of laudanum a week to a pint a day, and on one occasion he hadbeen known to take in the twenty-four hours a whole quart of laudanum. The serious expenditure of money resulting from this habit was theleast evil, though very great, and must have absorbed all the produceof his writings and lectures and the liberalities of his friends. "Cottle addressed to him a letter of not very delicate remonstrance onthe subject, to which Coleridge replied in his wontedly humble strain. There is a certain Pharisaism about the Bristol poet-publisher whichrenders it necessary to exercise some little caution in the acceptanceof his account of Coleridge's condition; but the facts, from whateversource one seeks them, appear to acquit him of any exaggeration in hissumming up of the melancholy matter. "A general impression, " he says, "prevailed on the minds of Coleridge's friends that it was a desperatecase, that paralysed all their efforts; that to assist Coleridge withmoney which, under favourable circumstances would have been mostpromptly advanced, would now only enlarge his capacity to obtain theopium which was consuming him. We merely knew that Coleridge hadretired with his friend, Mr. John Morgan, to a small house at Calne inWiltshire. " It must have been at Calne, then, that Coleridge composed the seriesof "Letters to Mr. Justice Fletcher concerning his charge to the GrandJury of the county of Wexford, at the summer Assizes in 1814, " whichappeared at intervals in the _Courier_ between 20th September and10th December of this year. Their subject, a somewhat injudiciouslyanimated address to the aforesaid Grand Jury on the subject of therelations between Catholicism and Protestantism in Ireland, was wellcalculated to stimulate the literary activity of a man who always tooksomething of the keen interest of the modern Radical in the eternalIrish question; and the letters are not wanting either inargumentative force or in grave impressiveness of style. But their lackof spring and energy as compared with Coleridge's earlier work injournalism is painfully visible throughout. Calne, it is to be supposed, was still Coleridge's place of abode whenSouthey (17th October) wrote Cottle that letter which appears in his_Correspondence_, and which illustrates with such sad completenessthe contrast between the careers of the two generous, romantic, brilliant youths who had wooed their wives together--and between thefates, one must add, of the two sisters who had listened to theirwooing--eighteen years before: a letter as honourable to the writer asit is the reverse to its subject. "Can you, " asks Southey, "tell meanything of Coleridge? A few lines of introduction for a son of Mr. ----of St. James's, in your city, are all that we have received from himsince I saw him last September twelvemonth (1813) in town. The childrenbeing thus left entirely to chance, I have applied to his brothers atOttey (Ottery?) concerning them, and am in hopes through their meansand the assistance of other friends of sending Hartley to college. Lady Beaumont has promised L30 a year for the purpose, and Poole L10. I wrote to Coleridge three or four months ago, telling him that unlesshe took some steps in providing for this object I must make theapplication, and required his answer within a given term of threeweeks. He received the letter, and in his note by Mr. ----promised toanswer it, but he has never taken any further notice of it. I haveacted with the advice of Wordsworth. The brothers, as I expected, promise their concurrence, and I daily expect a letter stating to whatextent they will contribute. " With this letter before him an impartialbiographer can hardly be expected to adopt the theory which hascommended itself to the filial piety of the Rev. Derwent Coleridge--namely, that it was through the father's "influence" that the sonswere sent to college. On a plain matter of fact such as this, one maybe permitted, without indelicacy, to uphold the conclusions compelledby the evidence. Such expressions of opinion, on the other hand, asthat Coleridge's "separation from his family, brought about andcontinued through the force of circumstances over which he had farless control than has been commonly supposed, was in fact nothing elsebut an ever-prolonged absence;" and that "from first to last he tookan affectionate, it may be said a passionate, interest in the welfareof his children"--such expressions of mere opinion as these it may beproper enough to pass by in respectful silence. The following year brought with it no improvement in the embarrassedcircumstances, no reform of the disordered life. Still domiciled withMr. Morgan at Calne, the self-made sufferer writes to Cottle: "Youwill wish to know something of myself. In health I am not worse thanwhen at Bristol I was best; yet fluctuating, yet unhappy, incircumstances poor indeed! I have collected my scattered and mymanuscript poems sufficient to make one volume. Enough I have to makeanother. But, till the latter is finished, I cannot, without great lossof character, publish the former, on account of the arrangement, besides the necessity of correction. For instance, I earnestly wish tobegin the volumes with what has never been seen by any, however few, such as a series of odes on the different sentences of the Lord'sPrayer, and, more than all this, to finish my greater work on'Christianity considered as philosophy, and as the only philosophy. '"Then follows a request for a loan of forty pounds on the security ofthe MSS. , an advance which Cottle declined to make, though he sentColeridge "some smaller temporary relief. " The letter concludes with areference to a project for taking a house and receiving pupils tohoard and instruct, which Cottle appeared to consider the crowning"degradation and ignominy of all. " A few days later we find Lord Byron again coming to Coleridge'sassistance with a loan of a hundred pounds and words of counsel andencouragement. Why should not the author of Remorse repeat his successI "In Kean, " writes Byron, "there is an actor worthy of expressing thethoughts of the character which you have every power of embodying, andI cannot but regret that the part of Ordonio was disposed of beforehis appearance at Drury Lane. We have had nothing to be mentioned inthe same breath with Remorse for very many years, and I should thinkthat the reception of that play was sufficient to encourage thehighest hopes of author and audience. " The advice was followed, andthe drama of Zapolya was the result. It is a work of even less dramaticstrength than its predecessor, and could scarcely, one thinks, havebeen as successful with an audience. It was not, however, destined tosee the footlights. Before it had passed the tribunal of the DruryLane Committee it had lost the benefit of Byron's patronage throughthe poet's departure from England, and the play was rejected by Mr. Douglas Kinnaird, the then reader for the theatre, who assigned, according to Mr. Gillman, "some ludicrous objections to themetaphysics. " Before leaving England, however, Byron rendered a last, and, as the result proved, a not unimportant service to his brother-poet. He introduced him to Mr. Murray, who, in the following year, undertook the publication of _Christabel_--the most successful, in the sense of the most popular, of all its author's productions inverse. With the coming of spring in the following year that dreary story ofslow self-destruction, into which the narrative of Coleridge's lifefrom the age of thirty to that of forty-five resolves itself, wasbrought to a close. Coleridge had at last perceived that his only hopeof redemption lay in a voluntary submission of his enfeebled will tothe control of others, and he had apparently just enough strength ofvolition to form and execute the necessary resolve. He appears, in thefirst instance, to have consulted a physician of the name of Adams, who, on the 9th of April 1816, put himself in communication with Mr. Gillman of Highgate. "A very learned, but in one respect anunfortunate gentleman, has, " he wrote, "applied to me on a singularoccasion. He has for several years been in the habit of taking largequantities of opium. For some time past he has been in vainendeavouring to break himself of it. It is apprehended his friends arenot firm enough, from a dread lest he should suffer by suddenlyleaving it off, though he is conscious of the contrary, and hasproposed to me to submit himself to any regimen, however severe. Withthis view he wishes to fix himself in the house of some medicalgentleman who will have the courage to refuse him any laudanum, andunder whose assistance, should he be the worse for it, he may berelieved. " Would such a proposal, inquires the writer, be absolutelyinconsistent with Mr. Gillman's family arrangements? He would not, headds, have proposed it "but on account of the great importance of thecharacter as a literary man. His communicative temper will make hissociety very interesting as well as useful. " Mr. Gillman'sacquaintance with Dr. Adams was but slight, and he had had no previousintention of receiving an inmate into his house. But the case verynaturally interested him; he sought an interview with Dr. Adams, and itwas agreed that the latter should drive Coleridge to Highgate thefollowing evening. At the appointed hour, however, Coleridge presentedhimself alone, and, after spending the evening at Mr. Gillman's, lefthim, as even in his then condition he left most people who met him forthe first time, completely captivated by the amiability of his mannersand the charm of his conversation. The next day Mr. Gillman receivedfrom him a letter, finally settling the arrangement to place himselfunder the doctor's care, and concluding with the following patheticpassage: "And now of myself. My ever wakeful reason and the keenness of mymoral feelings will secure you from all unpleasant circumstancesconnected with me save only one, viz. The evasion of a specificmadness. You will never hear anything but truth from me; prior habitsrender it out of my power to tell an untruth, but, unless carefullyobserved, I dare not promise that I should not, with regard to thisdetested poison, be capable of acting one. Not sixty hours have yetpassed without my having taken laudanum, though, for the last week, comparatively trifling doses. I have full belief that your anxietyneed not be extended beyond the first week, and for the first week, Ishall not, must not, be permitted to leave your house, unless withyou; delicately or indelicately, this must be done, and both theservants, and the assistant, must receive absolute commands from you. The stimulus of conversation suspends the terror that haunts my mind;but, when I am alone, the horrors I have suffered from laudanum, thedegradation, the blighted utility, almost overwhelm me. If (as I feelfor the _first time_ a soothing confidence that it will prove) Ishould leave you restored to my moral and bodily health, it is notmyself only that will love and honour you; every friend I have (and, thank God! in spite of this wretched vice I have many and warm ones, who were friends of my youth, and have never deserted me) will thankyou with reverence. I have taken no notice of your kind apologies. IfI could not be comfortable in your house and with your family, Ishould deserve to be miserable. " This letter was written on a Saturday, and on the following MondayColeridge presented himself at Mr. Gillman's, bringing in his hand theproof--sheets of _Christabel_, now printed for the first time. Hehad looked, as the letter just quoted shows, with a "soothingconfidence" to leaving his retreat at some future period in a restoredcondition of moral and bodily health; and as regards the restoration, his confidence was in a great measure justified. But the friendly doorswhich opened to receive him on this 15th of April 1816, were destinedto close only upon his departing bier. Under the watchful and almostreverential care of this well-chosen guardian, sixteen years ofcomparatively quiet and well-ordered life, of moderate but effectiveliterary activity, and of gradual though never complete emancipationfrom his fatal habit, were reserved to him. He had still, as we shallsee, to undergo certain recurrences of restlessness and renewals ofpecuniary difficulty; his shattered health was but imperfectly andtemporarily repaired; his "shaping spirit of imagination" could not anddid not return; his transcendental broodings became more and more the"habit of his soul. " But henceforth he recovers for us a certainmeasure of his long-lost dignity, and a figure which should alwayshave been "meet for the reverence of the hearth" in the greathousehold of English literature, but which had far too long and toodeeply sunk below it, becomes once more a worthy and even a venerablepresence. At evening-time it was light. FOOTNOTES 1. Coleridge made the acquaintance of this gentleman, who became hisenthusiastic disciple, in 1818. His chief interest for us is the factthat for the next seven years he was Coleridge's correspondent. Personally, he was a man of little judgment or critical discrimination, and his sense of the ridiculous may be measured by the followingpassage. Speaking of the sweetness of Charles Lamb's smile, he saysthat "there is still one man living, a stockbroker, who has thatsmile, " and adds: "To those who wish to see the only thing left onearth, _if it is still left_, of Lamb, his best and most beautifulremain--his smile, I will indicate its possessor, Mr. ---- of ThrogmortonStreet. " How the original "possessor" of this apparently assignablesecurity would have longed to "feel Mr. Allsop's head"! CHAPTER IX Life at Highgate-Renewed activity-Publications and re-publications--The_Biographia Literaria_--The lectures of 1818-Coleridge as aShakespearian critic. [1816-1818. ] The results of the step which Coleridge had just taken became speedilyvisible in more ways than one, and the public were among the first toderive benefit from it. For not only was he stimulated to greateractivity of production, but his now more methodical way of life gavehim time and inclination for that work of arrangement and preparationfor the press which, distasteful to most writers, was no doubtespecially irksome to him, and thus insured the publication of manypieces which otherwise might never have seen the light. The appearanceof _Christabel_ was, as we have said, received with signal marks ofpopular favour, three editions being called for and exhausted in thesame year. In 1816 there appeared also The Statesman's Manual; or theBible the best guide to Political Skill and Foresight: a Lay Sermonaddressed to the higher classes of Society, with an Appendix containingComments and Essays connected with the Study of the Inspired Writings;in 1817, another _Lay Sermon addressed to the higher and middleclasses on the existing distresses and discontents;_ and in the sameyear followed the most important publication of this period, the_Biographia Literaria_. In 1817, too, it was that Coleridge at last made his long-meditatedcollection and classification of his already published poems, and thatfor the first time something approaching to a complete edition of