36337	----	* * * * * Transcriber's Note: The original publication document has been replicated faithfully except as listed near the end in another Transcriber's Note. Words in italics are indicated _like this_. * * * * * [Illustration] [Illustration: THE CREW OF THE SKELETON SHIP. "Are those _her_ ribs through which the Sun Did peer, as through a grate? And is that Woman all her crew? Is that a Death? and are there two? Is Death that woman's mate? "_Her_ lips were red, _her_ looks were free, Her locks were yellow as gold: Her skin was as white as leprosy.... The naked hulk alongside came, And the twain were casting dice." (_The Ancient Mariner_).] A DAY WITH SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE BY MAY BYRON [Illustration] LONDON HODDER & STOUGHTON _In the same Series._ _Tennyson._ _Wordsworth._ _Browning._ _Burns._ _Byron._ _Keats._ _E. B. Browning._ _Whittier._ _Rossetti._ _Shelley._ _Longfellow._ _Scott._ _Whitman._ _Morris._ A DAY WITH COLERIDGE. In a beautiful part of beautiful Somerset, where the "soft orchard and cottage scenery" is dimpled between blue hillslopes, where meadows and woods and translucent streams compete with each other in charm,--in the lovely region of the Quantock hills, lies the quiet little market-village of Nether Stowey. About sunrise on a May morning of 1790, a young man awoke in a little wayside cottage there: and, resolutely thrusting back his natural inclination to indolence, rose and dressed, and set himself to the performance of such humble duties as devolve upon a very poor householder with a wife and child. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was in his twenty-sixth year: pale, stoutish, black-haired: not an immediately attractive man. His face, according to himself, bore evidence of "great sloth and great, indeed almost idiotic, good nature: ... a mere carcase of a face; fat, flabby, and expressive chiefly of inexpressions," with a wide, thick-lipped, always-open mouth, and small feeble nose. Yet it was capable of being roused, on occasion, to something akin to nobility and beauty, and redeemed by the animation of his full, grey eyes. It was a face, in short, to match his general appearance, which he dismissed as that of "indolence capable of energies," and Carlyle characterised as "weakness under possibility of strength." For this was a man who was consistent in his faults as in his virtues: "always conscious of power, but also conscious of want of will to use his power." And it was therefore with re-doubled vigour, this particular morning, that he put on a spurt, and threw unusual force into his chopping of firewood,--his somewhat clumsy attempts to clean up the cottage, with its poor accommodation and few utensils,--and his valiant if ineffectual endeavours to have the fire lighted and the modest meal _en route_, whilst his wife, up the ladder stairs, attended to herself and the baby. Between-whiles he cast admiring glances of the most ardent delight at his garden of an acre and a half, and its glowing mass of apple-bloom,--and at all the luscious greeneries of the May world without. These glimpses into "opening Paradise" went far to compensate him for his determination to keep no servant, but to be maid-of-all-work, and nurse if need be, himself. They ministered to that spirit of contemplation which was the ruling spirit of his life: they were the very texture of dreams.... Soon Sara Coleridge descended and took her share in the domestic preparations. She found fault, after a quick vivacious fashion, with her husband's futile efforts and perplexities. She was the typical incompatible wife for a poet: not only, socially speaking, his inferior, but naturally incapable of sharing his dreams or sympathising with his studies. Yet she was an honest and good-hearted woman; and perhaps, now and then, she felt a certain lack of human warmth in the warmest of human relationships. For there was a tepid quality about Coleridge's affections and his expression of them: fire and fervour were utterly unknown to his pensive, tender, gentle methods. He had no intensity or passion, either in love or friendship: his feelings were steadfast and of an unblemished purity, yet the very fact that they knew neither ebb nor flow, but were always maintained at a calm level, might jar upon the inscrutable mind of a woman. One might almost imagine, as Sara bustled to and fro and scolded her husband with the volubility of a squirrel, that she was anxious to urge him, if but for one moment, out of his invariable _laisser faire_ of amiability.... But no: he remained as placid, as good tempered, as cheerful as ever. Presently another member of the household appeared, Coleridge's pupil and paying-guest,--worth a precious £70 a year to the lean exchequer,--one Charles Lloyd. He was a young bank-clerk who had poetry on the brain, and found himself ill-attuned to the drudgery of keeping his father's ledgers. He was also subject to epileptic fits, which did not conduce either to poetizing or banking with success. What he expected to learn from Coleridge, it is hard to say: certainly his curriculum included a good many hardships, makeshifts and _contretemps_ to which he had never looked forward. His instructor, however, had not deceived him as to the hybrid nature of his present occupation. Coleridge had deliberately set himself down at Nether Stowey to be near his friend Tom Poole, and to support himself by "a mixture of literature and husbandry." He proposed to make some £60 per annum by reviewing and magazine work: he had an offer from Cottle, the Bristol publisher, for as much verse as he chose to write, at terms working out somewhere near fourpence a line,--and for the rest, "I would rather," he declared, "be an expert self-maintaining gardener than a Milton, for I could not unite both. I mean to raise the vegetables for myself and wife, and feed a couple of snouted and grunting cousins from the refuse. My evenings I shall devote to literature."--"And what," enquired Charles Lamb after hearing of this desperate undertaking, "what does your worship know about farming?" But Coleridge was not to be discouraged. He allowed his natural unfitness for the task--"I am, and ever have been, a great reader, and have read almost everything.... I am _deep_ in all out-of-the-way books, whether of the monkish times or of the Puritanical era. I have read and digested most of the historic writers, but I do not _like_ history. Metaphysics and poetry and 'facts of the mind' (_i.e._, accounts of all the strange phantasms that ever possessed your philosophy-dreamers, from Thoth, the Egyptian, to Taylor, the English pagan) are my darling studies. In short, I seldom read except to amuse myself, and I am almost always reading. Of useful knowledge,--I am a so-so chemist, and I love chemistry--all else is blank--but I will be (please God) a horticulturist and farmer." What is to be done against such impregnable obstinacy? Coleridge's friends let him "gang his ain gait": and when _mauvais quarts d'heure_ threatened to drive him to despair, they came to the rescue with timely cheques: meanwhile, Tom Poole strove hard to educate him in potato culture, and Charles Lloyd paid down his twenty-five shillings a week. But to-day Charles Lloyd was looking ill-at-ease and sulky. He threw out hints about the general discomfort of things,--vague allusions to other people being made much of and himself contemned. He was in a disagreeable mood, and evidently dying to pick a quarrel. Half through breakfast, he took umbrage at some inoffensive jest, and flung himself out of the room. "What can ail the lad?" asked Coleridge, in amazement. "I suppose he has another fit coming on," observed the practical Sara. "I don't like sour looks and bitter words in our peaceful home," said the poet, rumpling his heavy black locks with a distracted air. "God forbid that he should take it into his head to go away," said Sara: and she got up with a very grave face and proceeded to clear the breakfast table. Coleridge betook himself to the garden and called over the back hedge to the neighbour for whose companionship he had taken this inefficient little cottage. Thomas Poole, his friend and benefactor, was a well-to-do tanner, well-educated and a devout student of literature: he discerned the potentialities of great things in Coleridge, and felt honoured by his acquaintanceship. For the poet had something of that peculiar fascination for more prosaic men, that magnetic charm of personality, which atones for so many minor defects,--which obviates weakness and ill-balance of mind,--which even endears him who is "impossible" from a worldly standpoint, to those of saner and robuster calibre. Coleridge could never be without a friend, without a listener: and a listener was a desideratum to him. This "noticeable man with large grey eyes" undoubtedly attracted to himself all that was best in other people: his culture allured them, his eloquence held them spell-bound, and his voice--that wonderful voice which was to Hazlitt "as a stream of rich distilled perfumes"--sank into every fibre of their being. So you cannot be surprised that the faithful, kindly Thomas Poole, already busy in his tan-yard, hearing Coleridge calling at the hedge, instantly forsook his proper tasks and hurried to salute his comrade. When he heard of Charles Lloyd's tendency towards mutiny, "Oh," says Poole with a great laugh, "don't let that discompose you. The young man is consumed by a very common malady,--jealousy. And indeed I think he has some cause." "Jealousy!" repeated Coleridge, rolling his fine eyes wildly. It was a word which had little or no meaning for him. "Jealousy of whom? about whom?--I do not understand you in the least." "Why, your fine friends the Wordsworths, of course," Poole told him. "Here have you been gadding about with them the whole of this last twelve-month, trapesing the hills night and day and leaving your pupil, forsooth, to sit at home with Madam and Master Baby, a-twiddling his thumbs and scribbling schoolboy verse. You have taken precious little notice of him,--and as for your friends, they think him but a poor thing not worth mention. I say he is a lad of spirit to kick up his heels at last." "True, true,--I may have neglected him to some extent," murmured Coleridge with a pained air, "but indeed, my good Poole, if you knew what the Wordsworths have been to me! Manna in the desert--water in the wilderness--happiness like the alighting of a paradise-bird--" "Quite so, my dear fellow," interrupted the unemotional Poole, "but you are not now in the pulpit. Bring yourself down to earth for a moment, for I have but little time to spare this morning,--and let us see what are the most crying needs of to-day in your garden." There is enough to do in a May garden to occupy the most diligent: and as Coleridge raked and hoed and thinned out and weeded his vegetable beds, with blistered hands and a back that longed for a hinge in it, he was inclined to wish that Lloyd had come as an agricultural rather than a poetical pupil. From time to time he rested on his tool and assimilated with rapt eye the innumerable surrounding touches of simple beauty. He was a man who, like Wordsworth, interested himself in every little trifle. The delicate details of sight and sound were very dear to him; they had enabled him to "become one with Nature" in an almost literal sense, as he observed, with a calm but intense enjoyment, such side-issues as: The one red leaf, the last of its clan, That dances as often as dance it can, Hanging so light and hanging so high, On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky; or-- The unripe flax, When through its half-transparent stalks, at eve, The level sunshine glitters with green light; or-- The hornéd Moon, with one bright star Within the nether tip. And, indeed, Coleridge was aware himself of the extraordinary power which was exercised upon him by external and visible things,--especially by the magic of scenery. He wrote: [Illustration: THE CHASM IN XANADU. "But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover! A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon-lover!" (_Kubla Khan_).] I never find myself alone within the embracement of rocks and hills ... but my spirit careers, drives and eddies like a leaf in autumn; a wild activity of thoughts, imaginations, feelings and impulses of motion rises up within me.... The further I ascend from animated nature ... the greater in me becomes the intensity of the feeling of life. Life seems to me then a universal spirit, that neither has nor can have an opposite. God is everywhere, and where is there room for death? And he determinedly developed in his theory of poetry, his sense of the depths that lie below nature's more superficial aspects. He had accorded to his sleeping babe, a few short months before, that tenderest of all benedictions, that gift of untarnishable joy: Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee, Whether the summer clothe the general earth With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch Smokes in the sun-thaw; 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: and he had conversed at great length and frequency with Wordsworth, on what he termed "the two cardinal points of poetry--the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination. The sudden charm which accidents of light and shade, which moonlight or sunset diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining both. These are the poetry of nature." He had no greater pleasure possible than to steep himself in "the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us: an inexhaustible treasure," he proclaimed, "but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solitude, we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not and hearts that neither feel nor understand." And when his imagination craved some wilder and more romantic outlook than the peaceful village where, beside one friend, Beneath the impervious covert of one oak, I've raised a lowly shed, and know the names Of Husband and of Father,-- that imagination could at will supply its wants. His eyes could "make pictures when they are shut," and could carry him momentarily, as on some magic carpet, to a dreamland beyond the limitations of mortal experience. The same exquisite and meticulous perception which enabled Coleridge to realize and remember the double sound of rain, the "quiet sounds from hidden rills," among the heather, the slanting shower of blossoms on the "faint gale of departing May,"--revealed to him how In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. So twice five miles of fertile ground With walls and towers were girdled round: And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree; And here were forests ancient as the hills, Enfolding sunny spots of greenery. But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover! A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon-lover! * * * * * Five miles meandering with a mazy motion Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, Then reached the caverns measureless to man, And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean: And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far Ancestral voices prophesying war! Such, in fact, was the dual capacity of Coleridge's mind,--such its ability to commingle the actual and the imaginary, that whilst he could at one moment paint the gentle English landscape in which he dwelt,-- Low was our pretty Cot; our tallest Rose Peeped at the chamber-window. We could hear At silent noon, and eve, and early morn, The Sea's faint murmur. In the open air Our Myrtles blossom'd; and across the Porch Thick Jasmins twin'd: the little landscape round, Was green and woody, and refresh'd the eye. It was a spot which you might aptly call The Valley of Seclusion! he was enabled to describe, with the verisimilitude of perfect memory, the dim sea-reaches where,-- ... Now there came both mist and snow, And it grew wondrous cold: And ice, mast-high, came floating by, As green as emerald. And through the drifts the snowy clifts Did send a dismal sheen: Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken-- The ice was all between. The ice was here, the ice was there, The ice was all around: It cracked and growled, and roared and howled, Like noises in a swound! At length did cross an Albatross,-- Through the fog it came; As if it had been a Christian soul, We hailed it in God's name. It ate the food it ne'er had eat, And round and round it flew. The ice did split with a thunder-fit; The helmsman steered us through! But now, while the sun poured down hotter and still hotter rays upon the unaccustomed back of Coleridge, he heard the hearty voice of Tom Poole, summoning him to the bark-built arbour under the big elm-trees. A jug of egg-flip and a delightful chat were awaiting him: the bees were humming round in the "lime-tree bower" of the garden: and the deep, vibrating voice of the poet, roused to unwonted exhilaration, was presently moved to declaim one of his own magnificent imitations from Schiller, _The Visit of the Gods_. His recitation rose like a chant in its music and sonority. Never, believe me, Appear the Immortals, Never alone: Scarce had I welcomed the Sorrow-beguiler, Iacchus! but in came Boy Cupid the Smiler; Lo! Phoebus the Glorious descends from his Throne! They advance, they float in, the Olympians all! With Divinities fills my Terrestrial Hall! How shall I yield you Due entertainment, Celestial Quire? Me rather, bright guests! with your wings of upbuoyance Bear aloft to your homes, to your banquets of joyance, That the roofs of Olympus may echo my lyre! Ha! we mount! on their pinions they waft up my soul! O give me the Nectar! O fill me the Bowl! [Illustration: THE ALBATROSS BREAKS THE ICE-SPELL. "At length did cross an Albatross,-- Through the fog it came; As if it had been a Christian soul, We hailed it in God's name." (_The Ancient Mariner_).] "Indeed, one might easily forget all mundane matters upon a day like this," mused the poet as he became rested and refreshed. "It is not a day for doing, Poole,--for digging and forking and stooping,--it was meant for dreaming, for endless reveries of eternal beauty." "That is not likely ever to be my lot," said the matter-of-fact Poole, "Too much to see after." "It might be mine, perhaps, did I choose...." observed Coleridge, with the abstracted air of one talking in his sleep, "Have I ever told you, Poole, of the offer I have had from the Wedgwood brothers?" "The china-man's sons?" Poole queried. "The same," said Coleridge. "They have offered me an annuity for life, of £140 a year, to prevent my being obliged to abandon poetry and philosophy, as I must do if I take up preaching professionally." "It is a vastly fine offer!" exclaimed the astonished Poole. "On the other hand," continued his friend, "the Unitarian Chapel people at Shrewsbury will pay me £120 a year to become their preacher: and that means that I give up literary work. I cannot combine both. Hitherto, as you know, I have refused to accept any remuneration for my sermons: to be a hireling is against my principles: when I go to Taunton or Bridgewater, I do it freely. But here are these two proposals, and I know not which to accept. I freely confess to you, Poole, what you probably know already,--that I am very seriously worried over money matters, and that I perceive I can never support my family by manual labour. My play _Osorio_, which Sheridan requested me to write for Drury Lane, has been rejected: I have no talent, I fear, for the drama. I am too tired after work in an evening to do any reviewing or writing. And now I am threatened by the prospect of Lloyd leaving us--that means the loss of our main income. A sort of calm hopelessness diffuses itself over my heart. Indeed, every mode of life which promised me bread and cheese has been torn away from me: but God remains." This long speech was not without effect upon the kind-hearted Poole. Pocketing certain twinges of what in Charles Lloyd he had defined as jealousy, he asked, "And what does your friend Mr. Wordsworth say? You are so constantly in his company, that I should suppose he would be a very fit judge of the best course for you to take." "Oh, Wordsworth,--well, need you ask? Of course he urges me to accept the Wedgwoods' generosity, and devote myself to poetical work alone. But my mind misgives me, lest in doing that I should be turning my back upon the service of God. Am I not more efficacious for good as a preacher than as a versifier?" "We-ell, I don't know," muttered Poole, "We can all read your poems, you see, but we can't all follow you about the west-country to listen to you,--we can't track you to chapels at Taunton, or Bridgewater, or Shrewsbury, however eloquent you may be. Not but what," he added with a sly twinkle, "you do a pretty fairish deal of preaching in private." "That's what Lamb said," remarked Coleridge, "I asked him if he had ever heard me preach, and he said, 'M-my d-dear f-fellow, I n-n-never heard you do anything else!' A trifle flippant at times, is our good Lamb.... But who's this?"--and he sprang from his seat with unwonted energy. "Oh, it's your friends from Alfoxden," said Poole: and, with the resigned expression of one relegated to a back seat, he picked up the empty flip-jug and glasses, and returned to his own domain. Two people were coming down Coleridge's garden,--a "gaunt and Don-Quixote-like" man in striped pantaloons and a brown fustian jacket, and a slender, pleasing, dark-haired woman in her early twenties. They were William and Dorothy Wordsworth: names dearer than any to the contemplative heart of Coleridge. For nearly a year they had been tenants of Alfoxden Manor-house, about a mile away among the hills: for nearly a year they had been his constant companions, his solace, his inspiration. To their example and society he owed, as he allowed, the awakening and consummation of his genius: for although the "magic and melody" of his verse were all his own,--that magic unsurpassed and unsurpassable, "altogether beyond price," and that melody, Such a soft floating witchery of sound As twilight Elfins make, when they at eve Voyage on gentle gales from Fairy Land, Where melodies round heavy-dropping flowers, Footless and wild, like birds of Paradise, Nor pause, nor push, hovering on untam'd wing! (_The Eolian Harp_) yet it was Wordsworth who had helped him to "find himself," and it was Dorothy whose influence on both men called out their best and deepest. "Three people but one soul," Coleridge had called this ideally-united trio of himself and his friends; and as "three people with one soul," they "walked on seaward Quantock's heathy hills," and had every thought in common. "We are off for a long walk this lovely noon," explained Dorothy, "and taking our lunch with us: will you come, Mr. Coleridge?" A very hasty wash and brush, and a hurried goodbye to Sara, and the poet had forsaken a distasteful employment for a singularly congenial one. Over the hills and far away, he could postpone for the nonce every workaday question which troubled him, and, deep in the abstrusest consideration of poetry, or speculation of philosophy, could steep himself in the calm which was his ultimate desire. He had a host of projects to discuss. He had planned, in collaboration with Wordsworth, a "great book of Man and Nature and Society, to be symbolized by a brook in its course from upland source to sea:" much on the lines of his own strophe from the German: Unperishing youth! Thou leapest from forth The cell of thy hidden nativity; Never mortal saw The cradle of the strong one; Never mortal heard The gathering of his voices; The deep-murmur'd charm of the son of the rock, That is lisped evermore at his slumberless fountain. There's a cloud at the portal, a spray-woven veil At the shrine of his ceaseless renewing; It embosoms the roses of dawn, It entangles the shafts of the noon, And into the bed of its stillness The moonshine sinks down as in slumber, That the son of the rock, that the nursling of heaven May be born in a holy twilight! He had begun the _Ancient Mariner_ upon a previous walking-tour, also as a joint composition with the other poet, but had taken it into his own hands and finally completed it this spring. He had an immense proposal for an epic, which should take ten years for collecting material, five for writing and five for revising--nobody could accuse Coleridge of undue haste! He had undertaken a translation of Wieland's _Oberon_, which was likely to be more troublesome than remunerative. But most of all he desired to ascertain his friends' criticism on his newest fragment, _Christabel_: the bulk of his achievements were but fragmentary at the best. [Illustration: GERALDINE IN THE FOREST. "There she sees a damsel bright, Drest in a silken robe of white, That shadowy in the moonlight shone: The neck that made that white robe wan, Her stately neck, and arms were bare. * * * * * And wildly glittered here and there The gems entangled in her hair." (_Christabel_).] Coleridge's mind was that extremely _rara avis in terra_, which combines the artistic with the philosophic temperament--two inherently-opposed qualities. His acute and sensitive perceptions of sound, sight, colour and romantic possibility did not in the least satisfy his heavy logical demands. Of art for art's sake he had the poorest opinion. He was of dual nature,--and where the philosopher, the metaphysician and the divine preponderated in him, they completely over-weighted the exquisite, ethereal imagination, which was so infinitely more precious, had he known it. And although in this golden year of his life, this _annus mirabilis_ of his sojourn at Nether Stowey,--he was still allured to the marvellous, the strange and the supernatural, he sought to disguise his surrender to these phantasies, by clothing his desires in the garb of a severe philosophy of poetry. He decided, in concert with Wordsworth, that it would be well for him to undertake a series of poems in which, as he put it, "the incident and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural: and the excellence arrived at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency." A cold and unproductive soil this, one would suppose, in which to grow the glowing flowers of _Christabel_, where night itself, peopled with occult alarms, cannot minimise the mingled horror and splendour of Geraldine's first appearance. Is the night chilly and dark? The night is chilly, but not dark. The thin gray cloud is spread on high, It covers but not hides the sky. The moon is behind, and at the full; And yet she looks both small and dull. The night is chill, the cloud is gray: 'Tis a month before the month of May, And the Spring comes slowly up this way. The lovely lady, Christabel, Whom her father loves so well, What makes her in the wood so late, A furlong from the castle gate? She had dreams all yesternight Of her own betrothed knight; And she in the midnight wood will pray For the weal of her lover that's far away. She stole along, she nothing spoke, The sighs she heaved were soft and low, And naught was green upon the oak, But moss and rarest mistletoe: She kneels beneath the huge oak tree, And in silence prayeth she. The lady sprang up suddenly, The lovely lady, Christabel! It moaned as near, as near can be, But what it is, she cannot tell.-- On the other side it seems to be, Of the huge, broad-breasted, old oak tree. * * * * * There she sees a damsel bright, Drest in a silken robe of white, That shadowy in the moonlight shone: The neck that made that white robe wan, Her stately neck, and arms were bare; Her blue-veined feet unsandal'd were, And wildly glittered here and there The gems entangled in her hair. I guess, 'twas frightful there to see A lady so richly clad as she-- Beautiful exceedingly! And a chilly basis, these solemnly-propounded theories, for the gorgeous fabric of _The Ancient Mariner_. Originally founded, as regards its main outlines, upon a dream which occurred to Cruikshank,--a dream of a skeleton ship with figures in it,--who could have anticipated such results as that unforgettable scene where "The Ancient Mariner beholdeth a sign in the element afar off"?-- The western wave was all a-flame; The day was well nigh done; Almost upon the western wave Rested the broad bright Sun; When that strange shape drove suddenly Betwixt us and the Sun. And straight the Sun was flecked with bars (Heaven's Mother send us grace!) As if through a dungeon-grate he peered With broad and burning face. Alas! (thought I, and my heart beat loud) How fast she nears and nears! Are those _her_ sails that glance in the Sun, Like restless gossameres! Are those _her_ ribs through which the Sun Did peer, as through a grate? And is that Woman all her crew? Is that a Death? and are there two? Is Death that woman's mate? _Her_ lips were red, _her_ looks were free, Her locks were yellow as gold: Her skin was as white as leprosy, The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she, Who thicks man's blood with cold. The naked hulk alongside came, And the twain were casting dice; 'The game is done! I've won! I've won!' Quoth she, and whistles thrice. The Sun's rim dips; the stars rush out: At one stride comes the dark; With far-heard whisper, o'er the sea, Off shot the spectre-bark. We listened, and looked sideways up! Fear at my heart, as at a cup, My life-blood seemed to sip! The stars were dim, and thick the night, The steersman's face by his lamp gleamed white; From the sails the dew did drip-- Till clomb above the eastern bar The hornéd Moon, with one bright star Within the nether tip. Or who could have supposed that Wordsworth's subsequent suggestion for the plot of the poem, "Suppose you represent the Mariner as having killed an Albatross on entering the South Sea, and that the tutelary spirits of these regions take upon themselves to avenge the crime," should develop into that magnificent defence of the animal right to live, which, in Coleridge's opinion, obtruded a moral sentiment too openly in a work of such pure imagination? The curse of remorse, throughout the whole story, hangs as heavy on the seaman's soul as does the dead weight of the Albatross around his neck: until that mystical moment when he blesses the beauty of the "happy living things" in the water, "God's creatures of the great calm," The moving Moon went up the sky, And no where did abide: Softly she was going up, And a star or two beside. Her beams bemocked the sultry main, Like April hoar-frost spread; But where the ship's huge shadow lay, The charmed water burnt alway A still and awful red. Beyond the shadow of the ship, I watched the water-snakes: They moved in tracks of shining white, And when they reared, the elfish light Fell off in hoary flakes. Within the shadow of the ship I watched their rich attire: Blue, glossy green, and velvet black, They coiled and swam; and every track Was a flash of golden fire. O happy living things! no tongue Their beauty might declare: A spring of love gushed from my heart, And I blessed them unaware: Sure my kind saint took pity on me, And I blessed them unaware. The self-same moment I could pray; And from my neck so free The Albatross fell off, and sank Like lead into the sea. [Illustration: THE MARINER RECEIVES COMFORT IN PRAYER. "The self-same moment I could pray: And from my neck so free The Albatross fell off, and sank Like lead into the sea." (_The Ancient Mariner_).] ... Side by side the three friends wandered over the May-sweet hillsides,--dipping into wooded combes, musical with the sound of streams,--climbing the heathery slopes, resting here and there upon some glorious crest to drink in all the joy and colour of the landscape, and to reflect, in Coleridge's own words, how-- Flowers are lovely; Love is flower-like; Friendship is a sheltering tree. Each of them young,--each of them passionate lovers of Nature,--each brimming with hopes, and equipped with commanding intellect,--they formed the three-fold chord, with its tonic, dominant and mediant, of which is born all music.... It was nearly eight o'clock when Coleridge parted from the Wordsworths at the gate of Alfoxden. They were happily tired after some nine hours' rambling, and a serene joy lit up their faces, as of those who have passed through some enchanting experience,--who have touched at some oasis of sheer delight. Coleridge tried to frame his thoughts into words, as he strode homeward with his loose shambling gait, continually shifting from one side of the path to the other after his notorious "corkscrew" habit. The notes of the nightingale, poignantly sweet, echoed to him out of the woods,--and he would gladly have lingered to listen; but, instead, he thought-- Farewell, O Warbler! till to-morrow eve, And you, my friends! farewell, a short farewell! We have been loitering long and pleasantly, And now for our dear homes.--That strain again! Full fain it would delay me! My dear babe, Who, capable of no articulate sound, Mars all things with his imitative lisp, How he would place his hand beside his ear, His little hand, the small forefinger up, And bid us listen! And I deem it wise To make him Nature's play-mate. He knows well The evening star; and once, when he awoke In most distressful mood (some inward pain Had made up that strange thing, an infant's dream) I hurried with him to our orchard-plot, And he beheld the Moon, and, hushed at once, Suspends his sobs, and laughs most silently, While his fair eyes, that swam with un-dropped tears, Did glitter in the yellow moonbeam! Well!-- It is a father's tale. But if that Heaven Should give me life, his childhood shall grow up Familiar with these songs, that with the night He may associate joy! Once more farewell, Sweet Nightingale! Once more, my friends! farewell. Sara met him in the road with a despondent air. "Lloyd has gone," said she. "Gone! what, actually _gone_! Do you mean to say he has left us?" exclaimed Coleridge, horrorstruck. "He packed up his things and took leave of me," she replied; "it seems he hired a conveyance from Bristol to fetch him home." "Good Heavens!" cried her husband: and all the tranquil joy died out of his face; nothing but weariness, flabbiness and dejection remained. "Did he give no reason?" "O, he said things about the Wordsworths," replied Sara. "He thinks you have neglected him shamefully. So do I." And she shut her mouth with a snap. Coleridge, though so prolific a conversationalist, and so prone to speech, knew when there was a time to be silent. He attempted no defence or excuse. He simply went indoors, and sitting distastefully to an unprepossessing supper, let Sara say her say upon the subject of Lloyd: it was an extensive and a justifiable recrimination. Then--still in the same abstracted and monosyllabic state,--he helped to wash up, attended--better late than never--to the pigs and fowls, and sat before the fire, with a note-book in his hands and baby-clothes pinned to warm upon his knees, while Sara put the child to bed. He was working out with patient care those apparently unpremeditated effects which go to make up the haunting melody of _Christabel_. For, skilful and accomplished metrist as he was, it was only by dint of "repeated experiments and intense mental effort" that he achieved those results in which his art appears most artless. However, he was in no fit state, over-tired and distressed as he felt, for laborious efforts of this kind: and presently Nature took vengeance upon him in the form of intolerable toothache. A little while he bore it: then, moving tip-toe lest he should be heard in the upper room where Sara was soothing the little one to sleep, he stole to a corner cupboard and took out a bottle of laudanum. In this false friend and insidious comforter he had already found relief and repose from mental, as from physical troubles,--more and more frequently he had recourse to it. He knew its fatal tendency to undermine the will and debilitate the constitution, yet he could not deny himself an artificial peace which he described as "a spot of enchantment, a green spot of fountains and trees in the very heart of a waste of sand." And immediately he began to view things _couleur de rose_. The sharp tongue and angry face of Sara became transmogrified into the gentle semblance of her anagram, the imaginary _Asra_ of his poems,-- To be beloved is all I need, And whom I love I love indeed. * * * * * O ever--ever be thou blest! For dearly, Asra! love I thee! This brooding warmth across my breast, This depth of tranquil bliss--ah, me! Fount, tree and shed are gone, I know not whither, But in one quiet room we three are still together. The shadows dance upon the wall, By the still dancing fire-flames made; And now they slumber moveless all! And now they melt to one deep shade! But not from me shall this mild darkness steal thee: I dream thee with mine eyes, and at my heart I feel thee! The visions born of opium floated in vague, rich phantasmagoria across his slumbrous brain, And so, his senses gradually wrapt In a half-sleep, he dreams of better worlds, --sitting in the failing firelight. With a great effort he roused himself to creep up the stair-ladder, and to lay his drugged limbs upon the hard straw bed. The child and Sara were already dreaming: he gazed at them with serene affection: Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side, Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm, Fill up the interspersed vacancies And momentary pauses of the thought! My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart With tender gladness, thus to look at thee! and lastly, with all the mental power yet left him, he committed himself to the God of whom he was so weak, so well-intentioned a worshipper: Ere on my bed my limbs I lay, It hath not been my use to pray With moving lips or bended knees; But silently, by slow degress, My spirit I to Love compose, In humble trust mine eye-lids close, With reverential resignation, No wish conceived, no thought expressed. Only a _sense_ of supplication,-- A sense o'er all my soul impressed That I am weak, yet not unblest, Since in me, round me, every where Eternal Strength and Wisdom are. But now the stealthy narcotic utterly beclouded him: he sank away as through unfathomable gulfs of somnolence. Samuel Taylor Coleridge had closed another day. _Printed by Percy Lund, Humphries & Co., Ltd., Bradford and London._ _4885._ * * * * * Transcriber's Note: Blank pages have been deleted. Illustrations may have been moved. Discovered publisher's punctuation errors have been corrected. In addition, the following changes were made: None. * * * * * 
41378	----	Gutenberg. (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive.) [Transcriber's Note: Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as possible, including obsolete and variant spellings and other inconsistencies. Text that has been changed to correct an obvious error is noted at the end of this ebook.] COLERIDGE BY S. L. BENSUSAN [Illustration] LONDON: T. C. & E. C. JACK 67 LONG ACRE, W. C., AND EDINBURGH NEW YORK: DODGE PUBLISHING CO. [Illustration: Samuel Coleridge] CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE INTRODUCTION 7 I. EARLY YEARS 13 II. IN SEARCH OF THE IDEAL 25 III. IN THE LAKE COUNTRY AND AT MALTA 33 IV. TROUBLED YEARS 41 V. COLERIDGE AS AN OBSERVER OF NATURE 61 VI. COLERIDGE AS POET AND CRITIC 75 INDEX 93 COLERIDGE INTRODUCTION Among the great writers whose activity is associated with the closing years of the eighteenth and the opening of the nineteenth centuries, are several who claim more respect than popularity. If they were poets, their works find a place in a thousand libraries, but the dust gathers upon covers long unopened, and only the stray enthusiast removes it. Southey, Cowper, and Coleridge, for example, are authors of well-nigh universal acceptance, but who, outside the ranks of professed students of poetry, could claim an intimate acquaintance with their work? In _An Anthology of Longer Poems_ published at Oxford two years ago and prepared by two Professors of English Literature, Southey, for all his great gifts, is not represented at all, and William Cowper is responsible for nothing more than the familiar lines to his mother's picture. Dryden and Alexander Pope, Goldsmith, Gray, Crabbe, and Thomson are little more than names to the most of the generation that has just entered upon its inheritance. Perhaps, if the truth be told, the present-day reading public cannot keep pace with its ever-growing task, and satisfies its conscience by paying to the worthy dead the sacrifice of a small expenditure. In the old time it was hard to gather a modest library, to-day the difficulty lies in selection. The best efforts of a thousand years clamour for a place on our shelves, the material for reading has been multiplied, the capacity for reading remains where it was, if indeed the wonderful growth of claims upon our attention, the quickening of the pace of life, has not reduced our leisure time at the expense of books. Little wonder, then, that in the struggle for a sustained reputation many sound writers fail to hold their own. It is only when we choose one of the poets just named for a course of steady reading and turn to his pages with some knowledge of the life and times which gave them birth, that the dead man becomes a living force, and we find how far his claim to recognition lies outside the scope of a mere convention. Even then the inequalities of thought and style will be painfully apparent. We shall read much that would not have been preserved had the poet written in an age when self-criticism was as strong a force as it is to-day, but there will be no waste of labour if the full extent of his gifts as well as his limitations can be grasped. It is not safe to accept the "selected works" of any man of mark; a selection can never be quite fair to an author. Of all the men whose work was completed between the middle of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there are few, if any, whose life is of more interest to the psychologist, the student of transcendentalism, and the lover of fine thought, than that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the subject of this brief study. He was compact of remarkable strength and fatal weakness, of rare attainments and incomplete achievement, of courage and cowardice, of energy and laziness, of reason and unreason, of airy wit and solid wisdom. Look upon one side of his life and accomplishment and you are lost in wonder and admiration, look upon the other and there is food for little but pity and regret. Modern teaching has revealed the narrowness of the boundary between genius and insanity, and, in the light of this knowledge, we see that Coleridge was neither wholly a genius nor wholly sane, though he approached either condition very nearly at different periods of his troubled life. We would hesitate to-day to condemn him with the severity and fluency shown by his contemporaries--by Thomas de Quincey and William Hazlitt, for example. Perhaps the first thought to which a study of his life and work gives birth is the nearest to the truth, the thought that he was singularly unfitted to cope with life as he found it, that he was essentially a man of thought rather than of action. He was never strong enough to bear the thousand ills that writing man is heir to. He lacked courage, method, order; one might add that he lacked diligence, but for the knowledge that no man can move in advance of his inspiration if he would be just to himself. Even though his pen was idle his brain was ever active; his failure lay in lack of will-power to do full justice to its activity. Wordsworth, his contemporary and friend, had far better fortune; life offered his notable virtues every assistance. An early legacy, a small patrimony that arrived late, but not too late, appointment to one or two posts hardly to be regarded as anything other than sinecures, a government pension in his closing years, a splendid constitution, a fortunate marriage, colossal strength of purpose: all these gifts smoothed the rugged road of the greater man; to Coleridge the fates were adverse. He had at best a great but ill-balanced mind, to which philosophy made the first appeal. A shrewd practical man with half his attainments could have turned them to better advantage. His health was never really robust, and he suffered from the fatal sickness of self-pity. He accepted the charity of friends and asked for more; though he seems to have had few personal extravagances, the income that kept his friends, William, Mary, and Dorothy Wordsworth, free from financial strain, would not have been enough for his support. None of his biographers has discovered what he did with his money on the rare occasions when it was plentiful; there is ample reason to believe that he would have been equally puzzled to make out a balance-sheet. But, while his private life was beset by all manner of difficulties, while his private letters reveal too frequently an utter absence of personal dignity, his public utterances and the "table-talk" recorded by his nephew stand on a very high plane. Every class of cultivated man and woman was content to be silent when Coleridge was speaking; there was seemingly but one matter that the keen clear brain could neither grapple with nor control, and this was the conduct of his own life. Where he himself was not concerned, his wisdom and insight were remarkable, his natural gifts, splendidly cultivated in youth, had been reinforced by prolonged study as a man. His table-talk was fuller than most men's laboured essays, his lectures, even if delivered extempore, could charm an audience of scholars, and his published work, whether in prose or verse, is an enduring monument, not likely to be hard worn by the attentions of the multitude. Had his lines been cast in more pleasant places, had he married a woman strong enough to direct and guide him, had he been spared his pains and the unfortunate remedy by which he sought to lull them, there seems to be no height to which he might not have risen, no goal to which he might not have attained. We may not judge him save in all charity and kindness, for we know that his faults brought their own punishment in full measure and, apart from this, the lines he wrote a few years before he died seem to arrest the fault finder. "Frail creatures are we all! To be the best, Is but the fewest faults to have.-- Look Thou then to thyself, and leave the rest To God, thy conscience, and the grave." Few of his contemporaries spoke or wrote harshly of Coleridge. Lamb and Wordsworth loved him, despite occasional and regrettable misunderstandings. He collaborated with Wordsworth in the _Lyrical Ballads_ and with Southey in _The Fall of Robespierre_, a three-act drama of which the last-named poet wrote the second act. There were few who were not happy in his brief fortunes or without sympathy in the long-drawn period of his trouble and pain, while all who came within the charmed circle of his personality delighted in his company and sought it eagerly. Judged by ordinary standards, his life-work would provide a monument for any man whose attainments fall short of absolute genius, and perhaps they have been most severe who realise how nothing more than order and self-control kept Coleridge from the very highest rank. They are jealous for his gifts, they feel that he hid his light under a bushel. For the most of us it will suffice that the poet's utterances are melodious, inspiring, and finely wrought, that he himself was a greatly suffering man who fought desperately and at last successfully against his own worst failings. Even as he arrests our imagination he claims our sympathy, which we give the more gladly because he would have welcomed it. Not only did he ask for merciful judgment while he was alive, but appealed for it when life should have passed. Few who have read even a tithe of what he wrote will grudge a little tribute to his memory, while those who study Coleridge become his debtors, and realise that he played no insignificant part in moulding some aspects of nineteenth-century thought and faith. CHAPTER I EARLY YEARS Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the youngest of the nine sons of the Rev. John Coleridge, Vicar of Ottery St. Mary in Devonshire and Chaplain-Priest as well as Master of King's School, a Free Grammar School founded by King Henry VIII, who suppressed and replaced a long-standing monastic institution in the town. The Rev. John Coleridge, who was twice married, was the father of three daughters by his first wife and ten children by the second. He was the son of a trader in woollen goods who suffered serious financial losses when John was a boy, and the lad owed his Cambridge education to the generosity of a friend of the family. He married young, and kept a school at Southampton until his first wife died and he had married again. Then he obtained the living and mastership at Ottery St. Mary. Of his nine sons the youngest was destined to be the most distinguished, but James, who was born twelve years before Samuel Taylor, became the father of one Judge of the High Court, the grandfather of Lord Chief Justice Coleridge, and great-grandfather of the present Judge. The Vicar was a man of letters, who published several long-forgotten books by subscription, and was noted, to quote his youngest son's description, for "learning, good-heartedness, absentness of mind, and excessive ignorance of the world." It would not be hard to find all these qualities reproduced in the poet himself; they are of the kind that need a country school-house or vicarage for their home if they are not to be the cause of grave trouble to their possessor. From the very early days Sam, as his family called the future poet and philosopher, was a strange, precocious and unhappy child. Perhaps our modern ideas are shocked at the thought that he was sent to school at the age of three years. Should the twentieth-century theories be correct, such a brain as his would have been far healthier if the stage of happy ignorance had been extended until he was at least twice as old. Spoiled by his parents, the share of attentions he received from them provoked, naturally enough, the jealousy and resentment of his brothers and sisters, while his strange ways made him the unhappy butt of his school-fellows. Small wonder if, when he described his early childhood in the latter days, he had but a sorry tale to tell. Compared with his friends Charles Lamb and William Wordsworth, Coleridge was an unhappy boy. Nervous, self-conscious, and irritable, he took no pleasure in outdoor games, and at the earliest possible age was busy with books. With their aid he lived in a world of his own, a world peopled with the heroes and heroines who dwell between book covers. By the time he was six years of age he had read the _Arabian Nights' Entertainments_, and though it was certainly an abridged version in a single volume, there is no doubt that it must have provided a powerful and unhealthy stimulant to an imagination already far too active. Happily his father found that these books were dangerous to his youngest born, and destroyed them. The boy entered the grammar school, where he speedily passed all the other lads of his age. For the next three years the life at Ottery St. Mary continued in the seemingly peaceful fashion that was in reality so harmful. The little lad was disliked by his school-fellows and flattered and petted by his elders. His father took him seriously enough to pave the way, by a series of discourses, for the service of the Church. His mother's friends delighted in exhibitions of his precocity. His temper, sometimes sullen and perverse, showed itself disastrously on one occasion, when he ran away from home to avoid some punishment, doubtless well earned, and slept all night by the banks of the river that gives its name to his home. He woke so exhausted that his rescuer was obliged to carry him home. To this escapade he attributed the fits of ague to which he was subject for many following years. It is worth remarking in this place that for all the boy's undoubted precocity, the beauty of the scenes in which the first decade of his life was set seem to have left little or no impression. Had Coleridge been a lover of the country for its own sake, he must have been at least as deeply impressed by the all-pervading charm of Ottery St. Mary as his friend Wordsworth was by Hawkshead. For Ottery has beauty and history in plenty with which to reward the visitor or resident; its romance travels far away into the first twilight of legendry. In later years, of which the historical record is safe, the Manor of Ottery was granted by King Edward the Confessor to the Cathedral Church of Rouen. The poet might have seen as a child the royal arms of England and France on the stone scutcheons above the church altar, with the armorial bearings of several distinguished Devon families to bear them company. In the reign of Edward III, the head of one of these families, John de Grandisson, Bishop of Exeter, bought the manor and advowson of Ottery and established there the college of Monks. This was dissolved by Henry VIII, who made the college over to a corporation of four governors, and established the "King's New Grammar School," a building whose irregular roof is still a feature of the landscape. Here the Rev. John Coleridge was master and his son pupil. At Hayes Farm, close by, Sir Walter Raleigh was born; the family pew is to be seen in the parish church of East Budleigh. When Coleridge was a young man, the house of Raleigh in Ottery St. Mary was still standing; it was burnt down in the year of Trafalgar. He does not mention it, he does not even tell us of the wonderful orchards in the valley of the Otter, perhaps the most outstanding feature of the country in which his earliest years were passed. They say that these orchards are the more remarkable because mistletoe will not grow round the trees, the Druids having laid all Devonshire under a ban! The Valley of the Otter is a district no country lover could forget. The river, swift, though narrow, runs sparkling over many-coloured soil--Coleridge recalls this single feature in his Sonnet on the Otter. It separates the chalk flint and red marls of Ottery East Hill from the heather-clad black earth of West Hill, and makes a clean division between the plant growths on one side of its banks and those on the other. The high peaks of Dartmoor can be seen from either hill. In the valleys, while summer lasts, the red Devon kine stand amid luxuriant grasses which rise to their dewlaps. We are told that the transceptal towers of St. Mary's Church at Ottery inspired Bishop Quivil when he planned Exeter Cathedral. St. Mary's dominates the little town and adds to the perennial air of peace and seclusion that breathes over it. Coleridge might have made Ottery St. Mary immortal, but he did little more than write his well-remembered sonnet and a short ode inspired by the "Pixies' Parlour," a cave in the red sandstone cliffs below the town. The curious may still find "S.T.C. 1789" carved on the soft stones. If the valley of the Otter was not able to impress the early years of the poet, it is hardly surprising that neither Somersetshire nor Westmorland should succeed where Devonshire failed. The failure adds to the clear proof that Coleridge was at heart a philosopher, a student of life, faith, reason, and the immortality of the soul, but withal a man who was seldom or never on intimate terms with his immediate surroundings. The Rev. John Coleridge passed away, beloved by his pupils and parishioners, when his son Samuel Taylor was but nine years old, and within a year the efforts of friends had resulted in obtaining for the lad a presentation to Christ's Hospital. His period in the junior school in Hertfordshire was brief, and apparently quite uneventful. Before he was ten years old "the poor friendless boy" of Elia's famous essay was "in the great city pent, mid cloisters dim," and his apprenticeship to learning in the famous foundation that has now been removed from Newgate Street to the beautiful Sussex country near Horsham lasted for nine years, in the first seven of which he seems to have seen nothing of his Devonshire home. One would hesitate to say, despite the hardships of boarding-school life a century or more ago, that the poet would have been better off anywhere else. He recognised in later years the advantages of his training. Firmly, even brutally disciplined, his master in the upper school was Boyer, of whose severity Lamb and others have written unsparingly. Coleridge was thoroughly well grounded; he mastered the elementary rules of poetic expression, his eccentricities were repressed, his departures from law, order, and rule firmly punished. For one whose mind was ill-governed, in whom the newest idea found an immediate and devoted adherent, strong rule was the first essential of development. He passed through many phases; cobbling, medicine, and metaphysics attracted him in turn, and Boyer gladly provided an effective antidote for the virus of each. Lamb bears generous witness to his companion's budding talent, and we know that he made and kept friends, that there was something about his personality that was eminently attractive and led people to pardon in him what they would have condemned in others. A foolish escapade on the New River resulted in nearly a year's illness, and left him very weak, indeed throughout life he was never robust, but the troubles that affected his body did nothing to stunt his intellectual growth. The poet in him awoke, perhaps called to life by Mary Evans, eldest sister of a school-fellow whom he had befriended and who gratefully introduced him to his family. Mary Evans undoubtedly inspired much of his earliest, and comparatively feeble, verse. The sonnets of Bowles, who then had a following and a reputation, were another force in the making of the Coleridge we love and admire. Reading the detailed story of his life, we may note that, in the brief and simple relations with Mary Evans, Coleridge acted as though he had no definite control over his own impulses. Some of the correspondence has been preserved, and it is hard to escape the impression that while the poet was quite serious in his protestations, he exaggerated with true poetic licence the depth and permanency of his regard. In January 1791, the Almoners of Christ's Hospital appointed Coleridge to an Exhibition at Jesus College, Cambridge, with the idea that the school's promising pupil would pass from the University to the Church. He left Newgate Street in the September following, and entered the University a month later, intervening weeks being spent, in all probability, in Devonshire. We find him now at the parting of the ways, the wholesome bonds of discipline relaxing, a measure of liberty before him of a kind to which he had been a stranger hitherto, and one is inclined to think that he was absolutely unfitted to stand alone or to be his own master, even within the limits imposed upon the Cambridge undergraduate. His brilliant intellect was not associated with sound common sense, the conventions and restriction of normal life were things he would not trouble about, his mind, daring and speculative, was never at rest, he stood desperately in need of some steadying influence of a kind that never came to him. The newest thought could carry him away, he cared not whither. Like many another brilliant man, Coleridge needed direction and discipline long after the time when the convention of the world seeks to enforce either. We cannot see whence the force was to come, but we must realise how greatly it was needed. Coleridge was too clever for the ranks to which he was accredited; his gifts were of the uneasy kind that can find no rest. Some men of similar temperament can settle down after a brief struggle; they bridle themselves, hide their light, bow to the world above them, and prosper. To Coleridge such a method of living would have seemed immoral, far more immoral than his own shifting, haphazard and unhappy career. He was always the slave of his own moral ideas, his weaknesses were a tribute to the sick and ailing body; to his judgment, his moral consciousness, he acted with most rigorous honesty, even to his own detriment. When Coleridge went to Jesus College, the month was October; he became a pensioner in November, and matriculated in the following month. From 1792 he would have been in receipt of £40 per annum from his old school, and between 1792-4 he held one of the Rustat scholarships belonging to Jesus College and given only to sons of clergymen. In the year last named he became a Foundation scholar. For the first twelve months, while the recollection of Christ's Hospital discipline was perhaps still keen within him, and his friend Middleton was at Pembroke College, he worked diligently and gained his first award, the Browne Gold Medal. He competed for the Craven Scholarship, which fell to Samuel Butler, afterwards Bishop of Lichfield. By the following year Middleton had left the University and Coleridge was beginning to lose his head and find his powers. He associated himself with the most progressive and radical spirits in his College, and the authorities looked askance at him. But he paid little heed to such a trifle as the dissatisfaction of tutors. The centre of a large and admiring circle that clamoured to hear his political opinions, his latest poem, or his favourite recitation, he seemed to realise that he could hold an audience and lead opinion. Debts began to accumulate; he was indeed destined for the greater part of his life to owe more than he could pay. His suit with Mary Evans was not prospering; he tried to set himself right financially by speculating in a lottery, and, when that failed him, left Cambridge, the first of the long series of sudden departures from accustomed haunts that was to be a prominent feature in his career. A fortnight later he had become Silas Tomkyn Comberbach of the King's Light Dragoons. The new and popular recruit, who repaid his companions for doing his share of the common drudgery by writing their love-letters for them, soon found that under the most favourable conditions soldiering was not to his taste. He could not sit a horse, he could not even groom one, and it was not very long before his identity was revealed to an officer through the medium of some lines in Latin written in chalk on a wall. His elder brother, Captain James Coleridge, procured his discharge in the following April, when the Master and Fellows of Jesus readmitted him, much to the surprise of his friends. That the authorities were ready and willing to give him every chance is sufficient proof that his capacities and his personality alike pleaded powerfully in his defence. A few months later he was on a visit to Oxford, where he met Robert Southey, his future brother-in-law, and they talked of Pantisocracy. In his _Christian Life_, Peter Bayne speaks of the days "when Coleridge and Southey were building, of cloud and moonbeam, their notable fabric of Pantisocracy, the government of all by all." The idea was just suited to the hare-brained poets. Twelve men, each armed with £125, were to leave England in the company of twelve women, for one of the back settlements of America, there to establish a Utopia of their own. A few hours' work a day from each would suffice, they thought, for the needs of all. Political and religious opinions were to be free, and the question of the validity of the marriage contract was left open. Needless perhaps to add that neither the industrious Southey nor his erratic friend had £125, but the former hoped to raise the amount from the sale of _Joan of Arc_ and other of his early work, while Coleridge proposed to publish by subscription a volume of _Imitations from the Modern Latin Poets_. Like so many of the volumes he intended to write, this one was never written, though he had all the scholarship necessary to bring a venture of the kind to a successful issue. Southey and Coleridge met a little later in Bristol and went into Somersetshire, where they were joined by Burnett and Thomas Poole. Of these two men the latter was to play an important part in the life-story of Coleridge. A little later the young poet had recovered sufficiently from his overmastering attachment to Mary Evans to become engaged to Sarah Fricker, Southey's sister-in-law. He collaborated with the future laureate in a rapidly written dramatic poem, _The Fall of Robespierre_, which he dedicated to Mr. Martin of Jesus College, without any reference to Southey's considerable part in it. The enthusiasm for Pantisocracy was short-lived; in a few months its originators had dropped the scheme, though it was to be revived later. Coleridge went back to Cambridge, and left suddenly in the December of 1794 without taking his degree. The reasons for this step have never been revealed; some think that he left on account of debt, others think the cause must have been some further breach of discipline. His career at Jesus had been brief and unsatisfactory, and he was soon dropped by the College authorities and the Committee of Christ's Hospital. Whatever their private views of his ability, they could no longer remain indifferent to his irregular life, his inability to settle down and work, the dangerous results of too much tolerance in an institution that must control its scholars or cease to exist. On the other hand, Coleridge could not respond to order and discipline. He was not like other men; of him it might be truly said in the words of the Patriarch, "unstable as water, thou shalt not excel." The period of wandering trouble and unrest had begun; it was to continue until, the greater part of his life and life's-work accomplished, he found a hospitable asylum at Highgate. It cannot be supposed that Cambridge was in any degree responsible for what happened within the walls of Jesus College or in the world beyond. The erratic disposition was with Coleridge as a little boy. Christ's Hospital subdued but did not eradicate it, Jesus College gave it an atmosphere of limited freedom in which to blossom and bud until the college boundaries were no longer wide enough to contain such an errant spirit. CHAPTER II IN SEARCH OF THE IDEAL When Coleridge left the University he had entered his twenty-third year; he had rather more than forty before him, but, as the two preceding years had been, so were the most of those that followed. Trouble, largely if not altogether of his own making, anxiety, comparative poverty, ill-health, these were the shadows that darkened his days. For him life was a problem with which he could not grapple; although he had a giant's strength he did not know how to use it. He was master of a rare and exquisite gift, but it did not avail him. Other men, with a tithe of his talent and the full capacity for living a well-ordered life, could earn a comfortable competence, acquire honour and command respect, while Coleridge, who was in so many respects their master, drifted across the wide waters of life, a ship without a rudder. We need not criticise, we can better pity a man who, greatly gifted, could not raise his head among his contemporaries. Had some stern disciplinarian stood behind him at Cambridge he might have achieved distinction; had he married a strong resolute woman she might have taught him regular industry and self-respect. But in all the important actions of his life the mood of the moment was the deciding factor, so that, despite the number of his friends, there was none to help. Coleridge was almost a genius, and quite a law to himself. Such happiness as came to him was found chiefly in intercourse with kindred spirits, in grappling with metaphysical problems, in refuting the current errors of philosophy, and above all in the kindness and generosity of friends. Woe to the man who accepts help from others! Once he has done this he stands for ever on a lower plane, his life is no longer his own, he can no longer say, "I am the Captain of my fate, I am the Master of my soul." It was the misfortune of Coleridge to receive assistance in those critical hours when a man must stand alone, though it be but in a garret with no more food and clothing than will serve for the necessities of life. There are few brilliant exceptions to the sweeping rule that forbids self-respecting men to receive doles. Horace and Virgil are notable among them, but the rule stands, even while we remember that both Martial and Juvenal declared that the protection of prince or patron offers the only chance to poetry. With Coleridge there was less excuse than the poet may claim, for he could always command a living wage in journalism. The trouble with him was not to get money for his work, but to give work in return for other people's money. From Cambridge the poet drifted to London, journalism, and the delightful company of Charles Lamb. He wrote sonnets for the _Morning Chronicle_, and took his glass and pipe with Elia in long-forgotten taverns until Southey hunted him up and carried him back to Bristol and Sarah Fricker, to Pantisocracy and lecturing and the company of Burnett, with whom both Coleridge and Southey lived in College Street. In 1796 Cottle, the Bristol publisher, paid Coleridge thirty guineas for poems, including the "Monody on the Death of Chatterton" and "Religious Musings." Southey lost faith in Pantisocracy and went to live with his mother. Coleridge lost faith in Southey, the friends quarrelled, and for some time were not on speaking or writing terms. Cottle, who had a sure eye for promising work, offered to buy all the verse Coleridge could write at the price of one and a half guineas per hundred lines, and on the strength of this, Coleridge married Sarah Fricker in October 1795, and settled in a little cottage at Clevedon near Bristol, in company with Burnett and another of Sarah's sisters. The men shared in the labour of the house, but it was too far from town to serve for purposes of work in days when the circulating library was still unknown, and, early in their married life, Mr. and Mrs. Coleridge moved to Redcliffe Hill. There Coleridge decided to start a paper called _The Watchman_, to be published on every eighth day, and he has left on record an account of his northern pilgrimage in search of subscribers. He found enough to justify publication; the paper lived to reach its tenth number, when it departed from life, leaving its editor-proprietor stranded, though his _Poems on Various Subjects_, with additions by Charles Lamb, Robert Southey, and Mr. Favell, had been published in March by Cottle, and had been favourably received. Thomas Poole, as good a friend as ever poet had, came to the rescue with forty pounds, and Coleridge spent a happy fortnight at Nether Stowey; with him, as soon as a trouble was over it could be forgotten. But something had to be done; negotiations for the post of co-editor of the _Morning Chronicle_ were opened, and fell through. Following this came another plan, to educate the children of a wealthy Derbyshire lady, who changed her mind at the eleventh hour, giving the poet £95, and his wife a welcome gift of baby linen instead. In the meantime the prodigal son had visited Ottery St. Mary and been reconciled to his family. Proposals to establish a school in Derby came to nothing, and there is matter for regret here, for the poet would have made an admirable schoolmaster. In September his responsibilities were increased by the arrival of David Hartley Coleridge, born while the poet was on a visit to the Lloyds. Charles Lloyd, an epilept, was anxious to live with him, and Coleridge wished to rent a house near Nether Stowey that he might be near his friend Poole. After much search a cottage was found. By this time, the poet had begun to suffer from severe neuralgia, and had started to dose himself with laudanum for its cure. With his usual optimism in hours of change, the future was clear to him. "My farm will be a garden of an acre and a half," he writes to "Citizen" Thelwall, "in which I intend to raise vegetables and corn for my wife, and feed a couple of grunting and snouted cousins from the refuse. My evenings I shall devote to literature, and by reviews in the _Monthly Magazine_ and other shilling scavengering, shall probably gain £40 a year--which economy and self-denial, gold beaters, shall hammer till it covers my annual expenses." Well might Lamb write--"What does your worship know about farming?" More than a hundred years have passed since Coleridge took the little cottage of which the garden met Poole's, but successive generations of literary men and poets have shared his strange belief that anybody can go on the land and make it yield its fruits in due season. That farming demands a strenuous apprenticeship and sound judgment, if it is not to fail altogether to yield any harvest save debt, that appreciation of country life does not carry knowledge with it, these are truths which the majority of men of letters decline to admit. A second edition of his poems, with additions by Charles Lloyd as well as Lamb, produced twenty guineas from Cottle, and the poet settled to learn the rudiments of agriculture from Thomas Poole, and to train Charles Lloyd in the way he should go. Then he went on a visit to the Wordsworths, who were first at Racedown and later at Alfoxden House. An offer from Sheridan to consider a play for Drury Lane led to the writing of _Osorio_. Charles Lamb came to Nether Stowey, and so too did William and Dorothy Wordsworth and "Citizen" John Thelwall, with whom Coleridge kept up such a lively correspondence. This visit brought about the Wordsworths' departure from Alfoxden House, for the "Citizen," rather an undesirable person at best, was a political suspect, and a nervous government sent a spy down to Nether Stowey to find what company he kept. But in spite of "those gold beaters, economy and self-denial," the poet's poor exchequer was by no means equal to the demands made upon it by his unsettled mode of living. He received a fresh subscription from friends, urged to contribute by Thomas Poole, and declared that this would be the last subsidy he would be free to accept. Doubtless he thought so; at no period of his life had Coleridge the slightest idea of the value of money, the expense of living, or the probable fate of his own best intentions. One traces in him a faint likeness to Wilkins Micawber. With the later months of 1797, he visited Bowles, whose sonnets had appealed so greatly to him, and learned that Sheridan had rejected _Osorio_. Relations with Charles Lloyd no longer remained as they had been, and it may be that his contribution to the family exchequer at Nether Stowey was not maintained. But for all the troubles and trials of the year it is a notable one in the annals of British poetry, for on November 13 Coleridge set out with William and Dorothy Wordsworth on a walking tour of which the expense was to be defrayed by a joint composition. Wordsworth for once was not equal to the task, and Coleridge began the poem by which he is best known, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." His own description of it as "inimitable" does not seem extravagant. Begun in the course of the memorable walk, it was finished in the following March, though there were further alterations as subsequent editions of collected poems appeared. The beginning of "Christabel" belongs apparently to 1797. The opening of 1798 brought some good fortune in its train. Coleridge had been about to accept a call to the Unitarian Chapel at Shrewsbury, and had already given a taste of his quality in the pulpit, when Josiah and Thomas Wedgwood, sons of the famous potter, sought to keep him from burying his gifts. They understood that the need of cash rather than the claims of faith were responsible for his new departure. A present for his immediate needs the poet returned, and then came a remarkable letter from Josiah Wedgwood offering in his own and his brother's name to pay Coleridge £150 a year, the amount of his promised stipend from the Chapel, if he would turn from the work of the preacher and devote himself to poetry and philosophy. No further conditions were attached to this munificent offer, which was to last for life and to be independent of everything but the wreck of the brothers' fortunes. Coleridge was staying with William Hazlitt, at the house of the latter's father near Shrewsbury, when the letter from Josiah Wedgwood was received, and the essayist has set down the story in one of his papers. The poet accepted the offer, a very fortunate one, considering the ever-changing nature of his faith, and Unitarianism found some other advocate. About the same time came an invitation from the _Morning Post_, which would have brought in another fifty pounds a year, so that, had Coleridge been able to take the fullest advantage of his opportunities, financial anxieties might have come to an end. Doubtless his good fortune inspired him to some fine efforts in 1798, but he was nervous and hyper-sensitive, his quarrel with Charles Lloyd had affected his spirits, he retired to a Devonshire farm-house to indulge in seclusion and opium and write the fragmentary "Kubla Khan." Through Charles Lloyd came a misunderstanding, happily brief, with Charles Lamb. Other happenings in 1798 were the birth of a second son, the short-lived Berkeley Coleridge; the publication, anonymously, of _Lyrical Ballads with a few other Poems_, joint effort of Wordsworth and Coleridge; and the trip with William and Mary Wordsworth and a friend from Stowey (John Chester by name) to Germany, a journey described in part by Coleridge in _Satyrane's Letters_. Coleridge left the Wordsworths after a brief stay, and went to Ratzburg with Chester, while the brother and sister went to Goslar. From Ratzburg, Coleridge went to Göttingen, where he matriculated and collected material for a _Life of Lessing_. He seems to have worked hard in Germany, where his taste for abstruse metaphysical speculation was greatly strengthened. Before he left Göttingen for London, he had learned the sad news of the death of his youngest child, and with the return to the metropolis, we come to another chapter in the poet's life. It will be seen that the generosity of the brothers Wedgwood had stimulated him to an increased effort, though at the moment when he might have pulled himself together and was honestly trying to do so, the opium habit began to hold him. The current of his life could not run smoothly; he at least was "born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward." The best that can be said is that the visit to Germany, and the brief period of honest study, did much to develop the poet's mind, opening to it unknown fields of German thought, and filling him with dreams of great works that were to unite German and British philosophers. Needless to say that, though mountains were expected to arise, little more than a molehill was forthcoming. CHAPTER III IN THE LAKE COUNTRY AND AT MALTA A reconciliation between Southey and Coleridge marked the return of the latter to Stowey, where Mr. and Mrs. Southey came on a visit of some weeks. Following this Coleridge took his wife to Ottery St. Mary and joined the family circle for a month. In October he stayed with the Wordsworths at Sockburn-on-Tees, in the house of Mrs. Wordsworth's parents, and was with John and William Wordsworth when they lighted on the old inn that was to become Dove Cottage, the home of William Wordsworth during the period of his most fruitful labours, and in these latter days a centre of pilgrimage. By the end of the year Coleridge was in London again, living at 21 Buckingham Street in the Strand, and writing for the _Morning Post_. The association was a lengthy one, but it was not always pleasant, and it gave rise to controversy during the poet's life and when he was dead. Coleridge said in after years that Stuart had offered him a partnership and that he had declined it on the ground that any income in excess of five pounds a week was an evil. Coleridge may have said this, and doubtless believed what he said; we have seen that he was quite unable to deal authoritatively with financial matters. It is fair to say that the poet had few if any of the qualities that are demanded for daily journalism, in which a man must be safe and reliable. If he be brilliant, so much the better for those who employ him, but brilliance is not to be compared with punctuality in a newspaper office. Coleridge declared that he "wasted the prime and manhood of his intellect" on the _Morning Post_ and the _Courier_; but latter-day judgment, while acknowledging the high quality of some of his journalistic work, cannot accept the statement, which is yet another example of poetic licence. Modern Fleet Street does not treat erratic contributors as patiently or liberally as Stuart treated Coleridge; the rapid march of events and the stress of competition alike forbid. When he gave up his regular work on the papers he stayed for some weeks with Lamb at Pentonville, then went to Stowey, and from there to Dove Cottage. The translation from Schiller, on which he had been engaged, was now finished. From Dove Cottage he moved to Greta Hall, near Keswick, a semi-detached house some twelve miles or so from the Wordsworths. His landlord, who lived next door, was the possessor of a good library. Neighbours called upon the new-comer and offered hospitality, for his work had already attracted some attention. "Christabel" was finished, but when the two volumes of _Lyrical Ballads_ were published in January 1801, Coleridge had not fulfilled his promise in regard to them. He was busy promising volumes, still unwritten, to publishers, he was anticipating his allowance from the Wedgwoods, and nursing an attack of rheumatic fever. With the road clear before him, with a certain market for his work, he was paying tribute to "the thief of time." If at length he wrote, his writing took the form of long and brilliant letters to private friends. For relief from physical pain he was indulging in opium. The year 1801 is full of complaints and of direct or indirect appeals for money. In April 1802 came the famous "Ode to Dejection"; if space permitted it should be quoted here, for, in a couple of hundred lines, Coleridge has penned a picture of his own mental state that none can pass by with indifference, or without compassion. Not only were there monetary worries and the trouble of a mind diseased at this early period of the poet's uneasy life; there was also domestic unhappiness. The breach between the poet and his wife, already of long standing, was now serious, and he sought solace from his troubles not at Greta Hall but at Grasmere; his harmless devotion to Dorothy Wordsworth giving offence, not unnaturally, to his wife. The following year was uneventful. Coleridge was intensely unhappy at Keswick, though he had the pleasure of a visit from Charles and Mary Lamb in August. Later, he went on a tour with his patrons, the Wedgwoods, and stayed with them for a time in their country house, sending a few papers to the patient Stuart the while. Thomas Wedgwood was inclined to trifle with drugs, so he was at best a dangerous companion for Coleridge. In 1803, when bad health was the chief source of trouble, a volume of the earlier poems was reprinted with the editorial aid of Lamb. In 1804, Coleridge joined William and Mary Wordsworth on their Scottish tour, but did not remain with them for long. He left them for a solitary walking tour in the Highlands, apparently seeking in vain to tire himself so completely that drugs should cease to be a necessity. There is unfortunately no reason to believe that the device was successful. By mid-September he was back at Greta Hall, where Robert Southey and his wife were now installed. Southey, methodical, hard-working and temperate, was not likely to side with his brother of the pen in the controversies that made the household unhappy. Further residence in that house, the home that had so many outside attractions, was becoming impossible, and Coleridge started for the south, only to fall ill at Dove Cottage, where he stopped on the way. Recovered, he went for a while to London, thence to the Beaumonts' place at Dunmow in Essex. In town again, he sat for his portrait to Northcote, one that seems to present an accurate picture enough of his strength and weakness, "the heaven-eyes and flabby irresoluteness of mien." In April left England for Malta armed with letters to the Civil Commissioner, Vice-Admiral Ball, and, _mirabile dictu_, a pocket full of money. He had £100 lent by his patient and admiring friend William Wordsworth, whose position had improved by the return of the money borrowed from his father, in years long past, by the head of the Lonsdale family, and he had prevailed upon his conscience to accept a gift of £100 from Sir George Beaumont. His fellow-passengers on board the _Speedwell_ were but two, one of them the "unconscionably fat woman who would have wanted elbow-room on Salisbury Plain." Mrs. Coleridge remained at Greta Hall in the company of her sister and brother-in-law, dependent for her support upon the continued charity of the Wedgwoods, but it may be noticed that her husband corresponded with her while he was abroad. When the ill-matched pair were not under the same roof they could be good friends. The years so briefly summarised here show Coleridge at his best as a poet and at his worst as a man, sometimes kindled by the fire of genius, sometimes so degraded that he is dangerously near the ranks of the begging-letter writer. He is only saved from the contempt of his critics because he was at least sincere in his belief that the lack of pence alone stood between him and the mental tranquillity that would enable him to enrich the world with a masterpiece. There is a passage in Lucretius, in which the poet speaks of the wealthy senator, no longer able to endure the turmoil of the capital, galloping away as hard as his chariot can carry him to his country villa, only to find that change cannot cure his unrest, and to come thundering back to Rome. It is of himself that he is tired, and from himself there is no escape. So it has been with men of uneven mind for all time, so it was with Coleridge, so it will ever be with those to whom the secret of rational living is "a garden enclosed, a fountain sealed." For rather more than two years he left England behind him, but his letters, or those that remain to us, would suggest that he was no happier out of England than he was at home. At first the change stimulated his sick mind, he enjoyed his stay in Gibraltar, even while he complained that the lack of exercise on board affected his health and spirits. At Valetta, he became first the guest and then the private secretary of the Civil Commissioner, in whose service he describes himself rather complacently as "a sort of diplomatic understrapper." In August he left Malta for Sicily, to draw up a report of the island's possibilities. Sir Alexander Ball had a firm belief that Sicily should be taken over by Great Britain to keep it from falling into Napoleon's hands. Nothing came of the proposal, and by the beginning of the winter Coleridge was back in Malta, to find himself formally installed as the Commissioner's private secretary. The Public Secretary of Malta died soon afterward, and, while his successor was absent from the island, Coleridge was appointed to the temporary charge of the department at a salary of £600, no bad allowance for the man who could assure his friends that he had refused to accept a share in the _Morning Post_ because he thought that £250 per annum was enough for anybody, the man whose wife and children were being supported in his absence from England by the charity of friends. But the work at Malta was regular, and demanded constant attention; there was no leisure for dreaming of what was to be accomplished some day, so the position was bound to prove irksome to Coleridge, who was soon full of bitter complaints. The official salary attaching to the post was £1200 per annum; Coleridge, as a temporary substitute for the gentleman appointed, a Mr. Chapman, was paid half, and this inequality of reward provided ground for a considerable grievance. But the real trouble lay more in the work than in the pay, for at the end of April we find him greatly distressed by the news that Mr. Chapman could not arrive before July. Even that month brought no Secretary; he did not reach Malta until September, and then Coleridge went in company with a friend to Rome and Naples. Of his stay in Italy his own accounts are vague and unsatisfactory, but he claims to have obtained a better knowledge of the Fine Arts in three months spent at Rome than he could have gained in his own country in twenty years. Doubtless his health was bad; the Roman winter in 1805-6 was not as healthy as it is to-day; it may be, too, that the poet was particularly susceptible to low fever and ague, and that he cured his attacks, or sought to cure them, with the aid of drugs. He reached London in the middle of August 1806, and described his forlorn state in a letter written long after to Josiah Wedgwood, whose brother Thomas had died in the previous year. He said he had reached England, "ill, penniless, and worse than homeless." That he was ill is undoubted; that he was homeless is a figure of speech that will pass, though it should be remembered that Greta Hall was still open to him; but inasmuch as he had been the Civil Commissioner's private secretary, had earned over four hundred pounds as Public Secretary, and had gone to Italy at the expense of his travelling companion, the financial straits are more than ever inexplicable and unsatisfactory. Stuart was still willing and anxious to publish and pay for his erratic contributor's work; travel had increased its value. There can be no doubt but that Coleridge's will-power and self-respect were both at the lowest ebb at this period, all had gone save the love of friends and the admiration of those with whom he came in contact. He could still hold an audience silent, still prove to his immediate circle that his intellect was of the keenest and highest order. But the world, which demands from all poor men a definite expression of their rights to live, was far too strong for him, nor could any of the chances that came his way, and they were many, give to his strange character the strength it needed. He seemed to have inherited the curse of Cain--"a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be on the earth." So with a sick mind and an ailing body he cast about once more for the means to live in some position which should meet his own undefined requirements. CHAPTER IV TROUBLED YEARS For a while Coleridge stayed with the Lambs, to whom his company was ever welcome, and then took up work in the office of the _Courier_, where he found a room. By the end of September he was at Greta Hall, where his relations with his wife, doubtless made more difficult by the undiplomatic but strenuous and honest Southey, must have gone from bad to worse, for by December the two had decided to separate, Coleridge being allowed to take the boys, Hartley and Derwent, on the understanding that they spent their holidays with their mother. He passed Christmas at Coleorton, lent by Sir George Beaumont to the Wordsworths, and it may be that the relief of the proposed separation accounted for better spirits, better health, and inclination to work. He was still far from well, no day seems to have passed without bringing some hours of pain and unrest, but there was some change, and it was for the better. Wordsworth's dedication of _The Prelude_ may have given him a much-needed stimulus. In the early summer of 1807, Coleridge joined his wife for a time at Nether Stowey, where kindly Thomas Poole managed to patch up the differences between husband and wife, and brought Coleridge and Josiah Wedgwood together again. The poet had refused to answer his patron's letters or to supply promised material for a life of Thomas Wedgwood. In his letter to Josiah Wedgwood he declared that the contribution to the story of Thomas Wedgwood's life had been detained at Malta together with "many important papers," and that he had several works on the eve of publication. The measure of foundation upon which these statements stood was hardly sufficient to support them even in the pages of a letter to a fairly credulous patron. Soon the "penniless and friendless" man was to find another supporter, Thomas de Quincey, who, after meeting the poet and spending one evening in his company, supplied him anonymously, through Cottle the publisher, with a loan of three hundred pounds, without any conditions, in order that his financial troubles might be ended. Here we have another proof of the extraordinary personal magnetism of Coleridge. However badly he might behave, his friends forgave him and continued to love him, strangers helped to smooth the rough road over which his follies drew him--all in vain. Coleridge accepted the gift from an unknown sympathiser without compunction--he was quite reconciled to doles--merely remarking that he hoped in twelve months to ask the name of his benefactor in order to show him the results of his gift. Towards the end of an unsatisfactory year, Coleridge returned to his room and his work in the office of the _Courier_, and set himself to prepare some long-promised lectures to be delivered at the Royal Institution. The first were heard in February 1808, and others followed in the spring; they seem to have attracted considerable attention and to have been representative of the lecturer's considerable gifts. This work over, he went to stay at Bury St. Edmunds with his friend Mrs. Clarkson, whose influence was wholly good, and helped in no small measure to restore his health and peace of mind. From there he went to visit the Wordsworths at Allan Bank, and the improvement in health was maintained. He was now separated from Mrs. Coleridge; they met as friends, united to some extent by a genuine interest in their children's welfare. The year 1809 saw the birth of a paper called _The Friend_, described as "a Literary, Moral, and Political Weekly Paper, excluding Personal and Party Politics and Events of the Day. Conducted by S. T. Coleridge of Grasmere, Westmorland." This was another ill-planned venture, foredoomed to failure from the start. It contrived to appear at regular intervals on twenty-seven occasions, and considering the enormous difficulties associated with its production, this was a remarkable achievement enough. Needless to say helpers came forward with hard work and advances of money. Wordsworth wrote much for the columns of his friend's venture, but success and Coleridge never could run in double harness. By March 1810, after involving in endless trouble all who helped the editor, _The Friend_ was numbered among the things that had been, and until October the poet lingered on in the Lake Country, apparently at his wits' ends once more. He took his latest failure very much to heart. In October Coleridge accepted at short notice an invitation from Basil Montague, who was passing to London through Keswick, to stay with him in Soho, and this unfortunate journey led to a break in the very amicable relations that had existed so long between Coleridge and Wordsworth, and had been a source of great comfort to the less fortunate man. The author of _The Prelude_ warned Montague that his friend's habits were not satisfactory, and that he had but little hope of their permanent improvement, and Montague, translating Wordsworth's tempered note of advice into harshest terms, gave Coleridge his own crude version of it. The breach was not mended for two years, and even then the marks of it made the old happy relations between two great poets, who were intellectually brothers, though morally as far as the poles asunder, impossible. Stricken to the heart, Coleridge left Frith Street at once and went to Hammersmith on what was practically a six years' visit to some Bristol friends, the Morgans, who had settled in the western suburb. He had the Lambs to turn to as well, and in their company met Henry Crabb Robinson, to whose voluminous diary students of the poet are so deeply indebted. He completely ignored his relatives and friends in the Lake Country, though their anxiety about him was unfeigned. In 1811 he worked on the _Courier_ until the autumn, when he turned again to the lecture platform, which he could always adorn, for it was possible for Coleridge to speak without notes on almost any subject and to treat it luminously. These lectures, delivered in the rooms of the London Philosophical Society in Crane Court, Fetter Lane, were eminently successful, taking into consideration the conditions of their delivery. They were devoted to examination and criticism of the work of Shakespeare, Milton, and living poets, a study that Coleridge had made his own. The spring of 1812 was at hand before the series was completed, and at its conclusion the poet, who had delighted some of the sanest critics in London, set out for Greta Hall. While he was there--it was destined to be his last visit to the Lake Country--he was on the best of terms with his wife, but kept away from the Wordsworths because William had refused to apologise. It required the persistent efforts of Crabb Robinson to bring the two men together in May of 1812. One Brown, printer of _The Friend_, had left Penrith owing Coleridge money, so the poet went to his office to investigate the matter, and remained in Penrith for a month, without communicating with any of his anxious friends! Then he returned to the Morgans, who had left Hammersmith for the neighbourhood of Oxford Street, and issued a prospectus for a series of lectures designed to deal with the drama. He delivered about half a dozen, and arranged for a winter series to be given at the Surrey Institution. It was a period of renewed literary activity; he had re-written his play _Osorio_, now called _Remorse_, and it had been accepted for Drury Lane; he was working again for Stuart. The winter lectures opened badly and closed brilliantly; the poet was happy in having sympathetic audiences. Then came rehearsals of _Remorse_, which proved remarkably tedious to the gifted author, who for once in his life found a substantial reward for his work. _Remorse_ appealed sufficiently to the patrons of Drury Lane to yield over four hundred pounds to Coleridge in acting and publishing rights. The money came at an opportune moment, for Josiah Wedgwood had reduced his pension to the poet by one half. He has been very freely blamed for this, but who can say that Coleridge had kept to his promise to devote himself to poetry and philosophy or that he had justified to any reasonable extent the hopes that prompted the generous gift? Naturally, he resented the reduction of his allowance, but it did not stir him to any further effort. On the proceeds of his play he would seem to have lived in comparative idleness until the autumn of the year, when, finding the financial strain no longer bearable, he set out in October for Bristol, to deliver an extended series of lectures. The summer had been spent in formulating good resolutions and talking of the books he proposed to write as soon as his mind was sufficiently tranquil and he had no more worries. On the whole, the Bristol lectures were a great success. It may be said with all respect that Coleridge was always lecturing; even in private life, he had succeeded in keeping the brilliant Madame de Stäel a contented listener by the hour, and it was quite an easy matter for him to stand on a platform and discuss any matter in which he was interested, in a fashion safe to hold an educated audience. There is evidence that while Coleridge was at Bristol doing good work in a desultory fashion he was indulging immoderately in opium. Cottle, his old publisher, remonstrated with him, and some effort was made to raise the money to put him in a doctor's home; but Southey, who was approached, opposed the suggestion firmly and, with a certain brutal frankness that is not hard to condone, declared that nothing but a return to Greta Hall and hard, regular work, would minister effectively to his brother-in-law's complaint. This of course availed to keep Coleridge from the Lake Country, and still further to embitter his relations with the family at Keswick. In September 1814 he joined the Morgans in a cottage at Ashley, on the Bath Road, and planned the creation of some literary monuments, that when they came to be completed were of comparatively small account. He wrote some papers for the _Courier_, and towards the end of the year went with the Morgans to Calne in Wiltshire. There he wrote begging-letters, visited the leading representatives of the county and enjoyed the entertainment he received, ignored letters from his family, and wasted his great gifts by devoting them to consideration of local questions of small importance. By the kindness of friends, Hartley had been sent to Oxford, so doubtless his father thought he had done well for one of his family. The year 1815 passed, finding him more concerned with promises than with the performance of work, but in March 1816 he returned to town with the MS. of a new play--_Zapolya_. He stayed for a while with his faithful friends, Charles and Mary Lamb, and then took the strongest and wisest decision of his life by putting himself in the hands of Mr. Gillman of Highgate, with whom his life was so closely associated down to the end. He took this step, after much self-searching, and on the advice of a physician, Dr. Adams of Hatton Garden, to whom he told frankly and fully the story of his case. A few days after his arrival at Highgate the "Christabel," "Kubla Khan," and "Pains of Sleep" were published by John Murray, to whom Coleridge appears to have been introduced by Lord Byron. Murray also accepted _Zapolya_, but parted with it to another publisher. In the summer of 1816, Coleridge took a holiday at Muddiford, near Christchurch in Hampshire. Back in Highgate, he projected more work, and being in better health, carried on brisk quarrels with publishers. Under Gillman's care he was becoming more temperate, but his system was suffering from lack of its accustomed stimulant. By the spring of 1817, the _Metropolitan Encyclopædia_ was projected, and Coleridge was to be a liberal contributor as well as assistant editor in return for £500 a year, but he wanted so much down on account that the publishers, who probably knew their man, broke off negotiations, and Coleridge wrote nothing but his well-known paper, "Preliminary Treatise on Method," for which he received sixty guineas. In March 1817, the publication of the _Biographia Literaria_, a glorified scrap-book, full of profound thoughts that dazzled many a thinking man, led to bitter criticism in the _Edinburgh_ and _Blackwood's_. The philosophical prose of Coleridge is of importance, but no attempt will be made to deal with it here, in a sketch that has no other aim than to present a great figure in our literary history to those who need such an introduction. The _Biographia Literaria_ and the _�sthetical Essays_ have been published as recently as 1907 by the Oxford University Press. They supply a complete reprint of the 1817 edition, and have been edited with a masterly introduction by Mr. J. Shawcross. In this year (1817) Coleridge renewed his work in the _Courier_ and upheld Southey's reputation in connection with the pirated publication of that poet's twenty-five-year-old indiscretion, "Wat Tyler." This was generous vindication of a severe critic. In the same year he started his stimulating friendship with Joseph Henry Green, philosopher and surgeon. In the autumn he again sought the sea, going this time to Littlehampton in Sussex, where he met the Rev. H. F. Cary, translator of _Dante_, and Charles Augustus Tulk, afterwards member for Sudbury. It is to the efforts of Coleridge that Mr. Cary owed the first acceptance of his remarkable work. _Zapolya_ sold well towards the close of this year, and the sale helped to stimulate the author. It would seem that residence at Highgate was doing something at last to build up the poet's shattered nervous system, that the bonds of opium were being loosened, that self-respect was coming, however late, into his