thepoet's works was given to the world. The _Sibylline Leaves_, asthis reissue was called, had been intended to be preceded by anothervolume of verse, and "accordingly on the printer's signatures of everysheet we find Vol. II, appearing. " Too characteristically, however, the scheme was abandoned, and Volume II. Emerged from the presswithout any Volume I. To accompany it. The drama of _Zapolya_followed in the same year, and proved more successful with the publicthan with the critic of Drury Lane. The "general reader" assigned no"ludicrous objections to its metaphysics;" on the contrary, he tookthem on trust, as his generous manner is, and _Zapolya_, publishedthus as a Christmas tale, became so immediately popular that twothousand copies were sold in six weeks. In the year 1818 followed thethree-volume selection of essays from the _Friend_, a reissue towhich reference has already been made. With the exception of_Christabel_, however, all the publications of these three yearsunfortunately proceeded from the house of Gale and Fenner, a firmwhich shortly afterwards became bankrupt; and Coleridge thus lost allor nearly all of the profits of their sale. The most important of the new works of this period was, ashas been said, the _Biographia Literaria_, or, to give it itsother title, _Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life andOpinions_. Its interest, however, is wholly critical andillustrative; as a narrative it would be found extremely disappointingand probably irritating by the average reader. With the exception ofone or two incidental disclosures, but little biographical informationis to be derived from it which is not equally accessible from sourcesindependent of the author; and the almost complete want of sequence andarrangement renders it a very inconvenient work of reference even forthese few biographical details. Its main value is to be found in thecontents of seven chapters, from the fourteenth to the twentieth; butit is not going too far to say that, in respect of these, it isliterally priceless. No such analysis of the principles of poetry--nosuch exact discrimination of what was sound in the modern "return-to-nature" movement from what was false--has ever been accomplished by anyother critic, or with such admirable completeness by this consummatecritic at any other time. Undoubtedly it is not of the light order ofreading; none, or very little, of Coleridge's prose is. The whole ofchapter xv. , for instance, in which the specific elements of "poeticpower" are "distinguished from general talent determined to poeticcomposition by accidental motives, " requires a close and sustainedeffort of the attention, but those who bestow it will find it amply re-paid. I know of no dissertation conceived and carried out in terms ofthe abstract which in the result so triumphantly justifies itself uponapplication to concrete cases, As regards the question of poeticexpression, and the laws by which its true form is determined, Coleridge's analysis is, it seems to me, final. I cannot, at least, after the most careful reflection upon it, conceive it as being otherthan the absolutely last word on the subject. Reasoning andillustration are alike so convincing that the reader, like thecontentious student who listened unwillingly to his professor'sdemonstration of the first proposition of Euclid, is compelled toconfess that "he has nothing to reply. " To the judicious admirer ofWordsworth, to every one who, while recognising Wordsworth'sinestimable services to English literature as the leader of thenaturalist reaction in poetry, has yet been vaguely conscious of thedefect in his poetic theory, and very keenly conscious of the vices ofhis poetic practice, --to all such persons it must be a profound reliefand satisfaction to be guided as unerringly as Coleridge guides them tothe "parting of the ways" of truth and falsity in Wordsworth'sdoctrines, and to be enabled to perceive that nothing which hasoffended him in that poet's thought and diction has any real connectionwith whatever in the poet's principles has commanded his assent. Thereis no one who has ever felt uneasy under the blasphemies of the enemybut must entertain deep gratitude for so complete a discharge asColeridge has procured him from the task of defending such lines as "And I have travelled far as Hull to see What clothes he might have left or other property. " Defend them indeed the ordinary reader probably would not, preferringeven the abandonment of his theory to a task so humiliating. But thetheory has so much of truth and value in it that the critic who hasredeemed it from the discredit of Wordsworth's misapplications of it isentitled to the thanks of every friend of simplicity, who is at thesame time an enemy of bathos. There is no longer any reason to treatthe deadly commonplaces, amid which we toil through so many pages ofthe _Excursion_, as having any true theoretic affinity with itsbut too occasional majestic interludes. The smooth square-cut blocks ofprose which insult the natural beauty of poetic rock and boulder evenin such a scene of naked moorland grandeur as that of _Resolution andIndependence_ are seen and shown to be the mere intruders which wehave all felt them to be. To the Wordsworthian, anxious for a fulljustification of the faith that is in him, the whole body ofColeridge's criticism on his friend's poetry in the _BiographiaLiteraria_ may be confidently recommended. The refutation of what isuntenable in Wordsworth's theory, the censure pronounced upon certaincharacteristics of his practice, are made all the more impressive bythe tone of cordial admiration which distinguishes every personalreference to the poet himself, and by the unfailing discrimination withwhich the critic singles out the peculiar beauties of his poetry. Nofiner selection of finely characteristic Wordsworthian passages couldperhaps have been made than those which Coleridge has quoted inillustration of his criticisms in the eighteenth and two followingchapters of the _Biographia Literaria_. For the rest, however, unless indeed one excepts the four chapters on the Hartleian system andits relation to the German school of philosophy, the book is rather oneto be dipped into for the peculiar pleasure which an hour inColeridge's company must always give to any active intelligence, thanto be systematically studied with a view to perfecting one's conceptionof Coleridge's philosophical and critical genius considered in itstotality. As to the two lay sermons, the less ambitious of them is decidedly themore successful. The advice to "the higher and middle classes" on theexisting distresses and discontents contains at least an ingredient ofthe practical; its distinctively religious appeals are varied by soundpolitical and economical arguments; and the enumeration and exposure ofthe various artifices by which most orators are accustomed to deludetheir hearers is as masterly as only Coleridge could have made it. Whobut he, for instance, could have thrown a piece of subtle observationinto a form in which reason and fancy unite so happily to impress iton the mind as in the following passage: "The mere appeal to theauditors, whether the arguments are not such that none but an idiot oran hireling could resist, is an effective substitute for any argumentat all. For mobs have no memories. They are in nearly the same stateas that of an individual when he makes what is termed a bull. _Thepassions, like a fused metal, fill up the wide interstices of thoughtand supply the defective links; and thus incompatible assertions areharmonised by the sensation, without the sense of connection_. " Theother lay sermon, however, the _Statesman's Manual_, is lessappropriately conceived. Its originating proposition, that the Bible is"the best guide to political skill and foresight, " is undoubtedly opento dispute, but might nevertheless be capable of plausible defence upon_a priori_ grounds. Coleridge, however, is not content with thismethod of procedure; as, indeed, with so avowedly practical an objectin view he scarcely could be, for a "manual" is essentially a workintended for the constant consultation of the artificer in the actualperformance of his work, and ought at least to contain illustrations ofthe application of its general principles to particular cases. It is inundertaking to supply these that the essential mysticism of Coleridge'scounsels comes to light. For instance: "I am deceived if you will not becompelled to admit that the prophet Isaiah revealed the true philosophyof the French Revolution more than two thousand years before it became asad irrevocable truth of history. 'And thou saidst, I shall be a ladyfor ever, so that thou didst not lay these things to thy heart neitherdidst remember the latter end of it. .. . Therefore shall evil come uponthee; thou shalt not know from whence it riseth, etc. '" And to thisast-quoted sentence Coleridge actually appends the following note: "Thereader will scarcely fail to find in this verse a remembrancer of thesudden setting in of the frost before the usual time (in a country, too, where the commencement of its two seasons is in general scarcelyless regular than that of the wet and dry seasons between the tropics)which caused, and the desolation which accompanied, the flight fromMoscow. " One can make no other comment upon this than that if it really be wisdom which statesmen would do well to lay to heart, the late Dr. Cumming must have been the most profound instructor in statesmanshipthat the world has ever seen. A prime minister of real life, however, could scarcely be seriously recommended to shape his policy upon a dueconsideration of the possible allegoric meaning of a passage in Isaiah, to say nothing of the obvious objection that this kind of appeal to_Sortes Biblicae_ is dangerously liable to be turned against those whorecommend it. On the whole, one must say of this lay sermon that itjustifies the apprehension expressed by the author in its concludingpages. It does rather "resemble the overflow of an earnest mind than anorderly and premeditated, " in the sense, at any rate, of a well-considered "composition. " In the month of January 1818 Coleridge once more commenced the deliveryof a course of lectures in London. The scope of this series-fourteen innumber was, as will be seen from the subjoined syllabus, an immenselycomprehensive one. The subject of the first was "the manners, morals, literature, philosophy, religion, and state of society in general inEuropean Christendom, from the eighth to the fifteenth century;" and ofthe second "the tales and metrical romances common for the most part toEngland, Germany, and the north of France; and English songs and balladscontinued to the reign of Charles I. " In the third the lecturer proposedto deal with the poetry of Chaucer and Spenser, of Petrarch, and ofAriosto, Pulci, and Boiardo. The fourth, fifth, and sixth were to bedevoted to the dramatic works of Shakespeare, and to comprise thesubstance of Coleridge's former courses on the same subject, "enlargedand varied by subsequent study and reflection. " In the seventh he wasto treat of the other principal dramatists of the Elizabethan period, Ben Jonson, Massinger, and Beaumont and Fletcher; in the eighth of thelife and all the works of Cervantes; in the ninth of Rabelais, Swift, and Sterne, with a dissertation "on the nature and constituents ofgenuine humour, and on the distinctions of humorous from the witty, thefanciful, the droll, the odd, etc. " Donne, Dante, and Milton formed thesubject of the tenth; the _Arabian Nights Entertainment_, and the_romantic_ use of the supernatural in poetry, that of the eleventh. The twelfth was to be on "tales of witches and apparitions, etc. , " asdistinguished from magic and magicians of Asiatic origin; and thethirteenth, --"on colour, sound, and form in nature, as connected withPoesy--the word 'Poesy' being used as the generic or class termincluding poetry, music, painting, statuary, and ideal architecture asits species, the reciprocal relations of poetry and philosophy to eachother, and of both to religion and the moral sense. '" In the fourteenthand final lecture Coleridge proposed to discuss "the corruptions of theEnglish language since the reign of Queen Anne, in our style of writingprose, " and to formulate "a few easy rules for the attainment of amanly, unaffected, and pure language in our genuine mother tongue, whether for the purposes of writing, oratory, or conversation. " These lectures, says Mr. Gillman, were from Coleridge's own accountmore profitable than any he had before given, though delivered in anunfavourable situation; a lecture-room in Flower de Luce Court, which, however, being near the Temple, secured to him the benefit--if benefitit were--of a considerable number of law students among his auditors. It was the first time that his devoted guardian had ever heard him inpublic, and he reports the significant fact that though Coleridgelectured from notes, which he had carefully made, "it was obvious thathis audience were more delighted when, putting his notes aside, hespoke extempore. .. . " He was brilliant, fluent, and rapid; his wordsseemed to flow as from a person repeating with grace and energy somedelightful poem. If he sometimes paused, it was not for the want ofwords, but that he was seeking their most appropriate or most logicalarrangement. An incident related with extreme, though in a great measureunconscious, drollery by Mr. Gillman in connection with alecture delivered at this period is to my mind of more assistancethan many of the accounts of his "lay sermons" in private circles, inenabling us to comprehend one element of Coleridge's marvellous powersof discourse. Early one morning at Mr. Gillman's he received twoletters-one to inform him that he was expected that same evening todeliver a lecture, at the rooms of the London Philosophical Society, to an audience of some four or five hundred persons; the othercontaining a list of the previous lecturers and the lectures deliveredby them during the course of the season. At seven o'clock in theevening Coleridge and Mr. Gillman went up to town to make someinquiries respecting this unexpected application; but, on arriving atthe house of the gentleman who had written the letter, they wereinformed that he was not at home, but would return at eight o'clock--the hour fixed for the commencement of the lecture. They thenproceeded to the Society's rooms, where in due time the audienceassembled; and the committee having at last entered and taken theirplaces on the seats reserved for them, "Mr. President arose fromthe centre of the group, and, putting on a 'president's hat, ' whichso disfigured him that we could scarcely refrain from laughter, addressed the company in these words: This evening Mr. Coleridgewill deliver a lecture on 'the Growth of the Individual Mind. '"Coleridge at first "seemed startled, " as well he might, and turninground to Mr. Gillman whispered: "A pretty stiff subject they havechosen for me. " However, he instantly mounted his standing-place andbegan without hesitation, previously requesting his friend to observethe effect of his lecture on the audience. It was agreed that, shouldhe appear to fail, Gillman was to "clasp his ancle; but that he was tocontinue for an hour if the countenances of his auditors indicatedsatisfaction. " Coleridge then began his address in these words: "Thelecture I am about to give this evening is purely extempore. Shouldyou find a nominative case looking out for a verb, or a fatherlessverb for a nominative case, you must excuse it. It is purely extempore, though I have read and thought much on the subject. " At this thecompany smiled, which seemed to inspire the lecturer with confidence. He plunged at once into his lecture--and most brilliant, eloquent, andlogically consecutive it was. The time moved on so swiftly that Mr. Gillman found, on looking at his watch, that an hour and a half hadpassed away, and, therefore, he continues "waiting only a desirablemoment--to use his own playful words--I prepared myself to punctuatehis oration. As previously agreed, I pressed his ancle, and thus gavehim the hint he had requested; when, bowing graciously, and with abenevolent and smiling countenance, he presently descended. The lecturewas quite new to me, and I believe quite new to himself so far as thearrangement of his words was concerned. The floating thoughts werebeautifully arranged, and delivered on the spur of the moment. Whataccident gave rise to the singular request, that he should deliverthis lecture impromptu, I never learnt; nor did it signify, as itafforded a happy opportunity to many of witnessing in part the extentof his reading and the extraordinary strength of his powers. " It is tantalising to think that no record of this remarkable performanceremains; but, indeed, the same may to some extent be said, and invarious degrees, of nearly all the lectures which Coleridge everdelivered. With the exception of seven out of the fifteen of 1811, which were published in 1856 by Mr. Payne Collier from shorthand notestaken at the time, Coleridge's lectures scarcely exist for us otherwisethan in the form of rough preparatory notes. A few longer pieces, suchas the admirable observations in the second volume of the _LiteraryRemains_, on poetry, on the Greek drama, and on the progress of thedramatic art in England, are, with the exception above noticed, almostthe only general disquisitions on these subjects which appear to havereached us in a complete state. Of the remaining contents of thevolume, including the detailed criticisms now textual, now analytic--ofthe various plays of Shakespeare, a considerable portion is franklyfragmentary, pretending, indeed, to no other character than that ofmere marginalia. This, however, does not destroy--I had almost said itdoes not even impair--their value. It does but render them all the moretypical productions of a writer, whose greatest services to mankind inalmost every department of human thought and knowledge with which heconcerned himself were much the most often performed in the leastmethodical way. In reading through these incomparable notes onShakespeare we soon cease to lament, or even to remember, theirunconnected form and often somewhat desultory appearance; if, indeed, we do not see reason to congratulate ourselves that the annotator, unfettered by the restraints which the composition of a systematictreatise would have imposed upon him, is free to range with us at willover many a flower-strewn field, for which otherwise he could notperhaps have afforded to quit the main road of his subject. And thisliberty is the more welcome, because Coleridge, _primus interpares_ as a critic of any order of literature, is in the domain ofShakespearian commentary absolute king. The principles of analysiswhich he was charged with having borrowed without acknowledgment fromSchlegel, with whose Shakespearian theories he was at the time entirelyunacquainted, were in fact of his own excogitation. He owed nothing inthis matter to any individual German, nor had he anything in commonwith German Shakespearianism except its profoundly philosophisingspirit, which, moreover, was in his case directed and restrained byother qualities, too often wanting in critics of that industrious race;for he possessed a sense of the ridiculous, a feeling for the poetic, atact, a taste, and a judgment, which would have saved many a worthy butheavy-handed Teutonic professor, who should have been lucky enough toown these gifts, from exposing himself and his science to the satire ofthe light-minded. Very rarely, indeed, do we find Coleridge indulging_plus 'quo_ his passion for psychological analysis. Deeply as hiscriticism penetrates, it is yet loyally recognitive of the opacity ofmilestones. Far as he sees into his subject, we never find him fancyingthat he sees beyond the point at which the faculty of human vision isexhausted. His conception of the more complex of Shakespeare'spersonages, his theory of their characters, his reading of theirmotives, is often subtle, but always sane; his interpretation of themaster's own dealings with them, and of the language which he puts intotheir mouths, is often highly imaginative, but it is rarely fanciful. Take, as an illustration of the first-mentioned merit, the followingacute but eminently sensible estimate of the character of Polonius:-- "He is the personified memory of wisdom no longer actually possessed. This admirable character is always misrepresented on the stage. Shakspeare never intended to exhibit him as a buffoon; for although itwas natural for Hamlet--a young man of fire and genius, detestingformality and disliking Polonius on political grounds, as imaginingthat he had assisted his uncle in his usurpation--should expresshimself satirically, yet this must not be taken exactly as the poet'sconception of him. In Polonius a certain induration of character hadarisen from long habits of business; but take his advice to Laertes, and Ophelia's reverence for his memory, and we shall see that he wasmeant to be represented as a statesman somewhat past his faculties--hisrecollections of life all full of wisdom, and showing a knowledge ofhuman nature, while what immediately takes place before him and escapesfrom him is indicative of weakness. " Or this comment on the somewhat faint individualisation of the figure ofLear: "In Lear old age is itself a character-natural imperfections beingincreased by life-long habits of receiving a prompt obedience. Anyaddition of individualisation would have been unnecessary and painful;for the relation of others to him, of wondrous fidelity and of frightfulingratitude, alone sufficiently distinguish him. Thus Lear becomes theopen and ample playroom of nature's passions. " Or lastly, in illustration of my second point, let us take this note onthe remark of the knight that "since my young lady's going into France thefool hath much pined away ":-- "The fool is no comic buffoon--to make the groundlings laugh--no forcedcondescension of Shakspeare's genius to the taste of his audience. Accordingly the poet prepares us for the introduction, which he never doeswith any of his common clowns and fools, by bringing him into livingconnection with the pathos of the play. He is as wonderful a creation asCaliban, --his wild babblings and inspired idiocy articulate and gauge thehorrors of the scene. " The subject is a tempting one to linger over, did not imperativeExigencies of space compel me to pass on from it. There is much--verymuch--more critical matter in the Literary Remains of which it is hard toforbear quotation; and I may mention in particular the profoundlysuggestive remarks on the nature of the humorous, with their accompanyinganalysis of the genius and artistic method of Sterne. But it is, as hasbeen said, in Shakespearian criticism that Coleridge's unique mastery ofall the tools of the critic is most conspicuous, and it is in thebrilliant, if unmethodised, pages which I have been discussing that wemay most readily find consolation for the too early silencing of hismuse. For these consummate criticisms are essentially and above all thecriticisms of a poet They are such as could not have been achieved byany man not originally endowed with that divine gift which was fated inthis instance to expend itself within so few years. Nothing, indeed, could more strikingly illustrate the commanding advantage possessed bya poet interpreting a poet than is to be found in Coleridge'soccasional sarcastic comments on the _banalites_ of our nationalpoet's most prosaic commentator, Warburton--the "thought-swarming, butidealess Warburton, " as he once felicitously styles him. The one manseems to read his author's text under the clear, diffused, unwaveringradiance emitted from his own poetic imagination; while the criticismof the other resembles a perpetual scratching of damp matches, whichash a momentary light into one corner of the dark assage, and then goout. CHAPTER X Closing years--Temporary renewal of money troubles--The Aids to Reflection--Growing weakness-Visit to Germany with the Wordsworths--Last illnessand death. [1818-1834. ] For the years which now remained to Coleridge, some sixteen in number, dating from his last appearance as a public lecturer, his life wouldseem to have been attended with something, at least, of that sort ofhappiness which is enjoyed by the nation of uneventful annals. There islittle to be told of him in the way of literary performance; littlerecord remains, unfortunately, of the discursively didactic talk inwhich, during these years, his intellectual activity found its busiestexercise; of incident in the ordinary sense of the word there is almostnone. An account of these closing days of his life must resolve itselfalmost wholly into a "history of opinion, "--an attempt to reanimate forourselves that life of perpetual meditation which Coleridge lived, andto trace, so far as the scanty evidence of his utterances enables us todo so, the general tenor of his daily thoughts. From one point of view, of course, this task would be extremely difficult, if not impossible;from another comparatively easy. It is easy, that is to say, toinvestigate Coleridge's speculations, so far as their subject isconcerned, whatever difficulties their obscurity and subtlety maypresent to the inquirer; for, as a matter of fact, their subject isremarkably uniform. Attempts to divide the literary life of a writerinto eras are more often arbitrary and fanciful than not; but thepeculiar circumstances of Coleridge's career did in fact effect thedivision for themselves. His life until the age of twenty-six mayfairly be described as in its "poetic period. " It was during theseyears, and indeed during the last two or three of them, that heproduced all the poetry by which he will be remembered, while heproduced little else of mark or memorability. The twenty years whichfollow from 1798 to 1818 may with equal accuracy be styled the"critical period. " It was during these years that he did his best workas a journalist, and all his work as a public lecturer on aesthetics. It was during them that he said his say, and even his final say, so faras any public modes of expression were concerned, on politics and onart. From 1818 to his death his life was devoted entirely tometaphysics and theology, and with such close and constant reference tothe latter subject, to which indeed his metaphysics had throughout hislife been ancillary, that it deserves to give the name of the"theological period" to these closing years. Their lack of incident, however, is not entirely as favourable acircumstance as that uneventfulness of national annals to which I havecompared it; for, though "no news may be good news" in the case of anation's history, it is by no means as certainly so in the case of aman's biography, and, least of all, when the subject is a man whoseinward life of thought and feeling so completely overshadowed his outwardlife of action throughout his whole career. There is indeed evidence, slight in amount, but conclusive in character-plain and painful evidenceenough to show that at least the first four or five years of the period wehave mentioned were not altogether years of resignation and calm; thatthey were embittered by recurring agonies of self-reproach, by "Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain, And genius given, and knowledge won in vain;" and by the desolating thought that all which had been "culled in wood-walks wild, " and "all which patient toil had reared, " were to be --"but flowers Strewn on the corse, and borne upon the bier, In the same coffin, for the self-same grave!" Here and there in the correspondence with Thomas Allsop we obtain aglimpse into that vast half-darkened arena in which this captive spiritself-condemned to the lions was struggling its last. To one strange andhitherto unexplained letter I have already referred. It was writtenfrom Ramsgate in the autumn of 1822, evidently under circumstances ofdeep depression. But there is a letter nearly two years earlier in dateaddressed to the same correspondent which contains by far the fullestaccount of Coleridge's then condition of mind, the state of hisliterary engagements and his literary projects, his completed anduncompleted work. As usual with him it is stress of money matters thatprompts him to write, and he prefaces his request for assistance withthe following portentous catalogue of realised or contemplated schemes. "Contemplated, " indeed, is too modest a word, according to his ownaccount, to be applied to any one item in the formidable list. Of allof them, he has, he tells Allsop, "already the written materials andcontents, requiring only to be put together from the loose papers andcommonplace in memorandum books, and needing no other change, whetherof omission, addition, or correction, than the mere act of arranging, and the opportunity of seeing the whole collectively, bring with themof course. " Heads I. And II. Of the list comprise those criticisms onShakespeare and the other principal Elizabethan dramatists; on Dante, Spenser, Milton, Cervantes, Calderon; on Chaucer, Ariosto, Donne, Rabelais, etc. , which formed the staple of the course of lecturesdelivered in 1818, and which were published after his death in thefirst two of the four volumes of _Literary Remains_ brought outunder the editorship of Mr. H. N. Coleridge. Reserving No. III. For amoment we find No. IV. To consist of "Letters on the Old and NewTestament, and on the Doctrines and Principles held in common by theFathers and Founders of the Reformation, addressed to a Candidate forHoly Orders, including advice on the plan and subjects of preachingproper to a minister of the Established Church. " The letters neverapparently saw the light of publicity, at any rate, in the epistolaryform, either during the author's lifetime or after his death; and withregard to II. And III. , which did obtain posthumous publication, thefollowing caution should be borne in mind by the reader. "To thecompletion, " says Coleridge, "of these four works I have literallynothing more to do than to transcribe; but, as I before hinted, from somany scraps and Sibylline leaves, including margins of blank pages thatunfortunately I must be my own scribe, and, not done by myself, theywill be all but lost. " As