life. Lectures on Shakespeare and Poetical Literature delivered at Flower-de-Luce Court in Fetter Lane occupied the opening months of the new year, and while engaged on these addresses, Coleridge made a new and valued friend, Thomas Allsop, with whom he maintained for several years an important correspondence. A further course of lectures was delivered in the last weeks of 1818 and for some months in the following year, but although they were doubtless remarkably good, there was no money in them. The year 1819 was a disastrous one financially. Not only was little profit forthcoming from work, but, to make matters worse, Fenner, the poet's publisher, became bankrupt, and the unfortunate Coleridge was compelled to buy back his own books and copyrights, at least he wrote to that effect to Allsop, though one cannot take all these statements _au pied de la lettre_. In 1820, fortune had still more blows in store. Hartley Coleridge, who to his father's great delight had gained a Fellowship at Oriel, was deprived of it on account of his intemperance, nor could all the influence of friends or of the sorely stricken parent avail to move the Provost of Oriel to reconsider his judgment, though a sum of £300 was paid to Hartley by way of compensation later in the year. The career of Hartley Coleridge, the "little Hartley," beloved of the Lakemen, who, it will be remembered, preferred both his verse and his company to those of the self-centred Wordsworth, is no less sad than that of his father, and was far less brilliant. He inherited all the curses that made the career of Samuel Taylor Coleridge so disastrous, he was constitutionally unable to settle down to hard work, he was weak, and prone to give way to temptation on the least provocation. A great part of his life was passed in the Lake Country, where William and Mary and Dorothy Wordsworth were his staunch friends, loving him perhaps as much for his father's sake as for his own. He died shortly before William Wordsworth, and the graves of the two men, so remote from each other in all things save affection, may be seen side by side in Keswick churchyard. Coleridge was soon reconciled to his erring son, but the blow was the more severe because he could see that he was the father of the lad's faults and failings. In 1821 we find him turning to Allsop for pecuniary aid; self-respect must be laid aside in the face of financial straits. The excuse is the old one that age cannot wither nor custom stale. He is in sore distress, reduced to writing for Blackwood (who had been to Highgate bearing the olive branch, nearly two years before). He is even writing sermons for illiterate clergymen, he has four books well-nigh ready for press, he wishes to bring about a revolution in the world of French and English metaphysics through the medium of a work of far-reaching importance, still, of course, to be written. What remains, then, at a time when he is being pressed for money for the necessities of life, but an appeal to a few admirers who "think respectfully" of his gifts to subscribe an annuity of about £200 a year for three or four years? Nearly £100 has been promised by young friends whom he is engaged in teaching. Perhaps Allsop will suggest how, without loss of dignity, the appeal may be circulated in the proper quarters. Those of us who admire the work with which Coleridge has enriched his country may be pardoned if they regret the fact that this appeal ever saw the light. It had not even the negative virtue of success. The much-maligned Blackwood came to the rescue with an advance on account of work, and with the amount prepaid Coleridge went to Ramsgate for two months with the Gillmans, where he met Cowden Clarke, and derived benefit from the sea air and ample exercise. The next plan that came to the fertile brain was an extension of the informal class in philosophy that he held at Gillman's, and something, but not much, was done in this direction. A long visit from Mrs. Coleridge and their daughter Sara marked the comparatively cheerful close of the year 1822. Henry Nelson Coleridge, the poet's nephew, son of Colonel James Coleridge and afterwards Sara's husband, was of the party; his _Table Talk_, in which Coleridge shows something of his conversational quality, may still be read with interest. These visits and the poet's fast-widening social sphere suggest that the opium habit was being conquered at last, that the closing years of a strangely troubled life were bringing with them some measure of tranquillity. There is yet another indication of improvement; the fire of poetic inspiration flared up for a little while in the fall of 1823, and "Youth and Age," was the result. _Aids to Reflection_ was in the making in these days too, though it was not given to the world until the early summer of 1825, and then in a very slovenly form, which did little or nothing to diminish its value to thinking men and women. While the reception was a mixed one, there was a fairly substantial reward. The Royal Society of Literature gave him an Associateship carrying with it the welcome annuity of 100 guineas; there was balm in Gilead at last. In return for the honour, the poet read a paper on the "Prometheus of �schylus" before the R.S.L. (May 1825). In addition to some definite relief from financial stress, Coleridge was entering upon a mental phase of infinite comfort to his remaining years. The transcendentalist became suddenly convinced of the efficacy of prayer, of the existence of a personal God, and of other tenets peculiar to Christianity. We cannot indicate the gradual processes by which the brilliant mind reached harbour in the last days. It may be that the futility of his own struggles was becoming apparent, that his reasoning faculties, strengthened by relief from drugs, reverted to the faith of earlier times at Ottery St. Mary when, a little boy with the page of his life fair and unstained, he listened to the teachings of his father, a man of godly ways and simple belief. It may have been the final sense of defeat in the long struggle to realise ambitions, to justify the hopes of friends, and to silence those whose doubts were openly expressed. Whatever the cause, the result was eminently satisfactory; the last years saw the poet baffled and beaten by the world, but for once strong in failure, full of a conviction that there lay beyond the grave that which should atone for unsuccess. There is more dignity and less querulousness in the years that followed publication of _Aids to Reflection_ than in almost any of those that had passed since Coleridge left Cambridge; and for this spell of comparative tranquillity his latter-day admirers must needs be grateful. There would be interesting matter for speculation, if we had any data to assist us, how far the late-found faith of Coleridge enabled him to atone to his conscience for what seem to us the least reputable incidents of his career, and many remain to be explained away. He was too shrewd a critic, too sound a judge of life and character, to have overlooked his own failings, above all he must have been haunted by fear of his son Hartley's future and known that his own lack of self-discipline had, in all human probability, set yet another soul wandering along the paths of trouble. Perhaps we should be careful to remember, in considering the life of Coleridge, that all his faults were open to the eye. His friends discussed them with the greatest freedom and even set them down in cold print. History has turned a far more careful eye to the blemishes in a strange character than to the virtues that must have been present by their side. The worst foes of Coleridge have never denied the extraordinary influence he spread around him, or doubted that it was for good. They bear witness to the intense theoretical devotion to unattainable ideals, the respect for virtue, even in hours of backsliding, the belief in his own ability ultimately to overcome the faults that beset him and to rebuild the shattered fabric of personal honour. He was ever fighting against his own little company of devils, for ever being worsted, and yet it would be wrong to say that he abandoned the struggle for long. Doubtless, when he looked closely into his own past, he was less conscious of his faults than were his biographers; by him they were regarded as the outcome of forces he could not control. Had he pleaded his own case at the bar of public opinion, and some of his utterances come very near to constitute a plea, he could doubtless have done so with sincerity and conviction. He was at least nearer to the springs of action than were those who judged him by normal standards, forgetting that whether for good or for evil the man of genius is a law to himself, and that genius is at once a disease and a misfortune, which no sane man need covet. Certainly if Coleridge could forgive himself, we of another generation, who have had nothing but the fine fruits of his intellect for our portion, who bear no share of the burden of his weakness, are not called upon to judge him harshly, and only the fact that his life is one long record of faults and failings excuses any reference to them in a brief biography. The tragedy of the life we have watched for a moment at Highgate now loses something of its intensity. It gains a tranquillity we have learned to associate with evening twilight. The sudden recovery of faith calls for more than a passing word; it must have gladdened the heart not only of Coleridge, but of many of the devout admirers who have succeeded him. The thoughtful readers of our own generation can hardly turn to the life or works of Coleridge to-day without feelings of infinite pity for a man in whom the body and the spirit waged such long and uneven combat. We may remember, too, that his own generation had no perspective by which to judge him; it was unaware of his greatness, and ignored or misjudged him as it ignored Wordsworth and Elia until they had passed beyond the reach of praise or censure. Had it recognised the presence of a great force there might have been more happiness for the author of _Aids to Reflection_. But we can see, or think we see, that though help came to him in no small measure, there was little understanding save by the few, and in the long run the assistance he received was futile. Like every man born of woman, Coleridge had to seek and find his own salvation; it was his own effort that triumphed in the end. To the life-long list of disappointments another was added in 1827, when the post of Paymaster of the Gentlemen Pensioners, a sinecure long since abolished, became vacant by the death of William Gifford. A big effort was made by Hookham Frere to obtain this office for Coleridge, but it was not to be. The industrious, steady, resolute Wordsworth had his sinecure, and it seems a little hard, if such things were to exist, that poor Coleridge, whose necessities were not inconsiderable and whose means of satisfying them were so scanty, should have failed to gain one. Happily he still had his pension of one hundred guineas from the Royal Society of Literature, and in 1828 an edition of three hundred copies of his poems was published in three volumes and sold out. William Pickering of London was the publisher, and the preface, with a few unimportant alterations, is a reprint of the one attached to the edition of 1803, published by Longman and Rees, which in its turn was taken from the edition of 1797. Another edition with some added verses was published in 1829. When the volumes of the 1828 edition had been passed for press, Coleridge joined William Wordsworth and his favourite child, Dora, who married Mr. Quillinan and predeceased her father, and the three went to Belgium and Germany. The journey lasted six weeks, and at Bonn the travellers met some of the leading writers of Germany, including Schlegel and Niebuhr. The German visit is recorded by Thomas Colley Grattan, the author of _Beaten Paths_, and by Julian Young, son of Charles Mayne Young, the actor. Although the warmth of attachment between Wordsworth and Coleridge had undoubtedly suffered since the days when the former wrote his ill-advised letter to Basil Montague, nearly twenty years before, the admiration of the one poet for the other was quite unfeigned. Wordsworth's delight in a great intellect had never faltered; he could always distinguish between a man's gifts and weaknesses, admiring the one while he condemned or regretted the other. The journey refreshed Coleridge in body and mind. He was in high spirits, and the point of his pen was still very keen; witness his lines to Cologne, written when he and his fellow-travellers had passed through that malodorous city in July: "In Koln, a town of monks and bones And pavements fang'd with murderous stones, And rags, and hags, and hideous wenches; I counted two and seventy stenches, All well defined, and several stinks! Ye Nymphs that reign o'er sewers and sinks, The river Rhine, it is well known Doth wash your city of Cologne; But tell me, Nymphs! what power divine Shall henceforth wash the river Rhine?" These lines are worth quoting merely as a definite indication of the change in spirits that had come over the poet. Doubtless, for all the angry de Quincey has written to the contrary, Coleridge was in a comparatively healthy condition both mentally and physically in these closing years, nor could he have made the favourable impression upon the _illuminati_ of Bonn had he been still addicted to excess of opium. An easier mind prompted him to take further holiday during the year, for we have a record of a week with Charles and Mary Lamb, who were then at Enfield Chase, and a month at Ramsgate towards the beginning of the winter. In the following year his well-beloved daughter Sara married her cousin Henry Nelson Coleridge, who, in the spring of 1830, resumed the _Table Talk_ records that do so much to show us the extent, variety, and penetration of the poet's comments upon men and things. In this year Coleridge published, through the London firm of Hurst, Chance & Co., his remarkable essay "On the Constitution of the Church and State, according to the idea of each," a publication said to have been the foundation of the famous Oxford Movement. This year saw the death of George IV, and of the pensions of the Associates of the Royal Literary Society. King William IV pleaded that his very reduced income made it impossible for him to continue the grants of his predecessor, but a strong private representation to Lord Brougham led to the offer of a private grant of £200 to Coleridge, who declined to receive it. Hookham Frere undertook to pay the pension annually as long as Coleridge lived, and the Treasury compounded with King William's conscience by paying a sum of £300 in settlement of further liabilities. It is well that there were friends at hand in these latter days, for the star of Coleridge had set; he was to publish nothing more. His mind retained its pristine vigour, but his body was failing fast. Wordsworth, Lamb, Crabb Robinson, Walter Savage Landor, Harriet Martineau, Emerson and Poole were among the visitors to Highgate, where the poet, now seldom able to leave the house, waited with patience and resignation for the hour to come when "the dust returns to earth as it was, and the spirit unto God who gave it." He rallied sufficiently to attend the baptism of his granddaughter Edith, and in 1833 he went to the meeting of the British Association at Cambridge, the return to his old haunts being the occasion of great emotion. Too weak to rise betimes, he received old friend and new in his bedchamber. Then he returned to Highgate, never again to leave the Gillmans' hospitable house. In May 1834 his old and faithful comrade Thomas Poole, the man our memory loves to dwell upon, visited him, and Coleridge remarked that all the incidents of his life were now seen by him in a clear light "reconciled and harmonised." A bad attack of weakness in the last days of July was the signal of the end. In his last hours he communicated to his pupil J. H. Green a statement of his religious philosophy, and tired by the supreme effort passed peacefully from the lesser to the greater sleep. He was buried on August 2, in the Churchyard at Highgate. He had written his own epitaph not a year before he died, and no excuse is needed for its quotation here. There are several versions, differing but slightly from each other: "Stop, Christian Passer-by! Stop, Child of God! And read with gentle heart. Beneath this sod There lies a Poet: or what once was He, O lift thy soul in prayer for S. T. C. That He who many a year with toil of breath Found death in life, may here find life in death. Mercy for praise, to be forgiven for fame He ask'd, and hoped thro' Christ. Do thou the same." CHAPTER V COLERIDGE AS AN OBSERVER OF NATURE The author of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," in which the observation of natural phenomena is extraordinary, was never the child of his environment in the same degree as his friends William Wordsworth and Charles Lamb, though a great part of his life was passed in the surroundings they knew best. Wordsworth is the true offspring of the Lake Country; he carried to Racedown Lodge and Alfoxton House rich memories of the sterner north, and his genius matured at Dove Cottage. Lamb was a Londoner all the days of his life; the nearer to the metropolis, the higher were his spirits, the more brilliant his pen. Take London from Lamb and the Lakeside from Wordsworth and it is difficult to say what would remain. Coleridge, on the other hand, must have expressed himself anywhere, nor does it seem likely that the quality of his utterances would have suffered from their place of birth. While he was young and vigorous he found it hard to stay for any length of time in one district, but wherever he went he seems to have felt at home. Such complaints as Wordsworth could utter at Goslar, or Lamb at Enfield, find no place that I can trace in the poems, essays, or correspondence of Coleridge. He took no overwhelming delight in populous cities or in the open spaces of the country. If he sojourned at Keswick, it was to be near Wordsworth, and the only noticeable influence his work owes to the Lake Country is to be found in "Christabel." If he came to London it was to be within touch of work that was immediately remunerative. The one remaining force that could decide the question of a district's quality was proximity to a good library. His imagination, when the spirit moved him, annihilated distance and ignored immediate surroundings, his muse in its rare working hours knew no fetters of time or place. Friends were more necessary to him than either to Wordsworth or to Lamb, for these had a beloved sister for constant companion, and while Lamb, the most hospitable of men, could console himself for the absence of his friends with the aid of his folios, and a generous measure of beer, Wordsworth had the additional gift of loving wife and children. Then again Lamb worked for a great part of his life in the office of the East India Company, while Wordsworth was supremely conscious of the call of duty, and was anxious to read the lesson of the simple life to a generation given over to the unavailing pursuit of happiness. Of the three, only Coleridge was condemned to live in a condition of perennial anxiety for the future, an anxiety not a little due to his lack of capacity for steady work, the curse of a vagrant disposition, and a fatal surrender to self-indulgence of a peculiarly dangerous kind. The moods in which Coleridge could turn for relief to Nature and scenes of natural beauty were rare, and consequently the utterances thus directly inspired are few and far between. He had but a passing regard for flowers and birds, no marked preference for mountain, river, or plain, no very ready response to changing seasons. In a collected edition of his poetical works, the student will find less than thirty poems that seem to be suggested by Nature. He knew the north, the west, and the south of England, but there is nothing in his work to indicate that one was more to him than the other. His genius was subjective rather than objective, and though he was a great poet he was a still greater scholar and philosopher, with more of the fruits of deep reading in his capacious brain than Wordsworth and Lamb (each a scholar) could boast between them. To the full extent that his infirmities and overmastering vice permitted, he was a man of the world, at home in any company, able to discourse _de omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis_, and so overflowing with ideas that he could carry on a monologue in the company of the most brilliant conversationalists and leave them well content for once to be silent. It will be seen, then, that in the case of Samuel Taylor Coleridge the question of residence, although of admitted interest, is of relatively small importance, since each might have been altered without affecting the volume, trend, or quality of his output. Ottery St. Mary has already been described at sufficient length for the purposes of this brief essay. For all the beauty that belongs of right to Devonshire it left no lasting impression upon his mind, and though he quitted the home of his family at a tender age, we might have looked for some definite utterances, because the early years of a poet are frequently associated with very lasting impressions. Wordsworth remembered his schooldays and Dame Tyson's cottage even in old age. Christ's Hospital--by the way, does not de Quincey tell us that it should be called Christ Hospital?--was the scene of Coleridge's earliest poetic effort, and a sonnet to the autumnal moon is dated 1788, at a time when, it is generally understood, he had not returned to his mother's house. There is no direct inspiration from Nature here. He compares the appearance of the moon coming from a cloud to Hope, now brightening the eye, now hidden behind "dragon-winged Despair," and finally shining like a meteor over the "sorrow-clouded breast of Care." The lines are fluent but superficial. It may be that owing to long residence in Newgate Street with the terror of Boyer's discipline upon him the young "Grecian" had little chance to respond to such glimpses of Nature as his brief holiday rambles afforded. A year later, in some verses called "Life" he makes a passing reference to Otter's "scanty stream," and in 1790 writes some weak verses condemning the bad Devonshire roads. His "Absence," a farewell ode on quitting school for Cambridge, and "The Raven," belonging to the same year, show no influence of Nature, but in 1793, in the brave year when he was twenty-one, there are verses that show at last an awakening appreciation. The "Songs of the Pixies," the Sonnet to the River Otter, the lines "To a Beautiful Spring in a Village," and "On an Autumnal Evening" exhibit the mood of a young man to whom Nature is beginning to reveal some of the secrets of her immortal charm, but there are none of the distinctive thoughts that a Keats or a Wordsworth would have given us under the stress of similar emotion, so we may presume that neither half-remembered Ottery St. Mary, nor Christ's Hospital, nor even Jesus College, Cambridge, had served to string the poet's lyre. Out of the superabundant gift of expression and the long course of varied reading, certain emotions had proceeded, but they are never the emotions of a poet of Nature. The early verses that Coleridge contributed to the _Morning Post_ include adaptations from the classics. The "Lines to a Nightingale" (1795) are inspired by Sarah Fricker, and she too comes into the far better compositions of the same year, "Lines composed while climbing the left ascent of Brackley Coomb, Somersetshire," written when Coleridge was dallying with Pantisocracy in company with Burnett and Southey. The maythorn, yew, and elm are the only trees he notices, and cuckoo the only bird. The "�olian Harp," written in the same year, is inspired too by Sarah Fricker, and it must be remembered that Coleridge was then twenty-three, when the best and worst men are guilty of writing verse in which the inspiration felt is quite out of proportion to the thought expressed. Perhaps "Reflection on having left a Place of Retirement" strikes the pastoral and rural note most clearly. The "place of retirement" was the little cottage at Clevedon he found after marriage. The lines seem to be a record of the honeymoon. They are happy and speak of a certain resolution that had yet to be undermined: "Ah! quiet dell! dear cot, and mount sublime! I was constrained to quit you. Was it right While my unnumbered brethren toiled and bled, That I should dream away the entrusted hours On rose-leaf beds, pampering the coward heart With feelings all too delicate for use? I therefore go, and join head, heart, and hand Active and firm, to fight the bloodless fight Of science, freedom, and the truth in Christ." The lines, of which the above are a part, are important in so far as they show that even on his honeymoon and in the most delightful country Coleridge was not yet on intimate terms with natural objects. He writes of rose and myrtle and jasmine and "the bare bleak mountain speckled thin with sheep." He knew neither the small nor the great on terms of intimacy, and here again we have further proof that there is nothing local about his genius, and that his homes and haunts did little more than influence his health upon occasions; they never stirred his pen or turned him to seek nature knowledge. Doubtless, had he been left to spend his boyhood by the Otter's banks, he would have gathered some small lore of tree, and bird, and plant, but London, though it did much for him, left him quite ill-equipped. The Clevedon cottage where he spent his honeymoon is still to be seen by the tourist and lover of the poet, who may well pause to wonder how Wordsworth would have sung such a peaceful and yet stimulating spot. In the February of 1796 come lines "On observing a blossom on the first of February," and this will make the most modest botanist smile, for by the first of February the winter jasmine, the Christmas rose, and the winter aconite, to name but three flowers at random, have been blossoming for some time, and so, too, has many a pleasant weed. Later in the same year the first primrose of the season tempted him to some charming lines, of which four may be quoted: "But, tender blossom, why so pale, Dost hear stern winter in the gale? And didst thou tempt the ungentle sky To catch one vernal glance and die?" This is very pretty and naïve, but quite childish, and the lines are prefaced by a quotation from Ovid. In June 1797, at Nether Stowey, Coleridge wrote the exquisite poem, "This Lime Tree Bower my Prison." It was addressed to Charles Lamb, and on a copy of this poem, thirty-seven years later, he wrote his last words, "Charles and Mary Lamb, dear to my heart, yea, as it were, my heart." Here for once the spirit of Nature descends for a moment upon him. He sees his surroundings with what Sir Joshua would have called "a dilated eye." There are lines in it with which memory loves to dwell; they bring Coleridge nearer to some of us than many of the poems upon which his reputation stands secure: "....In this bower, This little lime tree bower, have I not marked Much that has soothed me? Pale beneath the blaze Hung the transparent foliage, and I watched Some broad and sunny leaf and stem above Dappling its sunshine! And that walnut tree Was richly tinged, and a deep radiance lay Full on the ancient ivy, which usurps Those fronting elms, and now, with blackest mass Makes their dark branches gleam a lighter hue Through the late twilight, and though now the bat Wheels silent by, and not a swallow twitters, Yet still the solitary humble bee Sings in the bean flower!" The recurrence of the word "and" in four consecutive lines is perhaps the most noticeable blemish here. It is at Nether Stowey when Coleridge was five-and-twenty years old that we find the first utterance which seems to treat Nature as the theme and not merely as a subsidiary aid to the expression of certain thoughts. "Frost at Midnight," belonging to 1798, has some fine lines addressed to little Hartley: "Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee Whether the summer clothe the general earth With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch Of mossy apple tree, while the nigh thatch Smokes in the sun thaw, 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." This is full of promise, and so too is the "Conversation Poem" called "The Nightingale," written in April of that year, in which Coleridge shows the true instinct by rejecting the suggestion that the bird's notes are sad: "....'Tis the merry Nightingale That crowds, and hurries, and precipitates With fast thick warble his delicious notes As he were fearful that an April night Would be too short for him to utter forth His love-chant, and disburthen his full soul Of all its music." If the presence of Lamb inspired the "Lime Tree Bower" music, it is undoubtedly to the happy association at Alfoxden with the Wordsworths that we owe the "Nightingale" song, though the image of his child, presumably little Berkeley, the short-lived second-born, runs sparkling through the closing lines. Some years pass now before Coleridge responds again to Nature, this time in his magnificent "Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni." This is as stately an invocation as ever the poet penned, and to the same year belongs the well-known "Inscription for a Fountain on a Heath." After this date one will look in vain to Coleridge for a direct response to Nature or for any prolonged utterance founded upon the beauty of earth, sea, or sky. The year 1802, in which this side of the poet's work seems to fail, is the date of the "Ode to Dejection," a twelvemonth before the visit to Scotland and two years before the visit to Malta and Italy. Is it unreasonable, then, to suggest that the Nature love and study that the poems of Coleridge reveal are associated only with the early years of courtship and marriage, and the first long association with the Wordsworths in and around Nether Stowey and Alfoxden? We know that by the time "Kubla Khan" was written (1798) Coleridge was already beginning to surrender himself to opium, and a very few years of close devotion to this drug would have served to deprive him, not only of the spring joy of life, but of response to Nature. He was not a Nature lover at heart, and consequently there was little to be rooted out. Courtship and the birth of children kindled some light that the drug was to quench effectually, and after 1802, Coleridge turned but seldom to Nature even for pictorial imagery. His mind wandered farther and farther into fields of abstruse and difficult speculation, the poet in him mingled with the scholar, and in the later years his essays were, from the standpoint of fine thought, expressed in terse, vigorous English that lacked neither wit nor humour upon occasion, far more important than his poetry. Lamb's essays breathe the spirit of a poet; much of Coleridge's later work, whether dramatic or lyrical, is in the first place the effort of an accomplished man of letters and philosopher. This brings me back to the first statement of the chapter; Coleridge was not influenced by residence, but by the circumstances of his life, by his failure to earn sufficient money, a failure due in its turn to his besetting weakness. We cannot name any place of the poet's uneasy sojourn and say the district exercised an abiding influence upon his poetry. Here we have material for a very painful reflection. We know how largely some of the saddest lives in literature have been soothed or brightened by close communion with what we call common things, because they are within reach of all. Had Coleridge been able to take comfort in them, had he possessed, with William and Dorothy Wordsworth, the "inward eye that is the bliss of solitude," his life would have been immeasurably happier, long periods of keen distress would have been spared him. No man stands so much alone as he who, having no home-life to which he can turn for comfort, is unable to find any abiding happiness in contemplation of the life the seasons show. To make matters worse, we can see Coleridge was profoundly conscious that such a healing power existed. Surely nobody who was in Wordsworth's company, or even in Robert Southey's, could have failed to realise this. Coleridge and Southey lived together, and Southey, though he walked book in hand, tells us of the sights that delighted him on his rambles, and how on winter mornings he would take his little ones to the hill-tops "for the sake of getting the first sunshine on the mountains." But Coleridge could not grasp this gift, so keenly appreciated by the two future Poets Laureate, any more than he could grasp the opportunities extended to him on every side by men who realised at once the extent of his troubles and his gifts. To him the sources of most human consolations "were barr'd and bann'd, forbidden fare." If only for this, his harshest critic who can see his life in true perspective must respond to the appeal of the epitaph the poet wrote for himself when he saw the end of a weary pilgrimage in sight. Never did man so richly blessed with friends and well-wishers travel along a more lonely road, and when we consider the conditions under which the most of his work was written, the comparatively few hours in which he was the master of his own soul, we are left with a feeling of surprise at the quantity and quality of his accomplishment. Coleridge will receive from most kindly human judges the mercy and forgiveness for which he pleads, but at the same time the fame remains, nor can the praise be withheld. But by reason of his close association with Wordsworth, and his considerable sojourn by the Lakes and in Somersetshire, Coleridge is often considered in his relations to Nature, and a few selected poems from which free quotation has been made here, are brought forward to suggest that he too was in his turn a Nature poet. It has been shown that such an opinion is hard to justify; it would be more fair to say that as far as the introduction of the imagery of nature is concerned, Coleridge bears the same relation to Wordsworth that Horace bears to Virgil. Horace used nature to illustrate his philosophy, to clothe or adorn his imagery dealing with matters outside the countryside; Coleridge did the same, but not so well, for he lacked the Horatian humour. The second epode of Horace explodes for all time in its closing lines the theory that Horace has the country man's love for the country. It suggests that the Augustan age had its cry of "back to the land," and that the cry was insincere. Horace turned it to good account, though doubtless the little estate among the Sabine hills near Roccagiavone and the Licenza valley that he owed to the kindness of Mæcenas was a source of infinite delight to him. But the pleasure came from the opportunity it afforded of quiet and uninterrupted work when Rome was too hot to be pleasant and all the interesting people had left the city. One can imagine that Coleridge would have looked with much the same regard upon a country-house that cost him nothing and gave complete assurance of privacy. With Virgil, as with Wordsworth, the case was different. The Mantuan loved the country as Wordsworth loved it, and, for his time, with a much more studied appreciation. Virgil and Wordsworth hold the ear and stimulate the mind when they write of rural life and scenery. Horace and Coleridge, for all their exquisite facility, fail to utter the litany to which the heart of the country lover responds. The comparison between the Mantuan peasant and the son of a slave on the one hand, and two eighteenth-century poets who had their education rounded off by the University on the other, may seem at first a little strained, but if it were possible to pursue it here we might find many points that, _mutatis mutandis_, connect Coleridge with Horace and Wordsworth with Virgil in the relation of the poets to the country and the country life. Moreover, each of the latter-day poets was indebted to patrons, as were their great prototypes, if such a word be permissible. There is something in the Bucolics and Georgics which connects Virgil with the best period of Wordsworth, if we will remember that the men saw life in a different age, under different skies, and in the light of different faiths. Even those who will not admit as much will acknowledge that Virgil and Wordsworth ring true to the country man, while neither Horace nor Coleridge, though they call the country to their aid for an illustration, or a moral or philosophical lesson, could have written: "O fortunatos nimium, sua si bona norint Agricolas!" But it is time to turn from a general survey of Coleridge's work to a more detailed consideration of certain examples. CHAPTER VI COLERIDGE AS POET AND CRITIC Before entering upon any attempt, however brief and inadequate it be, to estimate the multiform genius of Coleridge, it is well to remember that its permanent expression was, at least, three-sided. To-day he is regarded chiefly as a poet; for a dozen who know something of his poetry, there is hardly one who troubles to read his prose. The _Biographia Literaria_, for example, attracts few students; the _Table Talk_ recorded by his nephew, and Thomas Allsop's _Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge_, passed out of fashion about the middle of the Victorian Era. His _Aids to Reflection_ is only now returning to public notice after long neglect. The book enjoyed about twenty years' popularity in England and America, and then seemed to pass from the service of readers. But it is clear that quite apart from his poetry and prose, Coleridge's gifts found complete expression not only in lectures and letters, but in those casual discourses which held complete strangers entranced. He has been described as the finest conversationalist since Samuel Johnson. The printed work that bears his name falls far short of doing him justice. It suffers on the prose side from the modern lack of interest in his precise attitude towards the metaphysical speculations that meant so much to him and his times. On the side of poetry it suffers from the widening of the boundaries that then marked the confines of legitimate poetic expression, and from the unfortunate truth that the poet in him died young. Coleridge the poet employed a very limited palette, not because he had no more colours, but because their use was discountenanced by his own early training and by the canons of contemporary criticism. To estimate the tradition that went to the making of the poet, and the long road he had to follow before he could find himself, turn to his Sonnet to the Evening Star, written when he was eighteen. It opens: "O meek attendant of Sol's setting blaze I hail, sweet star, thy chaste efulgent glow." And it closes: "Her spirit in thy kindred orb, O star benign." Though it is generally unfair to divorce lines from their context, it is permissible here, just to show what passed current as legitimate poetic expression, and we have to remember that within ten years of the writing of the sonnet, the poet in Coleridge had given place to the critic, after enriching poetry with many immortal lines. Clearly one may not hope, save in certain inspired moments, for much in the way of beauty of untrammelled form; the thought must be sought beneath the cumbrous wrapping, and modern readers have less leisure for this than was granted to Coleridge's contemporaries. The "Lines on an Autumnal Evening," written perhaps three years later than the sonnet, show a marked improvement: the poet is beginning to prove stronger than the formal limitations that beset him, but the spirit of the time is displayed through a curious incident. The poem was first printed in the little volume offered to the public in 1796, and is accompanied by an apology for printing such "intolerable stuff" as lines 57-70. At the same time he declares that he has not imitated Rogers' "Pleasure of Memory" in certain other lines (27-36), and suggests that Rogers himself had borrowed his story from "Lochleven," a poem by Michael Bruce. In a second edition Coleridge gives reasons for "reprieving his own poem from immediate oblivion," and proceeds to apologise to Rogers in terms of which the following are part: "No one can see more clearly the _littleness_ and futility of imagining plagiarisms in the works of men of genius; but _nemo omnibus horis sapit_; and my mind at the time of writing that note was sick and sore with anxiety and weakened through much suffering. I have not the most distant knowledge of Mr. Rogers save as a correct and elegant poet. If any of my readers should know him personally, they would oblige me by informing him that I have expiated a sentence of unfounded detraction by an unsolicited and self-originating apology." One can hardly resist the temptation of applying to the youthful writer of such stuff as this his own opening line of the address "To a Young Ass," written one year after the lines to the Autumnal Evening, and three years earlier than the above apology: "Poor little foal of an oppressed race." It is in his "Ode on the Departing Year" (1796) that Coleridge seems for the first time to discover his own full power, but the classical top-hamper accompanying it shows that the limitations upon freedom of expression are still there. The poem is preceded by a quotation from the "Agamemnon" of �schylus, and when published in a small quarto pamphlet held dedicatory letter to Tom Poole, into which a long quotation from Statius forces unwelcome way. Capital letters, quotations, italics, notes of exclamation were ever to the fore in the early days of the nineteenth century. But 1797-8 brought some of the finest lines the poet has given us. "The Three Graves" has much that one is pleased to remember, and the lines addressed to Charles Lamb--"This Lime Tree Bower my Prison," and referred to with a quotation in a previous chapter, show keen appreciation of Nature and natural beauty. Reference has been made elsewhere in this little paper to the limited response that Coleridge shows to his surroundings, but this poem shows that he was not quite oblivious of them. One cannot help feeling that the inspiration came suddenly and unexpectedly, born of compulsory solitude and the fine June evening; the limited appeal of Nature to the poet is shown by the fact that the poem was omitted from the 1803 edition of his work, and that, in the lines near the end, "My Sarah and my friends" was substituted for "My gentle-hearted Charles," rather to Elia's annoyance. Of the famous "Kubla Khan" fragment, written in a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire, it has been pointed out that opium was in all probability the source of inspiration. The poet had been reading a passage from _Purchas his Pilgrimage_--it runs as follows: "In Xamdu did Cublai Can build a stately Palace, encompassing sixteene miles of plaine ground within a wall wherein are fertile Meadowes, pleasant Springs, delightfull Streames, and all sorts of beasts of chase and game, and in the middle thereof a sumptuous house of pleasure." Coleridge used to recite his strange fragment to Lamb, who told Wordsworth that it brought Heaven and Elysian bowers into his parlour, but added in the same letter his fear lest in the light of cold print it should appear "no better than nonsense." There is a clear suggestion of transient force behind the lines. For example, we read in the beginning (lines 3-5): "Where Alph the sacred river ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea." And in line 18: "A mighty fountain momently was forced." Then in line 27 the poet harks back to an earlier image: "Then reached the caverns measureless to man"; while earlier in line 24 he reverts to the ill-conditioned adverb of his 18th line: "It flung up momently the sacred river." But, as was suggested earlier, the explanation of "Kubla Khan" may be found in its last two lines: "For he on honey dew hath fed And drunk the milk of Paradise." Next in order of composition comes "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," the poem which is the most widely read of any that Coleridge wrote, though it may be doubted whether the full extent of the poet's achievement is grasped by more than a minority of those who know it. The "Ancient Mariner" has many merits; it is one of the greatest ballads in English poetry. The sheer music of the lines, the romance they enshrine, the sense they convey of a vivid description of things actually seen, have given an abridged version of the poem a place in schoolbooks without number, and will probably continue to do so for generations to come, so that "The Mariner" is the first figure of his kind to touch the youthful imagination. Wordsworth has told us how the poem came to be written, when he, his sister Dorothy, and Coleridge had left Stowey to visit the Valley of Rocks, near Linton, on a November day in 1797. They had planned an excursion, and proposed to pay for it out of the proceeds of some poetry then to be written. In the course of the walk Coleridge discussed the poem with his two friends; he was founding it upon the dream of Mr. Cruickshank, a friend of his. Wordsworth, who had been reading a book of travels dealing with a journey round Cape Horn (Shelvocke's _Voyage Round the World_), suggested the incident of the albatross and the navigation of the ship by dead men. On the same evening the work started, Wordsworth contributing a few lines--less than a dozen at most. A great deal has been written about the Wordsworth contribution, which, upon his own showing, was quite slight in substance, though it was valuable in suggestion. Shelvocke's story of the doubling of Cape Horn and the meeting with albatrosses prompted Wordsworth, and Coleridge may have derived some of his details from a book by Captain Thomas James, published in 1633, and dealing with the "intended discovery of a North-West Passage in to the South Sea." But we are less concerned with this than with the implicit logic that Coleridge has packed into his poem. His vivid imagination traced the whole course of the Ancient Mariner's journey in fashion that demands and will repay the closest observation. For example, turn to the sixth stanza: "Below the kirk, below the hill, Below the lighthouse top"; and it will be realised that here we have the natural order of the disappearance of objects seen by a vessel leaving the shore. The position stands reversed in the passage describing the Mariner's return. In the opening line of Part II we read: "The sun now rose upon the right." This is, because they have doubled Cape Horn. These instances of close observation of natural phenomena could be multiplied did space permit, the poem is full of them, only in the line "the furrow followed free" may he be held to have fallen into error. Yet this excellence has, after all, but a small concern with the poetic worth of the work, and it is astonishing to find that its music rang harshly in the ears of contemporary criticism, though its awesome and fantastic beauty moves the English-speaking world to this day. One lady (Mrs. Barbauld) told Coleridge that, while she liked the "Ancient Mariner," she had to find two faults. In the first place, the story was improbable, and secondly, it had no moral! Wordsworth himself had his doubts about it, and Southey somewhat obscurely called it "a Dutch attempt at German sublimity," for which quintessential criticism Charles Lamb took him to task. Looking back upon the life and work of Coleridge, we know that his "Ancient Mariner" reaches the high-water mark of his poetic achievement in narrative verse, and that it will endure when the greater part of his writing, whether in verse or prose, has been forgotten--remembered not only on account of its beauty as a complete work of art, but on account of the irresistible music of many of the stanzas. It stands for the fruit of the supremely inspired hours of a greatly gifted man. "Christabel," another poem that has gained Coleridge a host of admirers, is, unfortunately, incomplete. In the ponderous preface to the first edition (John Murray, 1816), Coleridge explains that he wrote the first part at Nether Stowey in 1797, and the second part at Keswick three years later. "Since then his powers have been in a state of suspended animation, but he hopes to embody in verse the three parts yet to come in the course of the present year." Twelve or thirteen years later, Coleridge was still full of the thought of completion, but he omits the pious hope from the preface to the 1834 edition--he knew by then that inspiration had long been dead. Yet the failure to complete galled him through many years after the poem was laid aside. We find him writing to Allsop in 1821: "Of my poetic works, I would fain finish 'Christabel.'" In later years, when he was living with Gillman, he described the story as it was to have been told in verse, but Wordsworth told the late Lord Chief Justice Coleridge that he did not know anything about the plan of completion, and does not think Coleridge had one. In his _Table Talk_ Coleridge himself remarks that the presence of worries and the absence of good music kept him from completing "Christabel," which was received with marked favour by the limited public of its day, three editions being called for in one year. He did not realise, when he spoke to his nephew, that his gifts had passed from one form of expression to another. Hazlitt is suspect, on insufficient evidence, of having reviewed "Christabel" harshly in the _Edinburgh Review_ and the _Examiner_; but the _Quarterly Review_ found that its success in dealing with "witchery by daylight" is complete. It is a matter for regret that the interest taken in the "Ancient Mariner" and in fragments like "Kubla Khan" and "Christabel" has been at the expense of poems like the "Ode to Dejection" and smaller pieces, gems of poetic thought, finely expressed. As time wore on, the realities of life divorced the poet's muse, now quite a minor quantity, from its union with classicism, to the great advantage of his work, and though he cannot be said to have fulfilled the promise of his best years, he wrote much that his admirers will not willingly let die. One would perhaps hesitate to call it poetry--the work he wrote between his twenty-third and twenty-seventh years was poetry in the fullest sense of the term--it is rather philosophy expressed in set forms with a measure of charm that can never be absent long from any utterance of Coleridge. It may perhaps be suggested that the poetic genius in Coleridge needed nursing, and failed to get what it required; to a certain extent such a theory is permissible. We have to remember, in the first place, that his health was bad from youth. He was very susceptible to rheumatism; before middle age he was a martyr to gout; he could not endure extreme cold; and yet he elected to go and live at Greta Hall, in the Vale of Derwentwater, where the rain it raineth nearly every day, and strong harsh winds are the rule rather than the exception. These surroundings confirmed and strengthened the opium habit. To make matters worse, his home life was not of the kind that makes for poetry. Mrs. Coleridge was in many respects a deserving and worthy lady, but she had grave limitations. With things of the intellect she was not on any terms, however remote, and she had a weakness that is said to extend to others of her sex--she worried incessantly about trifles. Reading closely the history of the unhappy married life that involved husband and wife in so much trouble, the mistake of marrying the wrong woman may be condoned. To the overstrung "philosopher in a mist," as he describes himself in one of his earliest letters from Greta Hall, a querulous wife who found small grievances everywhere, who judged her husband's talent from the standpoint of what it brought in from the publishers, must have been a sore trial. In the same way, for the sake of justice, let us admit that the man who was always ready to undertake work that he could never be prevailed upon to begin, who was erratic, intemperate, and wholly unreliable, must have been a sore trouble to any woman who could not appreciate his gifts, and could discern nothing in the future save an increasing family and a diminishing income. But whatever the proper apportionment of praise or blame, one fact remains. At Greta Hall the fine flame of poetic inspiration burned low, and never afterwards recovered its pristine radiance. Professor Alois Brandl does not go too far when he says that at the age of thirty, that is by the year 1802, Coleridge was a broken man; and it was this failure of his health, this prolonged suffering from rheumatism and gout, which he sought so foolishly and so vainly to cure by the aid of opium, that turned him from poetry to the study of philosophy in order to find relief. He sought, as he says in that fine but mournful "Ode to Dejection," "By abstruse research to steal From my own nature all the natural man." And at this point of his life, we find him turning away from the muse, to which nearly all his lasting contribution has long been made, and venturing into a field wherein he was destined to achieve considerable success. Criticism and metaphysics occupied him in turn. The period of study was a very long one; he was forty-four years of age when his _Lay Sermons_ was published, in the wake of much journalism and some desultory and miscellaneous work. Needless to say, he had many brilliant intentions that were never carried out. One of them, a book to supersede all dogmatic philosophy, was designed to fill six hundred pages with "A collection of all possible modes of true, probable, and false reasonings, with a strict analysis of their origin and operation." But if he did not write the books--and he once declared that the mere titles of those he had projected would fill a volume--Coleridge accomplished a very considerable amount of work. Much of it must be lost. He was an omnivorous reader, and his clear mind could detect flaws in any reasoning that was not sound. He studied Berkeley, Fichte, Hartley, Hegel, Herder, Hume, Kant, Lessing, Maass, Schelling, and Spinoza, studied them with complete understanding, and luminous criticism, and could discourse upon them brilliantly. It needed a well-equipped intelligence to follow him; few could, and the majority thought he talked brilliantly but irrelevantly. We know that this was not the case, the truth being that he was too big for the most of his audience. He passed through a very considerable number of religious phases. His earlier Pantheism gave way to Rationalism and Unitarianism, and he arrived by way of the German transcendental philosophers to his ultimate reconciliation with the doctrines of Christianity. In the years in which he lived this ultimate orthodoxy was good alike for his reputation and his circulation. His influence affected profoundly great thinkers like F. D. Maurice and John Sterling, and it may be doubted whether cheap reprints of certain of his prose writings would not find a considerable measure of success to-day, for it is impossible to deny his gift of style, his capacity to reason closely and clearly, or the intense earnestness and conviction that vitalise his message. It is unfortunate, perhaps, that his most popular work as a poet has kept him from receiving due recognition first as a critic and then as a philosopher, and that his work as a philosopher has been clouded by his unfortunate inability to rule his own life on philosophic lines. In the order of publication, his prose works are the _Lay Sermons_, to which reference has been made; the _Sibylline Leaves_ (a revised edition of his poems); the _Biographia Literaria_ (full of valuable criticism badly arranged); the _Aids to Reflection_ (1824); _Church and State_ (1830); and two posthumous works, the _Confessions of an Enquiring Mind_ (1840), and _Literary Remains_. The _Satyrane's Letters_ was republished in the _Biographia Literaria_. It is due probably to his troubled health, that he frequently incorporated the reflections of other men among his own, and accusations of plagiarism were not lacking. Among those who attacked him on this ground were Thomas de Quincey, who led the assault in _Tait's Magazine_, three months after his sometime friend was dead; Professor Ferrier, some years later; and Sir William Hamilton, this last a singularly bitter critic of little judgment. The charge against Coleridge is one that should not have been made, even though it may be sustained to the complete satisfaction of those who like to belittle great minds. "I regard truth as a Divine ventriloquist, and care not from whose mouth the sounds are supposed to proceed, if only the words be audible and intelligible." In this passage Coleridge summed up an attitude that will satisfy all who can take a sane and dispassionate view of his life, and weigh its accomplishments and vicissitudes. Certain thoughts are the children of every era, and will reach more than one thinker at a time; they belong to the man who can make noblest use of them. It is impossible to deny that for all his shortcomings Coleridge did more for his countrymen than his countrymen did for him, and harsh criticism is unbecoming the present generation, which enjoys the full benefit of his work, and has not suffered any of the disappointments that he inflicted upon his contemporaries. Let us remember, too, that he was a simple and modest man, and nowhere claims to be a distinguished poet or a great philosopher. He knew that he had more than the average mental gift, but instead of pride in his possession we find him regretting deeply his inability to justify it. Indeed, he goes further than this, for he says in one of his letters that Wordsworth taught him to recognise some of his limitations. The letter is written to Godwin when Coleridge was in his thirty-first year, and in it he says that Wordsworth, by showing him what true poetry was, made him know that he himself was no poet. Coleridge had a very highly developed critical faculty, and exercised it brilliantly in his writings on Shakespeare. His criticisms sparkle with intelligence; terse and virile, they leave the reader regretting that they were not extended. He speaks of Polonius, "a statesman somewhat past his faculties"; of Lear as "the ample and open playground of Nature's passions." Whether as poet, critic, or metaphysician, Coleridge was a progressive thinker, and broke away slowly but deliberately from the fetters of form that cripple his earliest utterances; nor were the flights of his thought less remarkable than his experiments in method. Whatever his acts, his intentions were of the highest. He sought to do good, and he placed at the service of his countrymen the best that he had to offer. One can only speculate upon the extent of the loss that his chronic ill-health inflicted upon his own and succeeding generations. His were the instincts of the schoolmaster, but of the schoolmaster who takes all his fellow-countrymen for pupils. His discourses on poetry, founded so largely upon prolonged and intimate study of Wordsworth, stand to-day one of the finest examinations of the range and proper limitation of poetic expression. Coleridge was destined to be overshadowed in his own time, and in the critical years immediately following his death, by more powerful personalities--men whose appeal to the public was more immediate and better sustained; but much that he wrote a hundred years ago is of importance to us to-day, and modern criticism, detached, impersonal, and with a true perspective, can hardly fail to do him justice in any of the departments of his life-work. How did he appeal to his contemporaries? Criticism was generally undiscerning and hostile, but those who came within the charmed circle were, with rare exception, delighted. The secret of his appeal passed with him; there are still some who wonder how it has come about that, the limits of ordered achievement being so marked, Coleridge stands where he does. Poet, critic, and metaphysician, in each capacity he had attracted the interest and retained the regard of a great majority of his most notable contemporaries. His inspiration came by fits and starts, but, when it did come, would find expression in felicitous phrases revealing some aspects of truth that captured the imagination. At the end of a long unhappy and often ill-spent life, he could command the unstinted admiration of such a sour-tongued old critic as Thomas Carlyle. Hear him in his _Life of Sterling_: "Coleridge sat on the brow of Highgate Hill in those years looking down on London and its smoke tumult like a sage escaped from the inanity of life's battle, attracting towards him the thoughts of innumerable brave souls still engaged there.... A sublime man, who alone in those dark days had saved his crown of spiritual manhood, escaping from the black materialism and revolutionary deluges with 'God, Freedom, Immortality' still his; a king of men." And later he describes him with the true Carlyle touch as that "heavy laden, high aspiring, and surely much suffering man." Wordsworth said that Coleridge was the only wonderful man he had ever met; Nelson Coleridge said that a day spent with Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a "sabbath past expression, deep, tranquil, and serene." Find him at the right time and in happy mood, he was capable of great feats. For example, he was invited one morning to lecture before the London Philosophical Society. He went with Gillman to the secretary to inquire the subject chosen, but the secretary was out. In the evening Coleridge and Gillman went to the Society's rooms, and heard the announcement made that Mr. Coleridge would deliver an address on "The Growth of the Individual Mind." He spoke extempore for over an hour and a half, holding a critical audience enthralled. Joseph Henry Green, whose two posthumous volumes entitled _Spiritual Philosophy_, founded upon the teaching of the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, were published in 1865, was sufficiently under the spell to devote a whole life-work to his master's teaching. With Coleridge, the metaphysician, it is impossible to deal here. Dr. Traill summed up his teaching very concisely in the following sentences: "There is indeed no moral theory of life, there are no maxims of conduct, such as youth above all things craves for, in Coleridge's teaching. Apart from the intrinsic difficulties of the task to which he invites his disciples, it labours under a primary and essential disadvantage of postponing moral to intellectual liberation. Contrive somehow or other to attain to just ideas as to the capacities and limitations of the human consciousness, considered especially in relation to its two important and eternally distinct functions, the Reason and the Understanding: 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 as obvious as it is obscure to the average unmetaphysical mind, and of a value as assured for the purpose to which Coleridge applies it as it is uncertain, the answer would nevertheless send many a would-be disciple sorrowful away." It is not necessary to pursue the subject. Between the reader and the metaphysician stands the poet and the critic, and for the greater part of the present and future generations these will suffice. INDEX "Absence," 64 "�olian Harp," 65 _�sthetical Essays_, 49 _Aids to Reflection_, 52, 53, 75, 87 Allsop, Thomas, 49, 50, 51, 75, 83 Beaumont, Sir George, 36, 41 _Biographia Literaria_, 48, 49, 75 Blackwoods, the, 51 Boyer, Rev. James, 18, 64 Burnett, 23, 26, 65 Carlyle, on Coleridge, 91 Cary, Rev. H. F., 49 "Christabel," 30, 34, 48, 62, 82 Christ's Hospital, 18, 64 "Church and State," 58, 87 Clarke, Cowden, 52 Clarkson, Mrs., 43 Coleridge, Berkeley, 31 Coleridge, David Hartley, 28, 47, 50 Coleridge, Henry Nelson, 52, 58, 91 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, early life and education, 13; at Christ's Hospital, 18, 64; ill-health, 19, 25, 35, 39, 41, 84; attachment to Mary Evans, 19; at Jesus College, Cambridge, 19, 20, 23; pecuniary difficulties and debts, 21, 23, 29, 39, 50, 51, 52; erratic disposition, 20, 24, 40, 62; joins the army, 21, 22; Pantisocracy scheme, 22, 26; relations with Southey, 22, 26, 27, 33, 36, 41, 47, 49, 71, 82; engagement to Sarah Flicker, 23; relations with Charles Lamb, 26, 27, 31, 34, 44, 47, 58, 59, 62, 78, 79; marriage, 27; opium habit, 28, 31, 32, 35, 47, 49, 52, 70, 84; life at Nether Stowey with Charles Lloyd, 29; relations with the Wordsworths, 29, 30, 32, 33, 36, 43, 44, 50, 57, 62, 73, 80, 82, 83, 89, 91; the Wedgwoods' generosity, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 41, 46; visit to Germany, 32; literary life in London, 33; in the Lake District, 34; in Malta, 36, 37; in Italy, 39; troubled years, 41; lectures, 42, 44, 46, 49, 91; _Table Talk_, 52, 58, 63, 74, 83; pension from Royal Society of Literature, 52, 56; later and more tranquil years, 53, 55; successful re-issue of poems, 56; second visit to Germany, 57; Government grant, 58, 59; last days and death at Highgate, 59; epitaph, 60, 71; as observer of Nature, 61, 64, 65, 78; philosophic bent, 63, 86; essays and prose writings, 70, 75, 91; as poet and critic, 75 _et seq._; religious phases, 87; place in literature, 88, 89 Coleridge, Sara, his daughter, 52, 58 Cologne, lines on, 57 _Confessions of an Enquiring Mind_, 88 Cottle, the publisher, 27, 47 _Courier, The_, 34, 41, 47, 49 De Quincey, 42, 88 Dove Cottage, 33, 34 Evans, Mary, 19, 21 Evening Star, Sonnet to, 26 _Fall of Robespierre_, 11, 23 Favell, Mr., 27 Ferrier, Professor, 88 Fricker, Sarah, afterwards Mrs. Coleridge, 23, 26, 43, 65, 84, 85 _Friend, The_, 43, 45 "Frost at Midnight," 68 Gillman, Dr., 47, 48, 52, 91 Grattan, Thomas Colley, 57 Green, Joseph Henry, 49, 59, 91 Greta Hall, 34, 84 Hamilton, Sir William, 88 Hazlitt, William, 31, 83 Horace, 72, 73 "Hymn before Sunrise," 69 "Inscription for a Fountain," 69 Jesus College, 19 _Joan of Arc_, by Southey, 23 "Kubla Khan," 31, 48, 79, 84 Lake Country, the, 33, 61 Lamb, Charles, 11, 18, 26, 27, 31, 34, 44, 47, 58, 59, 62, 78, 79 _Lay Sermons_, 86, 87 "Life," 64 _Literary Remains_, 88 Lloyd, Charles, 28, 29, 30, 31 _Lyrical Ballads_, 32, 34 _Metropolitan Encyclopædia_, 48 "Monody on the Death of Chatterton," 27 Montague, Basil, 44, 57 Morgans, the, 44, 45, 47 _Morning Chronicle, The_, 26, 28 _Morning Post_, 31, 34, 38, 65 Murray, John, publisher, 48 Nether Stowey, 28, 29 "Nightingale," the, 69 "Ode on the Departing Year," 78 "Ode to Dejection," 69, 84, 86 "On an Autumnal Evening," 65, 77 _Osorio_, 29, 30 Ottery St. Mary, 15, 16, 63 "Pains of Sleep," the, 48 Pantisocracy scheme, the, 22, 27 Pickering, William, publisher, 56 _Poems on Various Subjects_, 27 Poole, Thomas, 23, 27, 28, 41, 59 "Preliminary Treatise on Method," 48 "Prometheus of �schylus," 53 "Raven, the," 64 "Reflection on having left a place of Retirement," 65 "Religious Musings," 27 _Remorse_, 45 "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," 30, 61, 80 Robinson, Henry Crabb, 44, 45, 59 Rogers, Samuel, 77 "Satyrane's Letters," 32 _Sibylline Leaves_, 87 "Songs of the Pixies," 64 "Sonnet to the River Otter," 64 Southey, Robert, 11, 22, 26, 27, 33, 36, 41, 49, 71, 82 _Table Talk_, 10, 11, 52, 58, 63, 74, 83 Thelwall, "Citizen" John, 28, 29 "This Lime Tree Bower my Prison," 67, 78 "Three Graves," 78 "To a Beautiful Spring in a Village," 64 "To a Young Ass," 77 Traill, Dr., quoted, 92 Tulk, Charles Augustus, 49 Virgil, 73 _Watchman, The_, 27 Wedgwoods, the, 30, 31, 34, 35, 41, 46 Wordsworth family, the, 11, 29, 30, 32, 33, 36, 43, 44, 50, 57, 62, 73, 80, 82, 83, 89, 91 "Youth and Age," 52 _Zapolya_, 47, 48, 49 Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO. 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JACK NEW YORK: DODGE PUBLISHING CO. * * * * * [Transcriber's Notes: The transcriber made these changes to the text to correct obvious errors: 1. p. 75 stangers --> strangers 2. p. 81 reserved --> reversed 3. p. 92 suffiee --> suffice End of Transcriber's Notes] 
41705	----	Transcriber's note Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice. Printer errors have been changed and are listed at the end. All other inconsistencies are as in the original. Characters that could not be displayed directly in Latin-1 are transcribed as follows: _ - Italic ^ - superscript {_C} - subscript C [cir] - circle [py] - pyramid [rec] - rectangle [scir] - small circle [sq] - square [V] - slant ANIMA POETÆ FROM THE UNPUBLISHED NOTE-BOOKS OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE EDITED BY ERNEST HARTLEY COLERIDGE LONDON WILLIAM HEINEMANN MDCCCXCV _All rights reserved_ _Entered at Stationers' Hall_ _Entered at the Library of Congress, Washington_ _Copyright_, 1895 When shall I find time and ease to reduce my pocket-books and memorandums to an _Index_ or _Memoriæ Memorandorum_? If--aye! and alas! if I could see the last sheet of my _Assertio Fidei Christianæ, et eterni temporizantis_, having previously beheld my elements of Discourse, Logic, Dialectic, and Noetic, or Canon, Criterion, and Organon, with the philosophic Glossary--in one printed volume, and the Exercises in Reasoning as another--if--what then? Why, then I would publish all that remained unused, Travels and all, under the title of Excursions Abroad and at Home, what I have seen and what I have thought with a little of what I have felt, in the words in which I told and talked them to my pocket-books, the confidants who have _not_ betrayed me, the friends whose silence was _not_ detraction, and the inmates before whom I was not ashamed to complain, to yearn, to weep, or even to pray! To which are added marginal notes from many old books and one or two new ones, sifted through the Mogul Sieve of Duty towards my Neighbour--by [Greek: 'Estêse]. _21 June, 1823._ PREFACE _Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge_, which the poet's nephew and son-in-law, Henry Nelson Coleridge, published in 1835, was a popular book from the first, and has won the approval of two generations of readers. Unlike the _Biographia Literaria_, or the original and revised versions of _The Friend_, which never had their day at all, or the _Aids to Reflection_, which passed through many editions, but now seems to have delivered its message, the _Table Talk_ is still well known and widely read, and that not only by students of literature. The task which the editor set himself was a difficult one, but it lay within the powers of an attentive listener, possessed of a good memory and those rarer gifts of a refined and scholarly taste, a sound and luminous common sense. He does not attempt to reproduce Coleridge's conversation or monologue or impassioned harangue, but he preserves and notes down the detached fragments of knowledge and wisdom which fell from time to time from the master's lips. Here are "the balmy sunny islets of the blest and the intelligible," an unvexed and _harbourous_ archipelago. Very sparingly, if at all, have those pithy "sentences" and weighty paragraphs been trimmed or pruned by the pious solicitude of the memorialist, but it must be borne in mind that the unities are more or less consciously observed, alike in the matter of the discourse and the artistic presentation to the reader. There is, in short, not merely a "mechanic" but an "organic regularity" in the composition of the work as a whole. A "myriad-minded" sage, who has seen men and cities, who has read widely and shaped his thoughts in a peculiar mould, is pouring out his stores of knowledge, the garnered fruit of a life of study and meditation, for the benefit of an apt learner, a discreet and appreciative disciple. A day comes when the marvellous lips are constrained to an endless silence, and it becomes the duty and privilege of the beloved and honoured pupil to "snatch from forgetfulness" and to hand down to posterity the great tradition of his master's eloquence. A labour of love so useful and so fascinating was accomplished by the gifted editor of the _Table Talk_, and it was accomplished once for all. The compilation of a new _Table Talk_, if it were possible, would be a mistake and an impertinence. The present collection of hitherto unpublished aphorisms, reflections, confessions and soliloquies, which for want of a better name I have entitled _Anima Poetæ_, does not in any way challenge comparison with the _Table Talk_. It is, indeed, essentially different, not only in the sources from which it has been compiled but in constitution and in aim. "Since I left you," writes Coleridge in a letter to Wordsworth of May 12, 1812, "my pocket-books have been my sole confidants." Doubtless, in earlier and happier days, he had been eager not merely to record but to communicate to the few who would listen or might understand the ceaseless and curious workings of his ever-shaping imagination, but from youth to age note-books and pocket-books were his silent confidants, his "never-failing friends" by night and day. More than fifty of these remarkable documents are extant. The earliest of the series, which dates from 1795 and which is known as the "Gutch Memorandum Book," was purchased in 1868 by the trustees of the British Museum, and is now exhibited in the King's Library. It consists, for the most part, of fragments of prose and verse thrown off at the moment, and stored up for future use in poem or lecture or sermon. A few of these fragments were printed in the _Literary Remains_ (4 vols. 1836-39), and others are to be found (pp. 103, 5, 6, 9 _et passim_) in Herr Brandl's _Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the English Romantic School_. The poetical fragments are printed _in extenso_ in Coleridge's _Poetical Works_ (Macmillan, 1893), pp. 453-58. A few specimens of the prose fragments have been included in the first chapter of this work. One of the latest note-books, an unfinished folio, contains the Autobiographic Note of 1832, portions of which were printed in Gillman's _Life of Coleridge_, pp. 9-33, and a mass of unpublished matter, consisting mainly of religious exercises and biblical criticism. Of the intervening collection of pocket-books, note-books, copy-books, of all shapes, sizes and bindings, a detailed description would be tedious and out of place. Their contents may be roughly divided into diaries of tours in Germany, the Lake District, Scotland, Sicily and Italy; notes for projected and accomplished works, rough drafts of poems, schemes of metre and metrical experiments; notes for lectures on Shakspere and other dramatists; quotations from books of travel, from Greek, Latin, German and Italian classics, with and without critical comments; innumerable fragments of metaphysical and theological speculation; and commingled with this unassorted medley of facts and thoughts and fancies, an occasional and intermitted record of personal feeling, of love and friendship, of disappointment and regret, of penitence and resolve, of faith and hope in the Unseen. Hitherto, but little use has been made of this life-long accumulation of literary material. A few specimens, "Curiosities of Literature" they might have been called, were contributed by Coleridge himself to Southey's _Omniana_ of 1812, and a further selection of some fifty fragments, gleaned from note-books 21-1/2 and 22, and from a third unnumbered MS. book now in my possession, were printed by H. N. Coleridge in the first volume of the _Literary Remains_ under the heading _Omniana 1809-1816_. The _Omniana_ of 1812 were, in many instances, re-written by Coleridge before they were included in Southey's volumes, and in the later issue, here and there, the editor has given shape and articulation to an unfinished or half-formed sentence. The earlier and later _Omniana_, together with the fragments which were published by Allsop in his _Letters, Conversations and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge_, in 1836, were included by the late Thomas Ashe in his reprint of the _Table Talk_, Bell & Co., 1884. Some fourteen or fifteen notes of singular interest and beauty, which belong to the years 1804, 1812, 1826, 1829, etc., were printed by James Gillman in his unfinished "Life of Coleridge," and it is evident that he contemplated a more extended use of the note-books in the construction of his second volume, or, possibly, the publication of a supplementary volume of notes or _Omniana_. Transcripts which were made for this purpose are extant, and have been placed at my disposal by the kindness of Mrs. Henry Watson, who inherited them from her grandmother, Mrs. Gillman. I may add that a few quotations from diaries of tours in the Lake Country and on the Continent are to be found in the foot-notes appended to the two volumes of _Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge_ which were issued in the spring of the present year. To publish the note-books _in extenso_ would be impracticable, if even after the lapse of sixty years since the death of the writer it were permissible. They are private memoranda-books, and rightly and properly have been regarded as a sacred trust by their several custodians. But it is none the less certain that in disburthening himself of the ideas and imaginations which pressed upon his consciousness, in committing them to writing and carefully preserving them through all his wanderings, Coleridge had no mind that they should perish utterly. The invisible pageantry of thought and passion which for ever floated into his spiritual ken, the perpetual hope, the half-belief that the veil of the senses would be rent in twain, and that he and not another would be the first to lay bare the mysteries of being, and to solve the problem of the ages--of these was the breath of his soul. It was his fate to wrestle from night to morn with the Angel of the Vision, and of that unequal combat he has left, by way of warning or encouragement, a broken but an inspired and inspiring record. "Hints and first thoughts" he bade us regard the contents of his memorandum-books--"_cogitabilia_ rather than _cogitata_ a me, not fixed opinions," and yet acts of obedience to the apostolic command of "Try all things: hold fast that which is good"--say, rather, acts of obedience to the compulsion of his own genius to "take a pen and write in a book all the words of the vision." The aim of the present work, however imperfectly accomplished, has been to present in a compendious shape a collection of unpublished aphorisms and sentences, and at the same time to enable the reader to form some estimate of those strange self-communings to which Coleridge devoted so much of his intellectual energies, and by means of which he hoped to pass through the mists and shadows of words and thoughts to a steadier contemplation, to the apprehension if not the comprehension of the mysteries of Truth and Being. The various excerpts which I have selected for publication are arranged, as far as possible, in chronological order. They begin with the beginning of Coleridge's literary career, and are carried down to the summer of 1828, when he accompanied Wordsworth and his daughter Dora on a six months' tour on the Continent. The series of note-books which belong to the remaining years of his life (1828-1834) were devoted for the most part to a commentary on the Old and New Testament, to theological controversy, and to metaphysical disquisition. Whatever interest they may have possessed, or still possess, appeals to the student, not to the general reader. With his inveterate love of humorous or facetious titles, Coleridge was pleased to designate these serious and abstruse dissertations as "The Flycatchers." My especial thanks are due to Amy, Lady Coleridge, who, in accordance with the known wishes of the late Lord Coleridge, has afforded me every facility for collating my own transcripts of the note-books, and those which were made by my father and other members of my family, with the original MSS. now in her possession. I have to also thank Miss Edith Coleridge for valuable assistance in the preparation of the present work for the press. The death of my friend, Mr. James Dykes Campbell, has deprived me of aid which he alone could give. It was due to his suggestion and encouragement that I began to compile these pages, and only a few days before his death he promised me (it was all he could undertake) to "run through the proofs with my pencil in my hand." He has passed away _multis flebilis_, but he lived to accomplish his own work both as critic and biographer, and to leave to all who follow in his footsteps a type and example of honest workmanship and of literary excellence. ERNEST HARTLEY COLERIDGE. ANIMA POETÆ CHAPTER I _1797-1801_ "O Youth! for years so many and sweet, 'Tis known, that Thou and I were one." S. T. C. [Sidenote: PAST AND PRESENT] "We should judge of absent things by the absent. Objects which are present are apt to produce perceptions too strong to be impartially compared with those recalled only by the memory." SIR J. STEWART. True! and O how often the very opposite is true likewise, namely, that the objects of memory are, often, so dear and vivid, that present things are injured by being compared with them, vivid from dearness! [Sidenote: LOVE] Love, a myrtle wand, is transformed by the Aaron touch of jealousy into a serpent so vast as to swallow up every other stinging woe, and makes us mourn the exchange. Love that soothes misfortune and buoys up to virtue--the pillow of sorrows, the wings of virtue. Disappointed love not uncommonly causes misogyny, even as extreme thirst is supposed to be the cause of hydrophobia. Love transforms the soul into a conformity with the object loved. [Sidenote: DUTY AND EXPERIENCE] From the narrow path of virtue Pleasure leads us to more flowery fields, and there Pain meets and chides our wandering. Of how many pleasures, of what lasting happiness, is Pain the parent and Woe the womb! Real pain can alone cure us of imaginary ills. We feel a thousand miseries till we are lucky enough to feel misery. Misfortunes prepare the heart for the enjoyment of happiness in a better state. The life of a religious benevolent man is an April day. His pains and sorrows [what are they but] the fertilising rain? The sunshine blends with every shower, and look! how full and lovely it lies on yonder hill! Our quaint metaphysical opinions, in an hour of anguish, are like playthings by the bedside of a child deadly sick. Human happiness, like the aloe, is a flower of slow growth. What we must do let us love to do. It is a noble chymistry that turns necessity into pleasure. [Sidenote: INFANCY AND INFANTS] 1. The first smile--what kind of _reason_ it displays. The first smile after sickness. 2. Asleep with the polyanthus held fast in its hand, its bells dropping over the rosy face. 3. Stretching after the stars. 4. Seen asleep by the light of glowworms. 5. Sports of infants; their excessive activity, the means being the end. Nature, how lovely a school-mistress!... Children at houses of industry. 6. Infant beholding its new-born sister. 7. Kissing itself in the looking-glass. 8. The Lapland infant seeing the sun. 9. An infant's prayer on its mother's lap. Mother directing a baby's hand. (Hartley's "love to Papa," scrawls pothooks and reads what he meant by them.) 10. The infants of kings and nobles. ("Princess unkissed and foully husbanded!") 11. The souls of infants, a vision (_vide Swedenborg_). 12. Some tales of an infant. 13. [Greek: Storgê]. The absurdity of the Darwinian system (instanced by) birds and alligators. 14. The wisdom and graciousness of God in the infancy of the human species--its beauty, long continuance, etc. (Children in the wind--hair floating, tossing, a miniature of the agitated trees below which they played. The elder whirling for joy the one in petticoats, a fat baby eddying half-willingly, half by the force of the gust, driven backward, struggling forward--both drunk with the pleasure, both shouting their hymn of joy.) [_Letters of S. T. C._, 1895, i. 408.] 15. Poor William seeking his mother, in love with her picture, and having that union of beauty and filial affection that the Virgin Mary may be supposed to give. [Sidenote: POETRY] Poetry, like schoolboys, by too frequent and severe correction, may be cowed into dullness! Peculiar, not far-fetched; natural, but not obvious; delicate, not affected; dignified, not swelling; fiery, but not mad; rich in imagery, but not loaded with it--in short, a union of harmony and good sense, of perspicuity and conciseness. Thought is the body of such an ode, enthusiasm the soul, and imagery the drapery. Dr. Darwin's poetry is nothing but a succession of landscapes or paintings. It arrests the attention too often, and so prevents the rapidity necessary to pathos. The elder languages were fitter for poetry because they expressed only prominent ideas with clearness, the others but darkly.... Poetry gives most pleasure when only generally and not perfectly understood. It was so by me with Gray's "Bard" and Collins' Odes. The "Bard" once intoxicated me, and now I read it without pleasure. From this cause it is that what I call metaphysical poetry gives me so much delight. [Compare _Lecture_ vi. 1811-12, Bell & Co., p. 70; and _Table Talk_, Oct. 23, 1833, Bell & Co., p. 264.] [Sidenote: COMPARISONS AND CONTRASTS] Poetry which excites us to artificial feelings makes us callous to real ones. The whale is followed by waves. I would glide down the rivulet of quiet life, a trout. Australis [Southey] may be compared to an ostrich. He cannot fly, but he has such other qualities that he needs it not. Mackintosh _intertrudes_ not introduces his beauties. Snails of intellect who see only by their feelers. Pygmy minds, measuring others by their own standard, cry What a _monster_, when they view a man! Our constitution is to some like cheese--the rotten parts they like the best. Her eyes sparkled as if they had been cut out of a diamond-quarry in some Golconda of Fairyland, and cast such meaning glances as would have vitrified the flint in a murderer's blunderbuss. [A task] as difficult as to separate two dew-drops blended together on a bosom of a new-blown rose. I discovered unprovoked malice in his hard heart, like a huge toad in the centre of a marble rock. Men anxious for this world are like owls that wake all night to catch mice. At Genoa the word _Liberty_ is engraved on the chains of the galley slaves and the doors of prisons. Gratitude, worse than witchcraft, conjures up the pale, meagre ghosts of dead forgotten kindnesses to haunt and trouble [his memory]. The sot, rolling on his sofa, stretching and yawning, exclaimed, "_Utinam hoc esset laborare._" Truth still more than Justice [is] blind, and needs Wisdom for her guide. [Sidenote: OF THINGS VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE] [A Proof of] the severity of the winter--the kingfisher [by] its slow, short flight permitting you to observe all its colours, almost as if it had been a flower. Little daisy--very late Spring, March. Quid si vivat? Do all things in faith. _Never pluck a flower again!_ Mem. [Sidenote: May 20, 1799] The nightingales in a cluster or little wood of blossomed trees, and a bat wheeling incessantly round and round! The noise of the frogs was not unpleasant, like the humming of spinning wheels in a large manufactory--now and then a distinct sound, sometimes like a duck, and, sometimes, like the shrill notes of sea-fowl. [This note was written one day later than S. T. C.'s last letter from Germany, May 19, 1799.] O Heavens! when I think how perishable things, how imperishable thoughts seem to be! For what is forgetfulness? Renew the state of affection or bodily feeling [so as to be the] same or similar, sometimes dimly similar, and, instantly, the trains of forgotten thoughts rise from their living catacombs! [Sidenote:[Sockburn] October 1799] Few moments in life are so interesting as those of our affectionate reception from a stranger who is the dear friend of your dear friend! How often you have been the subject of conversation, and how affectionately! [The note commemorates his first introduction to Mary and Sarah Hutchinson.] [Sidenote: Friday evening, Nov, 27, 1799] The immoveableness of all things through which so many men were moving--a harsh contrast compared with the universal motion, the harmonious system of motions in the country, and everywhere in Nature. In the dim light London appeared to be a huge place of sepulchres through which hosts of spirits were gliding. Ridicule the rage for quotations by quoting from "My Baby's Handkerchief." Analyse the causes that the ludicrous weakens memory, and laughter, mechanically, makes it difficult to remember a good story. Sara sent twice for the measure of George's[A] neck. He wondered that Sara should be such a fool, as she might have measured William's or Coleridge's--as "all poets' throttles were of one size." Hazlitt, the painter, told me that a picture never looked so well as when the pallet was by the side of it. Association, with the glow of production. Mr. J. Cairns, in the _Gentleman's Diary_ for 1800, supposes that the Nazarites, who, under the law of Moses, had their heads [shaved] must have used some sort of wigs! Slanting pillars of misty light moved along under the sun hid by clouds. Leaves of trees upturned by the stirring wind in twilight--an image of paleness, wan affright. A child scolding a flower in the words in which he had been himself scolded and whipped, is poetry--passion past with pleasure. [Sidenote: July 20, 1800] Poor fellow at a distance--idle? in this hay-time when wages are so high? [We] come near [and] then [see that he is] pale, can scarce speak or throw out his fishing rod. [This incident is fully described by Wordsworth in the last of the four poems on "Naming of Places." --_Poetical Works of W. Wordsworth_, 1889, p. 144.] [Sidenote: September 1, [1800]] The beards of thistle and dandelions flying about the lonely mountains like life--and I saw them through the trees skimming the lake like swallows. ["And, in our vacant mood, Not seldom did we stop to watch some tuft Of dandelion seed or thistle's beard, That skimmed the surface of the dead calm lake, Suddenly halting now--a lifeless stand! And starting off again with freak as sudden; In all its sportive wanderings, all the while, Making report of an invisible breeze That was its wings, its chariot and its horse, Its playmate, rather say, its moving soul." _Ibid._ p. 143.] Luther--a hero, fettered, indeed, with prejudices--but with those very fetters he would knock out the brains of a modern _Fort Esprit_. _Comment._ Frightening by his prejudices, as a spirit does by clanking his chains. Not only words, as far as relates to speaking, but the knowledge of words as distinct component parts, which we learn by learning to read--what an immense effect it must have on our reasoning faculties! Logical in opposition to real. [Sidenote: 1797-1801] Children, in making new words, always do it analogously. Explain this. Hot-headed men confuse, your cool-headed gentry jumble. The man of warm feelings only produces order and true connection. In what a jumble M. and H. write, every third paragraph beginning with "Let us now return," or "We come now to the consideration of such a thing"--that is, what _I said_ I _would_ come to in the contents prefixed to the chapter. [Sidenote: Dec. 19, 1800] The thin scattered rain-clouds were scudding along the sky; above them, with a visible interspace, the crescent moon hung, and partook not of the motion; her own hazy light filled up the concave, as if it had been painted and the colours had run. "He to whom all things are one, who draweth all things to one, and seeth all things in one, may enjoy true peace of mind and rest of spirit."--JEREMY TAYLOR'S _Via Pacis_. To each reproach that thunders from without may remorse groan an echo. A prison without ransom, anguish without patience, a sick bed in the house of contempt. To _think_ of a thing is different from to _perceive_ it, as "to walk" is from to "feel the ground under you;" perhaps in the same way too--namely, a succession of perceptions accompanied by a sense of _nisus_ and purpose. Space, is it merely another word for the perception of a capability of additional magnitude, or does this very perception presuppose the idea of space? The latter is Kant's opinion. A babe who had never known greater cruelty than that of being snatched away by its mother for half a moment from the breast in order to be kissed. To attempt to subordinate the idea of time to that of likeness. Every man asks _how_? This power to instruct is the true substratum of philosophy. Godwin's philosophy is contained in these words: _Rationem defectus esse defectum rationis_.--HOBBES. Hartley just able to speak a few words, making a fire-place of stones, with stones for fire--four stones for the fire-place, two for the fire--seems to illustrate a theory of language, the use of arbitrary symbols in imagination. Hartley walked remarkably soon and, therefore, learnt to talk remarkably late. Anti-optimism! Praised be our Maker, and to the honour of human nature is it, that we may truly call this an inhuman opinion. Man strives after good. Materialists unwilling to admit the mysterious element of our nature make it all mysterious--nothing mysterious in nerves, eyes, &c., but that nerves think, etc.! Stir up the sediment into the transparent water, and so make all opaque. [Sidenote: 1797-1801] As we recede from anthropomorphism we must go either to the Trinity or Pantheism. The Fathers who were Unitarians were anthropomorphites. [Sidenote: EGOTISM January 1801] Empirics are boastful and egotists because they introduce real or apparent novelty, which excites great opposition, [while] personal opposition creates re-action (which is of course a consciousness of power) associated with the person re-acting. Paracelsus was a boaster, it is true; so were the French Jacobins, and Wolff, though not a boaster, was persecuted into a habit of egotism in his philosophical writings; so Dr. John Brown, and Milton in his prose works; and those, in similar circumstances, who, from prudence, abstain from egotism in their writings are still egotists among their friends. It would be unnatural effort not to be so, and egotism in such cases is by no means offensive to a kind and discerning man. Some flatter themselves that they abhor egotism, and do not suffer it to appear _primâ facie_, either in their writings or conversation, however much and however personally they or their opinions have been opposed. What now? Observe, watch those men; their habits of feeling and thinking are made up of _contempt_, which is the concentrated vinegar of egotism--it is _lætitia mixta cum odio_, a notion of the weakness of another conjoined with a notion of our own comparative strength, though that weakness is still strong enough to be troublesome to us, though not formidable. "--and the deep power of Joy We see into the Life of Things." [Sidenote: THE EGO] By deep feeling we make our _ideas dim_, and this is what we mean by our life, ourselves. I think of the wall--it is before me a distinct image. Here I necessarily think of the _idea_ and the thinking _I_ as two distinct and opposite things. Now let me think of _myself_, of the thinking being. The idea becomes dim, whatever it be--so dim that I know not what it is; but the feeling is deep and steady, and this I call _I_--identifying the percipient and the perceived. "O Thou! whose fancies from afar are brought." [Sidenote: March 17, 1801, Tuesday] [Sidenote: 1797-1801] Hartley, looking out of my study window, fixed his eyes steadily and for some time on the opposite prospect and said, "Will yon mountains _always_ be?" I shewed him the whole magnificent prospect in a looking-glass, and held it up, so that the whole was like a canopy or ceiling over his head, and he struggled to express himself concerning the difference between the thing and the image almost with convulsive effort. I never before saw such an abstract of _thinking_ as a pure act and energy--of thinking as distinguished from thought. [Sidenote: GIORDANO BRUNO] Monday, April 1801, and Tuesday, read two works of Giordano Bruno, with one title-page: _Jordani Bruni Nolani de Monade, Numero et Figurâ liber consequens. Quinque de Minimo, Magno et Mensurâ. Item. De Innumerabilibus Immenso, et Infigurabili seu de Universo et Mundis libri octo. Francofurti, Apud Joan. Wechelum et Petrum Fischerum consortes_, 1591. Then follows the dedication, then the index of contents of the whole volume, at the end of which index is a Latin ode, conceived with great dignity and grandeur of thought. Then the work _De Monade, Numero et Figurâ, secretioris nempe Physicæ, Mathematicæ, et Metaphysicæ elementa_ commences, which, as well as the eight books _De Innumerabili_, &c., is a poem in Latin hexameters, divided (each book) into chapters, and to each chapter is affixed a prose commentary. If the five books _de Minimo_, &c., to which this book is consequent are of the same character, I lost nothing in not having it. As to the work _De Monade_, it was far too numerical, lineal and Pythagorean for my comprehension. It read very much like Thomas Taylor and Proclus, &c. I by no means think it certain that there is no meaning in these works. Nor do I presume even to suppose that the meaning is of no value (till I understand a man's ignorance I presume myself ignorant of his understanding), but it is for others, at present, not for me. Sir P. Sidney and Fulk Greville shut the doors at their philosophical conferences with Bruno. If his conversation resembled this book, I should have thought he would have talked with a trumpet. The poems and commentaries, in the _De Immenso et Innumerabili_ are of a different character. The commentary is a very sublime enunciation of the dignity of the human soul, according to the principles of Plato. [Here follows the passage, "_Anima Sapiens ----ubique totus_," quoted in _The Friend_ (_Coleridge's Works_, ii. 109), together with a brief _résumé_ of Bruno's other works. See, too, _Biographia Literaria_, chapter ix. (_Coleridge's Works_, iii. 249).] [Sidenote: OBSERVATIONS AND REFLECTIONS] The spring with the little tiny cone of loose sand ever rising and sinking at the bottom, but its surface without a wrinkle. [Sidenote: Monday, September 14, 1801] Northern lights remarkably fine--chiefly a purple-blue--in shooting pyramids, moved from over Bassenthwaite behind Skiddaw. Derwent's birthday, one year old. [Sidenote: September 15, 1801] Observed the great half moon setting behind the mountain ridge, and watched the shapes its various segments presented as it slowly sunk--first the foot of a boot, all but the heel--then a little pyramid [py]--then a star of the first magnitude--indeed, it was not distinguishable from the evening star at its largest--then rapidly a smaller, a small, a very small star--and, as it diminished in size, so it grew paler in tint. And now where is it? Unseen--but a little fleecy cloud hangs above the mountain ridge, and is rich in amber light. I do not wish you to act from those truths. No! still and always act from your feelings; but only meditate often on these truths, that sometime or other they may become your feelings. The state should be to the religions under its protection as a well-drawn picture, equally eyeing all in the room. Quære, whether or no too great definiteness of terms in any language may not consume too much of the vital and idea-creating force in distinct, clear, full-made images, and so prevent originality. For original might be distinguished from positive thought. The thing that causes _in_stability in a particular state, of itself causes stability. For instance, wet soap slips off the ledge--detain it till it dries a little, and it _sticks_. Is there anything in the idea that citizens are fonder of good eating and rustics of strong drink--the one from the rarity of all such things, the other from the uniformity of his life? [Sidenote: October 19, 1801] [Sidenote: 1797-1801] On the Greta, over the bridge by Mr. Edmundson's father-in-law, the ashes--their leaves of that light yellow which autumn gives them, cast a reflection on the river like a painter's sunshine. [Sidenote: October 20, 1801] My birthday. The snow fell on Skiddaw and Grysdale Pike for the first time. [A life-long mistake. He was born October 21, 1772.] [Sidenote: Tuesday evening, 1/2 past 6, October 22, 1801] All the mountains black and tremendously obscure, except Swinside. At this time I saw, one after the other, nearly in the same place, two perfect moon-rainbows, the one foot in the field below my garden, the other in the field nearest but two to the church. It was grey-moonlight-mist-colour. Friday morning, Mary Hutchinson arrives. The art in a great man, and of evidently superior faculties, to be often _obliged_ to people, often his inferiors--in this way the enthusiasm of affection may be excited. Pity where we can help and our help is accepted with gratitude, conjoined with admiration, breeds an enthusiastic affection. The same pity conjoined with admiration, where neither our help is accepted nor efficient, breeds dyspathy and fear. _Nota bene_ to make a detailed comparison, in the manner of Jeremy Taylor, between the searching for the first cause of a thing and the seeking the fountains of the Nile--so many streams, each with its particular fountain--and, at last, it all comes to a name! The soul a mummy embalmed by Hope in the catacombs. To write a _series_ of love poems truly Sapphic, save that they shall have a large interfusion of moral sentiment and calm imagery--love in all the moods of mind, philosophic, fantastic--in moods of high enthusiasm, of simple feeling, of mysticism, of religion--comprise in it all the practice and all the philosophy of love! [Greek: Ho myrionous]--hyperbole from Naucratius' panegyric of Theodoras Chersites. Shakspere, _item_, [Greek: ho pollostos kai polyeidês tê poikilostrophô sophia. Ho megalophrônotatos tês alêtheias kêryx.]--LORD BACON. [Compare _Biographia Literaria_, cap. xv., "our myriad-minded Shakspere" and _footnote_. [Greek: Anêr myrionous] a phrase which I have borrowed from a Greek monk, who applies it to a Patriarch of Constantinople. I might have said that I have reclaimed rather than borrowed it; for it seems to belong to Shakspere, _de jure singulari, et ex privilegio naturæ. Coleridge's Works_, iii. 375.] FOOTNOTES: [Footnote A: Presumably George Dyer.] CHAPTER II _1802-1803_ "In a half sleep, he dreams of better worlds, And dreaming hears thee still, O singing lark, That singest like an angel in the clouds!" S. T .C. [Sidenote: THOUGHTS AND FANCIES] No one can leap over his own shadow, but poets leap over death. The old world begins a new year. That is _ours_, but this is from God. We may think of time as threefold. Slowly comes the Future, swift the Present passes by, but the Past is unmoveable. No impatience will quicken the loiterer, no terror, no delight rein in the flyer, and no regret set in motion the stationary. Wouldst be happy, take the delayer for thy counsellor; do not choose the flyer for thy friend, nor the ever-remainer for thine enemy. [Sidenote: LIMBO] Vastum, incultum, solitudo mera, et incrinitissima nuditas. [_Crinitus_, covered with hair, is to be found in Cicero, _nuditas_ in Quintilian, but _incrinitissima_ is, probably, Coleridgian Latinity.] [An old man gloating over his past vices may be compared to the] devil at the very end of hell, warming himself at the reflection of the fire in the ice. Dimness of vision, mist, &c., magnify the powers of sight, numbness adds to those of touch. A numb limb seems twice its real size. Take away from sounds the sense of outness, and what a horrible disease would every minute become! A drive over a pavement would be exquisite torture. What, then, is sympathy if the feelings be not disclosed? An inward reverberation of the stifled cry of distress. Metaphysics make all one's thoughts equally corrosive on the body, by inducing a habit of making momently and common thought the subject of uncommon interest and intellectual energy. A kind-hearted man who is obliged to give a refusal or the like which will inflict great pain, finds a relief in doing it roughly and fiercely. Explain this and use it in Christabel. The unspeakable comfort to a good man's mind, nay, even to a criminal, to be _understood_--to have some one that understands one--and who does not feel that, on earth, no one does? The hope of this, always more or less disappointed, gives the passion to friendship. [Sidenote: October,1802] Hartley, at Mr. Clarkson's, sent for a candle. The _seems_ made him miserable. "What do you mean, my love?" "The seems, the seems. What seems to be and is not, men and faces, and I do not [know] what, ugly, and sometimes pretty, and these turn ugly, and they seem when my eyes are open and worse when they are shut--and the candle cures the _seems_." Great injury has resulted from the supposed incompatibility of one talent with another, judgment with imagination and taste, good sense with strong feeling, &c. If it be false, as assuredly it is, the opinion has deprived us of a test which every man might apply. [Hence] Locke's opinions of Blackmore, Hume's of Milton and Shakspere. [Sidenote: October 25, 1802] I began to look through Swift's works. First volume, containing "Tale of a Tub," wanting. Second volume--the sermon on the Trinity, rank Socinianism, _purus putus Socinianism_, while the author rails against the Socinians for monsters. The first sight of green fields with the numberless nodding gold cups, and the winding river with alders on its banks, affected me, coming out of a city confinement, with the sweetness and power of a sudden strain of music. Mem. to end my preface with "in short, speaking to the poets of the age, '_Primus vestrûm non sum, neque imus_.' I am none of the best, I am none of the meanest of you."