matters turned out he was not his own scribe, and the difficulty which Mr. Nelson Coleridge experienced in piecingtogether the fragmentary materials at his disposal is feelinglydescribed by him in his preface to the first edition. He added that thecontents of these volumes were drawn from a portion only of the MSS. Entrusted to him, and that the remainder of the collection, which, under favourable circumstances, he hoped might hereafter see thelight, "was at least of equal value" with what he was then presenting tothe reader. This hope was never realised; and it must be remembered, therefore, that the published record of Coleridge's achievements as acritic is, as has already been pointed out, extremely imperfect. [1]That it is not even more disappointingly so than it is, may wellentitle his nephew and editor to the gratitude of posterity; but wheremuch has been done, there yet remains much to do ere Coleridge'sconsummate analyses of poetic and dramatic works can be presented tothe reader in other than their present shape of a series of detachedbrilliancies. The pearls are there, but the string is wanting. Whetherit will be ever supplied, or whether it is possible now to supply it, one cannot say. The third of Coleridge's virtually completed works there is much virtuein a "virtually"-was a "History of Philosophy considered as a Tendencyof the Human Mind to exhibit the Powers of the Human Reason, todiscover by its own strength the Origin and Laws of Man and the World, from Pythagoras to Locke and Condillac. " This production, however, considerable as it is, was probably merely ancillary to what he calls"My GREAT WORK, to the preparation of which more than twenty years ofmy life have been devoted, and on which my hopes of extensive andpermanent utility, of fame in the noblest sense of the word, mainlyrest. " To this work he goes on to say: "All my other writings, unless I except my Poems (and these I canexclude in part only), are introductory and preparative, while itsresult, if the premises be as I with the most tranquil assurance amconvinced they are-incontrovertible, the deductions legitimate, and theconclusions commensurate, and only commensurate with both [must be], toeffect a revolution in all that has been called Philosophy andMetaphysics in England and France since the era of commencingpredominance of the mechanical system at the Restoration of our SecondCharles, and with [in] the present fashionable views not only ofreligion, morals, and politics, but even of the modern physics andphysiology. " This, it must be allowed, is a sufficiently "large order, " beingApparently indeed nothing less than an undertaking to demolish thesystem of Locke and his successors, and to erect GermanTranscendentalism on the ruins. With anything less than this, howeverwith any less noble object or less faith in their attainments--Coleridge could not, he declares, have stood acquitted of folly andabuse of time, talent, and learning, on a labour of three--fourths ofhis intellectual life. Somewhat more than a volume of this _magnumopus_ had been dictated by him to his "friend and enlightened pupil, Mr. Green, so as to exist fit for the press;" and more than as muchagain had been done, but he had been compelled to break off the weeklymeetings with his pupil from the necessity of writing on subjects ofthe passing day. Then comes a reference, the last we meet with, to thereal "great work, " as the unphilosophic world has always considered andwill always consider it. On this subject he says: "Of my poetic works I would fain finish the _Christabel_, Alas!for the proud time when I planned, when I had present to my mind thematerials as well as the scheme of the Hymns entitled Spirit, Sun, Earth, Air, Water, Fire, and Man; and the Epic Poem on what appears tome the only fit subject remaining for an Epic Poem--Jerusalem besiegedand destroyed by Titus. " And then there follows this most pathetic passage, necessary, in spiteof its length, to be transcribed entire, both on account of the valueof its biographic details--its information on the subject of the uselessworldly affairs, etc. --and because of the singularly penetrating lightwhich it throws upon the mental and moral nature of the man:-- "I have only by fits and starts ever prayed--I have not prevailed uponmyself to pray to God in sincerity and entireness for the fortitudethat might enable me to resign myself to the abandonment of all mylife's best hopes, to say boldly to myself, 'Gifted with powersconfessedly above mediocrity, aided by an education of which no lessfrom almost unexampled hardships and sufferings than from manifold andpeculiar advantages I have never yet found a parallel, I have devotedmyself to a life of unintermitted reading, thinking, meditating, andobserving, I have not only sacrificed all worldly prospects of wealthand advancement, but have in my inmost soul stood aloof from temporaryreputation. In consequence of these toils and this self-dedication Ipossess a calm and clear consciousness that in many and most importantdepartments of truth and beauty I have outstrode my contemporaries, those at least of highest name, that the number of my. Printed worksbear witness that I have not been idle, and the seldom acknowledged butstrictly _proveable_ effects of my labours appropriated to thewelfare of my age in the _Morning Post_ before the peace ofAmiens, in the _Courier_ afterwards, and in the serious andvarious subjects of my lectures. .. (add to which the unlimited freedomof my communications to colloquial life) may surely be allowed asevidence that I have not been useless to my generation. But, fromcircumstances, the main portion of my harvest is still on the ground, ripe indeed and only waiting, a few for the sickle, but a large partonly for the _sheaving_ and carting and housing-but from all thisI must turn away and let them rot as they lie, and be as though theynever had been; for I must go and gather black berries and earth-nuts, or pick mushrooms and gild oak-apples for the palate and fancies ofchance customers. I must abrogate the name of philosopher and poet, andscribble as fast as I can and with as little thought as I can for_Blackwood's Magazine_, or as I have been employed for the lastdays in writing MS. Sermons for lazy clergymen who stipulate that thecomposition must be more than respectable. '. .. This" [_i. E. _ tosay this to myself] "I have not yet had courage to do. My soul sickensand my heart sinks, and thus oscillating between both" [forms ofactivity--the production of permanent and of ephemeral work] "I doneither--neither as it ought to be done to any profitable end. " And his proposal for extricating himself from this distressing positionis that "those who think respectfully and hope highly of my power andattainments should guarantee me a yearly sum for three or four years, adequate to my actual support, with such comforts and decencies ofappearance as my health and habit have made necessaries, so that mymind may be unanxious as far as the present time is concerned. " Thusprovided for he would undertake to devote two-thirds of his time tosome one work of those above mentioned that is to say, of the firstfour--and confine it exclusively to it till finished, while theremaining third of his time he would go on maturing and completing his"great work, " and "(for, if but easy in my mind, I have no doubt eitherof the reawakening power or of the kindling inclination) my_Christabel_ and what else the happier hour may inspire. " Mr. Green, he goes on to say, had promised to contribute L30 to L40 yearly, another pupil, "the son of one of my dearest old friends, L50, " and L10or L20 could, he thought, be relied on from another. The whole amountof the required annuity would be about L200, to be repaid of courseshould disposal or sale of his works produce, or as far as they shouldproduce, the means. But "am I entitled, " he asks uneasily, "have I a_right_ to do this I Can I do it without moral degradation? Andlastly, can it be done without loss of character in the eyes of myacquaintances and of my friends' acquaintances?" I cannot take upon myself to answer these painful questions. The replyto be given to them must depend upon the judgment which each individualstudent of this remarkable but unhappy career may pass upon it as awhole; and, while it would be too much to expect that that judgmentshould be entirely favourable, one may at least believe that a fairallowance for those inveterate weaknesses of physical constitutionwhich so largely aggravated, if they did not wholly generate, the fatalinfirmities of Coleridge's moral nature, must materially mitigate theharshness of its terms. The story of Coleridge's closing years is soon told. It is mainly arecord of days spent in meditation and discourse, in which character itwill be treated of more fully in a subsequent chapter. His literaryproductions during the last fourteen years of his life were few innumber, and but one of them of any great importance. In 1821 he hadoffered himself as an occasional contributor to _Blackwood'sMagazine_, but a series of papers promised by him to that periodicalwere uncompleted, and his only two contributions (in October 1821 andJanuary 1822) are of no particular note. In May 1825 he read a paper onthe _Prometheus_ of 'schylus before the Royal Society of Literature;but "the series of disquisitions respecting the Egyptian in connectionwith the sacerdotal theology and in contrast with the mysteries ofancient Greece, " to which this essay had been announced as preparatory, never made their appearance. In the same year, however, he publishedone of the best known of his prose works, his _Aids to Reflection_. Of the success of this latest of Coleridge's more importantcontributions to literature there can be no doubt. New editions of itseem to have been demanded at regular intervals for some twenty yearsafter its first production, and it appears to have had during the sameperiod a relatively equal reissue in the United States. The Rev. Dr. James Marsh, an American divine of some ability and reputation, composed a preliminary essay (now prefixed to the fifth Englishedition), in which he elaborately set forth the peculiar merits of thework, and undertook to initiate the reader in the fittest and mostprofitable method of making use of it. In these remarks the reverendessayist insists more strongly on the spiritually edifying quality ofthe _Aids_ than on their literary merits, and, for my own part, Imust certainly consider him right in doing so. As a religious manual itis easy to understand how this volume of Coleridge's should haveobtained many and earnest readers. What religious manual, which showstraces of spiritual insight, or even merely of pious yearnings afterhigher and holier than earthly things, has ever failed to win suchreaders among the weary and heavy-laden of the world? And thatColeridge, a writer of the most penetrating glance into divinemysteries, and writing always from a soul all tremulous, as it were, with religious sensibility, should have obtained such readers inabundance is not surprising. But to a critic and literary biographer Icannot think that his success in this respect has much to say. For myown part, at any rate, I find considerable difficulty in tracing it toany distinctively literary origin. There seems to me to be less charmof thought, less beauty of style, less even of Coleridge's seldom-failing force of effective statement, in the _Aids to Reflection_than in almost any of his writings. Even the volume of some dozen shortchapters on the Constitution of the Church and State, published in1830, as an "aid towards a right judgment in the late Catholic KeliefBill, " appears to me to yield a more characteristic flavour of theauthor's style, and to exhibit far more of his distinction of literaryworkmanship than the earlier and more celebrated work. Among the acquaintances made by Coleridge after his retirement to Mr. Gillman's was one destined to be of some importance to the history ofhis philosophical work. It was that of a gentleman whose name hasalready been mentioned in this chapter, Mr. Joseph Henry Green, afterwards a distinguished surgeon and Fellow of the Royal Society, whoin his early years had developed a strong taste for metaphysicalspeculation, going even so far as to devote one of his hard-earnedperiods of professional holiday to a visit to Germany for the sake ofstudying philosophy in that home of abstract thought. To him Coleridgewas introduced by his old Roman acquaintance, Ludwig Tieck, on one ofthe latter's visits to England, and he became, as the extract abovequoted from Coleridge's correspondence shows, his enthusiastic discipleand indefatigable fellow-worker. In the pursuit of their common studiesand in those weekly reunions of admiring friends which Coleridge, whilehis health permitted it, was in the habit of holding, we may believethat a considerable portion of these closing years of his life waspassed under happier conditions than he had been long accustomed to. Itis pleasant to read of him among his birds and flowers, and surroundedby the ever-watchful tendance of the affectionate Gillmans, tranquil inmind at any rate, if not at ease from his bodily ailments, andenjoying, as far as enjoyment was possible to him, the peaceful closeof a stormy and unsettled day. For the years 1825-30, moreover, hispecuniary circumstances were improved to the extent of L105 per annum, obtained for him at the instance of the Royal Society of Literature, and held by him till the death of George IV. Two incidents of his later years are, however, worthy of more specialmention--a tour up the Rhine, which he took in 1828, in company withWordsworth and his daughter; and, some years earlier, a meeting withJohn Keats. "A loose, slack, not well dressed youth, " it is recorded inthe _Table Talk, _ published after his death by his nephew, "metMr. ------" (it was Mr. Green, of whom more hereafter) "and myself in alane near Highgate. Green knew him and spoke. It was Keats. He wasintroduced to me, and stayed a minute or so. After he had left us alittle way, he came back and said, 'Let me carry away the memory, Coleridge, of having pressed your hand. ' 'There is death in that hand, 'I said to Green when Keats was gone; yet this was, I believe, beforethe consumption showed itself distinctly. " His own health, however, had been steadily declining in these latteryears, and the German tour with the Wordsworths must, I should imagine, have been the last expedition involving any considerable exercise ofthe physical powers which he was able to take. Within a year or soafterwards his condition seems to have grown sensibly worse. InNovember 1831 he writes that for eighteen months past his life had been"one chain of severe sicknesses, brief and imperfect convalescences, and capricious relapses. " Henceforth he was almost entirely confined tothe sick-room. His faculties, however, still remained clear andunclouded. The entries in the _Table Talk_ do not materiallydimmish in frequency. Their tone of colloquy undergoes no perceptiblevariation; they continue to be as stimulating and delightful reading asever. Not till 11th July 1834 