--BURTON. "Et pour moi, le bonheur n'a commencé que lorsque je l'ai eu perdu. Je mettrais volontiers sur la porte du Paradis le vers que le Dante a mis sur celle de l'Enfer. 'Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch' entrate.'" Were I Achilles, I would have had my leg cut off, and have got rid of my vulnerable heel. In natural objects we feel ourselves, or think of ourselves, only by _likenesses_--among men, too often by _differences_. Hence the soothing, love-kindling effect of rural nature--the bad passions of human societies. And why is difference linked with hatred? [Sidenote: TRANSCRIPTS FROM MY VELVET-PAPER POCKET-BOOKS] Regular post--its influence on the general literature of the country; turns two-thirds of the nation into writers. Socinianism, moonlight; methodism, a stove. O for some sun to unite heat and light! [Sidenote: Nov. 25, 1802] I intend to examine minutely the nature, cause, birth and growth of the verbal imagination, in the possession of which Barrow excels almost every other writer of prose. [Sidenote: Sunday, December 19] Remember the pear trees in the lovely vale of Teme. Every season Nature converts me from some unloving heresy, and will make a Catholic of me at last. A fine and apposite quotation, or a good story, so far from promoting, are wont to _damp_ the easy commerce of sensible chit-chat. We imagine ourselves discoverers, and that we have struck a light, when, in reality, at most, we have but snuffed a candle. A thief in the candle, consuming in a blaze the tallow belonging to the wick which has sunk out of sight, is an apt simile for a plagiarist from a dead author. An author with a new play which has been hissed off the stage is not unlike a boy who has launched on a pond a ship of his own making, and tries to prove to his schoolfellows that it _ought_ to have sailed. Repose after agitation is like the pool under a waterfall, which the waterfall has made. Something inherently mean in action! Even the creation of the universe disturbs my idea of the Almighty's greatness--would do so but that I perceive that thought with Him creates. The great federal republic of the universe. T. Wedgwood's objection to my "Things and Thoughts," because "thought always implies an act or _nisus_ of mind" is not well founded. A thought and thoughts are quite different words from Thought, as a fancy from Fancy, a work from Work, a life from Life, a force and forces from Force, a feeling, a writing [from Feelings, Writings.] [Sidenote: May 10, 1803] To _fall_ asleep. Is not a real _event_ in the body well represented by this phrase? Is it in _excess_ when on first _dropping_ asleep we _fall_ down precipices, or sink down, all things sinking beneath us, or drop down? Is there not a disease from deficiency of this critical sensation when people imagine that they have been awake all night, and actually lie dreaming, expecting and wishing for the critical sensation? [Compare the phrase, "precipices of distempered sleep," in the sonnet, "No more my visionary soul shall dwell," attributed by Southey to Favell.--_Life and Corresp._ of R. SOUTHEY, i. 224.] [Sidenote: A TREACHEROUS KNAVE] [He] drew out the secrets from men's hearts as the Egyptian enchanters by particular strains of music draw out serpents from their lurking-places. [Sidenote: COUNTRY AND TOWN] The rocks and stones put on a vital resemblance and life itself seemed, thereby, to forego its restlessness, to anticipate in its own nature an infinite repose, and to become, as it were, compatible with immoveability. Bright reflections, in the canal, of the blue and green vitriol bottles in the druggists' shops in London. A curious, and more than curious, fact, that when the country does not benefit, it depraves. Hence the violent, vindictive passions and the outrageous and dark and wild cruelties of very many country folk. [On the other hand] the continual sight of human faces and human houses, as in China, emasculates [and degrades.] [Sidenote: Monday night, June 8, 1803] "He who cannot wait for his reward has, in reality, not earned it." These words I uttered in a dream, in which a lecture I was giving--a very profound one, as I thought--was not listened to, but I was quizzed. [Sidenote: Tuesday night, July 19, 1803] Intensely hot day; left off a waistcoat and for yarn wore silk stockings. Before nine o'clock, had unpleasant chillness; heard a noise which I thought Derwent's in sleep, listened, and found it was a calf bellowing. Instantly came on my mind that night I slept out at Ottery, and the calf in the field across the river whose lowing so deeply impressed me. Chill + child and calf-lowing--probably the Rivers Greta and Otter. [_Letters of S.T.C._, 1895, i. 14, _note_.] [Sidenote: October, 1803] A smile, as foreign or alien to, as detached from the gloom of the countenance, as I have seen a small spot of light travel slowly and sadly along the mountain's breast, when all beside has been dark with the storm. [Sidenote: A PRINCIPLE OF CRITICISM.] Never to lose an opportunity of reasoning against the head-dimming, heart-damping principle of judging a work by its defects, not its beauties. Every work must have the former--we know it _a priori_--but every work has not the latter, and he, therefore, who discovers them, tells you something that you could not with certainty, or even with probability, have anticipated. [Sidenote: WORDSWORTH AND THE PRELUDE] I am sincerely glad that he has bidden farewell to all small poems, and is devoting himself to his great work, grandly imprisoning, while it deifies, his attention and feelings within the sacred circle and temple-walls of great objects and elevated conceptions. In those little poems, his own corrections coming of necessity so often--at the end of every fourteen or twenty lines, or whatever the poem might chance to be--wore him out; difference of opinion with his best friends irritated him, and he wrote, at times, too much with a sectarian spirit, in a sort of bravado. But now he is at the helm of a noble bark; now he sails right onward; it is all open ocean and a steady breeze, and he drives before it, unfretted by short tacks, reefing and unreefing the sails, hauling and disentangling the ropes. His only disease is the having been out of his element; his return to it is food to famine; it is both the specific remedy and the condition of health. [Sidenote: THE INCOMMUNICABLE] Without drawing, I feel myself but half invested with language. Music, too, is wanting to me. But yet, though one should unite poetry, draftsman's skill, and music, the greater and, perhaps, nobler, certainly _all_ the subtler, parts of one's nature must be _solitary_. Man exists herein to himself and to God alone--yea! in how much only to God! how much lies _below_ his own consciousness! The tree or sea-weed like appearance of the side of the mountain, all white with snow, made by little bits of snow loosened. Introduce this and the stones leaping rabbit-like down on my sopha of sods. [_Vide_ p. 60.] The sunny mist, the luminous gloom of Plato. [Sidenote: TIME AN ELEMENT OF GRIEF] Nothing affects me much at the moment it happens. It either stupefies me, and I, perhaps, look at a merry-make and dance-the-hay of flies, or listen entirely to the loud click of the great clock, or I am simply indifferent, not without some sense of philosophical self-complacency. For a thing at the moment is but a thing of the moment; it must be taken up into the mind, diffuse itself through the whole multitude of shapes and thoughts, not one of which it leaves untinged, between [not one of] which and it some new thought is not engendered. Now this is a work of time, but the body feels it quicker with me. [Sidenote: THE POET AND THE SPIDER] On St. Herbert's Island, I saw a large spider with most beautiful legs, floating in the air on his back by a single thread which he was spinning out, and still, as he spun, heaving on the air, as if the air beneath was a pavement elastic to his strokes. From the top of a very high tree he had spun his line; at length reached the bottom, tied his thread round a piece of grass, and reascended to spin another--a net to hang, as a fisherman's sea-net hangs, in the sun and wind to dry. [Sidenote: THE COMMUNICABLE] One excellent use of communication of sorrow to a friend is this, that in relating what ails us, we ourselves first know exactly what the real grief is, and see it for itself in its own form and limits. Unspoken grief is a misty medley of which the real affliction only plays the first fiddle, blows the horn to a scattered mob of obscure feelings. Perhaps, at certain moments, a single, almost insignificant sorrow may, by association, bring together all the little relicts of pain and discomfort, bodily and mental, that we have endured even from infancy. [Sidenote: NOSCITUR A SOCIIS] One may best judge of men by their pleasures. Who has not known men who have passed the day in honourable toil with honour and ability, and at night sought the vilest pleasure in the vilest society? This is the man's self. The other is a trick learnt by heart (for we may even learn the power of extemporaneous elocution and instant action as an automatic trick); but a man's pleasures--children, books, friends, nature, the Muse--O these deceive not. [Sidenote: TEMPERAMENT AND MORALS October, 1803] Even among good and sensible men, how common it is that one attaches himself scrupulously to the rigid performance of some minor virtue or makes a point of carrying some virtue into all its minutiæ, and is just as lax in a similar point, _professedly_ lax. What this is depends, seemingly, on temperament. _A_ makes no conscience of a little flattery in cases where he is certain that he is not acting from base or interested motives--in short, whenever his only motives are the amusement, the momentary pleasure given, &c., a medley of good nature, diseased proneness to sympathy, and a habit of _being wiser_ behind the curtain than his own actions before it. _B_ would die rather than deviate from truth and sincerity in this instance, but permits himself to utter, nay, publish the harshest censure of men as moralists and as literati, and that, too, on his simple _ipse dixit_, without assigning any reason, and often without having any, save that he himself _believes_ it--believes it because he _dislikes_ the man, and dislikes him probably for his looks, or, at best, for some one fault without any collation of the sum total of the man's qualities. Yet _A_ and _B_ are both good men, as the world goes. They do not act from conscious self-love, and are amenable to principles in their own minds. [Sidenote: BRIGHT OCTOBER October 21, 1803, Friday morning] A drizzling rain. Heavy masses of shapeless vapour upon the mountains (O the perpetual forms of Borrowdale!) yet it is no unbroken tale of dull sadness. Slanting pillars travel across the lake at long intervals, the vaporous mass whitens in large stains of light--on the lakeward ridge of that huge arm-chair of Lodore fell a gleam of softest light, that brought out the rich hues of the late autumn. The woody Castle Crag between me and Lodore is a rich flower-garden of colours--the brightest yellows with the deepest crimsons and the infinite shades of brown and green, the _infinite_ diversity of which blends the whole, so that the brighter colours seem to be colours upon a ground, not coloured things. Little woolpacks of white bright vapour rest on different summits and declivities. The vale is narrowed by the mist and cloud, yet through the wall of mist you can see into a bower of sunny light, in Borrowdale; the birds are singing in the tender rain, as if it were the rain of April, and the decaying foliage were flowers and blossoms. The pillar of smoke from the chimney rises up in the mist, and is just distinguishable from it, and the mountain forms in the gorge of Borrowdale consubstantiate with the mist and cloud, even as the pillar'd smoke--a shade deeper and a determinate form. [Sidenote: TELEOLOGY AND NATURE WORSHIP A PROTEST October 26, 1803] A most unpleasant dispute with Wordsworth and Hazlitt. I spoke, I fear, too contemptuously; but they spoke so irreverently, so malignantly of the Divine Wisdom that it overset me. Hazlitt, how easily raised to rage and hatred self-projected! but who shall find the force that can drag him up out of the depth into one expression of kindness, into the showing of one gleam of the light of love on his countenance. Peace be with him! But _thou_, dearest Wordsworth--and what if Ray, Durham, Paley have carried the observation of the aptitude of things too far, too habitually into pedantry? O how many worse pedantries! how few so harmless, with so much efficient good! Dear William, pardon pedantry in others, and avoid it in yourself, instead of scoffing and reviling at pedantry in good men and a good cause and _becoming_ a pedant yourself in a bad cause--even by that very act becoming one. But, surely, always to look at the superficies of objects for the purpose of taking delight in their beauty, and sympathy with their real or imagined life, is as deleterious to the health and manhood of intellect as, always to be peering and unravelling contrivance may be to the simplicity of the affection and the grandeur and unity of the imagination. O dearest William! would Ray or Durham have spoken of God as you spoke of Nature? [Sidenote: W. H.] Hazlitt to the feelings of anger and hatred, phosphorus--it is but to open the cork and it flames--but to love and serviceable friendship, let them, like Nebuchadnezzar, heat the furnace with a sevenfold heat, this triune, Shadrach, Meshach, Abed-nego, will shiver in the midst of it. [Sidenote: THE ORIGIN OF EVIL Thursday October 27, 1803] I sate for my picture [to Hazlitt]--heard from Southey the "Institution of the Jesuits," during which some interesting idea occurred to me, and has escaped. I made out, however, the whole business of the origin of evil satisfactorily to my own mind, and forced H. to confess that the metaphysical argument reduced itself to this, Why did not infinite Power _always exclusively_ produce such beings as in each moment of their duration were infinite? why, in short, did not the Almighty create an absolutely infinite number of Almighties? The hollowness and impiety of the argument will be felt by considering that, suppose a universal happiness, a perfection of the moral as well as natural world, still the whole objection applies just as forcibly as at this moment. The malignity of the Deity (I shudder even at the assumption of this affrightful and Satanic language) is manifested in the creation of archangels and cherubs and the whole company of pure Intelligences burning in their unquenchable felicity, equally as in the creation of Neros and Tiberiuses, of stone and leprosy. Suppose yourself perfectly happy, yet, according to this argument, you _ought_ to charge God with malignity for having created you--your own life and all its comforts are in the indictment against the Creator--for surely even a child would be ashamed to answer, "No! I should still exist, only in that case, instead of being a man, I should be an infinite being." As if the word _I_ here had even the remotest semblance of a meaning. Infinitely more absurd than if I should write the fraction 1/1000 on a slate, then rub it out with my sponge, and write in the same place the integral number 555,666,879, and then observe that the former figure was _greatly_ improved by the measure, that _it_ was grown a far finer figure!--conceiting a _change_ where there had been positive substitution. Thus, then, it appears that the sole justification of those who, offended by the vice and misery of the created world, as far as we know it, impeach the power and goodness of the Almighty, making the proper cause of such vice and misery to have been a defect either of power or goodness--it appears, I say, that their sole justification rests on an argument which has nothing to do with vice and misery, as vice and misery--on an argument which would hold equally good in heaven as in hell--on an argument which it might be demonstrated no human being in a state of happiness could ever have conceived--an argument which a millennium would annihilate, and which yet would hold equally good then as now! But even in point of metaphysic the whole rests at last on the conceivable. Now, I appeal to every man's internal consciousness, if he will but sincerely and in brotherly simplicity silence the bustle of argument in his mind and the ungenial feelings that mingle with and fill up the mob, and then ask his own intellect whether, supposing he could conceive the creation of positively infinite and co-equal beings, and whether, supposing this not only possible but real, this has exhausted his notion of _creatability_? whether the intellect, by an unborn and original law of its essence, does not demand of infinite power more than merely infinity of number, infinity of sorts and orders? Let him have created this infinity of infinites, still there is space in the imagination for the creation of finites; but instead of these, let him again create infinites; yet still the same space is left, it is no way filled up. I feel, too, that the whole rests on a miserable sophism of applying to an Almighty Being such words as _all_. Why were not _all_ Gods? But there is no _all_ in creation. It is composed of infinites, and the imagination, bewildered by heaping infinites on infinites and wearying of demanding increase of number to a number which it conceives already infinite, deserted by images and mocked by words, whose sole substance is the inward sense of difficulty that accompanies all our notions of infinity applied to numbers--turns with delight to distinct images and clear ideas, contemplates a _world_, an harmonious system, where an infinity of kinds subsist each in a multitude of individuals apportionate to its kind in conformity to laws existing in the divine nature, and therefore in the nature of things. We cannot, indeed, _prove_ this in any other way than by finding it as impossible to deny omniform, as eternal, agency to God--by finding it impossible to conceive that an omniscient Being should not have a distinct idea of finite beings, or that distinct ideas in the mind of God should be without the perfection of real existence, that is, imperfect. But this is a proof subtle indeed, yet not more so than the difficulty. The intellect that can start the one can understand the other, if his vices do not prevent him. Admit for a moment that "conceive" is equivalent to creation in the divine nature, synonymous with "to beget" (a feeling of which has given to marriage a mysterious sanctity and sacramental significance in the mind of many great and good men)--admit this, and all difficulty ceases, all tumult is hushed, all is clear and beautiful. We sit in the dark, but each by the side of his little fire, in his own group, and lo! the summit of the distant mountain is smitten with light. All night long it has dwelt there, and we look at it and know that the sun is not extinguished, that he is elsewhere bright and vivifying, that he is coming to us, to make our fires needless; yet, even now, that our cold and darkness are so called only in comparison with the heat and light of the coming day, never wholly deserted of the rays. This I wrote on Friday morning, forty minutes past three o'clock, the sky covered with one cloud that yet lies in dark and light shades, and though one smooth cloud, by the dark colour, it appears to be _steppy_. [Sidenote: A DREAM AND A PARENTHESIS Friday morning, 5 o'clock] Dozing, dreamt of Hartley as at his christening--how, as he was asked who redeemed him, and was to say, "God the Son," he went on humming and hawing in one hum and haw (like a boy who knows a thing and will not make the effort to recollect) so as to irritate me greatly. Awakening gradually, I was able completely to detect that it was the ticking of my watch, which lay in the pen-place in my desk, on the round table close by my ear, and which, in the diseased state of my nerves, had fretted on my ears. I caught the fact while Hartley's face and moving lips were yet before my eyes, and his hum and haw and the ticking of the watch were each the other, as often happens in the passing off of sleep--that curious modification of ideas by each other which is the element of _bulls_. I arose instantly and wrote it down. It is now ten minutes past five. To return to the question of evil--woe to the man to whom it is an uninteresting question, though many a mind over-wearied by it may shun it with dread. And here--N.B.--scourge with deserved and lofty scorn those critics who laugh at the discussion of old questions: God, right and wrong, necessity and arbitrement, evil, &c. No! forsooth, the question must be _new, spicy hot_ gingerbread, from a French constitution to a balloon, change of ministry, or, Which had the best of it in the parliamentary duel, Wyndham or Sheridan? or, at the best, a chymical thing [or] whether the new celestial bodies shall be called planets or asteroids--something new [it must be], something out of themselves--for whatever is _in_ them is deep within them--must be old as elementary nature [but] to find no contradiction in the union of old and novel--to contemplate the Ancient of Days with feelings new as if they _then_ sprang forth at His own Fiat--this marks the mind that feels the riddle of the world, and may help to unravel it. But to return to the question. The whole rests on the sophism of imaginary change in a case of positive substitution. This, I fully believe, settles the question. The assertion that there is in the essence of the divine nature a necessity of omniform harmonious action, and that order and system (not number--in itself base, disorderly and irrational) define the creative energy, determine and employ it, and that number is subservient to order, regulated, organised, made beautiful and rational, an object both of imagination and intellect by order--this is no mere assertion, it is strictly in harmony with the fact. For the world appears so, and it is proved by whatever proves the being of God. Indeed, it is involved in the idea of God. [Sidenote: THE AIM OF HIS METAPHYSIC] What is it that I employ my metaphysics on? To perplex our clearest notions and living moral instincts? To extinguish the light of love and of conscience, to put out the life of arbitrement, to make myself and others _worthless, soulless, Godless_? No, to expose the folly and the legerdemain of those who have thus abused the blessed organ of language, to support all old and venerable truths, to support, to kindle, to project, to make the reason spread light over our feelings, to make our feelings diffuse vital warmth through our reason--these are my objects and these my subjects. Is this the metaphysic that bad spirits in hell delight in? [Sidenote: IN THE VISIONS OF THE NIGHT Nov. 2, 1803, Wednesday morning, 20 minutes past 2 o'clock] The voice of the Greta and the cock-crowing. The voice seems to grow like a flower on or about the water beyond the bridge, while the cock-crowing is nowhere particular--it is at any place I imagine and do not distinctly see. A most remarkable sky! the moon, now waned to a perfect ostrich egg, hangs over our house almost, only so much beyond it, garden-ward, that I can see it, holding my head out of the smaller study window. The sky is covered with whitish and with dingy cloudage, thin dingiest scud close under the moon, and one side of it moving, all else moveless; but there are two great breaks of blue sky, the one stretches over our house and away toward Castlerigg, and this is speckled and blotched with white cloud; the other hangs over the road, in the line of the road, in the shape of an ellipse or shuttle, I do not know what to call it--this is unspeckled, all blue, three stars in it--more in the former break, all unmoving. The water leaden-white, even as the grey gleam of water is in latest twilight. Now while I have been writing this and gazing between-whiles (it is forty minutes past two), the break over the road is swallowed up, and the stars gone; the break over the house is narrowed into a rude circle, and on the edge of its circumference one very bright star. See! already the white mass, thinning at its edge, _fights_ with its brilliance. See! it has bedimmed it, and now it is gone, and the moon is gone. The cock-crowing too has ceased. The Greta sounds on for ever. But I hear only the ticking of my watch in the pen-place of my writing-desk and the far lower note of the noise of the fire, perpetual, yet seeming uncertain. It is the low voice of quiet change, of destruction doing its work by little and little. [Sidenote: AURI SACRA FAMES] O! The impudence of those who dare hold property to be the great binder-up of the affections of the young to the old, &c., and Godwin's folly in his book! Two brothers in this country fought in the mourning coach, and stood with black eyes and their black clothes all blood over their father's grave. [Sidenote: EARLY DEATH November 1803] Poor Miss Dacre! born with a spinal deformity, that prophesied the early death it occasioned. Such are generally gentle and innocent beings. God seems to stamp on their foreheads the seal of death, in sign of appropriation. No evil dares approach the sacred hieroglyphic on this seal of redemption; we on earth interpret early death, but the heavenly spirits, that minister around us, read in it "Abiding innocence." Something to me delicious in the thought that one who dies a baby presents to the glorified Saviour and Redeemer that same sweet face of infancy which He blessed when on earth, and sanctified with a kiss, and solemnly pronounced to be the type and sacrament of regeneration. [Sidenote: THE NIGHT SIDE OF NATURE November 9, Wednesday night, 45 min. past 6] The town, with lighted windows and noise of the _clogged_ passengers in the streets--sound of the unseen river. Mountains scarcely perceivable except by eyes long used to them, and supported by the images of memory flowing in on the impulses of immediate impression. On the sky, black clouds; two or three dim, untwinkling stars, like full stops on damp paper, and large stains and spreads of sullen white, like a tunic of white wool seen here and there through a torn and tattered cloak of black. Whence do these stains of white proceed all over the sky, so long after sunset, and from their indifference of place in the sky, seemingly unaffected by the west? [Sidenote: November 10, 1/2 past 2 o'clock, morning] Awoke, after long struggles, from a persecuting dream. The tale of the dream began in two _images_, in two sons of a nobleman, desperately fond of shooting, brought out by the footman to resign their property, and to be made believe that they had none. They were far too cunning for that, and as they struggled and resisted their cruel wrongers, and my interest for them, I suppose, increased, I became they--the duality vanished--Boyer and Christ's Hospital became concerned; yet, still, the former story was kept up, and I was conjuring him, as he met me in the street, to have pity on a nobleman's orphan, when I was carried up to bed, and was struggling up against some unknown impediment--when a noise of one of the doors awoke me. Drizzle; the sky uncouthly marbled with white vapours and large black clouds, their surface of a fine woolly grain, but in the height and key-stone of the arch a round space of sky with dim watery stars, like a friar's crown; the seven stars in the central seen through white vapour that, entirely shapeless, gave a whiteness to the circle of the sky, but stained with exceedingly thin and subtle flakes of black vapour, might be happily said in language of Boccace (describing Demogorgon, in his _Genealogia De Gli Dei_) to be _vestito d'una pallidezza affumicata_. [Sidenote: Tuesday night, 1/4 after 7] The sky covered with stars, the wind up--right opposite my window, over Brandelhow, as its centre, and extending from the gorge to Whinlatter, an enormous black cloud, exactly in the shape of an egg--this, the only cloud in all the sky, impressed me with a demoniacal grandeur. O for change of weather! [Sidenote: Sunday morning, Nov. 13, 1/2 past 2] The sky, in upon Grysdale Pike and onward to the Withop Fells, floored with flat, smooth, dark or dingy clouds, elsewhere starry. Though seven stars and all the rest in the height of the heaven be dimmed, those in the descent bright and frosty. The river has a loud voice, self-biographer of to-day's rain and thunder-showers. The owls are silent; they have been very musical. All weathers on Saturday the twelfth, storm and frost, sunshine, lightning and what not! God be praised, though sleepless, am marvellously bettered, and I take it for granted that the barometer has risen. I have been reading Barrow's treatise "On the Pope's Supremacy," and have made a note on the _L'Estrangeism_ of his style whenever his thoughts rendered it possible for the words to be pert, frisky and vulgar--which, luckily, could not be often, from the gravity of his subjects, the solidity and appropriateness of his thoughts, and that habitual geometrical _precision_ of mind which demanded the most _appropriate_ words. He seems to me below South in dignity; at least, South never sinks so low as B. sometimes. [Sidenote: AN OPTICAL ILLUSION] A pretty optical fact occurred this morning. As I was returning from Fletcher's, up the back lane and just in sight of the river, I saw, floating high in the air, somewhere over Mr. Banks', a noble kite. I continued gazing at it for some time, when, turning suddenly round, I saw at an equi-distance on my right, that is, over the middle of our field, a pair of kites floating about. I looked at them for some seconds, when it occurred to me that I had never before seen two kites together, and instantly the vision disappeared. It was neither more nor less than two pair of leaves, each pair on a separate stalk, on a young fruit tree that grew on the other side of the wall, not two yards from my eye. The leaves being alternate, did, when I looked at them as leaves, strikingly resemble wings, and they were the only leaves on the tree. The magnitude was given by the imagined distance, that distance by the former adjustment of the eye, which _remained_ in consequence of the deep impression, the length of time I had been looking at the kite, the pleasure, &c., and [the fact that] a new object [had] impressed itself on the eye. [Sidenote: THE INWARD LIGHT] In Plotinus the system of the Quakers is most beautifully expressed in the fifth book of the Fifth Ennead (he is speaking of "the inward light"): "It is not lawful to enquire from whence it originated, for it neither approached hither, nor again departs from hence to some other place, but it either appears to us, or does not appear. So that we ought not to pursue it as if with a view of discerning its latent original, but to abide in quiet till it suddenly shines upon us, preparing ourselves for the blessed spectacle, like the eye waiting for the rising sun." [Sidenote: PARS ALTERA MEI] My nature requires another nature for its support, and reposes only in another from the necessary indigence of its being. Intensely similar yet not the same [must that other be]; or, may I venture to say, the same indeed, but dissimilar, as the same breath sent with the same force, the same pauses, and the same melody pre-imaged in the mind, into the flute and the clarion shall be the same _soul diversely incarnate_. [Sidenote: NOT THE BEAUTIFUL BUT THE GOOD] "ALL things desire that which is first from a necessity of nature, prophesying, as it were, that they cannot subsist without the energies of that first nature. But beauty is not first, it happens only to intellect, and creates restlessness and seeking; but good, which is present from the beginning and unceasingly to our innate appetite, abides with us even in sleep, and never seizes the mind with astonishment, and requires no peculiar reminiscence to convince us of its presence."--PLOTINUS. This is just and profound, yet perfect beauty being an abstract of good, in and for that particular form excites in me no passion but that of an admiration so quiet as scarcely to admit of the name _passion_, but one that, participating in the same root of soul, does yet spring up with excellences that I have not. To this I am driven by a desire of self-completion with a restless and inextinguishable love. God is not all things, for in this case He would be indigent of all; but all things are God, and eternally indigent of God. And in the original meaning of the word _essence_ as predicable of that concerning which you can say, This is he, or That is he (this or that rather than any other), in this sense of the word essence, I perfectly coincide with the Platonists and Plotinists that, if we add to the nature of God either essence or intellect or beauty, we deprive Him of being the Good himself, the only One, the purely and absolutely One. [Sidenote: A MOON-SET Friday, Nov. 25, 1803, morning 45 minutes past] After a night of storm and rain, the sky calm and white, by blue vapour thinning into formlessness instead of clouds, the mountains of height covered with snow, the secondary mountains black. The moon descending aslant the [V]^A, through the midst of which the great road winds, set exactly behind Whinlatter Point, marked A. She being an egg, somewhat uncouthly shaped, perhaps, but an ostrich's egg rather than any other (she is two nights more than a half-moon), she set behind the black point, fitted herself on to it like a cap of fire, then became a crescent, then a mountain of fire in the distance, then the peak itself on fire, one steady flame; then stars of the first, second and third magnitude, and vanishing, upboiled a swell of light, and in the next second the whole sky, which had been _sable blue_ around the yellow moon, whitened and brightened for as large a space as would take the moon half an hour to descend through. [Sidenote: THE DEATH OF ADAM A DREAM Dec. 6, 1803] Adam travelling in his old age came to a set of the descendants of Cain, ignorant of the origin of the world, and treating him as a madman, killed him. A sort of dream which I had this night. [Sidenote: A MAN'S A MAN FOR ALL THAT] We ought to suspect reasoning founded wholly on the difference of man from man, not on their commonnesses, which are infinitely greater. So I doubt the wisdom of the treatment of sailors and criminals, because it is wholly grounded on their vices, as if the vices formed the whole or major part of their being. [Sidenote: A DEFENCE OF METAPHYSIC] Abstruse reasoning is to the inductions of common sense what reaping is to delving. But the implements with which we reap, how are they gained? by delving. Besides, what is common sense now was abstract reasoning with earlier ages. [Sidenote: A SUNSET] A beautiful sunset, the sun setting behind Newlands across the foot of the lake. The sky is cloudless, save that there is a cloud on Skiddaw, one on the highest mountains in Borrowdale, some on Helvellyn, and that the sun sets in a glorious cloud. These clouds are of various shapes, various colours, and belong to their mountains and have nothing to do with the sky. N.B.--There is something metallic, silver playfully and imperfectly gilt and highly polished, or, rather, something mother-of-pearlish, in the sun-gleams on ice, thin ice. [Sidenote: EXTREMES MEET] I have repeatedly said that I could make a volume if only I had noted down, as they occurred to my recollection, the instances of the proverb "Extremes Meet." This night, Sunday, December 11, 1803, half-past eleven, I have determined to devote the last nine pages of my pocket-book to a collection of the same. 1. The parching air Burns frore and cold performs the effect of fire. _Paradise Lost_, ii. 594. 2. Insects by their smallness, the mammoth by its hugeness, terrible. 3. In the foam-islands in a fiercely boiling pool, at the bottom of a waterfall, there is sameness from infinite change. 4. The excess of humanity and disinterestedness in polite society, the desire not to give pain, for example, not to talk of your own diseases and misfortunes, and to introduce nothing but what will give pleasure, destroy all humanity and disinterestedness, by making it intolerable, through desuetude, to listen to the complaints of our equals, or of any, where the listening does not gratify or excite some vicious pride and sense of superiority. 5. It is difficult to say whether a perfectly unheard-of subject or a _crambe bis cocta_, if chosen by a man of genius, would excite in the higher degree the sense of novelty. Take, as an instance of the latter, the "Orestes" of Sotheby. 6. Dark with excess of light. 7. Self-absorption and worldly-mindedness (N.B.--The latter a most philosophical word). 8. The dim intellect sees an absolute oneness, the perfectly clear intellect _knowingly perceives_ it. Distinction and plurality lie in the betwixt. 9. The naked savage and the gymnosophist. 10. Nothing and intensest absolute being. 11. Despotism and ochlocracy. [Sidenote: ABSTRUSE RESEARCH] A dirty business! "How," said I, with a great effort to conquer my laziness and a great wish to rest in the generality, "what do you include under the words 'dirty business'"? I note this in order to remember the reluctance the mind has in general to analysis. The soul within the body--can I, any way, compare this to the reflection of the fire seen through my window on the solid wall, seeming, of course, within the solid wall, as deep within as the distance of the fire from the wall. I fear I can make nothing out of it; but why do I always hurry away from any interesting thought to do something uninteresting? As, for instance, when this thought struck me, I turned off my attention suddenly and went to look for the copy of Wolff which I had missed. Is it a cowardice of all deep feeling, even though pleasurable? or is it laziness? or is it something less obvious than either? Is it connected with my epistolary embarrassments? ["The window of my library at Keswick is opposite to the fireplace. At the coming on of evening, it was my frequent amusement to watch the image or reflection of the fire that seemed burning in the bushes or between the trees in different parts of the garden."--_The Friend._ _Coleridge's Works_, ii. 135.] As I was sitting at the foot of my bed, reading with my face downwards, I saw a phantom of my face upon the nightcap which lay just on the middle of my pillow--it was indistinct but of bright colours, and came only as my head bent low. Was it the action of the rays of my face upon my eyes? that is, did my eyes see my face, and from the sidelong and faint action of the rays place the image in that situation? But I moved the nightcap and I lost it. [Sidenote: Dec. 19, 1803, morning] I have only to shut my eyes to feel how ignorant I am whence these forms and coloured forms, and colours distinguishable beyond what I can distinguish, derive their birth. These varying and infinite co-present colours, what are they? I ask, to what do they belong in my waking remembrance? and almost never receive an answer. Only I perceive and know that whatever I change, in any part of me, produces some change in these eye-spectra; as, for instance, if I press my legs or change sides. [Sidenote: OF STREAMY ASSOCIATION] I will at least make the attempt to explain to myself the origin of moral evil from the streamy nature of association, which thinking curbs and rudders. Do not the bad passions in dreams throw light and show of proof upon this hypothesis? If I can but explain those passions I shall gain light, I am sure. A clue! a clue! a Hecatomb à la Pythagoras, if it unlabyrinth me. [Sidenote: December 28, 1803, 11 o'clock] I note the beautiful luminous shadow of my pencil-point which follows it from the candle, or rather goes before it and illuminates the word I am writing. But, to resume, take in the blessedness of innocent children, the blessedness of sweet sleep, do they or do they not contradict the argument of evil from streamy associations? I hope not, but all is to be thought over and _into_. And what is the height and ideal of mere association? Delirium. But how far is this state produced by pain and denaturalisation? And what are these? In short, as far as I can see anything in this total mist, vice is imperfect yet existing volition, giving diseased currents of association, because it yields on all sides and yet _is_--so, too, think of madness! [Sidenote: A DOUBTFUL EXPERIMENT] December 30th, half-past one o'clock, or, rather, Saturday morning, December 31st, put rolled bits of paper, many tiny bits of wick, some tallow, and the soap together. The whole flame, equal in size to half-a-dozen candles, did not give the light of one, and the letters of the book looked by the unsteady flare just as through tears or in dizziness--every line of every letter dislocated into angles, or like the mica in crumbly stones. [Sidenote: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MOTION] The experiment over leaf illustrates my idea of motion, namely, that it is a presence and absence rapidly alternating, so that the fits of _absence_ exist continuously in the feeling, and the fits of presence _vice versâ_ continuedly in the eye. Of course I am speaking of motion psychologically, not physically, what it is in us, not what the supposed mundane cause may be. I believe that what we call _motion_ is our consciousness of motion arising from the interruption of motion, the action of the soul in suffering resistance. Free unresisted action, the going forth of the soul, life without consciousness, is, properly, infinite, that is unlimited. For whatever resists limits, and whatever is unresisted is unlimited. This, psychologically speaking, is space, while the sense of resistance or limitation is time, and motion is a synthesis of the two. The closest approach of time to space forms co-existent multitude. [Sidenote: RECOLLECTION AND REMEMBRANCE] There is an important distinction between the memory or reminiscent faculty of sensation which young children seem to possess in so small a degree, from their perpetual desire to have a tale repeated to them, and the memory of words and images which the very same children manifestly possess in an unusual degree, even to sealing-wax accuracy of retention and representation. [Sidenote: THE ETHICS OF SPINOZA] If Spinoza had left the doctrine of miracles untouched, and had not written so powerfully in support of universal toleration, his ethics would never have brought on him the charge of Atheism. His doctrine, in this respect, is truly and severely orthodox, in the reformed Church; neither do I know that the Church of Rome has authoritatively decided between the Spinosists and Scotists in their great controversy on the nature of the being which creatures possess. [Sidenote: A UNITARIAN SCHOOLMAN] Creation is explained by Joannes Scotus Erigena as only a manifestation of the unity of God in forms--_et fit et facit, et creat et creatur_. Lib. 4. p. 7. P. 8. A curious and highly-philosophical account of the Trinity, and completely Unitarian. God is, is wise, and is living. The essence we call Father, the wisdom Son, the life the Holy Spirit. And he positively affirms that these three exist only as distinguishable relations--_habitudines_; and he states the whole doctrine to be an invention and condescension of Theology to the intellect of man, which must _define_, and consequently _personify_, in order to understand, and must have some phantom of understanding in order to keep alive in the heart the substantial faith. They are _fuel_ to the sacred fire--in the empyrean it may burn without fuel, and they who do so are seraphs. [Sidenote: A CROWD OF THOUGHTS] A fine epitheton of man would be "Lord of fire and light." All other creatures whose existence we perceive are mere alms-receivers of both. A company of children driving a hungry, hard-skinned ass out of a corn-field. The ass cannot by such weaklings be driven so hard but he will feed as he goes. Such light as lovers love, when the waxing moon steals in behind a black, black cloud, emerging soon enough to make the blush visible which the long kiss had kindled. All notions [remain] hushed in the phantasms of place and time that still escape the finest sieve and most searching winnow of our reason and abstraction. A rosemary tree, large as a timber tree, is a sweet sign of the antiquity and antique manners of the house against which it groweth. "Rosemary" (says Parkinson, _Theatrum Botanicum_ [London, 1640] p. 76) "is a herb of as great use with us in these days as any whatsoever, not only for physical but civil purposes--the civil uses, as all know, are at weddings, funerals, &c., to bestow on friends." Great harm is done by bad poets in trivialising beautiful expressions and images and associating disgust and indifference with the technical forms of poetry. Advantage of public schools. [They teach men to be] content with school praise when they publish. Apply this to Cottle and J. Jennings. Religious slang operates better on women than on men. N.B.--Why? I will give over--it is not _tanti_! Poem. Ghost of a mountain--the forms, seizing my body as I passed, became realities--I a ghost, till I had reconquered my substance. The sopha of sods. Lack-wit and the clock find him at last in the Yorkshire cave, where the waterfall is. [The reference is, no doubt, to Wordsworth's "Idiot Boy," which was composed at Nether Stowey, in 1798. In a letter addressed to John Wilson of June 5, 1802, Wordsworth discusses and discards the use of the word "lackwit" as an equivalent to "idiot." The "Sopha of Sods" was on Latrigg. In her journal for August, 1800, Dorothy Wordsworth records the making of a seat on Windybrow, a part of Latrigg. Possibly this was the "Sopha of Sods."--_Life of W. Wordsworth_, 1889, i. 268, 403.] The old stump of the tree, with briar-roses and bramble leaves wreathed round and round--a bramble arch--a foxglove in the centre. The palm, still faithful to forsaken deserts, an emblem of hope. The stedfast rainbow in the fast-moving, fast-hurrying hail-mist! What a congregation of images and feelings, of fantastic permanence amidst the rapid change of tempest--quietness the daughter of storm. [Sidenote: "POEM ON SPIRIT, OR ON SPINOZA"] I would make a pilgrimage to the deserts of Arabia to find the man who could make me understand how the _one can be many_. Eternal, universal mystery! It seems as if it were impossible, yet it _is_, and it is everywhere! It is indeed a contradiction in _terms_, and only in terms. It is the co-presence of feeling and life, limitless by their very essence, with form by its very essence limited, determinable, definite. [Sidenote: TRANS-SUBSTANTIATION] Meditate on trans-substantiation! What a conception of a miracle! Were one a Catholic, what a sublime oration might one not make of it? Perpetual, [Greek: pan]topical, yet offering no violence to the sense, exercising no domination over the free-will--a miracle always existing, yet perceived only by an act of the free-will--the beautiful fuel of the fire of faith--the fire must be pre-existent or it is not fuel, yet it feeds and supports and is necessary to feed and support the fire that converts it into his own nature. [Sidenote: THE DANGER OF THE MEAN] Errors beget opposite errors, for it is our imperfect nature to run into extremes. But this trite, because ever-recurring, truth is not the whole. Alas! those are endangered who have avoided the extremes, as if among the Tartars, in opposition to a faction that had unnaturally lengthened their noses into monstrosity, there should arise another who had cut off theirs flat to the face, Socinians in physiognomy. The few who retained their noses as nature made them and reason dictated would assuredly be persecuted by the noseless party as adherents of the rhinocerotists or monster-nosed men, which is the case of those [Greek: archaspistai] [braves] of the English Church, called Evangelicals. Excess of Calvinism produced Arminianism, and those not in excess must therefore be Calvinists! [Sidenote: ALAS! THEY HAD BEEN FRIENDS IN YOUTH] To a former friend who pleaded how near he formerly had been, how near and close a friend! Yes! you were, indeed, near to my heart and native to my soul--a part of my being and its natural, even as the chaff to corn. But since that time, through whose fault I will be mute, I have been thrashed out by the flail of experience. Because you have been, therefore, never more can you be a part of the grain. [Sidenote: Oct. 31, 1803 AVE PH[OE]BE IMPERATOR] The full moon glided behind a black cloud. And what then? and who cared? It was past seven o'clock in the morning. There is a small cloud in the east, not larger than the moon and ten times brighter than she! So passes night, and all her favours vanish in our minds ungrateful! [Sidenote: THE ONE AND THE GOOD] In the chapter on abstract ideas I might introduce the subject by quoting the eighth Proposition of Proclus' "Elements of Theology." The whole of religion seems to me to rest on and in the question: The One and The Good--are these words or realities? I long to read the schoolmen on the subject. [Sidenote: A MORTAL AGONY OF THOUGHT] There are thoughts that seem to give me a power over my own life. I could kill myself by persevering in the thought. Mem., to describe as accurately as may be the approximating symptoms. I met something very like this observation where I should least have expected such a coincidence of sentiment, such sympathy with so wild a feeling of mine--in p. 71 of Blount's translation of "The Spanish Rogue," 1623. CHAPTER III _1804_ "Home-sickness is no baby-pang."--S. T. C. [Sidenote: THE UNDISCIPLINED WILL] This evening, and indeed all this day, I ought to have been reading and filling the margins of Malthus. ["An Essay on the Principles of Population, &c., London," 1803, 4to. The copy annotated by Coleridge is now in the British Museum.] I had begun and found it pleasant. Why did I neglect it? Because I ought not to have done this. The same applies to the reading and writing of letters, essays, etc. Surely this is well worth a serious analysis, that, by understanding, I may attempt to heal it. For it is a deep and wide disease in my moral nature, at once elm-and-oak-rooted. Is it love of liberty, of spontaneity or what? These all express, but do not explain the fact. [Sidenote: Tuesday morning, January 10, 1804] After I had got into bed last night I said to myself that I had been pompously enunciating as a difficulty, a problem of easy and common solution--viz., that it was the effect of association. From infancy up to manhood, under parents, schoolmasters, inspectors, etc., our pleasures and pleasant self-chosen pursuits (self-chosen because pleasant, and not originally pleasant because self-chosen) have been forcibly interrupted, and dull, unintelligible rudiments, or painful tasks imposed upon us instead. Now all duty is felt as a _command_, and every command is of the nature of an offence. Duty, therefore, by the law of association being felt as a command from without, would naturally call up the sensation of the pain roused from the commands of parents and schoolmasters. But I awoke this morning at half-past one, and as soon as disease permitted me to think at all, the shallowness and sophistry of this solution flashed upon me at once. I saw that the phenomenon occurred far, far too early: I have observed it in infants of two or three months old, and in Hartley I have seen it turned up and layed bare to the unarmed eye of the merest common sense. The fact is that interruption of itself is painful, because and as far as it acts as _disruption_. And thus without any reference to or distinct recollection of my former theory I saw great reason to attribute the effect, wholly, to the streamy nature of the associative faculty, and the more, as it is evident that they labour under this defect who are most reverie-ish and streamy--Hartley, for instance, and myself. This seems to me no common corroboration of my former thought or the origin of moral evil in general. [Sidenote: COGITARE EST LABORARE] A time will come when passiveness will attain the dignity of worthy activity, when men shall be as proud within themselves of having remained in a state of deep tranquil emotion, whether in reading or in hearing or in looking, as they now are in having figured away for an hour. Oh! how few can transmute activity of mind into emotion! Yet there are as active as the stirring tempest and playful as the may-blossom in a breeze of May, who can yet for hours together remain with _hearts_ broad awake, and the _understanding_ asleep in all but its retentiveness and _receptivity_. Yea, and (in) the latter (state of mind) evince as great genius as in the former. [Sidenote: A SHEAF OF ANECDOTES, Sunday morning, Feb. 5, 1804] I called on Charles Lamb fully expecting him to be out, and intending all the way, to write to him. I found him at home, and while sitting and talking to him, took the pen and note-paper and began to write. As soon as Holcroft heard that Mary Wollstonecraft was dead, he took a chaise and came with incredible speed to "have Mrs. Godwin opened for a remarkable woman!" [Sidenote: Sunday morning, Feb. 13, 1804] Lady Beaumont told me that when she was a child, previously to her saying her prayers, she endeavoured to think of a mountain or great river, or something great, in order to raise up her soul and kindle it. Rickman has a tale about George Dyer and his "Ode to the Hero Race." "Your Aunt, Sir," said George to the Man of Figures, "your Aunt is a very sensible woman. Why I read Sir, my Ode to her and she said that it was a very pretty Thing. There are very few women, Sir! that possess that fine discrimination, Sir!" The huge Organ Pipe at Exeter, larger than the largest at Haarlem, at first was dumb. Green determined to make it speak, and tried all means in vain, till at last he made a second pipe precisely alike, and placed it at its side. _Then_ it spoke. Sir George Beaumont found great advantage in learning to draw from Nature through gauze spectacles. At Göttingen, at Blumenbach's lectures on Psychology, when some anatomical preparations were being handed round, there came in and seated himself by us Englishmen a _Hospitator_, one, that is, who attends one or two lectures unbidden and unforbidden and gratis, as a stranger, and on a claim, as it were, of hospitality. This _Hospes_ was the uncouthest, strangest fish, pretending to human which I ever beheld. I turned to Greenough and "Who broke his bottle?" I whispered. Godwin and Holcroft went together to Underwood's chambers. "Little Mr. Underwood," said they, "we are perfectly acquainted with the subject of your studies, only ignorant of the particulars. What is the difference between a thermometer and a barometer?" [Sidenote: THE ADOLESCENCE OF LOVE] It is a pleasure to me to perceive the buddings of virtuous loves, to know their minutes of increase, their stealth and silent growings-- A pretty idea, that of a good soul watching the progress of an attachment from the first glance to the time when the lover himself becomes conscious of it. A poem for my "Soother of Absence." [Sidenote: THE RAGE FOR MONITION] To J. Tobin, Esq., April 10, 1804. Men who habitually enjoy robust health have, too generally, the trick, and a very cruel one it is, of imagining that they discover the secret of all their acquaintances' ill health in some malpractice or other; and, sometimes, by gravely asserting this, here there and everywhere (as who likes his penetration [hid] under a bushel?), they not only do all they can, without intending it, to deprive the poor sufferer of that sympathy which is always a comfort and, in some degree, a support to human nature, but, likewise, too often implant serious alarm and uneasiness in the minds of the person's relatives and his nearest and dearest connections. Indeed (but that I have known its inutility, that I should be ridiculously sinning against my own law which I was propounding, and that those who are most fond of advising are the least able to hear advice from others, as the passion to command makes men disobedient) I should often have been on the point of advising you against the two-fold rage of advising and of discussing character, both the one and the other of which infallibly generates presumption and blindness to our own faults. Nay! more particularly where, from whatever cause, there exists a slowness to understand or an aptitude to mishear and consequently misunderstand what has been said, it too often renders an otherwise truly good man a mischief-maker to an extent of which he is but little aware. Our friends' reputation should be a religion to us, and when it is lightly sacrificed to what self-adulation calls a love of telling the truth (in reality a lust of talking something seasoned with the cayenne and capsicum of personality), depend upon it, something in the heart is warped or warping, more or less according to the greater or lesser power of the counteracting causes. I confess to you, that being exceedingly low and heart-fallen, I should have almost sunk under the operation of reproof and admonition (the whole too, in my conviction, grounded on utter mistake) at the moment I was quitting, perhaps for ever! my dear country and all that makes it so dear--but the high esteem I cherish towards you, and my sense of your integrity and the reality of your attachment and concern blows upon me refreshingly as the sea-breeze on the tropic islander. Show me anyone made better by blunt advice, and I may abate of my dislike to it, but I have experienced the good effects of the contrary in Wordsworth's conduct to me; and, in Poole and others, have witnessed enough of its ill effects to be convinced that it does little else but harm both to the adviser and the advisee. [See _Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge_, Letter cli., ii. 474, 475.] [Sidenote: PLACES AND PERSONS, Thursday, April 19, 1804] This is Spain! That is Africa! Now, then, I have seen Africa! &c., &c. O! the power of names to give interest. When I first sate down, with Europe on my left and Africa on my right, both distinctly visible, I felt a quickening of the movements in the blood, but still it felt as a pleasure of _amusement_ rather than of thought or elevation; and at the same time, and gradually winning on the other, the nameless silent forms of nature were working in me, like a tender thought in a man who is hailed merrily by some acquaintance in his work, and answers it in the same tone. This is Africa! That is Europe! There is _division_, sharp boundary, abrupt change! and what are they in nature? Two mountain banks that make a noble river of the interfluent sea, not existing and acting with distinctness and manifoldness indeed, but at once and as one--no division, no change, no antithesis! Of all men I ever knew, Wordsworth himself not excepted, I have the faintest pleasure in things contingent and transitory. I never, except as a forced courtesy of conversation, ask in a stage-coach, Whose house is that? nor receive the least additional pleasure when I receive the answer. Nay, it goes to a disease in me. As I was gazing at a wall in Caernarvon Castle, I wished the guide fifty miles off that was telling me, In this chamber the Black Prince was born (or whoever it was). I am not certain whether I should have seen with any emotion the mulberry-tree of Shakspere. If it were a tree of no notice in itself, I am sure that I should feel by an effort--with self-reproach at the dimness of the feeling; if a striking tree, I fear that the pleasure would be diminished rather than increased, that I should have no unity of feeling, and find in the constant association of Shakspere having planted it an intrusion that prevented me from wholly (as a whole man) losing myself in the flexures of its branches and intertwining of its roots. No doubt there are times and conceivable circumstances in which the contrary would be true, in which the thought that under this rock by the sea-shore I know that Giordano Bruno hid himself from the pursuit of the enraged priesthood, and overcome with the power and sublimity of the truths for which they sought his life, thought his life therefore given him that he might bear witness to the truths, and _morti ultra occurrens_, returned and surrendered himself! So, here, on this bank Milton used to lie, in late May, when a young man, and familiar with all its primroses, made them yet dearer than their dear selves, by that sweetest line in the Lycidas, "And the rathe primrose that forsaken dies:" or from this spot the immortal deer-stealer, on his escape from Warwickshire, had the first view of London, and asked himself, And what am I to do there? At certain times, uncalled and sudden, subject to no bidding of my own or others, these thoughts would come upon me like a storm, and fill the place with something more than nature. But these are not contingent or transitory, they are nature, even as the elements are nature--yea, more to the human mind, for the mind has the power of abstracting all agency from the former and considering [them] as mere effects and instruments. But a Shakspere, a Milton, a Bruno, exist in the mind as pure _action_, defecated of all that is material and passive. And the great moments that formed them--it is a kind of impiety against a voice within us, not to regard them as predestined, and therefore things of now, for ever, and which were always. But it degrades the sacred feeling, and is to it what stupid superstition is to enthusiastic religion, when a man makes a pilgrimage to see a great man's shin-bone found unmouldered in his coffin. Perhaps the matter stands thus. I could feel amused by these things, and should be, if there had not been connected with the great name upon which the amusement wholly depends a higher and deeper pleasure, that will [not] endure the co-presence of so mean a companion; while the mass of mankind, whether from nature or (as I fervently hope) from error of rearing and the worldliness of their after-pursuits, are rarely susceptible of any other pleasures than those of _amusement_, gratification of curiosity, novelty, surprise, wonderment, from the glaring, the harshly-contrasted, the odd, the accidental, and find the reading of the _Paradise Lost_ a task somewhat alleviated by a few entertaining incidents, such as the pandemonium and self-endwarfment of the devils, the fool's paradise and the transformation of the infernal court into serpents and of their intended applauses into hisses. ["Dear Sir Walter Scott and myself were exact, but harmonious opposites in this--that every old ruin, hill, river or tree called up in his mind a host of historical or biographical associations; whereas, for myself, I believe I should walk over the plain of Marathon without taking more interest in it than in any other plain of similar features."--_Table Talk_, August 4, 1833, Bell & Co., 1834, p. 242.] [Sidenote: THE INTOLERANCE OF CONVERTS] Why do we so very, very often see men pass from one extreme to the other? [Greek: stodkardia] [Stoddart, for instance]. Alas! they sought not the truth, but praise, self-importance, and above all [the sense of] something doing! Disappointed, they hate and persecute their former opinion, which no man will do who by meditation had adopted it, and in the course of unfeigned meditation gradually enlarged the circle and so get out of it. For in the perception of its falsehood he will form a perception of certain truths which had made the falsehood plausible, and can never cease to venerate his own sincerity of intention and Philalethie. For, perhaps, we never _hate_ any opinion, or can do so, till we have _impersonated_ it. We hate the persons because they oppose us, symbolise that opposition under the form and words of the opinion and then hate the person for the opinion and the opinion for the person. [For some weeks after his arrival at Valetta Coleridge remained as the guest of Dr. John (afterwards Sir John) Stoddart, at that time H.M. Advocate at Malta.] [Sidenote: FACTS AND FICTION] Facts! Never be weary of discussing and exposing the hollowness of these. [For, in the first place,] every man [is] an accomplice on one side or the other, [and, secondly, there is] _human testimony_. "You were in fault, I hear," said B to C, and B had heard it from A. [Now] A had said, "And C, God bless her, was perhaps the innocent occasion"! But what a trifle this to the generality of blunders! [Sidenote: CANDOUR ANOTHER NAME FOR CANT] [I have no pity or patience for that], blindness which comes from putting out your own eyes and in mock humility refusing to form an opinion on the right and the wrong of a question. "If we say so of the Sicilians, why may not Buonaparte say this of the Swiss?" and so forth. As if England and France, Swiss and Sicilian were the x y z of Algebra, naked names of unknown quantities. [What is this but] to fix morals without morality, and [to allow] general rules to supersede all particular thought? And though it be never acted on in reality, yet the opinion is pernicious. It kills public spirit and deadens national effort. [Sidenote: A SIMILE] The little point, or, sometimes, minim globe of flame remains on the [newly] lighted taper for three minutes or more unaltered. But, see, it is given over, and then, at once, the flame darts or plunges down into the wick, then up again, and all is bright--a fair cone of flame, with its black column in it, and minor cone, shadow-coloured, resting upon the blue flame the common base of the two cones, that is, of the whole flame. A pretty detailed simile in the manner of J. Taylor might be made of this, applying it to slow learners, to opportunities of grace manifestly neglected and seemingly lost and useless. [Sidenote: O STAR BENIGN] Monday evening, July 9, 1804, about 8 o'clock. The glorious evening star coasted the moon, and at length absolutely crested its upper tip.... It was the most singular and at the same time beautiful sight I ever beheld. Oh, that it could have appeared the same in England, at Grasmere! [Sidenote: NEFAS EST AB HOSTE DOCERI] In the Jacobinism of anti-jacobins, note the dreariest feature of Jacobins, a contempt for the institutions of our ancestors and of past wisdom, which has generated Cobbetts and contempt of the liberty of the press and of liberty itself. Men are not wholly unmodified by the opinion of their fellow-men, even when they happen to be enemies or (still worse) of the opposite faction. [Sidenote: THE MANY AND THE ONE] I saw in early youth, as in a dream, the birth of the planets; and my eyes beheld as _one_ what the understanding afterwards divided into (1) the origin of the masses, (2) the origin of their motions, and (3) the site or position of their circles and ellipses. All the deviations, too, were seen as one intuition of one the self-same necessity, and this necessity was a law of spirit, and all was spirit. And in matter all beheld the past activity of others or their own--and this reflection, this echo is matter--its only essence, if essence it be. And of this, too, I saw the necessity and understood it, but I understood not how infinite multitude and manifoldness could be one; only I saw and understood that it was yet more out of my power to comprehend how it could be otherwise--and in this unity I worshipped in the depth of knowledge that passes all understanding the Being of all things--and in Being their sole goodness--and I saw that God is the One, the Good--possesses it not, but _is it_. [Sidenote: THE WINDMILL AND ITS SHADOW] The visibility of motion at a great distance is increased by all that increases the the distinct visibility of the moving object. This Saturday, August 3, 1804, in the room immediately under the tower in St. Antonio, as I was musing on the difference, whether ultimate or only of degree, between _auffassen_ and _erkennen_ (an idea received and an idea acquired) I saw on the top of the distant hills a shadow on the sunny ground moving very fast and wave-like, yet always in the same place, which I should have attributed to the windmill close by, but the windmill (which I saw distinctly too) appeared at rest. On steady gazing, however, (and most plainly with my spy-glass) I found that it was not at rest, but that this was its shadow. The windmill itself was white in the sunshine, and there were sunny white clouds at its back, the shadow black on the white ground. [Sidenote: SYRACUSE Thursday night at the Opera, September 27, 1804] In reflecting on the cause of the "meeting soul" in music, the seeming recognisance etc., etc., the whole explanation of _memory_ as in the nature of _accord_ struck upon me; accord produces a phantom of memory, because memory is always in accord. [Sidenote: Oct. 5, 1804] Philosophy to a few, religion with many, is the friend of poetry, as producing the two conditions of pleasure arising from poetry, namely tranquillity and the attachment of the affections to _generalisations_. God, soul, Heaven, the Gospel miracles, etc., are a sort of _poetry_ compared with Lombard Street and Change Alley speculations. [Sidenote: A SERIOUS MEMORANDUM Syracuse, Saturday, Oct. 5, 1804] In company, indeed, with all except a very chosen few, never dissent from anyone as to the _merits_ of another, especially in your own supposed department, but content yourself with praising, in your turn; the really good praises of the unworthy are felt by a good man, and man of genius as detractions from the worthy, and robberies--so the _flashy_ moderns seem to _rob_ the ancients of the honours due to them, and Bacon and Harrington are _not_ read because Hume and Condillac _are_. This is an evil; but oppose it, if at all, in books in which you can evolve the whole of your reasons and feeling, not in conversation when it will be inevitably attributed to envy. Besides, they who praise the unworthy must be the injudicious: and the eulogies of critics without taste or judgment are the natural pay of authors without feeling or genius--and why rob them? _Sint unicuique sua præmia._ Coleridge! Coleridge! will you never learn to appropriate your conversation to your company! Is it not desecration, indelicacy, and a proof of great weakness and even vanity to talk to, etc. etc., as if you [were talking to] Wordsworth or Sir G. Beaumont? [Sidenote: "CAST NOT YOUR PEARLS BEFORE SWINE"] [Sidenote: Oct. 11, Syracuse, Lecky's, midnight] O young man, who hast seen, felt and known the truth, to whom reality is a phantom and virtue and mind the sole actual and permanent being, do not degrade the truth in thee by disputing. Avoid it! do not by any persuasion be tempted to it! Surely not by vanity or the weakness of the pleasure of communicating thy thoughts and awaking sympathy, but not even by the always mixed hope of producing conviction. This is not the mode, this is not the time, not the place. [Truth will be better served] by modestly and most truly saying, "Your arguments are all consequent, if the foundation be admitted. I do not admit the foundation. But this will be a business for moments of thought, for a Sabbath-day of your existence. Then, perhaps, a voice from within will say to you, better, because [in a manner] more adapted to you, all I can say. But if I felt this to _be_ that day or that moment, a sacred sympathy would at once compel and inspire me to the task of uttering the very truth. Till then I am right willing to bear the character of a mystic, a visionary, or self-important juggler, who nods his head and says, 'I could if I would.' But I cannot, I _may_ not, bear the reproach of profaning the truth which is my life in moments when all passions heterogeneous to it are eclipsing it to the exclusion of its dimmest ray. I might lose my tranquillity, and in acquiring the _passion_ of proselytism lose the _sense_ of conviction. I might become _positive_! Now I am _certain_! I might have the heat and fermentation, now I have the warmth of life." [Sidenote: THE YEARNING OF THE FINITE FOR THE INFINITE: Oct. 13, 1804, Saturday, Syracuse] Each man having a spark (to use the old metaphor) of the Divinity, yet a whole fire-grate of humanity--each, therefore, will legislate for the whole, and spite of the _De gustibus non est disputandum_, even in trifles--and, till corrected by experience, at least, in this endless struggle of presumption, really occasioned by the ever-working spark of the Universal, in the disappointments and baffled attempts of each, all are disposed to [admit] the _jus extrinsecum_ of Spinoza, and recognise that reason as the highest which may not be understood as the best, but of which the concrete possession is felt to be the strongest. Then come society, habit, education, misery, intrigue, oppression, then _revolution_, and the circle begins anew. Each man will universalise his notions, and, yet, each is variously finite. To _reconcile_, therefore, is truly the work of the inspired! This is the true _Atonement_--that is, to reconcile the struggles of the infinitely various finite with the _permanent_. [Sidenote: A MEASURE IN SELF-REPROOF] Do not be too much discouraged, if any virtue _should_ be mixed, in your consciousness, with affectation and imperfect sincerity, and some vanity. Disapprove of this, and continue the practice of the good feeling, even though mixed, and it will _gradually_ purify itself. _Probatum est_. Disapprove, be _ashamed_ of the thought, of its always continuing thus, but do not harshly quarrel with your present self, for all virtue subsists in and by pleasure. S. T. C. Sunday evening, October 14, 1804. But a great deal of this is constitutional. That constitution which predisposes to certain virtues, the [Greek: Dôron Theôn], has this [Greek: temenos Nemeseôs] in it. It is the dregs of sympathy, and while we are _weak_ and dependent on each other, and each is forced to think often for himself, sympathy will have its dregs, and the strongest, who have least of these, have the dregs of other virtues to strain off. [Sidenote: THE OPERA] All the objections to the opera are equally applicable to tragedy and comedy without music, and all proceed on the false principle that theatrical representations are _copies_ of nature, whereas they are imitations. [Sidenote: A SALVE FOR WOUNDED VANITY] When you are harassed, disquieted, and have little dreams of resentment, and mock triumphs in consequence of the clearest perceptions of unkind treatment and strange misconceptions and illogicalities, palpably from bad passion, in any person connected with you, suspect a sympathy in yourself with some of these bad passions--vanity, for instance. Though a sense of wounded justice is possible, nay, probably, forms a part of your uneasy feelings, yet this of itself would yield, at the first moment of reflection, to pity for the wretched state of a man too untranquil and perpetually selfish to love anything for itself or without some end of vanity or ambition--who detests all poetry, tosses about in the impotence of desires disproportionate to his powers, and whose whole history of his whole life is a tale of disappointment in circumstances where the hope and pretension was always unwise, often presumptuous and insolent. Surely an intuition of this restless and no-end-having mood of mind would at once fill a hearer having no sympathy with these passions with tender melancholy, virtuously mixed with grateful unpharisaic self-complacency. But a patient _almost_, but not quite, recovered from madness, yet on its confines, finds in the notions of madness that which irritates and haunts and makes unhappy. [Sidenote: OFFICIAL DISTRUST] Malta, Friday, Nov. 23, 1804. One of the heart-depressing habits and temptations of men in power, as governors, &c., is to make _instruments_ of their fellow-creatures, and the moment they find a man of honour and talents, instead of loving and esteeming him, they wish to _use him_. Hence that self-betraying side-and-down look of cunning; and they justify and inveterate the habit by believing that every individual who approaches has selfish designs on them. [Sidenote: FOR THE "SOOTHER IN ABSENCE"] Days and weeks and months pass on, and now a year--and the sea, the sea, and the breeze have their influences on me, and [so, too, has the association with] good and sensible men. I feel a pleasure upon me, and I am, to the outward view, cheerful, and have myself no distinct consciousness of the contrary, for I use my faculties, not, indeed, at once, but freely. But, oh! I am never happy, never deeply gladdened. I know not--I have forgotten--what the _joy_ is of which the heart is full, as of a deep and quiet fountain overflowing insensibly, or the gladness of joy, when the fountain overflows ebullient. The most common appearance in wintry weather is that of the sun under a sharp, defined level line of a stormy cloud, that stretches one-third or half round the circle of the horizon, thrice the height of the space that intervenes between it and the horizon, which last is about half again as broad as the sun. [At length] out comes the sun, a mass of brassy light, himself lost and diffused in his [own] strong splendour. Compare this with the beautiful summer _set_ of colours without cloud. Even in the most tranquil dreams, one is much less a mere spectator [than in reveries or day-dreams]. One seems always about to do, [to be] suffering, or thinking or talking. I do not recollect [in dreams] that state of feeling, so common when awake, of thinking on one subject and looking at another; or [of looking] at a whole prospect, till at last, perhaps, or by intervals, at least, you only look passively at the prospect. [Sidenote: MULTUM IN PARVO] At Dresden there is a cherry-stone engraved with eighty-five portraits. Christ and the Twelve Apostles form one group, the table and supper all drawn by the letters of the text--at once portraits and language. This is a universal particular language--Roman Catholic language with a vengeance. The beautifully _white_ sails of the Mediterranean, so carefully, when in port, put up into clean bags; and the interesting circumstance of the Spéronara's sailing without a compass--by an obscure sense of time. [Sidenote: THROUGH DOUBT TO FAITH] So far from deeming it, in a religious point of view, criminal to spread doubts of God, immortality and virtue (that 3 = 1) in the minds of individuals, I seem to see in it a duty--lest men by taking the _words_ for granted never attain the feeling or the true _faith_. They only forbear, that is, even to suspect that the idea is erroneous or the communicators deceivers, but do not _believe_ the idea itself. Whereas to _doubt_ has more of faith, nay even to disbelieve, than that blank negation of all such thoughts and feelings which is the lot of the herd of church-and-meeting-trotters. [Sidenote: AN APOLOGY FOR COTTLE] The Holy Ghost, say the harmonists, left all the solecisms, Hebraisms, and low Judaic prejudices as evidences of the credibility of the Apostles. So, too, the Theophneusty left Cottle his Bristolisms, not to take away the credit from him and give it to the Muses. [Sidenote: FOR THE "SOOTHER IN ABSENCE"] His fine mind met vice and vicious thoughts by accident only, as a poet running through terminations in the heat of composing a rhyme-poem on the purest and best subjects, startles and half-vexedly turns away from a foul or impure word. The gracious promises and sweetnesses and aids of religion are alarming and distressful to a trifling, light, fluttering gay child of fashion and vanity, as its threats and reproaches and warnings--as a little bird which fears as much when you come to give it food as when you come with a desire to kill or imprison it. That is a striking legend of Caracciolo and his floating corse, that came to ask the King of Naples' pardon. Final causes answer to why? not to how? and who ever supposed that they did? O those crinkled, ever-varying circles which the moonlight makes in the not calm, yet not wavy sea! Quarantine, Malta, Saturday, Nov. 10, 1804. [Sidenote: THE CREATIVE POWER OF WORDS AND IMAGES] Hard to express that sense of the analogy or likeness of a thing which enables a symbol to represent it so that we think of the thing itself, yet knowing that the thing is not present to us. Surely on this universal fact of words and images depends, by more or less mediations, the imitation, instead of the _copy_ which is illustrated, in very nature Shaksperianised--that Proteus essence that could assume the very form, but yet known and felt not to be the thing by that difference of the substance which made every atom of the form another thing, that likeness not identity--an exact web, every line of direction miraculously the same, but the one worsted, the other silk. [Sidenote: SHAKSPERE AND MALONE] Rival editors have recourse to necromancy to know from Shakspere himself who of them is the fittest to edit and illustrate him. Describe the meeting, the ceremonies of conjuration, the appearance of the spirit, the effect on the rival invokers. When they have resumed courage, the arbiter appointed by them asks the question. They listen, Malone leaps up while the rest lay their heads at the same instant that the arbiter re-echoes the words of the spirit, "Let Malone!" The spirit shudders, then exclaims in the dread and angry utterance of the dead, "No! no! Let me alone, I said, inexorable boobies!" O that eternal bricker-up of Shakspere! Registers, memorandum-books--and that Bill, Jack and Harry, Tom, Walter and Gregory, Charles, Dick and Jim, lived at that house, but that nothing more is known of them. But, oh! the importance when half-a-dozen players'-bills can be made to stretch through half-a-hundred or more of pages, though there is not one word in them that by any force can be made either to illustrate the times or life or writings of Shakspere, or, indeed, of any time. And, yet, no edition but this gentleman's name _burs_ upon it--_burglossa_ with a vengeance. Like the genitive plural of a Greek adjective, it is Malone, Malone, Malone, [Greek: Malôn, Malôn, Malôn]. [Edmund Malone's _Variorum_ edition of Shakspere was published in 1790.] [Sidenote: OF THE FROWARDNESS OF WOMAN December 11, 1804] It is a remark that I have made many times, and many times, I guess, shall repeat, that women are infinitely fonder of clinging to and beating about, hanging upon and keeping up, and reluctantly letting fall any doleful or painful or unpleasant subject, than men of the same class and rank. [Sidenote: NE QUID NIMIS] A young man newly arrived in the West Indies, who happened to be sitting next to a certain Captain Reignia, observed by way of introducing a conversation, "It is a very fine day, sir!" "Yes, sir," was the abrupt reply, "and be damned to it; it is never otherwise in this damned rascally climate." [Sidenote: WE ASK NOT WHENCE BUT WHAT AND WHITHER] I addressed a butterfly on a pea-blossom thus, "Beautiful Psyche, soul of a blossom, that art visiting and hovering o'er thy former friends whom thou hast left!" Had I forgot the caterpillar? or did I dream like a mad metaphysician that the caterpillar's hunger for plants was self-love, recollection, and a lust that in its next state refined itself into love? Dec. 12, 1804. [Sidenote: ANALOGY] Different means to the same end seem to constitute analogy. Seeing and touching are analogous senses with respect to magnitude, figure, &c.--they would, and to a certain extent do, supply each other's place. The air-vessels of fish and of insects are analogous to lungs--the end the same, however different the means. No one would say, "Lungs are analogous to lungs," and it seems to me either inaccurate or involving some true conception obscurely, when we speak of planets by analogy of ours--for here, knowing nothing but likeness, we presume the difference from the remoteness and difficulty, in the vulgar apprehension, of considering those pin-points as worlds. So, likewise, instead of the phrase "analogy of the past," applied to historical reasoning, nine times out of ten I should say, "by the example of the past." This may appear verbal trifling, but "_animadverte quam sit ab improprietate verborum pronum hominibus prolabi in errores circa res_." In short, analogy always implies a difference in kind and not merely in degree. There is an analogy between dimness and numbness and a certain state of the sense of hearing correspondent to these, which produces confusion with _magnification_, for which we have no name. But between light green and dark green, between a mole and a lynceus, there is a gradation, no analogy. [Sidenote: COROLLARY] Between beasts and men, when the same actions are performed by both, are the means analogous or different only in degree? That is the question! The sameness of the end and the equal fitness of the means prove no identity of means. I can only read, but understand no arithmetic. Yet, by Napier's tables or the _House-keepers' Almanack_, I may even arrive at the conclusion quicker than a tolerably expert mathematician. Yet, still, reading and reckoning are utterly different things. [Sidenote: THOMAS WEDGWOOD AND REIMARUS] In Reimarus on _The Instincts of Animals_, Tom Wedgwood's ground-principle of the influx of memory on perception is fully and beautifully detailed. ["Observations Moral and Philosophical on the Instinct of Animals, their Industry and their Manners," by Herman Samuel Reimarus, was published in 1770. See _Biographia Literaria_, chapter vi. and _Note_, by Mrs. H. N. Coleridge in the Appendix, _Coleridge's Works_, Harper & Brothers, iii. 225, 717.] [Sidenote: HINC ILLA MARGINALIA] It is often said that books are companions. They are so, dear, very dear companions! But I often, when I read a book that delights me on the whole, feel a pang that the author is not present, that I cannot _object_ to him this and that, express my sympathy and gratitude for this part and mention some facts that self-evidently overset a second, start a doubt about a third, or confirm and carry [on] a fourth thought. At times I become restless, for my nature is very social. [Sidenote: CORRUPTIO OPTIMI PESSIMA] "Well" (says Lady Ball), "the Catholic religion is better than none." Why, to be sure, it is called a religion, but the question is, Is it a religion? Sugar of lead! better than no sugar! Put oil of vitriol into my salad--well, better than no oil at all! Or a fellow vends a poison under the name of James' powders--well, we must get the best we can--better that than none! So did not our noble ancestors reason or feel, or we should now be slaves and even as the Sicilians are at this day, or worse, for even they have been made less foolish, in spite of themselves, by others' wisdom. [Sidenote: REIMARUS AND THE "INSTINCTS OF ANIMALS"] I have read with wonder and delight that passage of Reimarus in which he speaks of the immense multitude of plants, and the curious, regular _choice_ of different herbivorous animals with respect to them, and the following pages in which he treats of the pairing of insects and the equally wonderful processes of egg-laying and so forth. All in motion! the sea-fish to the shores and rivers--the land crab to the sea-shore! I would fain describe all the creation thus agitated by the one or other of the three instincts--self-preservation, childing, and child-preservation. Set this by Darwin's theory of the maternal instinct--O mercy! the blindness of the man! and it is imagination, forsooth! that misled him--too much poetry in his philosophy! this abject deadness of all that sense of the obscure and indefinite, this superstitious fetish-worship of lazy or fascinated fancy! O this, indeed, deserves to be dwelt on. Think of all this as an absolute revelation, a real presence of Deity, and compare it with historical traditionary religion. There are two revelations--the material and the moral--and the former is not to be seen but by the latter. As St. Paul has so well observed: "By worldly wisdom no man ever arrived at God;" but having seen Him by the moral sense, then we _understand_ the outward world. Even as with books, no book of itself teaches a language in the first instance; but having by sympathy of soul learnt it, we then understand the book--that is, the _Deus minor_ in His work. The _hirschkäfer_ (stag-beetle) in its worm state makes its bed-chamber, prior to its metamorphosis, half as long as itself. Why? There was a stiff horn turned under its belly, which in the fly state must project and harden, and this required exactly that length. The sea-snail creeps out of its house, which, thus hollowed, lifts him aloft, and is his boat and cork jacket; the Nautilus, additionally, spreads a thin skin as a sail. All creatures obey the great game-laws of Nature, and fish with nets of such meshes as permit many to escape, and preclude the taking of many. So two races are saved, the one by taking part, and the other by part not being taken. [Sidenote: ENTOMOLOGY VERSUS ONTOLOGY] Wonderful, perplexing divisibility of life! It is related by D. Unzer, an authority wholly to be relied on, that an _ohrwurm_ (earwig) cut in half ate its own hinder part! Will it be the reverse with Great Britain and America? The head of the rattlesnake severed from the body bit it and squirted out its poison, as is related by Beverley in his History of Virginia. Lyonnet in his Insect. Theol. tells us that he tore a wasp in half and, three days after, the fore-half bit whatever was presented to it of its former food, and the hind-half darted out its sting at being touched. Stranger still, a turtle has been known to live six months with his head off, and to wander about, yea, six hours after its heart and intestines (all but the lungs) were taken out! How shall we think of this compatibly with the monad soul? If I say, what has spirit to do with space?--what odd dreams it would suggest! or is every animal a republic _in se_? or is there one Breeze of Life, "at once the soul of each, and God of all?" Is it not strictly analogous to generation, and no more contrary to unity than it? But IT? Aye! there's the twist in the logic. Is not the reproduction of the lizard a complete generation? O it is easy to dream, and, surely, better of these things than of a £20,000 prize in the lottery, or of a place at Court. Dec. 13, 1804. [Sidenote: FOR THE "SOOTHER IN ABSENCE"] To trace the if not absolute birth, yet the growth and endurancy of language, from the mother talking to the child at her breast. O what a subject for some happy moment of deep feeling and strong imagination! Of the Quintetta in the Syracuse opera and the pleasure of the voices--one and not one, they leave, seek, pursue, oppose, fight with, strengthen, annihilate each other, awake, enliven, soothe, flatter and embrace each other again, till at length they die away in one tone. There is no sweeter image of wayward yet fond lovers, of seeking and finding, of the love-quarrel, and the making-up, of the losing and the yearning regret, of the doubtful, the complete recognition, and of the total melting union. Words are not interpreters, but fellow-combatants. Title for a Medical Romance:--The adventures, rivalry, warfare and final union and partnership of Dr. Hocus and Dr. Pocus. Idly talk they who speak of poets as mere indulgers of fancy, imagination, superstition, etc. They are the bridlers by delight, the purifiers; they that combine all these with reason and order--the true protoplasts--Gods of Love who tame the chaos. To deduce instincts from obscure recollections of a pre-existing state--I have often thought of it. "Ey!" I have said, when I have seen certain tempers and actions in Hartley, "that is I in my future state." So I think, oftentimes, that my children are my soul--that multitude and division are not [O mystery!] necessarily subversive of unity. I am sure that two very different meanings, if not more, lurk in the word One. The drollest explanation of instinct is that of Mylius, who attributes every act to pain, and all the wonderful webs and envelopes of spiders, caterpillars, etc., absolutely to fits of colic or paroxysms of dry belly-ache! This Tarantula-dance of repetitions and vertiginous argumentation _in circulo_, begun in imposture and self-consummated in madness! While the whole planet (_quoad_ its Lord or, at least, Lord-Lieutenancy) is in stir and bustle, why should not I keep in time with the tune, and, like old Diogenes, roll my tub about? I cannot too often remember that to be deeply interested and to be highly satisfied are not always commensurate. Apply this to the affecting and yet unnatural passages of the _Stranger_ or of _John Bull_, and to the finest passages in Shakspere, such as the death of Cleopatra or Hamlet. [Sidenote: A SUNDOG Dec. 15, 1804] Saw the limb of a rainbow footing itself on the sea at a small apparent distance from the shore, a thing of itself--no substrate cloud or even mist visible--but the distance glimmered through it as through a thin semi-transparent hoop. [Sidenote: THE SQUARE, THE CIRCLE, THE PYRAMID] To be and to act, two in Intellect (that mother of orderly multitude, and half-sister of Wisdom and Madness) but one in essence = to rest, and to move = [sq] and a [cir]! and out of the infinite combinations of these, from the more and the less, now of one now of the other, all pleasing figures and the sources of all pleasure arise. But the pyramid, that base of stedfastness that rises, yet never deserts itself nor can, approaches to the [cir]. Sunday. Midnight. Malta. December 16th, 1804. [Sidenote: THE PYRAMID IN ART] I can make out no other affinity [in the pyramid] to the circle but by taking its evanescence as the central point, and so, having thus gained a melting of the radii in the circumference [by proceeding to] _look_ it into the object. Extravagance! Why? Does not everyone do this in looking at any conspicuous three stars together? does not every one see by the inner vision, a triangle? However, this is in art; but the prototype in nature is, indeed, loveliness. In Nature there are no straight lines, or [such straight lines as there are] have the soul of curves, from activity and positive rapid energy. Or, whether the line seem curve or straight, yet _here_, in nature, is motion--motion in its most significant form. It is motion in that form which has been chosen to express motion in general, hieroglyphical from pre-eminence, [and by this very pre-eminence, in the particular instance, made significant of motion in its totality]. Hence, though it chance that a line in nature should be perfectly straight, there is no need here of any curve whose effect is that of embleming motion and counteracting actual solidity by that emblem. For here the line [in contra-distinction to the line in art] is actual motion, and therefore a balancing _Figurite_ of rest and solidity. But I will study the wood-fire this evening in the Palace. [Sidenote: Wednesday Night, 11 o'clock, December 19] I see now that the eye refuses to decide whether it be surface or convexity, for the exquisite oneness of the flame makes even its angles so different from the angles of tangible substances. Its exceeding oneness added to its very subsistence in motion is the very _soul_ of the loveliest curve--it does not need its body as it were. Its sharpest point is, however, rounded, and besides it is cased within its own penumbra. [Sidenote: FOR THE "SOOTHER IN ABSENCE" Friday Morning, Dec. 21, 8 o'clock] How beautiful a circumstance, the improvement of the flower, from the root up to that crown of its life and labours, that bridal-chamber of its beauty and its two-fold love, the nuptial and the parental--the womb, the cradle, and the nursery of the garden! _Quisque sui faber_--a pretty simile this would make to a young lady producing beauty by moral feeling. Nature may be personified as the [Greek: polymêchanos erganê], an ever industrious Penelope, for ever unravelling what she has woven, for ever weaving what she has unravelled. [Sidenote: THE MEDITERRANEAN] Oh, said I, as I looked at the blue, yellow, green and purple-green sea, with all its hollows and swells, and cut-glass surfaces--oh, what an _ocean_ of lovely forms! And I was vexed, teased that the sentence sounded like a play of words! _That_ it was not--the mind within me was struggling to express the marvellous distinctness and unconfounded personality of each of the million millions of forms, and yet the individual unity in which they subsisted. A brisk gale and the foam that peopled the _alive_ sea, most interestingly combined with the number of white sea-gulls, that, repeatedly, it seemed as if the foam-spit had taken life and wing and had flown up--the white precisely-same-colour birds rose up so close by the ever-perishing white-water wavehead, that the eye was unable to detect the illusion which the mind delighted to indulge in. O that sky, that soft, blue, mighty arch resting on the mountain or solid sea-like plain--what an awful omneity in unity! I know no other perfect union of the sublime with the beautiful, so that they should be felt, that is, at the same minute, though by different faculties, and yet, each faculty be predisposed, by itself, to receive the specific modifications from the other. To the eye it is an inverted goblet, the inside of a sapphire basin, perfect beauty in shape and colour. To the mind, it is immensity; but even the eye feels as if it were [able] to look through with [a] dim sense of the non-resistance--it is not exactly the feeling given to the organ by solid and limited things, [but] the eye feels that the limitation is in its own power, not in the object. But [hereafter] to pursue this in the manner of the old Hamburg poet [Klopstock]. [Sidenote: I WILL LIFT UP MINE EYES TO THE HILLS] One travels along with the lines of a mountain. Years ago I wanted to make Wordsworth sensible of this. How fine is Keswick vale! Would I repose, my soul lies and is quiet upon the broad level vale. Would it act? it darts up into the mountain-top like a kite, and like a chamois-goat runs along the ridge--or like a boy that makes a sport on the road of running along a wall or narrow fence! [Sidenote: FORM AND FEELING] One of the most noticeable and fruitful facts in psychology is the modification of the same feeling by difference of form. The Heaven lifts up my soul, the sight of the ocean seems to widen it. We feel the same force at work, but the difference, whether in mind or body that we should feel in actual travelling horizontally or in direct ascent, _that_ we feel in fancy. For what are our feelings of this kind but a motion imagined, [together] with the feelings that would accompany that motion, [but] less distinguished, more blended, more rapid, more confused, and, thereby, co-adunated? Just as white is the very emblem of one in being the confusion of all. [Sidenote: VERBUM SAPIENTIBUS] Mem.--Not to hastily abandon and kick away the means after the end is or seems to be accomplished. So have I, in blowing out the paper or match with which I have lit a candle, blown out the candle at the same instant. [Sidenote: THE CONTINUITY OF SENSATIONS] How opposite to nature and the fact to talk of the "one moment" of Hume, of our whole being an aggregate of successive single sensations! Who ever felt a single sensation? Is not every one at the same moment conscious that there co-exist a thousand others, a darker shade, or less light, even as when I fix my attention on a white house or a grey bare hill or rather long ridge that runs out of sight each way (how often I want the German _unübersekbar_!) [untranslatable]--the pretended sight-sensation, is it anything more than the light-point in every picture either of nature or of a good painter? and, again, subordinately, in every component part of the picture? And what is a moment? Succession with interspace? Absurdity! It is evidently only the _icht-punct_ in the indivisible undivided duration. See yonder rainbow strangely preserving its form on broken clouds, with here a bit out, here a bit in, yet still a rainbow--even as you might place bits of coloured ribbon at distances, so as to preserve the form of a bow to the mind. Dec. 25, 1804. [Sidenote: HIS CONVERSATION, A NIMIETY OF IDEAS, NOT OF WORDS] There are two sorts of talkative fellows whom it would be injurious to confound, and I, S. T. Coleridge, am the latter. The first sort is of those who use five hundred words more than needs to express an idea--that is not my case. Few men, I will be bold to say, put more meaning into their words than I, or choose them more deliberately and discriminately. The second sort is of those who use five hundred more ideas, images, reasons, &c., than there is any need of to arrive at their object, till the only object arrived at is that the mind's eye of the bystander is dazzled with colours succeeding so rapidly as to leave one vague impression that there has been a great blaze of colours all about something. Now this is my case, and a grievous fault it is. My illustrations swallow up my thesis. I feel too intensely the omnipresence of all in each, platonically speaking; or, psychologically, my brain-fibres, or the spiritual light which abides in the brain-marrow, as visible light appears to do in sundry rotten mackerel and other _smashy_ matters, is of too general an affinity with all things, and though it perceives the _difference_ of things, yet is eternally pursuing the likenesses, or, rather, that which is common [between them]. Bring me two things that seem the very same, and then I am quick enough [not only] to show the difference, even to hair-splitting, but to go on from circle to circle till I break against the shore of my hearers' patience, or have my concentricals dashed to nothing by a snore. That is my ordinary mishap. At Malta, however, no one can charge me with one or the other. I have earned the general character of being a quiet well-meaning man, rather dull indeed! and who would have thought that he had been a _poet_! "O, a very wretched poetaster, ma'am! As to the reviews, 'tis well known he half-ruined himself in paying cleverer fellows than himself to write them," &c. [Sidenote: THE EMBRYONIC SOUL] How far might one imagine all the theory of association out of a system of growth, by applying to the brain and soul what we know of an embryo? One tiny particle combines with another its like, and, so, lengthens and thickens, and this is, at once, memory and increasing vividness of impression. One might make a very amusing allegory of an embryo soul up to birth! Try! it is promising! You have not above three hundred volumes to write before you come to it, and as you write, perhaps, a volume once in ten years, you have ample time. My dear fellow! never be ashamed of scheming--you can't think of living less than 4000 years, and that would nearly suffice for your present schemes. To be sure, if they go on in the same ratio to the performance, then a small difficulty arises; but never mind! look at the bright side always and die in a dream! Oh! [Sidenote: OF A NEW HYPOTHESIS] The evil effect of a new hypothesis or even of a new nomenclature is, that many minds which had familiarised themselves to the old one, and were riding on the road of discovery accustomed to their horse, if put on a new animal, lose time in learning how to sit him; while the others, looking too stedfastly at a few facts which the jeweller Hypothesis had set in a perfectly beautiful whole, forget to dig for more, though inhabitants of a Golconda. However, it has its advantages too, and these have been ably pointed out. It excites contradiction, and is thence a stimulus to new experiments to _support_, and to a more severe repetition of these experiments and of other new ones to _confute_ [arguments pro and con]. And, besides, one must alloy severe truth with a little fancy, in order to mint it into common coin. [Sidenote: HIS INDEBTEDNESS TO GERMAN PHILOSOPHY] In the preface of my metaphysical works, I should say--"Once for all, read Kant, Fichte, &c., and then you will trace, or, if you are on the hunt, track me." Why, then, not acknowledge your obligations step by step? Because I could not do so in a multitude of glaring resemblances without a lie, for they had been mine, formed and full-formed, before I had ever heard of these writers, because to have fixed on the particular instances in which I have really been indebted to these writers would have been hard, if possible, to me who read for truth and self-satisfaction, and not to make a book, and who always rejoiced and was jubilant when I found my own ideas well expressed by others--and, lastly, let me say, because (I am proud, perhaps, but) I seem to know that much of the _matter_ remains my own, and that the _soul_ is mine. I fear not him for a critic who can confound a fellow-thinker with a compiler. [Sidenote: THE METAPHYSICIAN AT BAY] Good heavens! that there should be anything at all, and not nothing. Ask the bluntest faculty that pretends to reason, and, if indeed he have felt and reasoned, he must feel that something is to be sought after out of the vulgar track of Change-Alley speculation. If my researches are shadowy, what, in the name of reason, are you? or do you resign all pretence to reason, and consider yourself--nay, even that in a contradiction--as a passive [cir] among Nothings? [Sidenote: MEANS TO ENDS] How flat and common-place! O that it were in my heart, nerves, and muscles! O that it were the _prudential_ soul of all I love, of all who deserve to be loved, in every proposed action to ask yourself, To what end is this? and how is this the means? and not the means to something else foreign to or abhorrent from my purpose? _Distinct means to distinct ends!