do we find any change; but here at lastwe meet the shadow, deemed longer than it was in reality, of theapproaching end. "I am dying, " said Coleridge, "but without expectationof a speedy release. Is it not strange that, very recently, bygoneimages and scenes of early life have stolen into my mind like breezesblown from the spice-islands of Youth and Hope--those twin realities ofthe phantom world! I do not add Love, for what is Love but Youth andHope embracing, and, so seen, as _one_. .. . Hooker wished to liveto finish his _Ecclesiastical Polity_--so I own I wish life andstrength had been spared to me to complete my _Philosophy. _ For, as God hears me, the originating, continuing, and sustaining wish anddesign in my heart were to exalt the glory of His name; and, which isthe same thing in other words, to promote the improvement of mankind. But _visum aliter Deo, _ and His will be done. " The end was nearer than he thought. It was on the 11th of July, as hasbeen said, that he uttered these last words of gentle and piousresignation. On that day fortnight he died. Midway, however, in thisintervening period, he knew that the "speedy release" which he had notventured to expect was close at hand. The death, when it came, was insome sort emblematic of the life. Sufferings severe and constant, tillwithin thirty-six hours of the end: at the last peace. On the 25th ofJuly 1834 this sorely-tried, long-labouring, fate-marred and self-marred life passed tranquilly away. The pitiful words of Kent over hisdead master rise irrepressibly to the lips-- "O let him pass: he hates him Who would upon the rack of this tough world Stretch him out longer. " There might have been something to be said, though not by Kent, of theweaknesses of Lear himself; but at such a moment compassion both forthe king and for the poet may well impose silence upon censure. FOOTNOTES 1. How imperfect, a comparison between estimated and actual bulk willshow. No. I. Was, according to Coleridge's reckoning, to form threevolumes of 500 pages each. In the Literary Remains it fills less thanhalf of four volumes of little more than 400 pages each. CHAPTER XI Coleridge's metaphysics and theology--The _Spiritual Philosophy_of Mr. Green. In spite of all the struggles, the resolutions, and the entreatieswhich displayed themselves so distressingly in the letter to Mr. Allsop, quoted in the last chapter, it is doubtful whether Coleridge's"great work" made much additional progress during the last dozen yearsof his life. The weekly meeting with Mr. Green seems, according to thelatter's biographer, to have been resumed. Mr. Simon tells us that hecontinued year after year to sit at the feet of his Gamaliel, gettingmore and more insight into his opinions, until, in 1834, two eventsoccurred which determined the remaining course of Mr. Green's life. Oneof these events, it is needless to say, was Coleridge's death; theother was the death of his disciple's father, with the result ofleaving Mr. Green possessed of such ample means as to render himindependent of his profession. The language of Coleridge's will, together, no doubt, with verbal communications which had passed, imposed on Mr. Green what he accepted as an obligation to devote so faras necessary the whole remaining strength and earnestness of his lifeto the one task of systematising, developing, and establishing thedoctrines of the Coleridgian philosophy. Accordingly, in 1836, twoyears after his master's death, he retired from medical practice, andthenceforward, until his own death nearly thirty years afterwards, heapplied himself unceasingly to what was in a twofold sense a labour oflove. We are not, it seems from his biographer's account, to suppose that Mr. Green's task was in any material degree lightened for him by his previouscollaboration with Coleridge. The latter had, as we have seen, declaredin his letter to Allsop that "more than a volume" of the great work hadbeen dictated by him to Mr. Green, so as to exist in a condition fit forthe press: but this, according to Mr. Simon, was not the case; and theprobability is therefore that "more than a volume" meant written materialequal in amount to more than a volume--of course, an entirely differentthing. Mr. Simon, at any rate, assures us that no available writtenmaterial existed for setting comprehensively before the public, inColeridge's own language, and in an argued form, the philosophical systemwith which he wished his name to be identified. Instead of it there werefragments--for the most part mutually inadaptable fragments, andbeginnings, and studies of special subjects, and numberless notes on themargins and fly-leaves of books. With this equipment, such as it was, Mr. Green set to work to methodisethe Coleridgian doctrines, and to construct from them nothing less thansuch a system of philosophy as should "virtually include the law andexplanation of all being, conscious and unconscious, and of allcorrelativity and duty, and be applicable directly or by deduction towhatsoever the human mind can contemplate--sensuous or supersensuous--ofexperience, purpose, or imagination. " Born under post-diluvianconditions, Mr. Green was of course unable to accomplish his self-proposed enterprise, but he must be allowed to have attacked his taskwith remarkable energy. "Theology, ethics, politics and politicalhistory, ethnology, language, aesthetics, psychology, physics, and theallied sciences, biology, logic, mathematics, pathology, all thesesubjects, " declares his biographer, "were thoughtfully studied by him, inat least their basial principles and metaphysics, and most wereelaborately written of, as though for the divisions of some vastcyclop'dic work. " At an early period of his labours he thought itconvenient to increase his knowledge of Greek; he began to study Hebrewwhen more than sixty years old, and still later in life he took upSanscrit. It was not until he was approaching his seventieth year andfound his health beginning to fail him that Mr. Green seems to have feltthat his design, in its more ambitious scope, must be abandoned, andthat, in the impossibility of applying the Coleridgian system ofphilosophy to all human knowledge, it was his imperative duty under hisliterary trust to work out that particular application of it which itsauthor had most at heart. Already, in an unpublished work which he hadmade it the first care of his trusteeship to compose, he had, though butroughly and imperfectly, as he considered, exhibited the relation of hismaster's doctrines to revealed religion, and it had now become time tosupersede this unpublished compendium, the _Religio Laici_, as hehad styled it, by a fuller elaboration of the great Coleridgian position, that "Christianity, rightly understood, is identical with the highestphilosophy, and that, apart from all question of historical evidence, theessential doctrines of Christianity are necessary and eternal truths ofreason--truths which man, by the vouchsafed light of Nature and withoutaid from documents or tradition, may always and anywhere discover forhimself. " To this work accordingly Mr. Green devoted the few remainingyears of his life, and, dying in 1863 at the age of seventy-two, leftbehind him in MS. The work entitled _Spiritual Philosophy: founded onthe teaching of the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, _ which was publishedtwo years later, together with the memoir of the author, from which Ihave quoted, by Mr. John Simon. It consists of two volumes, the first ofwhich is devoted to the exposition of the general principles ofColeridge's philosophy, while the second is entirely theological, andaims at indicating on principles for which the first volume hascontended, the essential doctrines of Christianity. The earlier chapters of this volume Mr. Green devotes to an exposition(if indeed the word can be applied to what is really a catalogue of theresults of a transcendental intuition) of the essential differencebetween the reason and the understanding--a distinction which Coleridgehas himself elsewhere described as preeminently the _gradus adphilosophiam, _ and might well have called its _pons asinorum. _ Inthe second part of his first volume Mr. Green applies himself to theestablishment of a position which, fundamental as it must be accounted inall philosophical speculations of this school, is absolutely vital to thetheology which Coleridge sought to erect upon a metaphysical basis. Thisposition is that the human will is to be regarded as the one ultimatefact of self-consciousness. So long as man confines himself to thecontemplation of his percipient and reflective self alone--so long as heattends only to those modes of consciousness which are produced in him bythe impressions of the senses and the operations of thought, he can neverhope to escape from the famous _reductio ad inscibile_ of Hume. Hecan never affirm anything more than the existence of those modes ofconsciousness, or assert, at least as a direct deliverance of intuition, that his conscious self _is_ anything apart from the perceptions andconcepts to which he is attending. But when he turns from his perceivingand thinking to his willing self he becomes for the first time aware ofsomething deeper than the mere objective presentations of consciousness;he obtains a direct intuition of an originant, causative, and independentself-existence. He will have attained in short to the knowledge of anoumenon, and of the only knowable noumenon. The barrier, elsewhereinsuperable between the subject and object, is broken down; that which_knows_ becomes identified with that which _is;_ and in theconsciousness of will the consciousness also of a self, as somethingindependent of and superior to its own modifications, is not so muchaffirmed as acquired. The essence, in short, of the Coleridgian ontologyconsists in the alteration of a single though a very important word inthe well-known Cartesian formula. _Cogito ergo sum_ had been shownby Hume to involve an illicit process of reasoning. Descartes, accordingto the Scottish sceptic, had no right to have said more than _Cogitoergo cogitationes sunt. _ But substitute willing for thinking, convertthe formula into _Volo ergo sum_, and it becomes irrefragable. So far as I can perceive, it would have been sufficient for Mr. Green'ssubsequent argument to have thus established the position of the will asthe ultimate fact of consciousness, but he goes on to assert that he hasthus secured the immovable ground of a philosophy of Realism. For sinceman, "in affirming his Personality by the verb substantive I am, asserts, nay, acquires, the knowledge of his own Substance as a Spiritual being, and thereby knows what substance truly and properly is--so hecontemplates the outward, persons or things, as subjects partaking ofreality by virtue of the same substance of which he is conscious in hisown person. " So far, however, from this being a philosophy of Realism, itis in effect, if not indeed in actual terms, a philosophy of Idealism. I, at least, am unable to see how any Idealist, from Berkeley downwards, could ask for a better definition of his theory of the external worldthan that it "partakes of reality by virtue of the same substance ofwhich he is conscious in his own person. " But it is, of course, with the second volume of Mr. Green's work that oneis chiefly concerned. Had Coleridge been a mere Transcendentalist forTranscendentalism's sake, had there been no connection between hisphilosophy of Being and his religious creed, it might be a questionwhether even the highly condensed and necessarily imperfect sketch whichhas here been given of it would not have been superfluous and out ofplace. But Coleridge was a Theosophist first, and a philosopherafterwards; it was mainly as an organon of religion that he valued hisphilosophy, and it was to the development and perfection of it, _assuch organon, _ that he may be said to have devoted, so far as it couldbe redeemed from its enthralment to lower necessities, the whole of thelatter half of his career. No account of his life, therefore, could becomplete without at least some brief glance at the details of thisnotable attempt to lead the world to true religion by the road of theTranscendental philosophy. It is difficult, of course, for those who havebeen trained in a wholly differet school of thought to do justice toprocesses of reasoning carried on, as they cannot but hold, in terms ofthe inconceivable; it is still more difficult to be sure that you havedone justice to it after all has been said; and I think that no candidstudent of the Coleridgian philosophico-theology (not being a professeddisciple of it, and therefore bound, at any rate, to feign familiaritywith incomprehensibilities) will deny that he is often compelled, toformulate its positions and recite its processes in somewhat of the samemodest and confiding spirit as animates those youthful geometricians wholeacn their Euclid by heart. With this proviso I will, as briefly as maybe, trace the course of the dialectic by which Mr. Green seeks to makethe Coleridgian metaphysics demonstrative of the truth of Christianity. Having shown that the Will is the true and the only tenable base ofPhilosophic Realism, the writer next proceeds to explain the growth ofthe Soul, from its rudimental strivings in its fallen condition to thedevelopment of its spiritual capabilities and to trace its ascent to theconception of the Idea of God. The argument--if we may apply so definitea name to a process which is continually forced to appeal to somethingthat may perhaps be higher, but is certainly _other_ than theratiocinative faculty--is founded partly on moral and partly onintellectual considerations. By an analysis of the moral phenomenaassociated with the action of the human will, and, in particular, of theconflict which arises between "the tendency of all Will to make itselfabsolute, " and the consciousness that, under the conditions of man'sfallen state, nothing but misery could result both to the individual andthe race from the fulfilment of this tendency, --Mr. Green shows how theSoul, or the Reason, or the Speculative Intellect (for he seems to useall three expressions indiscriminately) is morally prepared for thereception of the truth which his Understanding alone could never havecompassed, --the Idea of God. This is in effect neither more nor less thana restatement of that time-honoured argument for the existence of someBeing of perfect holiness which has always weighed so much with men ofhigh spirituality as to blind them to the fact of its actually enhancingthe intellectual difficulties of the situation. Man possesses a Willwhich longs to fulfil itself; but it is coupled with a nature whichconstantly impels him to those gratifications of will which tend not toself-preservation and progress, but to their contraries. Surely, then, onthe strength of the mere law of life, which prevails everywhere, heremust be some higher archetypal Will, to which human wills, or rathercertain selected examples of them, may more and more conform themselves, and in which the union of unlimited efficiency in operation withunqualified purity of aim has been once for all effected. Or