_ With friends and beloved ones follow the heart. Better be deceived twenty times than suspect one-twentieth of once; but with strangers, or enemies, or in a quarrel, whether in the world's squabbles, as Dr. Stoddart's and Dr. Sorel in the Admiralty Court at Malta; or in moral businesses, as mine with Southey or Lloyd (O pardon me, dear and honoured Southey, that I put such a name by the side of yours....)--in all those cases, write your letter, disburthen yourself, and when you have done it--even as when you have pared, sliced, vinegared, oiled, peppered and salted your plate of cucumber, you are directed to smell it, and then throw it out of the window--so, dear friend, vinegar, pepper and salt your letter--your cucumber argument, that is, cool reasoning previously sauced with passion and sharpness--then read it, eat it, drink it, smell it, with eyes and ears (a small catachresis but never mind), and then throw it into the fire--unless you can put down in three or four sentences (I cannot allow more than one side of a sheet of paper) the _distinct end_ for which you conceive this letter (or whatever it be) to be the _distinct means_! How trivial! Would to God it were only _habitual_! O what is sadder than that the _crambe bis cocta_ of the understanding should be and remain a foreign dish to the efficient _will_--that the best and loftiest precepts of wisdom should be trivial, and the worst and lowest modes of folly habitual. [Sidenote: VERBAL CONCEITS] I have learnt, sometimes not _at all_, and seldom _harshly_, to chide those conceits of words which are analogous to sudden fleeting affinities of mind. Even, as in a dance, you touch and join and off again, and rejoin your partner that leads down with you the dance, in spite of these occasional off-starts--for they, too, not merely conform to, but are of and in and help to form the delicious harmony. Shakspere is not a thousandth part so faulty as the [scir][scir][scir] believe him. "Thus him that over-rul'd I over-sway'd," etc., etc. I noticed this to that bubbling ice-spring of cold-hearted, mad-headed fanaticism, the late Dr. Geddes, in the "_Heri vidi fragilem frangi, hodie mortalem mori_." [Dr. Alexander Geddes, 1737-1802, was, _inter alia_, author of a revised translation of the Scriptures.] [Sidenote: THE BRIGHT BLUE SEA] How often I have occasion to notice with pure delight the depth of the exceeding blueness of the Mediterranean from my window! It is often, indeed, purple; but I am speaking of its blueness--a perfect blue, so very pure an one. The sea is like a night-sky; and but for its _planities_, it were as if the night-sky were a thing that turned round and lay in the day-time under the paler Heaven. And it is on this expanse that the vessels have the fine white dazzling cotton sails. [Sidenote: THE BIRTH OF THE IDEA] Centuries before their mortal incarnation, Jove was wont to manifest to the gods the several creations as they emerged from the divine ideal. Now it was reported in heaven that an unusually fair creation of a woman was emerging, and Venus, fearful that her son should become enamoured as of yore with Psyche (what time he wandered alone, his bow unslung, and using his darts only to cut out her name on rocks and trees, or, at best, to shoot hummingbirds and birds of Paradise to make feather-chaplets for her hair, and the world, meanwhile, grown loveless, hardened into the Iron Age), entreats Jove to secrete this form [of perilous beauty]. But Cupid, who had heard the report, and fondly expected a re-manifestation of Psyche, hid himself in the hollow of the sacred oak beneath which the Father of Gods had withdrawn as to an unapproachable adytum, and beheld the Idea emerging in its _First Glory_. Forthwith the wanton was struck blind by the splendour ere yet the blaze had defined itself with form, and now his arrows strike but vaguely. [Sidenote: THE CONVERSION OF CERES] I have somewhere read, or I have dreamt, a wild tale of Ceres' loss of Proserpine, and her final recovery of her daughter by means of Christ when He descended into hell, at which time she met Him and abjured all worship for the future. It were a quaint mythological conceit to feign that the gods of Greece and Rome were some of the _best_ of the fallen spirits, and that of their number _Apollo_, Mars, and the Muses were converted to Christianity, and became different saints. [Sidenote: AS THE SPARKS FLY UPWARD] The ribbed flame--its snatches of impatience, that half-seem, and only _seem_ that half, to baffle its upward rush--the eternal unity of individualities whose essence is in their distinguishableness, even as thought and _fancies_ in the mind; the points of so many cherubic swords snatched back, but never discouraged, still fountaining upwards:--flames self-snatched up heavenward, if earth supply the fuel, heaven the dry light air--themselves still making the current that will fan and spread them--yet all their force in vain, if of itself--and light dry air, heaped fuel, fanning breeze as idle, if no inward spark lurks there, or lurks unkindled. Such a spark, O man! is thy Free Will--the star whose beams are Virtue! CHAPTER IV _1805_ Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide, wide sea! And never a saint took pity on My soul in agony. S. T. C. [Sidenote: THE SENSE OF MAGNITUDE Tuesday, Jan. 15, 1805] This evening there was the most perfect and the brightest halo circling the roundest and brightest moon I ever beheld. So bright was the halo, so compact, so entire a circle, that it gave the whole of its area, the moon itself included, the appearance of a solid opaque body, an enormous planet. It was as if this planet had a circular trough of some light-reflecting fluid for its rim (that is the halo) and its centre (that is the moon) a small circular basin of some fluid that still more copiously reflected, or that even emitted light; and as if the interspatial area were somewhat equally substantial but sullen. Thence I have found occasion to meditate on the nature of the sense of magnitude and its absolute dependence on the idea of _substance_; the consequent difference between magnitude and spaciousness, the dependence of the idea on double-touch, and thence to evolve all our feelings and ideas of magnitude, magnitudinal sublimity, &c., from a scale of our own bodies. For why, if form constituted the sense, that is, if it were pure vision, as a perceptive sense abstracted from _feeling_ in the organ of vision, why do I seek for mountains, when in the flattest countries the clouds present so many and so much more romantic and _spacious_ forms, and the coal-fire so many, so much more varied and lovely forms? And whence arises the pleasure from musing on the latter? Do I not, more or less consciously, fancy myself a Lilliputian to whom these would be mountains, and so, by this factitious scale, make them mountains, my pleasure being consequently playful, a voluntary poem in hieroglyphics or picture-writing--"_phantoms_ of sublimity," which I continue to know to be _phantoms_? And form itself, is not its main agency exerted in individualising the thing, making it _this_ and _that_, and thereby facilitating the shadowy measurement of it by the scale of my own body? Yon long, not unvaried, ridge of hills, that runs out of sight each way, it is _spacious_, and the pleasure derivable from it is from its _running_, its _motion_, its assimilation to action; and here the scale is taken from my life and soul, and not from my body. Space is the Hebrew name for God, and it is the most perfect image of _soul, pure soul_, being to us nothing but unresisted action. Whenever action is resisted, limitation begins--and limitation is the first constituent of body--the more omnipresent it is in a given space, the more that space is _body_ or matter--and thus all body necessarily presupposes soul, inasmuch as all resistance presupposes action. Magnitude, therefore, is the intimate blending, the most perfect union, through its whole sphere, in every minutest part of it, of action and resistance to action. It is spaciousness in which space is filled up--that is, as we well say, transmitted by incorporate accession, not destroyed. In all limited things, that is, in _all forms_, it is at least fantastically stopped, and, thus, from the positive _grasp_ to the mountain, from the mountain to the cloud, from the cloud to the blue depth of sky, which, as on the top of Etna, in a serene atmosphere, seems to go _behind_ the sun, all is _graduation_, that precludes division, indeed, but not distinction; and he who endeavours to overturn a distinction by showing that there is no chasm, by the old sophism of the _cumulus_ or the horse's tail, is still diseased with the _formication_,[B] the (what is the nosological name of it? the hairs or dancing infinites of black specks seeming always to be before the eye), the araneosis of corpuscular materialism.--S. T. C. [Sidenote: STRAY THOUGHTS FOR THE "SOOTHER IN ABSENCE"] The least things, how they evidence the superiority of English artisans! Even the Maltese wafers, for instance, that stick to your mouth and fingers almost so as to make it impossible to get them off without squeezing them into a little pellet, and yet will not stick to the paper. Everyone of tolerable education feels the _imitability_ of Dr. Johnson's and other-such's style, the inimitability of Shakspere's, &c. Hence, I believe, arises the partiality of thousands for Johnson. They can imagine _themselves_ doing the same. Vanity is at the bottom of it. The number of imitators proves this in some measure. Of the feelings of the English at the sight of a convoy from England. Man cannot be selfish--that part of me (my beloved) which is distant, in space, excites the same feeling as the "ich"[C] distant from me in time. My friends are indeed my soul! [Sidenote: Jan. 22, 1805.] I had not moved from my seat, and wanted the stick of sealing-wax, nearly a whole one, for another letter. I could not find it, it was not on the table--had it dropped on the ground? I searched and searched everywhere, my pockets, my fobs, impossible places--literally it had vanished, and where was it? It had stuck to my _elbow_, I having leaned upon it ere it had grown cold! A curious accident, and in no way similar to that of the butcher and his steel in his mouth which he was seeking for. Mine was true accident. The maxims which govern the Courts of Admiralty, their "betwixt and between" of positive law and the dictates of right reason, resemble the half-way _inter jus et æquitatem_ of Roman jurisprudence. It were worth while to examine the advantages of this as far as it is a real _modification_, its disadvantages as far as it appears a _jumble_. Seeing a nice bed of glowing embers with one junk of firewood well placed, like the remains of an old edifice, and another well-nigh mouldered one corresponding to it, I felt an impulse to put on three pieces of wood that exactly completed the perishable architecture, though it was eleven o'clock, though I was that instant going to bed, and there could be, in common ideas, no possible use in it. Hence I seem (for I write not having yet gone to bed) to suspect that this disease of totalising, of perfecting, may be the bottom impulse of many, many actions, in which it never is brought forward as an avowed or even agnised as a conscious motive. Mem.--to collect facts for a comparison between a _wood_ and a _coal_ fire, as to sights and sounds and bodily feeling. I have read somewhere of a sailor who dreamt that an encounter with the enemy was about to take place, and that he should discover cowardice during action. Accordingly he awakes his brother the Captain, and bids him prepare for an engagement. At daybreak a ship is discovered on the horizon and the sailor, mindful of his dream, procures himself to be tied to a post. At the close of the day he is released unwounded but dead from fright. Apply this incident to Miss Edgeworth's Tales, and all similar attempts to cure faults by detailed forewarnings, which leave on the similarly faulty an impression of fatality that extinguishes hope. What precedes to the voice follows to the eye, as 000.1 and 100. A, B, C--were they men, you would say that "C" went first, but being letters, things of voice and ear in their original, we say that "A" goes first. There are many men who, following, made 1 = 1000, being placed at head, become useless cyphers, mere finery for form's sake. [Sidenote: Feb. 1, 1805, Friday, Malta] Of the millions that use the pen, how many (query) understand the story of this machine, the action of the slit, eh? I confess, ridiculous as it must appear to those who do understand it, that I have not been able to answer the question off-hand to myself, having only this moment thought of it. [Sidenote: Feb. 3, 1805] The gentlest form of Death, a Sylphid Death, passed by, beheld a sleeping baby--became, Narcissus-like, enamoured of its own self in the sweet counterfeit, seized it and carried it off as a mirror close by the green Paradise--but the reviving air awakened the babe, and 'twas death that died at the sudden loss. [Sidenote: THE FRENCH LANGUAGE AND POETRY Feb. 4, 1805] I cannot admit that any language can be unfit for poetry, or that there is any language in which a divinely inspired architect may not sustain the lofty edifice of verse on its two pillars of sublimity and pathos. Yet I have heard Frenchmen, nay, even Englishmen, assert that of the German, which contains perhaps an hundred passages equal to the-- Und ein Gott ist, ein heiliger Wille lebt, Wie auch der menschliche wanke;-- and I have heard both German and Englishmen (and these, too, men of true feeling and genius, and so many of them that such company of my betters makes me not ashamed to the having myself been guilty of this injustice) assert that the French language is insusceptible of poetry in its higher and purer sense, of poetry which excites emotion not merely creates amusement, which demands continuous admiration, not regular recurrence of conscious surprise, and the effect of which is love and joy. Unfortunately the manners, religion and government of France, and the circumstances of its emergence from the polyarchy of feudal barony, have given a bad taste to the Parisians--so bad a one as doubtless to have mildewed many an opening blossom. I cannot say that I know and can name any one French writer that can be placed among the greater poets, but when I read the inscription over the Chartreuse-- C'est ici que la Mort et la Verité Elevent leurs flambeaux terribles; C'est de cette demeure au monde inaccessible Que l'on passe à l'Eternité I seem to feel that if France had been for ages a Protestant nation, and a Milton had been born in it, the French language would not have precluded the production of a "Paradise Lost," though it might, perhaps, that of a Hamlet or a Lear. [Sidenote: THE ABSTRACT SELF On Friday night, Feb. 8, 1805] On Friday Night, 8th Feb. 1805, my feeling, in sleep, of exceeding great love for my infant, seen by me in the dream!--yet so as it might be Sara, Derwent, or Berkley, and still it was an individual babe and mine. "All look or likeness caught from earth, All accident of kin or birth, Had pass'd away. There seem'd no trace Of aught upon her brighten'd face, Upraised beneath the rifted stone, Save of one spirit all her own; She, she herself, and only she, Shone through her body visibly." _Poetical Works_, 1893, p. 172. This abstract self is, indeed, in its nature a Universal personified, as Life, Soul, Spirit, etc. Will not this _prove_ it to be a _deeper_ feeling, and of such intimate affinity with ideas, so as to modify them and become one with them; whereas the appetites and the feelings of revenge and anger co-exist with the ideas, not combine with them, and alter the apparent effect of this form, not the forms themselves? Certain modifications of fear seem to approach nearest to this love-sense in its manner of acting. Those whispers just as you have fallen asleep--what are they, and whence? [Sidenote: LITERA SCRIPTA MANET Monday, Feb 11, 1805] I must own to a superstitious dread of the destruction of paper worthy of a Mahometan. But I am also ashamed to confess to myself what pulling back of heart I feel whenever I wish to light a candle or kindle a fire with a Hospital or Harbour Report, and what a cumulus lies on my table, I not able to conjecture of what use they can ever be, and yet trembling lest what I then destroyed might be of some use in the way of knowledge. This seems to be the excess of a good feeling, but it is ridiculous. [Sidenote: COWPER'S "LINES TO MRS. UNWIN"] It is not without a certain sense of self-reproof, as well as self-distrust, that I ask, or, rather, that my understanding suggests to me the query, whether this divine poem (in so original a strain of thought and feeling honourable to human nature) would not have been more perfect if the third, fourth, and fifth stanzas had been omitted, and the tenth and eleventh transposed so as to stand as the third and fourth. It is not, perhaps not at all, but, certainly, not principally that I feel any meanness in the "needles;" but, not to mention that the words "once a shining store" is a speck in the diamond (in a less dear poem I might, perhaps, have called it more harshly a _rhyme-botch_), and that the word "restless" is rather too strong an impersonation for the serious tone, the _real_ness of the poem, and seems to tread too closely on the mock-heroic; but that it seems not true to poetic feeling to introduce the affecting circumstance of dimness of sight from decay of nature on an occasion so remote from the [Greek: to katholou], and that the fifth stanza, graceful and even affecting as the spirit of the playfulness is or would be, at least, in a poem having less depth of feeling, breaks in painfully here--the age and afflicting infirmities both of the writer and his subject seem abhorrent from such trifling of--scarcely fancy, for I fear, if it were analysed, that the whole effect would be found to depend on phrases hackneyed, and taken from the alms-house of the Muses. The test would be this: read the poem to a well-educated but natural woman, an unaffected, gentle being, endued with sense and sensibility--substituting the tenth and eleventh stanzas for those three, and some days after shew her the poem as it now stands. I seem to be sure that she would be shocked--an alien would have intruded himself, and be found sitting in a circle of dear friends whom she expected to have found _all to themselves_. [Sidenote: ETYMOLOGY] To say that etymology is a science--is to use this word in its laxest and improper sense. But our language, except, at least, in poetry, has dropped the word "lore"--the _lehre_ of the Germans, the _logos_ of the Greek. Either we should have retained the word and ventured on _Root-lore_, _verse-lore_, etc., or have adopted the Greek as a single word as well as a word in combination. All novelties appear or are rather felt as ridiculous in language; but, if it had been once adopted, it would have been no stranger to have said that etymo_logy_ is a _logy_ which perishes from a plethora of probability, than that the _art_ of war is an _art_ apparently for the destruction and subjugation of particular states, but really for the lessening of bloodshed and the preservation of the liberties of mankind. Art and Science are both too much appropriated--our language wants terms of comprehensive generality, implying the kind, not the degree or species, as in that good and necessary word _sensuous_, which we have likewise dropped, opposed to sensual, sensitive, sensible, etc., etc. Chymistry has felt this difficulty, and found the necessity of having one word for the supposed cause, another for the effect, as in caloric or calorific, opposed to heat; and psychology has still more need of the reformation. [Sidenote: SENTIMENT, AN ANTIDOTE TO CASUISTRY] The Queen-bee in the hive of Popish Error, the great mother of the swarm, seems to me their tenet concerning Faith and Works, placing the former wholly in the rectitude, nay, in the rightness of intellectual conviction, and the latter in the definite and, most often, the material action, and, consequently, the assertion of the dividuous nature and self-existence of works. Hence the doctrine of damnation out of the Church of Rome--of the one visible Church--of the absolute efficiency _in se_ of all the Sacraments and the absolute merit of ceremonial observances. Consider the incalculable advantage of chiefly dwelling on the virtues of the heart, of habits of feeling and harmonious action, the music of the adjusted string at the impulse of the breeze, and, on the other hand, the evils of books concerning particular actions, minute cases of conscience, hair-splitting directions and decisions, O how illustrated by the detestable character of most of the Roman Catholic casuists! No actions should be distinctly described but such as manifestly tend to awaken the heart to efficient feeling, whether of fear or of love--actions that, falling back on the fountain, keep it full, or clear out the mud from its pipes, and make it play in its abundance, shining in that purity in which, at once, the purity and the light is each the cause of the other, the light purifying, and the purified receiving and reflecting the light, sending it off to others; not, like the polished mirror, by reflection from itself, but by transmission through itself. [Sidenote: THE EMPYREAN] Friday + Saturday, 12-1 o'clock [March 2, 1805.] What a sky! the not yet orbed moon, the spotted oval, blue at one edge from the deep utter blue of the sky--a MASS of _pearl_-white cloud below, distant, and travelling to the horizon, but all the upper part of the ascent and all the height such _profound_ blue, deep as a deep river, and deep in colour, and those two depths so entirely _one_, _as_ to give the meaning and explanation of the two different significations of the epithet. Here, so far from _divided_, they were scarcely _distinct_, scattered over with thin pearl-white cloudlets--hands and fingers--the largest not larger than a floating veil! Unconsciously I stretched forth my arms as to embrace the sky, and in a trance I had worshipped God in the moon--the spirit, not the form. I felt in how innocent a feeling Sabeism might have begun. Oh! not only the moon, but the depths of the sky! The moon was the _idea_; but deep sky is, of all visual impressions, the nearest akin to a feeling. It is more a feeling than a sight, or, rather, it is the melting away and entire union of feeling and sight! [Sidenote: DISTEMPER'S WORST CALAMITY] Monday morning, which I ought not to have known not to be Sunday night, 2 o'clock, March 4, 1805. My dreams to-night were interfused with struggle and fear, though, till the very last, not victors; but the very last, which awoke me, was a completed night-mare, as it gave the _idea_ and _sensation_ of actual grasp or touch contrary to _my_ will and in apparent consequence of the malignant will of the external form, whether actually appearing or, as sometimes happened, believed to exist--in which latter case I have two or three times felt a horrid touch of hatred, a grasp, or a weight of hate and horror abstracted from all [conscious] form or supposal of form, an _abstract touch_, an _abstract_ grasp, an _abstract_ weight! _Quam nihil ad genium Papiliane tuum!_ or, in other words, _This Mackintosh would prove to be nonsense by a Scotch smile._ The last [dream], that woke me, though a true night-mare, was, however, a mild one. I cried out early, like a scarcely-hurt child who knows himself within hearing of his mother. But, anterior to this, I had been playing with children, especially with one most lovely child, about two years or two and a half, and had repeated to her, in my dream, "The dews were falling fast," &c., and I was sorely frightened by the sneering and fiendish malignity of the beautiful creature, but from the beginning there had been a terror about it and proceeding from it. I shall hereafter, read the Vision in "Macbeth" with increased admiration. ["_Quam nihil ad genium Papiniane tuum_," was the motto of _The Lyrical Ballads_.] That deep intuition of our _one_ness, is it not at the bottom of many of our faults as well as virtues? the dislike that a bad man should have any virtues, a good man any faults? And yet, too, a something noble and incentive is in this. [Sidenote: THE OMNISCIENT THE COMFORTER] What comfort in the silent eye upraised to God! "_Thou_ knowest." O! what a thought! Never to be friendless, never to be unintelligible! The omnipresence has been generally represented as a spy, a sort of Bentham's Panopticon.[D] O to feel what the pain is to be utterly unintelligible and then--"O God, thou understandest!" [Sidenote: POETS AS CRITICS OF POETS] The question should be fairly stated, how far a man can be an adequate, or even a good (as far as he goes) though inadequate critic of poetry who is not a poet, at least, _in posse_? Can he be an adequate, can he be a good critic, though not commensurate [with the poet criticised]? But there is yet another distinction. Supposing he is not only not a poet, but is a bad poet! What then? [Sidenote: IMMATURE CRITICS March 16, 1805] [The] cause of the offence or disgust received by the _mean_ in good poems when we are young, and its diminution and occasional evanescence when we are older in true taste [is] that, at first, we are from various causes delighted with _generalities_ of nature which can all be expressed in dignified words; but, afterwards, becoming more intimately acquainted with Nature in her detail, we are delighted with _distinct_, vivid ideas, and with vivid ideas most when made distinct, and can most often forgive and sometimes be delighted with even a low image from art or low life when it gives you the very thing by an illustration, as, for instance, Cowper's stream "inlaying" the level vale as with silver, and even Shakspere's "shrill-tongued Tapster's answering shallow wits" applied to echoes in an _echofull_ place. [Sidenote: ATTENTION AND SENSATION March 17, 1805] Of the not being able to know whether you are smoking in the dark or when your eyes are shut: item, of the ignorance in that state of the difference of beef, veal, &c.--it is all attention. Your ideas being shut, other images arise which you must _attend to_, it being the habit of a _seeing_ man to attend chiefly to _sight_. So close your eyes, (and) you attend to the ideal images, and, attending to them, you abstract your _attention_. It is the same when deeply thinking in a reverie, you no longer hear distinct sound made to you. But what a strange inference that there were no sounds! [Sidenote: ST. COLUMBA] I love St. Combe or Columba and he shall be my saint. For he is not in the Catalogue of Romish Saints, having never been canonised at Rome, and because this Apostle of the Picts lived and gave his name to an island on the Hebrides, and from him Switzerland was christianised. [Sidenote: EXPERIENCE AND BOOK KNOWLEDGE Midnight, April 5, 1805] "I will write," I said, "as truly as I can from experience, actual individual experience, not from book-knowledge." But yet it is wonderful how exactly the knowledge from good books coincides with the experience of men of the world. How often, when I was younger, have I noticed the deep delight of men of the world who have taken late in life to literature, on coming across a passage the force of which had either escaped me altogether, or which I knew to be true from books only and at second hand! Experience is necessary, no doubt, if only to give a light and shade in the mind, to give to some one idea a greater vividness than to others, and thereby to make it a _Thing_ of _Time_ and actual reality. For all ideas being equally vivid, the whole becomes a dream. But, notwithstanding this and other reasons, I yet believe that the saws against book-knowledge are handed down to us from times when books conveyed only abstract science or abstract morality and religion. Whereas, in the present day, what is there of real life, in all its goings on, trades, manufactures, high life, low life, animate and inanimate that is not to be found in books? In these days books are conversation. And this, I know, is for evil as well as good, but for good, too, as well as evil. [Sidenote: DUTY AND SELF INTEREST Sunday morning 4 o'clock, April 7, 1805] How feebly, how unlike an English cock, that cock crows and the other answers! Did I not particularly notice the _un_likeness on my first arrival at Malta? Well, to-day I will disburthen my mind. Yet one thing strikes me, the difference I find in myself during the past year or two. My enthusiasm for the happiness of mankind in particular places and countries, and my eagerness to promote it, seems to decrease, and my sense of duty, my hauntings of conscience, from any stain of thought or action to increase in the same ratio. I remember having written a strong letter to my most dear and honoured Wordsworth in consequence of his "Ode to Duty," and in that letter explained this as the effect of selfness in a mind incapable of gross self-interest--I mean, the decrease of hope and joy, the soul in its round and round flight forming narrower circles, till at every gyre its wings beat against the _personal self_. But let me examine this more accurately. It may be that the phenomena will come out more honourable to our nature. [Sidenote: EVIL PRODUCES EVIL] It is as trite as it is mournful (but yet most instructive), and by the genius that can produce the strongest impressions of novelty by rescuing the stalest and most admitted truths from the impotence caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission--admitted so instantly as never to be _reflected_ on, never by that sole key of reflection admitted into the effective, legislative chamber of the heart--so true that they lose all the privileges of Truth, and, as extremes meet by being _truisms_, correspond in utter inefficiency with universally acknowledged errors (in Algebraic symbols Truisms = Falsehoodisms = [scir][scir])--by that genius, I say, might good be worked in considering the old, old Methusalem saw that "evil produces evil." One error almost compels another. Tell one lie, tell a hundred. Oh, to show this, _a priori_, by bottoming it in all our faculties and by experience of touching examples! [Sidenote: JOHN WORDSWORTH Monday, April 8, 1805] The favourite object of all Oriental tales, and that which, whist it inspired their authors in the East, still inspires their readers everywhere, is the impossibility of baffling Destiny--the perception that what we considered as the means of one thing becomes, in a strange manner, the direct means of the reverse. O dear John Wordsworth! what joy at Grasmere that you were made Captain of the Abergavenny, and so young too! Now it was next to certain that you would in a few years settle in your native hills and be verily one of the _Concern_! Then came your share in the brilliant action with Linois. (I was at Grasmere in spirit only, but in spirit I was one of the rejoicers--as joyful as any, and, perhaps, more joyous!) This, doubtless, not only enabled you to lay in a larger and more advantageous cargo, but procured you a voyage to India instead of China, and in this circumstance a next to certainty of independence--and all these were decoys of Death! Well, but a nobler feeling than these vain regrets would become the friend of the man whose last words were: "I have done my duty! let her go!" Let us do our _duty_! all else is a dream, life and death alike a dream. This short sentence would comprise, I believe, the sum of all profound philosophy, of ethics and metaphysics conjointly, from Plato to Fichte! [_Vide Letters of S. T. C._, 1895, ii. 495, _note_.] [Sidenote: LOVE THE DIVINE ESSENCE] The best, the truly lovely in each and all, is God. Therefore the truly beloved is _the symbol of God_ to whomever it is truly beloved by, but it may become perfect and maintained love by the function of the two. The lover worships in his beloved that final consummation of itself which is produced in his own soul by the action of the soul of the beloved upon it, and that final perception of the soul of the beloved which is in part the consequence of the reaction of his (so ameliorated and regenerated) soul upon the soul of his beloved, till each contemplates the soul of the other as involving his own, both in its givings and its receivings, and thus, still keeping alive its _outness_, its _self-oblivion_ united with self-warmth, still approximates to God! Where shall I find an image for this sublime symbol which, ever involving the presence of Deity, yet tends towards it ever? Shall it be in the attractive powers of the different surfaces of the earth? each attraction the vicegerent and representative of the central attraction, and yet being no other than that attraction itself? By some such feeling as this I can easily believe the mind of Fénelon and Madame Guyon to have coloured its faith in the worship of saints, but that was most dangerous. It was not idolatry in _them_, but it encouraged idolatry in others. Now, the pure love of a good man for a good woman does not involve this evil, but it multiplies, intensifies the good. [Sidenote: ORDER IN DREAMS] Dreamt that I was saying or reading, or that it was read to me, "Varrius thus prophesied vinegar at his door by damned frigid tremblings." Just after, I woke. I fell to sleep again, having in the previous doze meditated on the possibility of making dreams regular; and just as I had passed on the other side of the confine of dozing, I afforded this specimen: "I should have thought it Vossius rather than Varrius, though, Varrius being a great poet, the idea would have been more suitable to him, only that all his writings were unfortunately lost in the _Arrow_." Again I awoke. _N.B._--The _Arrow_, Captain Vincent's frigate, from which our Malta letters and dispatches had been previously thrown overboard, was taken by the French, in February 1805. This _illustrates the connection of dreams_. [Sidenote: ORANGE BLOSSOM April 8, 1805] I never had a more lovely twig of orange-blossoms, with four old last year's leaves with their steady green well-placed among them, than to-day, and with a rose-twig of three roses [it] made a very striking nosegay to an Englishman, The Orange Twig was so very full of blossoms that one-fourth of the number becoming fruit of the natural size would have broken the twig off. Is there, then, disproportion here? or waste? O no! no! In the first place, here is a prodigality of beauty; and what harm do they do by existing? And is not man a being capable of Beauty even as of Hunger and Thirst? And if the latter be fit objects of a final cause, why not the former? But secondly [Nature] hereby multiplies manifold the chances of a proper number becoming fruit--in this twig, for instance, for one set of accidents that would have been fatal to the year's growth if only as many blossoms had been on it as it was designed to bear fruit, there may now be three sets of accidents--and no harm done. And, thirdly and lastly, for _me_ at _least_--or, at least, at present, for in nature doubtless there are many additional reasons, and possibly for _me_ at some future hour of reflection, after some new influx of information from books or observance-and, thirdly, these blossoms are Fruit, fruit to the winged insect, fruit to man--yea! and of more solid value, perhaps, than the orange itself! O how the Bees be-throng and be-murmur it! O how the honey tells the tale of its birthplace to the sense of sight and odour! and to how many minute and uneyeable insects beside! So, I cannot but think, ought I to be talking to Hartley, and sometimes to detail all the insects that have arts or implements resembling human--the sea-snails, with the nautilus at their head; the wheel-insect, the galvanic eel, etc. [This note was printed in the _Illustrated London News_, June 10, 1893.] [Sidenote: ANTICIPATIONS IN NATURE AND IN THOUGHT Saturday night, April 14, 1805] In looking at objects of Nature while I am thinking, as at yonder moon dim-glimmering through the dewy window-pane, I seem rather to be seeking, as it were _asking_ for, a symbolical language for something within me that already and for ever exists, than observing anything new. Even when that latter is the case, yet still I have always an obscure feeling as if that new phenomena were the dim awaking of a forgotten or hidden truth of my inner nature. It is still interesting as a word--a symbol. It is [Greek: Logos] the Creator, and the Evolver! [Now] what is the right, the virtuous feeling, and consequent action when a man having long meditated on and perceived a certain truth, finds another, a foreign writer, who has handled the same with an approximation to the truth as he had previously conceived it? Joy! Let Truth make her voice audible! While I was preparing the pen to write this remark, I lost the train of thought which had led me to it. I meant to have asked something else now forgotten. For the above answers itself. It needed no answer, I trust, in my heart. [Printed in _Life of S. T. C._, by James Gillman, 1838, p. 311.] [Sidenote: THE HOPE OF HUMANITY, Easter Sunday, 1805] That beautiful passage in dear and honoured W. Wordsworth's "Michael," respecting the forward-looking Hope inspired pre-eminently by the birth of a child, was brought to my mind most forcibly by my own independent though, in part, anticipated reflections on the importance of young children to the keeping up the stock of Hope in the human species. They seem to be the immediate and secreting organ of Hope in the great organised body of the whole human race, in _all men_ considered as the component atoms of _Man_--as young leaves are the organs of supplying vital air to the atmosphere. Thus living on through such a length of years, The Shepherd, if he loved himself, must needs Have loved his Helpmate; but to Michael's heart This son of his old age was yet more dear-- Less from instinctive tenderness, the same Fond spirit that blindly works in the blood of all-- Than that a child, more than all other gifts That earth can offer to declining man, Brings hope with it, and forward-looking thoughts, And stirrings of inquietude, when they By tendency of nature needs must fail. --_Poetical Works of_ W. WORDSWORTH, p. 133. [Sidenote: THE NORTHERN EASTER Easter Sunday, 1805] The English and German climates and that of northern France possess, among many others, this one little beauty of uniting the mysteries of positive with those of natural religion--in celebrating the symbolical resurrection of the human soul in that of the Crucified, at the time of the actual resurrection of the "living life" of nature. [Sidenote: SPIRITUAL RELIGION] Religion consists in truth and virtue, that is, the permanent, the _forma efformans_, in the flux of things without, of feelings and images within. Well, therefore, does the Scripture speak of the Spirit as praying to the Spirit, "The Lord said to my Lord." God is the essence as well as the object of religion. [Sidenote: A SUPPOSITION Wednesday, April 17, 1805] I would not willingly kill even a flower, but were I at the head of an army, or a revolutionary kingdom, I would do my duty; and though it should be the ordering of the military execution of a city, yet, supposing it to be my duty, I would give the order--and then, in awe, listen to the uproar, even as to a thunderstorm--the awe as tranquil, the submission to the inevitable, to the unconnected with myself, as profound. It should be as if the lightning of heaven passed along my sword and destroyed a man. [Sidenote: ENTHUSIASM] Does the sober judgement previously measure out the banks between which the stream of enthusiasm shall rush with its torrent-sound? Far rather does the stream itself plough up its own channel and find its banks in the adamant rocks of nature! [Sidenote: ADHÆSIT PAVIMENTO COR] There are times when my thoughts--how like music! O that these times were more frequent! But how can they be, I being so hopeless, and for months past so incessantly employed in official tasks, subscribing, examining, administering oaths, auditing, and so forth? [Sidenote: THE REALISATION OF DEATH] John Tobin dead, and just after the success of his play! and Robert Allen dead suddenly! O when we are young we lament for death only by sympathy, or with the general feeling with which we grieve for misfortunes in general, but there comes a time (and this year is the time that has come to me) when we lament for death as death, when it is felt for itself, and as itself, aloof from all its consequences. Then comes the grave-stone into the heart with all its mournful names, then the bell-man's or clerk's verses subjoined to the bills of mortality are no longer common-place. [John Tobin the dramatist died December 7, 1804. His play entitled "The Honeymoon" was published in 1805. Robert Allen, Coleridge's contemporary and school-friend, held the post of deputy-surgeon to the 2nd Royals, then on service in Portugal. He was a friend of Dr. (afterwards Sir J.) Stoddart, with whom Coleridge stayed on his first arrival at Malta. See _Letters of Charles Lamb_, Macmillan, 1888, i. 188.] [Sidenote: LOVE AND DUTY] Würde, worthiness, VIRTUE, consist in the mastery over the sensuous and sensual impulses; but love requires INNOCENCE. Let the lover ask his heart whether he can endure that his mistress should have _struggled_ with a sensual impulse for another man, though she overcame it from a sense of duty to him. Women are LESS offended with men, in part, from the vicious habits of men, and, in part, from the difference of bodily constitution. Yet, still, to a pure and truly loving woman this must be a painful thought. That he should struggle with and overcome ambition, desire of fortune, superior beauty, &c., or with objectless desire of any kind, is pleasing, but _not_ that he has struggled with positive, appropriated desire, that is, desire _with_ an object. Love, in short, requires an absolute peace and harmony between all parts of human nature, such as it is; and it is offended by any _war_, though the battle should be decided in favour of the worthier. This is, perhaps, the final cause of the _rarity_ of true love, and the efficient and immediate cause of its difficulty. Ours is a life of probation. We are to contemplate and obey _duty_ for its own sake, and in order to do this, we, in our present imperfect state of being, must see it not merely abstracted from but in direct opposition to the _wish_, the _inclination_. Having perfected this, the highest possibility of human nature, man may then with safety harmonise _all_ his being with this--he may _love_. To perform duties absolutely from the sense of duty is the _ideal_, which, perhaps, no human being ever can arrive at, but which every human being ought to try to draw near unto. This is, in the only wise, and, verily, in a most sublime sense, to see God face to face, which, alas! it seems too true that no man can do and _live_, that is, a _human_ life. It would become incompatible with his organization, or rather, it would _transmute_ it, and the process of that transmutation, to the senses of other men, would be called death. Even as to the caterpillar, in all probability, the caterpillar dies, and he either, which is most probable, does not see (or, at all events, does not see the connection between the caterpillar and) the butterfly, the beautiful Psyche of the Greeks. [Sidenote: HAPPINESS MADE PERFECT] Those who in this life love in perfection, if such there be, in proportion as their love has no struggles, see God darkly and through a veil. For when duty and pleasure are absolutely co-incident, the very nature of our organisation necessitates that duty will be contemplated as the symbol of pleasure, instead of pleasure being (as in a future life we have faith it will be) the symbol of duty. For herein lies the distinction between human and angelic happiness. Humanly happy I call him who in enjoyment _finds_ his duty; angelically happy he, who seeks and finds his duty in enjoyment. Happiness in general may be defined, not the aggregate of pleasurable sensations--for this is either a dangerous error and the creed of sensualists, or else a mere translation or wordy paraphrase--but the state of that person who, in order to enjoy his nature in the highest manifestation of conscious _feeling_, has no need of doing wrong, and who, in order to do right, is under no necessity of abstaining from enjoyment. [_Vide Life of S. T. C._, by James Gillman, 1838, pp. 176-78.] [Sidenote: THOUGHT AND THINGS] Thought and reality are, as it were, two distinct corresponding sounds, of which no man can say positively which is the voice and which the echo. Oh, the beautiful fountain or natural well at Upper Stowey! The images of the weeds which hung down from its sides appear as plants growing up, straight and upright, among the water-weeds that really grow from the bottom of the well, and so vivid was the image, that for some moments, and not till after I had disturbed the water, did I perceive that their roots were not neighbours, and they side-by-side companions. So ever, then I said, so are the happy man's thoughts and things, [or in the language of the modern philosophers] his ideas and impressions. [Sidenote: SUPERSTITION] The two characteristics which I have most observed in Roman Catholic mummery processions, baptisms, etc., are, first, the immense _noise_ and jingle-jingle as if to frighten away the dæmon common-sense; and, secondly, the unmoved, stupid, uninterested faces of the conjurers. I have noticed no exception. Is not the very nature of superstition in general, as being utterly sensuous, _cold_ except where it is _sensual_? Hence the older form of idolatry, as displayed in the Greek mythology, was, in some sense, even preferable to the Popish. For whatever life did and could exist in superstition it brought forward and sanctified in its rites of Bacchus, Venus, etc. The papist by pretence of suppression warps and denaturalises. In the pagan [ritual, superstition] burnt with a bright flame, in the popish it consumes the soul with a smothered fire that stinks in darkness and smoulders like gum that burns but is incapable of light. [Sidenote: ILLUSION Sunday Midnight, May 12, 1805] At the Treasury, La Valetta, Malta, in the room the windows of which directly face the piazzas and vast saloon built for the archives and Library and now used as the Garrison Ball-room, sitting at one corner of a large parallelogram table well-littered with books, in a red arm-chair, at the other corner of which (diagonally) {_C}[rec]^D Mr. Dennison had been sitting--he and I having conversed for a long time, he bade me good night, and retired--I meaning to retire too, however sunk for five minutes or so into a doze and on suddenly awaking up I saw him as distinctly sitting in the chair, as I had, really, some ten minutes before. I was startled, and thinking of it, sunk into a second doze, out of which awaking as before I saw again the same appearance; not more distinct indeed, but more of his form--for at the first time I had seen only his face and bust--but now I saw as much as I could have seen if he had been really there. The appearance was very nearly that of a person seen through thin smoke distinct indeed, but yet a sort of distinct _shape_ and _colour_, with a diminished sense of _substantiality_--like a face in a clear stream. My nerves had been violently agitated yesterday morning by the attack of three dogs as I was mounting the steps of Captain Pasley's door--two of them savage Bedouins, who wounded me in the calf of my left leg. I have noted this down, not three minutes having intervened since the illusion took place. Often and often I have had similar experiences and, therefore, resolved to write down the particulars whenever any new instance should occur, as a weapon against superstition, and an explanation of ghosts--Banquo in "Macbeth" the very same thing. I once told a lady the reason why I did not believe in the existence of ghosts, etc., was that I had seen too many of them myself. N.B. There were on the table a common black wine-bottle, a decanter of water, and, between these, one of the half-gallon glass flasks which Sir G. Beaumont had given me (four of these full of port), the cork in, covered with leather, and having a white plated ring on the top. I mention this because since I wrote the former pages, on blinking a bit a third time, and opening my eyes, I clearly _detected_ that this high-shouldered hypochondriacal bottle-man had a great share in producing the effect. The metamorphosis was clearly beginning, though I snapped the spell before it had assumed a recognisable form. The red-leather arm-chair was so placed at the corner that the flask was exactly between me and it--and the lamp being close to my corner of the large table, and not giving much light, the chair was rather obscure, and the brass nails where the leather was fastened to the outward wooden rim reflecting the light more copiously were seen almost for themselves. What if instead of immediately checking the sight, and then pleased with it as a philosophical _case_, I had been frightened and encouraged it, and my understanding had joined _its vote_ to that of my senses? My own shadow, too, on the wall not far from Mr. D.'s chair--the white paper, the sheet of Harbour Reports lying spread out on the table on the other side of the bottles--influence of mere colour, influence of shape--wonderful coalescence of scattered colours at distances, and, then, all going to some one shape, and the modification! Likewise I am more convinced by repeated observation that, perhaps, always in a very minute degree but assuredly in certain states and postures of the eye, as in drowsiness, in the state of the brain and nerves after distress or agitation, especially if it had been accompanied by weeping, and in many others, we see our own faces, and project them according to the distance given them by the degree of indistinctness--that this may occasion in the highest degree the Wraith (_vide_ a hundred Scotch stories, but better than all, Wordsworth's most wonderful and admirable poem, Peter Bell, when he sees his own figure), and, still oftener, that it facilitates the formation of a human face out of some really present object, and from the alteration of the distance among other causes never suspected as the occasion and substratum. S. T. C. N.B.--This is a valuable note, re-read by me, Tuesday morning, May 14. [Compare _Table Talk_ for January 3 and May 1, 1823, Bell & Co., 1884, pp. 20, 31-33. See, too, _The Friend_, First Landing Place Essay, iii., _Coleridge's Works_, Harper & Brothers, 1853, ii. 134-137.] [Sidenote: FOR THE "SOOTHER IN ABSENCE"] Mem. always to bear in mind that profound sentence of Leibnitz that men's intellectual errors consist chiefly in _denying_. What they _affirm_ with _feeling_ is, for the most part, right--if it be a real affirmation, and not affirmative in form, negative in reality. As, for instance, when a man praises the French stage, meaning and implying his dislike of Shakspere [and the Elizabethan dramatists]. "Facts--stubborn facts! None of your theory!" A most entertaining and instructive essay might be written on this text, and the sooner the better. Trace it from the most absurd credulity--_e.g._, in Fracastorius' _De Sympathiâ_, cap. i. and the Alchemy Book--even to that of your modern agriculturists, relating their own facts and swearing against each other like ships' crews. O! it is the relation of the facts--not the facts, friend! Speculative men are wont to be condemned by the general. But who more speculative then Sir Walter Raleigh, and _he_, even he, brought the potato to Europe. Good heavens! let me never eat a roasted potato without dwelling on it, and detailing its train of consequences. Likewise, too, _dubious_ to the philosopher, but to be clapped chorally by the commercial world, he, this mere wild speculatist, introduced tobacco. For a nation to make peace only because it is tired of war, and, as it were, in order just to take breath, is in direct subversion of the end and object of the war which was its sole justification. 'Tis like a poor way-sore foot traveller getting up behind a coach that is going the contrary way to his. The eye hath a two-fold power. It is, verily, a window through which you not only look _out_ of the house, but can look into it too. A statesman and diplomatist should for this reason always wear spectacles. Worldly men gain their purposes with worldly men by that instinctive belief in sincerity. Hence (nothing immediately and passionately contradicting it) the effect of the "with unfeigned esteem," "entire devotion," and the other smooth phrases in letters, all, in short, that sea-officers call _oil_, and of which they, with all their bluntness, well understand the use. The confusion of metaphor with reality is one of the fountains of the many-headed Nile of credulity, which, overflowing its banks, covers the world with miscreations and reptile monsters, and feeds by its many mouths the sea of blood. A ready command of a limited number of words is but a playing cat-cradle dexterously with language. Plain contra-reasoning may be compared with boxing with fists. Controversy with boxing is the cestus, that is, the lead-loaded glove, like the pugilists in the Æneid. But the stiletto! the envenomed stiletto is here. What worse? (a Germanism) Yes! the poisoned Italian glove of mock friendship. The more I reflect, the more exact and close appears to me the analogy between a watch and watches, and the conscience and consciences of men, on the one hand, and that between the sun and motion of the heavenly bodies in general and the reason and goodness of the Supreme on the other. Never goes quite right any one, no two go exactly the same; they derive their dignity and use as being substitutes and exponents of heavenly motions, but still, in a thousand instances, they are and must be our instructors by which we must act, in practice presuming a coincidence while theoretically we are aware of incalculable variations. One lifts up one's eyes to heaven, as if to seek there what one had lost on earth--eyes, Whose half-beholdings through unsteady tears Gave shape, hue, distance to the inward dream. [Sidenote: GREAT MEN THE CRITERION OF NATIONAL WORTH] Schiller, disgusted with Kotzebuisms, deserts from Shakspere! What! cannot we condemn a counterfeit and yet remain admirers of the original? This is a sufficient proof that the first admiration was not sound, or founded on sound distinct perceptions [or, if sprung from], a sound feeling, yet clothed and manifested to the consciousness by false ideas. And now the French stage is to be re-introduced. O Germany! Germany! why this endless rage for novelty? Why this endless looking out of thyself? But stop, let me not fall into the pit against which I was about to warn others. Let me not confound the discriminating character and genius of a nation with the conflux of its individuals in cities and reviews. Let England be Sir Philip Sidney, Shakspere, Milton, Bacon, Harrington, Swift, Wordsworth; and never let the names of Darwin, Johnson, Hume, _fur_ it over. If these, too, must be England let them be another England; or, rather, let the first be old England, the spiritual, Platonic old England, and the second, with Locke at the head of the philosophers and Pope [at the head] of the poets, together with the long list of Priestleys, Paleys, Hayleys, Darwins, Mr. Pitts, Dundasses, &c., &c., be the representatives of commercial Great Britain. These have [indeed] their merits, but are as alien to me as the Mandarin philosophers and poets of China. Even so Leibnitz, Lessing, Voss, Kant, shall be _Germany_ to me, let whatever coxcombs rise up, and _shrill_ it away in the grasshopper vale of reviews. And so shall Dante, Ariosto, Giordano Bruno, be my Italy; Cervantes my Spain; and O! that I could find a France for my love. But spite of Pascal, Madame Guyon and Molière, France is my Babylon, the mother of whoredoms in morality, philosophy and taste. The French themselves feel a foreignness in these writers. How indeed is it possible at once to _love_ Pascal and Voltaire? [Sidenote: AN INTELLECTUAL PURGATORY Tuesday morning, May 14, 1805] With any distinct remembrance of a past life there could be no fear of death as death, no idea even of death! Now, in the next state, to meet with the Luthers, Miltons, Leibnitzs, Bernouillis, Bonnets, Shaksperes, etc., and to live a longer and better life, the good and wise entirely among the good and wise, might serve as a step to break the abruptness of an immediate Heaven? But it must be a human life; and though the faith in a hereafter would be more firm, more undoubting, yet, still, it must not be a sensuous remembrance of a death passed over. No! [it would be] something like a dream that you had not died, but had been taken off; in short, the real events with the obscurity of a dream, accompanied with the notion that you had never died, but that death was yet to come. As a man who, having walked in his sleep, by rapid openings of his eyes--too rapid to be observable by others or rememberable by himself--sees and remembers the whole of his path, mixing it with many fancies _ab intra_, and, awaking, remembers, but yet as a dream. [Sidenote: OF FIRST LOVES] 'Tis one source of mistakes concerning the merits of poems, that to those read in youth men attribute all that praise which is due to poetry in general, merely considered as select language in metre. (Little children should not be taught verses, in my opinion; better not to let them set eyes on verse till they are ten or eleven years old.) Now, poetry produces two kinds of pleasure, one for each of the two master-movements and impulses of man, the gratification of the love of variety, and the gratification of the love of uniformity--and that by a recurrence delightful as a painless and yet exciting act of memory--tiny breezelets of surprise, each one destroying the ripplets which the former had made--yet all together keeping the surface of the mind in a bright dimple-smile. So, too, a hatred of vacancy is reconciled with the love of rest. These and other causes often make [a first acquaintance with] poetry an overpowering delight to a lad of feeling, as I have heard Poole relate of himself respecting Edwin and Angelina. But so it would be with a man bred up in a wilderness by Unseen Beings, who should yet converse and discourse rationally with him--how beautiful would not the first other man appear whom he saw and knew to be a man by the resemblance to his own image seen in the clear stream; and would he not, in like manner, attribute to the man all the divine attributes of humanity, though, haply, he should be a very ordinary, or even a most ugly man, compared with a hundred others? Many of us who have felt this with respect to women have been bred up where few are to be seen; and I acknowledge that, both in persons and in poems, it is well _on the whole_ that we should retain our first love, though, alike in both cases, evils have happened as the consequence. [Sidenote: THE MADDENING RAIN August 1, 1805] The excellent fable of the maddening rain I have found in Drayton's "Moon Calf," most miserably marred in the telling! vastly inferior to Benedict Fay's Latin exposition of it, and that is no great thing. _Vide_ his Lucretian Poem on the Newtonian System. Never was a finer tale for a satire, or, rather, to conclude a long satirical poem of five or six hundred lines. [For excellent use of this fable, see _The Friend_, No. 1, June 9, 1809, _Coleridge's Works_, Harper & Brothers, ii. 21, 22.] [Sidenote: SENTIMENTS BELOW MORALS] Pasley remarked last night (2nd August 1805), and with great precision and originality, that men themselves, in the present age, were not so much degraded as their sentiments. This is most true! almost all men nowadays act and feel more nobly than they think--yet still the vile, cowardly, selfish, calculating ethics of Paley, Priestley, Locke, and other Erastians do woefully influence and determine our course of action. [Sidenote: TIME AND ETERNITY] O the complexities of the ravel produced by time struggling with eternity! _a_ and _b_ are different, and eternity or duration makes them one--this we call modification--the principle of all greatness in finite beings, the principle of all contradiction and absurdity. [Sidenote: THE PASSION FOR THE MOT PROPRE August 3, 1805 Saturday] It is worthy notice (shewn in the phrase "I envy him such and such a thing," meaning only, "I regret I cannot share with him, have the same as he, without depriving him of it, or any part of it,") the instinctive passion in the mind for a _one word_ to express _one act_ of feeling--[one] that is, in which, however complex in reality, the mind is _conscious_ of no discursion and synthesis _a posteriori_. On this instinct rest all the improvements (and, on the habits formed by this instinct and [the] knowledge of these improvements, Vanity rears all the Apuleian, Apollonian, etc., etc., corruptions) of style. Even so with our Johnson. [Sidenote: BULLS OF ACTION] There are _bulls_ of action equally as of thought, [for] (not to allude to the story of the Irish labourer who laid his comrade all his wages that he would not carry him down in his hod from the top to the bottom of a high house, down the ladder) the feeling of vindictive honour in duelling, and the feudal revenges anterior to duelling, formed a true bull; for they were superstitious Christians, knew it was wrong, and yet knew it was right--they would be damned deservedly if they did, and, if they did not, they thought themselves deserving of being damned. [Sidenote: PSEUDO-POETS] The pseudo-poets Campbell, Rogers, etc., both by their writings and moral character tend to bring poetry into disgrace, and, but that men in general are the slaves of the same wretched infirmities, they would [set their seal on this disgrace,] and it would be well. The true poet could not smother the sacred fire ("his heart burnt within him and he spake"), and wisdom would be justified by her children. But the false poet--that is, the no-poet--finding poetry in contempt among the many, of whose praise, whatever he may affirm, he is alone ambitious, would be prevented from scribbling. [Sidenote: LANDING PLACES] The progress of human intellect from earth to heaven is not a Jacob's ladder, but a geometrical staircase with five or more landing-places. That on which we stand enables us to see clearly and count all below us, while that or those above us are so transparent for our eyes that they appear the canopy of heaven. We do not see them, and believe ourselves on the highest. ["Among my earliest impressions I still distinctly remember that of my first entrance into the mansion of a neighbouring baronet, awefully known to me by the name of the Great House [Escot, near Ottery St. Mary, Devon].... Beyond all other objects I was most struck with the magnificent staircase, relieved at well-proportioned intervals by spacious landing-places.... My readers will find no difficulty in translating these forms of the outward senses into their intellectual analogies, so as to understand the purport of _The Friend's_ Landing-Places." _The Friend_, "The Landing-Place," Essay iv. _Coleridge's Works_, Harper & Brothers, 1853, ii. 137, 138.] [Sidenote: WILLIAM BROWNE OF OTTERY] In the _Threnæ_ or funeral songs and elegies of our old poets, I am often impressed with the idea of their resemblance to hired weepers in Rome and among the Irish, where he who howled the loudest and most wildly was the most capital mourner and was at the head of his trade. So [too] see William Browne's elegy on Prince Henry (_Britt. Past. Songs_ v.), whom, perhaps, he never spoke to. Yet he is a dear fellow, and I love him, that W. Browne who died at Ottery, and with whose family my own is united, or, rather, connected and acquainted. [Colonel James Coleridge, the poet's eldest surviving brother and Henry Langford Browne of Combe-Satchfield married sisters, Frances and Dorothy Taylor, whose mother was one of five co-heiresses of Richard Duke of Otterton. It is uncertain whether a William Browne of Ottery St. Mary, who died in 1645, was the author of _The Shepherd's Pipe_ and _Britannia's Pastorals_. Two beautiful inscriptions on a tomb in St. Stephen's Chapel in the collegiate church of St. Mary Ottery, were, in Southey's opinion (doubtless at Coleridge's suggestion), composed by the poet William Browne.] [Sidenote: "ASCEND A STEP IN CHOOSING A FRIEND" TALMUD] God knows! that at times I derive a comfort even from my infirmities, my sins of omission and commission, in the joy of the deep feeling of the opposite virtues in the two or three whom I love in my heart of hearts. Sharp, therefore, is the pain when I find faults in these friends opposite to my virtues. I find no comfort in the notion of average, for I wish to love even more than to be beloved, and am so haunted by the conscience of my many failings that I find an unmixed pleasure in esteeming and admiring, but, as the recipient of esteem or admiration, I feel as a man, whose good dispositions are still alive, feels in the enjoyment of a _darling_ property on a doubtful title. My instincts are so far dog-like that I love beings superior to myself better than my equals. But the notion of inferiority is so painful to me that I never, in common life, feel a man my inferior except by after-reflection. What seems vanity in me is in great part attributable to this feeling. But of this hereafter. I will cross-examine myself. [Sidenote: A CAUTION TO POSTERITY] There are actions which left undone mark the greater man; but to have done them does not imply a bad or mean man. Such, for instance, are Martial's compliments of Domitian. So may we praise Milton without condemning Dryden. By-the-bye, we are all too apt to forget that contemporaries have not the same _wholeness_, and _fixedness_ in their notions of persons' characters, that we their posterity have. They can _hope_ and _fear_ and _believe_ and _disbelieve_. We make up an ideal which, like the fox or lion in the fable, never changes. [Sidenote: FOR THE "SOOTHER IN ABSENCE"] I have several times seen the stiletto and the rosary come out of the same pocket. A man who marries for love is like a frog who leaps into a well. He has plenty of water but then he cannot get out. [Not until national ruin is imminent will Ministers contemplate the approach of national danger]; as if Judgment were overwhelmed like Belgic towns in the sea, and showed its towers only at dead low water. The superiority of the genus to the particular may be illustrated by music. How infinitely more perfect in passion and its transition than even poetry, and poetry again than painting! And yet how marvellous is genius in all its implements! [Compare _Table Talk_, July 6, 1833. H. N. C. _foot-note_. Bell & Co., 1884, p. 240.] Those only who feel no originality, no consciousness of having received their thoughts and opinions from immediate inspiration are anxious to be thought original. The certainty, the feeling that he is right, is enough for the man of genius, and he rejoices to find his opinions plumed and winged with the authority of several forefathers. The water-lily in the midst of the lake is equally refreshed by the rain, as the sponge on the sandy sea-shore. In the next world the souls of dull good men serve for bodies to the souls of the Shaksperes and Miltons, and in the course of a few centuries, when the soul can do without its vehicle, the bodies will by advantage of good company have refined themselves into souls fit to be clothed with like bodies. How much better it would be, in the House of Commons, to have everything that is, and by the spirit of English freedom must be legal, legal and open! The reporting, for instance, should be done by shorthandists appointed by Government. There are, I see, weighty arguments on the other side, but are they not to be got over? Co-arctation is not a bad phrase for that narrowing in of breadth on both sides as in my interpolation of Schiller. "And soon The narrowing line of day-light that ran after The closing door was gone." _Piccolomini_, ii. sc. 4, _P.W._, p. 257. [Sidenote: THE DEVIL WITH A MEMORY THE FIRST SINNER] In order not to be baffled by the infinite ascent of the heavenly angels, the devil feigned that all (the [Greek: tagathon], that is, God himself included) sprang from nothing. And now he has a pretty task to multiply, without paper or slate, the exact number of all the animalcules, and the eggs and embryos of each planet, by some other, and the product by a third and that product by a fourth, and he is not to stop till he has gone through the planets of half the universe, the number of which being infinite, it is considered by the devils in general a great puzzle. A dream in a doze. [Sidenote: THE SUN OF RIGHTEOUSNESS] A bodily substance, an unborrowed Self--God in God immanent! The Eternal Word! That goes forth yet remains! Crescent and Full and Wane, yet ever entire and one, it dawns, and sets, and crowns the height of heaven. At the same time, the dawning and setting sun, at the same time the zodiac--while each, in its own hour, boasts and beholds the exclusive Presence, a peculiar Orb, each the great Traveller's inn, yet still the unmoving Sun-- Great genial Agent in all finite souls; And by that action puts on finiteness, Absolute Infinite, whose dazzling robe Flows in rich folds, and plays in shooting hues Of infinite finiteness. [Sidenote: FOR THE "SOOTHER IN ABSENCE." Syracuse, September 26, 1805] I was standing gazing at the starry heaven, and said, "I will go to bed, the next star that shoots." Observe this, in counting fixed numbers previous to doing anything, and deduce from man's own unconscious acknowledgment man's _dependence_ on something more apparently and believedly subject to regular and certain laws than his own will and reason. To Wordsworth in the progression of spirit, once Simonides, or Empedocles, or both in one-- "Oh! that my spirit, purged by death of its weaknesses, which are, alas! my identity, might flow into thine, and live and act in thee and be thine!" Death, first of all, eats of the Tree of Life and becomes immortal. Describe the frightful metamorphosis. He weds the Hamadryad of the Tree [and begets a twy-form] progeny. This in the manner of Dante. Sad drooping children of a wretched parent are those yellowing leaflets of a broken twig, broke ere its June. We are not inert in the grave. St. Paul's corn in the ground proves this scripturally, and the growth of infants in their sleep by natural analogy. What, then, if our spiritual growth be in proportion to the length and depth of the sleep! With what mysterious grandeur does not this thought invest the grave, and how poor compared with this an immediate Paradise! I awake and find my beloved asleep, gaze upon her by the taper that feebly illumines the darkness, then fall asleep by her side; and we both awake together for _good_ and _all_ in the broad daylight of heaven. Forget not to impress as often and as manifoldly as possible the _totus in omni parte_ of Truth, and its consequent interdependence on co-operation and, _vice versâ_, the fragmentary character of action, and its absolute dependence on society, a majority, etc. The blindness to this distinction creates fanaticism on one side, alarm and prosecution on the other. Jacobins or soul-gougers. It is an interesting fact or fable that the stork (the emblem of filial or conjugal piety) never abides in a monarchy. Commend me to the Irish architect who took out the foundation-stone to repair the roof. Knox and the other reformers were _Scopæ viarum_--that is, highway besoms. The Pine Tree blasted at the top was applied by Swift to himself as a prophetic emblem of his own decay. The Chestnut is a fine shady tree, and its wood excellent, were it not that it dies away at the _heart_ first. Alas! poor me! [Sidenote: TASTE, AN ETHICAL QUALITY] Modern poetry is characterised by the poets' _anxiety_ to be always striking. There is the same march in the Greek and Latin poets. Claudian, who had powers to have been anything--observe in him this anxious, craving vanity! Every line, nay, every word, stops, looks full in your face, and asks and _begs_ for praise! As in a Chinese painting, there are no distances, no perspective, but all is in the foreground; and this is nothing but vanity. I am pleased to think that, when a mere stripling, I had formed the opinion that true taste was virtue, and that bad writing was bad feeling. [Sidenote: A PLEA FOR POETIC LICENSE] The desire of carrying things to a greater height of pleasure and admiration than, _omnibus trutinatis_, they are susceptible of, is one great cause of the corruption of poetry. Both to understand my own reasoning and to communicate it, ponder on Catullus' hexameters and pentameters, his "_numine abusum homines_" [Carmen, lxxvi. 4] [and similar harsh expressions]. It is not whether or no the very same ideas expressed with the very same force and the very same naturalness and simplicity in the versification of Ovid and Tibullus, would not be still more delightful (though even that, for any number of poems, may well admit a doubt), but whether it is _possible_ so to express them and whether, in every attempt, the result has not been to substitute manner for matter, and point that will not bear reflection (so fine that it breaks the moment you try it) for genuine sense and true feeling, and, lastly, to confine both the subjects, thoughts, and even words of poetry within a most beggarly cordon. _N.B._--The same criticism applies to Metastasio, and, in Pope, to his quaintness, perversion, unnatural metaphors, and, still more, the cold-blooded use, for artifice or connection, of language justifiable only by enthusiasm and passion. [Sidenote: RICHARDSON] I confess that it has cost, and still costs, my philosophy some exertion not to be vexed that I must admire, aye, greatly admire, Richardson. His mind is so very vile a mind, so oozy, hypocritical, praise-mad, canting, envious, concupiscent! But to understand and draw _him_ would be to produce a work almost equal to his own; and, in order to do this, "_down, proud Heart, down_" (as we teach little children to say to themselves, bless them!), all hatred down! and, instead thereof, charity, calmness, a heart fixed on the good part, though the understanding is surveying all. Richardson felt truly the defect of Fielding, or what was not his excellence, and made that his _defect_--a trick of uncharitableness often played, though not exclusively, by contemporaries. Fielding's talent was observation, not meditation. But Richardson was not philosopher enough to know the difference--say, rather, to understand and develop it. [Sidenote: HIS NEED OF EXTERNAL SOLACE] O there are some natures which under the most cheerless all-threatening nothing-promising circumstances can draw hope from the invisible, as the tropical trees that in the sandy desolation produce their own lidded vessels full of the waters from air and dew! Alas! to my root not a drop trickles down but from the watering-pot of immediate friends. And, even so, it seems much more a sympathy with their feeling rather than hope of my own. So should I feel sorrow, if Allston's mother, whom I have never seen, were to die? [Sidenote: MINUTE CRITICISM] Stoddart passes over a poem as one of those tiniest of tiny night-flies runs over a leaf, casting its shadow, three times as long as itself, yet only just shading one, or at most two letters at a time. [Sidenote: DR. PRICE] A maidservant of Mrs. Clarkson's parents had a great desire to hear Dr. Price, and accordingly attended his congregation. On her return, being asked "Well, what do you think?" &c., "Ai--i," replied she, "there was neither the poor nor the Gospel." Excellent that on the fine _respectable_ attendants of Unitarian chapels, and the moonshine, heartless head-work of the sermons. [Sidenote: A _DOCUMENT HUMAIN_] The mahogany tables, all, but especially the large dining-table, [marked] with the segments of circles (deep according to the passion of the dice-box plunger), chiefly half-circles, O the anger and spite with which many have been thrown! It is truly a written history of the fiendish passion of gambling. Oct. 12, 1806. Newmarket. [Sidenote: PINDAR] The odes of Pindar (with few exceptions, and these chiefly in the shorter ones) seem by intention to die away by soft gradations into a languid interest, like most of the landscapes of the great elder painters. Modern ode-writers have commonly preferred a continued rising of interest. [Sidenote: "ONE MUSIC AS BEFORE, BUT VASTER"] The shattering of long and deep-rooted associations always places the mind in an angry state, and even when our own understandings have effected the revolution, it still holds good, only we apply the feeling to and against our former faith and those who still hold it--[a tendency] shown in modern infidels. Great good, therefore, of such revolution as alters, not by exclusion, but by an enlargement that includes the former, though it places it in a new point of view. [Sidenote: TO ALLSTON] After the formation of a new acquaintance, found, by some weeks' or months' unintermitted communion, worthy of all our esteem, affection and, perhaps, admiration, an intervening absence, whether we meet again or only write, raises it into friendship, and encourages the modesty of our nature, impelling us to assume the language and express all the feelings of an established attachment. [Sidenote: MORBID SENTIMENT] The _thinking_ disease is that in which the feelings, instead of embodying themselves in _acts_, ascend and become materials of general reasoning and intellectual pride. The dreadful consequences of this perversion [may be] instanced in Germany, _e.g._, in Fichte _versus_ Kant, Schelling _versus_ Fichte and in Verbidigno [Wordsworth] _versus_ S. T. C. Ascent where nature meant descent, and thus shortening the process--viz., _feelings_ made the subjects and tangible substance of thought, instead of actions, realizations, _things done_, and as such externalised and remembered. On such meagre diet as feelings, evaporated embryos in their progress to _birth_, no moral being ever becomes healthy. [Sidenote: "PHANTOMS OF SUBLIMITY"] Empires, states, &c., may be beautifully illustrated by a large clump of coal placed on a fire--Russia, for instance--or of small coal moistened, and by the first action of the heat of any government not absolutely lawless, formed into a cake, as the northern nations under Charlemagne--then a slight impulse from the fall of accident, or the hand of patriotic foresight, splits [the one] into many, and makes each [fragment] burn with its own flame, till at length all burning equally, it becomes again one by universal similar action--then burns low, cinerises, and without accession of rude materials goes out. [Sidenote: A MILD WINTER] Winter slumbering soft, seemed to smile at visions of buds and blooms, and dreamt so livelily of spring, that his stern visage had relaxed and softened itself into a dim likeness of his dream. The soul of the vision breathed through and lay like light upon his face. But, heavens! what an outrageous day of winter this is and has been! Terrible weather for the last two months, but this is horrible! Thunder and lightning, floods of rain, and volleys of hail, with such frantic winds. December 1806. [This note was written when S. T. C. was staying with Wordsworth at the Hall Farm, Coleorton.] [Sidenote: MOONLIGHT GLEAMS AND MASSY GLORIES] In the first [entrance to the wood] the spots of moonlight of the wildest outlines, not unfrequently approaching so near to the shape of man and the domestic animals most attached to him as to be easily confused with them by fancy and mistaken by terror, moved and started as the wind stirred the branches, so that it almost seemed like a flight of recent spirits, sylphs and sylphids dancing and capering in a world of shadows. Once, when our path was over-canopied by the meeting boughs, as I halloed to those a stone-throw behind me, a sudden flash of light dashed down, as it were, upon the path close before me, with such rapid and indescribable effect that my life seemed snatched away from me--not by terror but by the whole attention being suddenly and unexpectedly seized hold of--if one could conceive a violent blow given by an unseen hand, yet without pain or local sense of injury, of the weight falling here or there, it might assist in conceiving the feeling. This I found was occasioned by some very large bird, who, scared by my noise, had suddenly flown upward, and by the spring of his feet or body had driven down the branch on which he was aperch. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote B: When instead of the general feeling of the lifeblood in its equable individual motion, and the consequent wholeness of the one feeling of the skin, we feel as if a heap of ants were running over us--_the one_ corrupting into _ten thousand_--so in _araneosis_, instead of the one view of the air, or blue sky, a thousand specks, etc., dance before the eye. The metaphor is as just as, of a metaphor, anyone has a right to claim, but it is clumsily expressed.] [Footnote C: I have the same anxiety for my friend now in England as for myself, that is to be, or may be, two months hence.] [Footnote D: "A prison so constructed that the inspector can see each of the prisoners at all times without being seen by them."] CHAPTER V _September 1806--December 1807_ Alas! for some abiding-place of love, O'er which my spirit, like the mother dove, Might brood with warming wings! S. T. C. [Sidenote: DREAMS AND SHADOWS] I had a confused shadow rather than an image in my recollection, like that from a thin cloud, as if the idea were descending, though still in some measureless height. As when the taper's white cone of flame is seen double, till the eye moving brings them into one space and then they become one--so did the idea in my imagination coadunate with your present form soon after I first gazed upon you. And in life's noisiest hour There whispers still the ceaseless love of thee, The heart's self-solace and soliloquy. You mould my hopes, you fashion me within, And to the leading love-throb in my heart Through all my being, all my pulses beat. You lie in all my many thoughts like light, Like the fair light of dawn, or summer light, On rippling stream, or cloud-reflecting lake-- And looking to the Heaven that beams above you, How do I bless the lot that made me love you! [Sidenote: KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING] In all processes of the understanding the shortest way will be discovered the last and this, perhaps, while it constitutes the great advantage of having a teacher to put us on the shortest road at the first, yet sometimes occasions a difficulty in the comprehension, inasmuch as the longest way is more near to the existing state of the mind, nearer to what if left to myself, on starting the thought, I should have thought next. The shortest way gives me the _knowledge_ best, but the longest makes me more _knowing_. [Sidenote: PARTISANS AND RENEGADES] When a party man talks as if he hated his country, saddens at her prosperous events, exults in her disasters and yet, all the while, is merely hating the opposite party, and would himself feel and talk as a patriot were he in a foreign land [_he_ is a party man]. The true monster is he (and such alas! there are in these monstrous days, "vollendeter Sündhaftigkeit"), who abuses his country when out of his country. [Sidenote: POPULACE AND PEOPLE] Oh the profanation of the sacred word _the People_! Every brutal Burdett-led mob, assembled on some drunken St. Monday of faction, is the People forsooth, and each leprous ragamuffin, like a circle in geometry, is, at once, one and all, and calls its own brutal self, "_us_ the People." And who are the friends of the People? Not those who would wish to elevate each of them, or, at least, the child who is to take his place in the flux of life and death, into something worthy of esteem and capable of freedom, but those who flatter and infuriate them, as they _are_. A contradiction in the very thought! For if, really, they are good and wise, virtuous and well-informed, how weak must be the motives of discontent to a truly moral being--but if the contrary, and the motives for discontent proportionably strong, how without guilt and absurdity appeal to them as judges and arbiters? He alone is entitled to a share in the government of all, who has learnt to govern himself. There is but one possible ground of a right of freedom--viz., to understand and revere its duties. [_Vide Life of S. T. C._, by James Gillman, 1838, p. 223.] [Sidenote: FOR THE "SOOTHER IN ABSENCE." May 28, 1807 Bristol] How villainously these metallic pencils have degenerated, not only in the length and quantity, but what is far worse, in the _quality_ of the metal! This one appears to have no superiority over the worst sort sold by the Maltese shopkeepers. Blue sky through the glimmering interspaces of the dark elms at twilight rendered a lovely deep yellow-green--all the rest a delicate blue. The hay-field in the close hard by the farm-house--babe, and totterer little more [than a babe]--old cat with her eyes blinking in the sun and little kittens leaping and frisking over the hay-lines. What an admirable subject for an Allston would Tycho Brahe be, listening with religious awe to the oracular gabble of the idiot, whom he kept at his feet, and used to feed with his own hands! The sun-flower ought to be cultivated, the leaves being excellent fodder, the flowers eminently melliferous, and the seeds a capital food for poultry, none nourishing quicker or occasioning them to lay more eggs. Serpentium allapsus timet. Quære--_allapse_ of serpents. _Horace_.--What other word have we? Pity that we dare not Saxonise as boldly as our forefathers, by unfortunate preference, Latinised. Then we should have on-glide, _angleiten_; onlook _anschauen_, etc. I moisten the bread of affliction with the water of adversity. If kings are gods on earth, they are, however, gods of earth. Parisatis poisoned one side of the knife with which he carved, and eat of the same joint the next slice unhurt--a happy illustration of affected self-inclusion in accusation. It is possible to conceive a planet without any general atmosphere, but in which each living body has its peculiar atmosphere. To hear and understand, one man joins his atmosphere to that of another, and, according to the sympathies of their nature, the aberrations of sound will be greater or less, and their thoughts more or less intelligible. A pretty allegory might be made of this. Two faces, each of a confused countenance. In the eyes of the one, muddiness and lustre were blended; and the eyes of the other were the same, but in them there was a red fever that made them appear more fierce. And yet, methought, the former struck a greater trouble, a fear and distress of the mind; and sometimes all the face looked meek and mild, but the eye was ever the same. [Qu. S. T. C. and De Quincey?] Shadow--its being subsists in shaped and definite nonentity. Plain sense, measure, clearness, dignity, grace over all--these made the genius of Greece. Heu! quam miserum ab illo lædi, de quo non possis queri! Eheu! quam miserrimum est ab illo lædi, de quo propter amorem non possis queri! Observation from Bacon after reading Mr. Sheridan's speech on Ireland: "Things will have their first or second agitation; if they be not tossed on the arguments of council, they will be tossed on the waves of fortune." The death of an immortal has been beautifully compared to an Indian fig, which at its full height declines its branches to the earth, and there takes root again. The blast rises and falls, and trembles at its height. A passionate woman may be likened to a wet candle spitting flame. TO LOVE. It is a duty, nay, it is a religion to that power to shew that, though it makes all things--wealth, pleasure, ambition--worthless, yea, noisome for themselves; yet for _it_self can it produce all efforts, even if only to secure its name from scoffs as the child and parent of slothfulness. Works, therefore, of general profit--works of abstruse thought [will be born of love]; activity, and, above all, virtue and chastity [will come forth from his presence]. The moulting peacock, with only two of his long tail-feathers remaining, and those sadly in tatters, yet, proudly as ever, spreads out his ruined fan in the sun and breeze. Yesterday I saw seven or eight water-wagtails following a feeding horse in the pasture, fluttering about and hopping close by his hoofs, under his belly, and even so as often to tickle his nostrils with their pert tails. The horse shortens the grass and they get the insects. Sic accipite, sic credite, ut mereamini intelligere: fides enim debet præcedere intellectum, ut sit intellectus fidei præmium. _S. August. Sermones De Verb. Dom._ Yet should a friend think foully of that wherein the pride of thy spirit's purity is in shrine. O the agony! the agony! Nor Time nor varying Fate, Nor tender Memory, old or late, Nor all his Virtues, great though they be, Nor all his Genius can free His friend's soul from the agony! [So receive, so believe [divine ideas] that ye may earn the right to understand them. For faith should go before understanding, in order that understanding may be the reward of faith.] [Greek: Hote enthousiasmos epineusin tina theian hechein dokei kai tô mantikô genei plêsiazein.] _Strabo Geographicus._ Though Genius, like the fire on the altar, can only be kindled from heaven, yet it will perish unless supplied with appropriate fuel to feed it; or if it meet not with the virtues whose society alone can reconcile it to earth, it will return whence it came, or, at least, lie hid as beneath embers, till some sudden and awakening gust of regenerating Grace, [Greek: anazôpyrei], rekindles and reveals it anew. [Now the inspiration of genius seems to bear the stamp of Divine assent, and to attain to something of prophetic strain.] [Sidenote: FALLINGS FROM US, VANISHINGS] I trust you are very happy in your domestic being--very; because, alas! I know that to a man of sensibility and more emphatically if he be a literary man, there is _no_ medium between that and "the secret pang that eats away the heart." ... Hence, even in dreams of sleep, the soul never _is_, because it either cannot or dare not be any _one_ thing, but lives in _approaches_ touched by the outgoing pre-existent ghosts of many feelings. It feels for ever as a blind man with his protruded staff dimly through the medium of the instrument by which it pushes off, and in the act of repulsion--(O for the eloquence of Shakspere, who alone could feel and yet know how to embody those conceptions with as curious a felicity as the thoughts are subtle!)--as if the finger which I saw with eyes, had, as it were, another finger, invisible, touching me with a ghostly touch, even while I feared the real touch from it. What if, in certain cases, touch acted by itself, co-present with vision, yet not coalescing? Then I should see the finger as at a distance, and yet feel a finger touching which was nothing but it, and yet was not it. The two senses cannot co-exist without a sense of causation. The _touch_ must be the effect of that finger [which] I see, and yet it is not yet near to me, and therefore it is not it, and yet it is it. Why it is is in an imaginary pre-duplication! _N.B._--There is a passage in the second part of Wallenstein expressing, not explaining, the same feeling. "The spirits of great events stride on before the events"--it is in one of the last two or three scenes:-- "As the sun, Ere it is risen, sometimes paints its image In the atmosphere, so often do the spirits Of great events, stride on before the events." [WALLENSTEIN, Part II., act v. sc. 1. _P. W._, 1893, p. 351.] [Sidenote: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CLERICAL ERRORS] It is worth noting and endeavouring to detect the Law of the Mind, by which, in writing earnestly while we are thinking, we omit words necessary to the sense. It will be found, I guess, that we seldom omit the material word, but generally the word by which the mind expresses its modification of the _verbum materiale_. Thus, in the preceding page, 7th line, _medium_ is the _materiale_: that was its own brute, inert sense--but the _no_ is the mind's action, its _use_ of the word. I think this a hint of some value. Thus, _the_ is a word in constant combination with the passive or material words; but _to_ is an act of the mind, and I had written _the_ detect instead of _to_ detect. Again, when my sense demanded "the" to express a distinct modification of some _verbum materiale_, I remember to have often omitted it in writing. The principle is evident--the mind borrows the _materia_ from without, and is passive with regard to it as the mere subject "stoff"--a simple event of memory takes place; but having the other in itself, the inward Having with its sense of security passes for the outward Having--or is all memory an anxious act, and thereby suspended by vivid security? or are both reasons the same? or if not, are they consistent, and capable of being co-or sub-ordinated? It will be lucky if some day, after having written on for two or three sheets rapidly and as a first copy, without correcting, I should by chance glance on this note, not having thought at all about it during or before the time of writing; and then to examine every word omitted. [Sidenote: BIBLIOLOGICAL MEMORANDA] To spend half-an-hour in Cuthill's shop, examining Stephen's _Thesaurus_, in order to form an accurate idea of its utilities above Scapula, and to examine the _Budæo-Tusan-Constantine_, whether it be the same or as good as Constantine, and the comparative merits of Constantine with Scapula. 3. To examine Bosc relatively to Brunck, and to see after the new German _Anthologia_. 4. Before I quit town, to buy Appendix (either No. 1430 or 1431), 8_s._ or 18_s._ What a difference! ten shillings, because the latter, the Parma Anacreon, is on large paper, green morocco; the former is neat in red morocco, but the type the same. 5. To have a long morning's ramble with De Quincey, first to Egerton's, and then to the book haunts. 6. To see if I can find that Arrian with Epictetus which I admired so much at Mr. Leckie's. 7. To find out D'Orville's _Daphnis_, and the price. Is there no other edition? no cheap German? 8. To write out the passage from Strada's _Prolusions_ at Cuthill's. 9. Aristotle's Works, and to hunt for Proclus. 10. In case of my speedy death, it would answer to buy a £100 worth of carefully-chosen books, in order to attract attention to my library and to give accession to the value of books by their co-existing with co-appurtenants--as, for instance, Plato, Aristotle; Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus: Schoolmen, Interscholastic; Bacon, Hobbes; Locke, Berkeley; Leibnitz, Spinoza; Kant and the critical Fichte, and Wissenschaftslehre, Schelling, &c. [The first edition of Robert Constantin's _Lexicon Græco-Lat._ was published at Geneva in 1564. A second ed. _post correctiones_ G. Budæi et J. Tusani, at Basle, in 1584.] [Sidenote: [Greek: panta rhei]] Our mortal existence, what is it but a stoppage in the blood of life, a brief eddy from wind or concourse of currents in the ever-flowing ocean of pure Activity, who beholds pyramids, yea, Alps and Andes, giant pyramids, the work of fire that raiseth monuments, like a generous victor o'er its own conquest, the tombstones of a world destroyed! Yet these, too, float adown the sea of Time, and melt away as mountains of floating ice. [Sidenote: DISTINCTION IN UNION] Has every finite being (or only some) the temptation to become intensely and wholly conscious of its distinctness and, as a result, to be betrayed into the wretchedness of _division_? Grosser natures, wholly swallowed up in selfishness which does not rise to self-love, never even acquire that sense of distinctness, while, to others, love is the first step to re-union. It is a by-word that religious enthusiasm borders on and tends to sensuality--possibly because all our powers work together, and as a consequence of striding too vastly up the ladder of existence, a great _round_ of the ladder is omitted, namely, love to some, _Eine verschiedene_, of our own kind. Then let Religion love, else will it not only partake of, instead of being partaken by, and so co-adunated with, the summit of love, but will necessarily include the nadir of love, that is, appetite. Hence will it tend to dissensualise its nature into fantastic passions, the idolatry of Paphian priestesses. [Sidenote: IN WONDER ALL PHILOSOPHY BEGAN] Time, space, duration, action, active passion passive, activeness, passiveness, reaction, causation, affinity--here assemble all the mysteries known. All is known-unknown, say, rather, _merely_ known. All is unintelligible, and yet Locke and the stupid adorers of that _fetish_ earth-clod take all for granted. By the bye, in poetry as well as metaphysics, that which we first meet with in the dawn of our mind becomes ever after _fetish_, to the many at least. Blessed he who first sees the morning star, if not the sun, or purpling clouds his harbingers. Thence is _fame_ desirable to a great man, and thence subversion of vulgar fetishes becomes a duty. Rest, motion! O ye strange locks of intricate simplicity, who shall find the key? He shall throw wide open the portals of the palace of sensuous or symbolical truth, and the Holy of Holies will be found in the adyta. Rest = enjoyment and death. Motion = enjoyment and life. O the depth of the proverb, "Extremes meet"! [Sidenote: IN A TWINKLING OF THE EYE] The "break of the morning"--and from inaction a nation starts up into motion and wide fellow-consciousness! The trumpet of the Archangel--and a world with all its troops and companies of generations starts up into a hundredfold expansion, power multiplied into itself cubically by the number of all its possible acts--all the potential springing into power. Conceive a bliss from self-conscience, combining with bliss from increase of action; the first dreaming, the latter dead-asleep in a grain of gunpowder--conceive a huge magazine of gunpowder and a flash of lightning awakes the whole at once. What an image of the resurrection, grand from its very inadequacy. Yet again, conceive the living, moving ocean--its bed sinks away from under and the whole world of waters falls in at once on a thousand times vaster mass of intensest fire, and the whole prior orbit of the planet's successive revolutions is possessed by it at once (_Potentia fit actus_) amid the thunder of rapture. [Sidenote: SINE QUÂ NON] Form is factitious being, and thinking is the process; imagination the laboratory in which the thought elaborates essence into existence. A philosopher, that is, a nominal philosopher without imagination, is a _coiner_. Vanity, the _froth_ of the molten mass, is his _stuff_, and verbiage the stamp and impression. This is but a deaf metaphor--better say that he is guilty of forgery. He presents the same sort of _paper_ as the honest barterer, but when you carry it to the bank it is found to be drawn to _Outis_, _Esq._ His words had deposited no forms there, payable at sight--or even at any imaginable _time_ from the date of the draft. [Sidenote: SOLVITUR SUSPICIENDO] The sky, or rather say, the æther at Malta, with the sun apparently suspended in it, the eye seeming to pierce beyond and, as it were, behind it--and, below, the æthereal sea, so blue, so _ein zerflossenes_, the substantial image, and fixed real reflection of the sky! O! I could annihilate in a deep moment all possibility of the needle-point, pin's-head system of the _atomists_ by one submissive gaze! [Sidenote: A GEM OF MORNING] A dewdrop, the pearl of Aurora, is indeed a true _unio_. I would that _unio_ were the word for the dewdrop, and the pearl be called _unio marinus_. _VER_, _ZER_, AND _AL_ O for the power to persuade all the writers of Great Britain to adopt the _ver_, _zer_, and _al_ of the German! Why not verboil, zerboil; verrend, zerrend? I should like the very words _verflossen_, _zerflossen_, to be naturalised: And as I looked now feels my soul creative throes, And now all joy, all sense _zerflows_. I do not know, whether I am in earnest or in sport while I recommend this _ver_ and _zer_; that is, I cannot be sure whether I feel, myself, anything ridiculous in the idea, or whether the feeling that seems to imply this be not the effect of my anticipation of and sympathy with the ridicule of, perhaps, all my readers. [Sidenote: THE LOVER'S HUMILITY] To you there are many like me, yet to me there is none like you, and you are always like yourself. There are groves of night-flowers, yet the night-flower sees only the moon. CHAPTER VI _1808-1809_ Yea, oft alone, Piercing the long-neglected holy cave The haunt obscure of old Philosophy, He bade with lifted torch its starry walls Sparkle, as erst they sparkled to the flame Of odorous lamps tended by Saint and Sage. S. T. C. [Sidenote: INOPEM ME COPIA FECIT] If one thought leads to another, so often does it blot out another. This I find when having lain musing on my sofa, a number of interesting thoughts having suggested themselves, I conquer my bodily indolence, and rise to record them in these books, alas! my only confidants. The first thought leads me on indeed to new ones; but nothing but the faint memory of having had these remains of the other, which had been even more interesting to me. I do not know whether this be an idiosyncrasy, a peculiar disease, of _my_ particular memory--but so it is with _me_--my thoughts crowd each other to death. [Sidenote: A NEUTRAL PRONOUN] Quære--whether we may not, _nay_ ought not, to use a neutral pronoun relative, or representative, to the word "Person," where it hath been used in the sense of _homo_, _mensch_, or noun of the common gender, in order to avoid particularising man or woman, or in order to express either sex indifferently? If this be incorrect in syntax, the whole use of the word Person is lost in a number of instances, or only retained by some stiff and strange position of words, as--"not letting the _person_ be aware, _wherein offence has been given_"--instead of--"wherein he or she has offended." In my [judgment] both the specific intention and general _etymon_ of "Person" in such sentences, fully authorise the use of _it_ and _which_ instead of he, she, him, her, who, whom. [Sidenote: THE HUMBLE COMPLAINT OF THE LOVER] If love be the genial sun of human nature, unkindly has he divided his rays [in acting] on me and my beloved! On her hath he poured all his light and splendour, and my being doth he permeate with his invisible rays of heat alone. She shines and is cold like the tropic fire-fly--I, dark and uncomely, would better resemble the cricket in hot ashes. My soul, at least, might be considered as a cricket eradiating the heat which gradually cinerising the heart produces the embers and ashes from among which it chirps out of its hiding-place. N.B.--This put in simple and elegant verse, [would pass] as an imitation of Marini, and of too large a part of the madrigals of Guarini himself. [Sidenote: TRUTH] Truth _per se_ is like unto quicksilver, bright, agile, harmless. Swallow a pound and it will run through unaltered and only, perhaps, by its weight force down impurities from out the system. But mix and comminute it by the mineral acid of spite and bigotry, and even truth becomes a deadly poison--medicinal only when some other, yet deadlier, lurks in the bones. [Sidenote: LOVE THE INEFFABLE] O! many, many are the seeings, hearings, of pure love that have a being of their own, and to call them by the names of things unsouled and debased below even their own lowest nature by associations accidental, and of vicious accidents, is _blasphemy_. What seest thou yonder? The lovely countenance of a lovely maiden, fervid yet awe-suffering with devotion--her face resigned to bliss or bale; or a _bit_ of _flesh_; or, rather, that which cannot be seen unless by him whose very seeing is more than an act of mere sight--that which refuses all words, because words being, perforce, generalities do not awake, but really involve associations of other words as well as other thoughts--but that which I see, must be felt, be possessed, in and by its sole self! What! shall the _statuary_ Pygmalion of necessity feel this for every part of the insensate marble, and shall the lover Pygmalion in contemplating the living statue, the heart-adored maiden, breathing forth in every look, every movement, the genial life imbreathed of God, grovel in the mire and grunt the language of the swinish slaves of the Circe, of vulgar generality and still more vulgar association? The Polyclete that created the Aphrodite [Greek: kallipygos], thought in acts, not words--energy divinely languageless--[Greek: dia ton Logon, ou syn epesi], through _the_ Word, not with _words_. And what though it met with Imp-fathers and Imp-mothers and Fiendsips at its christening in its parents' absence! [Sidenote: THE MANUFACTURE OF PROPHESY] One of the causes of superstition, and also of enthusiasm, and, indeed, of all errors in matters of fact, is the great power with which the effect acts upon and modifies the remembrance of its cause, at times even transforming it in the mind. Let _A_ have said a few words to _B_, which (by some change and accommodation of them to the event in the mind of _B_) have been remarkably fulfilled; and let _B_ remind _A_ of these words which he (_A_) had spoken, _A_ will instantly forget all his mood, motive, and meaning, at the time of speaking them, nay, remember words he had never spoken, and throw back upon them, from the immediate event, an imagined fulfillment, a prophetic grandeur--himself, in his own faith, a seer of no small inspiration. We yet want the growth of a prophet and self-deceived wonder-worker _step by step_, through all the stages; and, yet, what ample materials exist for a true and nobly-minded psychologist! For, in order to make fit use of these materials, he must love and honour as well as understand human nature--rather, he must love in order to understand it. [Sidenote: THE CAPTIVE BIRD May 16th, 1808] O that sweet bird! where is it? It is encaged somewhere out of sight; but from my bedroom at the _Courier_ office, from the windows of which I look out on the walls of the Lyceum, I hear it at early dawn, often, alas! lulling me to late sleep--again when I awake and all day long. It is in prison, all its instincts ungratified, yet it feels the influence of spring, and calls with unceasing melody to the Loves that dwell in field and greenwood bowers, unconscious, perhaps, that it calls in vain. O are they the songs of a happy, enduring day-dream? Has the bird hope? or does it abandon itself to the joy of its frame, a living harp of Eolus? O that I could do so! Assuredly a thrush or blackbird encaged in London is a far less shocking spectacle, its encagement a more venial defect of just feeling, than (which yet one so often sees) a bird in a gay cage in the heart of the country--yea, as if at once to mock both the poor prisoner and its kind mother, Nature--in a cage hung up in a tree, where the free birds after a while, when the gaudy dungeon is no longer a scare, crowd to it, perch on the wires, drink the water, and peck up the seeds. But of all birds I most detest to see the nightingale encaged, and the swallow, and the cuckoo. Motiveless! monstrous! But the robin! O woes' woe! woe!--he, sweet cock-my-head-and-eye, pert-bashful darling, that makes our kitchen its chosen cage. [Sidenote: ARCHITECTURE AND CLIMATE] If we take into consideration the effect of the climates of the North, _Gothic_, in contra-distinction to Greek and Græco-Roman architecture, is rightly so named. Take, for instance, a rainy, windy day, or sleet, or a fall of snow, or an icicle-hanging frost, and then compare the total effect of the South European roundnesses and smooth perpendicular surface with the ever-varying angles and meeting-lines of the North-European or Gothic styles. [The above is probably a dropped sentence from the report of the First or Second Lecture of the 1818 series. See _Coleridge's Works_ (Harper and Brothers, 1853), iv. 232-239.] [Sidenote: NEITHER BOND NOR FREE] The demagogues address the lower orders as if they were negroes--as if each individual were an inseparable part of the order, always to remain, _nolens volens_, poor and ignorant. How different from Christianity, which for ever calls on us to detach ourselves spiritually not merely from our rank, but even from our body, and from the whole world of sense! [Sidenote: THE MAIDEN'S PRIMER] The one mighty main defect of female education is that everything is taught but reason and the means of retaining affection. This--this--O! it is worth all the rest told ten thousand times:--how to greet a husband, how to receive him, how never to recriminate--in short, the power of pleasurable thoughts and feelings, and the mischief of giving pain, or (as often happens when a husband comes home from a party of old friends, joyous and full of heart) the love-killing effect of cold, dry, uninterested looks and manners. [Sidenote: THE HALFWAY HOUSE Wednesday night, May 18th, 1808] Let me record the following important remark of Stuart, with whom I never converse but to receive some distinct and rememberable improvement (and if it be not remembered, it is the defect of my memory--which, alas! grows weaker daily--or a fault from my indolence in not noting it down, as I do this)--that there is a period in a man's life, varying in various men, from thirty-five to forty-five, and operating most strongly in bachelors, widowers, or those worst and miserablest widowers, unhappy husbands, in which a man finds himself at the _top of the hill_, and having attained, perhaps, what he wishes, begins to ask himself, What is all this for?--begins to feel the vanity of his pursuits, becomes half-melancholy, gives in to wild dissipation or self-regardless drinking; and some, not content with these (not _slow_) poisons, destroy themselves, and leave their ingenious female or female-minded friends to fish out some _motive_ for an act which proceeded from a _motive-making_ impulse, which would have acted even without a motive (even as the terror[E] in nightmare is a bodily sensation, and though it most often calls up consonant images, yet, as I know by experience, can take effect equally without any); or, if not so, yet like gunpowder in a smithy, though it will not go off without a spark, is _sure_ to receive one, if not this hour, yet the next. I had _felt_ this truth, but never saw it before clearly: it came upon me at Malta under the melancholy, dreadful feeling of finding myself to be _man_, by a distinct division from boyhood, youth, and "young man." Dreadful was the feeling--till then life had flown so that I had always been a boy, as it were; and this sensation had blended in all my conduct, my willing acknowledgment of superiority, and, in truth, my meeting every person as a superior at the first moment. Yet if men survive this period, they commonly become cheerful again. That is a comfort for mankind, _not for me_! [Sidenote: HIS OWN GENIUS] My inner mind does not justify the thought that I possess a genius, my _strength_ is so very small in proportion to my power. I believe that I first, from internal feeling, made or gave light and impulse to this important distinction between strength and power, the oak and the tropic annual, or biennial, which grows nearly as high and spreads as large as the oak, but in which the _wood_, the _heart_ is wanting--the vital works vehemently, but the immortal is not with it. And yet, I think, I must have some analogue of genius; because, among other things, when I am in company with Mr. Sharp, Sir J. Mackintosh, R. and Sydney Smith, Mr. Scarlett, &c. &c., I feel like a child, nay, rather like an inhabitant of another planet. Their very faces all act upon me, sometimes, as if they were ghosts, but more often as if I were a ghost among them--at all times as if we were not consubstantial. [Sidenote: NAME IT AND YOU BREAK IT] "The class that ought to be kept separate from all others"--and this said by one of themselves! O what a confession that it is no longer separated! Who would have said this even fifty years ago? It is the howling of ice during a thaw. When there is any just reason for saying this, it ought not to be said, it is already too late. And though it may receive the assent of the people of "the squares and places," yet what does that do, if it be the ridicule of all other classes? [Sidenote: THE DANGER OF OVER-BLAMING] The general experience, or rather supposed experience, prevails over the particular knowledge. So many causes oppose man to man, that he _begins_ by thinking of other men worse than they deserve, and receives his punishment by at last thinking worse of himself than the truth is. [Sidenote: EXCESS OF SELF-ESTEEM] Expressions of honest self-esteem, in which _self_ was only a diagram of the _genus_, will excite sympathy at the minute, and yet, even among persons who love and esteem you, be remembered and quoted as ludicrous instances of strange self-involution. [Sidenote: DEFECT OF SELF-ESTEEM. May 23, 1808] Those who think lowliest of themselves, perhaps with a _feeling_ stronger than rational comparison would justify, are apt to feel and express undue asperity for the faults and defects of those whom they habitually have looked up to as to their superiors. For placing themselves very low, perhaps too low, wherever a series of experiences, struggled against for a while, have at length convinced the mind that in such and such a moral habit the long-idolised superior is far below even itself, the grief and anger will be in proportion. "If even _I_ could never have done this, O anguish, that _he_, so much my superior, should do it! If even _I_ with all my infirmities have not this defect, this selfishness, that _he_ should have it!" This is the course of thought. Men are bad enough; and yet they often think themselves worse than they are, among other causes by a reaction from their own uncharitable thoughts. The poisoned chalice is brought back to our own lips. [Sidenote: A PRACTICAL MAN] He was grown, and solid from his infancy, like that most _useful_ of domesticated animals, that never runs but with some prudent motive to the mast or the wash-tub and, at no time a slave to the present moment, never even grunts over the acorns before him without a scheming squint and the segment, at least, of its wise little eye cast toward those on one side, which his neighbour is or may be about to enjoy. [Sidenote: LUCUS A NON LUCENDO] Quære, whether the high and mighty Edinburghers, &c., have not been elevated into guardians and overseers of taste and poetry for much the same reason as St. Cecilia was chosen as the guardian goddess of music, because, forsooth, so far from being able to compose or play herself, she could never endure any other instrument than the jew's-harp or Scotch bag-pipe? No! too eager recensent! you are mistaken, there is no anachronism in this. We are informed by various antique bas-reliefs that the bag-pipe was well known to the Romans, and probably, therefore, that the Picts and Scots were even then fond of seeking their fortune in other countries. [Sidenote: LOVE AND MUSIC] "Love is the spirit of life and music the life of the spirit." Q. What is music? A. Poetry in its grand sense! Passion and order at once! Imperative power in obedience! Q. What is the first and divinest strain of music? A.--In the intellect--"Be able to will that thy maxims (rules of individual conduct) should be the law of all intelligent being!" In the heart, or practical reason, "Do unto others as thou wouldst be done by." This in the widest extent involves the test, "Love thy neighbour as thyself, and God above all things." For, conceive thy being to be all-including, that is, God--thou knowest that _thou_ wouldest command thyself to be beloved above all things. [For the motto at the head of this note see the lines "Ad Vilmum Axiologum." _P. W._, 1893, p. 138.] [Sidenote: CONSCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY] From what reasons do I believe in _continuous_ and ever-continuable consciousness? From conscience! Not for myself, but for my conscience, that is, my affections and duties towards others, I should have no self--for self is definition, but all boundary implies neighbourhood and is knowable only by neighbourhood or relations. Does the understanding say nothing in favour of immortality? It says nothing for or against; but its silence gives consent, and is better than a thousand arguments such as mere understanding could afford. But miracles! "Do you speak of them as proofs or as natural consequences of revelation, whose presence is proof only by precluding the disproof that would arise from their absence?" "Nay, I speak of them as of positive fundamental proofs." Then I dare answer you "Miracles in that sense are blasphemies in morality, contradictions in reason. God the Truth, the actuality of logic, the very _logos_--He deceive his creatures and demonstrate the properties of a triangle by the confusion of all properties! If a miracle merely means an event before inexperienced, it proves only itself, and the inexperience of mankind. Whatever other definition be given of it, or rather attempted (for no other not involving direct contradiction can be given), it is blasphemy. It calls darkness light, and makes Ignorance the mother of Malignity, the appointed nurse of religion--which is knowledge as opposed to mere calculating and conjectural understanding. Seven years ago, but oh! in what happier times--I wrote thus-- O ye hopes! that stir within me! Health comes with you from above! God is _with_ me! God is _in_ me! I _cannot_ die: for life is love! And now, that I am alone and utterly hopeless for myself, yet still I love--and more strongly than ever feel that conscience or the duty of love is the proof of continuing, as it is the cause and condition of existing consciousness. How beautiful the harmony! Whence could the proof come, so appropriately, so conformly with all nature, in which the cause and condition of each thing is its revealing and infallible prophecy! And for what reason, say, rather, for what cause, do you believe immortality? Because I _ought_, therefore I _must_! [The lines "On revisiting the sea-shore," of which the last stanza is quoted, were written in August, 1801. [_P.W._, 1893, p. 159.] If the note was written exactly seven years after the date of that poem, it must belong to the summer of 1808, when Coleridge was living over the _Courier_ office in the Strand.] [Sidenote: THE CAP OF LIBERTY] Truly, I hope not irreverently, may we apply to the French nation the Scripture text, "From him that hath nothing shall be taken that which he hath"--that is, their pretences to being free, which are the same as nothing. They, the illuminators, the discoverers and sole possessors of the true philosopher's stone! Alas! it proved both for them and Europe the _Lapis Infernalis_. [Sidenote: VAIN GLORY] Lord of light and fire? What is the universal of man in all, but especially in savage states? Fantastic ornament and, in general, the most frightful deformities--slits in the ears and nose, for instance. What is the solution? Man will not be a mere thing of nature: he will be and shew himself a power of himself. Hence these violent disruptions of himself from all other creatures! What they are made, that they remain--they are Nature's, and wholly Nature's. [Sidenote: CHILDREN OF A LARGER GROWTH] Try to contemplate mankind as children. These we love tenderly, because they are beautiful and happy; we know that a sweet-meat or a top will transfer their little love for a moment, and that we shall be repelled with a grimace. Yet we are not offended. [Sidenote: CHYMICAL ANALOGIES] I am persuaded that the chymical technology, as far as it was borrowed from life and intelligence, half-metaphorically, half-mystically, may be brought back again (as when a man borrows of another a sum which the latter had previously borrowed of him, because he is too polite to remind him of a debt) to the use of psychology in many instances, and, above all, [may be re-adapted to] the philosophy of language, which ought to be experimentative and analytic of the elements of meaning--their double, triple, and quadruple combinations, of simple aggregation or of composition by balance of opposition. Thus innocence is distinguished from virtue, and _vice versâ_. In both of them there is a positive, but in each opposite. A decomposition must take place in the first instance, and then a new composition, in order for innocence to become virtue. It loses a positive, and then the base attracts another different positive, by the higher affinity of the same base under a different temperature for the latter. I stated the legal use of the innocent as opposed to mere _not guilty_ (he was not only acquitted, but was proved innocent), only to shew the existence of a _positive_ in the former--by no means as confounding this use of the word with the moral pleasurable feeling connected with it when used of little children, maidens, and those who in mature age preserve this sweet fragrance of vernal life, this mother's gift and so-seldom-kept keepsake to her child, as she sends him forth into the world. The distinction is obvious. Law agnizes actions alone, and character only as presumptive or illustrative of particular action as to its guilt or non-guilt, or to the commission or non-commission. But our moral feelings are never pleasurably excited except as they refer to a state of being--and the most glorious actions do not delight us as separate acts, or, rather, facts, but as representatives of the being of the agent--mental stenographs which bring an indeterminate extension within the field of easy and simultaneous vision, diffused being rendered visible by condensation. Only for the hero's sake do we exult in the heroic act, or, rather, the act abstracted from the hero would no longer appear to us heroic. Not, therefore, solely from the advantage of poets and historians do the deeds of ancient Greece and Rome strike us into admiration, while we relate the very same deeds of barbarians as matters of curiosity, but because in the former we refer the deed to the individual exaltation of the agent, in the latter only to the physical result of a given state of society. Compare the [heroism of that] Swiss patriot, with his bundle of spears turned towards his breast, in order to break the Austrian pikemen, and that of the Mameluke, related to me by Sir Alexander Ball, who, when his horse refused to plunge in on the French line, turned round and _backed_ it on them, with a certainty of death, in order to effect the same purpose. In the former, the state of mind arose from reason, morals, liberty, the sense of the duty owing to the independence of his country, and its continuing in a state compatible with the highest perfection and development; while the latter was predicative only of mere animal habit, ferocity, and unreasoned antipathy to strangers of a different dress and religion. [Sidenote: BOOKS IN THE AIR] If, contrary to my expectations--alas! almost, I fear, to my wishes--I should live, it is my intention to make a catalogue of the Greek and Latin Classics, and of those who, like the author of the _Argenis_ [William Barclay, 1546-1605], and Euphormio, Fracastorius, Flaminius, etc., deserve that name though moderns--and every year to apply all my book-money to the gradual completion of the collection, and buy no other books except German, if the continent should be opened again, except Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Jonson. The two last I have, I believe, but imperfect--indeed, B. and F. worthless, the best plays omitted. It would be a pleasing employment, had I health, to translate the Hymns of Homer, with a disquisitional attempt to settle the question concerning the _personality_ of Homer. Such a thing in two volumes, _well done_, by philosophical notes on the mythology of the Greeks, distinguishing the sacerdotal from the poetical, and both from the philosophical or allegorical, fairly grown into two octavos, might go a good way, if not all the way, to the Bipontine Latin and Greek Classics. [Sidenote: A TURTLE-SHELL FOR HOUSE-HOLD TUB] I almost fear that the alteration would excite surprise and uneasy contempt in Verbidigno's mind (towards one less loved, at least); but had I written the sweet tale of the "Blind Highland Boy," I would have substituted for the washing-tub, and the awkward stanza in which it is specified, the images suggested in the following lines from Dampier's Travels, vol. i. pp. 105-6:--"I heard of a monstrous green turtle once taken at the Port Royal, in the Bay of Campeachy, that was four feet deep from the back to the belly, and the belly six feet broad. Captain Rock's son, of about nine or ten years of age, went in it as in a boat, on board his father's ship, about a quarter of a mile from the shore." And a few lines before--"The green turtle are so called because their shell is greener than any other. It is very thin and clear, and better clouded than the Hawksbill, but 'tis used only for _inlays_, being _extraordinary_ thin." Why might not some mariners have left this shell on the shore of Loch Leven for a while, about to have transported it inland for a curiosity, and the blind boy have found it? Would not the incident be in equal keeping with that of the child, as well as the image and tone of romantic uncommonness? ["In deference to the opinion of a friend," this substitution took place. A promise made to Sara Coleridge to re-instate the washing-tub was, alas! never fulfilled. See _Poetical Works_ of W. Wordsworth, 1859, pp. 197, and 200 _footnote_.] [Sidenote: THE TENDER MERCIES OF THE GOOD] Tremendous as a Mexican god is a strong sense of duty--separate from an enlarged and discriminating mind, and gigantic ally disproportionate to the size of the understanding; and, if combined with obstinacy of self-opinion and indocility, it is the parent of tyranny, a promoter of inquisitorial persecution in public life, and of inconceivable misery in private families. Nay, the very virtue of the person, and the consciousness that _it_ is sacrificing its own happiness, increases the obduracy, and selects those whom it best loves for its objects. _Eoque immitior quia ipse tolerat_ (not _toleraverat_) is its inspiration and watchword. [Sidenote: HINTS FOR "THE FRIEND"] A nation of reformers looks like a scourer of silver-plate--black all over and dingy, with making things white and brilliant. A joint combination of authors leagued together to declaim for or against liberty may be compared to Buffon's collection of smooth mirrors in a vast fan arranged to form one focus. May there not be gunpowder as well as corn set before it, and the latter will not thrive, but become cinders? A good conscience and hope combined are like fine weather that reconciles travel with delight. Great exploits and the thirst of honour which they inspire, enlarge states by enlarging hearts. The rejection of the love of glory without the admission of Christianity is, truly, human darkness lacking human light. Heaven preserve me from the modern epidemic of a proud ignorance! Hypocrisy, the deadly crime which, like Judas, kisses Hell at the lips of Redemption. Is't then a mystery so great, what God and the man, and the world is? No, but we hate to hear! Hence a mystery it remains. The massy misery so prettily hidden with the gold and silver leaf--_bracteata felicitas_. [Sidenote: CONCERNING BELLS] If I have leisure, I may, perhaps, write a wild rhyme on the _Bell_, from the mine to the belfry, and take for my motto and Chapter of Contents, the two distichs, but especially the latter-- Laudo Deum verum, plebem voco, congrego clerum: Defunctos ploro, pestem fugo, festa decoro. Funera plango, fulgura frango, sabbata pango: Excito lentos, dissipo ventos, paco cruentos. The waggon-horse _celsâ cervice eminens clarumque jactans tintinnabulum_. Item, the cattle on the river, and valley of dark pines and firs in the Hartz. The army of Clotharius besieging Sens were frightened away by the bells of St. Stephen's, rung by the contrivance of Lupus, Bishop of Orleans. For ringing the largest bell, as a Passing-bell, a high price was wont to be paid, because being heard afar it both kept the evil spirits at a greater distance, and gave the chance of the greater number of prayers _pro mortuo_, from the pious who heard it. Names of saints were given to bells that it might appear the voice of the Saint himself calling to prayer. Man will humanise all things. [It is strange that Coleridge should make no mention of Schiller's "Song of the Bell," of which he must, at any rate, have heard the title. Possibly the idea remained though its source was forgotten. The Latin distichs were introduced by Longfellow in his "Golden Legend." Of the cow-bells in the Hartz he gives the following account in an unpublished letter to his wife. April-May, 1799. "But low down in the valley and in little companies on each bank of the river a multitude of green conical fir-trees, with herds of cattle wandering about almost every one with a cylindrical bell around its neck, of no inconsiderable size. And as they moved, scattered over the narrow vale, and up among the trees of the hill, the noise was like that of a great city in the stillness of the Sabbath morning, where all the steeples, all at once are ringing for Church. The whole was a melancholy scene and quite new to me."] FOOTNOTES: [Footnote E: [O heaven, 'twas frightful! now run down and stared at By shapes more ugly than can be remembered-- Now seeing nothing and imagining nothing, But only being afraid--stifled with Fear! And every goodly, each familiar form Had a strange somewhat that breathed terrors on me! (_From my MS. tragedy_ [S. T. C.]) _Remorse_, iv. 69-74--but the passage is omitted from _Osorio_, act iv. 53 _sq. P. W._, pp. 386-499]]. CHAPTER VII _1810_ O dare I accuse My earthly lot as guilty of my spleen, Or call my destiny niggard! O no! no! It is her largeness, and her overflow, Which being incomplete, disquieteth me so! S. T. C. [Sidenote: A PIOUS ASPIRATION] My own faculties, cloudy as they may be, will be a sufficient direction to me in plain daylight, but my friend's wish shall be the pillar of fire to guide me darkling in my nightly march through the wilderness. [Sidenote: THOUGHT AND ATTENTION] Thought and attention are very different things. I never expected the former, (viz., _selbst-thätige Erzeugung dessen, wovon meine Rede war_) from the readers of _The Friend_. I did expect the latter, and was disappointed. Jan. 3, 1810. This is a most important distinction, and in the new light afforded by it to my mind, I see more plainly why mathematics cannot be a substitute for logic, much less for metaphysics, that is, transcendental logic, and why, therefore, Cambridge has produced so few men of genius and original power since the time of Newton. Not only it does not call forth the balancing and discriminating power [_that_ I saw long ago] but it requires only _attention,_ not _thought_ or self-production. [Sidenote: LAW AND GOSPEL] "The man who squares his conscience by the law" was, formerly, a phrase for a prudent villain, an unprincipled coward. At present the law takes in everything--the things most incongruous with its nature, as the moral motive, and even the feelings of sensibility resulting from accidents of cultivation, novel-reading for instance. If, therefore, _at all_ times, the law would be found to have a much greater influence on the actions of men than men generally suppose, or the agents were themselves conscious of, this influence we must expect to find augmented at the present time in proportion to the encroachments of the law on religion, the moral sense, and the sympathies engendered by artificial rank. Examine this and begin, for instance, with reviews, and so on through the common legal immoralities of life, in the pursuits and pleasures of the higher half of the middle classes of society in Great Britain. [Sidenote: CATHOLIC REUNION] "Hence (_i.e._, from servile and thrall-like fear) men came to scan the Scriptures by the letter and in the covenant of our redemption magnified the external signs more than the quickening power of the Spirit."--MILTON'S _Review of Church Government_, vol. i. p. 2. It were not an unpleasing fancy, nor one wholly unworthy of a serious and charitable Christianity, to derive a shadow of hope for the conversion and purification of the Roman Apostasy from the conduct and character of St. Peter as shadowing out the history of the Latin Church, whose ruling pastor calls himself the successor of that saint. Thus, by proud _humility_, he hazarded the loss of his heavenly portion in objecting to Christ's taking upon himself a lowly office and character of a servant (hence the pomps and vanities with which Rome has tricked out her bishops, &c.), the eager drawing of the fleshly sword in defence of Christ; the denying of Christ at the cross (in the apostasy); but, finally, his bitter repentance at the third crowing of the cock (perhaps Wickliffe and Huss the first, Luther the second, and the third yet to come-or, perhaps Wickliffe and Luther the first, the second may be the present state of humiliation, and the third yet to come). After this her eyes will be opened to the heavenly vision of the universal acceptance of Christ of all good men of all sects, that is, that faith is a moral, not an intellectual act. [Sidenote: THE IDEAL MARRIAGE] On some delightful day in early spring some of my countrymen hallow the anniversary of their marriage, and with love and fear go over the reckoning of the past and the unknown future. The wife tells with half-renewed modesty all the sweet feelings that she disguised and cherished in the courting-time; the man looks with a tear full in his eye and blesses the hour when for the first time (and oh! let it be the last) he spake deep and solemn to a beloved being--"Thou art mine and I am thine, and henceforward I shield and shelter [thee] against the world, and thy sorrows shall be my sorrows, and though abandoned by all men, we two will abide together in love and duty." In the holy eloquent solitude where the very stars that twinkle seem to be a _voice_ that suits the dream, a voice of a dream, a voice soundless and yet for the _ear_ not the _eye_ of the soul, when the winged soul passes over vale and mountain, sinks into glens, and then climbs with the cloud, and passes from cloud to cloud, and thence from sun to sun--never is she alone. Always one, the dearest, accompanies and even when he melts, diffused in the blue sky, she melts at the same moment into union with the beloved. [Sidenote: A SUPERFLUOUS ENTITY] That our religious faiths, by the instincts which lead us to metaphysical investigation, are founded in a practical necessity, not a mere intellectual craving after knowledge, and systematic conjecture, is evinced by the interest which all men take in the questions of future existence, and the being of God; while even among those who are speculative by profession a few phantasts only have troubled themselves with the questions of pre-existence, or with attempts to demonstrate the _posse_ and _esse_ of a devil. But in the latter case more is involved. Concerning pre-existence men in general have neither care nor belief; but a devil is taken for granted, and, if we might trust words, with the same faith as a Deity--"He neither believes God or devil." And yet, while we are delighted in hearing proofs of the one, we never think of asking a simple question concerning the other. This, too, originates in a practical source. The Deity is not a mere solution of difficulties concerning origination, but a truth which spreads light and joy and hope and certitude through all things--while a devil _is_ a mere solution of an enigma, an assumption to silence our uneasiness. That end answered (and most easily are such ends answered), we have no further concern with it. [Sidenote: PSYCHOLOGY IN YOUTH AND MATURITY] The _great change_--that in youth and early manhood we psychologise and with enthusiasm but all out of ourselves, and so far ourselves only as we descry therein some general law. Our own self is but the diagram, the triangle which represents all triangles. Afterward we pyschologise out of others, and so far as they differ from ourselves. O how hollowly! [Sidenote: HAIL AND FAREWELL!] We have been for many years at a great distance from each other, but that may happen with no real breach of friendship. All intervening nature is the _continuum_ of two good and wise men. We are now separated. You have combined arsenic with your gold, Sir Humphry! You are brittle, and I will rather dine with Duke Humphry than with you. [Sidenote: A GENUINE "ANECDOTE"] Sara Coleridge says, on telling me of the universal sneeze produced on the lasses while shaking my carpet, that she wishes my snuff would _grow_, as I sow it so plentifully! [This points to the summer of 1810, the five months spent at Greta Hall previous to the departure south with Basil Montagu.] [Sidenote: SPIRITUAL RELIGION] A thing cannot be one _and_ three at the same time! True! but _time_ does not apply to God. He is neither one in time nor three in time, for he exists not in time at all--the Eternal! The truly religious man, when he is not conveying his feelings and beliefs to other men, and does not need the medium of words--O! how little does he find in his religious sense either of form or of number--it is _infinite_! Alas! why do we all seek by instinct for a God, a supersensual, but because we feel the insufficiency, the unsubstantiality of all _forms_, and formal being for itself. And shall we explain _a_ by _x_ and then _x_ by _a_--give a soul to the body, and then a body to the soul--_ergo_, a body to the body--feel the weakness of the weak, and call in the strengthener, and then make the very weakness the substratum of the strength? This is worse than the poor Indian! Even he does not make the tortoise support the elephant, and yet put the elephant under the tortoise! But we are too social, we become in a sort idolaters--for the means we are obliged to use to excite notions of truth in the minds of others we by witchcraft of slothful association impose on ourselves for the truths themselves. Our intellectual bank stops payment, and we pass an act by acclamation that hereafter the paper promises shall be the gold and silver itself--and ridicule a man for a dreamer and reviver of antiquated dreams who believes that gold and silver exist. This may do as well in the market, but O! for the universal, for the man himself the difference is woeful. [Sidenote: TRUTH] The immense difference between being glad to find Truth _it_, and to find _it_ TRUTH! O! I am ashamed of those who praise me! For I know that as soon as I tell them my mind on another subject, they will shrink and abhor me. For not because I enforced a truth were they pleased in the first instance, but because I had supported a favourite notion of theirs which they loved for its and their sake, and therefore would be glad to find it true--not that loving Truth they loved this opinion as one of its forms and consequences. The root! the root must be attacked! [Sidenote: A TIME TO CRY OUT] Among the evils that attend a conscientious author who writes in a corrupt age, is the necessity he is under of exposing himself even to plausible charges of envy, mortified vanity, and, above all, of self-conceit before those whose bad passions would make even the most improbable charges plausible. What _can_ he do? Tell the truth, and the whole truth plainly, and with the natural affection which it inspires, and keeping off (difficult task!) all _scorn_ (for to suppress resentment is easy), let him trust the bread to the waters in the firm faith that wisdom shall be justified by her children. Vanity! self-conceit! What vanity, what self-conceit? What say I more than this? Ye who think and feel the same will love and esteem me by the law of sympathy, and _value_ me according to the comparative effect I have made on your intellectual powers, in enabling you better to defend before others, or more clearly to _onlook_ (_anschauen_) in yourselves the truths to which your noblest being bears witness. The rest I leave to the judgment of posterity, utterly unconcerned whether _my name_ be attached to these opinions or (_my_ writings forgotten) another man's. But what can I say, when I have declared my abhorrence of the _Edinburgh Review_? In vain should I tell my critics that were I placed on the rack I could not remember ten lines of my own poems, and that on seeing my own name in their abuse, I regard it only as a symbol of Wordsworth and Southey, and that I am well aware that from utter disregard and oblivion of anything and all things which they can know of me by experience, my name is mentioned only because they have heard that I was Wordsworth's and Southey's friend. [Sidenote: HINTS FOR "THE FRIEND"] The brightest luminaries of earth give names to the dusky spots in the selenography of Helvetius. The intrepidity of a pure conscience and a simple principle [may be] compared to a life-boat, and somewhat in the detail, stemming with a little rudder the tumbling ruins of the sea, rebounding from the rocks and shelves in fury. Duns Scotus affirms that the certainty of faith is the greatest certainty--a dark speech which is explained and proved by the dependence of the theoretic powers on the practical. But Aristotle admits that demonstrated truths are inferior in kind of certainty to the indemonstrable out of which the former are deduced. Faithful, confident reliance on man and on God is the last and hardest virtue! And wherefore? Because we must first have earned a FAITH in ourselves. Let the conscience pronounce: "Trust in thyself!" Let the whole heart be able to say, "I trust in myself," and those whomever we _love_ we shall rely on, in proportion to that love. A testy patriot might be pardoned for saying with Falstaff, when Dame Quickly told him "She came from the two parties, forsooth," "The Devil take one party and his Dam the other." John Bull has suffered more for their sake, more than even the supererogatory cullibility of his disposition is able to bear. Lavater fixed on the simplest physiognomy in his whole congregation, and pitched his sermon to his comprehension. Narcissus either looks at or thinks of his looking glass, for the same wise purpose I presume. Reviewers resemble often the English jury and the Italian conclave, they are incapable of eating till they have condemned or craned. The Pope [may be compared to] an old lark, who, though he leaves off soaring and singing in the height, yet has his spurs grow longer and sharper the older he grows. Let us not, because the foliage waves in necessary obedience to every breeze, fancy that the tree shakes also. Though the slender branch bend, one moment to the East and another to the West, its motion is circumscribed by its connection with the unyielding trunk. [Sidenote: A HINT FOR "CHRISTABEL"] My first cries mingled with my mother's death-groan, and she beheld the vision of glory, ere I the earthly sun. When I first looked up to Heaven consciously, it was to look up after, or for, my mother. [Sidenote: "ALL THOUGHTS ALL PASSIONS ALL DELIGHTS"] The two sweet silences--first in the purpling dawn of love-troth, when the heart of each ripens in the other's looks within the unburst calyx, and fear becomes so sweet that it seems but a fear of losing hope in certainty; the second, when the sun is setting in the calm eve of confident love, and [the lovers] in mute recollection enjoy each other. "I fear to speak, I fear to hear you speak, so deeply do I now enjoy your presence, so totally possess you in myself, myself in you. The very sound would break the union and separate _you-me_ into you and me. We both, and this sweet room, its books, its furniture, and the shadows on the wall slumbering with the low, quiet fire are all _our_ thought, one harmonious imagery of forms distinct on the still substance of one deep feeling, love and joy--a lake, or, if a stream, yet flowing so softly, so unwrinkled, that its flow is life, not change--that state in which all the individuous nature, the distinction without division of a vivid thought, is united with the sense and substance of intensest reality." And what if joy pass quick away? Long is the track of Hope before--long, too, the track of recollection after, as in the Polar spring the sun [is seen in the heavens] sixteen days before it really rises, and in the Polar autumn ten days after it has set; so Nature, with Hope and Recollection, pieces out our short summer. [Sidenote: WORDS AND THINGS] N.B.--In my intended essay in defence of punning (Apology for Paronomasy, _alias_ Punning), to defend those turns of words-- Che l'onda chiara, El'ombra non men cara-- in certain styles of writing, by proving that language itself is formed upon associations of this kind--that possibly the _sensus genericus_ of whole classes of words may be thus deciphered (as has indeed been attempted by Mr. White, of Clare Hall), that words are not mere symbols of things and thoughts, but themselves things, and that any harmony in the things symbolised will perforce be presented to us more easily, as well as with additional beauty, by a correspondent harmony of the symbols with each other. Thus, _heri vidi fragilem frangi, hodie mortalem mori_; Gestern seh ich was gebrechliches brechen, heute was sterbliches sterben, compared with the English. This the beauty of homogeneous languages. So _Veni, vidi, vici_. [This note follows an essay on Giambattista Strozzi's Madrigals, together with a transcription of twenty-seven specimens. The substance of the essay is embodied in the text of Chapter xvi. of the "Biographia Literaria," and a long footnote. The quotation is from the first madrigal, quoted in the note, which is not included in those transcribed in Notebook 17.--_Coleridge's Works_, iii. (Harper & Brothers, 1853), pp. 388-393.] [Sidenote: ASSOCIATION] Important suggestion on 4th March, 1810 (Monday night). The law of association clearly begins in common causality. How continued but by a _causative power_ in the soul? What a proof of _causation_ and _power_ from the very law of mind, and cluster of facts adduced by Hume to overthrow it! [Sidenote: COROLLARY] It is proud ignorance that, as a disease of the mind, alone superinduces the necessity of the _medium_ of metaphysical philosophy. The errors into which a sound, unaffected mind is led by the nature of things (Thing as the substratum of power)--no errors at all, any more than the motion of the sun. "So it _appears_"--and that is most true--but when pride will work up these phenomena into a _system_ of _things in themselves_, then they become most pernicious errors, and it is the duty of true mind to examine these with all the virtues of the intellect--patience, humility, etc. [Sidenote: MOTHER WIT] "By aid of a large portion of mother's wit, Paine, though an unlearned man, saw the absurdity of the Christian religion." Mother's wit, indeed! Wit from his mother the earth--the earthy and material wit of the _flesh_ and its lusts. One ounce of mother-wit may be worth a pound of learning, but a grain of the Father's wisdom is worth a ton of mother-wit--yea! of both together. [Sidenote: OF EDUCATION] "O it is but an infant! 'tis but a child! he will be better as he grows older." "O! she'll grow ashamed of it. This is but waywardness." Grant all this--that _they_ will _out_grow these particular actions, yet with what HABITS of _feeling_ will they arrive at youth and manhood? Especially with regard to obedience, how is it possible that they should struggle against the boiling passions of youth by means of obedience to their own conscience who are to meet the dawn of conscience with the broad meridian of disobedience and habits of self-willedness? Besides, when are the rebukes, the chastisements to commence? Why! about nine or ten, perhaps, when, for the father at least, [the child] is less a plaything--when, therefore, anger is not healed up in its mind, either by its own infant versatility and forgetfulness, or by after caresses--when everything is remembered individually, and sense of injustice felt. For the boy very well remembers the different treatment when he was a child; but what has been so long permitted becomes a right to him. Far better, in such a case, to have them sent off to others--a strict schoolmaster--than to breed that contradiction of feeling toward the same person which subverts the very _principle_ of our impulses. Whereas, in a tender, yet obedience-exacting and improvement-enforcing education, though very gradually, and by small doses at a time, yet always going on--yea! even from a twelvemonth old--at six or seven the child really has outgrown all things that annoy, just at the time when, as the charm of infancy begins to diminish, they would begin really to annoy. [Sidenote: THE DANGERS OF ADAPTING TRUTH TO THE MINDS OF THE VULGAR] There are, in every country, times when the few who know the truth have clothed it for the vulgar, and addressed the vulgar in the vulgar language and modes of conception, in order to convey any part of the truth. This, however, could not be done with safety, even to the _illuminati_ themselves in the first instance; but to their successors, habit gradually turned lie into belief, partial and _stagnate_ truth into ignorance, and the teachers of the vulgar (like the Franciscan friars in the South of Europe) became a part of the vulgar--nay, because the laymen were open to various impulses and influences, which their instructors had built out (compare a brook in open air, liable to rainstreams and rills from new-opened fountains, to the same running through a mill guarded by sluice-gates and back-water), they became the vulgarest of the vulgar, till, finally, resolute not to detach themselves from the mob, the mob at length detaches itself from them, and leaves the mill-race dry, the moveless, rotten wheels as day-dormitories for bats and owls, and the old grindstones for wags and scoffers of the taproom to whet their wits on. [Sidenote: POETRY AND PROSE] When there are few literary men, and the vast 999999/10000000 of the population are ignorant, as was the case of Italy from Dante to Metastasio, _from causes I need not here put down, there will be a poetical language_; but that a poet ever uses a word as poetical--that is, formally--which he, in the same mood and thought, would not use in prose or conversation, Milton's Prose Works will assist us in disproving. But as soon as literature becomes common, and critics numerous in any country, and a large body of men seek to express themselves habitually in the most precise, sensuous, and impassioned words, the difference as to mere words ceases, as, for example, the German prose writers. Produce to me _one_ word out of Klopstock, Wieland, Schiller, Goethe, Voss, &c., which I will not find as frequently used in the most energetic prose writers. The sole difference in style is that poetry demands a severe keeping--it admits nothing that prose may not often admit, but it oftener rejects. In other words, it presupposes a more continuous state of passion. _N.B._--Provincialisms of poets who have become the supreme classics in countries one in language but under various states and governments have aided this false idea, as, in Italy, the Tuscanisms of Dante, Ariosto, and Alfieri, foolishly imitated by Venetians, Romans, and Neapolitans. How much this is against the opinion of Dante, see his admirable treatise on "Lingua Volgare Nobile," the first, I believe, of his prose or _prose and verse_ works; for the "Convito" and "La Vita Nuova" are, one-third, in metre. [Sidenote: WORLDLY WISE] I would strongly recommend Lloyd's "State Worthies" [_The Statesmen and Favourites of England since the Reformation._ By David Lloyd. London, 1665-70] as the manual of every man who would rise in the world. In every twenty pages it recommends contradictions, but he who cannot reconcile them for himself, and discover which suits his plan, can never rise in the world. _N.B._--I have a mind to draw a complete character of a worldly-wise man out of Lloyd. He would be highly-finished, useful, honoured, popular--a man revered by his children, his wife, and so forth. To be sure, he must not expect to be _beloved_ by _one_ proto-friend; and, if there be truth in reason or Christianity, he will go to hell--but, even so, he will doubtless secure himself a most respectable place in the devil's chimney-corner. [Sidenote: HINTS FOR "THE FRIEND"] The falseness of that so very common opinion, "Mathematics, aye, that is something! that has been useful--but metaphysics!" Now fairly compare the two, what each has really done. But [be thou] only concerned to find out truth, which, on what side soever it appears, is always _victory_ to every honest mind. Christianity, too (as well as Platonism and the school of Pythagoras), has its esoteric philosophy, or why are we forbidden to cast pearls before swine? But who are the swine? Are they the poor and despised, the unalphabeted in worldly learning? O, no! the rich whose hearts are steeled by ignorance of misery and habits of receiving slavish obedience--the dropsical learned and the St. Vitus' [bewitched] sciolist. In controversy it is highly useful to know whether you are really addressing yourself to an opponent or only to partisans, with the intention of preserving them firm. Either is well, but they should never be commingled. In her letter to Lord Willoughby Queen Elizabeth hath the word "eloign." There is no exact equivalent in modern use. Neither "withdraw" or "absent" are precisely synonymous. We understand Nature just as if, at a distance, we looked at the image of a person in a looking-glass, plainly and fervently discoursing, yet what he uttered we could decipher only by the motion of the lips or by his mien. I must extract and transcribe from the preface to the works of Paracelsus that eloquent defence of technical new words and of old words used in a new sense. The whole preface is exceedingly lively, and (excepting the mountebank defence of intentional obscurity and the attack on logic, as if it were ever intended to be an organon of discovery of material truth and directly, instead of a formal preliminary assisting the mind indirectly, and showing what cannot be truth, and what has not been proved truth,) very just. The Chinese call the monsoon whirlwind, when more than usually fierce, the elephant. This is a fine image--a mad wounded war-elephant. The poor oppressed Amboynese, who bear with patience the extirpation of their clove and nutmeg trees, in their fields and native woods, and the cruel taxes on sugar, their staff of life, will yet, at once and universally, rise up in rebellion and prepare to destroy in despair all and everything, themselves included, if any attempt is made to destroy any individual's Tatanaman, the clove-tree which each Amboynese plants at the birth of each of his children. Very affecting! [Sidenote: GENIUS] The man of genius places things in a new light. This trivial phrase better expresses the appropriate effects of genius than Pope's celebrated distich-- "What oft was thought but ne'er so well exprest." It has been thought distinctly, but only possessed, as it were, unpacked and unsorted. The poet not only displays what, though often seen in its unfolded mass, had never been opened out, but he likewise adds something, namely, light and relations. Who has not seen a rose, or sprig of jasmine or myrtle? But behold those same flowers in a posy or flower-pot, painted by a man of genius, or assorted by the hand of a woman of fine taste and instinctive sense of beauty! [Sidenote: LOVE] To find our happiness incomplete without the happiness of some other given person or persons is the definition of affection in general, and applies equally to friendship, to the parental and to the conjugal relations. But what is love? Love as it may subsist between two persons of different senses? This--and what more than this? The mutual dependence of their happiness, each on that of the other, each being at once cause and effect. You, therefore, I--I, therefore you. The sense of this reciprocity of well-being, is that which first stamps and legitimates the name of happiness in all the other advantages and favourable accidents of nature, or fortune, without which they would change their essence and become like the curse of Tantalus, insulting remembrances of misery, of that most unquiet of all miseries, means of happiness blasted and transformed by incompleteness, nay, by the loss of the sole organ through which we could enjoy them. Suppose a wide and delightful landscape, and what the eye is to the light, and the light to the eye, that interchangeably is the lover to the beloved. "O best beloved! who lovest _me_ the best!" In strictest propriety of application might he thus address her, if only she with equal truth could echo the same sense in the same feeling. "Light of mine eye! by which alone I not only see all I see, but which makes up more than half the loveliness of the objects seen, yet, still, like the rising sun in the morning, like the moon at night, remainest thyself and for thyself, the dearest, fairest form of all the thousand forms that derive from thee all their visibility, and borrow from thy presence their chiefest beauty!" [Sidenote: COTTLE'S "FREE VERSION OF THE PSALMS"] Diamond + oxygen = charcoal. Even so on the fire-spark of his zeal did Cottle place the King-David diamonds, and caused to pass over them the oxygenous blast of his own inspiration, and lo! the diamond becomes a bit of charcoal. [Sidenote: FRIENDSHIP AND MARRIAGE] "Ich finde alles eher auf der Erde, so gar Wahrheit und Freude, als Freundschaft."--JEAN PAUL.[F] This for the motto--to examine and attest the fact, and then to explain the reason. First, then, there are the extraordinary qualifications demanded for true friendship, arising from the multitude of causes that make men delude themselves and attribute to friendship what is only a similarity of pursuit, or even a mere dislike of feeling oneself alone in anything. But, secondly, supposing the friendship to be as real as human nature ordinarily permits, yet how many causes are at constant war against it, whether in the shape of violent irruptions or unobserved yet constant wearings away by dyspathy, &c. Exemplify this in youth and then in manhood. First, there is the influence of wives, how frequently deadly to friendship, either by direct encroach, or, perhaps, intentional plans of alienation! Secondly, there is the effect of families, by otherwise occupying the heart; and, thirdly, the action of life in general, by the worldly-wise, chilling effects of prudential anxieties. Corollary. These reflections, however, suggest an argument in favour of the existing indissolubility of marriage. To be compelled to make it up, or consent to be miserable and disrespected, is indeed a coarse plaister for the wounds of love, but so it must be while the patients themselves are of coarse make and unhealthy humours. [Sidenote: IMAGINATION] His imagination, if it must be so called, is at all events of the pettiest kind--it is an _imaginunculation_. How excellently the German _Einbildungskraft_ expresses this prime and loftiest faculty, the power of co-adunation, the faculty that forms the many into one--_In-eins-bildung!_ Eisenoplasy, or esenoplastic power, is contradistinguished from fantasy, or the mirrorment, either catoptric or metoptric--repeating simply, or by transposition--and, again, involuntary [fantasy] as in dreams, or by an act of the will. [See _Biog. Lit._, cap. x.; _Coleridge's Works_, iii. 272. See also _Blackwood's Magazine_, March 1840, No. ccxciii., Art. The Plagiarisms of S. T. Coleridge.] [Sidenote: PUBLIC OPINION AND THE SERVICES] Ministers, as in the Admiralty, or War Office, compared to managers of theatres. The numerous absurd claims at length deaden their sense of judgment to real merit, and superinduce in the mind an anticipation of clamorous vanity. Hence the great importance of the public voice, forcing them to be just. This, how illustrated by the life of Nelson--the infamous coldness with which all his claims were received--especially Mr. Wyndham's answer, July 21, 1795. And no wonder! for such is the state of moral feeling even with the English public, that an instance of credulity to an ingenious scheme which has failed in the trial will weigh more heavily on a minister's character than to have stifled in the birth half-a-dozen such men as Nelson or Cochrane, or such schemes as that of a floating army. Nelson's life is a perpetual comment on this. [Sidenote: SERMONS ANCIENT AND MODERN] Of moral discourses and fine moral discussions in the pulpit--"none of your Methodist stuff for me." And, yet, most certain it is, that never were either ministers or congregations so strict in all morality as at the time when nothing but fine _moral_ discourses (that is calculations in self-love) would have driven a preacher from the pulpit--and when the clergy thought it their pulpit-duty to preach Christ and Him crucified, and the why and the wherefore--and that the soberest, law-obeying, most prudent nation in the world would need Him as much as a nation of drunkards, thieves and profligates. How was this? Why, I take it, those old parsons thought, very wisely, that the pulpit was the place for truths that applied to all men, humbled all alike (not mortified one or two, and sent the rest home, scandal-talking with pharisaic "I thank thee, God, I am not as so and so, but I was glad to hear the parson"), comforted all, frightened all, offended all, because they were all _men_--that private vices depend so much on particular circumstances, that without making the pulpit a lampoon shop, (or, even supposing the genius of him who wrote Isaac Jenkins, without particulars not suited to the pulpit) that it would be a cold generality affair--and that, therefore, they considered the pulpit as _one_ part of their duty, but to their whole congregation as _men_, and that the other part of their duty, which they thought equally binding on them, was to each and every member of that congregation as John Harris, or James Tomkins, in private conversation--and, like that of Mr. Longford, sometimes to rebuke and warn, sometimes to comfort, sometimes and oftener to instruct, and render them capable of understanding his sermon. In short they would _preach_ as Luther, and would converse as Mr. Longford to Isaac Jenkins. [_The History of Isaac Jenkins, a Moral Fiction._ By Thomas Beddoes, M.D., 1793]. [Sidenote: HEAVINESS MAY ENDURE FOR A NIGHT] With a loving generous man whose activity of intellect is exerted habitually on truth and events of permanent, or, at least, general interest still warmed and coloured by benevolent enthusiasm self-unconsciously, and whose heart-movements are all the property of the few, whom he dearly loves--with such a man, for the vast majority of the wrongs met with in life, that at all affect him, a one-night's sleep provides the oblivion and the cure--he awakes from his slumbers and his resentment at the same moment. Yesterday is gone and the clouds of yesterday. The sun is born again, and how bright and joyous! and I am born again! But O! there may be wrongs, for which with our best efforts for the most perfect suppression, with the absence, nay, the impossibility of anger or hate, yet, longer, deeper sleep is required for the heart's oblivion, and thence renewal--even the long total sleep of death. To me, I dare avow, even this connects a new soothing with the thought of death, an additional lustre in anticipation to the confidence of resurrection, that such sensations as I have so often had after small wrongs, trifling quarrels, on first awaking in a summer morn after refreshing sleep, I shall experience after death for those few wounds too deep and broad for the _vis medicatrix_ of mortal life to fill wholly up with new flesh--those that, though healed, yet left an unsightly scar which, too often, spite of our best wishes, opened anew at other derangements and indispositions of the mental health, even when they were altogether unconnected with the wound itself or its occasions--even as the scars of the sailor, the relics and remembrances of sword or gun-shot wounds (first of all his bodily frame giving way to ungenial influences from without or from within), ache and throb at the coming in of rain or easterly winds, and open again and bleed anew, at the attack of fever, or injury from deficient or unwholesome food--that even for these I should enjoy the same delightful annihilation of them, as of ordinary wrongs after sleep. I would say to a man who reminded me of a friend's unkind words or deeds which I had forgiven--Smoking is very well while we are all smoking, even though the head is made dizzy by it and the candle of reason burns red, dim and thick; but, for Heaven's sake, don't put an old pipe to my nose just at breakfast time, among dews and flowers and sunshine. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote F: ["I find all things upon earth, even truth and joy, rather than friendship."]] CHAPTER VIII _1811-1812_ From all that meets or eye or ear, There falls a genial holy fear, Which, like the heavy dew of morn, Refreshes while it bows the heart forlorn! S. T. C. [Sidenote: TIME REAL AND IMAGINARY] How marked the contrast between troubled manhood, and joyously-active youth in the sense of time! To the former, time like the sun in an empty sky is never seen to move, but only to have _moved_. There, there it was, and now 'tis here, now distant! yet all a blank between. To the latter it is as the full moon in a fine breezy October night, driving on amid clouds of all shapes and hues, and kindling shifting colours, like an ostrich in its speed, and yet seems not to have moved at all. This I feel to be a just image of time real and time as felt, in two different states of being. The title of the poem therefore (for poem it ought to be) should be time real and time felt (in the sense of time) in active youth, or activity with hope and fullness of aim in any period, and in despondent, objectless manhood--time objective and subjective. [The riddle is hard to read, but the underlying thought seems to be that in youth the sense of time is like the apparent motion of the moon through clouds, ever driving on, but ever seeming to stand still; whereas the sense of time in manhood is like the sun, which seems to be stationary, and yet, at short intervals, is seen to have moved. This is time _felt_ in two different states of being. Time real is, as it were, sun or moon which move independently of our perceptions of their movements. The note (1811), no doubt, contains the germ of "Time Real and Imaginary" first published in "Sibylline Leaves" in 1817, which Coleridge in his Preface describes as a "school-boy poem," and interprets thus: "By imaginary time I meant the state of a schoolboy's mind when, on his return to school, he projects his being in his day-dreams, and lives in his next holidays, six months hence!" The explanation was probably an afterthought. "The two lovely children" who "run an endless race" may have haunted his schoolboy dreams, may perhaps have returned to the dreams of his troubled manhood, bringing with them the sense rather than the memory of youth, intermingled with a consciousness that youth was gone for ever, but the composition of the poem dates from 1811, or possibly 1815, when the preparation of the poems for the press would persuade him once more to express his thoughts in verse.] [Sidenote: TIME REAL AND IMAGINARY; AN ALLEGORY] On the wide level of a mountain's head, (I knew not where, but 'twas some faery place) Their pinions, ostrich-like, for sails outspread, Two lovely children run an endless race, A sister and a brother! This far outstript the other; Yet ever runs she with reverted face, And looks and listens for the boy behind: For he, alas! is blind! O'er rough and smooth with even step he passed, And knows not whether he be first or last. [_P. W._, 1893, p. 187. See, too, Editor's _Note_, p. 638.] [Sidenote: THE HAG NIGHTMARE] Elucidation of my _all-zermalming_, [that is, all-crushing] argument on the subject of ghosts, apparitions, &c. Night-mare is, I think, always, even when it occurs in the midst of sleep, and not as it more commonly does after a waking interval, a state not of sleep, but of stupor of the outward organs of sense--not in words, indeed, but yet in fact distinguishable from the suspended power of the senses in true sleep, while the volitions of reason, that is the faculty of comparison, &c., are awake though disturbed. This stupor seems to be occasioned by some painful sensations of unknown locality (most often, I believe, in the lower bowel) which, withdrawing the attention to itself from the sense of other realities present, makes us asleep to them, indeed, but otherwise awake. And, whenever the derangement occasions an interruption in the circulation, aided, perhaps, by pressure, awkward position, &c., the part deadened, as the hand, the arm, or the foot and leg, or the side, transmits double touch as single touch, to which the imagination, therefore, the true inward creatrix, instantly out of the chaos of elements or shattered fragments of memory, puts together some form to fit it. And this [_imaginatio_] derives an over-mastering sense of reality from the circumstance that the power of reason, being in good measure awake, most generally presents to us all the accompanying images very nearly as they existed the moment before, when we fell out of anxious wakefulness into this reverie. For example, the bed, the curtain, the room and its furniture, the knowledge of who lives in the next room, and so forth contribute to the illusion.... In short, the night-mare is not, properly, a dream, but a species of reverie, akin to somnambulism, during which the understanding and moral sense are awake, though more or less confused, and over the terrors of which the reason can exert no influence, because it is not true _terror_, that is, apprehension of danger, but is itself a specific sensation = _terror corporeus sive materialis_. The explanation and classification of these strange sensations, the organic material analogous (_ideas materiales intermedias_, as the Cartesians say) of Fear, Hope, Rage, Shame, and (strangest of all) Remorse, form at present the most difficult, and at the same time the most interesting problem of psychology, and are intimately connected with prudential morals, the science, that is, of morals not as the ground and law of duty, but in their relation to the empirical hindrances and focillations in the realising of the law by human beings. The solution of this problem would, perhaps, throw great doubt on the present [notion] that the forms and feelings of sleep are always the reflections and confused echoes of our waking thoughts and experiences. [Sidenote: A MOMENT AND A MAGIC MIRROR] What a swarm of thoughts and feelings, endlessly minute fragments, and, as it were, representations of all preceding and embryos of all future thought, lie compact in any one moment! So, in a single drop of water, the microscope discovers what motions, what tumult, what wars, what pursuits, what stratagems, what a circle-dance of death and life, death-hunting life, and life renewed and invigorated by death! The whole world seems here in a many-meaning cypher. What if our existence was but that moment? What an unintelligible, affrightful riddle, what a chaos of limbs and trunk, tailless, headless, nothing begun and nothing ended, would it not be? And yet scarcely more than that other moment of fifty or sixty years, were that our all? Each part throughout infinite diminution adapted to some other, and yet the whole a means to nothing--ends everywhere, and yet an end nowhere. [Compare the three last lines of "What is Life?" Is very life by consciousness unbounded? And all the thoughts, pains, joys of mortal breath, A war-embrace of wrestling life and death? _P. W._, 1893, p. 173.] [Sidenote: THAT INWARD EYE, THE BLISS OF SOLITUDE] The love of Nature is ever returned double to us, not only the delighter in our delight, but by linking our sweetest, but of themselves perishable feelings to distinct and vivid images, which we ourselves, at times, and which a thousand casual recollections, recall to our memory. She is the preserver, the treasurer of our joys. Even in sickness and nervous diseases, she has peopled our imagination with lovely forms which have sometimes overpowered the inward pain and brought with them their old sensations. And even when all men have seemed to desert us and the friend of our heart has passed on, with one glance from his "cold disliking eye"--yet even then the blue heaven spreads it out and bends over us, and the little tree still shelters us under its plumage as a second cope, a domestic firmament, and the low creeping gale will sigh in the heath-plant and soothe us by sound of sympathy till the lulled grief lose itself in fixed gaze on the purple heath-blossom, till the present beauty becomes a vision of memory. [Sidenote: HESPERUS] I have never seen the evening star set behind the mountains, but it was as if I had lost a hope out of my soul, as if a love were gone, and a sad memory only remained. O it was my earliest affection, the evening star! One of my first utterances in verse was an address to it as I was returning from the New River, and it looked newly bathed as well as I. I remember that the substance of the sonnet was that the woman whom I could ever love would surely have been emblemed in the pensive serene brightness of that planet, that we were both constellated to it, and would after death return thither. [Sidenote: TO THE EVENING STAR] TO THE EVENING STAR O meek attendant of Sol's setting blaze, I hail, sweet star, thy chaste effulgent glow; On thee full oft with fixed eye I gaze, Till I methinks, all spirit seem to grow. O first and fairest of the starry choir, O loveliest 'mid the daughters of the night, Must not the maid I love like thee inspire _Pure_ joy and _calm_ delight? Must she not be, as is thy placid sphere, Serenely brilliant? Whilst to gaze awhile Be all my wish 'mid Fancy's high career E'en till she quit this scene of earthly toil; Then Hope perchance might fondly sigh to join Her image in thy kindred orb, O star benign! [First printed from MS. _Poetical and Dramatic Works_, 1877-80; _Poetical Works_, 1893, p. 11.] [Sidenote: HEALTH, INDEPENDENCE, FRIENDSHIP] Where health is--at least, though pain be no stranger, yet when the breath can rise, and turn round like a comet at its perihelion in its ellipse, and again descend, instead of being a Sisiphus's stone; and the chest can expand as by its own volition and the head sits firm yet mobile aloft, like the vane of a tower on a hill shining in the blue air, and appropriating sunshine and moonlight whatever weight of clouds brood below--O when health and hope, and if not competence yet a debtless _unwealth, libera et læta paupertas_, is his, a man may have and love many friends, but yet, if indeed they be friends, he lives with each a several and individual life. [Sidenote: SELF-ABSORPTION AND SELFISHNESS] One source of calumny (I say _source_, because _allophoby_ from _hëautopithygmy_ is the only proper _cause_) may be found in this--every man's life exhibits two sorts of selfishness, those which are and those which are not objects of his own consciousness. _A_ is thinking, perhaps, of some plan in which he may benefit another, and during this absorption consults his own little bodily comforts blindly--occupies the best place at the fire-side, or asks at once, "Where am I to sit?" instead of first inquiring after the health of another. Now the error lies here, that _B_, in complaining of _A_, first takes for granted either that these are acts of conscious selfishness in _A_, or, if he allows the truth, yet considers them just as bad (and so perhaps they may be in a certain sense), but _forgets_ that his own life presents the same, judges of his own life exclusively by his own consciousness, that of another by conscious and unconscious in a lump. A monkey's anthropomorph attitudes we take for anthropic. [Sidenote: SELF-ADVERTISING PHILANTHROPY] Try not to become disgusted with active benevolence, or despondent because there is a _philanthropy-trade_. It is a sort of benefit-club of virtue, supported by the contributions of paupers in virtue, founded by genuine enthusiasts who gain a reputation for the thing--then slip in successors who know how to avail themselves of the influence and connections derived thereby--quite gratuitous, however, and bustling-active--but yet _bribe high_ to become the unpaid physicians of the dispensary at St. Luke's Hospital, and bow and scrape and intrigue, Carlyleise and Knappise for it. And such is the [case with regard to] the slave trade. The first abolitionists were the good men who laboured when the thing seemed desperate--it was virtue for its own sake. Then the quakers, Granville Sharp, etc.--then the restless spirits who are under the action of tyrannical oppression from images, and, gradually, mixed vanity and love of power with it--the politicians + saints = Wilberforce. Last come the Scotchmen--and Brougham is now canvassing more successfully for the seat of Wilberforce, who retires with great honour and regret, from infirmities of age and _enoughness_. It is just as with the great original benefactors and founders of useful plans, Raleigh, Sir Hugh Middleton, etc.--men of genius succeeded by sharpers, but who often can better carry on what they never could have first conceived--and this, too, by their very want of those qualities and virtues which were necessary to the discovery. [Sidenote: "BUT LOVE IS INDESTRUCTIBLE"] All mere passions, like spirits and apparitions, have their hour of cock-crow, in which they must vanish. But pure love is, therefore, no _mere_ passion; and it is a test of its being love, that no reason can be assigned _why_ it should disappear. Shall we not always, in this life at least, remain _animæ dimidiatæ_?--must not the moral reason always hold out the perfecting of each by union of both as good and lovely? With reason, therefore, and conscience let love vanish, but let these vanish only with our being. [Sidenote: THE FEINT OF THE SLEEPLESS] The sick and sleepless man, after the dawn of the fresh day, is fain to watch the smoke now from this and then from the other chimney of the town from his bed-chamber, as if willing to borrow from others that sense of a new day, of a discontinuity between the yesterday and the to-day which his own sensations had not afforded. [Compare Wordsworth's "Blessed Barrier Between Day and Day," Wordsworth's Third Sonnet to Sleep, _Poetical Works_, 1889, 354.] [Sidenote: FIRST THOUGHTS AND FRIENDSHIP] O what wisdom could I _talk_ to a YOUTH of genius and genial-heartedness! O how little could I teach! and yet, though despairing of success, I would attempt to enforce:--"Whenever you meet with a person of undoubted talents, more especially if a woman, and of apparent goodness, and yet you feel uncomfortable, and urged against your nature, and, therefore, probably in vain, to be on your guard--then take yourself to task and enquire what strong reason, moral or prudential, you have to form any intimacy or even familiarity with that person. If you after this (or moreover) detect any falsehood, or, what amounts to the same, proneness and quickness to look into, to analyse, to find out and represent evil or weakness in others (however this may be disguised even from the person's own mind by _candour_, [in] pointing out the good at the same time, by affectation of speculative truth, as psychologists, or of telling you all their thoughts as open-hearted friends), then let no reason but a strong and coercive one suffice to make you any other than as formal and distant acquaintance as circumstances will permit." And am I not now suffering, in part, for forcing my feelings into slavery to my notions, and intellectual admiration for a whole year and more with regard to ---- ? [So the MS.] If I played the hypocrite to myself, can I blame my fate that he has, at length, played the deceiver to me? Yet, God knows! I did it most virtuously!--not only without vanity or any self-interest of however subtle a nature, but from humility and a true delight in finding excellence of any kind, and a disposition to fall prostrate before it. [Sidenote: MILTON'S BLANK VERSE] To understand fully the mechanism, in order fully to feel the incomparable excellence of Milton's metre, we must make four tables, or a fourfold compartment, the first for the feet, single and composite, for which the whole twenty-six feet of the ancients will be found necessary; the second to note the construction of the feet, whether from different or from single words--for who does not perceive the difference to the ear between-- "Inextricable disobedience" and "To love or not: in this we stand or fall"-- yet both lines are composed of five iambics? The third, of the strength and position, the concentration or diffusion of the _emphasis_. Fourth, the length and position of the pauses. Then compare his narrative with the harangues. I have not noticed the ellipses, because they either do not affect the rhythm, or are not ellipses, but are comprehended in the feet. [Sidenote: APHORISMS OR PITHY SENTENCES] Shall I compare man to a clockwork Catamaran, destined to float on in a meaner element for so many moments or hours, and then to explode, scattering its _involucrum_ and itself to ascend into its proper element? I am persuaded that we love what is above us more than what is under us. Money--paper money--peace, war. How comes it that all men in all companies are talking of the depreciation, etc. etc.--and yet that a discourse on transubstantiation would not be a more withering sirocco than the attempt to explain philosophically the true cure and causes of that which interests all so vehemently? All convalescence is a resurrection, a palingenesy of our youth--"and loves the earth and all that live thereon with a new heart." But oh! the anguish to have the aching freshness of yearning and no answering object--only remembrances of faithless change--and unmerited alienation! The sun at evening holds up her fingers of both hands before her face that mortals may have one steady gaze--her transparent crimson fingers as when a lovely woman looks at the fire through her slender palms. O that perilous moment [for such there is] of a half-reconciliation, when the coldness and the resentment have been sustained too long. Each is drawing toward the other, but like glass in the mid-state between fusion and compaction a single sand will splinter it. Sometimes when I earnestly look at a beautiful object or landscape, it seems as if I were on the _brink_ of a fruition still denied--as if Vision were an _appetite_; even as a man would feel who, having put forth all his muscular strength in an act of prosilience, is at the very moment _held back_--he leaps and yet moves not from his place. Philosophy in general, but a plummet to so short a line that it can sound no deeper than the sounder's eyes can reach--and yet--in certain waters it may teach the exact depth and prevent a drowning. The midnight wild beasts staring at the hunter's torch, or when the hunter sees the tiger's eye glaring on the red light of his own torch. A summer-sailing on a still peninsulating river, and sweet as the delays of parting lovers. Sir F[rancis] B[urdett], like a Lapland witch drowned in a storm of her own raising. Mr. Cobbett, who, for a dollar, can raise what, offer him ten thousand dollars, he could not allay. [Sidenote: August, 1811] Why do you make a book? Because my hands can extend but a few score inches from my body; because my poverty keeps those hands empty when my heart aches to empty them; because my life is short, and [by reason of] my infirmities; and because a book, if it extends but to one edition, will probably benefit three or four score on whom I could not otherwise have acted, and, should it live and deserve to live, will make ample compensation for all the aforestated infirmities. O, but think only of the thoughts, feelings, radical impulses that have been implanted in how many thousands by the little ballad of the "Children in the Wood"! The sphere of Alexander the Great's agency is trifling compared with it. [Sidenote: PRESENTIMENTS] One of the strangest and most painful peculiarities of my nature (unless others have the same, and, like me, hide it, from the same inexplicable feeling of causeless shame and sense of a sort of guilt, joined with the apprehension of being feared and shrunk from as a something transnatural) I will here record--and my motive, or, rather, impulse, to do this seems an effort to eloign and abalienate it from the dark adyt of my own being by a visual outness, and not the wish for others to see it. It consists in a sudden second sight of some hidden vice, past, present or to come, of the person or persons with whom I am about to form a close intimacy--which never deters me, but rather (as all these transnaturals) urges me on, just like the feeling of an eddy-torrent to a swimmer. I see it as a vision, feel it as a prophecy, not as one _given_ me by any other being, but as an act of my own spirit, of the absolute _noumenon_, which, in so doing, seems to have offended against some law of its being, and to have acted the traitor by a commune with full consciousness independent of the tenure or inflected state of association, cause and effect, &c. [Sidenote: THE FIXED STARS OF TRUTH] As the most far-sighted eye, even aided by the most powerful telescope, will not make a fixed star appear larger than it does to an ordinary and unaided sight, even so there are heights of knowledge and truth sublime which all men in possession of the ordinary human understanding may comprehend as much and as well as the profoundest philosopher and the most learned theologian. Such are the truths relating to the _logos_ and its oneness with the self-existent Deity, and of the humanity of Christ and its union with the _logos_. It is idle, therefore, to refrain from preaching on these subjects, provided only such preparations have been made as no man can be a Christian without. The misfortune is that the majority are Christians only in name, and by birth only. Let them but once, according to St. James, have looked down steadfastly into the _law_ of liberty or freedom in their own souls (the will and the conscience), and they are capable of whatever God has chosen to reveal. [Sidenote: C'EST MAGNIFIQUE, MAIS CE N'EST PAS LA POÉSIE] A long line of (!!) marks of admiration would be its aptest symbol! It has given me the eye-ache with dazzlement, the brain-ache with wonderment, the stomach and all-ache with the shock and after-eddy of contradictory feelings. Splendour is there, splendour everywhere--distinct the figures as vivid--skill in construction of events--beauties numberless of form and thought. But there is not anywhere the "one low piping note more sweet than all"--there is not the divine vision of the poet, which gives the full fruition of sight without the effort--and where the feelings of the heart are struck, they are awakened only to complain of and recoil from the occasion. O! it is mournful to see and wonder at such a marvel of labour, erudition and talent concentered into such a burning-glass of factitious power, and yet to know that it is all in vain--like the Pyramids, it shows what can be done, and, like them, leaves in painful and almost scornful perplexity, why it was done, for what or whom. [Sidenote: SILENCE IS GOLDEN September 29th, 1812] Grand rule in case of quarrels between friends or lovers--never to say, hint, or do _anything_ in a moment of anger or indignation or sense of ill-treatment, but to be passive--and even if the fit should recur the next morning, still to delay it--in short, however plausible the motive may be, yet if you have loved the persons concerned, not to say it till their love has returned toward you, and your feelings are the same as they were before. And for this plain reason--you knew this before, and yet because you were in kindness, you never felt an impulse to speak of it--then, surely, not now when you may perpetuate what would otherwise be fugitive. [Sidenote: THE DEVIL: A RECANTATION] "That not one of the _peculiarities_ of Christianity, no one point in which, being clearly different from other religions or philosophies, it would have, at least, the _possibility_ of being superior to all, is retained by the modern Unitarians." This remark is occasioned by my reflections on the fact that Christianity _exclusively_ has asserted the _positive_ being of evil or sin, "of sin the exceeding sinfulness"--and thence exclusively the _freedom_ of the creature, as that, the clear intuition of which is, both, the result and the accompaniment of redemption. The nearest philosophy to Christianity is the Platonic, and it is observable that this is the mere antipodes of the Hartleio-Lockian held by the Unitarians; but the true honours of Christianity would be most easily manifested by a comparison even with that "_nec pari nec secundo_," but yet "_omnibus aliis propriore_," the Platonic! With what contempt, even in later years, have I not contemplated the doctrine of a devil! but now I see the intimate connection, if not as existent _person_, yet as essence and symbol with Christianity--and that so far from being identical with Manicheism, it is the surest antidote (that is, rightly understood). CHAPTER IX _1814-1818_ Lynx amid moles! had I stood by thy bed, Be of good cheer, meek soul! I would have said: I see a hope spring from that humble fear. S. T. C. [Sidenote: SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY] The first man of science was he who looked into a thing, not to learn whether it could furnish him with food, or shelter, or weapons, or tools, or ornaments, or _playwiths_, but who sought to know it for the gratification of _knowing_; while he that first sought to _know_ in order to _be_ was the first philosopher. I have read of two rivers passing through the same lake, yet all the way preserving their streams visibly distinct--if I mistake not, the Rhone and the Adar, through the Lake of Geneva. In a far finer distinction, yet in a subtler union, such, for the contemplative mind, are the streams of knowing and being. The lake is formed by the two streams in man and nature as it exists in and for man; and up this lake the philosopher sails on the junction-line of the constituent streams, still pushing upward and sounding as he goes, towards the common fountain-head of both, the mysterious source whose being is knowledge, whose knowledge is being--the adorable I AM IN THAT I AM. [Sidenote: PETRARCH'S EPISTLES] I have culled the following extracts from the First Epistle of the First Book of Petrarch's Epistle, that "Barbato Salmonensi." [Basil, 1554, i. 76.] Vultûs, heu, blanda severi Majestas, placidæque decus pondusque senectæ! Non omnia terræ Obruta! vivit amor, vivit dolor! Ora negatum Dulcia conspicere; at flere et meminisse relictum est. Jamque observatio vitæ Multa dedit--lugere nihil, ferre omnia; jamque Paulatim lacrymas rerum experientia tersit. [Heu! et spem quoque tersit] Pectore nunc gelido calidos miseremur amantes, Jamque arsisse pudet. Veteres tranquilla tumultus Mens horret, relegensque alium putat esse locutum. But, indeed, the whole of this letter deserves to be read and translated. Had Petrarch lived a century later, and, retaining all his _substantiality_ of head and heart, added to it the elegancies and manly politure of Fracastorius, Flaminius, Vida and their corrivals, this letter would have been a classical gem. To a translator of genius, and who possessed the English language as unembarrassed property, the defects of style in the original would present no obstacle; nay, rather an honourable motive in the well-grounded hope of rendering the version a finer poem than the original. [Twelve lines of Petrarch's Ep. _Barbato Salmonensi_ are quoted in the _Biog. Liter._ at the end of chapter x.; and a portion of the same poem was prefixed as a motto to "Love Poems" in the _Sibylline Leaves_, 1817, and the editions of _P. W._, 1828-9. _Coleridge's Works_, Harper & Brother, 1853, iii. 314. See, too, _P. W._, 1893, _Editor's Note_, pp. 614, 634.] [Sidenote: CORRUPTIO OPTIMI PESSIMA] A fine writer of bad principles or a fine poem on a hateful subject, such as the "Alexis" of Virgil or the "Bathyllus" of Anacreon, I compare to the flowers and leaves of the Stramonium. The flowers are remarkable sweet, but such is the fetid odour of the leaves that you start back from the one through disgust at the other. [Sidenote: A BLISS TO BE ALIVE] Zephyrs that captive roam among these boughs, Strive ye in vain to thread the leafy maze? Or have ye lim'd your wings with honey-dew? Unfelt ye murmur restless o'er my head And rock the feeding drone or bustling bees That blend their eager, earnest, happy hum! [Sidenote: WHAT MAN HAS MADE OF MAN] Gravior terras infestat Echidna, Cur sua vipereæ jaculantur toxica linguæ Atque homini sit homo serpens. O prodiga culpæ Germina, naturæque uteri fatalia monstra! Queis nimis innocuo volupe est in sanguine rictus Tingere, fraternasque fibras cognataque per se Viscera, et arrosæ deglubere funera famæ. Quæ morum ista lues! 25th Feb. 1819 Five years since the preceding lines were written on this leaf!! Ah! how yet more intrusively has the hornet scandal since then scared away the bee of poetic thought and silenced its "eager, earnest, happy hum"! [Sidenote: SAVE ME FROM MY FRIENDS] The sore evil now so general, alas! only not universal, of supporting our religion, just as a keen party-man would support his party in Parliament. All must be defended which can give a momentary advantage over any one opponent, no matter how naked it lays the cause open to another, perhaps, more formidable opponent--no matter how incompatible the two assumptions may be. We rejoice, not because our religion is the truth, but because the truth appears to be our religion. Talk with any dignified orthodoxist in the sober way of farther preferment and he will concrete all the grounds of Socinianism, talk Paley and the Resurrection as a proof and as the only proper _proof_ of our immortality, will give to external evidence and miracles the same self-grounded force, the same fundamentality. Even so the old Puritans felt towards the Papists. Because so much was wrong, everything was wrong, and by denying all reverence to the fathers and to the constant tradition of the Catholic Churches, they undermined the wall of the city in order that it might fall on the heads of the Romanists--thoughtless that by this very act they made a Breach for the Arian and Socinian to enter. [Sidenote: DRIP DRIP DRIP DRIP] The ear-deceiving imitation of a steady soaking rain, while the sky is in full uncurtainment of sprinkled stars and milky stream and dark blue interspace. The rain had held up for two hours or more, but so deep was the silence of the night that the _drip_ from the leaves of the garden trees _copied_ a steady shower. [Sidenote: REMEDIUM AMORIS] So intense are my affections, and so despotically am I governed by them (not indeed so much as I once was, but still far, far too much) that I should be the most wretched of men if my love outlived my esteem. But this, thank Heaven! is the antidote. The bitterer the tear of anguish at the clear detection of misapplied attachment, the calmer I am afterwards. It is a funeral tear for an object no more. [Sidenote: THE CONCLUSION OF THE WHOLE MATTER] February 23, 1816. I thought I expressed my thoughts well when I said, "There is no superstition but what has a religion as its base [or radical], and religion is only reason, seen perspectively by a finite intellect." [Sidenote: THE POWER OF WORDS] It is a common remark, in medical books for instance, that there are certain niceties which words, from their always abstract and so far general nature, cannot convey. Now this I am disposed to deny, that is, in any comparative sense. In my opinion there is nothing which, being equally known as any other thing, may not be conveyed by words with equal clearness. But the question of the source of the remark is, to whom? If I say that in jaundice the skin looks yellow, my words have no meaning for a man who has no sense of colours. Words are but remembrances, though remembrance may be so excited, as by the _a priori_ powers of the mind to produce a _tertium aliquid_. The utmost, therefore that should be said is that every additament of perception requires a new word, which (like all other words) will be intelligible to all who have seen the subject recalled by it, and who have learnt that such a word or phrase was appropriated to it; and this may be attained either by a new word, as _platinum_, _titanium_, _osmium_, etc., for the new metals, or an epithet peculiarising the application of an old word. For instance, no one can have attended to the brightness of the eyes in a healthy person in high spirits and particularly delighted by some occurrence, and that of the eye of a person deranged or predisposed to derangement, without observing the difference; and, in this case, the phrase "a maniacal glitter of the eye" conveys as clear a notion as that jaundice is marked by yellow. There is, doubtless, a difference, but no other than that of the _commencement_ of particular knowledge by the application of universal knowledge (that is to all who have the senses and common faculties of men), and the next step of knowledge when it particularises itself. But the defect is not in words, but in the imperfect knowledge of those to whom they are addressed. Then proof is obvious. Desire a physician or metaphysician, or a lawyer to mention the most perspicuous book in their several knowledges. Then bid them read that book to a sensible carpenter or shoemaker, and a great part will be as unintelligible as a technical treatise on carpentering to the lawyer or physician, who had not been brought up in a carpenter's shop or looked at his tools. I have dwelt on this for more reasons than one: first, because a remark that seems at first sight the same, namely, that "everything clearly perceived may be conveyed in simple common language," without taking in the "to whom?" is the disease of the age--an arrogant pusillanimity, a hatred of all information that cannot be obtained without thinking; and, secondly, because the pretended imperfection of language is often a disguise of muddy thoughts; and, thirdly, because to the mind itself it is made an excuse for indolence in determining what the fact or truth is which is the premise. For whether there does or does not exist a term in our present store of words significant thereof--if not, a word must be made--and, indeed, all wise men have so acted from Moses to Aristotle and from Theophrastus to Linnæus. The sum, therefore, is this. The conveyal of knowledge by words is in direct proportion to the stores and faculties of observation (internal or external) of the person who hears or reads them. And this holds equally whether I distinguish the green grass from the white lily and the yellow crocus, which all who have eyes understand, because all are equal to me in the knowledge of the facts signified--or of the difference between the apprehensive, perceptive, conceptive, and conclusive powers which I might [try to enunciate to] Doctors of Divinity and they would translate the words by _Abra Ca Dabra_. [Sidenote: FLOWERS OF SPEECH Sunday, April 30, 1816] Reflections on my four gaudy flower-pots, compared with the former flower-poems. After a certain period, crowded with counterfeiters of poetry, and illustrious with true poets, there is formed for common use a vast _garden_ of language, all the showy and all the odorous words and clusters of words are brought together, and to be plucked by mere mechanic and passive memory. In such a state, any man of common poetical reading, having a strong desire (to be?--O no! but--) to be thought a poet will present a flower-pot gay and gaudy, but the _composition_! That is wanting. We carry on judgment of times and circumstances into our pleasures. A flower-pot which would have enchanted us before flower gardens were common, for the very beauty of the component flowers, will be rightly condemned as common-place, out of place (for such is a common-place poet)--it involves a contradiction both in terms and thought. So Homer's Juno, Minerva, etc., are read with delight--but Blackmore? This is the reason why the judgment of those who are newlings in poetic reading is not to be relied on. The positive, which belongs to all, is taken as the comparative, which is the individual's praise. A good ear which had never heard music--with what raptures would it praise one of Shield's or Arne's Pasticcios and Centos! But it is the human mind it praises, not the individual. Hence it may happen (I believe has happened) that fashionableness may produce popularity. "The Beggar's Petition" is a fair instance, and what if I dared to add Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard"? [Sidenote: SPIRITUAL BLINDNESS] Men who direct what they call their understanding or common-sense by rules abstracted from sensuous experience in moral and super-sensuous truths remind one of the zemmi (mus [Greek: typhlos] or _typhlus_), "a kind of rat in which the skin (conjunctiva) is not even transparent over the eye, but is there covered with hairs as in the rest of the body. The eye (= the understanding), which is scarcely the size of the poppy-seed, is perfectly useless." An eel (_muroena coecilia_) and the myxine (_gastobranchus coecus_) are blind in the same manner, through the opacity of the conjunctiva. [Sidenote: INSECTS] Sir G. Staunton asserts that, in the forests of Java, spiders' webs are found of so strong a texture as to require a sharp-cutting instrument to make way through them. Pity that he did not procure a specimen and bring it home with him. It would be a pleasure to see a sailing-boat rigged with them--twisting the larger threads into ropes and weaving the smaller into a sort of silk canvas resembling the indestructible white cloth of the arindy or _palma Christi_ silkworm. The _Libellulidæ_ fly all ways without needing to turn their bodies--onward, backward, right and left--with more than swallow-rivalling rapidity of wing, readiness of evolution, and indefatigable continuance. The merry little gnats (_Tipulidæ minimæ_) I have myself often watched in an April shower, evidently "dancing the hayes" in and out between the falling drops, unwetted, or, rather, un-down-dashed by rocks of water many times larger than their whole bodies. [Sidenote: OF STYLE Sunday, January 25, 1817] A valuable remark has just struck me on reading Milton's beautiful passage on true eloquence, his apology for Smectymnuus. "For me, reader, though I cannot say," etc.