to put ityet another way: The life of the virtuous man is a life auxiliary to thepreservation and progress of the race; but his will is under restraint. The will of the vicious man energises freely enough, but his life ishostile to the preservation and progress of the race. Now the natural andessential _nisus_ of all Will is towards absolute freedom. Butnothing in life has a natural and essential _nisus_ towards thatwhich tends to its deterioration and extinction. Therefore, there must besome ultimate means of reconciling absolute freedom of the Will withperfectly salutary conditions of its exercise. And since Mr. Green, likehis master and all other Platonists, is incapable of stopping here, andcontenting himself with assuming the existence of a "stream of tendency"which will gradually bring the human will into the required conditions, he here makes the inevitable Platonic jump, and proceeds to conclude thatthere must be a self-existent ideal Will in which absolute freedom andpower concur with perfect purity and holiness. So much for the moral part of Mr. Green's proof, which so far fails, itwill be observed, to carry us much beyond the Pantheistic position. Ithas, that is to say, to be proved that the "power not ourselves, " whichhas been called Will, originates in some source to which we should berationally justified in giving the name of "God;" and, singular as such athing may seem, it is impossible at any rate for the logic of theunderstanding to regard Mr. Green's argument on this point as otherwisethan hopelessly circular. The half-dozen pages or so which he devotes tothe refutation of the Pantheistic view reduce themselves to the followingsimple _petitio principii:_ the power is first assumed to be a Will;it is next affirmed with perfect truth that the very notion of Will wouldescape us except under the condition of Personality; and from this theexistence of a personal God as the source of the power in questiondeduced. And the same vice underlies the further argument by which Mr. Green meets the familiar objection to the personality of the Absolute asinvolving contradictory conceptions. An infinite Person, he argues, is nocontradiction in terms, unless "finition or limitation" be regarded asidentical with "negation" (which, when applied to a hypotheticalInfinite, one would surely think it is); and an Absolute Will is not theless absolute from being self-determined _ab intra. _ For how, heasks, can any Will which is causative of reality be conceived as a Willexcept by conceiving it as _se finiens, _ predetermining itself tothe specific processes required by the act of causation? How, indeed? Butthe answer of a Pantheist would of course be that the very impossibilityof conceiving of Will except as _se finiens_ is his very ground forrejecting the notion of a volitional (in the sense of a personal) originof the cosmos. However, it is beyond my purposes to enter into any detailed criticism ofMr. Green's position, more especially as I have not yet reached thecentral and capital point of his spiritual philosophy--the constructionof the Christian theology on the basis of the Coleridgian metaphysics. Having deduced the Idea of God from man's consciousness of an individualWill perpetually affirming itself, Mr. Green proceeds to evolve the Ideaof the Trinity, by (as he considers it) an equally necessary process fromtwo of the invariable accompaniments of the above-mentioned introspectiveact. "For as in our consciousness, " he truly says, "we are under thenecessity of distinguishing the relation of 'myself, ' now as the_subject_ thinking and now as the _object_ contemplated in themanifold of thought, so we might express the relations in the Divineinstance as _Deus Subjectivus_ and _Deus Objectimis, _--that is, the Absolute Subjectivity or Supreme Will, uttering itself as andcontemplating itself in the Absolute Objectivity or plenitude of Beingeternally and causatively realised in his Personality. " Whence it follows(so runs or seems to run the argument) that the Idea of God the Father asnecessarily involves the Idea of God the Son as the "I" who, as thethinking subject, contemplate myself, implies the contemplated "Me" asthe object thought of. Again, the man who reflects on the fact of hisconsciousness, "which discloses to him the unavoidable opposition ofsubject and object in the self of which he is conscious, cannot fail tosee that the conscious mind requires not only the distinction in order tothe act of reflection in itself, but the continual sense of the relativenature of the distinction and of the essential oneness of the minditself. " Whence it follows (so runs or seems to run the argument) thatthe Idea of the first two Persons of the Trinity as necessarily involvesthe Idea of the Third Person, as the contemplation of the "Me" by the "I"implies the perpetual consciousness that the contemplator and thecontemplated--the "I" and the "Me"--are one. In this manner is the Ideaof the Trinity shown to be involved in the Idea of God, and to arise outof it by an implication as necessary as that which connects together thethree phases of consciousness attendant upon every self-contemplative actof the individual mind. [1] It may readily be imagined that after the Speculative Reason has beenmade to perform such feats as these the remainder of the work proposed toit could present no serious difficulty. And in the half-dozen chapterswhich follow it is made to evolve in succession the doctrine of theIncarnation, the Advent, and the Atonement of Christ, and to explain themysteries of the fall of man and of original sin. Considered in theaspect in which Coleridge himself would have preferred to regard hispupil's work, namely as a systematic attempt to lead the minds of men toChristianity by an intellectual route, no more hopeless enterpriseperhaps could have been conceived than that embodied in these volumes. Itis like offering a traveller a guide-book written in hieroglyphics. Uponthe most liberal computation it is probable that not one-fourth part ofeducated mankind are capable of so much as comprehending the philosophicdoctrine upon which Coleridge seeks to base Christianity, and it isdoubtful whether any but a still smaller fraction of these would admitthat the foundation was capable of supporting the superstructure. Thatthe writings of the pupil, like the teachings of the master whom heinterprets, may serve the cause of religion in another than anintellectual way is possible enough. Not a few of the functions assignedto the Speculative Reason will strike many of us as moral and spiritualrather than intellectual in their character, and the appeal to them is infact an appeal to man to chasten the lower passions of his nature, and todiscipline his unruly will. Exhortations of that kind are religious allthe world of philosophy over, and will succeed in proportion to the moralfervour and oratorical power which distinguish them. But if the benefitsof Coleridge's theological teachings are to be reduced to this, it wouldof course have been much better to have dissociated them altogether fromthe exceedingly abstruse metaphysic to which they have been wedded. FOOTNOTES 1. Were it not hazardous to treat processes of the Speculative Reasonas we deal with the vulgar dialectic of the Understanding, one would bedisposed to reply that if the above argument proves the existence ofthree persons in the Godhead, it must equally prove the existence ofthree persons in every man who reflects upon his conscious self. Thatthe Divine Mind, when engaged in the act of self-contemplation, must beconceived under three relations is doubtless as true as that the humanmind, when so engaged, must be so conceived; but that these threerelations are so many objective realities is what Mr. Green assertsindeed a few pages farther on, but what he nowhere attempts to prove. CHAPTER XII. Coleridge's position in his later years--His discourse--His influenceon contemporary thought--Final review of his intellectual work. The critic who would endeavour to appreciate the position whichColeridge fills in the history of literature and thought for the firsthalf of the nineteenth century must, if he possesses ordinary candourand courage, begin, I think, with a confession. He must confess aninability to comprehend the precise manner in which that position wasattained, and the precise grounds on which it was recognised. For vastas were Coleridge's powers of thought and expression, and splendid, ifincomplete, as is the record which they have left behind them in hisworks, they were never directed to purposes of instruction orpersuasion in anything like that systematic and concentrated mannerwhich is necessary to him who would found a school. Coleridge'swritings on philosophical and theological subjects were essentiallydiscursive, fragmentary, incomplete. Even when he professes anintention of exhausting his subject and affects a logical arrangement, it is not long before he forgets the design and departs from the order. His disquisitions are in no sense connected treatises on the subjectsto which they relate. Brilliant _apercus, _ gnomic sayings, flightsof fervid eloquence, infinitely suggestive reflections--of these thereis enough and to spare; but these, though an ample equipment for thecritic, are not sufficient for the constructive philosopher. Nothing, it must be frankly said, in Coleridge's philosophical and theologicalwritings--nothing, that is to say, which appeals in them to the mereintelligence--suffices to explain, at least to the appreciation ofposterity, the fact that he was surrounded during these closing yearsof his life by an eager crowd of real or supposed disciples, includingtwo, at any rate, of the most remarkable personalities of the time. Andif nothing in Coleridge's writings serves to account for it, so neitherdoes anything traceable or tangible in the mere matter of hisconversations. This last point, however, is one which must be for thepresent reserved. I wish for the moment to confine myself to the factof Coleridge's position during his later life at Highgate. To this wehave, as we all know, an extremely eminent witness, and one from whoseevidence most people, one may suppose, are by this time able to maketheir own deductions in all matters relating to the persons with whomhe was brought into contact. Carlyle on Charles Lamb, few as the soursentences are, must always warn us to be careful how we follow Carlyle"on" anybody whomsoever. But there is no evidence of any ill feeling onCarlyle's part towards Coleridge--nothing but a humorous, kindly-contemptuous compassion for his weaknesses and eccentricities; and thefamous description in the _Life of Sterling_ may be takentherefore as a fairly accurate account of the man and the circumstancesto which it refers:-- "Coleridge sat on the brow of Highgate Hill in those years, lookingdown on London and its smoke tumult like a sage escaped from theinanity of life's battle, attracting towards him the thoughts ofinnumerable brave souls still engaged there. His expresscontributions to poetry, philosophy, or any specific province of humanliterature or enlightenment had been small and sadly intermittent; buthe had, especially among young inquiring men, a higher than literary, akind of prophetic or magician character. He was thought to hold--healone in England--the key of German and other Transcendentalisms; knewthe sublime secret of believing by the 'reason' what the'understanding' had been obliged to fling out as incredible; and couldstill, after Hume and Voltaire had done their best and worst with him, profess himself an orthodox Christian, and say and print to the Churchof England, with its singular old rubrics and surplices atAllhallowtide, _Esto perpetua. _ A sublime man; who alone in thosedark days had saved his crown of spiritual manhood, escaping from theblack materialisms and revolutionary deluges with 'God, Freedom, Immortality, ' still his; a king of men. The practical intellects of theworld did not much heed him, or carelessly reckoned him a metaphysicaldreamer; but to the rising spirits of the young generation he had thisdusky sublime character, and sat there as a kind of Magus, girt inmystery and enigma; his Dodona oak-grove (Mr. Gillman's house atHighgate) whispering strange things, uncertain whether oracles orjargon. " The above quotation would suffice for my immediate purpose, but it is impossible to deny oneself or one's readers the pleasure of arefreshed recollection of the noble landscape-scene and the masterlyportrait that follow: "The Gillmans did not encourage much company or excitation of any sortround their sage; nevertheless, access to him, if a youth did reverentlywish it, was not difficult. He would stroll about the pleasant gardenwith you, sit in the pleasant rooms of the place--perhaps take you tohis own peculiar room, high up, with a rearward view, which was thechief view of all. A really charming outlook in fine weather. Close athand wide sweeps of flowing leafy gardens, their few houses mostlyhidden, the very chimney-pots veiled under blossoming umbrage, flowedgloriously down hill; gloriously issuing in wide-tufted undulatingplain country, rich in all charms of field and town. Waving bloomingcountry of the brightest green, dotted all over with handsome villas, handsome groves crossed by roads and human traffic, here inaudible, orheard only as a musical hum; and behind all swam, under olive-tintedhaze, the illimitable limitary ocean of London, with its domes andsteeples definite in the sun, big Paul's and the many memories attachedto it hanging high over all. Nowhere of its kind could you see a granderprospect on a bright summer day, with the set of the air going southward--southward, and so draping with the city smoke not _you_ but thecity. " Then comes the invariable final touch, the one dash of black--or green, shall we call it--without which the master left no picture that had ahuman figure in the foreground:-- "Here for hours would Coleridge talk concerning all conceivable orinconceivable things; and liked nothing better than to have anintelligent, or, failing that, even a silent and patient humanlistener. He distinguished himself to all that ever heard him as atleast the most surprising talker extant in this world, --and to somesmall minority, by no means to all, as the most excellent. " Then follows the well-known, wonderfully vivid, cynically pathetic, sketch of the man:-- "The good man--he was now getting old, towards sixty perhaps, andgave you the idea of a life that had been full of sufferings; alife heavy-laden, half-vanquished, still swimming painfully inseas of manifold physical and other bewilderment. Brow andhead were round and of massive weight, but the face was flabby andirresolute. The deep eyes, of a light hazel, were as full of sorrow asof inspiration; confused pain looked mildly from them, as in a kind ofmild astonishment. The whole figure and air, good and amiableotherwise, might be called flabby and irresolute; expressive ofweakness under possibility of strength. He hung loosely on his limbs, with knees bent, and stooping attitude; in walking he rather shuffledthan decisively stept; and a lady once