--first, to shew the vastly greater numbers of admirable passages, in our elder writers, that may be gotten by heart as the most exquisite poems; and to point out the great intellectual advantage of this reading, over the gliding smoothly on through a whole volume of equability. But still, it will be said, there is an antiquity, an oddness in the style. Granted; but hear this same passage from the Smectymnuus, or this, or this. Every one would know at first hearing that they were not written by Gibbon, Hume, Johnson, or Robertson. But why? Are they not pure English? Aye! incomparably more so! Are not the words precisely appropriate, so that you cannot change them without changing the force and meaning? Aye! But are they not even now intelligible to man, woman, and child? Aye! there is no riddle-my-ree in them. What, then, is it? The unnatural, false, affected style of the moderns that makes sense and simplicity _oddness_. [Sidenote: OBDUCTÂ FRONTE SENECTUS] Even to a sense of shrinking, I felt in this man's face and figure what a shape comes to view when age has dried away the mask from a bad, depraved man, and flesh and colour no longer conceal or palliate the traits of the countenance. Then shows itself the indurated nerve; stiff and rigid in all its ugliness the inflexible muscle; then quiver the naked lips, the cold, the loveless; then blinks the turbid eye, whose glance no longer pliant _fixes_, abides in its evil expression. Then lie on the powerless forehead the wrinkles of suspicion and fear, and conscience-stung watchfulness. Contrast this with the countenance of Mrs. Gillman's mother as she once described it to me. This for "Puff and Slander,"[G] Highgate, 1817. [Sidenote: A "KINGDOM-OF-HEAVENITE"] When the little creature has slept out its sleep and stilled its hunger at the mother's bosom (that very hunger a mode of love all made up of kisses), and coos, and wantons with pleasure, and laughs, and plays bob-cherry with his mother, that is all, all to it. It understands not either itself or its mother, but it clings to her, and has an undeniable right to cling to her, seeks her, thanks her, loves her without forethought and without an afterthought. [Sidenote: A DIVINE EPIGRAM] _Nec mihi, Christe, tua sufficiunt sine te, nec tibi placent mea sine me_, exclaims St. Bernard. _Nota Bene._--This single epigram is worth (shall I say--O far rather--is a sufficient antidote to) a waggon-load of Paleyan moral and political philosophies. [Sidenote: SERIORES ROSÆ] We all look up to the blue sky for comfort, but nothing appears there, nothing comforts, nothing answers us, and so we die. Lie with the ear upon a dear friend's grave. On the same man, as in a vineyard, grow far different grapes--on the sunny south nectar, and on the bleak north verjuice. The blossom gives not only future fruit, but present honey. We may take the one, the other nothing injured. Like some spendthrift Lord, after we have disposed of nature's great masterpiece and [priceless] heirloom, the wisdom of innocence, we hang up as a poor copy our [own base] cunning. [Sidenote: A PLEA FOR SCHOLASTIC TERMS] The revival of classical literature, like all other revolutions, was not an unmixed good. One evil was the passion for pure Latinity, and a consequent contempt for the barbarism of the scholastic style and terminology. For awhile the schoolmen made head against their assailants; but, alas! all the genius and eloquence of the world was against them, and by an additional misfortune the scholastic logic was professed by those who had no other attainments, namely, the monks, and these, from monkishness, were the enemies of all genius and liberal knowledge. They were, of course, laughed out of the field as soon as they lost the power of aiding their logic by the post-predicaments of dungeon, fire, and faggot. Henceforward speculative philosophy must be written classically, that is, without technical terms--therefore popularly--and the inevitable consequence was that those sciences only were progressive which were permitted by the apparent as well as real necessity of the case to have a scientific terminology--as mathesis, geometry, astronomy and so forth--while metaphysic sank and died, and an empirical highly superficial psychology took its place. And so it has remained in England to the present day. A man must have felt the pain of being compelled to express himself either laxly or paraphrastically (which latter is almost as great an impediment in intellectual construction as the translation of letters and symbols into the thought they represent would be in Algebra), in order to understand how much a metaphysician suffers from not daring to adopt the _ivitates_ and _eitates_ of the schoolmen as objectivity, subjectivity, negativity, positivity. April 29, 1817, Tuesday night. [Sidenote: THE BODY OF THIS DEATH] The sentimental _cantilena_ respecting the benignity and loveliness of nature--how does it not sink before the contemplation of the pravity of nature, on whose reluctance and inaptness a form is forced (the mere reflex of that form which is itself absolute substance!) and which it struggles against, bears but for a while and then sinks with the alacrity of self-seeking into dust or _sanies_, which falls abroad into endless nothings or creeps and cowers in poison or explodes in havock! What is the beginning? what the end? And how evident an alien is the supernatural in the brief interval! [Sidenote: SPIRITUALISM AND MYSTICISM] There are many, alas! too many, either born or who have become deaf and dumb. So there are too many who have perverted the religion of the spirit into the superstition of spirits that mutter and mock and mow, like deaf and dumb idiots. Plans of teaching the deaf and dumb have been invented. For these the deaf and dumb owe thanks, and we for their sakes. _Homines sumus et nihil humani a nobis alienum._ But does it follow, therefore, that in _all_ schools these plans of teaching should be followed? Yet in the other case this is insisted on--and the Holy Ghost must not be our guide because mysticism and ghosts may come in under this name. Why? Because the deaf and dumb have been promoted to superintendents of education at large for all! [Sidenote: IDEALISM AND SUPERSTITION] Save only in that in which I have a right to demand of every man that he should be able to understand me, the experience or inward witnessing of the conscience, and in respect of which every man in real life (even the very disputant who affects doubt or denial in the moment of metaphysical arguing) would hold himself insulted by the supposition that he did not understand it--save in this only, and in that which if it be at all must be _unique_, and therefore cannot be supported by an analogue, and which, if it be at all, must be first, and therefore cannot have an antecedent, and therefore may be _monstrated_, but cannot be _de_monstrated.--I am no ghost-seer, I am no believer in apparitions. I do not contend for indescribable sensations, nor refer to, much less ground my convictions on, blind feelings or incommunicable experiences, but far rather contend against these superstitions in the mechanic sect, and impeach you as guilty, habitually and systematically guilty, of the same. Guilty, I say, of superstitions, which at worst are but exceptions and _fits_ in the poor self-misapprehending pietists, with whom, under the name mystics, you would fain confound and discredit _all_ who receive and worship God in spirit and in truth, and in the former as the only possible mode of the latter. According to your own account, your own scheme, you know nothing but your own sensations, indescribable inasmuch as they are sensations--for the appropriate expression even of which we must fly not merely to the indeclinables in the lowest parts of speech, but to human articulations that only (like musical notes) _stand for_ inarticulate sounds--the [Greek: oi, oi, papai] of the Greek tragedies, or, rather, Greek oratorios. You see nothing, but only by a sensation that conjures up an image in your own brain, or optic nerve (as in a nightmare), have an apparition, in consequence of which, as again in the nightmare, you are _forced_ to believe for the moment, and are _inclined_ to infer the existence of a corresponding reality out of your brain, but by what intermediation you cannot even form an intelligible conjecture. During the years of ill-health from disturbed digestion, I saw a host of apparitions, and heard them too--but I attributed them to an act in my brain. You, according to your own showing, see and hear nothing but apparitions in your brain, and strangely attribute them to things that _are_ outside your skull. Which of the two notions is most like the philosopher, which the superstitionist? The philosopher who makes my apparitions nothing but apparitions--a brain-image nothing more than a brain-image--and affirm _nihil super stare_--or you and yours who vehemently contend that it is but a brain-image, and yet cry, "_ast superstitit aliquid. Est super stitio alicujus quod in externo, id est, in apparenti non apparet_." What is outness, external and the like, but either the generalisation of apparence or the result of a given degree, a comparative intensity of the same? "I see it in my mind's eye," exclaims Hamlet, when his thoughts were in his own purview the same phantom, yea! in a higher intensity, became his father's ghost and marched along the platform. I quoted your own exposition, and dare you with these opinions charge others with superstition? You who deny aught permanent in our being, you with whom the soul, yea, the soul of the soul, our conscience and morality, are but the _tune_ from a fragile barrel-organ played by air and water, and whose life, therefore, must of course be a _pointing_ to--as of a Marcellus or a Hamlet--"Tis here! 'Tis gone!" Were it possible that I could actually believe such a system, I should not be scared from striking it, from its being so _majestical_! [Sidenote: THE GREATER DAMNATION] The old law of England punishes those who dig up the bones of the dead for superstitious or magical purposes, that is, in order to injure the living. What then are they guilty of who uncover the dormitories of the departed, and throw their souls into hell, in order to cast odium on a living truth? [Sidenote: DARWIN'S BOTANICAL GARDEN] Darwin possesses the _epidermis_ of poetry but not the _cutis_; the _cortex_ without the _liber_, _alburnum_, _lignum_, or _medulla_. And no wonder! for the inner bark or _liber_, alburnum, and wood are one and the same substance, in different periods of existence. [Sidenote: SEVENTEEN HUNDRED AND SIXTY YARDS NOT EXACTLY A MILE] "It is a mile and a half in height." "How much is that in yards or feet?" The mind rests satisfied in producing a correspondency in its own thoughts, and in the exponents of those thoughts. This seems to be a matter purely analytic, not yet properly synthetic. It is rather an interchange of equivalent acts, but not the same acts. In the yard I am prospective; in the mile I seem to be retrospective. Come, a hundred strides more, and we shall have come a mile. This, if true, may be a subtlety, but is it necessarily a trifle? May not many common but false conclusions originate in the neglect of this distinction--in the confounding of objective and subjective logic? [Sidenote: OF A TOO WITTY BOOK] I like salt to my meat so well that I can scarce say grace over meat without salt. But salt to one's salt! Ay! a sparkling, dazzling, lit-up saloon or subterranean minster in a vast mine of rock-salt--what of it?--full of white pillars and aisles and altars of eye-dazzling salt. Well, what of it?--'twere an uncomfortable lodging or boarding-house--in short, _all my eye_. Now, I am content with a work if it be but my eye and Betty Martin, because, having never heard any charge against the author of the adage, candour obliges me to conclude that Eliza Martin is "sense for certain." In short, never was a metaphor more lucky, apt, ramescent, and fructiferous--a hundred branches, and each hung with a different graft-fruit--than salt as typical of wit--the uses of both being the same, not to nourish, but to season and preserve nourishment. Yea! even when there is plenty of good substantial meat to incorporate with, stout aitch-bone and buttock, still there may be too much; and they who confine themselves to such meals will contract a scorbutic habit of intellect (_i.e._, a scurvy taste), and, with loose teeth and tender gums, become incapable of chewing and digesting hard matters of mere plain thinking. [Sidenote: SPOOKS] It is thus that the Glanvillians reason. First, they assume the facts as objectively as if the question related to the experimentable of our senses. Secondly, they take the imaginative possibility--that is, that the [assumed] facts involve no contradiction, [as if it were] a scientific possibility. And, lastly, they [advocate] them as proofs of a spiritual world and our own immortality. This last [I hold to] be the greatest insult to conscience and the greatest incongruity with the objects of religion. N.B.--It is amusing, in all ghost stories, etc., that the recorders are "the farthest in the world from being credulous," or "as far from believing such things as any man." If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke--Aye! and what then? The more exquisite and delicate a flower of joy, the tenderer must be the hand that plucks it. Floods and general inundations render for the time even the purest springs turbid. For compassion a human heart suffices; but for full, adequate sympathy with joy, an angel's. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote G: A projected satire, of which, perhaps, the lines headed "A Character" were an instalment. See _P. W._, 1893, pp. 195-642. _Letters of S. T. C._, 1895, ii. 631.] CHAPTER X _1819-1828_ Where'er I find the Good, the True, the Fair, I ask no names--God's spirit dwelleth there! The unconfounded, undivided Three, Each for itself, and all in each, to see In man and Nature, is Philosophy. S. T. C. [Sidenote: THE MOON'S HALO AN EMBLEM OF HOPE] The moon, rushing onward through the coursing clouds, advances like an indignant warrior through a fleeing army; but the amber halo in which she moves--O! it is a circle of Hope. For what she leaves behind her has not lost its radiance as it is melting away into oblivion, while, still, the other semi-circle catches the rich light at her approach, and heralds her ongress. [Sidenote: A COMPLEX VEXATION] It is by strength of mind that we are to untwist the tie or copula of the besom of affliction, which not nature but the strength of imagination had twisted round it, and thus resolve it into its component twigs, and conquer in detail "one down and t'other come on"! _Dividendo diminuitur_--which forms the true ground of the advantage accruing from communicating our griefs to another. We enable ourselves to see them each in its true magnitude. [Sidenote: THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF ENGLAND] After re-perusal of my inefficient, yet not feeble efforts in behalf of the poor little white slaves in the cotton-factories, I ask myself, "But still are we not better than the other nations of Christendom?" Yes--Perhaps. I don't know. I dare not affirm it. Better than the French certainly! Mammon _versus_ Moloch and Belial. But Sweden, Norway, Germany, the Tyrol? No. [Sidenote: THE MEED OF PRAISE] There is a species of applause scarcely less genial to a poet, whether bard, musician, or artist, than the vernal warmth to the feathered songsters during their nest-building or incubation--a sympathy, an expressed hope, that is the open air in which the poet breathes, and without which the sense of power sinks back on itself like a sigh heaved up from the tightened chest of a sick man. Alas! alas! alas! [Sidenote: THE GREAT UNKNOWN] Anonymity is now an artifice to acquire celebrity, as a black veil is worn to make a pair of bright eyes more conspicuous. [Sidenote: BOOK-LEARNING FOR LEGISLATORS] For the same reasons that we cannot now act by impulses, but must think, so now must every legislator be a man of sound book-learning, because he cannot, if he would, think or act from the simple dictates of unimproved but undepraved common sense. Newspapers, reviews, and the conversation of men who derive their opinions from newspapers and reviews will secure for him artificial opinions, if he does not secure them for himself from purer and more authentic sources. There is now no such being as a country gentleman. Like their relation, the Dodo, the race is extinct, or if by accident one has escaped, it belongs to the Museum, not to active life, or the purposes of active life. [Sidenote: THEISM AND ATHEISM] The more I read and reflect on the arguments of the truly philosophical theists and atheists, the more I feel convinced that the ultimate difference is a moral rather than an intellectual one, that the result is an x y z, an acknowledged insufficiency of the known to account for itself, and, therefore, a something unknown--that to which, while the atheist leaves it a blank in the understanding, the theist dedicates his noblest feelings of love and awe, and with which, by a moral syllogism, he connects and unites his conscience and actions. For the words goodness and wisdom are clearly only reflexes of the effect, just as when we call the unknown cause of cold and heat by the name of its effects, and _know_ nothing further. For if we mean that a Being like man, with human goodness and intellect, only magnified, is the cause, that is, that the First Cause is an immense man (as according to Swedenborg and Zinzendorf), then come the insoluble difficulties of the incongruity of qualities whose very essence implies finiteness, with a Being _ex hypothesi_ infinite. [Sidenote: THE MIND'S EYE] An excellent instance of the abstraction [from objects of the sense] that results from the attention converging to any one object, is furnished by the oily rags, broken saucers, greasy phials, dabs, crusts, and smears of paints in the laboratory of a Raphael, or a Claude Lorraine, or a Van Huysum, or any other great master of the beautiful and becoming. In like manner, the mud and clay in the modelling hand of a Chantrey--what are they to him whose total soul is awake, in his eye as a subject, and before his eye as some ideal of beauty _objectively_? The various objects of the senses are as little the objects of _his_ senses, as the ink with which the "Lear" was written, existed in the consciousness of a Shakspere. [Sidenote: A LAND OF BLISS] The humming-moth with its glimmer-mist of rapid unceasing motion before the humble-bee within the flowering bells and cups--and the eagle _level_ with the clouds, himself a cloudy speck, surveys the vale from mount to mount. From the cataract flung on the vale, the broadest fleeces of the snowy foam light on the bank flowers or the water-lilies in the stiller pool below. [Sidenote: TIME AND ETERNITY] The defect of Archbishop Leighton's reasoning is the taking eternity for a sort of time, a _baro major_, a baron of beef or quarter of lamb, out of which and off which time is cut, as a brisket or shoulder--while, even in common discourse, without any design of sounding the depth of the truth or of weighing the words expressing it in the hair-balance of metaphysics, it would be more convenient to consider eternity the _simul et totum_ as the _antitheton_ of time. [Sidenote: THE LITERARY STERILITY OF ISLAMISM] The extraordinary florency of letters under the Spanish Caliphate in connection with the character and capabilities of Mohammedanism has never yet been treated as its importance requires. Halim II, founder of the University of Cordova, and of numerous colleges and libraries throughout Spain, is said to have possessed a library of six hundred thousand MSS., the catalogue filling forty-four volumes. Nor were his successors behind him in zeal and munificence. That the prime article of Islamism, the uni-personality of God, is one cause of the downfall, say rather of the merely meteoric existence of their literary age, I am persuaded, but the exclusive scene (in Spain) suggests many interesting views. With a learned class Mohammedanism could not but pass into Deism, and Deism never did, never can, establish itself as a religion. It is the doctrine of the tri-unity that connects Christianity with philosophy, gives a positive religion a specific interest to the philosopher, and that of redemption to the moralist and psychologist. Predestination, in the plenitude, in which it is equivalent to fatalism, was the necessary alternative and _succedaneum_ of Redemption, and the Incarnation the only preservative against pantheism on one side, and anthropomorphism on the other. The Persian (Europeans in Asia) form of Mohammedanism is very striking in this point of view. [Sidenote: THE SPIRIT OF A PEOPLE] It is not by individual character that an individual can derive just conclusions respecting a community or an age. Conclusions so drawn are the excuse of selfish, narrow and pusillanimous statesmen, who, by dwelling on the kindred baseness or folly of the persons with whom they come in immediate contact, lose all faith in human nature, ignorant that even in these a spark is latent which would light up and consume the worthless overlay in a national moment. The spirit of a race is the character of a people, the sleep or the awakening of which depends on a few minds, pre-ordained for this purpose, and sometimes by the mere removal of the dead weight of a degenerate Court or nobility pressing on the spring. So I doubt not would it be with the Turks, were the Porte and its seraglio conquered by Russia. But the spirit of a race ought never to be supposed extinct, but on the other hand no more or other ought to be expected than the race contains in itself. The true cause of the irrecoverable fall of Rome is to be found in the fact, that Rome was a city, a handful of men that multiplied its subjects incomparably faster than its citizens, so that the latter were soon dilute and lost in the former. On a similar principle colonists in modern times degenerate by _excision_ from their race (the ancient colonies were _buds_). This, I think, applies to the Neapolitans and most of the Italian States. A nest of republics keep each other alive; but a patchwork of principalities has the effect of excision by insulation, or rather by compressure. How long did the life of Germany doze under these ligatures! Yet did we not _despair wrongfully_ of the people? The spirit of the race survived, of which literature was a part. Hence I dare not despair of Greece, because it has been barbarised and enslaved, but not split up into puny independent governments under Princes of their own race. The Neapolitans have always been a conquered people, and degenerates in the original sense of the word, _de genere_--they have lost their race, though what it was is uncertain. Lastly, the individual in all things is the prerogative of the divine knowledge. What it is, our eyes can see only by what it has in common, and this can only be seen in communities where neither excision, nor ligature, nor commixture exists. Despotism and superstition will not extinguish the character of a race, as Russia testifies. But again, take care to understand that character, and expect no other fruit than the root contains in its nature. [Sidenote: THE FLIGHT OF MOHAMMED] Had I proceeded, in concert with R. Southey, with the "Flight and Return of Mohammed," [1799] I had intended to introduce a disputation between Mahomet, as the representative of unipersonal Theism with the Judaico-Christian machinery of angels, genii, and prophets, an idolater with his gods, heroes, and spirits of the departed mighty, and a fetish-worshipper who adored the invisible alone, and held no religion common to all men or any number of men other than as they chanced at the same moment to be acted on by the same influence--even as when a hundred ant-hills are in motion under the same burst of sunshine. And, still, chiefly for the sake of the last scheme, I should like to do something of the kind. My enlightened fetish-divine would have been an Okenist, a zoo-magnetist and (a priest of) the night-side of Nature. [For the fragment entitled "Mahomet," see _P. W._, 1893, p. 139, and editor's _Note_, p. 615.] [Sidenote: PRUDENCE _VERSUS_ FRIENDSHIP] Among the countless arguments against the Paleyans state, this too--Can a wise moral legislator have made _prudence_ the true principle-ground, and guide of moral conduct, where in almost all cases in which there is contemplation to act wrong the first appearances of prudence are in favour of immorality, and, in order to ground the contrary on a principle of prudence, it is necessary to refine, to calculate, to look far onward into an uncertain future? Is this a guide, or primary guide, that for ever requires a guide against itself? Is it not a strange system which sets prudence against prudence? Compare this with the Law of Conscience--Is it not its specific character to be immediate, positive, unalterable? In short, _a priori_, state the requisites of a moral guide, and apply them first to prudence, and then to the law of pure reason or conscience, and ask if we need fear the result if the Judge is pure from all bribes and prejudices. What then are the real dictates of prudence as drawn from every man's experience in late manhood, and so lured from the intoxication of youth, hope, and love? How cold, how dead'ning, what a dire vacuum they would leave in the soul, if the high and supreme sense of duty did not form a root out of which new prospects budded. What, I say, is the clear dictate of prudence in the matter of friendship? Assuredly to _like_ only, and never to be so attached as to be stripped naked by the loss. A friend may be a great-coat, a beloved a couch, but never, never our necessary clothing, our only means of quiet heart-repose! And, yet, with this the mind of a generous man would be so miserable, that prudence itself would fight against prudence, and advise him to drink off the draught of Hope, spite of the horrid and bitter dregs of disappointment, with which the draught will assuredly finish. Though I have said that duty is a consolation, I have not affirmed that the scar of the wound of disappointed love and insulted, betrayed fidelity would be removed in _this_ life. No! it will not--nay, the very duty must for ever keep alive feelings the appropriate objects of which are indeed in another world; but yet our human nature cannot avoid at times the connection of those feelings with their original or their first forms and objects; and so far, therefore, from removing the scar, will often and often make the wound open and bleed afresh. But, still, we know that the feeling is not objectless, that the counterfeit has a correspondent genuine, and this is the comfort. [Sidenote: A POET ON POETRY] _Canzone XVIII. fra le Rime di Dante_ is a poem of wild and interesting images, intended as an enigma, and to me an enigma it remains, spite of all my efforts. Yet it deserves transcription and translation. A.D. 1806 [? 1807]. "Tre donne intorno al cuor mi son venute," &c. [After the four first lines the handwriting is that of my old, dear, and honoured friend, Mr. Wade, of Bristol.--S. T. C.] _Ramsgate, Sept. 2nd, 1819._--I _begin_ to understand the above poem, after an interval from 1805, during which no year passed in which I did not reperuse, I might say construe, parse, and spell it, twelve times at least--such a fascination had it, spite of its obscurity! It affords a good instance, by the bye, of that soul of _universal_ significance in a true poet's composition, in addition to the specific meaning. [Sidenote: GREAT AND LITTLE MINDS] Great minds can and do create the taste of the age, and one of the contingent causes which warp the taste of nations and ages is, that men of genius in part yield to it, and in part are acted on by the taste of the age. Common minds may be compared to the component drops of the stream of life--men of genius to the large and small bubbles. What if they break? they are still as good as the rest--drops of water. [Sidenote: SUBJECT AND OBJECT] In youth our happiness is hope; in age the recollection of the hopes of youth. What else can there be?--for the substantial mind, for the _I_, what else can there be? Pleasure? Fruition? Filter hope and memory from pleasure, and the more entire the fruition the more is it the death of the _I_. A neutral product results that may exist for others, but no longer for itself--a coke or a slag. To make the object one with us, we must become one with the object--_ergo, an_ object. _Ergo_, the object must be itself a subject--partially a favourite dog, principally a friend, wholly God, _the_ Friend. God is Love--that is, an object that is absolutely subject (God is a spirit), but a subject that for ever condescends to become the object for those that meet Him subjectively. [As in the] Eucharist, [He is] verily and truly present to the Faithful, neither [by a] _trans_ nor _con_, but [by] _substantiation_. [Sidenote: THE THREE ESTATES OF BEING] We might as well attempt to conceive more than three dimensions of space, as to imagine more than three kinds of living existence--God, man, and beast. And even of these the last (division) is obscure, and scarce endures a fixed contemplation without passing into an unripe or degenerated humanity. [Sidenote: A LIFE-LONG ERROR] My mother told my wife that I was a year younger, and that there was a blunder made either in the baptismal register itself or in the transcript sent for my admission into Christ's Hospital; and Mrs. C., who is older than myself, believes me only 48. Be this as it may, in _life_, if not in years, I am, alas! nearer to 68. [S. T. C. was born on October 21, 1772. Consequently, on October 20, 1819, he was not yet forty-seven. He entered his forty-eighth year October 21, 1819.] [Sidenote: AN UNWRITTEN SONNET] N.B.--A sonnet on the child collecting shells and pebbles on the sea-shore or lake-side, and carrying each with a fresh shout of delight and admiration to the mother's apron, who smiles and assents to each "This is pretty!" "Is not that a nice one?" and then when the prattler is tired of its _conchozetetic_ labours lifts up her apron and throws them out on her apron. Such are our first discoveries both in science and philosophy.--S. T. Coleridge, Oct. 21, 1819. [Sidenote: MILTON AND SHAKSPERE] Found Mr. G. with Hartley in the garden, attempting to explain to himself and to Hartley a feeling of a something not present in Milton's works, that is, in "Paradise Lost," "Paradise Regained," and "Samson Agonistes," which he _did_ feel delightedly in the "Lycidas," and (as I added afterwards) in the Italian sonnets compared with the English. And this appeared to me to be the _poet_ appearing and wishing to appear as the poet, and, likewise, as the man, as much as, though more rare than, the father, the brother, the preacher, and the patriot. Compare with Milton, Chaucer's "Fall of the Leaf" and Spenser throughout, and you cannot but _feel_ what Gillman meant to convey. What is the solution? This, I believe--but I must premise that there is a _synthesis_ of intellectual insight including the mental object, the organ of the correspondent being indivisible, and this (O deep truth!) because the objectivity consists in the universality of its subjectiveness--as when it _sees_, and millions _see_ even so, and the seeing of the millions is what constitutes to _A_ and to each of the millions the _objectivity_ of the sight, the equivalent to a common object--a synthesis of _this_, I say, and of proper external object which we call _fact_. Now, this it is which we find in religion. It is more than philosophical truth--it is other and more than historical fact; it is not made up by the addition of the one to the other, but it is the _identity_ of both, the co-inherence. Now, this being understood, I proceed to say, using the term objectivity (arbitrarily, I grant), for this identity of truth and fact, that Milton hid the poetry in or transformed (not trans-substantiated) the poetry into this objectivity, while Shakspere, in all things, the divine opposite or antithetic correspondent of the divine Milton, transformed the objectivity into poetry. Mr. G. observed as peculiar to the Hamlet, that it alone, of all Shakspere's plays, presented to him a moving along _before_ him; while in others it was a moving, indeed, but with which he himself moved equally in all and with all, and without any external something by which the motion was manifested, even as a man would move in a balloon--a sensation of motion, but not a sight of moving and having been moved. And why is this? Because of all the characters of Shakspere's plays Hamlet is the only character with which, by contra-distinction from the rest of the _dramatis personæ_, the fit and capable reader identifies himself as the representation of his own contemplative and strictly proper and very own being (action, etc., belongs to others, the moment we call it our own)--hence the events of the play, with all the characters, move because you stand still. In the other plays, your identity is equally diffused over all. Of no parts can you say, as in Hamlet, they are moving. But ever it is _we_, or that period and portion of human action, which is unified into a dream, even as in a dream the personal unity is diffused and severalised (divided to the sight though united in the dim feeling) into a sort of reality. Even so [it is with] the styles of Milton and Shakspere--the same weight of effect from the exceeding _felicity_ (subjectively) of Shakspere, and the exceeding _propriety_ (_extra arbitrium_) of Milton. [Sidenote: A ROYAL ROAD TO KNOWLEDGE] The best plan, I think, for a man who would wish his mind to continue growing is to find, in the first place, some means of ascertaining for himself whether it does or no; and I can think of no better than early in life, say after three-and-twenty, to procure gradually the works of some two or three great writers--say, for instance, Bacon, Jeremy Taylor, and Kant, with the _De Republicâ_, _De Legibus_, the _Sophistes_ and _Politicus_ of Plato, and the _Poetics_, _Rhetorics_, and _Politics_ of Aristotle--and amidst all other reading, to make a point of reperusing some one, or some weighty part of some one of these every four or five years, having from the beginning a separate note-book for each of these writers, in which your impressions, suggestions, conjectures, doubts and judgments are to be recorded with date of each, and so worded as to represent most sincerely the exact state of your convictions at the time, such as they would be if you did not (which this plan will assuredly make you do sooner or later) anticipate a change in them from increase of knowledge. "It is possible that I am in the wrong, but so it now appears to me, after my best attempts; and I must therefore put it down in order that I may find myself so, if so I am." It would make a little volume to give in detail all the various moral as well as intellectual advantages that would result from the systematic observation of the plan. Diffidence and hope would reciprocally balance and excite each other. A continuity would be given to your being, and its progressiveness ensured. All your knowledge otherwise obtained, whether from books or conversation or experience, would find centres round which it would organise itself. And, lastly, the habit of confuting your past self, and detecting the causes and occasions of your having mistaken or overlooked the truth, will give you both a quickness and a winning kindness, resulting from sympathy, in exposing the errors of others, as if you were an _alter ego_, of his mistake. And such, indeed, will your antagonist appear to you, another past self--in all points in which the falsity is not too plainly a derivation from a corrupt heart and the predominance of bad passion or worldly interests overlaying the love of truth as truth. And even in this case the liveliness with which you will so often have expressed yourself in your private note-books, in which the words, unsought for and untrimmed because intended for your own eye, exclusively, were the first-born of your first impressions, when you were either enkindled by admiration of your writer, or excited by a humble disputing with him reimpersonated in his book, will be of no mean rhetorical advantage to you, especially in public and extemporary debate or animated conversation. [Sidenote: THE IDEA OF GOD] Did you deduce your own being? Even that is less absurd than the conceit of deducing the Divine being? Never would you have had the notion, had you not had the idea--rather, had not the idea worked in you like the memory of a name which we cannot recollect and yet feel that we have and which reveals its existence in the mind only by a restless anticipation and proves its _a priori_ actuality by the almost explosive instantaneity with which it is welcomed and recognised on its re-emersion out of the cloud, or its re-ascent from the horizon of consciousness. [Sidenote: APHORISMS AND ADAGES] I should like to know whether or how far the delight I feel, and have always felt, in adages or aphorisms of universal or very extensive application is a general or common feeling with men, or a peculiarity of my own mind. I cannot describe how much pleasure I have derived from "Extremes meet," for instance, or "Treat everything according to its nature," and, the last, "Be"! In the last I bring all inward rectitude to its test, in the former all outward morality to its rule, and in the first all problematic results to their solution, and reduce apparent contraries to correspondent opposites. How many hostile tenets has it enabled me to contemplate as fragments of truth, false only by negation and mutual exclusion? [Sidenote: IGNORE THYSELF July 12, 1822] I have myself too often of late used the phrase "rational self-love" the same as "enlightened self-love." O no more of this! What have love, reason or light to do with _self_, except as the dark and evil spirit which it is given to them to overcome! _Soul-love_, if you please. O there is more stuff of thought in our simple and pious fore-elders' adjuration, "Take pity of your poor soul!" than in all the volumes of Paley, Rochefoucauld, and Helvetius! [Sidenote: RUGIT LEO] N.B.--The injurious manner in which men of genius are treated, not only as authors, but even when they are in social company. _A_ is believed to be, or talked of as, a man of unusual talent. People are anxious to meet him. If he says little or nothing, they wonder at the report, never considering whether they themselves were fit either to excite, or if self-excited to receive and comprehend him. But with the simplicity of genius he attributes more to them than they have, and they put questions that cannot be answered but by a return to first principles, and then they complain of him as not conversing, but lecturing. "He is quite intolerable," "Might as well be hearing a sermon." In short, in answer to some objection, _A_ replies, "Sir, this rests on the distinction between an _idea_ and an _image_, and, likewise, its difference from a perfect _conception_." "Pray, sir, explain." Because he does not and cannot [state the case as concisely as if he had been appealed to about a hand at] whist, 'tis "Lord! how long he talks," and they never ask themselves, Did this man force himself into your company? Was he not dragged into it? What is the practical result? That the man of genius should live as much as possible with beings that simply love him, from relationship or old association, or with those that have the same feelings with himself; but in all other company he will do well to cease to be the man of genius, and make up his mind to appear dull or commonplace as a companion, to be the most silent except upon the most trivial subjects of any in the company, to turn off questions with a joke or a pun as not suiting a wine-table, and to trust only to his writings. [Sidenote: A BROKEN HEART] Few die of a _broken heart_, and these few (the surgeons tell us) know nothing of it, and, dying suddenly, leave to the dissector the first discovery. O this is but the shallow remark of a hard and unthinking prosperity! Have you never seen a stick broken in the middle, and yet cohering by the rind? The fibres, half of them actually broken and the rest sprained and, though tough, unsustaining? O many, many are the broken-hearted for those who know what the moral and practical heart of the man is! [Sidenote: VOX HIEMALIS Thursday, Sept. 30, 1824] Now the breeze through the stiff and brittle-becoming foliage of the trees counterfeits the sound of a rushing stream or water-flood suddenly sweeping by. The sigh, the modulated continuousness of the murmur is exchanged for the confusion of overtaking sounds--the self-evolution of the One, for the clash or stroke of ever-commencing contact of the multitudinous, without interspace, by confusion. The short gusts rustle and the ear feels the unlithesome dryness, before the eye detects the coarser, duller, though deeper green, deadened and not [yet] awakened into the hues of decay--echoes of spring from the sepulchral vault of winter. The aged year, conversant with the forms of its youth and forgetting all the intervals, feebly reproduces them [as it were, from], memory. [Sidenote: CONSTANCY Friday, June 9, 1826] "Constancy lives in realms above." This exclusion of constancy from the list of earthly virtues may be a poet's exaggeration, but, certainly, it is of far rarer occurrence in _all_ relations of life than the young and warm-hearted are willing to believe, but in cases of _exclusive_ attachment (that is, in Love, properly so-called, and yet distinct from Friendship), and in the _highest_ form of the Virtue, it is _so_ rare that I cannot help doubting whether an instance of _mutual_ constancy in effect ever existed. For there are two sorts of constancy, the one negative, where there is no _transfer_ of affection, where the bond of attachment is not broken though it may be attenuated to a thread--this may be met with, not so seldom, and, where there is goodness of heart, it may be expected--but the other sort, or _positive_ constancy, where the affection endures in the same intensity with the same or increased tenderness and _nearness_, of this it is that I doubt whether once in an age an instance occurs where _A_ feels it toward _B_, and _B_ feels it towards _A_, and _vice versâ_. [Sidenote: FLOWERS AND LIGHT April 18, 1826] Spring flowers, I have observed, look best in the day, and by sunshine: but summer and autumnal flower-pots by lamp or candle-light. I have now before me a flower-pot of cherry-blossoms, polyanthuses, double violets, periwinkles, wall-flowers, but how dim and dusky they look! The scarlet anemone is an exception, and three or four of them with all the rest of the flower-glass sprays of white blossoms, and one or two periwinkles for the sake of the dark green leaves, green stems, and flexible elegant form, make a lovely group both by sun and by candle-light. Grove, Highgate. [Sidenote: THE BREATH OF SPRING Feb. 28, 1827] What an interval! Heard the singing birds this morning in our garden for the first time this year, though it rained and blew fiercely; but the long frost has broken up, and the wind, though fierce, was warm and westerly. [Sidenote: THE IDEA OF LIFE May 5, 1827] To the right understanding of the most awfully _concerning_ declaration of Holy Writ there has been no greater obstacle than the want of insight into the nature of Life--what it is and what it is not. But in order to this, the mind must have been raised to the contemplation of the _Idea_--the life celestial, to wit--or the distinctive essence and character of the Holy Spirit. Here Life is _Love_--communicative, outpouring love. _Ergo_, the terrestrial or the Life of Nature ever the shadow and opposite of the Divine is appropriative, absorbing _appetence_. But the great mistake is, that the soul cannot continue without life; for, if so, with what propriety can the portion of the reprobate soul be called Death? What if the natural life have two possible terminations--true Being and the falling back into the dark Will? [Sidenote: A COMPREHENSIVE FORMULA] The painter-parson, Rev. Mr. Judkin, is about to show off a Romish priest converted to the Protestant belief, on Sunday next at his church, and asked of me (this day, at Mr. Gray's, Friday, 27th July, 1827) whether I knew of any form of recantation but that of Archbishop Tenison. I knew nothing of Tenison's or any other, but expressed my opinion that no other recantation ought to be required than a declaration that he admitted no outward authority superior to, or co-ordinate with, the canonical Scriptures, and no interpreter that superseded or stood in the place of the Holy Spirit, enlightening the mind of each true believer, according to his individual needs. I can conceive a person holding all the articles that distinguish the Romish from the Protestant conception, with this one exception; and, yet, if he did make this exception, and professed to believe them, because he thought they were contained in, or to be fairly inferred from, right reason and the Scriptures, I should consider him as true a Protestant as Luther, Knox, or Calvin, and a far better than Laud and his compeers, however meanly I might think of him as a philosopher and theologian. The laying so great a stress on transubstantiation I have long regarded as the great calamity or error of the Reformation--if not constrained by circumstances, the great _error_--or, if constrained, the great _calamity_. [Sidenote: THE NIGHT IS AT HAND August 1, 1828] The sweet prattle of the chimes--counsellors pleading in the court of Love--then the clock, the solemn sentence of the mighty Judge--long pause between each pregnant, inappellable word, too deeply weighed to be reversed in the High-Justice-Court of Time and Fate. A more richly solemn sound than this eleven o'clock at Antwerp I never heard--dead enough to be opaque as central gold, yet clear enough to be the mountain air. INDEX OF PROPER NAMES _Abergavenny, The_, 132 Achilles, 25 Adam, 51 Adar River, 261 Africa, 70, 71 Alexander the Great, 256 Alfieri, 230 Allen, Robert, 139, 140 _n_ Allston, Washington, 167, 175 Anacreon, 183, 263 Antonio, St., 78 Antwerp, 307 Aphrodite, 192 Apollo, 110 Ariosto, 151, 230 Aristotle, 183, 222, 268, 298 Arne, 270 Arrian, 183 Augustine, St., 179 Bacon, F. (Lord Verulam), 21, 79, 151, 177, 183, 298 Ball, Sir Alexander, 206 Ball, Lady, 92 Barrow, J., 26, 47 Bassenthwaite, 18 Barclay, W. ("Argenis"), 207 Beaumont, Francis, 207 Beaumont, Sir George, 67, 79, 145 Beaumont, Lady, 67 Beddoes, Thomas, M.D., 239 _n_ Bentham, 127 Berkeley, Bishop, 183 Bernard, Saint, 273 Bernouilli, 152 Beverley, 94 Blackmore, 24, 270 Blount, Sir Edward, 63 Blumenbach, 67 Boccaccio, 46 Bonnet, 152 Borrowdale, 34, 35, 52 Bosch, 182 Boyer, J., 14 Brandelhow, 46 Bristol, 293 _n_ Brunck, 182 Brougham, Lord, 250 Brown, Dr. J., 14 Browne, William, 158 and _n_ Bruno, Giordano, 16, 17 _n_, 72, 73, 151 Buffon, 209 Buonaparte, 75 Burdett, Sir F., 174, 255 Burton, Robert, 25 Cain, 51 Cairns, M. J., 9 Calvin, 307 Cambridge, 214 Campbell, T., 156 Campeachy, Bay of, 208 Caracciolo, 87 Caernarvon Castle, 71 Castle Crag, 34 Castlerigg, 43 Catullus, 165 Cecilia, St., 200 Ceres, 110 Cervantes, 152 Chantrey, 286 Charlemagne, 170 Chartreuse, 119 Chaucer, 296 Chersites, Theodoras, 21 China, 29, 132, 151 Christ's Hospital, 46, 295 Cicero, 23 _n_ Circe, 192 Clarkson, Thomas, 24 Clarkson, Mrs., 167 Claudian, 165 Clotharius, 211 Cobbett, W., 76, 255 Cochrane (Earl of Dundonald). 237 Coleorton, 171 _n_ Coleridge, Berkeley, 120 Coleridge, Derwent, 18, 29, 120 Coleridge, Hartley, 3, 13, 15, 24, 40, 41, 65, 66, 96, 135, 296 Coleridge, Colonel James, 158 _n_. Coleridge, S. T., 9, 23 _n_, 64 _n_, 75 _n_, 103, 140 _n_, 157 and _n_, 158 _n_, 169, 177 _n_, 195 _n_, 196 _n_, 203 _n_, 211 _n_, 225 _n_, 236 _n_, 242 _n_, 246 _n_, 248 _n_, 263 _n_, 273 _n_, 293 _n_, 295 and _n_ Coleridge, Sara (Mrs. S. T.), 9, 218, 295 Coleridge, Sara (Mrs. H. N. Coleridge), 120, 208 _n_. Collins, 5 Combe, S., 129 Combe Satchfield, 158 _n_. Condillac, 79 Constantine, Budæo-Tusan, 182 Cordova, 287 Cottle, Joseph, 60, 86, 235 _Courier_ Office, 193, 203 _n_ Cowper, William, 121, 128 Cuthill, Mr., 182, 183 Dampier, Travels of, 208 Dante, 25, 151, 229, 230, 293 Daphnis, D'Orvilles, 183 Darwin, Dr., 5, 92, 151, 280 David, King, 235 Davy, Sir H., 218 Dennison, Mr., 144, 146 De Quincey, 177 _n_, 183 Diogenes, 97 Domitian, 159 Drayton, 154 Dresden, 85 Dryden, 159 Duke Richard, 158 _n_ Dundas (Lord Melville), 151 Durham, 35, 36 Dyer, George, 9 _n_, 67 Edgeworth, Miss, 117 Elizabeth, Queen, 231 Empedocles, 163 Eolus, 193 Epictetus, 183 Erigena, Joannes Scotus, 58 Escot, 157 _n_ Etna, 114 Euphormio, 207 Exeter, 67 Favell, 28 _n_ Fay, Benedict, 154 Fénelon, 133 Fichte, 106, 133, 169, 183 Fielding, 166, 167 Flaminius, 207, 263 Fletcher, John, 207 Fracastorius, 148, 207, 263 France, 75, 119, 120, 152 Geddes, Dr. Alexander, 109 _n_ Geneva, Lake of, 261 Genoa, 7 Germany, 8 _n_, 151, 169, 284, 289 Gibbon, 272 Gillman, James, 296, 297 Gillman, Mrs., 273 Glanvillians, The, 281 Godwin, W., 13, 66, 68 Goethe, 229 Göttingen, 67 Grasmere, 76, 132 Gray, Thomas, 5, 270 Greece, 110, 177, 206, 289 Greenough, 68 Greta River, 19, 29, 43, 44 Greta Hall, 218 _n_ Greville, Fulk, 17 Grysdale Pike, 19, 46 Guarini, 191 Guyon, Madame, 133, 152 Haarlem, 67 Halim II., 287 Hamburg, 101 Harrington, J., 79, 151 Hartz, 211 and _n_ Hayley, 151 Hazlitt, W., 9, 35, 36 Hebrides, 129 Helvellyn, 52 Helvetius, 301 Henry, Prince, 158 Herbert's, St., Island, 32 Hobbes, 13, 183 Holcroft, 66, 68 Homer, 207, 270 Horace, 176 Hume, David, 24, 79, 102, 151, 272 Huss, 215 Hutchinson, Mary (Mrs. Wordsworth), 8 _n_, 20 Hutchinson, Sarah, 8 _n_ India, 132 Ireland, 177 Italy, 152, 229 Java, 271 Jennings, J., 60 Johnson, Dr., 115, 151, 155, 272 Jonson, Ben, 207 Judkin, Rev. Mr., 306 Kant, 12, 106, 151, 169, 183 Keswick, 54 _n_, 101 Klopstock, 101, 229 Knox, John, 164, 307 Lamb, Charles, 66, 140 _n_. Latrigg, 60 _n_ Laud, 307 Lavater, 223 Leckie, 183 Leibnitz, 147, 151, 152, 183 Leighton, 287 Lessing, 151 Linnæus, 268 Lloyd, Charles, 107 Lloyd, David, 230 Locke, 24, 151, 155, 183, 185 Loch Leven, 208 Lodore, 34 London, 9, 28, 194 Lorraine, Claude, 286 Lupus, 211 Luther, 11, 152, 215, 239, 307 Lyceum, 193 Lyonnet, 94 Mackintosh, Sir J., 6, 126, 198 Malone, E., 88, 89 _n_ Malta, 75 _n_, 83, 87, 98, 104, 107, 130, 140 _n_, 144, 187, 197 Malthus, Rev. J., 64 Marathon, 74 _n_ Marini, G. B., 191 Martial, 159 Massinger, 207 Mediterranean, 85, 109 Metastasio, 166, 229 Middleton, Sir Hugh, 250 Milton, 14, 24, 72, 73, 120, 151, 152, 159, 161, 215 _n_, 229, 253, 271, 296, 297, 298 Mohammed, 290, 291 _n_. Molière, 152 Montagu, Basil, 218 _n_. Moses, 9, 268 Mylius, Johann Christoph., 96 Naples, King of, 87 Naucratius, 21 Nelson, Lord, 237 Newlands, 52 Newmarket, 168 New River, 168 Newton, Sir Isaac, 214 Nile, 20 Norway, 284 Okenist, An, 291 Orleans, 211 Otter River, 29 Otterton, 158 _n_ Ottery St. Mary, 29, 157 _n_, 158 _n_ Ovid, 165 Paine, Tom, 226 Paley, Archdeacon, 35, 151, 155, 265, 301 Paracelsus, 14, 232 Parisatis, 176 Parkinson (_Theatrum Botanicum_), 59 Pascal, 152 Pasley, Captain, 145, 154 Paul, Jean (Richter), 235 Paul, St., 93, 163 Penelope, Nature a, 100 Peter, St., 215 Petrarch, 262, 263 _n_ Picts, The, 129 Pindar, 168 Pitt, 151 Plato, 31, 133, 183, 298 Plotinus, 48, 49, 183 Polyclete, 192 Poole, T., 70, 153 Pope, 151, 166, 233 Porphyry, 183 Port Royal, 208 Porte, The, 289 Portugal, 140 _n_ Price, Dr., 167 Priestley, Dr., 151, 155 Prince, The Black, 71 Proclus, 17, 63, 183 Proserpine, 110 Psyche, 89, 109, 142 Pygmalion, 192 Pyramids, The, 258 Pythagoras, 55, 231 Quintilian, 23 _n_ Raleigh, Sir W., 148, 250 Raphael, 286 Ray (or Wray), John, 35, 36 Reignia, Captain, 89 Reimarus, Herman Samuel, 91 _n_, 92 Rhone River, 261 Richardson, Samuel, 166, 167 Rickman, J., 67 Robertson, William, 272 Rochefoucauld, 301 Rock, Captain (son of), 208 Rogers, Samuel, 156 Rome, Church of, 58, 124, 215 Rome, 110, 129, 206, 289 Russia, 170, 289 Scapula, 182 Scarlett (James Lord Abinger), 198 Schelling, 169, 183 Schiller, 150, 161, 181, 211 _n_, 229 Scott, Sir Walter, 74 _n_ Scotus, Duns, 222 Sens, 211 Shakspere, 21, 24, 71, 72, 73, 88, 89 _n_, 97, 108, 115, 127, 128, 145, 147, 150, 151, 152, 161, 180, 286, 297, 298 Sharp, Grenville, 250 Sharp, Richard, 158, 198 Sheridan, R. B., 41, 177 Shield, 270 Sidney, Sir Philip, 17, 151 Simonides, 163 Skiddaw, 18, 19, 52 Smith, Robert, 198 Smith, Sydney, 198 Sorel, Dr., 107 Sotheby, William, 53 South, 47 Southey, 6, 28 _n_, 36, 107, 158 _n_, 221, 290 Spain, 70, 152, 287 Spenser, 296 Spinoza, 57, 81, 183 Staunton, Sir G., 271 Stephen's, St., 211 Stephen's Thesaurus, 182 Stewart, Sir James, 1 Stoddart (Dr. afterwards Sir J.), 74, 75 _n_, 107, 140 _n_, 167 Stowey, Upper, 143 Stowey, Nether, 60 _n_ Strabo, Geographicus, 179 Strada, Prolusions of, 183 Strozzi, Giambatista, 225 Stuart, Daniel, 195 Sweden, 284 Swedenborg, 286 Swift, Dean, 24, 151, 164 Swinside, 19 Switzerland, 129 Syracuse, 95 Tantalus, 234 Taylor, Dorothy, 158 _n_ Taylor, Frances, 158 _n_ Taylor, Jeremy, 12, 20, 76, 298 Taylor, Thomas, 17 Teme, Valley of, 26 Tenison, Archbishop, 306 Theophrastus, 268 Tiberius, 37 Tibullus, 165 Tobin, J., 68, 139, 140 _n_ Tyrol, The, 284 Underwood, Mr., 68 Unzer, D., 94 Valetta, 75 _n_, 144 Van Huysum, 286 Varrius, 134 Vida, 263 Vincent, Captain, 134 Virgil, 263 Virginia, 94 Voltaire, 152 Voss, 151, 229 Vossius, 134 Wade, Mr., 293 _n_ Wedgwood, T., 27, 91 Whinlatter, 46, 50 White, Mr. (of Clare Hall, Camb.), 225 Wickliffe, 215 Wieland, 229 Wilberforce, 250 Willoughby, Lord, 231 Wilson, John, 60 _n_ Windybrow, 60 _n_ Withop Fells, 47 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 66 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 60 _n_ Wordsworth, John, 132 Wordsworth, William, 4, 10 _n_, 30, 35, 36, 60 _n_, 70, 71, 79, 101, 131, 137, 138 _n_, 147, 151, 163, 169, 171 _n_, 201 _n_, 207, 208 _n_, 221, 251 _n_ Wyndham, 41, 237 Zinzendorf, 286 INDEX OF TITLES NOTE.--_Brief paragraphs and sentences to which no title has been given, in the text will be found indexed under the following headings._ Abstruse Research, 53-56 Anecdotes, A Sheaf of, 66-68 Aphorisms and Pithy Sentences, 253-256 Comparisons and Contrasts, 5-7 Country and Town, 28-29 Dreams and Shadows, 172-173 Duty and Experience, 2-3 For the _Soother in Absence_, 84-85; 86-87; 95-97; 99-100; 115-118; 147-150; 159-161; 162-165; 175-180 Hints for _The Friend_, 209, 210; 221-223; 230-233 Observations and Reflections, 17-21 _Seriores Rosæ_, 274 Things Visible and Invisible, 7-14 Thoughts, a Crowd of, 58-61 Thoughts and Fancies, 22-25 Transcripts from my Velvet Pocket Books, 26-28 INDEX _Abstruse Research_, 53-55 Face, the phantom of, 54 Eye-spectra, 55 Reluctance of mind to analyse, 53 Soul within the body. Window at Keswick, 54 A bliss, &c., 264 Adam's death, 51 Alas! they had been friends, &c., 62 Allston, To, 169 All thoughts, all passions, &c., 224 A man's a man, &c., 51 Analogy, 89-91 Anecdote, a genuine, 218 _Anecdotes, a Sheaf of_, 66-68 Beaumont, Sir G., and gauze spectacles, 67 Beaumont, Lady, her prayers, 67 Göttingen and the _hospes_, 67 Godwin, Holcroft, and Underwood, 68 Holcroft and M. Wollstonecraft, 66 Exeter, the organ pipe, 67 Lamb, Charles, a call upon, 66 Rickman and George Dyer, 67 Anticipations in Nature, &c., 136 Aphorisms and Adages, 300-301 _Aphorisms and Pithy Sentences_, 253-256 Bookmaking, 256 Burdett, Sir Francis, 255 Catamaran, man compared with, 253 Convalescence without love, 254 Half-reconciliation, 254 Hunter, the light of his torch, 255 Love, inspired by superiority, 253 Money, the depreciation of, 254 Peninsulating river, 255 Philosophy, its plummet-line, 255 Sun, the rosy fingers of, 254 Vision and appetite, 255 Architecture and Climate, 194 Art, the pyramid in, 98 An afterthought, 99 As the sparks fly upward, 110 Ascend a step, etc., 158-159 Aspiration, a pious, 213 Association, 226 Association, of streamy, 55 A time to cry out, 220-221 Attention and sensation, 128 _Auri sacra fames_, 44 Ave Phoebe Imperator, 63 Being, the three estates of, 294 Bells, concerning, 210-212 Clotharius, 211 Latin distichs, 210 Names of bells, 211 Passing bells, 211 Waggon-horse, &c., in the Hartz, 211 Note on Schiller's 'Song of the Bell,' &c., 211 Bibliological memoranda, 182-183 Bird, the captive, 193 Birds caged, especially the robin, 194 Bliss, a land of, 286-287 Book-knowledge and experience, 129 Book-learning for legislators, 285 Books in the air, 206-207 Bright October, 34 Browne, William, of Ottery and Note, 157-158 Bruno, Giordano, 16, 17 Bulls in action, 156 But love is indestructible, 250 Candour another name for cant, 75 Catholic reunion, 215 Cast not your pearls, &c., 80-81 Ceres, the conversion of, 110 _C'est magnifique_, etc., 258 Children of a larger growth, 204 Christabel, a hint for, 223 Chymical analogies, 204-206 Clerical errors, the psychology of, 181-182 _Cogitare est laborare_, 66 Communicable, the, 32 _Comparisons and Contrasts_, 5-7 Constitution, the, and rotten cheese, 6 Eyes, meaning glances from, 6 Genoa, "Liberty" on prisons of, 7 Gratitude, the curse of, 7 Intellect, snails of, 6 Mackintosh, the style of, 6 Malice, 6 Minds, pygmy, 6 Poetry, the effect of, 5 Sot, the prayer of, 7 Southey, an ostrich, 6 Trout, his likeness to, 5 Truth, the blindness of, 7 Two dew-drops, 6 Worldly-minded men, like owls, 7 Columba, St., 129 Conceits, verbal, 108 Conscience and immortality, 201-3 Constancy, etc., 304 Conversation, his, a nimiety, &c., 103-104 Converts, the intolerance of, 74 _Corruptio optimi pessima_, 92, 263 Cottle, an apology for, 86 Cottle, free version of the Psalms, 235 _Country and Town_, 28-29 Calf-lowing, a reminiscence of Ottery, 29 Coloured bottles, reflections of, 28 Country, depraving effect of, 25 Lecture, dream concerning a, 29 Smiles on men and mountains, 29 Stones like life, and life motionless as stones, 28 Critics, immature, 128 Criticism, a principle of, 30 Criticism, minute, 167 Darwin's "Botanical Garden," 280 Death, the realisation of, 139-140 Delusion, an optical, 47 Devil, the, with a memory, 161-162 Devil, the, a recantation, 259-260 Distemper's worst calamity, 126-127 Distinction in union, 184 _Document humain_, 168 Dream, a, and a parenthesis, 40 Dreams, order in, 134 _Dreams and Shadows_, 172-173 Idea, the descent of, 172 Taper's cone of flame, a simile, 172 "As in life's noisiest hour," etc., 172 "You mould my thoughts," etc., 173 Drip, drip, drip, drip, 165 _Duty and Experience_, 2, 3 Human happiness, 3 Chymistry, a noble, 3 Metaphysical opinion in anguish, 3 Misfortunes a fertilising rain, 2 Pleasure and pain, 2 Real pain a panacea, 2 Duty and self-interest, 130-131 Early death, 44, 45 Easter, the Northern, 138 Education, of, 227-228 Ego, the, 15 Egotism, 14 Empyrean, the, 125 England, the righteousness of, 284 Enthusiasm, 139 Entity, a superfluous, 217 Entomology _v._ ontology, 94 Epigram, a divine, 273 Error, a life-long (his age), 295 Etymology, 123-124 Evil, the origin of, 36-42 Evil produces evil, 131 Experience and book knowledge, 129-130 Experiment, a doubtful, 56 Extremes meet, 52, 53 Facts and Fiction, 75 Fallings from us vanishings, 180-181 "Floods and general inundations," 282 First thoughts and friendship, 251, 252 Flowers and light, 304, 305 Flowers of speech, 269, 270 Form and feeling, 101 Formula, a comprehensive, 306-307 "For compassion a human heart," 282 _For the soother in absence_, 84-85 Dreams and reveries, 85 Dresden, the engraved cherry-stone, 85 Mediterranean, the white sails on, 85 Outwardly happy but no joy within, 84 Sunset in winter, and summer-set, 84 _For the soother in absence_, 86-87 Caracciolo and his floating corse, 87 Final causes, 87 Moonlight, crinkled circles on the sea, 87 Religion repels the gay, 86 Vicious thoughts and rhyme-terminations, 86 Diogenes, why not? 97 Interest and satisfaction, 97 _For the soother in absence_, 95-97 Language, its growth, etc., 95 Medical romance--a title, 96 Mylius, 96 Poets the bridlers of delight, 96 Quintetta, the, in the Syracuse Opera, 95 Recollections of pre-existent state, 96 Tarantula dance of argumentation, 97 _For the soother in absence_, 99-100 _Quisque sui faber_, 99 Nature a Penelope, 100 Root to the crown--growth of the flower, 99 _For the soother in absence_, 115-118 Admiralty Court maxims, 116 Convoy from England, 115 Cyphers, 118 Death and the sleeping baby, 118 Faults and forewarnings, Miss Edgeworth, 117 Johnson, Dr., and Shakspere, 115 Pen-slit, the action of, 118 Sealing-wax--where was it? 116 Totalising, disease of, 116 Voice and eye--precedence and sequence, 118 Wafers, Maltese, 115 _For the soother in absence_, 147-150 Conscience and watches, 150 Contra-reasoning and controversy, 149 Earthly losses and heaven, 150 Eye, the twofold power of, 149 Facts and the relation of them, 148 Metaphor and reality, 149 Negation begets errors, 147 Speculative men not unpractical, 148 War, the weariness of, no excuse for peace, 148 Word-play a cat's cradle, 149 Worldly men, their belief in sincerity, 149 _For the soother in absence_, 159-161 _Co-arctation_, 161 Dull souls may become great poet's bodies, 161 Judgment compared to Belgic towns, 160 Lover married, a frog in a well, 160 Music and the genus and particular, 160 Originality not claimed by the original, 160 Shorthandists for the House of Commons, 161 Stiletto and the rosary, 159 Water-lily and the sponge, 160 _For the Soother in Absence_, 162-164 Death and the tree of life, 163 Grave, our growth in, 163 Irish architect, 164 _Scopæ viarum_, 164 Shooting stars and bedtime, 162 Sleep, the lovers', 164 Swift and the pine-tree, 164 Truth and action, 164 Wordsworth, an aspiration, 163 Yellowing leaflets, 163 _For the Soother in Absence_, 175-180 Affliction and adversity, 176 _Allapse_ of serpents, 176 Atmosphere, every man his own, 176 Augustine, St., and a friend's misjudgment, 179 Blast, the, 178 Blue sky, yellow green at twilight, 175 Greece, the genius of, 177 Hayfield and still life, 175 _Heu! quam miserum_, 177 Indian fig and death of an immortal, 177 Kings, what kind of gods? 176 Love, the mighty works of, 178 Metallic pencils, 175 Parisatis, and the poisoned knife, 176 Peacock moulting, 178 Shadow, 177 Sheridan, and Bacon, 177 Sunflowers, 175 Strabo Geographicus on genius, 179 Two faces, etc., 176-177 Tycho Brahe, a subject for Allston, 175 Water-wagtails, 178 Woman, a passionate, a simile, 178 French language and poetry, 118-120 Friendship and marriage, 235-236 Genius, 233 Genius, his own, 197-198 German philosophy, his indebtedness to, 106 God, the idea of, 300 Great and little minds, 293 Great men and national worth, 150-152 Hail and farewell, 218 Halfway house, the, 195-197 Happiness made perfect, 142 Hazlitt, W., 36 Health, independence, and friendship, 248 Heart, a broken, 303 Heaviness, may endure, &c., 239, 240 Hesperus, 247, 248 _Hinc illa marginalia_, 91-92 _Hints for the Friend_, 209, 210 Authors and Buffon's fan, 209 Conscience good, and fine weather, 209 Great deeds, great hearts, and great states, 209 Hypocrisy, 210 Massy misery, 210 Mystery from wilful deafness, 210 No glory and no Christianity, a total eclipse, 210 Proud ignorance, 210 Reformers like scourers of silver plate, 209 _Hints for the Friend_, 221-223 Conscience, a pure, like a life-boat, 221 Dame Quickly on parties, 222 Duns Scotus on faith, 222 Foliage, not the trunk, 223 Helvetius, his selenography, 221 Lavater and Narcissus, 223 Pope, the, a simile, 233 Reliance on God and man, 222 Reviewers like jurymen, 223 _Hints for the Friend_, 230-233 Amboynese, and their clove trees, 232 Eloign, a word of Queen Elizabeth's, 231 Esoteric Christianity, 231 Mathematics and metaphysics, 230 Monsoon, the Chinese elephant, 232 Nature, the perception of, a comparison, 232 Paracelsus, on new words, 232 Partisans or opponents, how to address them, 231 Hope, the moon's halo an emblem of, 238 Humanity, the hope of, 137, 138 Humility, the lover's, 188 Hypothesis, of a new, 105 I will lift up, etc., 101 Idea, the birth of, 109 Idealist, the, at bay, 277-279 "If a man could pass through paradise," 282 Ignore thyself, 301 Illusion (Mr. Dennison and the "bottle man"), 144-147 Imagination 'eisenoplasy,' 236 In a twinkling of an eye, 185-186 In wonder all philosophy began, 185 Incommunicable, the, 31 Infancy and infants, 3, 4 Infinite, the, and the finite, 81 _Inopem me copia fecit_, 189 Insects, 271 _Spiders' webs in Java_, 271 _Libellulidæ_, 271 _Tipulidæ minimæ_, 271 Islamism, 287, 288 "Kingdom of Heavenite," a, 273 Knave, a treacherous, 28 Knowledge, a royal road to, 298-300 Knowledge and Understanding, 173 Landing places, 157 Law and gospel, 214 Liberty, the cap of, 203 Life, the idea of, 305 Light, the inward, 48 _Litera scripta manet_, 121 Love, 1-2 Affected by jealousy, 1 soother of misfortune, 2 Disappointed, 2 The transformer, 2 Love, 233-235 Love, the adolescence of, 68 Love, the divine essence, 133-134 Love and duty, 140-142 Love, the ineffable, 191-192 Love and music, 200-201 Lover, the humble complaint of, 190 Loves, of first, 153-154 _Lucus a non lucendo_, 200 Magnitude, the sense of, 112-115 Maiden's primer, 195 Marriage, the ideal, 216 Mean, the danger of, 62 Means to ends, 107 Mediterranean, the, 100 "A brisk gale and the foam," 100 Memorandum, a serious, 79 Metaphysic, a defence of, 42 Metaphysician, the, at bay, 106 Metaphysic, the aim of his, 42 Milton's blank verse, 253 Milton and Shakspere, 296-8 Mohammed, the flight of, 290-291 Moment, a, and a magic mirror, 245-246 Monition, the rage for, 68-70 Moonlight gleams and massy glories, 171 Moonset, a, 50 Morning, a gem of, 187 _Mot propre_, the passion for, 155 Mother wit, 226 Motion, the psychology of, 56-57 _Multum in parvo_, 85 Name it and you break it, 198 Nature, the night side of, 45-47 _Ne quid nimis_, 89 _Nefas est ab hoste doceri_, 76 Neither bond nor free, 195 Neutral pronoun, a, 190 Night, in the visions of, 43, 44 Nightmare, the hag, 243-245 _Noscitur a sociis_, 32 Not the beautiful, etc., 49-50 _Obductâ fronte senectus_, 272-273 _Observations and Reflections_, 17-21 Ashes in autumn, 19 Citizens eat, rustics drink, 19 Definition hostile to images, 19 First cause and source of the Nile, 20 Love poems, a scheme of, 20 Moon, the setting, 18 My birthday, 19 Northern Lights, Derwent's birthday, 18 Shakspere and Naucratius, 21 Soul the mummy, an emblem, 20 Spring with cone of sand, 17 Stability and Instability, the cause of, 19 State, the eye of, 18 Superiors and inferiors, 20 Truths and feelings, 18 Two moon-rainbows, 19 Of a too witty book, 280-281 Official distrust, 83 O star benign! 76 O thou whose fancies, etc., 15-16 Omniscient, the comforter, 127 One music as before, etc. 168 One, the, and the good, 63 One, the many and the, 77 Opera, the, 82 Orange blossom, 134-136 Over-blaming, the danger of, 198 [Greek: PANTA RHEI], 183-184 _Pars altera mei_, 49 Partisans and renegades, 173-174 Past and present, 1 People, the spirit of a, 288-290 Petrarch's epistles, 262, 263 Phantoms of sublimity, 170 Philanthropy and self-advertisement, 249, 250 Philosophy the friend of poetry, 78 Pindar, 168 Places and persons, 70-74 Poet, a, on poetry, 294 Poet, the, and the spider, 32 Poetic licence, a plea for, 165-166 Poetry, 4 Correction of, 4 Dr. Darwin, 5 Elder languages, the fitter for, 5 Ode, definition of, 4 Poetry and prose, 229-230 Poets as critics of poets, 127-128 Populace and people, 174 Posterity, a caution to, 159 Practical man, a, 199-200 Praise, the meed of, 284 Presentiments, 256-257 Price, Dr., 167-168 Prophecy, the manufacture of, 192-193 Prudence _versus_ friendship, 291-293 Pseudo-poets, 156 Psychology in youth and maturity, 218 Public opinion and the services, 237 Purgatory, an intellectual, 152-153 Rain, the maddening, 154 Recollection and remembrance, 57 Reimarus and the instinct of animals, 92-95 Religion, spiritual, 138, 218-219 _Remedium amoris_, 266 Richardson, 166-167 Righteousness, the sun of, 162 _Rugit leo_, 301-303 Save me from my friends, 264-265 Science and philosophy, 261-262 Scholastic terms, a plea for, 274-275 Schoolman, a Unitarian, 58 Sea, the bright blue, 109 Self, the abstract, 120 Self-absorption and selfishness, 249 Self-esteem, excess of, 198, 199 Self-esteem, defect of, 199 Self-reproof, a measure in, 81-82 Sensations, the continuity of, 102, 103 Sentiment an antidote to casuistry, 124-125 Sentiment, morbid, 169-170 Sentiments below morals, 154 _Seriores Rosæ_, 274 "Lie with the ear," 274 "Like some spendthrift lord," 274 "On the same man as in a vineyard," 274 "The blossom gives not only," 274 "We all look up," 274 Sermons, ancient and modern, 237-239 Seventeen hundred and sixty yards, etc., 280 Shakspere and Malone, 88 Subject and object, 294 Silence is golden, 259 Simile, a, 76 _Sine qua non_, 186 Sleepless, the feint of the, 251 Solace, external, his need of, 167 _Solvitur suspiciendo_, 187 Sonnet, an unwritten, 295 Soul, the embryonic, 104 Spinoza, a poem on spirit or on, 61 Spinoza, the ethics of, 57 Spiritual blindness, 270 Spiritualism and mysticism, 276-277 Spooks, 281 Spring, the breath of, 305 Square, the, the circle, the pyramid, 97 Star, to the evening, 247 Style of Milton, Smectymnuus, etc., 271 Subject and object, 294 Sundog, a, 97 Sunset, a, 52 Superstition, 143-144 Supposition, a, 138 Syracuse, 78 Taste, an ethical quality, 165 Teleology and nature worship, 35 Temperament and morals, 33 That inward eye, etc., 246, 247 The body of this death, 276 The conclusion of the whole matter, 266 The greater damnation, 279 The mind's eye, 286 "The more exquisite," etc., 282 The night is at hand, 307 "The sunny mist," etc., 31 The tender mercies of the good, 208-209 "The tree or sea-weed like," etc., 31 Theism and Atheism, 285-286 _Things Visible and Invisible_, 7-14 Anthropomorphism and the Trinity, 14 Anti-optimism, 13 Babe, its sole notion of cruelty, 13 Cairns, J., on the Nazarites, 9 Child scolding a flower, 10 Children's words, analogous, 11 Dandelions, beards of, note, 10 Dyer, George, and poets' throttles, 9 Fisherman, the idle, note, 10 Friends' friends, reception by, note, 8 Godwin, a definition of, 13 Hartley's fire-place of stones, 13 Hazlitt's theory of picture and palette, 9 "Hot-headed men confuse," 11 "How," the substratum of philosophy, 13 Kingfishers' flight, 7 "Little Daisy," etc., 7 London and Nature, 8 Luther, his prejudices, 11 Comment, 11 Materialists and mystery, 14 Nightingale and frogs in Germany, note, 7 Quotations, rage for, 9 Reproaches and remorse, 12 Sickbed and prison, 12 "Slanting pillars of misty light," 9 Space a perception of additional magnitude, 12 Taylor, Jeremy, quotation from _Via Pacis_, 12 "The thin scattered rain-clouds," 12 Things perishable, thoughts imperishable, 8 Thinking and perceiving, 12 Time and likeness, 13 Upturned leaves, 10 _Thoughts, a Crowd of_, 58-61 Children and hard-skinned ass, 59 Ghost of a mountain, 60 Light as lovers love, 59 Man, epitheton of, 58 Palm, the, 61 Place and time, 59 Poets' bad and beautiful expressions, 59 Public schools, advantage of, 60 Rainbows stedfast in mist, 61 Rosemary tree, a, 59 Slang, religious, 60 Sopha of sods, note, 60 Stump of a tree, 61 Thought, a mortal agony of, 63 Thought and attention, 213-214 _Thoughts and Fancies_, 22-25 Achilles and his heel, 25 Devil at the very end of hell, 23 Dimness and numbness, 23 Friendship and comprehension, 24 Green fields after the city, 25 Happiness and paradise, 25 Hartley and the "seems," 24 Kind-hearted men refuse roughly, 23 Limbo, 22 Metaphysics, their effect on the thoughts, 23 Nature for likeness, men for difference, 25 Old world, the, and the new year, 22 Opposite talents not incompatible, 24 Poets and death, 22 Poets, his rank among, 25 Sounds and outness, 23 Swift and Socinianism, 24 Time as threefold, 22 Thought and things, 143 Thoughts-how like music at times! 139 Through doubt to faith, 85 Time an element of grief, 31 Time and eternity, 155 Time, real and imaginary, note, 241-243 _Transcripts from my velvet pocket-books_, 26-28 Action, the meanness of, 27 Barrow and the verbal imagination, 26 Candle-snuffers not discoverers, 26 Falling asleep, 27 New play compared to toy ship, 27 Plagiarist, a thief in the candle, 26 Post, its influence, 26 Quotation and conversation, 26 Repose after agitation, 27 Socinianism and methodism, 26 Teme, the valley of, 26 Universe, the federal republic of, 27 Wedgwood, T., and thoughts and things, 27 Transubstantiation, 61-62 Truth, 191, 220 Truth, the danger of adapting, &c., 228 Truth, the fixed stars of, 257 Turtle-shell, a, for household tub, 207-208 Unwin, Mrs., Cowper's lines to, 121-123 Unknown, the great, 284 Vain Glory, 203-204 _Verbum sapientibus_, 102 _Ver, zer, and al_, 187 Vexation, a complex, 283 _Vox hiemalis_, 303-304 We ask not whence, etc., 89 Wedgwood, T., and Reimarus, 91 What man has made of man, 264-265 Will, the undisciplined, 64-66 Windmill and its shadow, 77-78 Winter, a mild, 170 Woman's frowardness, 89 Words and things, 225 Words, creative power of, and images, 87 Words, the power of, 266-269 Wordsworth and _The Prelude_, 30 Wordsworth, John, 132 Worldly wise, 230 Wounded vanity, a salve for, 82-83 Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO. London & Edinburgh * * * * * Transcriber's note The following changes have been made to the text: Page ix: "ceasless" changed to ceaseless". Page 73: "wordliness" changed to "worldliness". Page 173: "PARTIZANS" changed to "PARTISANS". Page 218: "pyschologise" changed to "psychologise". Page 253: "strenghth" changed to "strength". Page 320: "lifelong" changed to "life-long". Page 320: "Caraccioli" changed to "Caracciolo". Page 323: "philososhy" changed to "philosophy". Page 324: "Partizans" changed to "Partisans". Page 327: "Righteousnesss" changed to "Righteousness". Page 330: "rainclouds" changed to "rain-clouds'. Page 330: "hardskinned" changed to "hard-skinned". 
8957	----	THE LIFE OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE BY JAMES GILLMAN 1838 '... But some to higher hopes Were destined; some within a finer mould Were wrought, and temper'd with a purer flame: To these the Sire Omnipotent unfolds The world's harmonious volume, there to read The transcript of himself ....' TO JOSEPH HENRY GREEN, F.R.S. PROFESSOR OF ANATOMY OF THE ROYAL ACADEMY, ETC. ETC. THE HONOURED FAITHFUL AND BELOVED FRIEND OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, THESE VOLUMES ARE MOST RESPECTFULLY AND AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED. PREFACE. The more frequently we read and contemplate the lives of those eminent men so beautifully traced by the amiable Izaak Walton, the more we are impressed with the sweetness and simplicity of the work. Walton was a man of genius--of simple calling and more simple habits, though best known perhaps by his book on Angling; yet in the scarcely less attractive pages of his biographies, like the flowing of the gentle stream on which he sometimes cast his line, to practise "the all of treachery he ever learnt," he leads the delighted reader imperceptibly on, charmed with the natural beauty of his sentiments, and the unaffected ease and simplicity of his style. In his preface to the Sermons of (that pious poet and divine,) Dr. Donne, so much may be found applicable to the great and good man whose life the author is now writing, that he hopes to be pardoned for quoting from one so much more able to delineate rare virtues and high endowments: "And if he shall now be demanded, as once Pompey's poor bondman was, who art thou that alone hast the honour to bury the body of Pompey the great?" so who is he who would thus erect a funeral pile to the memory of the honoured dead? ... With the writer of this work, during the latter twenty years of his life, Coleridge had been domesticated; and his intimate knowledge of that illustrious character induces him to hope that his present undertaking, "however imperfectly it may set forth the memory he fain would honour," will yet not be considered presumptuous; inasmuch as he has had an opportunity of bringing together facts and anecdotes, with various memoranda never before published, some of which will be found to have much of deep interest, of piety and of loveliness. At the same time he has also been desirous of interweaving such information as he has been enabled to collect from the early friends of Coleridge, as well as from those of his after-life. Thus, he trusts, he has had the means of giving, with truth and correctness, a faithful portraiture of one whom he so dearly loved, so highly prized. Still he feels that from various causes, he has laboured under many and great difficulties. First, he never contemplated writing this Memoir, nor would he have made the attempt, had it not been urged on him as a duty by friends, whom Coleridge himself most respected and honoured; they, "not doubting that his intimate knowledge of the author, and dear love to his memory, might make his diligence useful." Secondly, the duties of a laborious profession, rendered still more arduous by indifferent health--added to many sorrows, and leisure (if such it might be called,) which permitted only occasional attention to the subject--and was liable to frequent interruptions; will, he flatters himself, give him a claim to the candour and kindness of his readers. And if Coleridge's "glorious spirit, now in heaven, could look down upon him, he would not disdain this well meant sacrifice to his memory--for whilst his conversation made him, and many others happy below, his humility and gentleness were also pre-eminent;--and divines have said, those virtues that were but sparks upon earth, become great and glorious flames in heaven." LIFE OF COLERIDGE. CHAPTER I. BIRTH-PLACE OF COLERIDGE.--SLIGHT SKETCH OF HIS PARENTS.--WHIMSICAL ANECDOTES HE USED TO RELATE OF HIS FATHER, &C.--AS A PASTOR, HOW MUCH BELOVED.--HIS BROTHERS AND SISTERS ENUMERATED.--THE DEATH OF HIS FATHER.--HIS ENTRANCE AT CHRIST'S HOSPITAL.--LAMB'S ACCOUNT OF HIM WHEN AT SCHOOL.--WRITES THIS ACCOUNT UNDER THE NAME OF ELIA.--LAMB'S ADMISSION THAT HE MEANT COLERIDGE FOR THE "FRIENDLESS BOY."--THE DELICACY OF HIS STOMACH.--HIS FIRST ATTEMPT AT MAKING VERSE WHEN A SCHOOL BOY.--AND CONTINUATION OF HIS SUFFERINGS WHEN AT SCHOOL.--HIS WATER EXCURSIONS, THE ORIGIN OF MOST OF HIS SUBSEQUENT SUFFERING. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, the subject of this memoir, was born at Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire, the 21st October, 1772. His father, the Rev. John Coleridge, was vicar of Ottery, and head master of Henry VIII Free Grammar School, usually termed the King's School; a man of great learning, and one of the persons who assisted Dr. Kennicott in his Hebrew Bible. Before his appointment to the school at Ottery he had been head master of the school at South Molton. Some dissertations on the 17th and 18th chapters of the Book of Judges, [1] and a Latin grammar for the use of the school at Ottery were published by him. He was an exceedingly studious man, pious, of primitive manners, and of the most simple habits: passing events were little heeded by him, and therefore he was usually characterized as the "absent man". Many traditional stories concerning his father had been in circulation for years before Coleridge came to Highgate. These were related with mirth in the neighbourhood of Ottery, and varied according to the humour of the narrator. To beguile the winter's hour, which, however, was never dull in his society, he would recall to memory the past anecdotes of his father, and repeat them till the tears ran down his face, from the fond recollection of his beloved parent. The relation of the story usually terminated with an affectionate sigh, and the observation, "Yes, my friend, he was indeed an Israelite without guile, and might be compared to Parson Adams." The same appellation which Coleridge applied to his father will also, with equal justice, be descriptive of himself. In many respects he "differed in kind" from his brothers and the rest of his family, but his resemblance to his father was so strong, that I shall continue this part of the memoir with a sketch of the parent stock from which he sprung. The Rev. John Coleridge had been twice married; his second wife, Anne Bowdon, by whom he had a large family, was the mother of my friend, and seems to have been peculiarly fitted for the wife of a clergyman who had a large family and limited means. Her husband, not possessing that knowledge usually termed worldly wisdom, she appeared to supply the place of the friend, which such a man required in his wife. He was better fitted for the apostolic age, so primitive was he in his manners and uneducated in the fashions and changing customs surrounding him: his companions were chiefly his books, and the few scholars he had to educate. To all around him he was extremely kind and amiable, and greatly beloved by the flock over whom he presided as pastor. For each individual, whatever his rank, he had a kindly word of greeting, and in sickness or distress he was an attentive friend. His richer and more educated neighbours visited him, and shared the general pleasure and amusement excited by his simple and peculiarly absent manners. It is said of him, that on one occasion, having to breakfast with his bishop, he went, as was the practice of that day, into a barber's shop to have his head shaved, wigs being then in common use. Just as the operation was completed, the clock struck nine, the hour at which the bishop punctually breakfasted. Roused, as from a reverie, he instantly left the barber's shop, and in his haste forgetting his wig, appeared at the breakfast table, where the bishop and his party had assembled. The bishop, well acquainted with his absent manners, courteously and playfully requested him to walk into an adjoining room, and give his opinion of a mirror which had arrived from London a few days previously, and which disclosed to his astonished guest the consequences of his haste and forgetfulness. On another occasion he dined with the bishop, who had great pleasure and delight in his society, when the following ludicrous scene took place. The bishop had a maiden daughter, past the meridian of life, who was always glad to see and converse with the "dear good old man" (his usual appellation), and who was also kind enough to remind him of his little 'Forgets' in society, and rouse him from his absent moods. It not being the fashion in his day for gentlemen to wear braces, his small-clothes, receding from his waistcoat, left a space in his black dress, through which often appeared a portion of his linen. On these occasions, the good lady would draw his attention to this appearance, by saying in an under tone, "A little to this side, Mr. Coleridge," or to that, as the adjustment might require. This hint was as instantly attended to as his embarrassed manner, produced by a sense of the kindness, would permit. On the day above alluded to, his kind friend sat next to him, dressed, as was then the fashion, in a smart party-going muslin apron. Whilst in earnest conversation with his opposite neighbour, on the side next the lady appeared the folds of his shirt, through the hiatus before described, so conspicuously as instantly to attract her notice. The hint was immediately given: "Mr. Coleridge, a little on the side next me;"--and was as instantly acknowledged by the usual reply, "Thank you, ma'am, thank you," and the hand set to work to replace the shirt; but unfortunately, in his nervous eagerness, he seized on the lady's apron, and appropriated the greater part of it. The appeal of "Dear Mr. Coleridge, do stop!" only increased his embarrassment, and also his exertions to dispose, as he thought, of his shirt; till the lady, to put a stop to the titter of the visitors, and relieve her own confusion, untied the strings, and thus disengaging herself, left the room, and her friend in possession of her apron. [2] Mrs. Coleridge, the mother of my friend, and of whom I have already spoken, had naturally a strong mind. She was an uneducated woman, industriously attentive to her household duties, and devoted to the care of her husband and family. Possessing none, even of the most common female accomplishments of her day, she had neither love nor sympathy for the display of them in others. She disliked, as she would say, "your harpsichord ladies," and strongly tried to impress on her sons their little value, in their choice of wives. As a clergyman's wife her conduct was exemplary; the father of my friend had a fortune in such a woman, and she found in him, with all his peculiarities, a kind, sweet tempered, engaging husband. She was, I should add, a very good woman, though like Martha, over careful in many things, very ambitious for the advancement of her sons in life, but wanting perhaps that flow of heart which her husband possessed so largely. But "imperfection cleaves to mortality." Such, as given in this brief sketch, were the parents of the subject of this memoir. [3] I have heard Coleridge relate the following anecdote of his father. The old gentleman had to take a short journey on some professional business, which would detain him from home for three or four days: his good wife, in her care and watchfulness, had packed a few things in a small trunk, and gave them in charge to her husband, with strong injunctions that he was to put on a clean shirt every day. On his return home, his wife went to search for his linen, when, to her dismay, it was not in the trunk. A closer search, however, discovered that the vicar had strictly obeyed her injunctions, and had put on daily a clean shirt, but had forgotten to remove the one underneath. This might have been the pleasantest and most portable mode of carrying half a dozen shirts in winter, but not so in the dog-days. As a preacher, he was peculiar: it is said, that the poor idolized, and looked upon him with great reverence; and when death removed this distinguished and eminent scholar from among them, his successor had little chance of pleasing to the same extent. In their great admiration of him, they would often say, "How fine he was in his discourse, for he gave us the very words the spirit spoke in," viz. the Hebrew, with which he frequently indulged them in his sermons, and which seems greatly to have attracted the notice of the agricultural population, who flocked from the neighbourhood, to the town in which he resided. Excited and stimulated by curiosity, this class of persons might attend the church, and in listening for the Hebrew they would perhaps be more attentive, and carry away some useful portions of the English from this amiable and accomplished pastor. As a schoolmaster his singularities were of the same character, manifesting the same simplicity and honesty of purpose. I have before stated that he wrote a Latin Grammar for the use of his school, and instead of the word ablative, in general use, he compounded three or four Latin words [4] as explanatory of this case. Whether the mothers were startled at the repetition of these words, and thought of the hardships their sons would have to endure in the acquirement of this grammar, I can only conjecture; but it seems he thought it his duty to explain to the ladies, in justice to their feelings, his learned reasons for the alteration he had made in the name of this case. I had often pressed him to write some account of his early life, and of the various circumstances connected with it. But the aversion he had to read or write any thing about himself was so great, that I never succeeded, except in obtaining a few notes, rather than a detailed account. There would be little either useful or interesting in any account of Coleridge's life, which a stranger to him could give; therefore, from the best authorities with which I am acquainted, and from an intimacy of nearly twenty years, is this memoir of my late lamented friend compiled. He commences one of the notes above alluded to, with his early childhood. "I was," says he, "the last child, the youngest child of ten by the same mother, that is to say, John, William (who died in infancy), James, William, Edward, George, Luke, Ann, Francis, and myself, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, beneficially abridged Esteese [Greek: estaesae], i.e. S. T. C., and the thirteenth, taking in three sisters by my dear father's first wife,--Mary, afterwards Mrs. Bradley,--Sarah, who married a seaman and is lately dead, and Elizabeth, afterwards Mrs. Phillips--who alone was bred up with us after my birth, and whom alone of the three I was wont to think of as a sister, though not exactly, yet I did not know why, the same sort of sister, as my sister Nancy. Being the youngest child, I possibly inherited the weakly state of health of my father, who died at the age of 62, before I had reached my seventh year; and from certain jealousies of old Molly, my brother Frank's dotingly fond nurse, (and if ever child by beauty and loveliness deserved to be doted on, my brother Francis was that child,) and by the infusions of her jealousy into my brother's mind, I was in earliest childhood huffed away from the enjoyments of muscular activity from play, to take refuge at my mother's side, on my little stool, to read my little book, and to listen to the talk of my elders. I was driven from life in motion, to life in thought and sensation. I never played except by myself, and then only acting over what I had been reading or fancying, or half one, half the other, with a stick cutting down weeds and nettles, as one of the seven champions of Christendom. [5] Alas! I had all the simplicity, all the docility of the little child, but none of the child's habits. I never thought as a child, never had the language of a child. I forget whether it was in my fifth or sixth year, but I believe the latter, in consequence of some quarrel between me and my brother, in the first week in October, I ran away from fear of being whipped, and passed the whole night, a night of rain and storm, on the bleak side of a hill on the Otter, and was there found at daybreak, without the power of using my limbs, about six yards from the naked bank of the river." "In my seventh year, about the same time, if not the very same time, i.e. Oct. 4th, my most dear, most revered father, died suddenly. O that I might so pass away, if like him I were an Israelite without guile. The image of my father, my revered, kind, learned, simple-hearted father is a religion to me!" Judge Buller who had been educated by his father, had always promised to adopt the son, at least to educate him, foreseeing that Samuel, the youngest, was likely to be left an orphan early in life. Soon after the death of the Rev. John Coleridge, the Judge obtained from John Way, Esq., one of the governors of Christ's Hospital, a presentation to that school, and young Coleridge was sent by the Judge and placed there on the 18th July, 1782. "O! what a change!" [6] he goes on in the note above quoted. "Depressed, moping, friendless, poor orphan, half starved; (at that time the portion of food to the Bluecoats was cruelly insufficient for those who had no friends to supply them)." In the late Mr. Charles Lamb's "Works" published in 1818, there is an account of the school, entitled "Recollections of Christ's Hospital." In 1823 there is a second essay on the same subject by Lamb, under the assumed title of "Elia,"--Elia supposed to be intimate with Lamb and Coleridge. This second account, entitled "Christ's Hospital five-and-thirty years ago," gave umbrage to some of the "Blues," as they termed themselves, as differing so much from the first in full praise of this valuable foundation, and particularly as a school from which he had benefited so much. In the preface to the second series, Elia says, "What he (Elia) tells of himself is often true only (historically) of another; when under the first person he shadows forth the forlorn state of a country boy placed at a London school far from his friends and connexions," which is in direct opposition to Lamb's own early history. The second account, under the personification of Elia, is drawn from the painful recollections and sufferings of Coleridge while at school, which I have often heard him relate. Lamb told Coleridge one day that the friendless school boy in his "Elia," (soon after its publication) was intended for him, and taken from his description of the Blue-coat school. After Coleridge's death, Lamb related the same circumstance to me, that he had drawn the account from Coleridge's feelings, sufferings, &c., Lamb having himself been an indulged boy and peculiarly favoured through the instrumentality of a friend: "I remember," says Elia, "Lamb at school, and can well recollect that he had some peculiar advantages, which I and others of his schoolfellows had not. His friends lived in town and were at hand, and he had the privilege of going to see them almost as often as he wished, through some invidious distinction which was denied to us. The present treasurer of the Inner Temple can explain how it happened. He had his tea and hot rolls in the morning, while we were battening upon our quarter of penny loaf--our 'crug' moistened with attenuated small beer in wooden piggins, smacking of the pitched leathern jack it was poured from. On Monday's milk porritch, blue and tasteless, and the pease-soup of Saturday, coarse and choking, were enriched for him with a slice of 'extraordinary bread and butter,' from the hot-loaf of the Temple. The Wednesday's mess of millet, somewhat less repugnant--(we had three banyan to four meat-days in the week)--was endeared to his palate with a lump of double-refined, and a smack of ginger, (to make it go down the more glibly) or the fragrant cinnamon. In lieu of our 'half-pickled' Sundays, or 'quite fresh' boiled beef on Thursdays, (strong as caro equina), with detestable marigolds floating in the pail to poison the broth--our scanty mutton crags on Fridays--and rather more savoury, but grudging, portions of the same flesh, rotten-roasted or rare, on the Tuesdays (the only dish which excited our appetites, and disappointed our stomachs, in almost equal proportion) he had his hot plate of roast veal, or the more tempting griskin (exotics unknown to our palates), cooked in the paternal kitchen. "I (Coleridge) was a poor friendless boy, my parents, and those who should have cared for me, were far away. Those few acquaintances of their's, which they could reckon upon being kind to me in the great city, after a little forced notice, which they had the grace to take of me on my first arrival in town, soon grew tired of my holiday visits. They seemed to them to recur too often, though I thought them few enough; one after another, they all failed me, and I felt myself alone among six hundred playmates--O the cruelty of separating a poor lad from his early homestead! The yearnings which I used to have towards it in those unfledged years! How in my dreams would my native town come back (far in the west) with its churches and trees and faces! To this late hour of my life, and even to the end of it did Coleridge trace impressions left by the painful recollection of these friendless holidays. The long warm days of summer never return but they bring with them a gloom from the haunting memory of those 'whole day's leave', when by some strange arrangement, we were turned out for the live-long day, upon our own hands whether we had friends to go to or none. I remember those bathing excursions to the New River, which Lamb recalls with such relish, better, I think, than he can--for he was a home-seeking lad, and did not care for such water-parties. How we would sally forth into the fields; and strip under the first warmth of the sun; and wanton like young dace in the streams; getting appetites for the noon; which those of us that were penny less (our scanty morning crust long since exhausted) had not the means of allaying--while the cattle, and the birds, and the fishes were at feed about us, and we had nothing to satisfy our cravings; the very beauty of the day, and the exercise of the pastime, and the sense of liberty setting a keener edge upon them! How faint and languid, finally, we would return toward nightfall to our desired morsel, half-rejoicing, half-reluctant, that the hours of uneasy liberty had expired. "It was worse in the days of winter, to go prowling about the streets objectless; shivering at cold windows of print-shops, to extract a little amusement; or haply, as a last resort, in the hope of a little novelty, to pay a fifty times repeated visit (where our individual faces would be as well known to the warden as those of his own charges) to the lions in the Tower, to whose levee, by courtesy immemorial, we had a prescriptive right of admission." In short, nearly the whole of this essay of Elia's is a transcript of Coleridge's account of the school. 'Never was a friend or schoolfellow more fondly attached to another than Lamb to Coleridge. The latter from his own account, as well as from Lamb and others who knew him when at school, must have been a delicate and suffering boy. His principal ailments he owed much to the state of his stomach, which was at that time so delicate, that when compelled to go to a large closet (shoe-bin, its school name,) containing shoes, to pick out a pair easy to his feet, which were always tender, and he required shoes so large that he could walk in them, rather than with them, and the smell, from the number in this place, used to make him so sick, that I have often seen him shudder, even in late life, when he gave an account of it. In this note, continuing an account of himself at school, he says, "From eight to fourteen I was a playless day-dreamer, a 'helluo librorum', my appetite for which was indulged by a singular incident: a stranger, who was struck by my conversation, made me free of a circulating library in King Street, Cheapside." The incident, indeed, was singular: going down the Strand, in one of his day-dreams, fancying himself swimming across the Hellespont, thrusting his hands before him as in the act of swimming, his hand came in contact with a gentleman's pocket; the gentleman seized his hand, turning round and looking at him with some anger, "What! so young, and so wicked?" at the same time accused him of an attempt to pick his pocket; the frightened boy sobbed out his denial of the intention, and explained to him how he thought himself Leander, swimming across the Hellespont. The gentleman was so struck and delighted with the novelty of the thing, and with the simplicity and intelligence of the boy, that he subscribed, as before stated, to the library, in consequence of which Coleridge was further enabled to indulge his love of reading. In his bathing excursions he had greatly injured his health, and reduced his strength; in one of these bathing exploits he swam across the New River in his clothes, and dried them in the fields on his back: from these excursions commenced those bodily sufferings which embittered the rest of his life, and rendered it truly one of sickness and suffering. When a boy he had a remarkably delicate, white skin, which was once the cause of great punishment to him. His dame had undertaken to cure him of the itch, with which the boys of his ward had suffered much; but Coleridge was doomed to suffer more than his comrades, from the use of sulphur ointment, through the great sagacity of his dame, who with her extraordinary eyes, aided by the power of glasses, could see the malady in the skin deep and out of common vision; and consequently, as often as she employed this miraculous sight, she found or thought she found fresh reasons for continuing the friction, to the prolonged suffering and mortification of her patient. This occurred when he was about eight years of age, and gave rise to his first attempt at making a verse, as follows: "O Lord, have mercy on me! For I am very sad! For why, good Lord? I've got the itch, And eke I've got the 'tad'," the school name for ringworm. He was to be found during play-hours often with the knees of his breeches unbuttoned, and his shoes down at the heel, [7] walking to and fro, or sitting on a step, or in a corner, deeply engaged in some book. This had attracted the notice of Middleton, at that time a deputy grecian, and going up to him one day, asked what he was reading; the answer was "Virgil." "Are you then," said M. "studying your lesson?" "No," said C., "I am reading it for pleasure;" for he had not yet arrived at Virgil in his class studies. This struck Middleton as something so peculiar, that he mentioned it to the head master, as Coleridge was then in the grammar school (which is the lower part of the classical school), and doing the work of the lower boys. The Rev. James Bowyer, who was at that time head master, a quick discerning man, but hasty and severe, sent for the master of the grammar school, and inquired about Coleridge; from him he learnt that he was a dull and inapt scholar, and that he could not be made to repeat a single rule of syntax, although he would give a rule in his own way. This brought Coleridge before Bowyer, and to this circumstance may be attributed the notice which he afterwards took of him: the school and his scholars were every thing to him, and Coleridge's neglect and carelessness never went unpunished. I have often heard him say, he was so ordinary a looking boy, with his black head, that Bowyer generally gave him at the end of a flogging an extra cut; "for," said he, "you are such an ugly fellow!" When, by the odd accident before mentioned, he was made a subscriber to the library in King Street, "I read," says he, "'through' the catalogue, folios and all, whether I understood them, or did not understand them, running all risks in skulking out to get the two volumes which I was entitled to have daily. Conceive what I must have been at fourteen; I was in a continual low fever. My whole being was, with eyes closed to every object of present sense, to crumple myself up in a sunny corner, and read, read, read; fancy myself on Robinson Crusoe's island, finding a mountain of plumb-cake, and eating a room for myself, and then eating it into the shapes of tables and chairs--hunger and fancy!" In his lad-hood he says, "My talents and superiority made me for ever at the head in my routine of study, though utterly without the desire to be so; without a spark of ambition; and, as to emulation, it had no meaning for me; but the difference between me and my form-fellows, in our lessons and exercises, bore no proportion to the measureless difference between me and them in the wide, wild, wilderness of useless, unarranged book-knowledge and book-thoughts. Thank Heaven! it was not the age nor the fashion of getting up prodigies; but at twelve or fourteen I should have made as pretty a juvenile prodigy as was ever emasculated and ruined by fond and idle wonderment. Thank Heaven! I was flogged instead of flattered. However, as I climbed up the school, my lot was somewhat alleviated." When Coleridge arrived at the age of fifteen, he was, from the little comfort he experienced, very desirous of quitting the school, and, as he truly said, he had not a spark of ambition. Near the school there resided a worthy, and, in their rank of life, a respectable middle-aged couple. The husband kept a little shop, and was a shoemaker, with whom Coleridge had become intimate. The wife, also, had been kind and attentive to him, and this was sufficient to captivate his affectionate nature, which had existed from earliest childhood, and strongly endeared him to all around him. Coleridge became exceedingly desirous of being apprenticed to this man, to learn the art of shoemaking; and in due time, when some of the boys were old enough to leave the school, and be put to trade, Coleridge, being of the number, tutored his friend Crispin how to apply to the head master, and not to heed his anger should he become irate. Accordingly, Crispin applied at the hour proposed to see Bowyer; who, having heard the proposal to take Coleridge as an apprentice, and Coleridge's answer and assent to become a shoemaker, broke forth with his favourite adjuration, "'Ods my life, man, what d'ye mean?" At the sound of his angry voice, Crispin stood motionless, till the angry pedagogue becoming infuriate, pushed the intruder out of the room with such force, that Crispin might have sustained an action at law against him for an assault. Thus, to Coleridge's mortification and regret, as he afterwards in joke would say, "I lost the opportunity of supplying safeguards to the understandings of those, who perhaps will never thank me for what I am aiming to do in exercising their reason. "Against my will," says he, "I was chosen by my master as one of those destined for the university; and about this time my brother Luke, or 'the Doctor,' so called from his infancy, because being the seventh son, he had, from his infancy, been dedicated to the medical profession, came to town to walk the London Hospital, under the care of Sir William Blizard. Mr. Saumarez, brother of the Admiral Lord Saumarez, was his intimate friend. Every Saturday I could make or obtain leave, to the London Hospital trudged I. O the bliss if I was permitted to hold the plasters, or to attend the dressings. Thirty years afterwards, Mr. Saumarez retained the liveliest recollections of the extraordinary, enthusiastic blue-coat boy, and was exceedingly affected in identifying me with that boy. I became wild to be apprenticed to a surgeon. English, Latin, yea, Greek books of medicine read I incessantly. Blanchard's Latin Medical Dictionary I had nearly by heart. Briefly, it was a wild dream, which gradually blending with, gradually gave way to a rage for metaphysics, occasioned by the essays on Liberty and Necessity in Cato's Letters, and more by theology. After I had read Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary, I sported infidel! but my infidel vanity never touched my heart:" nor ever with his lips did he for a few months only support the new light given him by Voltaire. "With my heart," says he, "I never did abandon the name of Christ." This reached Bowyer's ears, and he sent for him: not to reason with him, as teachers and parents do too often, and by this means as often increase the vanity of these tyro-would-be-philosophers; but he took the surest mode, if not of curing, at least of checking the disease. His argument was short and forcible. "So, sirrah, you are an infidel, are you? then I'll flog your infidelity out of you;" and gave him the severest flogging he had ever received at his hands. This, as I have often heard Coleridge say, was the only just flogging he had ever given him: certainly, from all I ever heard of him, Bowyer was strictly a flogging master. Trollope, in his History of Christ's Hospital, page 137, says of him, "His discipline was exact in the extreme, and tinctured, perhaps, with more than due severity." [8] Coleridge, in his 'Biographia Literaria', after paying a just compliment to Bowyer as a teacher, says, "The reader will, I trust, excuse this tribute of recollection to a man, whose severities, even now, not seldom furnish the dreams by which the blind fancy would fain interpret to the mind the painful sensation of distempered sleep, but neither lessen nor diminish the deep sense of my moral and intellectual obligations." He had his passionate days, which the boys described as the days he wore his Passy wig (passy abbreviated from passionate). "Sirrah! I'll flog you," were words so familiar to him, that on one occasion, some female relation or friend of one of the boys entered his room, when a class stood before him and inquired for Master--; master was no school title with Bowyer. The errand of this lady being to ask a short leave of absence for some boy, on the sudden appearance in town of his country cousin, still lingering at the door, after having been abruptly told to go, Bowyer suddenly exclaimed, "Bring that woman here, and I'll flog her!" Coleridge's themes in his fifteenth year, [9] in verse as well as prose, marked him as a boy of great talent, but of talent only according to his own definition of it (vide "Friend," vol. iii. edit. 1818). His verse was good, his prose powerful, and language correct, and beyond his years in depth of thought, but as yet he had not manifested, according to the same test, anything of genius. I met among some of his notes, written at the age of fifty-one, the following critique on one of his schoolboy themes: "This theme was written at the age of fifteen: it does not contain a line that any schoolboy might not have written, and like most school-poetry, there is a putting of thoughts into verse. Yet such verses as a striving of mind and struggles after the intense and vivid, are a fair promise of better things." The same observation might be made in the intense application of his intellectual powers in search of truth, at the time he called himself an infidel; in this struggle of mind was the "fair promise of better things." It was the preparation necessary for such a mind; the breaking up and tilling of the soil for the successful germination of the seeds of truth. The sleeping powers of thought were roused and excited into action. Perhaps this may be considered, as entering too early into the history of his mind in boyhood: to this I reply, that the entire man so to speak, is to be seen even in the cradle of the child. [10] The serious may be startled at the thought of a young man passing through such an ordeal; but with him it was the exercise of his strength, in order that he might "fight the good fight," and conquer for that truth which is permanent, and is the light and the life of every one who comes into the world, and who is in earnest search of it. In his sixteenth year he composed the allegory of "Real and Imaginary Time," first published in the Sibylline Leaves, having been accidentally omitted in the Juvenile Poems,-- "On the wide level of a mountain's head, (I knew not where, but 'twas some fairy place) Their pinions, ostrich-like, for sails outspread, Two lovely children run an endless race, A sister and a brother! That far outstripped the other; Yet ever runs she with reverted face, And looks and listens for the boy behind; For he, alas! is blind! O'er rough and smooth with even step he passed, And knows not whether he be first or last." [11] in which may be traced the first dawnings of his genius. He pictures to himself a boy returning to school after the holidays; in his day-dreams making plans for the future, and anticipating the pleasure he is to enjoy on his return home; his vivid thoughts, and sanguine expectations "far outstripping" the reality of time as marked by the watch or almanack. Real time is personified as a blind boy steadily pursuing his path; whilst imaginary time is represented as a fleeting girl, looking back and listening for her brother whom she has outrun. Perhaps to Mr. Bowyer's excellent method of instruction may be attributed this early developement of his genius. Coleridge remarks of him, "He was an admirable educer, no less than educator of intellect; he taught me to leave out as many epithets as would make eight syllable lines, and then ask if the exercise would not be greatly improved." Although in this year he began to indulge in metaphysical speculations, he was wedded to verse, and many of his early poems were planned; some of which he finished, and they were published in the "Juvenile Poems," on his entry into life; but as many more were scattered among his friends, who had greatly increased in number. About this time he became acquainted with a widow lady, "whose son," says he, "I, as upper boy, had protected, and who therefore looked up to me, and taught me what it was to have a mother. I loved her as such. She had three daughters, and of course I fell in love with the eldest. From this time to my nineteenth year, when I quitted school for Jesus, Cambridge, was the era of poetry and love." It has been observed, that about this sixteenth year, he first developed genius, and that during this early period of his life, his mind was incessantly toiling in the pursuit of knowledge. His love of reading seemed to have increased in proportion to his acquirements, which were equally great: his representing himself as an infidel was better perhaps understood by his master, who believed it to be only puerile vanity; and therefore Coleridge considered the flogging he received on this occasion, a just and appropriate punishment; and it was so, for as a boy he had not thought deep enough on an equally important point, viz., what is Fidelity, and how easily, he particularly might mistake the genuineness of sincere 'fidelity' for mere outward forms, and the simple observance of customs. Perhaps I might have been disposed to pass over this era with a slighter notice, which he in his simplicity of character thought it right to record. He was always honest in every thing concerning himself, and never spared self-accusation, often, when not understood, to his own injury. He never from his boyhood to his latest life, received kindness without grateful feelings, and, when he believed it coupled with love, without the deepest sense of its value; and if the person possessed sensibility and taste, he repaid it tenfold. This was the experience of nearly twenty years intimate knowledge of his character. His description of his first love was that of a young poet, recording the first era of the passion, the fleeting dream of his youth--but not that love which he afterwards records in the Geneviève when he says, "All thoughts, all passions, all delights, Whatever stirs this mortal frame, All are but ministers of love, And feed his sacred flame." First love, so seldom the mature love of future days, is a flower of premature growth and developement, on which fancy exercises itself in castle-building, and is in unison with that age when youth flings his limbs about in the air, as an exercise to rid himself of the superfluous volition, the accumulation of which gives him a sensation of uneasiness; and these simple and unreserved accounts of Coleridge's infidelity, and also of his first love-fit, should be put down merely as mental exercises. The lines above quoted, belong, I have said, to the maturer mind; they are thoughts which, unlike the sportive dace on the surface of some calm lake, may rather be compared to the inhabitants of the deep waters beneath. "How often will the loving heart and imaginative spirit of a young man mistake the projected creature of his own moral yearning, seen in the reflecting surface of the first not repulsive or vulgar female who treats him affectionately, for the realization of his idea. Reversing the order of the Genesis, he believes the female the original, and the outward reality and impressment of the self-constructed 'image', of the ideal! He most sincerely supposes himself in love--even in cases where the mistake might have been suspected by one curious fact--that his strongest emotions on love, were when absent from the imagined object. But the time comes, or may come, when the same feeling exists equally in presence and absence, in health and in sickness; when he verily 'is' in love. And now he 'knows' himself to be so, by the 'so' being--he can even prove it to his own mind by his certainty, his 'intuition' of the essential difference, as actually as it is uncommunicable, between it and its previous subjective counterfeits, and anticipations. Even so it is with friends.