remarked he never could fixwhich side of the gardenwalk would suit him best, but continuallyshifted, corkscrew fashion, and kept trying both; a heavy-laden, high-aspiring, and surely much-suffering man. His voice, naturally soft andgood, had contracted itself into a plaintive snuffle and singsong; hespoke as if preaching--you could have said preaching earnestly andalmost hopelessly the weightiest things. I still recollect his 'object'and 'subject, ' terms of continual recurrence in the Kantean province;and how he sang and snuffled them into 'om-m-ject' and 'sum-m-mject, 'with a kind of solemn shake or quaver as he rolled along. [1] No talkin his century or in any other could be more surprising. " Such, as he appeared to this half-contemptuous, half-compassionate, but ever acute observer, was Coleridge at this the zenith of hisinfluence over the nascent thought of his day. Such to Carlyleseemed the _manner_ of the deliverance of the oracles; in hisview of their matter, as we all know from an equally well-rememberedpassage, his tolerance disappears, and his account here, with allits racy humour, is almost wholly impatient. Talk, "suffering nointerruption, however reverent, " "hastily putting aside all foreignadditions, annotation, or most ingenuous desires for elucidation, aswell-meant superfluities which would never do;" talk "not flowinganywhither, like a river, but spreading everywhither in inextricablecurrents and regurgitations like a lake or sea;" a "confusedunintelligible flood of utterance, threatening to submerge all knownlandmarks of thought and drown the world with you"--this, it must beadmitted, is not an easily recognisable description of the Word ofLife. Nor, certainly, does Carlyle's own personal experience of itspreaching and effects--he having heard the preacher talk "with eagermusical energy two stricken hours, his face radiant and moist, andcommunicate no meaning whatsoever to any individual of his hearers, "--certain of whom, the narrator for one, "still kept eagerlylistening in hope, while the most had long before given up and formed(if the room was large enough) humming groups of their own. " "Hebegan anywhere, " continues this irresistibly comic sketch; "you putsome question to him, made some suggestive observation; instead ofanswering this, or decidedly setting out towards an answer of it, hewould accumulate formidable apparatus, logical swim-bladders, transcendental life-preservers, and other precautionary andvehiculatory gear for setting out; perhaps did at last get under way--but was swiftly solicited, turned aside by the flame of someradiant new game on this hand or on that into new courses, and everinto new; and before long into all the universe, where it wasuncertain what game you would catch, or whether any. " Hehad, indeed, according to the dissatisfied listener, "not the leasttalent for explaining this or anything to them; and you swam andfluttered on the mistiest, wide, unintelligible deluge of things formost part in a rather profitless uncomfortable manner. " And the fewvivid phrases of eulogy which follow seem only to deepen by contrastthe prevailing hue of the picture. The "glorious islets" which weresometimes seen to "rise out of the haze, " the "balmy sunny islets ofthe blest and the intelligible, at whose emergence the secondaryhumming group would all cease humming and hang breathless upon theeloquent words, till once your islet got wrapped in the mist again, andthey would recommence humming"--these, it seems to be suggested, butrarely revealed themselves; but "eloquent, artistically expressivewords you always had; piercing radiances of a most subtle insight cameat intervals; tones of noble pious sympathy recognisable as piousthough strangely coloured, were never wanting long; but, in general, you could not call this aimless cloud-capt, cloud-bound, lawlesslymeandering discourse, by the name of excellent talk, but only ofsurprising. .. . The moaning sing-song of that theosophico-metaphysicalmonotony left in you at last a very dreary feeling. " It is tolerably clear, I think, that some considerable discount mustbe allowed upon the sum of disparagement in this famous criticism. We havelearnt, indeed, to be more on the look-out for the disturbing influencesof temperament in the judgments of this atrabilious observer than was thecase when the _Life of Sterling_ was written, and it is difficultto doubt that the unfavourable strokes in the above-quoted descriptionhave been unduly multiplied and deepened, partly in the merewaywardness of a sarcastic humour, and partly perhaps from a lessexcusable cause. It is always dangerous to accept one remarkabletalker's view of the characteristics of another; and if this is true ofmen who merely compete with each other in the ordinary give-and-take ofthe dinner-table epigrammatist and _raconteur, _ the caution isdoubly necessary in the case of two rival prophets--two competingoracles. There are those among us who hold that the conversation of theChelsea sage, in his later years, resembled his own description of theHighgate philosopher's, in this, at any rate, that it was mightilyintolerant of interruption; and one is apt to suspect that at no timeof his life did Carlyle "understand duologue" much better thanColeridge. It is probable enough, therefore, that the young lay-preacher did not quite relish being silenced by the elder, and that hisaccount of the sermons was coloured by the recollection that his ownremained undelivered. There is an abundance of evidence that the"glorious islets" emerged far more often from the transcendental hazethan Carlyle would have us suppose. Hazlitt, a bitter assailant ofColeridge's, and whose caustic remark that "his talk was excellent ifyou let him start from no premisses and come to no conclusion" is citedwith approval by Carlyle, has elsewhere spoken of Coleridge as the onlyperson from whom he ever learned anything, has said of him that thoughhe talked on for ever you wished him to talk on for ever, that "histhoughts did not seem to come with labour and effort, but as if borneon the gusts of genius, and as if the wings of his imagination liftedhim from his feet. " And besides this testimony to the eloquence whichCarlyle only but inadequately recognises, one should set for what it isworth De Quincey's evidence to that consequence of thought whichCarlyle denies altogether. To De Quincey the complaint that Coleridgewandered in his talk appeared unjust. According to him the greatdiscourser only "seemed to wander, " and he seemed to wander the most"when in fact his resistance to the wandering instinct was greatest, viz. When the compass and huge circuit by which his illustrations movedtravelled farthest into remote regions before they began to revolve. Long before this coming round commenced most people had lost him, and, naturally enough, supposed that he had lost himself. They continued toadmire the separate beauty of the thoughts, but did not see theirrelations to the dominant theme. " De Quincey however, declarespositively in the faith of his "long and intimate knowledge ofColeridge's mind, that logic the most severe was as inalienable fromhis modes of thinking as grammar from his language. " Nor should we omit the testimony of another, a more partial, perhaps, but even better informed judge. The _Table Talk_, edited by Mr. Nelson Coleridge, shows how pregnant, how pithy, how full of subtleobservation, and often also of playful humour, could be the talk ofthe great discourser in its lighter and more colloquial forms. Thebook indeed is, to the thinking of one, at any rate, of its frequentreaders, among the most delightful in the world. But thus speaks itseditor of his uncle's conversation in his more serious moods:-- "To pass an entire day with Coleridge was a marvellous change indeed[from the talk of daily life]. It was a Sabbath past expression, deepand tranquil and serene. You came to a man who had travelled in manycountries and in critical times; who had seen and felt the world inmost of its ranks and in many of its vicissitudes and weaknesses; oneto whom all literature and art were absolutely subject; and to whom, with a reasonable allowance as to technical details, all science was, in a most extraordinary degree, familiar. Throughout a long-drawnsummer's day would this man talk to you in low, equable, but clearand musical tones concerning things Iranian and divine; marshallingall history, harmonising all experiment, probing the depths of yourconsciousness, and revealing visions of glory and terror to theimagination; but pouring withal such floods of light upon the mindthat you might for a season, like Paul, become blind in the very actof conversion. And this he would do without so much as one allusionto himself, without a word of reflection upon others, save when anygiven art fell naturally in the way of his discourse; without oneanecdote that was not proof and illustration of a previous position;--gratifying no passion, indulging no caprice, but, with a calmmastery over your soul, leading you onward and onward for everthrough a thousand windings, yet with no pause, to some magnificentpoint in which, as in a focus, all the parti-coloured rays of hisdiscourse should converge in light. In all these he was, in truth, your teacher and guide; but in a little while you might forget thathe was other than a fellow-student and the companion of your way--so playful was his manner, so simple his language, so affectionate theglance of his eye!" Impressive, however, as these displays may have been, it is impossibleto suppose that their direct didactic value as discourses was atall considerable. Such as it was, moreover, it was confined in allprobability to an extremely select circle of followers. A fewmystics of the type of Maurice, a few eager seekers after truthlike Sterling, may have gathered, or fancied they gathered, distinctdogmatic instruction from the Highgate oracles; and no doubt, to theextent of his influence over the former of these disciples, we mayjustly credit Coleridge's discourses with having exercised a real ifonly a transitory directive effect upon nineteenth-century thought. Butthe terms in which his influence is sometimes spoken of appear, as faras one can judge of the matter at this distance of time, to be greatlyexaggerated. To speak of it in the same way as we are--or were--accustomed to speak of the influence of Carlyle, is to subject it to analtogether inappropriate comparison. It is not merely that Coleridgefounded no recognisable school, for neither did Carlyle. It is that theformer can show absolutely nothing at all resembling that sort of powerwhich enabled the latter to lay hold upon all the youthful minds of histime--minds of the most disparate orders and associated with the utmostdiversities of temperament, and detain them in a captivity which, briefas it may have been in some cases, has in no case failed to leave itsmarks behind it. Over a few spirits already prepared to receive themColeridge's teachings no doubt exerted power, but he led no soulcaptive against its will. There are few middle-aged men of activeintelligence at the present day who can avoid a confession of having"taken" Carlylism in their youth; but no mental constitutions notpredisposed to it could ever have caught Coleridgism at all. There isindeed no moral theory of life, there are no maxims of conduct, such asyouth above all things craves for, in Coleridge's teaching. Apart fromthe intrinsic difficulties of the task to which he invites hisdisciples, it labours under a primary and essential disadvantage ofpostponing moral to intellectual liberation. Contrive somehow or otherto attain to just ideas as to the capacities and limitations of thehuman consciousness, considered especially in relation to its twoimportant and eternally distinct functions, the Reason and theUnderstanding: and peace of mind shall in due time be added unto you. That is in effect Coleridge's answer to the inquirer who consults him;and if the distinction between the Reason and the Understanding were asobvious as it is obscure to the average unmetaphysical mind, and of avalue as assured for the purpose to which Coleridge applies it as it isuncertain, the answer would nevertheless send many a would-be disciplesorrowful away. His natural impulse is to urge the oracle to tell himwhether there be not some one moral attitude which he can wisely andworthily adopt towards the universe, whatever theory he may form of hismental relations to it, or without forming any such theory at all. Andit was because Carlyle supplied, or was believed to supply an answer, such as it was, to this universal question, that his train offollowers, voluntary and involuntary, permanent and temporary, has beenso large. It appears to me, therefore, on as careful an examination ofthe point as the data admit of, that Coleridge's position in theselatter days of his life has been somewhat mythically exalted by thegeneration which succeeded him. There are, I think, distinct traces ofa Coleridgian legend which has only slowly died out. The actual truth Ibelieve to be that Coleridge's position from 1818 or 1820 till hisdeath, though one of the greatest eminence, was in no sense one of thehighest, or even of any considerable influence. Fame and honour, in thefullest measure, were no doubt his: in that matter, indeed, he was onlyreceiving payment of long-delayed arrears. The poetic school with whichhe was, though not with entire accuracy, associated had outlived itsperiod of contempt and obloquy. In spite of the two quarterlies, theTory review hostile, its Whig rival coldly silent, the public hadrecognised the high imaginative merit of _Christabel;_ and whoknows but that if the first edition of the _Lyrical Ballads_ hadappeared at this date instead of twenty years before, it would haveobtained a certain number of readers even among landsmen? [2] But overand above the published works of the poet there were thoseextraordinary personal characteristics to which the fame of his worksof course attracted a far larger share than formerly of popularattention. A remarkable man has more attractive power over the mass ofmankind than the most remarkable of books, and it was because thereport of Coleridge among those who knew him was more stimulating topublic curiosity than even the greatest of his poems, that hiscelebrity in these latter years attained such proportions. Wordsworthsaid that though "he had seen many men do wonderful things, Coleridgewas the only wonderful man he had ever met, " and it was not the doer ofwonderful things but the wonderful man that English society in thosedays went out for to see. Seeing would have been enough, but for acertain number there was hearing too, with the report of it for all;and it is not surprising that fame of the marvellous discourser should, in mere virtue of his extraordinary power of improvised speech, hislimitless and untiring mastery of articulate words, have risen to aheight to which writers whose only voice is in their pens can neverhope to attain. A reputation of that kind, however, must necessarily perish with itspossessor; and Coleridge's posthumous renown has grown, his place inEnglish literature has become more assured, if it has not been evenfixed higher, since his death than during his lifetime. Thisis, in part no doubt, one among the consequences of those very defectsof character which so unfortunately limited his actual achievements. Hehas been credited by faith, as it were, with those famous "unwrittenbooks" of which he assured Charles Lamb that the titles alone wouldfill a volume, and such "popular reputation, " in the strict sense ofthe word, as he has left behind him, is measured rather by what he wasthought capable of doing than by what he did. By serious students, however, the real worth of Coleridge will be differently estimated. Forthem his peculiar value to English literature is not only undiminishedby the incompleteness of his work; it has been, in a certain sense, enhanced thereby. Or, perhaps, it would be more strictly accurate tosay that the value could not have existed without the incompleteness. AColeridge with the faculty of concentration, and the habit of methodsuperadded--a Coleridge capable of becoming possessed by any one formof intellectual energy to the exclusion of all others--might, indeed, have left behind him a more enduring reputation as a philosopher, andpossibly (although this, for reasons already stated, is, in my ownopinion, extremely doubtful) bequeathed to his countrymen more poetrydestined to live; but, unquestionably, he would never have been able torender that precise service to modern thought and literature which, infact, they owe to him. To have exercised his vivifying and fertilisinginfluence over the minds of others his intellect was bound to be of thedispersive order; it was essential that he should "take all knowledgeto be his province, " and that that eager, subtle, and penetrative mindshould range as freely as it did over subject after subject of humaninterest;--illuminating each of them in turn with those rays of truecritical insight which, amid many bewildering cross-lights and some fewdownright _ignes fatui, _ flash forth upon us from all Coleridge'swork. Of the personal weaknesses which prevented the just developmentof the powers, enough, perhaps, has been incidentally said in thecourse of this volume. But, in summing up his history, I shall not, Itrust, be thought to judge the man too harshly in saying that, thoughthe natural disadvantages of wretched health, almost from boyhoodupward, must, in common fairness, be admitted in partial excuse for hisfailure, they do not excuse it altogether. It is difficult not to feelthat Coleridge's character, apart altogether from defects of physicalconstitution, was wanting in manliness of fibre. His willingness toaccept assistance at the hands of others is too manifestly displayedeven at the earlier and more robust period of his life. It would be amistake, of course, in dealing with a literary man of Coleridge's era, to apply the same standards as obtain in our own days. Wordsworth, aswe have seen, made no scruple to accept the benevolences of theWedgwoods. Southey, the type of independence and self-help, was, forsome years, in receipt of a pension from a private source. ButColeridge, as Miss Meteyard's disclosures have shown, was at all timesfar more willing to depend upon others, and was far less scrupulousabout soliciting their bounty, than was either of his two friends. Hadhe shared more of the spirit which made Johnson refuse to owe to thebenevolence of others what Providence had enabled him to do forhimself, it might have been better, no doubt, for the world and for thework which he did therein. But when we consider what that work was, how varied and how wonderful, it seems idle--nay, it seems ungrateful and ungracious--to speculatetoo curiously on what further or other benefits this great intellectmight have conferred upon mankind, had its possessor been endowed withthose qualities of resolution and independence which he lacked. ThatColeridge so often only _shows_ the way, and so seldom guides oursteps along it to the end, is no just ground of complaint. It would beas unreasonable to complain of a beacon-light that it is not a steam-tug, and forget in the incompleteness of its separate services the glory oftheir number. It is a more reasonable objection that the light itselfis too often liable to obscuration, --that it stands erected upon a rocktoo often enshrouded by the mists of its encircling sea. But even thisobjection should not too greatly weigh with us. It would be wiser andbetter for us to dwell rather upon its splendour and helpfulness in thehours of its efficacy, to think how vast is then the expanse of waterswhich it illuminates, and its radiance how steady and serene. FOOTNOTES 1. No one who recollects the equally singular manner in which anothermost distinguished metaphysician--the late Dean Hansel--was wont toquaver forth his admirably turned and often highly eloquent phrases ofphilosophical exposition, can fail to be reminded of him by the abovedescription. No two temperaments or histories however could be moredissimilar. The two philosophers resembled each other in nothing savethe "om-mject" and "sum-mject" of their studies. 2. The Longmans told Coleridge that the greater part of the firstedition of the Lyrical Ballads had been sold to seafaring men, who, having heard of the _Ancient Mariner_, took the volume for a navalsong-book. INDEX Adams, Dr. , _Aeolian Harp, _ circumstances under which it was written, Coleridge's opinion of, _Aids to Reflection, _ its popularity, its value as a spiritual manual, its inferiority from a literary point of view, Allan Bank, Allsop, Mr. Thomas, _Ancient Mariner, _ how and when first conceived, its uniqueness, Wordsworth's account of its origin and of his suggestions, a sublime "pot-boiler, " realistic force of its narrative, its vividness of imagery, its wonderful word-pictures, its evenness of execution, examples of its consummate art, its chief characteristics, Anecdotes, Ball, Sir Alexander, Beaumont, Lady, Berkeley, _Biographia Literaria, _ its interest, critical and illustrative, its main value, its analysis of the principles of poetry, its examination of Wordsworth's theory, its contents, _Blackwood's Magazine, _ Coleridge's contributions to, Bonaparte, _Borderers_ (Wordsworth's), Bowles, William Lisle, Burke, sonnet to, Byron, Calne, Coleridge at, _Cambridge Intelligencer _(Flower's), Carlyle, description of Coleridge by, Carrlyon, Dr. , reminiscences of Coleridge in Germany by, _Christabel, _ Coleridge's opinion of, its unfinished condition, the lines on the "spell, " its high place as a work of creative art, its fragmentary beauties, the description of Christabel's chamber, its main idea, outline of the unfinished parts, Lamb and Hartley Coleridge on, its perfection from the metrical point of view, publication of the second part, its popularity, Coleridge's great desire to complete it, _Circassian Love Chant_, its charm of melody, Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. His biographers, birth and family history, his boyhood and school days, early childhood, death of his father, goes to Christ's Hospital, goes to Jesus College, Cambridge, wins the Browne Gold Medal, leaves Cambridge suddenly and enlists in the army, his discharge, returns to Cambridge, his meeting with Southey and Sara Fricker (his future wife), writes the _Fall of Robespierre_ with Southey, leaves Cambridge, delivers the Bristol lectures, marries Sara Fricker at Bristol, writes the _Aeolian Harp_, plunges into politics and journalism, projects the _Watchman_ and goes on a canvassing tour, preaches Unitarian sermons by the way, brings out the _Watchman_, retires to a cottage in Somersetshire with Charles Lloyd, his meeting with Wordsworth, cooling of his revolutionary enthusiasm, his intercourse with Wordsworth, writes _Osorio_, his rambles with Wordsworth among the Quantock Hills, projects the _Lyrical Ballads_, writes the _Ancient Mariner_, _Christabel_, _Love_, _Kubla Khan_, undertakes the duties of a Unitarian preacher at Shrewsbury, accepts an annuity from the two Wedgwoods, goes to Germany with the Wordsworths, returns to England after a year's absence, translates Schiller's _Wallenstein_, devotes himself again to journalism, goes to the Lake country, takes opium as an anodyne, writes the _Ode to Dejection_, goes on a tour with Thomas Wedgwood, visits the Wordsworths at Grasmere, his illness there, goes to Malta, ill effects of his stay there, becomes Secretary to the Governor of the island, goes to Italy, returns to England after two and a half years' absence, his wretched condition of mind and body, estrangement from his wife, domestic unhappiness, meeting with De Quincey, pecuniary embarrassments, his lectures at the Royal Institution, lives with Wordsworth at Allan Bank, founds and edits the _Friend_, delivers lectures on Shakespeare, returns to journalism, his necessities, loses his annuity, neglect of his family, successful production of his play _Remorse_, lectures again at Bristol, retires to Calne with Mr. Morgan, more financial troubles, lives with Dr. Gillman at Highgate, undergoes medical treatment for the opium habit, returning health and vigour, renewed literary activity, writes the _Biographia Literaria_, lectures again in London, more money troubles, publishes _Aids to Reflection_, accompanies Wordsworth on a tour up the Rhine, his declining years, contemplation of his approaching end, his death, Poet and Thinker. His early bent towards poetry and metaphysics, his prose style, his early poems, their merits and defects, his sonnets, Coleridge at his best, untimely decline of his poetic impulse, Wordsworth's great influence on him, Coleridge's mastery of the true ballad manner, estimate of his poetic work, comparison with Byron and Wordsworth, his wonderful power of melody, his great projects, his critical powers, his criticism of Shakespeare, his philosophy, his contemplated "Great Work, " his materials for various poems, his metaphysics and theology, his discourses, exaggerated notions of his position and influence, his "unwritten books, " Precocious boyhood, descriptions of him at various times, his voice, his conduct as a husband, religious nature, revolutionary enthusiasm, consciousness of his great powers, generous admiration for the gifts of others, his womanly softness, his pride in his personal appearance, his contempt for money, his ill-health, his opium-eating, his restlessness, best portrait of him, his unbusinesslike nature, sorrows of his life, his laudanum excesses, his talk, his weaknesses, Coleridge, Mrs. , Coleridge, Rev. Derwent, Coleridge, Rev. George, Coleridge, Hartley, Coleridge, Rev. John, Coleridge, Luke, Coleridge, Nelson, Coleridge, Sarah, _Coleridge and Opium Eating_ (De Quincey's), _Condones ad Populum _(Bristol Lectures), their warmth of language, evidence of deep thought and reasoning in, their crudeness, Consulate, Coleridge on the French, Cottle, Joseph, _Courier, The, _ _Dark Ladie, _ _Dejection, Ode to, _ Coleridge's swan song, its promise, Coleridge's spiritual and moral losses bewailed in, stanzas from, biographical value of, De Quincey, Descartes, _Descriptive Sketches _(Wordsworth's), _Devil's Thoughts, _ _Early Years and Late Reflections_ (Dr. Carrlyon's), _Effusions, _ Erasmus, _Essays on his own Times, _ _Eve of St Agnes_ (Keats's), _Excursion_ (Wordsworth's), _Fall of Robespierre_, _Fears in Solitude_, _Fire, Famine and Slaughter_, Fox, Letters to, France, Coleridge on, ode to, Fricker, Edith, Mary, Sara, _Friend, The_, Coleridge's object in starting it, its short-lived career, causes of its failure, compared with the _Spectator_, _Frost at Midnight_ (lines), Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, Ode to, Germany, Coleridge and Wordsworth in, Gibbon, Gillman, Mr. , Green, Mr. J. H. , Grenville, Lord, Greta Hall, description of, _Group of Englishmen_ (Miss Meteyard's), Harz Mountains, Coleridge's tour through the, Hazlitt, Hume, _Joan of Arc_ (Southey's), Coleridge's contribution to, Johnson, Samuel, _Juvenile Poems_, Kean, Keats, Coleridge's meeting with and description of, Keswick, _Kosciusko_ (Sonnet), _Kubla Khan_, 39; a wild dream-poem, its curious origin, when written, _Lake Poets_ (De Quincey's), Lamb, Charles, Lamb, Mary, _Lay Sermons_, "Lear, ": Coleridge on, Lectures, Coleridge's, at Bristol, at the Royal Institution, on Shakespeare and Milton, at Flower de Luce Court, extempore lecture, Le Grice, Charles, _Liberal, The_, _Lines on ascending the Bracken_, _Lines to William Wordsworth_, _Literary Remains_, Lloyd, Charles, Locke, _Love_, fascination of melody in, Lovell, Robert, _Lover's Resolution_, Luther, _Lyrical Ballads_, origin of, Coleridge's contributions to, appearance of, anecdote concerning, Malta, Coleridge's stay at, Maurice, Metaphysics and theology; Coleridge's, Meteyard, Miss, Milton, lectures on Shakespeare and, _Monody on the Death of Chatterton_, Montagu, Mr. And Mrs. , Morgan, Mr. John, _Morning Post, The_, Coleridge's connection with, Nether Stowey, Coleridge at, _New Monthly Magazine_, _Nightingale_, _Omniana_ (Southey's), Coleridge's contribution to, Opium, Coleridge's resort to, origin of the habit, De Quincey on, _Pains of Sleep_, "Pantisocraey, " Parry, Coleridge's fellow-student in Germany, _Peau de Chagrin_ (Balzac's), Philosophy, Coleridge's, (see _Spiritual Philosophy_) _Pilgrimage_ (Purchas's), Pitt, sonnet to, Pius VII. , Pope, _Poems on Various Subjects_, _Poetical and Dramatic Works_, Poetry and the Fine Arts, Coleridge's lectures on, "Polonius, " Coleridge's estimate of the character of, Poole, Mr. Thomas, _Prometheus_, Coleridge's paper on, Quantock Hills, Coleridge and Wordsworth among the, _Recantation_, _Recollections_ (Cottle's), _Recollections of a Literary Life_ (Miss Mitford's) _Reflections on having left a Place of Retirement_, _Religious Musings_, _Remorse_, Revolution, the French, _Robbers_, Rome, Coleridge in, Rousseau, Royal Institution, Coleridge's lectures at the, Schiller, Schlegel, Scott, Sir Walter, _Sermons, Lay_, Shakespeare, lectures on, criticisms on, Shakespearianism, German, Shelley, Sheridan, Shrewsbury, Coleridge's preaching in, _Sibylline Leaves_, Slave Trade, Coleridge's Greek Ode on the, _Songs of the Pixies_, _Sonnets on Eminent Characters_, Sotheby, Mr. , Southey, Southey, Cuthbert, Southey, Edith, _Spectator_, _Spiritual Philosophy_ (Green's), an exposition of Coleridge's Philosophy, Coleridge's great fundamental principle, the reason and the understanding, will, not thought, the ultimate fact of self-consciousness, a philosophy of Realism, philosophy valued by Coleridge mainly as an organon of religion, growth of the soul, the idea of God, idea of the Trinity, "a guidebook written in hieroglyphics, " _Statesman's Manual_, _Sterling, Life of_ (Carlyle's), Sterne, Stuart, Mr. Daniel, Swinburne's praise of Coleridge's lyrics, _Table Talk_, Theology and metaphysics, Coleridge's system of, Unitarian, Coleridge as a, _Visionary Hope_, Voltaire, _Voyages_ (Shelvocke's), _Wallenstein_, Coleridge's translation of, Warburton, _Watchman_, Wedgwood, Josiah, Wedgwood, Thomas, Wordsworth, Wordsworth, Dorothy, _Year, Ode to the Departing_, _Zapolya_, THE END.