--O it is melancholy to think how the very forms and geniality of my affections, my belief of obligation, consequent gratitude and anxious sense of duty were wasted on the shadows of friendship. With few exceptions, I can almost say, that till I came to H----, I never 'found' what FRIENDS were--and doubtless, in more than one instance, I sacrificed substances who loved me, for semblances who were well pleased that I should love 'them', but who never loved nor inwardly respected ought but themselves. The distinction between 'the' friends and 'the' love is, that the latter we discover by itself to 'be', alone itself--for it is in its nature unique and exclusive. (See Improvvisatore in the 'Amulet' of 1826 or 7). "But of the former we discover the genuineness by comparison and experience--the reason is obvious--in the instances in which the person imagined himself to 'be in love' with another (I use this phrase 'be in love with' for the want of any other; for, in fact, from the absence in our language of any appropriate exponent of the thing meant), it is a delusion in toto. But, in the other instance, the one half (i.e. the person's own feelings and sense of duty with acts accordant) remains the same (ex. gr. S.T.C. could not feel more deeply, nor from abatement of nervous life by age and sickness so 'ardently') he could not feel, think, and act with a 'more' entire devotion, to I.G. or to H.G. than he did to W.W. and to R.S., yet the latter were and remain most honourable to his judgment. Their characters, as moral and intellectual beings, give a dignity to his devotion; and the imperishable consciousness of his devout and almost enthusiastic attachment to them, still sanctifies their names, and makes the men holy and revered to him." [12] Had Coleridge in early or even in later life paid an insincere, because undeserved, deference to outward show, and to the surface opinions counterfeiting depth, so attractive to the superficial observer--added to which, had he possessed a portion of that self-regarding policy which frequently aids success--he might have been idolized where he was neglected, and rewarded, if I might so profane this word, with high worldly honours in other quarters. But it was otherwise; and could a crown of gold have been offered him for the crown of glory of which he was in earnest search, he would have refused the exchange. The difference between time and eternity had already taken root, and he felt the mighty import of these words too strongly to have lost sight of their practical use; all that his health and powers would allow him to acquire he did acquire, and freely gave all he had for the benefit of others. He says, "From the exuberance of my animal spirits, when I had burst forth from my misery and moping and the indiscretions resulting from those spirits--ex. gr. swimming over the New River in my clothes, and remaining in them;--full half the time from seventeen to eighteen was passed in the sick-ward of Christ's Hospital, afflicted with jaundice and rheumatic fever." From these indiscretions and their consequences may be dated all his bodily sufferings in future life: in short, rheumatism sadly afflicting him, while the remedies only slightly alleviated his sufferings, without hope of a permanent cure; though confined to his bed, his mind, ever active, still allowed him time to continue the exercise of his intellectual powers, and afforded him leisure for contemplation. Medical men are too often called upon to witness the effects of acute rheumatism in the young subject: in some, the attack is on the heart, and its consequences are immediate; in others, it leaves behind bodily sufferings, which may indeed be palliated, but terminate only in a lingering dissolution. I have often heard Coleridge express regret that he had not cultivated mathematics, which he believed would have been of important use in life, particularly had he arrived so far as to have mastered the higher calculus; but he was, by an oversight of the mathematical master, stopped on the threshold. When he was commencing Euclid, among some of its first axioms came this:--"A line is length without breadth." "How can that be?" said the scholar, (Coleridge); "A line must have some breadth, be it ever so thin." This roused the master's indignation at the impertinence of the scholar, which was instantly answered by a box on the ear, and the words, hastily uttered, "Go along, you silly fellow;" and here ended his first tuition, or lecture. His second efforts afterwards were not more successful; so that he was destined to remain ignorant of these exercises of the logic of the understanding.[A] Indeed his logical powers were so stupendous, from boyhood, as never to require such drilling. Bowyer, his classical master, was too skilful in the management of youth, and too much interested in the success of his scholars to overlook what was best fitted for them. He exercised their logical powers in acquiring and comparing the different classics. On him, as a teacher, Coleridge loved to dwell; and, with his grateful feelings, ever ready to acknowledge the sense of his obligations to him, particularly those relating to his mental improvement, he has, in his Biog. Lit. vol. i. p. 7, expressed himself in these words: "He early moulded my taste to the preference of Demosthenes to Cicero, of Homer and Theocritus to Virgil, and again of Virgil to Ovid. He habituated me to compare Lucretius, (in such extracts as I then read,) Terence, and, above all, the chaster poems of Catullus, not only with the Roman poets of the, so called, silver and brazen ages; but with even those of the Augustan æra: and, on grounds of plain sense and universal logic, to see and assert the superiority of the former in the truth and nativeness, both of their thoughts and diction. At the same time that we were studying the Greek tragic poets, he made us read Shakespeare and Milton as lessons; and they were lessons too, which required most time and trouble to 'bring up' so as to escape his censure. I learnt from him that Poetry, even that of the loftiest, and, seemingly wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more, and more fugitive causes." In early life he was remarkably joyous; nature had blessed him with a buoyancy of spirits, and even when suffering, he deceived the partial observer. He delighted many of the strangers he met in his saunterings through the cloisters, arrested and riveted the attention of the passer by, whom, like his "Ancient Mariner," he held by a spell. His schoolfellow, Lamb, has mentioned him, when under the influence of this power, as the delight of his auditors. In the Elia, he says, "Come back into memory like as thou wert in the dayspring of thy fancies, with hope, like a fiery column before thee, the dark pillar not yet turned ... How have I seen the casual passer through the cloisters stand still, entranced with admiration, (while he weighed the disproportion between the 'speech' and the 'garb' of the mirandula,) to hear thee unfold, in deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of Iamblichus [14] or Plotinus, (for even in those years thou waxedst not pale at such philosophic draughts); or reciting Homer in his Greek, or Pindar, while the walls of the old Grey-Friars re-echoed to the accents." Middleton was not prepared to sympathise in these flights, considering them subversive of the dignity of a Grecian. [15] Middleton was then on the threshold of the College, and lads in this situation seemed called upon, to preserve with dignity their honours, and with more outward forms than suited their age. This at the time rendered them stiff and unfamiliar, so much so, that within the walls, and in the neighbourhood, it was mistaken for pride, and the words "Proud as a Grecian," were proverbial. These boys had the dignity of their rising prospects therefore to support--they were the aristocracy of the school. This was a task ill suited to Coleridge; and his flights of fancy, as Lamb termed them, would only produce a shrug of Middleton's shoulders, and a dread at the prospect of the falling dignity of the school. Middleton's Poem, in Mr. Trollope's [16] History of Christ's Hospital, and its companion that of Coleridge, characterize the two youths, and plainly point out that the selection of these poems was influenced more by a merit belonging purely to talent than from any display of genius in either. The verses of Middleton are more indicative of strength than of power; they are the verses of a well-tutored youth, of commanding talents. Those of Coleridge show more of fancy, but do not exhibit the power he possessed at that age, which will be seen by comparing this poem with many written by him at an earlier period, and now published among his "Juvenile Poems." Middleton being older than Coleridge was elected first, viz. 26th September, 1788, to Pembroke College, Cambridge. Coleridge left Christ's Hospital for Jesus' College, Cambridge, 7th September, 1790, [17] taking leave of his school-fellows in the following sonnet:-- Farewell, parental scenes! a sad farewell! To you my grateful heart still fondly clings, Tho' fluttering round on Fancy's burnish'd wings, Her tales of future joy Hope loves to tell. Adieu, adieu! ye much loved cloisters pale! Ah! would those happy days return again, When 'neath your arches, free from every stain, I heard of guilt, and wonder'd at the tale! Dear haunts! where oft my simple lays I sang, Listening meanwhile the echoings of my feet, Lingering I quit you, with as great a pang, As when ere while, my weeping childhood, torn By early sorrow from my native seat, Mingled its tears with hers--my widow'd parent lorn. 'Poetical Works', vol. i. p. 31. [Footnote 1: Bishop Berkeley, in his work ("Siris") commences with a dissertation on Tar Water, and ends with the Trinity. The Rev. John Coleridge commences his work, entitled "A miscellaneous Dissertation arising from the 17th and 18th chapters of the Book of Judges," with a well written preface on the Bible, and ends with an advertisement of his school, and his method of teaching Latin.] [Footnote 2: In 1809, the above whimsical stories were related to me by a gentleman, born in the town of Ottery, and by marriage closely related to the Rev. John Coleridge. While Coleridge resided at Highgate, he also repeated the stories which had grown up with him from boyhood as here related, himself believing them true; but a near relation has lately assured the writer, that some of these stories are told of another most respectable clergyman, residing at that time in the neighbourhood, and 'he' believes that they properly belong to him. It is commonly remarked that very studious men, either from inattention, or from ignorance of the conventional forms of society, are regardless of what passes before them. Paying, perhaps, too much attention to their inward feelings or thoughts, seemingly day-dreaming--and this may frequently give rise to the stories to be found in many towns besides Ottery. Still, however, thoughtful and contemplative persons are often the quickest observers of the weaknesses of human nature, and yet as they usually make the greatest allowances for every infirmity, they are often impartial judges, and judicious counsellors. The Rev. John Coleridge, though sometimes an absent man, was a most valuable pastor, and on all fitting occasions a good man of business, having conducted several difficult matters of controversy for his parish with great satisfaction to the parties.] [Footnote 3: Such at least were the recollections of this extraordinary boy of seven years of age.] [Footnote 4: Quale--quare--quidditive.] [Footnote 5: He had, before he was six years old, read three times through the Arabian Nights, or rather one of the volumes.--See "'The Friend'," vol. i. p. 252, ed. 1818.] [Footnote 6: I insert a similar observation on his feelings when he first left home. "When I was first plucked up and transplanted from my birth place and family, at the death of my dear father, whose revered image has ever survived in my mind, to make me know what the emotions and affections of a son are, and how ill a father's place is likely to be supplied by any other relation. Providence (it has often occurred to me) gave the first intimation, that it was my lot, and that it was best for me, to make or find my way of life a detached individual, a Terræ Filius, who was to ask love or service of no one on any more specific relation than that of being a man, and as such to take my chance for the free charities of humanity."] [Footnote 7: Whatever might have been his habits in boyhood, in manhood he was 'scrupulously' clean in his person, and especially took great care of his hands by frequent ablutions. In his dress also he was as cleanly as the liberal use of snuff would permit, though the clothes-brush was often in requisition to remove the wasted snuff. "Snuff," he would facetiously say, "was the final cause of the nose, though troublesome and expensive in its use."] [Footnote 8: "Jemmy Bowyer," as he was familiarly called by Coleridge and Lamb, might not inaptly be termed the "plagosus orbilius" of Christ's Hospital.] [Footnote 9: In his biographical sketch of his literary life, he informs us that he had translated the eight Hymns of Synesius from the Greek, into English Anacreontica, before his fifteenth year.] [Footnote 10: ... the childhood shews the man, As morning shews the day ... 'Paradise Regained', book iv. v. 220.] [Footnote 11: Aldine Edition, Vol. i. p. 6.--Pickering, London, 1834.] [Footnote 12: Extract of a note written Dec. 1829.] [Footnote 13: "'Thought' and 'attention' very different things.--I never expected the German (viz. selbst-mühige Erzeugung dessen, wovon meine Rede war) from the readers of the 'Friend'.--I did expect the latter, and was disappointed." "This is a most important distinction, and in the new light afforded by it to my mind, I see more plainly why mathematics cannot be a substitute for Logic, much less for Metaphysics--i.e. transcendental Logic, and why therefore Cambridge has produced so few men of genius and original power since the time of Newton.--Not only it does 'not' call forth the balancing and discriminating powers ('that' I saw long ago), but it requires only 'attention', not 'thought' or self-production. "In a long-brief Dream-life of regretted regrets, I still find a noticeable space marked out by the Regret of having neglected the Mathematical Sciences. No 'week', few 'days' pass unhaunted by a fresh conviction of the truth involved in the Platonic Superstition over the Portal of Philosophy, [Greek: Maedeis age_ométraetos eisít_o]. But surely Philosophy hath scarcely sustained more detriment by its alienation from mathematics." MS. Note.] [Footnote 14: "In my friendless wanderings on our leave-days, i.e. the Christ Hospital phrase, not for holidays altogether, but for those on which the boys are permitted to go beyond the precincts of the school (for I was an orphan, and had scarce any connexions in London), highly was I delighted, if any passenger, especially if he drest in black, would enter into conversation with me; for soon I found the means of directing it to my favourite subjects-- Of Providence, fore-knowledge, will, and fate, Fix'd fate, free will, fore-knowledge absolute, And found no end, in wandering mazes lost."] [Footnote 15: The upper boys of the school selected for the University are so termed, though wearing the same coloured dress, but made of more costly materials.] [Footnote 16: In a note on the History, p. 192, Mr. Trollope makes the following observation: "From this book" (a book in which the boys were allowed to copy their verses when considered good) "the verses referred to in the text were inscribed." They will be found in the Literary Remains, vol. i, p.33. Trollope says, "These verses are copied not as one of the best, but of the earliest productions of the writer."] [Footnote 17: Entered at Jesus' College, Feb. 5th, 1791, at the age of 19.--College Books.] CHAPTER II. COLERIDGE'S FIRST ENTRY AT JESUS' COLLEGE.--HIS SIMPLICITY AND WANT OF WORLDLY TACT.--ANECDOTES AND DIFFERENT ACCOUNTS OF HIM DURING HIS RESIDENCE AT COLLEGE INTIMACY WITH MIDDLETON--WITH SOUTHEY.--QUITS COLLEGE FOR BRISTOL. At Cambridge, whither his reputation had travelled before him, high hopes and fair promises of success were entertained by his young friends and relations. He was considered by the "Blues," as they are familiarly termed, one from whom they were to derive great immediate honour, which for a short period, however, was deferred. Individual genius has a cycle of its own, and moves only in that path, or by the powers influencing it. Genius has been properly defined 'prospective', talent on the contrary 'retrospective': genius is creative, and lives much in the future, and in its passage or progress may make use of the labours of talent. "I have been in the habit," says Coleridge, "of considering the qualities of intellect, the comparative eminence in which characterizes individuals and even countries, under four kinds,--genius, talent, sense, and cleverness. The first I use in the sense of most general acceptance, as the faculty which adds to the existing stock of power and knowledge by new views, new combinations, by discoveries not accidental, but anticipated, or resulting from anticipation." 'Friend', vol. iii. p. 85, edit. 1818. [1] Coleridge left school with great anticipation of success from all who knew him, for his character for scholarship, and extraordinary accounts of his genius had preceded him. He carried with him too the same childlike simplicity which he had from a boy, and which he retained even to his latest hours. His first step was to involve himself in much misery, and which followed him in after life, as the sequel will evidence. On his arrival at College he was accosted by a polite upholsterer, requesting to be permitted to furnish his rooms. The next question was, "How would you like to have them furnished?" The answer was prompt and innocent enough, "Just as you please, Sir!"--thinking the individual employed by the College. The rooms were therefore furnished according to the taste of the artizan, and the bill presented to the astonished Coleridge. Debt was to him at all times a thing he most dreaded, and he never had the courage to face it. I once, and once only, witnessed a painful scene of this kind, which occurred from mistaking a letter on ordinary business for an application for money. [2] Thirty years afterwards, I heard that these College debts were about one hundred pounds! Under one hundred pounds I believe to have been the amount of his sinnings; but report exceeded this to something which might have taxed his character beyond imprudence, or mere want of thought. Had he, in addition to his father's simplicity, possessed the worldly circumspection of his mother, he might have avoided these and many other vexations; but he went to the University wholly unprepared for a College life, having hitherto chiefly existed in his own 'inward' being, and in his poetical imagination, on which he had fed. But to proceed. Coleridge's own account is, that while Middleton, afterwards Bishop of Calcutta, remained at Pembroke, he "worked with him and was industrious, read hard, and obtained the prize for the Greek Ode," [3] &c. It has been stated, that he was locked up in his room to write this Ode; but this is not the fact. Many stories were afloat, and many exaggerations were circulated and believed, of his great want of attention to College discipline, and of perseverance in his studies, and every failure, or apparent failure, was attributed to these causes. Often has he repeated the following story of Middleton, and perhaps this story gave birth to the report. They had agreed to read together in the evening, and were not to hold any conversation. Coleridge went to Pembroke and found Middleton intent on his book, having on a long pair of boots reaching to the knees, and beside him, on a chair, next to the one he was sitting on, a pistol. Coleridge had scarcely sat down before he was startled by the report of the pistol. "Did you see that?" said Middleton. "See what?" said Coleridge. "That rat I just sent into its hole again--did you feel the shot? It was to defend my legs," continued Middleton, "I put on these boots. I am fighting with these rats for my books, which, without some prevention, I shall have devoured." There is an anecdote related of Coleridge while at College, and which I have heard him frequently repeat, when called upon to vouch for its truth. His fellow students had amused themselves, when he was in attendance at Lecture, by stealing a portion of the tail of his gown, and which they had repeated so frequently, as to shorten it to the length of a spencer. Crossing the quadrangle one day with these remains at his back, and his appearance not being in collegiate trim, the Master of Jesus' College, who was ever kind to him, and overlooked all little inattentions to appearances, accosted him smartly on this occasion--"Mr. Coleridge! Mr. Coleridge! when will you get rid of that shameful gown?" Coleridge, turning his head, and casting his eyes over his shoulders, as if observing its length, or rather want of length, replied in as courteous a manner as words of such a character would permit, "Why, Sir, I think I've got rid of the greatest part of it already!" Such were Coleridge's peculiarities, which were sometimes construed into irregularities; but through his whole life, attracting notice by his splendid genius, he fell too often under the observation of men who busied themselves in magnifying small things, and minifying large ones. About this period, that Volcano, in which all the worst passions of men were collected, and which had been for some time emitting its black smoke, at length exploded and rent society asunder. The shock was felt throughout Europe; each party was over-excited, and their minds enthralled by a new slavery--the one shouting out the blessings of liberty and equality--the other execrating them, and prophesying the consequences that were to follow:-- "There's no philosopher but sees That rage and fear are one disease; _Tho' that may burn, and this may freeze_, They're both alike tho ague." 'Mad Ox'. Combustibles composed of such ardent and evil spirits soon blaze out; yet the evil does not stop when the blaze has ceased; it leaves an excitement which is constantly disclosing itself in a restless morbid vanity, a craving for distinction, and a love of applause, in its way as dangerous as the thirst of gain, and the worship of the mammon of unrighteousness. Alas! the circulation of such anecdotes as have been here related of Coleridge when at College, and his inattention to some of the minor forms of discipline, were sufficient for illnatured persons to transform into serious offences, particularly when coupled with the disappointed hopes of zealous friends. At this period, in which all men who were not senseless, or so indifferent as nearly to be senseless, particularly the young men of our Universities, all embraced a party, and arranged themselves under their different banners. When I now look around me, and see men who have risen to the highest offices of the different professions, in the church, the law, or in physic, formerly only known by the name of Citizen John, &c. &c., _now_ my Lord so and so, or your Grace the----, it seems like a dream, or at least a world of fleeting shadows. Sir James Mackintosh, in a letter to Mr. Sharp, states what he conceived to be the errors of both parties, so far as they arose from errors of judgment: "The opposition mistook the moral character of the revolution; the ministers mistook its force: and both parties, from pique, resentment, pride, habit, and obstinacy, persisted in acting on these mistakes after they were disabused by experience. Mr. Burke alone avoided both these fatal mistakes. He saw both the malignity and the strength of the revolution. But where there was wisdom to discover the truth, there was not power, and perhaps there was not practical skill, to make that wisdom available for the salvation of Europe.--'Diis aliter visum!' My fortune has been in some respects very singular. I have lately read the lives and private correspondence of some of the most memorable men in different countries of Europe, who are lately dead. [4] Klopstock, Kant, Lavater, Alfieri, they were all filled with joy and hope by the French revolution--they clung to it for a longer or a shorter time--they were compelled to relinquish their illusions. The disappointment of all was bitter, but it showed itself in various modes, according to the variety of their characters. The series of passions growing out of that disappointment, was the not very remote cause of the death of Lavater. In the midst of society, Alfieri buried himself in misanthropic solitude; and the shock, which awakened him from the dreams of enthusiasm, darkened and shortened his days. In the mean time the multitude, comprehending not only those who have neither ardour of sensibility, nor compass of understanding to give weight to their suffrage, but those also whom accident had not brought into close and perpetual contact with the events, were insensibly detached from the revolution; and, before they were well aware that they had quitted their old 'position', they found themselves at the antipodes." The excitement which this state of things produced might have been highly advantageous to some, and even quickened their intellectual powers, particularly those destined either for the bar or the senate, but certainly not those intended for the church. The revolution [5] and its consequences engrossed the thoughts of all men too much for the calmer pursuits of life; and the minds of the young especially were so absorbed by passing temporal events, as to leave but little time for the contemplation of the deeper and more serious affairs of futurity. However, Coleridge appears in his political opinions to have leaned too much to the side of democracy; but this was so prevalent and so much a fashion, particularly in those filled with enthusiasm, that it seemed a natural consequence in any young man possessing even ordinary intellect. Middleton, his friend, passed on without attaching himself to either party. His manners (as I have before noticed) were austere and sedate. He steadily persevered, without deviation, in his studies, though chance did not always favour him, nor crown him with the success he merited. He was a good and amiable man, and an affectionate friend; but early want of success in his academical exertions rendering him melancholy, this by sympathy was soon imparted to his friend. After Middleton's departure, the keen desire which Coleridge previously felt for the possession of honours abated, and he became indifferent to them--he might at this time have been idle, but never vicious. The men who often appear to be the gayest and lightest of heart, are too frequently melancholic; and it is a well-known fact, that the best comic actors are the greatest sufferers from this malady, as if it seemed an essential qualification for that department of histrionic excellence, in which the greatest animal spirits are personated and successfully imitated. Coleridge, at this period, delighted in boyish tricks, which others were to execute. I remember a fellow-collegiate recalling to his memory an exploit of which he was the planner, and a late Lord Chancellor the executor. It was this: a train of gunpowder was to be laid on two of the neatly shaven lawns of St. John's and Trinity Colleges, in such a manner, that, when set on fire, the singed grass would exhibit the ominous words, Liberty and Equality, which, with able ladlike dexterity, was duly performed. The writer of the College Reminiscences in the Gentleman's Magazine, December, 1834, a first-form boy with Coleridge at Christ's Hospital, was well acquainted with his habits, and speaks of his having gained the gold medal in his freshman's year for the Greek Ode, but does not notice his having been locked up in his room for that purpose. "In his second year he stood for the Craven scholarship--a university scholarship, for which under-graduates of any standing are entitled to become candidates. This was in the winter of 1792. Out of sixteen or eighteen competitors, a selection of four were to contend for the prize, and these four were Dr. Butler, late head-master of Shrewsbury, Dr. Keate, the late head-master of Eton, [6] Dr. Bethell, the present Bishop of Bangor, and Coleridge. Dr. Butler was the successful candidate." Coleridge always spoke of this decision as having been in every way just, and due to Butler's merit as a clever and industrious scholar. "But pause a moment," says this writer, "in Coleridge's History, and think of him at this period! Butler! Keate Bethell! and Coleridge! How different the career of each in future life! O Coleridge, through what strange paths did the meteor of genius lead thee! Pause a moment, ye distinguished men! and deem it not the least bright spot in your happier career, that you and Coleridge were once rivals, and for a moment running abreast in the pursuit of honour. I believe that his disappointment at this crisis damped his ardour. Unfortunately, at that period, there was no classical tripos; so that, if a person did not obtain the classical medal, he was thrown back among the totally undistinguished; and it was not allowable to become a candidate for the classical medal, unless you had taken a respectable degree in mathematics. Coleridge had not the least taste for these, and here his case was hopeless; so that he despaired of a Fellowship, and gave up what in his heart he coveted--college honours and a college life. He had seen Middleton (late Bishop of Calcutta) quit Pembroke under similar circumstances. Not _quite_ similar, because Middleton had studied mathematics so as to take a respectable degree, and to enable him to try for the medal; but he failed, and therefore all hopes failed of a Fellowship--most fortunately, as it proved in after-life, for Middleton, though he mourned at the time most deeply, and exclaimed--'I am Middleton, which is another name for misfortune!' 'There is a Providence which shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will.' That which Middleton deemed a misfortune drew him from the cobwebs of a college library to the active energies of a useful and honoured life." If, as Shakespeare observes, "there be a providence which shapes our ends," such words as "fortunate" or "unfortunate," in their customary use, will be found, on closer attention, and deeper thought, worthless and full of error. We have each our part allotted to us in the great drama of life. But to return to Coleridge. "When he quitted college, which he did before he had taken a degree, in a moment of mad-cap caprice, and in an inauspicious hour! 'When,' as Coleridge says, 'I left the friendly cloisters, and the happy grove of quiet, ever-honoured Jesus' College, Cambridge.' Short, but deep and heartfelt reminiscence! In a Literary Life of himself, this short memorial is all that Coleridge gives of his happy days at college. Say not that he did not obtain, and did not wish to obtain, classical honours! He did obtain them, and was eagerly ambitious of them; [7] but he did not bend to that discipline which was to qualify him for the whole course. He was very studious, but his reading was desultory and capricious. He took little exercise merely for the sake of exercise; but he was ready at any time to unbend his mind in conversation; and, for the sake of this, his room (the ground-floor room on the right hand of the staircase facing the great gate,) was a constant rendezvous of conversation-loving friends; I will not call them loungers, for they did not call to kill time, but to enjoy it. What evenings have I spent in those rooms! What little suppers, or 'sizings', as they were called, have I enjoyed; when �schylus, and Plato, and Thucydides were pushed aside, with a pile of lexicons, &c. to discuss the pamphlets of the day. Ever and anon, a pamphlet issued from the pen of Burke. There was no need of having the book before us. Coleridge had read it in the morning, and in the evening he would repeat whole pages verbatim." Then came another disturbing cause, which altered the course of his path in life, and this was Frend's trial. [8] "During it," to resume the quotation, "pamphlets swarmed from the press. Coleridge had read them all; and in the evening, with our negus, we had them 'vivâ voce' gloriously." Coleridge has recorded that he was a Socinian till twenty-five. Be not startled, courteous reader! nor ye who knew him only in his later life, if the impetuous zeal and ardour of his mind in early youth led him somewhat wide of those fixed principles which he adopted in riper years. To quote his own words, written soon after he left college, and addressed to the late Rev. George Coleridge, "If aught of error or intemperate truth Should meet thine ear, think thou that riper age Will calm it down, and let thy love forgive it!" There is one incident very characteristic of him, which took place during this trial. The trial was observed by Coleridge, to be going against Frend, when some observation or speech was made in his favour; a dying hope thrown out as it appeared to Coleridge who, in the midst of the Senate, whilst sitting on one of the benches, extended his hands and clapped them. The Proctor in a loud voice demanded who had committed this indecorum. Silence ensued. The Proctor in an elevated tone, said to a young man sitting near Coleridge, "'Twas you, sir!" The reply was as prompt as the accusation; for, immediately holding out the stump of his right arm, it appeared that he had lost his hand,--"I would, sir," said he, "that I had the power."--That no innocent person should incur blame, Coleridge went directly afterwards to the Proctor, who told him that he saw him clap his hands, but fixed on this person who he knew had not the power. "You have had," said he, "a narrow escape." The opinions of youth are often treated too seriously. The matter of most importance to ascertain when they need correction, is, whether in these opinions they are 'sincere'; at all events, the outbursts of youth are not to be visited as veteran decisions; and when they differ from 'received' opinions, the advice offered should be tempered with kindliness of feeling and sympathy even with their failings. Unfortunately for Coleridge, however, he was to be exempted from those allowances made for others, and was most painfully neglected by those who ought to have sympathized with, and supported him; he was left "to chase chance-started friendships." Coleridge possessed a mind remarkably sensitive, so much so, as at times to divest him of that mental courage so necessary in a world full of vicissitude and painful trial; and this deficiency, though of short duration, was occasionally observed in early life. At the departure of Middleton, [9] to whom he had always looked up, whose success he had considered morally certain, and whose unexpected failure was therefore the more painful to his feelings, he became desponding, and, in addition, vexed and fretted by the college debts, he was overtaken by that inward grief, the product of fear, which he, in after life, so painfully described in his Ode to Dejection:-- "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." Such "viper thoughts" did at this time coil around his mind, and were for him "Reality's dark Dream." In this state of mind he suddenly left Cambridge for London, and strolled about the streets till night came on, and then rested himself on the steps of a house in Chancery Lane, in a reverie of tumultuous feelings, speculating on the future. In this situation, overwhelmed with his own painful thoughts, and in misery himself, he had now to contend with the misery of others--for he was accosted by various kinds of beggars importuning him for money, and forcing on him their real or pretended sorrows. To these applicants he emptied his pockets of his remaining cash. Walking along Chancery Lane in the morning, he noticed a bill posted on the wall, "Wanted a few smart lads for the 15th, Elliot's Light Dragoons;"--he paused a moment, and said to himself, "Well, I have had all my life a violent antipathy to soldiers and horses, the sooner I can cure myself of these absurd prejudices the better, and I will enlist in this regiment." Forthwith he went as directed to the place of enlistment. On his arrival, he was accosted by an old sergeant, with a remarkably benevolent countenance, to whom he stated his wish. The old man looking at him attentively, asked him if he had been in bed? On being answered in the negative, he desired him to take his, made him breakfast, and bade him rest himself awhile, which he did. This feeling sergeant finding him refreshed in his body, but still suffering apparently from melancholy, in kind words begged him to be of good cheer, and consider well the step he was about to take; gave him half a guinea, which he was to repay at his convenience, with a desire at the same time that he would go to the play, and shake off his melancholy, and not return to him. The first part of the advice Coleridge attended to, but returned after the play to the quarters he had left. At the sight of him, this kind-hearted man burst into tears--"Then it must be so," said he. This sudden and unexpected sympathy from an entire stranger deeply affected Coleridge, and nearly shook his resolution; still considering the die was cast, and that he could not in honour even to the sergeant, without implicating him, retreat, he preserved his secret, and after a short chat, they retired to rest. In the morning, the sergeant, not unmindful of his duty to his sovereign, mustered his recruits, and Coleridge, with his new comrades, was marched to Reading. On his arrival at the quarters of the regiment, the general of the district inspected the recruits, and looking hard at Coleridge with a military air, enquired, "What's your name, sir?" "Comberbach," (the name he had assumed.) "What do you come here for, sir?" as if doubting whether he had any business there. "Sir," said Coleridge, "for what most other persons come, to be made a soldier." "Do you think," said the general, "you can run a Frenchman through the body?" "I do not know," replied Coleridge, "as I never tried, but I'll let a Frenchman run me through the body before I'll run away." "That will do," said the general; and Coleridge was turned into the ranks. The same amiable and benevolent conduct which was so interwoven in his nature, soon made him friends, and his new comrades vied with each other in their endeavours to be useful to him; and being, as before described, rather helpless, he required the assistance of his fellow-soldiers. They cleaned his horse, attended particularly to its heels, and to the accoutrements. At this time he frequently complained of a pain at the pit of his stomach, accompanied with sickness, which totally prevented his stooping, and in consequence he could never arrive at the power of bending his body to rub the heels of his horse, which alone was sufficient to make him dependent on his comrades; but it should be observed that he on his part was ever willing to assist them by being their amanuensis when one was required, and wrote all their letters to their sweethearts and wives. [10] It appears that he never advanced beyond the awkward squad, and that the drill-sergeant had little hope of his progress from the necessary warnings he gave to the rest of the troop, even to this same squad to which he belonged; and, though his awkward manoeuvres were well understood, the sergeant would vociferously exclaim, "Take care of that Comberbach, [11] take care of him, for he will ride over you," and other such complimentary warnings. From the notice that one of his officers took of him, he excited, for a short time, the jealousy of some of his companions. When in the street, he walked behind this officer as an orderly, but when out of town they walked abreast, and his comrades not understanding how a soldier in the awkward squad merited this distinction, thought it a neglect of themselves, which, for the time, produced some additional discomfort to Coleridge. I believe this officer to have been Capt. Ogle, [12] who I think visited him in after life at Highgate. It seems that his attention had been drawn to Coleridge in consequence of discovering the following sentence in the stables, written in pencil, "Eheu! quam infortunii miserrimum est fuisse felicem!" but his more immediate discovery arose from a young man who had left Cambridge for the army, and in his road through Reading to join his regiment, met Coleridge in the street in his Dragoon's dress, who was about to pass him, but, said he, "No, Coleridge, this will not do, we have been seeking you these six months; I must and will converse with you, and have no hesitation in declaring that I shall immediately inform your friends that I have found you." This led to Coleridge's return to Cambridge. The same story is also related and made the ground work of some scene in a novel, without the names, by his early friend, Charles Lloyd--he who was included by Canning in the Anti-jacobin with Coleridge, Mr. Southey, and Lamb. He returned to Cambridge, but did not long remain there; and quitted it without taking a degree. It has been observed, that men of genius move in orbits of their own; and seem deprived of that free will which permits the mere man of talent steadily to pursue the beaten path. Coleridge had very early pictured to himself many of the advantages of mechanical employment, its immunities and exemptions from the sufferings consequent on the laborious exercise of 'thought'; but yet he never shrank from the task apparently allotted to him; he was made to soar and not to creep; even as a young man, his acquirements were far beyond the age in which he lived. With his amiable qualities, and early love of domestic life, he would have been well content to tread an humbler path, but it was otherwise ordained! However excellent for the many, the system adopted by our universities was ill suited for a mind like Coleridge's, and there were some who felt that a College routine was not the kind of education which would best evolve, cultivate, and bring into training powers so 'unique'. It has been repeated, 'ad nauseam', that great minds will not descend to the industrious accumulation of those acquirements best suited to fit them for independence. To say that Coleridge would not 'condescend' would be a calumny,--nay, when his health permitted, he would drudge and work more laboriously at some of the mechanical parts of literature, than any man I ever knew. To speak detractingly of great and good men is frequently the result of malice combined with egotism. Though it would be injustice not to admit that he has had warm admirers and deeply affectionate friends, it is much to be regretted that there have been persons who have strangely maligned Coleridge, and who have attributed to him vices of which he was innocent. Had these vices existed, they would not have found any unfair extenuation in this memoir, nor would they have been passed over without notice. In answer to calumnies at that time in circulation, (and with sorrow and just indignation it is added that these reports originated with some who called themselves his friends; but, alas! most false and hypocritical!) the following minute from his notes is quoted: "My academic adventures and indiscretions must have seemed unpardonable sins," that is, as they were related by the tale-bearers and gossips of the day. "I mention these," adds he, "because the only immoralities that can without the grossest slander be laid to my charge, were all comprised within the space of the last two years of my College life. As I went to Cambridge innocent, so I dare affirm, from the first week of my acquaintance with Robert Southey to this hour, Southey himself cannot stand more clear of all intention at violations of the moral law: but, in fact, even during my career at Jesus, the heaviest of my offences consisted in the folly of assuming the show of vices, from which I was all but free, and which in the comparatively few exceptions left loathing and self-disgust on my mind. Were I, indeed, to fix on that week of my existence, in which my moral being would have presented to a pitying guardian angel the most interesting spectacle, it would be that very week [13] in London, in which I was believed by my family to have abandoned myself to debauchery of all kinds, and 'thus' to have involved myself in disreputable pecuniary embarrassments. God knows, so intense was my mental anguish, that during the whole time I was physically incapable even of a 'desire'. My whole body seemed stunned and insensate, from excess of inward suffering--my debts were the 'cause', not the effect; but that I know there can be no substitute for a father, I should say,--surely, surely, the innocence of my whole 'pre' and 'post' academic life, my early distinction, and even the fact, that my Cambridge extravagations did not lose me, nor cool for me, the esteem and regard of a single fellow collegiate, might have obtained an amnesty from worse transgressions." Coleridge, who had desponded at the fate of Middleton, after the unsuccessful attempts he made to obtain a fellowship, lost all hope of procuring an income from the college, and as, through the instrumentality of Frend, with whom an intimacy had now taken place, he had been converted to what in these days is called Unitarianism, he was too conscientious to take orders and enter the Established Church. These circumstances opened to him new views, and effected a complete change in his course of life, and thus his former objects and plans were set aside. The friendship between Coleridge and Southey having greatly increased, and still continuing to increase, and Coleridge being easily led by the affection of those he loved, for which he had a constant yearning, determined to follow literature in future life as a profession, that appearing to him the only source of obtaining an honourable livelihood. Here there was no "mad caprice," but he calmly decided to leave Cambridge and join Southey in his plans for the future, and commence the profession on which they had mutually agreed. He went to Oxford to visit Mr. Southey, and thence to Wales, and thence to Bristol (Mr. Southey's native place), at which city they conjointly commenced their career in authorship, and for the first few months shared the same room. The times were still tumultuous; for although the great hurricane of the revolution ceased abroad, yet, like mighty waters that had been once agitated by a storm, tranquillity was not restored, nor was there any prospect of an immediate calm. The 'Habeas Corpus' act was at this time suspended, and the minister of that day, Mr. Pitt, had struck the panic of property among the wealthy and affluent. During the time of danger, when surrounded by government emissaries, these youthful poets gave lectures on politics, and that with impunity, to crowded audiences. Coleridge met with one interruption only, and that from a hired partizan who had assayed a disturbance at one of these lectures, in order to implicate him and his party, and by this means to effect, if possible, their incarceration. The gentleman who mentioned this in the presence of Coleridge (when with me at Highgate) said--He (Coleridge) had commenced his lecture when this intended disturber of the peace was heard uttering noisy words at the foot of the stairs, where the fee of admission into the room was to be paid. The receiver of the money on the alert ascended the stairs and informed Coleridge of the man's insolence and his determination not to pay for his admission. In the midst of the lecture Coleridge stopped, and said loud enough to be heard by the individual, that before the intruder "kicked up a dust, he would surely down with the dust," and desired the man to admit him. The individual had not long been in the room before he began hissing, this was succeeded by loud claps from Coleridge's party, which continued for a few minutes, but at last they grew so warm that they began to vociferate, "Turn him out!"--"Turn him out!"--"Put him out of the window!" Fearing the consequences of this increasing clamour, the lecturer was compelled to request silence, and addressed them as follows: "Gentlemen, ours is the cause of liberty! that gentleman has as much right to hiss as you to clap, and you to clap as he to hiss; but what is to be expected, gentlemen, when the cool waters of reason come in contact with red hot aristocracy but a hiss?" When the loud laugh ended, silence ensued, and the rebuke was treasured and related. [14] The terms aristocrat, democrat, and jacobin, were the fashionable opprobrious epithets of the day; and well do I remember, the man who had earned by his politics the prefix of jacobin to his name, was completely shunned in society, whatever might be his moral character: but, as might be expected, this was merely ephemeral, when parties ran high, and were guided and governed more by impulses and passion than by principle. "Truth I pursued, as Fancy sketch'd the way, And wiser men than I went worse astray." Men of the greatest sense and judgment possessing good hearts are, on the review of the past, more disposed to think 'well' of the young men of that day, who, from not exercising their reason, were carried into the vortex of the revolution. Much has been written on the proposed scheme of settling in the wilds of America;--the spot chosen was Susquehannah,--this spot Coleridge has often said was selected, on account of the name being pretty and metrical, indeed he could never forbear a smile when relating the story. This day-dream, as he termed it, (for such it really was) the detail of which as related by him always gave it rather a sportive than a serious character, was a subject on which it is doubtful whether he or Mr. Southey were really in earnest at the time it was planned. The dream was, as is stated in the "Friend," that the little society to be formed was, in its second generation, to have combined the innocence of the patriarchal age with the knowledge and general refinements of European culture, and "I dreamt," says he, "that in the sober evening of my life I should behold colonies of independence in the undivided dale of industry." Strange fancies! 'and as vain as strange'! This scheme, sportive, however, as it might be, had its admirers; and there are persons now to be found, who are desirous of realizing these visions, the past-time in thought and fancy of these young poets--then about 23 years of age. During this dream, and about this time, Southey and Coleridge married two sisters of the name of Fricker, and a third sister was married to an Utopian poet as he has been called, of the name of Lovel, whose poems were published with Mr. Southey's. They were, however, too wise to leave Bristol for America, for the purpose of establishing a genuine system of property--a Pantisocracy, which was to be their form of government--and under which they were to realize all their new dreams of happiness. Marriage, at all events, seems to have sobered them down, and the vision vanished. Chimerical as it appeared, the purveyors of amusement for the reading public were thus furnished with occupation, and some small pecuniary gain, while it exercised the wit of certain anti-Jacobin writers of the day, and raised them into notice. Canning had the faculty of satire to an extraordinary degree, and also that common sense tact, which made his services at times so very useful to his country; his powers seemed in their full meridian of splendour when an argument or new doctrine permitted him rapidly to run down into its consequence, and then brilliantly and wittily to skew its defects. In this he eminently excelled. The beauties of the anti-Jacobin are replete with his satire. He never attempted a display of depth, but his dry sarcasm left a sting which those he intended to wound carried off 'in pain and mortfication'. This scheme of Pantisocracy excited a smile among the kind-hearted and thinking part of mankind; but, among the vain and restless ignorant would-be-political economists, it met with more attention; and they, with their microscopic eyes, fancied they beheld in it what was not quite so visible to the common observer. Though the plan was soon abandoned, it was thought sufficient for the subject of a lecture, and afforded some mirth when the minds of the parties concerned in it arrived at manhood. Coleridge saw, soon after it was broached, that no scheme of colonizing that was not based on religion could be permanent.--Left to the disturbing forces of the human passions to which it would be exposed, it would soon perish; for all government to be permanent should be influenced by reason, and guided by religion. In the year 1795 Coleridge, residing then at Clevedon, a short distance from Bristol, published his first prose work, with some additions by Mr. Southey, the "Conciones ad Populum." In a short preface he observes, "The two following addresses were delivered in the month of February, 1795, and were followed by six others in defence of natural and revealed religion. 'There is a time to keep silence,' saith King Solomon;--but when I proceeded to the first verse of the fourth chapter of the Ecclesiastes, 'and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun: and behold the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power,' I concluded this was _not_ the 'time to keep silence;' for truth should be spoken at all times, but more especially at those times when to speak truth is dangerous." In these addresses he showed that the example of France was a warning to Great Britain; but, because he did not hold opinions equally violent with the Jacobin party of that day, he was put down as an anti-Jacobin; for, he says, "the annals of the French revolution have been recorded in letters of blood, that the knowledge of the few cannot counteract the ignorance of the many; that the light of philosophy, when it is confined to a small minority, points out its possessors as the victims, rather than the illuminators of the multitude. The patriots of France either hastened into the dangerous and gigantic error of making certain evils the means of contingent good, or were sacrificed by the mob, with whose prejudices and ferocity their unbending virtue forbade them to assimilate. Like Samson, the people were strong, like Samson, they were also blind:" and he admonishes them at the end of the third lecture to do all things in the spirit of love. "It is worthy of remark," says he, in a MS. note, "that we may possess a thing in such fulness as to prevent its possession from being an object of distinct consciousness. Only as it lessens or dims, we reflect on it, and learn to value it. This is one main cause why young men of high and ardent minds find nothing repulsive in the doctrines of necessity, which, in after years, they (as I have) recoil from. Thus, too, the faces of friends dearly beloved become distinct in memory or dream only after long absence." Of the work itself he says, "Except the two or three pages involving the doctrine of philosophical necessity and Unitarianism, I see little or nothing in these 'outbursts' of my 'youthful' zeal to 'retract', and with the exception of some flame-coloured epithets applied to persons, as to Mr. Pitt and others, or rather to personifications (for such they really were to 'me') as little to regret. Qualis ab initio [Greek: estaesae] S.T.C. [15] When a rifacimento of the 'Friend' took place, [1818] at vol. ii. p. 240, he states his reasons for reprinting the lecture referred to, one of the series delivered at Bristol in the year 1794-95, because, says he, "This very lecture, vide p. 10, has been referred to in an infamous libel in proof of the author's Jacobinism." When the mind of Coleridge was more matured he did not omit this truth, which has never been refuted, that the aristocratic system "had its golden side, for the noblest minds; but I "should," continues he, "act the part of a coward if I disguised my conviction that the errors of the aristocratic party were as gross, and far less excusable than those of the Jacobin. Instead of contenting themselves with opposing the real blessing of English law to the 'splendid promises of untried theory', too large a part of those who called themselves 'anti-Jacobins', did all in their power to suspend those blessings; and they furnished 'new arguments to the advocates of innovation', when they should have been answering 'the old ones!'" But, whatever were his opinions, they were founded on 'principle', and with the exception of the two above alluded to, he ought never to be accused of changing. Some years since, the late Charles Matthews, the comedian, (or rather, as Coleridge used to observe, "the comic poet acting his own poems,") showed me an autograph letter from Mr. Wordsworth to Matthews' brother, (who was at that time educating for the bar) and with whom he corresponded. In this letter he made the following observation, "To-morrow I am going to Bristol to see those two extraordinary young men, Southey and Coleridge," Mr. Wordsworth then residing at Allfoxden. They soon afterwards formed an intimacy, which continued (though not without some little interruption) during his life, as his "Biographia Literaria" and his will attest. Mr. Coleridge's next work was the "Watchman" in numbers--a miscellany to be published every eighth day. The first number appeared on the 5th of February, 1796. This work was a report of the state of the political atmosphere, to be interspersed with sketches of character and verse. It reached the 10th number, and was then dropped; the editor taking leave of his readers in the following address: "This is the last number of the Watchman. Henceforward I shall cease to cry the state of the political atmosphere. While I express my gratitude to those friends who exerted themselves so liberally in the establishment of this miscellany, I may reasonably be expected to assign some reason for relinquishing it thus abruptly. The reason is short and satisfactory. The work does not pay its expences. Part of my subscribers have relinquished it because it did not contain sufficient original composition, and a still larger because it contained too much. I have endeavoured to do well; and it must be attributed to defect of ability, not of inclination or effort, if the words of the prophet be altogether applicable to me, 'O watchman! thou hast watched in vain!'" Mr. Coleridge has given us in the "Biographia Literaria" a very lively account of his opinions, adventures, and state of feeling during this canvass in quest of subscribers. "Towards the close of the first year, that inauspicious hour," (it was, indeed, and for several reasons an "inauspicious hour" for him,) "when I left the friendly cloisters, and the happy grove of quiet, ever-honoured Jesus' College, Cambridge, to set on foot a periodical, entitled the 'Watchman,' that (according to the motto of the work) 'all might know the truth, and that truth might make us free!' "With a flaming prospectus 'Knowledge is power,' &c. and to cry the state of the political atmosphere and so forth, I set off on a tour to the north, from Bristol to Sheffield, for the purpose of procuring customers, preaching by the way in most great towns, as a hireless volunteer, in a blue coat and white waistcoat, that not a rag of the woman of Babylon might be seen on me; for I was at that time, though a Trinitarian (i.e. ad normam Platonis) in philosophy, yet a zealous Unitarian in religion; more accurately, I was a psilanthropist, one of those who believe our Lord to have been the real son of Joseph, and who lay the main stress on the resurrection rather than on the crucifixion. Oh! never can I remember those days with either shame or regret, for I was most sincere! most disinterested! My opinions were, indeed, in many and most important points erroneous, but my heart was single! Wealth, rank, life itself then seemed cheap to me, compared with the interests of (what I believe to be) the truth and the will of my Maker. I cannot even accuse myself of having been actuated by vanity; for, in the expansion of my enthusiasm, I did not think of myself at all. My campaign commenced at Birmingham, and my first attack was on a rigid Calvinist, a tallow-chandler by trade. He was a tall dingy man, in whom length was so predominant over breadth, that he might almost have been borrowed for a foundry poker. O that face! a face, [Greek: kat' emphasin!] I have it before me at this moment. The lank, black twine-like hair, pingui-nitescent, cut in a straight line, along the black stubble of his thin gunpowder eyebrows, that looked like a scorched aftermath from a last week's shaving. His coat collar behind in perfect unison, both of colour and lustre, with the coarse, yet glib cordage that I suppose he called his hair, and which with a 'bend' inward at the nape of the neck, (the only approach to flexure in his whole figure) slunk in behind his waistcoat; while the countenance lank, dark, very 'hard', and with strong perpendicular furrows, gave me a dim notion of some one looking at me through a 'used' gridiron, all soot, grease, and iron! A person to whom one of my letters of recommendation had been addressed, was my introducer. It was a 'new event' in my life, my first 'stroke' in the new business I had undertaken of an author; yes, and of an author on his own account. I would address," says Coleridge, "an affectionate exhortation to the youthful literati on my own experience. It will be but short; for the beginning, middle, and end converge to one charge. NEVER PURSUE LITERATURE AS A TRADE. [16] My companion," says he, "after some imperfect sentences, and a multitude of hums and hahs, abandoned the cause to his client; and I commenced an harangue of half an hour to Phileleutheros, the tallow-chandler, varying my notes through the whole gamut of eloquence, from the ratiocinative to the declamatory, and, in the latter, from the pathetic to the indignant. My taper man of lights listened with perseverant and praiseworthy patience, though (as I was afterwards told, in complaining of certain gales that were not altogether ambrosial,) it was a melting day with him. And what, sir! (he said, after a short pause,) might the cost be? only FOURPENCE, (O! how I felt the anti-climax, the abysmal bathos of that FOURPENCE!) 'only fourpence, sir, each number, to be published on every eighth day'. That comes to a deal of money at the end of a year; and how much did you say there was to be for the money? Thirty-two pages, sir! large octavo, closely printed. Thirty and two pages? Bless me, why except what I does in a family way on the sabbath, that's more than I ever reads, sir! all the year round. I am as great a one as any man in Brummagem, sir! for liberty and truth, and all them sort of things, but as to this, (no offence, I hope, sir!) I must beg to be excused. So ended my first canvass." Much the same indifference was shewn him at Manchester, &c., but he adds:--"From this rememberable tour, I returned nearly a thousand names on the subscription list of the 'Watchman;' yet more than half convinced that prudence dictated the abandonment of the scheme; but for this very reason I persevered in it; for I was at that period of my life so completely hagridden by the fear of being influenced by selfish motives, that to know a mode of conduct to be the dictate of 'prudence', was a sort of presumptive proof to my feelings, that the contrary was the dictate of 'duty'. Accordingly, I commenced the work, which was announced in London by long bills in letters larger than had ever been seen before, and which (I have been informed, for I did not see them myself) eclipsed the glories even of the lottery puffs; but, alas! the publication of the very first number was delayed beyond the day announced for its appearance. In the second number, an essay against fast days, with a most censurable application of a text from Isaiah, for its motto, lost me near five hundred of my subscribers at one blow. In the two following numbers, I made enemies of all my Jacobin and democratic patrons; for, disgusted by their infidelity and their adoption of French morals, and French philosophy, and, perhaps, thinking that charity ought to begin nearest home, instead of abusing the government and the aristocrats chiefly or entirely, as had been expected of me, I levelled my attacks at ''modern patriotism',' and even ventured to declare my belief, that whatever the motives of ministers might have been for the sedition (or as it was then the fashion to call them) the gagging bills, yet the bills themselves would produce an effect to be desired by all the true friends of freedom, as far they should contribute to deter men from openly declaiming on subjects, the 'principles of which they had never bottomed', and from 'pleading 'to' the 'poor and ignorant', instead of pleading for them.' At the same time I avowed my conviction, that national education, and a concurring spread of the gospel were the indispensable condition of any true political amelioration. Thus, by the time the seventh number was published, I had the mortification (but why should I say this, when, in truth, I cared too little for any thing that concerned my worldly interests, to be at all mortified about it?) of seeing the preceding numbers exposed in sundry old iron shops for a penny a piece. At the ninth number I dropped the work." He never recovered the money of his London publisher, and but little from his subscribers, and as he goes on to say:--"Must have been thrown into jail by my printer, for a sum between eighty and ninety pounds, if the money had not been paid for me by a man, by no means affluent, a dear friend who attached himself to me from my first arrival at Bristol, who continued my friend with a fidelity unconquered by time, or even by my own apparent neglect; a friend from whom I never received an advice that was not gentle and affectionate." (p. 177.) Coleridge's reputation from boyhood quietly increased, not through the favor, but the censure of reviewers. It was this which, contrary to their wishes, diffused his name as poet and philosopher. So long as there are readers to be gratified by calumny, there will always be found writers eager to furnish a supply; and he had other enemies, unacquainted with the critical profession, yet morbidly vain, and because disappointed in their literary hopes, no less malignant. Alas! how painful it is to witness at times the operation of some of the human passions.--Should envy take the lead, her twin sisters, hatred and malice, follow as auxiliaries in her train,--and, in the struggles for ascendancy and extension of her power, she subverts those principles which might impede her path, and then speedily effects the destruction of all the kindly feelings most honourable to man. Coleridge was conscientiously an opponent of the first revolutionary war, because he abhorred the principles; and it was part of his political creed, that whoever ceased "to act as an 'individual' by making himself a member of any society not sanctioned by his government, forfeited the rights of a citizen." He was at that time "a vehement anti-ministerialist," but, after the invasion of Switzerland, a more vehement anti-Gallican, and still more intensely an anti-Jacobin: "I retired," said he, "to a cottage at Stowey, and provided for my scanty maintenance by writing verses for a London Morning Paper. I saw plainly, that literature was not a profession by which I could expect to live; for 'I could not disguise from myself', that whatever my talents might or might not be in other respects, yet they were not of that 'sort' that 'could enable me to become a popular writer'; and that whatever my opinions might be in themselves, they were almost equi-distant from all the three opposite parties, the Pittites, the Foxites, and the democrats. Of the unsaleable nature of my writings I had an amusing memento one morning from our servant girl. For happening to rise at an earlier hour than usual, I observed her putting an extravagant quantity of paper into the grate in order to light the fire, and mildly checked her for her wastefulness; La, Sir! (replied poor Nanny) why, it is only WATCHMEN." There was at last a pause, as each party seemed worn out; for, "the hand of Providence had disciplined 'all' Europe into sobriety, as men tame wild elephants by alternate blows and caresses: now, that Englishmen of all classes are restored to their old English notions and feelings, it will with difficulty be credited, how great an influence was at that time possessed and exerted by the spirit of secret defamation (the too constant attendant on party zeal!) during the restless interim, from 1793 to the commencement of the Addington administration, or the year before the truce of Amiens." In short, the exhaustion which had followed the great stimulus, disposed individuals to reconciliation. Both parties found themselves in the wrong, the one had mistaken the moral character of the revolution, and the other had miscalculated its physical resources. The experiment was made at the price of great, we may say, of almost humiliating sacrifices; and wise men foresaw that it would fail, at least, in its direct and ostensible object. Yet it was purchased cheaply, and realized an object of equal value, and, if possible, of more vital importance; for it brought about a national unanimity, unexampled in our history since the reign of Elizabeth; and Providence, never failing to do his part when men have done theirs, soon provided a common focus in the cause of Spain, which made us all once more Englishmen, by gratifying and correcting the predilections of each party. The sincere reverers of the throne felt the cause of loyalty ennobled by its alliance with that of freedom while the 'honest' zealots of the people could not but admit that freedom itself assumed a more winning form, humanized by loyalty, and 'consecrated' by 'religious principle'. During this calm and rest, and while the political fever was subsiding, Coleridge retired, as he informs us, "to a cottage in Somersetshire, at the foot of Quantock," to devote himself to poetry, and to the study of ethics and psychology, to direct his thoughts and studies to the foundations of religion and morals. "During my residence here," he says, "I found myself all afloat; doubts rushed in; broke upon me 'from the fountains of the great deep',' and ''fell from the windows of Heaven'.' The fontal truths of natural religion and the books of Revelation alike contributed to the flood; and it was long ere my ark touched on an Ararat, and rested. The idea (viz. the law evolved in the mind) of the Supreme Being appeared to me to be as necessarily implied in all particular modes of being, as the idea, of infinite space in all the geometrical figures by which space is limited." He goes on to state at this period, about the latter end of the year 1796, "For a very long time I could not reconcile personality with infinity; and my head was with Spinosa, though my whole heart remained with Paul and John. Yet there had dawned upon me, even before I had met with the Critique of Pure Reason, a certain guiding light. If 'the mere intellect' could make no certain discovery of a holy and intelligent first cause, it might yet supply a demonstration that no legitimate argument could be drawn from the mere intellect 'against' its truth. 'And what is this' more than St. Paul's assertion, that by wisdom (more properly translated by the powers of reasoning) no man ever arrived at the knowledge of God? Man asks what is wisdom? and whence comes it? In Job, chap. 28th, it is stated, 'But to man he said, the fear of the Lord is wisdom for THEE! And to avoid evil, that is 'thy' understanding.'" Such were his philosophical opinions before his final conversion to the whole truth in Christ. He was contending for principles, and diligently in search of truth for its own sake;--the one thing only permanent, and which carries with it its "own exceeding great reward." Such was the state of his religious feelings and political opinions before his visit to Germany. There is a general observation or experience he has recorded, not only so applicable to him at that time, but equally to each stage of his career in life, as not to be lost sight of by his friends and admirers, when assailed, as he was, by opposing party-spirits, which, like opposite currents, were contending for the mastery. To avoid one party lest he should run on Scylla, he excited and provoked the jealousy and neglect of the other, who might have wrecked him on Charybdis. These were well-known dangers; but, as all navigable seas have their shoals often invisible; in order to avoid the effects of these jealousies, he selected from each party, men of experience to give him the soundings, and thus prevent him from wrecking his barque on rocks and quicksands; for, without such information, there could be little chance of escape. In so doing, be lost his popularity with the many, though these were evils he might perhaps have conquered (but still speaking figuratively); his crew (his great inward aid) had differed too seriously among themselves, and were under the influence of conflicting feelings. His whole mind was bent on the search after those truths that alone can determine fixed principles, and which not long after became to him an unerring guide. They were for him what the needle is to the mariner. The observation alluded to is as follows: "All my experience, from my first entrance into life to the present hour, is in favour of the warning maxim, that the man who opposes in toto 'the political or religious zealots of his age, is safer from their obloquy than he who differs from them but in one or two points only' IN DEGREE." This is a truth too important to pass lightly over, as in this consisted much of that feeling which prevented his being popular, (for unless an individual goes the whole length of the party who may choose to adopt him, he is discarded, and it is well for him if he is not persecuted and held up to public ridicule). [17] Zealots are usually superficial, but in herds they are found to support each other, and by their numbers assume an imposing air.--One weak man cannot stand, but three may.--By this mode of congregating, they are more easily managed by their leaders, whose impulses they obey, and to whom they become willing slaves. Men who sacrifice the many to the few, have been held out by almost every writer, where moral and political subjects have been introduced, as warnings to those liable to fall into their snares, but which have seemingly been put forth to little purpose. The necessity, therefore, for a continuation of instruction on such important moral truths, is still required; for, in the contending currents, so much mischief is often produced, that to divert these conflicting opinions, and to try to bring them into unity, Coleridge thought it a duty to employ his strength of intellect; he hoped to preserve a principle which he deemed so useful to mankind. The foot of Quantock was to Coleridge a memorable spot; here his studies were serious and deep; protected by one of the kindest of friends, and stimulated by the society also of a brother poet, whose lays seemed to have inspired his song, and also to have chimed in with it; for although it has been shewn that his poetic genius first dawned in his 16th year, yet after he left College, and during his residence at this place, [18] it seemed suddenly to have arrived at poetic manhood, and to have reached this developement as early as his 25th year. In his more serious studies he had greatly advanced, and had already planned and stored up much for his future life. It will often be repeated, but not too often for a society so full of sciolists and disbelievers,--men who are so self-satisfied as not to require teaching,--that Coleridge never was an idle man; and that, if nothing else remained, the progress he made in intellectual acquirements during his residence at Stowey and his short stay in Germany, might be instanced. Before he quitted this country to embark in fresh studies we have his own statement: "I became convinced, that religion, as both the corner-stone and the key-stone of morality, must have a 'moral' origin; so far, at least, that the evidence of its doctrines could not, like the truths of abstract science, be 'wholly' independent of the will. It was therefore to be expected, that its 'fundamental' truth would be such as MIGHT be denied, though only by the fool, and even by the fool from madness of 'heart' alone! The question then concerning our faith in the existence of a God, not only as the ground of the universe by his essence, but by his wisdom and holy will as its maker and judge, appeared to stand thus: the sciential reason, the objects of wit are purely theoretical, remains neutral, as long as its name and semblance are not usurped by the opponents of the doctrine; but it 'then' becomes an effective ally by exposing the false show of demonstration, or by evincing the equal demonstrability of the contrary from premises equally logical. The 'understanding', meantime suggests, the analogy of 'experience' facilitates, the belief. Nature excites and recalls it, as by a perpetual revelation. Our feelings almost necessitate it; and the law of conscience peremptorily commands it. The arguments that all apply to, are in its favor; and there is nothing against it, but its own sublimity. It could not be intellectually more evident without becoming morally less effective; without counteracting its own end by sacrificing the 'life' of faith to the cold mechanism of a worthless, because compulsory assent. The belief of a God and a future state (if a passive acquiescence may be flattered with the name of 'belief') does not, indeed, always beget a good heart; but a good heart so naturally begets the belief, that the very few exceptions must be regarded as strange anomalies from strange and unfortunate circumstances. From these premises I proceeded to draw the following conclusions,--first, that having once fully admitted the existence of an infinite yet self-conscious Creator, we are not allowed to ground the irrationality of any other article of faith on arguments which would equally prove 'that' to be irrational, which we had allowed to be 'real'. Secondly, that whatever is deducible from the admission of a 'self-comprehending' and 'creative' spirit, may be legitimately used in proof of the 'possibility' of any further mystery concerning the Divine Nature. "Possibilitatem mysteriorum (Trinitatis, &c.) contra insultus infidelium et hereticorum a contradictionibus vindico; haud quidem veritatem, quæ revelatione sola stabiliri possit;" says Leibnitz, in a letter to his duke. He then adds the following just and important remark. "In vain will tradition or texts of Scripture be adduced in support of a doctrine, 'donec clava impossibilitatis et contradictionis e manibus horum Herculum extorta fuerit.' For the heretic will still reply, that texts, the literal sense of which is not so much above as directly against all reason, must be understood figuratively, as Herod is a Fox, &c. These principles," says he, "I held philosophically, while in respect of revealed religion, I remained a zealous Unitarian. I considered the idea of a Trinity a fair scholastic inference from the being of God, as a creative intelligence; and that it was therefore entitled to the rank of an esoteric doctrine of natural religion: but seeing in the same no practical or moral bearing, I confined it to the schools of philosophy. The admission of the Logos, as hypostasized (i.e. neither a mere attribute nor a personification), in no respect removed my doubts concerning the incarnation and the redemption by the cross; which I could neither reconcile in 'reason' with the impassiveness of the Divine Being, nor in my moral feelings with the sacred distinction between things and persons, the vicarious payment of a debt and the vicarious expiation of guilt. A more thorough revolution in my philosophic principles, and a deeper insight into my own heart were yet wanting. Nevertheless, I cannot doubt, that the difference of my metaphysical notions from those of Unitarians in general 'contributed' to my final re-conversion to the 'whole truth' in 'Christ;' even as according to his own confession the books of certain Platonic philosophers (Libri quorundam Platonicorum) commenced the rescue of St. Augustine's faith from the same error, aggravated by the far darker accompaniment of the Manichean heresy." Perhaps it is right also to state, that no small share of his final reconversion was attributable to that zeal and powerful genius, and to his great desire that others should become sharers in his own acquirements, which he was so desirous to communicate. During his residence at the foot of Quantock, his thoughts and studies were not only directed to an enquiry into the great truths of religion, but, while he stayed at Stowey, he was in the habit of preaching often at the Unitarian Chapel at Taunton, and was greatly respected by all the better and educated classes in the neighbourhood. He spoke of Stowey with warmth and affection to the latest hours of his life. Here, as before mentioned, dwelt his friend Mr. Thomas Poole--the friend (justly so termed) to whom he alludes in his beautiful dedicatory poem to his brother the Rev. George Coleridge, and in which, when referring to himself, he says, "To me the Eternal Wisdom hath dispensed A different fortune and more different mind-- Me from the spot where first I sprang to light Too soon transplanted, ere my soul had fix'd Its first domestic loves; and hence through life Chasing chance-started friendships. A brief while Some have preserved me from life's pelting ills; But, like a tree with leaves of feeble stem, If the clouds lasted, and a sudden breeze Ruffled the boughs, they on my head at once Dropp'd the collected shower; and some most false, False and fair foliaged as the Manchineel, Have tempted me to slumber in their shade E'en mid the storm; then breathing subtlest damps, Mix'd their own venom with the rain from Heaven, That I woke poison'd! But, all praise to Him Who gives us all things, more have yielded me _Permanent shelter_; and beside one friend, [19] Beneath the impervious covert of one oak, I've raised a lowly shed, and know the names Of husband and of father; not unhearing Of that divine and nightly-whispering voice, Which from my _childhood to maturer years_ Spake to me of predestinated wreaths, Bright with no fading colours!" These beautiful and affecting lines to his brother are dated May 26th, 1797, Nether Stowey, Somerset. In his will, dated Highgate, July 2nd, 1830, he again refers to this friend, and directs his executor to present a plain gold mourning ring to Thomas Poole, Esq., of Nether Stowey. "The Dedicatory Poem to my 'Juvenile Poems,' and my 'Fears in Solitude,'[20] render it unnecessary to say more than what I then, in my early manhood, thought and felt, I now, a gray-headed man, still think and feel." In this volume, dedicated to his brother, are to be found several poems in early youth and upwards, none of later date than 1796. The "Ode," he says, "on the Departing Year, was written on the 24th, 25th, and 26th of December, 1796, and published separately on the last day of that year. 'The Religious Musings' were written as early as Christmas 1794." He then was about to enter his 23rd year. The preface to this volume is a key to his opinions and feelings at that time, and which the foregoing part of this memoir is also intended to illustrate. "Compositions resembling those of the present volume are not unfrequently condemned for their querulous egotism. But egotism is to be condemned only when it offends against time and place, as in a history or epic poem. To censure it in a monody or sonnet is almost as absurd as to dislike a circle for being round. Why then write sonnets or monodies? Because they give me pleasure when, perhaps, nothing else could. After the more violent emotions of sorrow, the mind demands amusement, and can find it in employment alone; but full of its late sufferings, it can endure no employment not in some measure connected with them. Forcibly to turn away our attention to general subjects is a painful and most often an unavailing effort. 'But O! how grateful to a wounded heart The tale of misery to impart From others' eyes bid artless sorrows flow, And raise esteem upon the base of woe.' (Shaw.) The communicativeness of our nature leads us to describe our own sorrows; in the endeavour to describe them, intellectual activity is exerted; and from intellectual activity there results a pleasure, which is gradually associated, and mingles as a corrective, with the painful subject of the description. 'True,' (it may be answered) 'but how are the PUBLIC interested in your sorrows or your description'?' We are for ever attributing personal unities to imaginary aggregates.--What is the PUBLIC, but a term for a number of scattered individuals? Of whom as many will be interested in these sorrows, as have experienced the same or similar. 'Holy be the lay Which mourning soothes the mourner on his way.' If I could judge of others by myself, I should not hesitate to affirm, that the most interesting passages in our most interesting poems are those in which the author developes his own feelings. The sweet voice of Cona [21] never sounds so sweetly, as when it speaks of itself; and I should almost suspect that man of an unkindly heart, who could read the opening of the third book of 'Paradise Lost' without peculiar emotion. By a law of nature, he, who labours under a strong feeling, is impelled to seek for sympathy; but a poet's feelings are all strong.--Quicquid amat valde amat.--Akenside therefore speaks with philosophical accuracy when he classes love and poetry as producing the same effects: 'Love and the wish of poets when their tongue Would teach to others' bosoms, what so charms Their own.' 'Pleasures of Imagination'. There is one species of egotism which is truly disgusting; not that which leads to communicate our feelings to others, but that which would reduce the feelings of others; to an identity with our own. The atheist who exclaims 'pshaw,' when he glances his eye on the praises of Deity, is an egotist; an old man, when he speaks contemptuously of love verses is an egotist; and the sleek favourites of fortune are egotists when they condemn all 'melancholy discontented' verses. Surely it would be candid not merely to ask whether the poem pleases ourselves, but to consider whether or no there may not be others, to whom it is well calculated to give an innocent pleasure. I shall only add, that each of my readers will, I hope, remember, that these poems on various subjects, which, he reads at one time and under the influence of one set of feelings, were written at different times and prompted by very different feelings; and, therefore, that, the supposed inferiority of one poem to another may sometimes be owing to the temper of mind in which he happens to peruse it." In the second edition (the second edition was published in conjunction with his friends Charles Lloyd and Charles Lamb) is added the following: "My poems have been rightly charged with a profusion of double-epithets, and a general turgidness. I have pruned the double-epithets with no sparing hand; and used my best efforts to tame the swell and glitter both of thought and diction. This latter fault, however, had insinuated itself into my Religious Musings with such intricacy of union, that sometimes I have omitted to disentangle the weed from the fear of snapping the flower. A third and heavier accusation has been brought against me, that of obscurity; but not, I think, with equal justice. An author is obscure, when his conceptions are dim and imperfect, and his language incorrect, or inappropriate, or involved. A poem that abounds in allusions, like the 'Bard' of Gray, or one that impersonates high and abstract truths, like Collins's 'Ode on the Poetical Character,' claims not to be popular, but should be acquitted of obscurity. The deficiency is in the reader; but this is a charge which every poet, whose imagination is warm and rapid, must expect from his 'contemporaries'. Milton did not escape it; and it was adduced with virulence against Gray and Collins. We now hear no more of it, not that their poems are better understood at present, than they were at their first publication; but their fame is established; and a critic would accuse him self of frigidity or, inattention, who should profess not to understand them: but a living writer is yet sub judice; and if we cannot follow his conceptions or enter into his feelings, it is more consoling to our pride to consider him as lost beneath, than as soaring above, us. If any man expect from my poems the same easiness of style which he admires in a drinking-song for him, I have not written. Intelligibilia, non intellectum adfero. I expect neither profit nor general fame by my writings; and I consider myself as having been amply repaid without either. Poetry has been to me its own 'exceeding great reward;' it has soothed my afflictions; it has multiplied and refined my enjoyments; it has endeared solitude; and it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and the beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me." We seem now to have arrived at that period of Coleridge's life which a profound student of his poetry, and himself a pleasing and elegant poet, has considered the period of the "Annus Mirabilis." "The Manhood," he observes, "of Coleridge's true poetical life was in the year 1797." This is perfectly true, and at that period he was only twenty-five, as before stated. He was, as is proved in his earlier poems, highly susceptible and sensitive, requiring kindness and sympathy, and the support of something like intellectual friendship. He tells us that he chose his residence at Stowey, on account of his friend Mr. Poole, who assisted and enabled him to brave the storm of "Life's pelting ills." Near him, at Allfoxden, resided Mr. Wordsworth, with whom, he says, "Shortly after my settlement there, I became acquainted, and whose society I found an invaluable blessing, and to whom I looked up with equal reverence as a poet, a philosopher, or a man. His conversation extended to almost all subjects except physics and politics; with the latter he never troubled himself." Although Coleridge lived a most retired life, it was not enough to exempt him from the watchfulness of the spies of government whose employment required some apparent activity before they could receive the reward they expected. Nor did he escape the suspicion of being a dangerous person to the government; which arose partly from his connexion with Wordsworth, and from the great seclusion of his life. Coleridge was ever with book, paper, and pencil in hand, making, in the language of, artists, "Sketches and studies from nature." This suspicion, accompanied with the usual quantity of obloquy, was not merely attached to Coleridge, but extended to his friend, "whose perfect innocence was even adduced as a suspicion of his guilt," by one of these sapients, who observed that "as to Coleridge, there is not much harm in him; for he is a whirl-brain, that talks whatever comes uppermost; but that Wordsworth! he is a dark traitor. You never hear _him_ say a syllable on the subject." During this time the brother poets must have been composing or arranging the Lyrical Ballads, which were published the following year, i.e. 1798. Coleridge also in 1797 wrote the "Remorse," or rather the play he first called Osorio, the name of the principal character in it, but finding afterwards that there was a respectable family of that name residing in London, it was changed for the title of the Remorse, and the principal character, Osorio, to Ordonio. This play was sent to Sheridan. The following remarks were given in Coleridge's "Biographia Literaria," which wholly clears him from the suspicion of being concerned in making maps of a coast, where a smuggler could not land, and they shew what really was his employment; and how poets may be mistaken at all times for other than what they wish to be considered: "During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry,--the power of exciting the sympathy of a reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination. The sudden charm which accidents of light and shade, which moonlight or sunset diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining both. These are the poetry of nature. The thought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real; and real in 'this' sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency. For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life: the characters and incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and its vicinity, where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after them, or to notice them when they present themselves. In this idea originated the plan of the 'Lyrical Ballads,' in which it was agreed that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself, as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us,--an inexhaustible treasure; but for which, in consequence of the feeling of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand. With this view I wrote the 'Ancient Mariner,' and was preparing, among other poems, the 'Dark Ladie' and the 'Christabel,' in which I should have more nearly realized my ideal than I had done in my first attempt: but Mr. Wordsworth's industry had proved so much more successful, and the number of his poems so much greater, that my compositions, instead of forming a balance, appeared rather an interpolation of heterogeneous matter. Mr. Wordsworth added two or three poems written in his own character, in the impassioned, lofty, and sustained diction, which is characteristic of his genius. In this form the 'Lyrical Ballads' were published, and were presented by him as an 'experiment', whether subjects, which from their nature rejected the usual ornaments and extra-colloquial style of poems in general, might not be so managed, in the language of ordinary life, as to produce the pleasurable interest which it is the peculiar business of poetry to impart. To the second edition he added a preface of considerable length, in which, notwithstanding some passages of apparently a contrary import, he was understood to contend for the extension of the style to poetry of all kinds, and to reject as vicious and indefensible all phrases and forms of style that were not included in what he (unfortunately, I think, adopting an equivocal expression) called the language of 'real' life. From this preface, prefixed to poems in which it was impossible to deny the presence of original genius, however mistaken its direction might be deemed, arose the whole long-continued controversy. For, from the conjunction of perceived power with supposed heresy, I explain the inveteracy, and in some instances, I grieve to say, the acrimonious passions, with which the controversy has been conducted by the assailants." (Vol. ii. p. 1.) There are few incidents in the life of the literary man to make any narrations of sufficient importance or sufficiently amusing for the readers, and the readers only of works of amusement. The biography of such men is supposed to contain the faithful history and growth of their minds, and the circumstances under which it is developed, and to this it must be confined. What has been done by Coleridge himself, and where he has been his own biographer, will be carefully noticed and given here, when it falls in with the intention and purposes of this work; for this reason the Biographia Literaria has been so frequently quoted. Coleridge had passed nearly half his life in a retirement almost amounting to solitude, and this he preferred. First, he was anxious for leisure to pursue those studies which wholly engrossed his mind; and secondly, his health permitted him but little change, except when exercise was required; and during the latter part of his life he became nearly crippled by the rheumatism. His character will form a part in the Philosophical History of the Human Mind, which will be placed in the space left for it by his amiable and most faithful friend and disciple, whose talents, whose heart and acquirements makes him most fit to describe them, and whose time was for so many years devoted to this great man. But, to continue in the order of time, in June, 1797, he was visited by his friend Charles Lamb and his sister. On the morning after their arrival, Coleridge met with an accident which disabled him from walking during the whole of their stay. One evening, when they had left him for a few hours, he composed the poem, "This Lime-tree Bower my Prison," in which he refers to his old friend, while watching him in fancy with his sister, winding and ascending the hills at a short distance, himself detained as if a prisoner: "Yes! they wander on In gladness all; but thou, methinks, most glad, My gentle-hearted Charles! for thou hast pined And hunger'd after nature, many a year; In the great city pent, winning thy way With sad yet patient soul, through evil, and pain, And strange calamity! Ah! slowly sink Behind the western ridge, thou glorious sun! Shine in the slant beams of the sinking orb, Ye purple heath flowers! richlier burn, ye clouds! Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves! And kindle, thou blue ocean! So my friend Struck with deep joy may stand, as I have stood, Silent with swimming sense; yea, gazing round On the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem Less gross than bodily; and of such hues As veil the Almighty Spirit, when yet he makes Spirits perceive his presence." During his residence here, Mr. William Hazlitt became acquainted with him, which is thus vividly recorded in the 'Liberal': "My father was a dissenting minister at Wem, in Shropshire; and in the year 1798, Mr. Coleridge came to Shrewsbury, to succeed Mr. Rowe in the spiritual charge of a Unitarian congregation there. He did not come till late on the Saturday afternoon before he was to preach, and Mr. Rowe, who himself went down to the coach in a state of anxiety and expectation, to look for the arrival of his successor, could find no one at all answering the description, but a round-faced man, in a short black coat (like a shooting jacket), which hardly seemed to have been made for him, but who appeared to be talking at a great rate to his fellow-passengers. Mr. Rowe had scarcely returned to give an account of his disappointment, when the round-faced man in black entered, and dissipated all doubts on the subject, by beginning to talk. He did not cease while he stayed, nor has he since that I know of. [22] He held the good town of Shrewsbury in delightful suspense for three weeks that he remained there, 'fluttering the proud Salopians like an eagle in a dove-cot;' and the Welsh mountains, that skirt the horizon with their tempestuous confusion, agree to have heard no such mystic sounds since the days of 'High-born Hoel's harp or soft Llewellyn's lyre!' My father lived ten miles from Shrewsbury, and was in the habit of exchanging visits with Mr. Rowe, and Mr. Jenkins of Whitchurch (nine miles further on), according to the custom of dissenting ministers in each other's neighbourhood. A line of communication is thus established, by which the flame of civil and religious liberty is kept alive, and nourishes its mouldering fire unquenchable, like the fires in the Agamemnon of �schylus, placed at different stations, that waited for ten long years to announce, with their blazing pyramids, the destruction of Troy. Coleridge had agreed to come once to see my father, according to the courtesy of the country, as Mr. Rowe's probable successor; but in the meantime I had gone to hear him preach the Sunday after his arrival. A poet and a philosopher getting up into a Unitarian pulpit to preach the gospel was a romance in these degenerate days,--which was not to be resisted. It was in January, 1798, that I rose one morning before daylight, to walk ten miles in the mud, to hear this celebrated person preach. Never, the longest day I have to live, shall I have such another walk as this cold, raw, comfortless one, in the winter of the year 1798. 'Il y a des impressions que ni le tems, ni les circonstances peuvent effacer. Dussé-je vivre des siècles entiers, le doux tems de ma jeunesse ne peut renaître pour moi, ni s'effacer jamais dans ma mémoire.' When I got there, the organ was playing the 100th psalm; and, when it was done, Mr. Coleridge rose and gave out his text,--'He departed again into a mountain 'himself alone'.' As he gave out this text, his voice 'rose like a stream of rich distilled perfumes;' and when he came to the two last words, which he pronounced loud, deep, and distinct, it seemed to me, who was then young, as if the sounds had echoed from the bottom of the human heart, and as if that prayer might have floated in solemn silence through the universe. The idea of St. John came into my mind, 'of one crying in the wilderness, who had his loins girt about, and whose food was locusts and wild honey.' The preacher then launched into his subject, like an eagle dallying with the wind. The sermon was upon peace and war--upon church and state--not their alliance, but their separation--on the spirit of the world, and the spirit of Christianity, not as the same, but as opposed to one another. He talked of those who had 'inscribed the cross of Christ on banners dripping with human gore.' He made a poetical and pastoral excursion,--and to show the fatal effects of war, drew a striking contrast between the simple shepherd-boy, driving his team afield, or sitting under the hawthorn, piping to his flock, as though he should never be old,' and the same poor country lad, crimped, kidnapped, brought into town, made drunk at an alehouse, turned into a wretched drummer-boy, with his hair sticking on end with powder and pomatum, a long cue at his back, and tricked out in the finery of the profession of blood: 'Such were the notes our once loved poet sung;' and, for myself, I could not have been more delighted if I had heard the music of the spheres. Poetry and Philosophy had met together. Truth and Genius had embraced under the eye and with the sanction of Religion. This was even beyond my hopes. I returned home well satisfied. The sun that was still labouring pale and wan through the sky, obscured by thick mists, seemed an emblem of the 'good cause'; and the cold dank drops of dew, that hung half melted on the beard of the thistle, had something genial and refreshing in them-- ... "On the Tuesday following, the half-inspired speaker came. I was called down into the room where he was, and went half-hoping, half-afraid. He received me very graciously, and I listened for a long time without uttering a word, and did not suffer in his opinion by my silence. 'For those two hours (he was afterwards pleased to say) he was conversing with W. H.'s forehead.' His appearance was different from what I had anticipated from seeing him before. At a distance, and in the dim light of the chapel, there was to me a strange wildness in his aspect, a dusky obscurity, and I thought him pitted with the small-pox. His complexion was at that time clear, and even bright, 'As are the children of yon azure sheen.' His forehead was broad and high, as if built of ivory, with large projecting eyebrows, and his eyes rolling beneath them like a sea with darkened lustre. 'A certain tender bloom his face o'erspread;' a purple tinge, as we see it in the pale, thoughtful complexions of the Spanish portrait painters, Murillo and Velasquez. His mouth was rather open, his chin good-humoured and round, and his nose small. Coleridge in his person was rather above the common size, inclining to the corpulent. His hair (now, alas! grey, and during the latter years of his life perfectly white) was then black, and glossy as the raven's wing, and fell in smooth masses over his forehead. This long liberal hair is peculiar to enthusiasts." [23] (The Liberal, vol. ii. pp. 23-27.) He used, in his hours of relaxation, to relate the state of his feelings, and his adventures during the short time he was a preacher. His congregations were large, and if he had the power of attracting one man of such talents from a distance, it may well be understood how the many near the chapel flocked to listen to him; in short, if one is to give credence to current report, he emptied churches and chapels to hear him. If he had needed any stimulus, this would have been sufficient, but such a mind so intensely occupied in the search after truth needed no external excitement. He has often said, that one of the effects of preaching was, that it compelled him to examine the Scriptures with greater care and industry. These additional exertions and studies assisted mainly to his final conversion to the whole truth; for it was still evident that his mind was perplexed, and that his philosophical opinions would soon yield to the revealed truth of Scripture. He has already pointed out what he felt on this important question, how much he differed from the generally received opinions of the Unitarians, confessing that he needed a thorough revolution in his philosophical doctrines, and that an insight into his own heart was wanting. "While my mind was thus perplexed, by a gracious providence," says he, "for which I can never be sufficiently grateful, the generous and munificent patronage of Mr. Josiah and Mr. Thomas Wedgewood enabled me to finish my education in Germany. Instead of troubling others with my own crude notions, and juvenile compositions, I was thenceforward better employed in attempting to store my own head with the wisdom of others. I made the best use of my time and means; and there is therefore no period of my life on which I can look back with such unmingled satisfaction." He quitted Clevedon and his cottage in the following farewell lines:-- "Ah! quiet dell! dear cot, and mount sublime! I was constrain'd to quit you. Was it right, While my unnumber'd brethren toil'd and bled, That I should dream away the entrusted hours On rose-leaf beds, pampering the coward heart With feelings all too delicate for use? Sweet is the tear that from some Howard's eye Drops on the cheeks of one he lifts from earth: And he that works me good with unmoved face, Does it but half: he chills me while he aids,-- My benefactor, not my brother man! Yet even this, this cold beneficence Praise, praise it, O my Soul! oft as thou scann'st The Sluggard Pity's vision-weaving tribe! Who sigh for wretchedness, yet shun the wretched, Nursing in some delicious solitude Their slothful loves and dainty sympathies! I therefore go, and join head, heart, and hand, Active and firm, to fight the bloodless fight Of Science, freedom, and the truth in Christ. Yet oft when after honourable toil Rests the tired mind, and waking loves to dream, My spirit shall revisit thee, dear cot! Thy jasmin and thy window-peeping rose, And myrtles fearless of the mild sea-air. And I shall sigh fond wishes--sweet abode! Ah! had none greater! And that all had such! It might be so, but, oh! it is not yet. Speed it, O Father! Let thy Kingdom come." He drew his own character when he described that of Satyrane, the idolocast or breaker of idols, the name he went by among his friends and familiars. "From his earliest youth," says he, "Satyrane had derived his highest pleasures from the admiration of moral grandeur and intellectual energy; and during the whole of his life he had a greater and more heartfelt delight in the superiority of other men to himself than men in general derive from their belief of their own. His readiness to imagine a superiority where it did not exist, was for many years his predominant foible; his pain from the perception of inferiority in others whom he had heard spoken of with any respect, was unfeigned and involuntary, and perplexed him as a something which he did not comprehend. In the child-like simplicity of his nature he talked to all men as if they were his equals in knowledge and talents, and many whimsical anecdotes could be related connected with this habit; he was constantly scattering good seed on unreceiving soils. When he was at length compelled to see and acknowledge the true state of the morals and intellect of his contemporaries, his disappointment was severe, and his mind, always thoughtful, became pensive and sad:--_for to love and sympathize with mankind was a necessity of his nature_." He sought refuge from his own sensitive nature in abstruse meditations, and delighted most in those subjects requiring the full exercise of his intellectual powers, which never seemed fatigued--and in his early life never did sun shine on a more joyous being! "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, seem'd mine. But now afflictions bow me down to earth Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth, But oh! 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." [24] It was indeed an inauspicious hour "when he changed his abode from the happy groves of Jesus' College to Bristol." But it was so ordained! He sought literature as a trade,--and became an author: "whatever," he would say, "I write, that alone which contains the truth _will live, for truth only is permanent_. The rest will deservedly perish." He wrote to supply the fountain which was to feed the fertilizing rills,--to develope the truth was that at which he aimed, and in which he hoped to find his reward. On the 16th of September, 1798, he sailed from Great Yarmouth to Hamburg, in company with Mr. Wordsworth and his sister in his way to Germany, and now for the first time beheld "his native land" retiring from him. In a series of letters, published first in the "Friend," afterwards in his "Biographia Literaria," is to be found a description of his passage to Germany, and short tour through that country. His fellow passengers as described by him were a motley group, suffering from the usual effects of a rolling sea. One of them, who had caught the customary antidote to sympathy for suffering, to witness which is usually painful, began his mirth by not inaptly observing, "That Momus might have discovered an easier way to see a man's inside than by placing a window in his breast. He needed only to have taken a salt-water trip in a pacquet-boat." Coleridge thinks that a "pacquet is far superior to a stage-coach, as a means of making men open out to each other. In the latter the uniformity of posture disposes to dozing, and the definiteness of the period at which the company will separate, makes each individual think of those 'to' whom he is going, rather than of those 'with' whom he is going. But at sea more curiosity is excited, if only on this account, that the pleasant or unpleasant qualities of your companions are of greater importance to you, from the uncertainty how long you may be obliged to house with them." On board was a party of Danes, who, from his appearance in a suit of black, insisted he was a "Docteur Teology." To relieve himself of any further questioning on this head, he bowed assent "rather than be nothing." "Certes," he says, "We were not of the Stoic school; for we drank, and talked, and sung altogether; and then we rose and danced on the deck a set of dances, which, in _one_ sense of the word at least, were very intelligibly and appropriately entitled reels. The passengers who lay in the cabin below in all the agonies of sea-sickness, must have found our bacchanalian merriment a tune Harsh and of dissonant mood for their complaint. I thought so at the time; and how closely the greater number of our virtues are connected with the fear of death, and how little sympathy we bestow on pain, when there is no danger." The Dane soon convinced him of the justice of an old remark, that many a faithful portrait in our novels and farces, has been rashly censured for an outrageous caricature, or perhaps nonentity. "I had retired to my station in the boat when he came and seated himself by my side, and appeared not a little tipsy. He commenced the conversation in the most magnific style, and a sort of pioneering to his own vanity, he flattered me with _such_ grossness! The parasites of the old comedy were modest in comparison." After a ludicrous conversation which took place, he passes on to the description of another passenger, an Englishman, who spoke German fluently and interpreted many of the jokes of a Prussian who formed one of the party. "The Prussian was a travelling merchant, turned of threescore, a hale, tall, strong man, and full of stories, gesticulations, and buffoonery, with the soul as well as the look of a mountebank, who, while he is making you laugh, picks your pocket. Amid all his droll looks and droll gestures, there remained one look untouched by laughter; and that one look was the true face, the others were but its mask. The Hanoverian (another of the party) was a pale, bloated, young man, whose father had made a large fortune in London as an army contractor. He seemed to emulate the manners of young Englishmen of fortune. He was a good-natured fellow, not without information or literature, but a most egregious coxcomb. He had been in the habit of attending the House of Commons; and had once spoken, as he informed me, with great applause in a debating society. For this he appeared to have qualified himself with laudable industry; for he was perfect in Walker's Pronouncing Dictionary, and with an accent that forcibly reminded me of the Scotchman in Roderick Random, who professed to teach the English pronunciation; he was constantly _deferring_ to my superior judgment, whether or no I had pronounced this or that word with propriety or 'the true delicacy.' When he spoke, though it were only half a dozen sentences, he always rose; for which I could detect no other motive, than his partiality to that elegant phrase, so liberally introduced in the orations of our British legislators, 'While I am on my legs.'" Coleridge continues his description of the party, and relates a quarrel that ensued between a little German tailor and his wife, by which he was the gainer of a bed, it being too cold to continue much longer on deck: "In the evening the sea rolling higher, the Dane became worse, and in consequence increased his remedy, viz. brandy, sugar, and nutmeg, in proportion to the room left in his stomach. The conversation or oration 'rather than dialogue, became extravagant beyond all that I ever heard.' After giving an account of his fortune acquired in the island of Santa Cruz, 'he expatiated on the style in which he intended to live in Denmark, and the great undertakings he proposed to himself to commence, till the brandy aiding his vanity, and his vanity and garrulity aiding the brandy, he talked like a madman. After this drunken apostrophe he changed the conversation, and commenced an harangue on religion, (mistaking Coleridge for "un Philosophe" in the continental sense of the word) he talked of the Deity in a declamatory style very much resembling the devotional rants of that rude blunderer Mr. Thomas Paine, in his 'Age of Reason'. I dare aver, that few men have less reason to charge themselves with indulging in persiflage than myself; I should hate it, if it were only that it is a Frenchman's vice, and feel a pride in avoiding it, because our own language is too honest to have a word to express it by. At four o'clock I observed a wild duck swimming on the waves, a single solitary wild duck. It is not easy to conceive, how interesting a thing it looked in that round objectless desert of waters." The cry of 'land' was heard soon afterwards, and in a short time they dropped anchor at Cuxhaven, and proceeded from thence in a boat to Hamburg. After this he travelled on to [25] Ratzeburg, and then took up his residence with a pastor for the purpose of acquiring the German language, but with what success will be presently shown. He soon after proceeded through Hanover to Göttingen.--Here he informs us he regularly "attended lectures in the morning in physiology, in the evening an natural history under BLUMENBACH, a name as dear to every Englishman who has studied at the university, as it is venerable to men of science throughout Europe! Eichorn's Lectures on the New Testament were repeated to me from notes by a student from Ratzeburg, a young man of sound learning and indefatigable industry, who is now I believe a professor of the oriental languages at Heidelberg." Few persons visit Gottingen without ascending the Brocken. At the close of one of their academic studies, equivalent to, what in this country is called a term, it was agreed that the following party should visit the Hartz Mountains, &c. Namely, Coleridge, the two Parrys of Bath, Charles and Edward, sons of the celebrated physician of that name, the son also of Professor Blumenbach, Dr. Carlyon, Mr. Chester, and Mr. Greenough. Coleridge and the party made the ascent of the Brocken, on the Hanoverian side of this mountain. During the toil of the ascent, Coleridge amused his companions with recapitulating some trifling verses, which he was wont to do some twenty years afterwards to amuse children of five and six years old, as Miss Mary Rowe, Tity Mouse Brim, Dr. Daniel Dove, of Doncaster, and his Horse Nobbs. It should, however, be observed, that these Dr. Carlyon seemed to think worth notice, while the Christabel and Ancient Mariner were probably but little to his taste. His dress, a short jacket of coarse material, though convenient, was not quite classical in a party of philosophical erratics in quest of novelty. This tale of Dr. Daniel Dove, of Doncaster, has given a frame and pegs, on which some literary man has founded a story, and on which he has hung the contents of his scrap book. The invention is not Coleridge's; and the writer believes the story itself to be traditional. The following account of his ascent up the Brocken was written by himself, soon after his return from Germany: FRAGMENT OF A JOURNEY OVER THE BROCKEN, &c. IN 1799. "Through roads no way rememberable, we came to Gieloldshausen, over a bridge, on which was a mitred statue with a great crucifix in its arms. The village, long and ugly; but the church, like most Catholic churches, interesting; and this being Whitsun Eve, all were crowding to it, with their mass-books and rosaries, the little babies commonly with coral crosses hanging on the breast. Here we took a guide, left the village, ascended a hill, and now the woods rose up before us in a verdure which surprised us like a sorcery. The spring had burst forth with the suddenness of a Russian summer. As we left Göttingen there were buds, and here and there a tree half green; but here were woods in full foliage, distinguished from summer only by the exquisite freshness of their tender green. We entered the wood through a beautiful mossy path; the moon above us blending with the evening light, and every now and then a nightingale would invite the others to sing, and some or other commonly answered, and said, as we suppose, 'It is yet somewhat too early!' for the song was not continued. We came to a square piece of greenery, completely walled on all four sides by the beeches; again entered the wood, and having travelled about a mile, emerged from it into a grand plain--mountains in the distance, but ever by our road the skirts of the green woods. A very rapid river ran by our side; and now the nightingales were all singing, and the tender verdure grew paler in the moonlight, only the smooth parts of the river were still deeply purpled with the reflections from the fiery light in the west. So surrounded and so impressed, we arrived at Prele, a dear little cluster of houses in the middle of a semicircle of woody hills; the area of the semicircle scarcely broader than the breadth of the village. ... "We afterwards ascended another hill, from the top of which a large plain opened before us with villages. A little village, Neuhoff, lay at the foot of it: we reached it, and then turned up through a valley on the left hand. The hills on both sides the valley were prettily wooded, and a rapid lively river ran through it. So we went for about two miles, and almost at the end of the valley, or rather of its first turning, we found the village of Lauterberg. Just at the entrance of the village, two streams come out from two deep and woody coombs, close by each other, meet, and run into a third deep woody coomb opposite; before you a wild hill, which seems the end and barrier of the valley; on the right hand, low hills, now green with corn, and now wooded; and on the left a most majestic hill indeed--the effect of whose simple outline painting could not give, and how poor a thing are words! We pass through this neat little town--the majestic hill on the left hand soaring over the houses, and at every interspace you see the whole of it--its beeches, its firs, its rocks, its scattered cottages, and the one neat little pastor's house at the foot, embosomed in fruit-trees all in blossom, the noisy coomb-brook dashing close by it. We leave the valley, or rather, the first turning on the left, following a stream; and so the vale winds on, the river still at the foot of the woody hills, with every now and then other smaller valleys on right and left crossing our vale, and ever before you the woody hills running like groves one into another. We turned and turned, and entering the fourth curve of the vale, we found all at once that we had been ascending. The verdure vanished! All the beech trees were leafless, and so were the silver birches, whose boughs always, winter and summer, hang so elegantly. But low down in the valley, and in little companies on each bank of the river, a multitude of green conical fir trees, with herds of cattle wandering about, almost every one with a cylindrical bell around its neck, of no inconsiderable size, and as they moved--scattered over the narrow vale, and up among the trees on the hill--the noise was like that of a great city in the stillness of a sabbath morning, when the bells all at once are ringing for church. The whole was a melancholy and romantic scene, that was quite new to me. Again we turned, passed three smelting houses, which we visited;--a scene of terrible beauty is a furnace of boiling metal, darting, every moment blue, green, and scarlet lightning, like serpents' tongues!--and now we ascended a steep hill, on the top of which was St. Andrias Berg, a town built wholly of wood. "We descended again, to ascend far higher; and now we came to a most beautiful road, which winded on the breast of the hill, from whence we looked down into a deep valley, or huge basin, full of pines and firs; the opposite hills full of pines and firs; and the hill above us, on whose breast we were winding, likewise full of pines and firs. The valley, or basin, on our right hand, into which we looked down, is called the Wald Rauschenbach, that is, the Valley of the Roaring Brook; and roar it did, indeed, most solemnly! The road on which we walked was weedy with infant fir-trees, an inch or two high; and now, on our left hand, came before us a most tremendous precipice of yellow and black rock, called the Rehberg, that is, the Mountain of the Roe. Now again is nothing but firs and pines, above, below, around us! How awful is the deep unison of their undividable murmur; what a one thing it is--it is a sound that impresses the dim notion of the Omnipresent! In various parts of the deep vale below us, we beheld little dancing waterfalls gleaming through the branches, and now, on our left hand, from the very summit of the hill above us, a powerful stream flung itself down, leaping and foaming, and now concealed, and now not concealed, and now half concealed by the fir-trees, till, towards the road, it became a visible sheet of water, within whose immediate neighbourhood no pine could have permanent abiding place. The snow lay every where on the sides of the roads, and glimmered in company with the waterfall foam, snow patches and waterbreaks glimmering through the branches in the hill above, the deep basin below, and the hill opposite. Over the high opposite hills, so dark in their pine forests, a far higher round barren stony mountain looked in upon the prospect from a distant country. Through this scenery we passed on, till our road was crossed by a second waterfall; or rather, aggregation of little dancing waterfalls, one by the side of the other for a considerable breadth, and all came at once out of the dark wood above, and rolled over the mossy rock fragments, little firs, growing in islets, scattered among them. The same scenery continued till we came to the Oder Seich, a lake, half made by man, and half by nature. It is two miles in length, and but a few hundred yards in breadth, and winds between banks, or rather through walls, of pine trees. It has the appearance of a most calm and majestic river. It crosses the road, goes into a wood, and there at once plunges itself down into a most magnificent cascade, and runs into the vale, to which it gives the name of the 'Vale of the Roaring Brook.' We descended into the vale, and stood at the bottom of the cascade, and climbed up again by its side. The rocks over which it plunged were unusually wild in their shape, giving fantastic resemblances of men and animals, and the fir-boughs by the side were kept almost in a swing, which unruly motion contrasted well with the stern quietness of the huge forest-sea every where else. ... "In nature all things are individual, but a word is but an arbitrary character for a whole class of things; so that the same description may in almost all cases be applied to twenty different appearances; and in addition to the difficulty of the thing itself, I neither am, nor ever was, a good hand at description. I see what I write, but, alas! I cannot write what I see. From the Oder Seich we entered a second wood; and now the snow met us in large masses, and we walked for two miles knee-deep in it, with an inexpressible fatigue, till we came to the mount called Little Brocken; here even the firs deserted us, or only now and then a patch of them, wind shorn, no higher than one's knee, matted and cowering to the ground, like our thorn bushes on the highest sea-hills. The soil was plashy and boggy; we descended and came to the foot of the Great Brocken without a river--the highest mountain in all the north of Germany, and the seat of innumerable superstitions. On the first of May all the witches dance here at midnight; and those who go may see their own ghosts walking up and down, with a little billet on the back, giving the names of those who had wished them there; for 'I wish you on the top of the Brocken,' is a common curse throughout the whole empire. Well, we ascended--the soil boggy--and at last reached the height, which is 573 toises above the level of the sea. We visited the Blocksberg, a sort of bowling-green, inclosed by huge stones, something like those at Stonehenge, and this is the witches' ball-room; thence proceeded to the house on the hill, where we dined; and now we descended. In the evening about seven we arrived at Elbingerode. At the inn they brought us an album, or stamm-buch, requesting that we would write our names, and something or other as a remembrance that we had been there. I wrote the following lines, which contain a true account of my journey from the Brocken to Elbingerode. I stood on Brocken's sovran height, and saw Woods crowding upon woods, hills over hills; A surging scene, and only limited By the blue distance. Wearily my way Downward I dragged, through fir groves evermore, Where bright green moss moved in sepulchral forms, Speckled with sunshine; and, but seldom heard, The sweet bird's song become a hollow sound; And the gale murmuring indivisibly, Reserved its solemn murmur, more distinct From many a note of many a waterbreak, And the brook's chatter; on whose islet stones The dingy kidling, with its tinkling bell, Leapt frolicksome, or old romantic goat Sat, his white beard slow waving. I moved on With low and languid thought, for I had found That grandest scenes have but imperfect charms Where the eye vainly wanders, nor beholds One spot with which the heart associates Holy remembrances of child or friend, Or gentle maid, our first and early love, Or father, or the venerable name Of our adored country. O thou Queen, Thou delegated Deity of Earth, O 'dear, dear' England! how my longing eyes Turned westward, shaping in the steady clouds Thy sands and high white cliffs! Sweet native isle, This heart was proud, yea, mine eyes swam with tears To think of thee; and all the goodly view From sovran Brocken, woods and woody hills Floated away, like a departing dream, Feeble and dim. Stranger, these impulses Blame thou not lightly; nor will I profane, With hasty judgment or injurious doubt, That man's sublimer spirit, who can feel That God is every where, the God who framed Mankind to be one mighty brotherhood, Himself our Father, and the world our home. We left Elbingerode, May 14th, and travelled for half a mile through a wild country, of bleak stony hills by our side, with several caverns, or rather mouths of caverns, visible in their breasts; and now we came to Rubilland,--Oh, it was a lovely scene! Our road was at the foot of low hills, and here were a few neat cottages; behind us were high hills, with a few scattered firs, and flocks of goats visible on the topmost crags. On our right hand a fine shallow river about thirty yards broad, and beyond the river a crescent hill clothed with firs, that rise one above another, like spectators in an amphitheatre. We advanced a little farther,--the crags behind us ceased to be visible, and now the whole was one and complete. All that could be seen was the cottages at the foot of the low green hill, (cottages embosomed in fruit trees in blossom,) the stream, and the little crescent of firs. I lingered here, and unwillingly lost sight of it for a little while. The firs were so beautiful, and the masses of rocks, walls, and obelisks started up among them in the very places where, if they had not been, a painter with a poet's feeling would have imagined them. Crossed the river (its name Bodi), entered the sweet wood, and came to the mouth of the cavern, with the man who shews it. It was a huge place, eight hundred feet in length, and more in depth, of many different apartments; and the only thing that distinguished it from other caverns was, that the guide, who was really a character, had the talent of finding out and seeing uncommon likenesses in the different forms of the stalactite. Here was a nun;--this was Solomon's temple;--that was a Roman Catholic Chapel;--here was a lion's claw, nothing but flesh and blood wanting to make it completely a claw! This was an organ, and had all the notes of an organ, &c. &c. &c.; but, alas! with all possible straining of my eyes, ears, and imagination, I could see nothing but common stalactite, and heard nothing but the dull ding of common cavern stones. One thing was really striking;--a huge cone of stalactite hung from the roof of the largest apartment, and, on being struck, gave perfectly the sound of a death-bell. I was behind, and heard it repeatedly at some distance, and the effect was very much in the fairy kind,--gnomes, and things unseen, that toll mock death-bells for mock funerals. After this, a little clear well and a black stream pleased me the most; and multiplied by fifty, and coloured ad libitum, might be well enough to read of in a novel or poem. We returned, and now before the inn, on the green plat around the Maypole, the villagers were celebrating Whit-Tuesday. This Maypole is hung as usual with garlands on the top, and, in these garlands, spoons, and other little valuables, are placed. The high smooth round pole is then well greased; and now he who can climb up to the top may have what he can get,--a very laughable scene as you may suppose, of awkwardness and agility, and failures on the very brink of success. Now began a dance. The women danced very well, and, in general, I have observed throughout Germany that the women in the lower ranks degenerate far less from the ideal of a woman, than the men from that of man. The dances were reels and waltzes; but chiefly the latter. This dance is, in the higher circles, sufficiently voluptuous; but here the emotions of it were far more faithful interpreters of the passion, which, doubtless, the dance was intended to shadow; yet, ever after the giddy round and round is over, they walked to music, the woman laying her arm, with confident affection, on the man's shoulders, or around his neck. The first couple at the waltzing was a very fine tall girl, of two or three and twenty, in the full bloom and growth of limb and feature, and a fellow with huge whiskers, a long tail, and woollen night-cap; he was a soldier, and from the more than usual glances of the girl, I presumed was her lover. He was, beyond compare, the gallant and the dancer of the party. Next came two boors: one of whom, in the whole contour of his face and person, and, above all, in the laughably would-be frolicksome kick out of his heel, irresistibly reminded me of Shakespeare's Slender, and the other of his Dogberry. Oh! two such faces, and two such postures! O that I were an Hogarth! What an enviable gift it is to have a genius in painting! Their partners were pretty lasses, not so tall as the former, and danced uncommonly light and airy. The fourth couple was a sweet girl of about seventeen, delicately slender, and very prettily dressed, with a full-blown rose in the white ribbon that went round her head, and confined her reddish-brown hair; and her partner waltzed with a pipe in his mouth, smoking all the while; and during the whole of this voluptuous dance, his countenance was a fair personification of true German phlegm. After these, but, I suppose, not actually belonging to the party, a little ragged girl and ragged boy, with his stockings about his heels, waltzed and danced;--waltzing and dancing in the rear most entertainingly. But what most pleased me, was a little girl of about three or four years old, certainly not more than four, who had been put to watch a little babe, of not more than a year old (for one of our party had asked), and who was just beginning to run away, the girl teaching him to walk, and who was so animated by the music, that she began to waltz with him, and the two babes whirled round and round, hugging and kissing each other, as if the music had made them mad. There were two fiddles and a bass viol. The fiddlers,--above all, the bass violer,--most Hogarthian phizzes! God love them! I felt far more affection for them than towards any other set of human beings I have met with since I have been in Germany, I suppose because they looked so happy!" Coleridge and his companions in their tour passed through a district belonging to the elector of Metz, and he often repeated the following story, which one of the party has since related in print; that, going through this district, chiefly inhabited by boors, who were Romanists, of the lowest form of this persuasion of Christians, the party fatigued and much exhausted, with the exception of Blumenbach, arrived somewhat late, though being a summer evening, it was still light, at a Hessian village, where they had hoped, as in England, to find quarters for the night. Most of the inhabitants had retired to rest, a few only loitering about, perhaps surprized at the sight of strangers. They shewed no inclination to be courteous, but rather eyed them with suspicion and curiosity. The party, notwithstanding this, entered the village ale-house, still open, asked for refreshments and a night's lodging, but no one noticed them. Though hungry, they could not procure any thing for supper, not even a cup of coffee, nor could they find beds; after some time, however, they asked for a few bundles of straw, which would probably have been granted, had not Coleridge, out of patience at seeing his friends' forlorn situation, imprudently asked one of them, if there lived any Christians in Hesse Cassel? At this speech, which was soon echoed by those within the house to the bystanders without, the boors became instantly so infuriated, that rushing in, the travellers were immediately driven out, and were glad to save themselves from the lighted fire-wood on the hearth, which was hurled at them. On this they went to seek a spot to bivouac for the night. Coleridge lay under the shelter of a furze-bush, annoyed by the thorns, which, if they did not disturb his rest, must have rendered it comfortless. Youth and fatigue, inducing sleep, soon rose above these difficulties. In the ascent of the Brocken, they despaired of seeing the famous spectre, in search of which they toiled, it being visible only when the sun is a few degrees above the horizon. Haué says, he ascended thirty times without seeing it, till at length he was enabled to witness the effect of this optical delusion. For the best account of it, see the Natural Magic of Sir D. Brewster, [26] who explains the origin of these spectres, and shews how the mind is deluded among an ignorant and easily deceived people, and thus traces the birth of various ghost stories in the neighbourhood, extending as far in Europe, as such stories find credence. "In the course of my repeated tours through the Hartz," Mr. Jordan says, "I ascended the Brocken twelve different times, but I had the good fortune only twice (both times about Whitsuntide), to see that atmospheric phenomenon called the Spectre of the Brocken, which appears to me worthy of particular attention, as it must, no doubt, be observed on other high mountains, which have a situation favourable for producing it. The first time I was deceived by this extraordinary phenomenon, I had clambered up to the summit of the Brocken, very early in the morning, in order to wait there for the inexpressibly beautiful view of the sun rising in the east. The heavens were already streaked with red: the sun was just appearing above the horizon in full majesty, and the most perfect serenity prevailed throughout the surrounding country. When the other Hartz mountains in the south-west, towards the Worm mountains, lying under the Brocken, began to be covered by thick clouds; ascending at this moment the granite rocks called the Teufelskauzel, there appeared before me, though at a great distance towards the Worm mountains, the gigantic figure of a man, as if standing on a large pedestal. But scarcely had I discovered it when it began to disappear; the clouds sank down speedily and expanded, and I saw the phenomenon no more. The second time, however, I saw the spectre somewhat more distinctly, a little below the summit of the Brocken, and near the Heinrichs-höhe, as I was looking at the sun rising about four o'clock in the morning. The weather was rather tempestuous, the sky towards the level country was pretty clear, but the Harz mountains had attracted several thick clouds which had been hovering around them, and which, beginning to settle on the Brocken, confined the prospect. In these clouds, soon after the rising of the sun, I saw my own shadow of a monstrous size, move itself for a couple of seconds exactly as I moved, but I was soon involved in clouds, and the phenomenon disappeared." It is impossible to see this phenomenon, except when the sun is at such an altitude as to throw his rays upon the body in a horizontal direction; for, if he is higher, the shadow is thrown rather under the body than before it. After visiting the Hartz, Coleridge returned to Göttingen, and in his note-book in a leave-taking memorial as well as autograph, the following lines were written by Blumenbach, the son:-- "Wenn Sie, bester Freund, auch in Jhrer Heimath die Natur bewundern werden, wie wir beide es auf dem Harze gethan haben, so erinnern Sie sich des Harzes, und ich darf dann hoffen, das Sie auch mich nicht vergessen werden. "Leben Sie wohl, und reisen glücklich, "Jhr. BLUMENBACH." TRANSLATION. If you perchance, my dearest friend, should still continue to admire the works of nature at your home, as we have done together on the Hartz; recall to your recollection the Hartz, and then I dare hope that you will also think of me. Farewell, may you have a prosperous voyage. (Signed) yours, BLUMENBACH. Coleridge returned to England after an absence of fourteen mouths, and arrived in London the 27th November, 1799. He went to Germany but little versed in the language, and adopted the following plan of acquiring it, which he recommends to others "To those," says he, "who design to acquire the language of a country in the country itself, it may be useful, if I mention the incalculable advantages which I derived from learning all the words that could possibly be so learnt, with the objects before me, and without the intermediation of the English terms. It was a regular part of my morning studies for the first six weeks of my residence at Ratzeburg, to accompany the good and kind old pastor, with whom I lived, from the cellar to the roof, through gardens, farm-yards, &c., and to call every the minutest thing by its German name. Advertisements, farces, jest-books, and conversation of children while I was at play with them, contributed their share to a more homelike acquaintance with the language, than I could have procured from books of polite literature alone, or even from polite society." In support of this plan, he makes a quotation from the massive folios of Luther--a passage as he calls it of "_hearty_ sound sense," and gives the simple, sinewy, idiomatic words of the "original," with a translation of his own: "For one must not ask the letters in the Latin tongue, how one ought to speak German; but one must ask the mother in the house, the children in the lanes and alleys, the common man in the market, concerning this; yea, and look at the _moves_ of their mouths while they are talking, and thereafter interpret. They understand then, and mark that one talks German with them." Whether he owed his successful acquirement of the language to these plans adopted by him, or whether to his extraordinary powers of mind, it must be left to others to judge. To form any thing like an accurate opinion, it may be necessary to re-state, that during this fourteen months' residence, he acquired such a knowledge of the German, as enabled him to make that extraordinary translation of the Wallenstein, (which will be presently noticed), reading at the same time several German authors, and storing up for himself the means of becoming familiar with others, on subjects in which the English language was deficient. In addition to what in this short period he effected, I may say that some part of this time was employed in receiving many lessons from professor Tychsen, in the Gothic of Ulphilas, which, says he, "sufficed to make me acquainted with its grammar, and the radical words of most frequent occurrence; and with the occasional assistance of the same philosophical linguist, I read through Ottfried's Metrical Paraphrase of the Gospel, and the most important remains of the Theotiscan." Coleridge's Biographia contains the history and developement of his mind till 1816, when it was published; he called it his Literary Life, but of necessity it is intermixed with his biography, as he must have found it impossible to separate them. He had even half promised himself to write his own biography, but the want of success in his literary labours, and the state of his health, caused him to think seriously that his life was diminishing too fast, to permit him to finish those great works, of which he had long planned the execution. The conception of these works was on such a scale, that even his giant intellect, with his great and continuous powers of application, could not have executed them. But to continue.--On his return to London, his first literary occupation was the translation of the Wallenstein, which he effected in six weeks, in a lodging in Buckingham-street, in the Strand; it was printed and published in 1800. The MS. was purchased by Longman's house under the condition that the English Version and Schiller's Play in German were to be published at the same time. The play, as is well known to all German readers, is in three parts; the first part, the Camp, being considered by Coleridge as not sufficiently interesting to the British public to translate, it was not attempted; the second part, the Piccolomini, was translated with the occasional addition of some lines, in order to make out the thought when it appeared to require it, particularly in the Horological scene of the Watch Tower. In the last part the Death of Wallenstein is equally free, but the liberties taken with this play are those of omission. German was not at that time cultivated in England, and the few plays which were translated, were but bad specimens of German Literature. The Wallenstein is an historical play, without any of those violent tragic events which the public expect to find in German plays, and this was one cause perhaps of disappointment.--It is a play of high thoughts-- ennobling sentiments, and for the reflecting individual with good feelings, one of those plays, by which, even without reference to the story, the head and the heart are both benefited. There is no violent excitement produced, and in quiet thought one can dwell on it with pleasure. Coleridge truly prophesied its fate, for when translating it, he said it would fall dead from the press, and indeed but few of the copies were sold;--his advice to the publishers, whom he had forewarned of this failure, was to reserve the unsold copies, and wait till it might become fashionable. They however parted with it as waste paper, though sixteen years afterwards it was eagerly sought for, and the few remaining copies doubled their price; but now that the German language has become more general, and the merit of this translation been appreciated, it has been reprinted with success. Since the visit of these remarkable men to Germany, the taste for German literature has each year slowly increased, so as to make it almost appear that they have given the direction to this taste, which in England has caused a free inquiry into the writings of German authors, particularly of their poets and philosophers for the one class; and also into the interesting tales and stories to be found for the many who require such amusement. The edition of Wallenstein, 1800, contains the following preface, which was afterwards abridged, but is here given as it was originally written; the first criticism on it was wholly made out of this preface, and these lines were quoted by the reviewer, in condemnation of the play and the translation, though it is well known that the critic was ignorant of German. The date of the MS. by Schiller is September 30th, 1799, the English is 1800. Coleridge indeed calls it a translation, but had it been verbatim, it would have required much longer time; take it however as we will, it displays wonderful powers; and as he noticed in a letter to a friend, it was executed in the prime of his life and vigour of his mind. Of the metre of this drama he spoke slightingly, and said according to his taste, "it dragged, like a fly through a glue-pot. It was my intention," he writes, "to have prefixed a life of Wallenstein to this translation; but I found that it must either have occupied a space wholly disproportionate to the nature of the publication, or have been merely a meagre catalogue of events narrated, not more fully than they already are in the play itself. The recent translation, likewise, of Schiller's History of the Thirty Years' War, diminished the motives thereto. In the translation, I have endeavoured to render my author literally, wherever I was not prevented by absolute differences of idiom; but I am conscious, that in two or three short passages, I have been guilty of dilating the original; and, from anxiety to give the full meaning, have weakened the force. In the metre I have availed myself of no other liberties, than those which Schiller had permitted to himself, except the occasional breaking up of the line, by the substitution of a trochee for an iambus; of which liberty, so frequent in our tragedies, I find no instance in these dramas. The two Dramas, Piccolomini, or the first part of Wallenstein, and Wallenstein, are introduced in the original manuscript by a prelude in one act, entitled Wallenstein's camp. This is written in rhyme, and in nine syllable verse, in the same lilting metre (if that expression may be permitted) with the second eclogue of Spencer's Shepherd's Calendar. This prelude possesses a sort of broad humour, and is not deficient in character, but to have translated it into prose, or into any other metre than that of the original, would have given a false idea, both of its style and purport; to have translated it into the same metre, would have been incompatible with a faithful adherence to the sense of the German, from the comparative poverty of our language in rhymes; and it would have been unadvisable, from the incongruity of those lax verses with the present state of the English public. Schiller's intention seems to have been merely to have prepared his reader for the tragedies, by a lively picture of the laxity of discipline, and the mutinous disposition of Wallenstein's soldiery. It is not necessary as a preliminary explanation. For these reasons it has been thought expedient not to translate it. The admirers of Schiller, who have abstracted their idea of that author from the Robbers, and the Cabal and Love plays, in which the main interest is produced by the excitement of curiosity, and in which the curiosity is excited by terrible and extraordinary incident, will not have perused, without some portion of disappointment, the dramas which it has been my employment to translate. They should, however, reflect, that these are historical dramas, taken from a popular German history; that we must therefore judge of them in some measure with the feelings of Germans, or by analogy with the interest excited in us by similar dramas in our own language. Few, I trust, would be rash or ignorant enough, to compare Schiller with Shakspeare, yet, merely as illustration, I would say, that we should proceed to the perusal of Wallenstein, not from Lear or Othello, but from Richard the Second, or the three parts of Henry the Sixth. We scarcely expect rapidity in an historical drama; and many prolix speeches are pardoned from characters, whose names and actions have formed the most amusing tales of our early life. On the other hand, there exist in these plays more individual beauties, more passages the excellence of which will bear reflection than in the former productions of Schiller. The description of the Astrological Tower, and the reflections of the young lover, which follow it, form in the original a fine poem, and my translation must have been wretched indeed, if it can have wholly overclouded the beauties of the scene in the first act of the first play, between Questenberg, Max. and Octavio Piccolomini. If we except the scene of the setting sun in the Robbers, I know of no part in Schiller's plays, which equals the whole of the first scene of the fifth act of the concluding play. It would be unbecoming in me to be more diffuse on this subject. A translator stands connected with the original author by a certain law of subordination, which makes it more decorous to point out excellencies than defects; indeed, he is not likely to be a fair judge of either. The pleasure or disgust from his own labour, will mingle with the feelings that arise from an after view of the original poem; and in the first perusal of a work in any foreign language, which we understand, we are apt to attribute to it more excellence than it really possesses, from our own pleasurable sense of difficulty overcome without effort. Translation of poetry into poetry is difficult, because the translator must give a brilliancy to his language without that warmth of original conception, from which such brilliancy would follow of its own accord. But the translator of a living author is encumbered with additional inconveniences. If he render his original faithfully, as to the 'sense' of each passage, he must necessarily destroy a considerable portion of the 'spirit'; if he endeavour to give a work executed according to laws of 'compensation', he subjects himself to imputations of vanity, or misrepresentation. I thought it my duty to remain by the sense of my original, with as few exceptions as the nature of the language rendered possible." About this time, or soon after his return from Germany, the proprietor of the Morning Post, who was also the editor, engaged Coleridge to undertake the literary department. In this he promised to assist, provided the paper was conducted on fixed and announced principles, and that he should neither be requested nor obliged to deviate from them in favour of any party or any event. In consequence, that journal became, and for many years continued, 'anti-ministerial, yet with a very qualified approbation of the opposition, and with far greater earnestness and zeal, both anti-jacobin and anti-gallican. As contributors to this paper, the editor had the assistance of Mr. Wordsworth, Mr. Southey, and Mr. Lamb. Mr. Southey, from his extreme activity and industry, with powers best suited for such employment, with a rapidity and punctuality which made him invaluable to the proprietor, was the largest contributor. The others not possessing the same qualifications, although extremely powerful in their way, were not of the same value to the proprietor. To Coleridge, he continued liberal and kind, and Coleridge appreciated his talents; often has he been heard to say, if Mr. Stuart "knew as much of man as he does of men, he would be one of the first characters in Europe." The world, and even that part of it, who either receive pleasure, or are benefited by the labours of literary men, often seem to forget how many there are who being compelled to work during the week for the provision of the week, are (if not possessed of much bodily strength) unfit to continue further mental exertions; nor can they find the leisure and repose necessary to produce any work of importance, though such efforts must always be found so much more congenial to the feelings of a man of genius. Whatever his enemies or his more envious friends may choose to have put forth, it was to him a most painful thought, particularly as he had made literature his profession, to have lived in vain. This feeling sometimes haunted him, and when the feelings are gloomily disposed, they often become in their turn depressing causes, which frequently ended in a deep and painful sigh, and a renewal of his laborious and inspiring thoughts as an antidote. The severest of his critics have not pretended to have found in his compositions triviality, or traces of a mind that shrank from the toil of thinking. A respectable portion of literary talent will secure the success of a newspaper, provided that it impartially adheres "to a code of intelligible principles previously announced, and faithfully referred to in support of every judgment on men and events." Such were the opinions and feelings by which the contributors to this paper, as well as the proprietor was influenced during this period; and to these causes, as well as from the talents of the editor and of the writers, it mainly owed its success. Papers so conducted do not require the aid of party, nor of ministerial patronage. Yet a determination to make money by flattering the envy and cupidity, and the vindictive restlessness of unthinking men, seems frequently to have succeeded, not confining itself to the daily press, but diffusing itself into periodicals of a different stamp. "I do derive," says Coleridge, "a gratification from the knowledge, that my essays have contributed to introduce the practice of placing the questions and events of the day in a moral point of view. In Burke's writings, indeed, the germs of all political truths may be found. But I dare assume to myself the merit of having first explicitly defined and analysed the nature of Jacobinism; and in distinguishing the Jacobin from the Republican, the Democrat, and the mere Demagogue," ('vide Friend'.) Whilst Coleridge retained the opinions of the Unitarians, or rather preached among them, they hailed him as the rising star of their society, but when he seceded from them on his change of opinions, many of them bruited his name in execration. Not so was it with Mr. Estlin and other amiable and intelligent men, they understood him, and felt he had acted on the full conviction of his mind, and that he was acting conscientiously when he declined the opportunity of possessing a fixed income, of which he stood so much in need. Those who knew him, knew how much he suffered, and how painful it was for him to have differed with such a friend as Mr. Estlin, one to whom he had been indebted for many kind offices: But Coleridge was too sincere a man to dissemble.--There were however others, who, from motives and feelings not honourable to them, dissemblers even in Unitarianism, who sought every opportunity of defaming him, and attempted to strip him of his virtues, and of his genius, by calumny and detraction. In this, however, they were foiled. On the other hand, the party more inclined to favour fanaticism, were so indiscreet in their praise as to become in their turn equally injurious to his character, and verified the old adage, that indiscreet friends are too often the worst of enemies; for this party considered his conversion as nothing less than a special miracle. It was impossible for a mind so philosophical and so constituted, to remain long in the trammels of a philosophy like Hartley's, or to continue to adhere to such a substitute for Christianity as Unitarianism; like the incarcerated chicken, he would on increase of growth and power, liberate himself from his imprisonment and breathe unencumbered the vital air, the pabulum of animal life, which by parallel reasoning, Coleridge was aiming at in a spiritual life. From such a substitute for Christianity, that imitation so unvitalizing in its effects, the studiously industrious and sincere man will recoil; but the vain and superficial man will find much in it for the display of his egotism, and superficial knowledge. Often did he remark when conversing on these subjects, there was a time, when "I disbelieved down to Unitarianism, it would have been _more honest_ to have gone farther, to have denied the existence of a GOD! but that my heart would not allow me to do." But to this subject we shall have occasion to return. The mind which grows with its culture, seeks deeper research, and so was it with his. Certainly, one of the effects of his visits to Germany, was to root up whatever remained of the Mechanical Philosophy of Hartley, after whom he had named his eldest son, and to open to his mind in philosophy new and higher views, and in religion more established views. But change with the many, though the result of conviction and the growth of truth, is still a change; and with the unthinking, it deteriorates from the character of a man, rather than as it should do elevate him, ... unless _above_ himself he can Erect himself, how mean a thing is man! DANIEL. In the years 1783, 1784, and 1786, Bishop Horsley wrote some of the tracts in controversy with Priestley, upon the historical question of the belief of the first ages in OUR LORD'S Divinity, which are collected in one volume, with large additional notes, dated 1789. In a memorandum 'book', made by Coleridge, it appears that he never saw nor read this volume, till some time in 1805; therefore his views were not altered by the bishop's reasoning, but had undergone a great change previously. Horsley's writings carry with them a conviction of their truth. His clear though concentrated style rivets the attention, and forcibly impresses the mind, with his depth of learning, and at the same time inspires the feeling of its practical utility. He was an opponent most aptly suited to Priestley. The times however greatly favoured the latter; the discoveries of Lavoisier, led the way to the study of chemistry, which became fashionable and generally cultivated, and with its brilliancy dazzled the multitude. Priestley displayed considerable expertness and fitness for the practical application of the discoveries of others; and he added also to the new mass of facts, which were daily presenting themselves, and thus science became enriched, enriching at the same time the pockets of the manufacturers, exciting national industry, and adding considerably to the national property. Priestley's researches and discoveries gave an irresistible weight to his name, and had an undue influence, as we shall presently see, in the arguments or opinions he advanced. This, Horsley foresaw, and felt, and therefore built his arguments on the permanent, in order to subdue the creatures founded on the impermanent and other worthless idols of the mind's forming. How the world were delighted and wonder-struck by the supposed discovery, that it was the province of vegetable life to supply the vital air, which animal life destroyed! Priestley was hailed as the wonder of his age, and for a while its oracle. He was however no ordinary being, and even his enemies admitted him to be a kind and moral man. His intellectual powers will speak for themselves. We have now had sufficient experience to see how shifting all kind of theory must be when left to the will and ingenuity of man only--and how unsafe a guide in questions of importance as the one now referred to. Horsley saw the weak points of Priestley's argument, and was not to be dazzled and put aside by Priestley's philosophical display. Horsley fearlessly entered into this controversy, like a man who felt his own strength, and particularly the strength of his cause; though he needed not the courage of a Luther, he was apparently a man who possessed it, if called on. He used the best means to silence his adversary [27], with the Bible before him as his shield, (but at the same time his support as well as defence,) from behind which he assailed his opponent with his Biblical learning so powerfully, that his first attack made Priestley feel the strength of his adversary. In vaunting language, Priestley made the best defence which he thought he could, but not the most prudent, by promising to answer his opponent so efficiently, as to make him a convert to his doctrines. But in this vaunting prediction, that he would not only answer his opponent satisfactorily, to all who were interested in the controversy, but convert him to his opinions, it need not be added he failed, so completely, and at the same time displayed such a "ridiculous vanity," as to deprive him of that influence which he had so overrated in himself. Horsley's letters seem particularly to have attracted Coleridge's attention, and to have caused him to make one of his concise, pithy and powerful notes as a comment on this letter of Horsley's, entitled, "The Unitarian Doctrine not well calculated for the conversion of Jews, Mahometans, or Infidels, of any description." [28] The following is Coleridge's Comment on the Letter, to which allusion has been made, and from the date seems to have been written during his residence at Malta: "February 12, 1805.--Thinking during my perusal of Horsley's letters in reply to Dr. Priestley's objections to the Trinity on the part of Jews, Mahometans, and Infidels, it burst upon me at once as an awful truth, what seven or eight years ago I thought of proving with a 'hollow faith', and for an 'ambiguous purpose', [29] my mind then wavering in its necessary passage from Unitarianism (which, as I have often said, is the religion of a man, whose reason would make him an atheist, but whose heart and common sense will not permit him to be so) through Spinosism into Plato and St. John. No Christ, no God! This I now feel with all its needful evidence of the understanding: would to God my spirit were made conform thereto--that no Trinity, no God! That Unitarianism in all its forms is idolatry, and that the remark of Horsley is most accurate; that Dr. Priestley's mode of converting the Jews and Turks is, in the great essential of religious faith, to give the name of Christianity to their present idolatry--truly the trick of Mahomet, who, finding that the mountain would not come to him, went to the mountain. O! that this conviction may work upon me and in me, and that my mind may be made up as to the character of Jesus, and of historical Christianity, as clearly as it is of the logos, and intellectual or spiritual Christianity--that I may be made to know either their especial and peculiar union, or their absolute disunion in any peculiar sense. [30] With regard to the Unitarians, it has been shamelessly asserted, that I have denied them to be Christians. God forbid! For how should I know what the piety of the heart may be, or what quantum of error in the understanding may consist, with a saving faith in the intentions and actual dispositions of the whole moral being, in any one individual? Never will God reject a soul that sincerely loves him, be his speculative opinions what they may: and whether in any given instance certain opinions, be they unbelief, or misbelief, are compatible with a sincere love of God, God only can know. But this I have said, and shall continue to say, that if the doctrines, the sum of which I 'believe' to constitute the truth in Christ, 'be' Christianity, then Unitarianism' is not, and vice versâ: and that in speaking theologically and 'impersonally', i.e. of Psilanthropism and Theanthropism, as schemes of belief--and without reference to individuals who profess either the one or the other--it will be absurd to use a different language, as long as it is the dictate of common sense, that two opposites cannot properly be called by the same name. I should feel no offence if a Unitarian applied the same to me, any more than if he were to say, that 2 and 2 being 4, 4 and 4 must be 8." Biog. Lit. vol. ii. p. 307. [Footnote 1: In his 'Literary Life,' Mr. Coleridge has made the following observation regarding talent and genius: "For the conceptions of the mind may be so vivid and adequate, as to preclude that impulse to the realising of them, which is strongest and most restless in those who possess more than mere 'talent' (or the faculty of appropriating and applying the knowledge of others,) yet still want something of the creative and self-sufficing power of absolute 'Genius'. For this reason, therefore, they are men of 'commanding' genius. While the former rest content between thought and reality, as it were in an intermundium of which their own living spirit supplies the 'substance', and their imagination the ever-varying 'form'; the latter must impress their preconceptions on the world without, in order to present them back to their own view with the satisfying degree of clearness, distinctness, and individuality." Vol. i. p. 31.] [Footnote 2: In consequence of various reports traducing Coleridge's good name, I have thought it an act of justice due to his character, to notice several mistatements here and elsewhere, which I should otherwise have gladly passed over.] [Footnote 3: Coleridge was always most ready to pass a censure on what appeared to him a defect in his own composition, of which the following is a proof:--In his introductory remarks to this Greek Ode, printed in the Sibylline Leaves, he observes: "The Slaves in the West Indies consider Death as a passport to their native country. This sentiment is expressed in the introduction to the 'Greek Ode on the Slave Trade,' of which the Ideas are better than the language in which they are conveyed." Certainly this is taking no merit to himself, although the Ode obtained the Prize.] [Footnote 4: "At the beginning of the French Revolution, Klopstock wrote odes of congratulation. He received some honorary presents from the French Republic (a golden crown, I believe), and, like our Priestley, was invited to a seat in the legislature, which he declined: but, when French liberty metamorphosed herself into a fury, he sent back these presents with a palinodia, declaring his abhorrence of their proceedings; and since then he has been more perhaps than enough an Anti-Gallican. I mean, that in his just contempt and detestation of the crimes and follies of the revolutionists, he suffers himself to forget that the revolution itself is a process of the Divine Providence; and that as the folly of men is the wisdom of God, so are their iniquities instruments of his goodness." 'Biographia Literaria,' vol. ii. p. 243.] [Footnote 5: Coleridge in the 'Friend,' says: "My feelings, however, and imagination did not remain unkindled in this general conflagration (the French Revolution); and I confess I should be more inclined to be ashamed than proud of myself if they had. I was a sharer in the general vortex, though my little world described the path of its revolution in an orbit of its own. What I dared not expect from constitutions of government and whole nations, I hoped from Religion."] [Footnote 6: This is a mistake. The candidate was Mr. Bethell, one of the members for Yorkshire, and not the Bishop of Bangor, as is commonly supposed. Bishop Bethel himself, not long ago, told me this.] [Footnote 7: The writer of the article above quoted followed Coleridge in the school, and was elected to Trinity College a year after. As I have before observed, he seems to have been well acquainted with his habits; yet, with regard to his feelings on certain points, as his ambition and desire for a college life, I think he must have misunderstood him. Ambition never formed any part of Coleridge's character. Honours, titles, and distinctions had no meaning for him. His affections, so strong and deep, were likely to be his only stimulants in the pursuit of them.] [Footnote 8: Frend's trial took place at Cambridge, in the Vice-Chancellor's Court, in the year 1793, for sedition and defamation of the Church of England, in giving utterance to and printing certain opinions, founded on Unitarian Doctrines, adverse to the established Church.--'Vide' State Trials. Sentence of banishment was pronounced against him: which sentence was confirmed by the Court of Delegates, to which Mr. Frend had appealed from the Vice-Chancellor's Court. He then appealed from the decision of the Court of Delegates, protested against the proceedings, and moved this cause to the Court of King's Bench. This Court, after an examination of the case, decided, that the proceedings at Cambridge having been strictly formal, they had no power to interfere, and therefore the sentence against Frend remained in full force. Being a Fellow of Jesus' College at the time that Coleridge was a student, he excited the sympathies of the young and ardent of that day.] [Footnote 9: The repetition of Middleton's name, so frequently occurring may appear to a stranger unnecessary; but Middleton, loving Coleridge so much, and being his senior in years, as well as in studies, was to him, while at school and at college, what the Polar Star is to the mariner on a wide sea without compass,--his guide, and his influential friend and companion.] [Footnote 10: There is another incident which I shall here relate that raised him in the esteem of his comrades. One of them was seized with confluent small-pox, and his life was considered in great danger. The fear of the spread of this had produced such alarm in his quarters, that the sufferer was nearly deserted. Here Coleridge's reading served him; and, having a small quantity of medical knowledge in addition to a large share of kindness, he volunteered his services, and nursed the sick man night and day for six weeks. His patient recovered, to the joy of Coleridge and of his comrades. The man was taken ill during a march, and in consequence of the fears of the persons of the place, he and Coleridge (who had volunteered to remain with him) were put into an out-building, and no communication held with them--Coleridge remaining the whole time in the same room with the man (who, during part of his illness, was violently delirious) nursing and reading to him, &c.] [Footnote 11: In a published letter to a friend is the following observation: "I sometimes compare my own life with that of Steele (yet oh! how unlike), led to this from having myself also for a brief time 'borne arms', and written 'private' after my name, or rather another name; for being at a loss when suddenly asked my name, I answered 'Comberbach', and verily my habits were so little equestrian, that my horse, I doubt not, was of that opinion."] [Footnote 12: Capt. Nathaniel Ogle sold out of the 15th Dragoons, Nov. 19th, 1794. Comberbacke enlisted at Reading, Dec. 3rd, 1793, commanded at this time by Brevet Lieutenant Colonel Churchill, who was a Major in the regiment at the time Comberbacke was discharged at Hounslow, on the 10th of April, 1794, according to the War-Office books.] [Footnote 13: Probably the week in which he enlisted.] [Footnote 14: A gentleman much interested in these lectures, who was also present, has given the following version of the story, and it is so well done, that I am desirous of inserting it:-- "In all Mr. Coleridge's lectures he was a steady opposer of Mr. Pitt and the then existing war; and also an enthusiastic admirer of Fox, Sheridan, Grey, &c. &c., but his opposition to the reigning politics discovered little asperity; it chiefly appeared by wit and sarcasm, and commonly ended in that which was the speaker's chief object, a laugh. Few attended Mr. C.'s lectures but those whose political views were similar to his own; but on one occasion, some gentlemen of the opposite party came into the lecture-room, and at one sentiment they heard, testified their disapprobation by the only easy and safe way in their power; namely, by a hiss. The auditors were startled at so unusual a sound, not knowing to what it might conduct; but their noble leader soon quieted their fears, by instantly remarking, with great coolness, 'I am not at all surprised, when the red hot prejudices of aristocrats are suddenly plunged into the cool waters of reason, that they should go off with a hiss!' The words were electric. The assailants felt, as well as testified their confusion, and the whole company confirmed it by immense applause! There was no more hissing."] [Footnote 15: This note was written at Highgate, in a copy of the 'Conciones ad Populum'.] [Footnote 16: "With the exception of one extraordinary man, I have never known an individual, least of all an individual of genius, healthy or happy without a profession, i.e., some 'regular' employment, which does not depend on the will of the moment, and which can be carried on so far 'mechanically', that an average quantum only of health, spirits, and intellectual exertion are requisite to its faithful discharge. Three hours of leisure, unannoyed by any alien anxiety, and looked forward to with delight as a change and recreation, will suffice to realize in literature a larger product of what is truly genial, than weeks of compulsion. Money, and immediate reputation form only an arbitrary and accidental end of literary labour. The 'hope' of increasing them by any given exertion will often prove a stimulant to industry; but the 'necessity' of acquiring them will, in all works of genius, convert the stimulant into a 'narcotic'. Motives by excess reverse their very nature, and instead of exciting, stun and stupify the mind; for it is one contra-distinction of genius from talent, that its predominant end is always comprised in the means; and this is one of the many points, which establish an analogy between genius and virtue. Now, though talents may exist without genius, yet, as genius cannot exist, certainly not manifest itself, without talents, I would advise every scholar, who feels the genial power working within him, so far to make a division between the two, as that he should devote his 'talents' to the acquirement of competence in some known trade or profession, and his genius to objects of his tranquil and unbiassed choice; while the consciousness of being actuated in both alike by the sincere desire to perform his duty, will alike ennoble both. 'My dear young friend,' (I would say), suppose yourself established in any honourable occupation. From the manufactory or counting-house, from the law-court, or from having visited your last patient, you return at evening, 'Dear tranquil time, when the sweet sense of home Is sweetest...' to your family, prepared for its social enjoyments, with the very countenances of your wife and children brightened, and their voice of welcome made doubly welcome by the knowledge that, as far as 'they' are concerned, you have satisfied the demands of the day, by the labour of the day. Then, when you retire into your study, in the books on your shelves, you revisit so many venerable friends with whom you can converse. Your own spirit scarcely less free from personal anxieties than the great minds, that in those books are still living for you! Even your writing-desk, with its blank paper and all its other implements, will appear as a chain of flowers, capable of linking your feelings, as well as thoughts to events, and characters, past or to come: not a chain of iron which binds you down to think of the future and the remote, by recalling the claims and feelings of the peremptory present: but why should I say retire? The habits of active life and daily intercourse with the stir of the world, will tend to give you such self command, that the presence of your family will be no interruption. Nay, the social silence, or undisturbing voices of a wife or sister will be like a restorative atmosphere, or soft music which moulds a dream without becoming its object. If facts are required to prove the possibility of combining weighty performances in literature with full and independent employment, the works of Cicero and Xenophon among the ancients; of Sir Thomas Moore, Bacon, Baxter, or, to refer at once to later and contemporary instances, Darwin and Roscoe, are at once decisive of the question." 'Biog. Lit.'] [Footnote 17: Tale and novel writing of second-rate order, somewhat spiced and stimulating, are sure to succeed, and carry 'of course' popularity with their success, by advertising the writer. Of this there is an instance in Coleridge's own works. The "Zapoyla," entitled a "Christmas Tale," (and which he never sat down to write, but dictated it while walking up and down the room,) became so immediately popular that 2000 copies were sold in six weeks, while it required two years for the sale of 1000 copies of the "Aids to Reflection," which cost him much labour, and was the fruit of many years' reflection.] [Footnote 18: i.e. Nether Stowey, at the foot of the Quantock Hills.] [Footnote 19: Thomas Poole, Esq.] [Footnote 20: The following lines are here referred to "And now, beloved Stowey! I behold Thy Church-tower, and, methinks, the four huge elms Clustering, which mark the mansion of my friend; And close behind them, hidden from my view, Is my own lowly cottage, where my babe And my babe's mother dwell in peace. With light And quicken'd footsteps thitherward I tend, Remembering thee, O green and silent dell! And grateful, that by nature's quietness And solitary musings, all my heart Is soften'd, and made worthy to indulge Love, and the thoughts that yearn for human kind. Nether Stowey, April 28th, 1798." ] [Footnote 21: Ossian.] [Footnote 22: This ill-natured remark requires no comment: but I would fain recommend the reader to peruse the beautiful and faithful portrait of him in the Preface to the second edition of the "Table Talk," Murray, Albemarle Street.] [Footnote 23: He was not an enthusiast in the sense this individual used the word; in whatever studies he was engaged, he pursued them with great earnestness, and they were sufficient to excite his powerful and sensitive intellect, so as to induce an observer not well acquainted with him to form this opinion. In the character of preacher, he exhibited more the character of philosopher and poet, never manifesting that sectarian spirit, which too often narrows the mind, or perhaps is rather the 'result' of a narrow mind, and which frequently seems to exclude men from the most substantial forms of Christianity, viz. "Christian charity and Christian humility." His religion was the very opposite of a worldly religion, it was at all times the religion of love. This visit to Shrewsbury, as the probable successor of Mr. Rowe, was undertaken by the advice of Mr. afterwards Dr. Estlin, a Unitarian dissenter and preacher in Bristol, a man possessed of great kindness and of great influence among this sect, to whom Coleridge had been indebted for many kind offices; the result of this visit forms a part of the sequel.] [Footnote 24: 'Poetical Works,' vol. i. p. 238.] [Footnote 25: "No little fish thrown back into the water, no fly unimprisoned from a child's hand, could more buoyantly enjoy its element than I this clear and peaceful home, with the lovely view of the town, groves, and lake of Ratzeburg."] [Footnote 26: From the earliest periods of authentic history, the Brocken has been the seat of the marvellous. On its summits are still seen huge blocks of granite, called the Sorcerer's Chair and the Altar. A spring of pure water is known by the name of the Magic Fountain, and the Anemone of the Brocken is distinguished by the title of the Sorcerer's Flower. These names are supposed to have originated in the rites of the great Idol Cortho, whom the Saxons worshipped in secret on the summit of the Brocken, when Christianity was extending her benignant sway over the subjacent plains. As the locality of these idolatrous rites, the Brocken must have been much frequented, and we can scarcely doubt that the spectre which now so often haunts it at sunrise, must have been observed from the earliest times; but it is nowhere mentioned that this phenomenon was in any way associated with the objects of their idolatrous worship. One of the best accounts of the Spectre of the Brocken, is that which is given by M. Haué, who saw it on the 23rd May, 1797. After having been on the summit of the mountain no less than thirty times, he had at last the good fortune of witnessing the object of his curiosity. The sun rose about four o'clock in the morning through a serene atmosphere. In the south-west, towards Achtermannshöhe, a brisk west wind carried before it the transparent vapours, which had yet been condensed into thick heavy clouds. About a quarter past four he went towards the inn, and looked round to see whether the atmosphere would afford him a free prospect towards the south-west, when he observed at a very great distance, towards Achtermannshöhe, a human figure of a monstrous size. His hat having been almost carried away by a violent gust of wind, he suddenly raised his hand to his head, to protect his hat, and the colossal figure did the same. He immediately made another movement by bending his body, an action which was repeated by the spectral figure. M. Haué was desirous of making further experiments, but the figure disappeared. He remained however in the same position expecting its return, and in a few minutes it again made its appearance on the Achtermannshöhe, when it mimicked his gestures as before. He then called the landlord of the inn, and having both taken the same position which he had before, they looked towards the Achtermannshöhe, but saw nothing. In a very short space of time, however, two colossal figures were formed over the above eminence, and after bending their bodies, and imitating the gestures of the two spectators, they disappeared. Retaining their position and keeping their eyes still fixed upon the same spot, the two gigantic spectres again stood before them, and were joined by a third. Every movement that they made was imitated by the three figures, but the effect varied in its intensity, being sometimes weak and faint, and at other times strong and well defined----. "Vide Sir D. Brewster's Natural Magic, p. 128.] [Footnote 27: Horseley appears to have been in his way a Christian Hercules, and well adapted for cleansing even an Augean stable of apostasy.] [Footnote 28: "Letter sixteenth," p. 264. ed. 1789, in Bishop Horsley's 'Tracts' in controversy with Dr. Priestley.] [Footnote 29: This observation, it is presumed, alludes to the time when he was 'preaching' Unitarianism.] [Footnote 30: Written in 1805.] [Footnote 31: Alas! for myself at least I know and feel, that wherever there is a wrong not to be forgiven, there is a grief that admits neither of cure nor comforting. 'Private Record, 1806.'] [Footnote 32: It appears that Mr. Alexander Macauley, the secretary, an honest and amiable man, died suddenly, without "moan or motion," and Coleridge filled his situation till the arrival of a new secretary, appointed and confirmed by the ministers in England.] [Footnote 33: 1805. "For months past so incessantly employed in official tasks, subscribing, examining, administering oaths, auditing," &c.] [Footnote 34: April 22, 1804. "I was reading when I was taken ill, and felt an oppression of my breathing, and convulsive snatching in my stomach and limbs. Mrs. Ireland noticed this laborious breathing."] [Footnote 35: I would fain request the reader to peruse the poem, entitled "A Tombless Epitaph," to be found in Coleridge's 'Poetical Works', 1834, page 200.] [Footnote 36: Coleridge when asked what was the difference between fame and reputation, would familiarly reply, "Fame is the fiat of the good and wise," and then with energy would quote the following beautiful lines from Milton:-- Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil, Nor in the glistering foil Set off to the world, nor in broad rumour lies: But lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes, And perfect witness of all-judging Jove; As he pronounces lastly on each deed, Of so much fame in Heaven expect thy meed. 'Lycidas.'] [Footnote 37: "The following memoranda written in pencil, and apparently as he journeyed along, but now scarcely legible, may perhaps have an interest for some readers:-- "Sunday, December 15th, 1805. "Naples, view of Vesuvius, the Hail-mist--Torre del Greco--bright amid darkness--the mountains above it flashing here and there from their snows; but Vesuvius, it had not thinned as I have seen at Keswick, but the air so consolidated with the massy cloud curtain, that it appeared like a mountain in basso relievo, in an interminable wall of some pantheon."] [Footnote 38: The order for Coleridge's arrest had already been sent from Paris, but his escape was so contrived by the good old Pope, as to defeat the intended indulgence of the Tyrant's vindictive appetite, which would have preyed equally on a Duc D'Enghien, and a contributor to a public journal. In consequence of Mr. Fox having asserted in the House of Commons, that the rupture of the Truce of Amiens had its origin in certain essays written in the Morning Post, which were soon known to have been Coleridge's, and that he was at Rome within reach, the ire of Buonaparte was immediately excited.] [Footnote 39: Though his Note Books are full of memoranda, not an entry or date of his arrival at Rome is to be found. To Rome itself and its magnificence, he would often refer in conversation. Unfortunately there is not a single document to recall the beautiful images he would place before your mind in perspective, when inspired by the remembrance of its wonder-striking and splendid objects. He however preserved some short essays, which he wrote when in Malta, Observations on Sicily, Cairo, &c. &c. political and statistical, which will probably form part of the literary remains in train of publication. Malta, on a first view of the subject, seemed to present a situation so well fitted for a landing place, that it was intended to have adopted this mode, as in 'The Friend', of dividing the present memoir; but this loss of MS. and the breaches of continuity, render it impracticable.] [Footnote 40: At this time all his writings were strongly tinctured with Platonism.] [Footnote 41: Each party claimed him as their own; for party without principles must ever be shifting, and therefore they found his opinions sometimes in accordance with their own, and sometimes at variance. But he was of no party--his views were purely philosophical.] [Footnote 42: The character of Buonaparte was announced in the same paper.] [Footnote 43: Those who spoke after Pitt were Wilberforce, Tierney, Sheridan, &c.] [Footnote 44: This speech of Mr. Pitt's is extracted from the 'Morning Post', February 18th, 1800.] [Footnote 45: The following exquisite image on Leighton was found in one of Coleridge's note books, and is also inserted in his Literary Remains: "Next to the inspired Scriptures, yea, and as the vibration of that once struck hour remaining on the air, stands Archbishop Leighton's commentary on the first epistle of Peter."] [Footnote 46: In his later days, Mr. Coleridge would have renounced the opinions and the incorrect reasoning of this letter]. CHAPTER III. LEAVES THE LAKES ON ACCOUNT OF HIS HEALTH FOR MALTA--HIS EMPLOYMENT IN MALTA IN 1805--GOES TO SYRACUSE AND ROME--WINTERS AT NAPLES 15TH OF DECEMBER, 1806. Mr. Coleridge once met Mrs. Barbauld at an evening party. He had not long been present, and the recognition of mere acquaintanceship over, than, walking across the room, she addressed him in these words: "So, Mr. Coleridge, I understand you do not consider Unitarians Christians." "I hope, Madam," said he, "that all persons born in a Christian country are Christians, and trust they are under the condition of being saved; but I 'do' contend that Unitarianism' is not 'Christianity';" to which she replied, "I do not understand the distinction." This want of knowledge of the difference, is common to many very clever and very amiable persons of this creed. It is hoped that we are not always to be tried by our speculative opinions, for man is frequently constituted higher and better than the principles he sometimes adopts. Coleridge frequently observed, "I do not so much care for men's religious opinions,--they vary, and are dependant on that which usually surrounds them-but I regard with more attention what men _are_." He extended his kindness to all he believed to be good, whatever their creed, and when in his power, his aid. When injured, he immediately forgave, as he hoped to be forgiven, [1] and when reviled and persecuted, he never became 'persecutor'. Of him it may be said, what he himself observed of the pious Baxter, that "he came a century before his time." The Western world however seems to have better appreciated the works of Coleridge, than most of his countrymen: in some parts of America, his writings are understood and highly valued. In 1801, he settled at Keswick, in a house, which if not built, was at least finished for him, by a then neighbour (a Mr. Jackson,) and for a time he occupied a part of it. But here his health greatly failed, and he suffered severe rheumatism from the humidity of a lake country, which was the main cause of his leaving Keswick for Malta. It has been already observed, that when a youth at school, he had, from imprudent bathing, become a rheumatic subject, and during the rest of his life, remained liable to most painful affections of that disorder. In 1803, the fear of sudden death induced him to insure his life, that his family might not be left, dependant on his friends. In 1804, his rheumatic sufferings increasing, he determined on a change of climate, and accepted an invitation from his friend, Sir John, then Mr. Stoddart, residing at Malta, where he arrived in May. He soon became acquainted with the governor of the island, Sir Alexander Ball, who was greatly attached to Coleridge, and whose character has been so well described by him in The Friend. During a change of secretaries, [2] Coleridge, at the request of Sir Alexander, officiated, pro tempore, as public secretary of that island; and there was found in him--what at that time was so much required--an able diplomatic writer in this department of correspondence. The dignities of the office he never attempted to support: he was greatly annoyed at what he thought its unnecessary parade, and he petitioned Sir Alexander to be released from the annoyance. There can be no doubt that, to an individual accustomed to public business, his occupation might appear light, and even agreeable; but his health, which was the object of this change, not being much benefited, and the duties of the employment greater than he was equal to, made it for him an arduous one. [3] He seemed at this time, in addition to his rheumatism, to have been oppressed in his breathing, which oppression crept on him imperceptibly to himself without suspicion of its cause yet so obvious was it, that it was noticed by others "as laborious;" [4] and continuing to increase, though with little apparent advancement, at length terminated in death. "Friday afternoon, four o'clock, April 18,1804. The Speedwell dropped anchor in the harbour of Malta: one of the finest in the world, the buildings surrounding it on all sides, of a neat ever-new-looking sand-free-stone. Some unfinished, and in all, the windows placed backward, looked like Carthage when �neas visited it-or a 'burnt out' place." Saturday, April 19.--In the after-dinner hour walked out with Mr. and Mrs. Stoddart, towards the Quarantine harbour. One's first feeling is, that it is all strange, very strange; and when you begin to understand a little of the meaning and uses of the massy endless walls and defiles, then you feel and perceive that it is very wonderful. A city all of freestone, all the houses looking new like Bath; all with flat roofs, the streets all strait, and at right angles to each other; but many of them exceedingly steep, none quite level; of the steep streets, some, 'all' stepped with a smooth artificial stone, some having the footpath on each side in stone steps, the middle left for carriages; lines of fortification, fosses, bastions, curtains, &c. &c. endless:--with gardens or bowling-grounds below; for it is all height and depth--you can walk nowhere without having whispers of suicide, toys of desperation. Expletive cries of Maltese venders shot up, sudden and violent. The inhabitants very dark, almost black; but straight, cleanlimbed, lively, active,--cannot speak in praise of their cleanliness--children very fair--women from the use of the faldetto, or cloak-hooding their heads, as women in England in a shower throw over their aprons, and from the use of always holding it down to one side of the face, all have a continued languishing manner of holding their heads one way--picturesque enough as expressive of a transient emotion, but shocking and inelegant in 'all' and always. The language Arabic, corrupted with Italian, and perhaps with others. Sunday, April 20, 1804.--Went to church, plain chapel with a picture behind the pulpit, which I was not close enough to see, and at the other end in a nitch, a 'cross painted'! Was it there before? or was it in complaisance to Maltese superstitions?--Called on Sir A. Ball--there I met General Valette, and delivered my letter to him,--a striking room, very high; 3/4ths of its height from the ground hung with rich crimson silk or velvet; and the 1/4th above, a mass of colours, pictures in compartments rudely done and without perspective or art, but yet very impressively and imagination-stirringly--representing all the events and exploits of the Order.--Some fine pictures, one by Correggio, one of a Cain killing Abel, I do not know by whom. Monday, April 21, 1804, Hardkain.--Sir A. Ball called on me, and introduced me to Mr. Lane, who was formerly his tutor, but now his chaplain. He invited me to dine with him on Thursday, and made a plan for me to ride to St. Antonio on Tuesday morning with Mr. Lane, offering me a horse. Soon after came on thunder and storm, and my breathing was affected a good deal, but still I was in no discomfort. April 22, Tuesday morning, six o'clock, was on horseback, and rode to St. Antonio.--Fields with walls, to keep the fort from the rain--mere desolation seemingly, and yet it is fertile. St. Antonio, a pleasant country-house, with a fine but unheeded garden, save among the low orange and lemon trees, still thick with fruit on many of the trees, fruit ripe, blossoms, and the next year's fruit. Pepper-trees very beautiful, and the locust-tree not amiss. Visited St. John's--O magnificence! Wednesday, April 23.--General Valette I called on at his country-house, just out of the gates, near the end of the Botanic Garden, and it is the pleasantest place I have seen here. The multitude of small gardens and orangeries, among the huge masses of fortifications, many of them seeming almost as thick as the gardens inclosed by them are broad. Pomegranate in (beautiful secicle) flower. Under a bridge over a dry ditch saw the largest prickly pear. Elkhorns for trunk, and then its leaves--but go and look and look.--(Hard rain.) We sheltered in the Botanic Garden; yet reached home not unwetted." The simplicity of Coleridge's manners, and entire absence of all show of business-like habits, amongst men chiefly mercantile, made him an object of curiosity, and gave rise to the relation of many whimsical stories about him. But his kindness and benevolence lent a charm to his behaviour and manners, in whatever he was engaged. From the state of his own lungs, invalid-like, he was in the habit of attending much to those about him, and particularly those who had been sent to Malta for pulmonary disease. He frequently observed how much the invalid, at first landing, was relieved by the climate and the 'stimulus' of change; but when the novelty, arising from 'that' change, had ceased, the monotonous sameness of the blue sky, accompanied by the summer heat of the climate, acted powerfully as a sedative, ending in speedy dissolution,--even more speedy than in a colder climate. The effects on Coleridge seemed to run parallel to this. At first he remarked that he was relieved, but afterwards speaks of his limbs "as lifeless tools," and of the violent pains in his bowels, which neither opium, ether, nor peppermint, separately or combined, could relieve. These several states he minuted down, from time to time, for after-consideration or comparison. He most frequently sought relief from bodily suffering in religious meditations, or in some augmented exercise of his mind: "Sickness, 'tis true, Whole years of weary days, besieged him close, Even to the gates and inlets of his life! But it is true, no less, that strenuous, firm, And with a natural gladness, he maintained The citadel unconquered, and in joy Was strong to follow the delightful muse." 'Tombless Epitaph'. [5] The citadel did, indeed, remain unconquered even to his 'last' hour--he found in religious meditation and prayer that solace and support which, during a life of misery and pain, gave him his extraordinary patience and resignation. If an ejaculation escaped him, it was usually followed by some moral or religious reflection, as thus runs one of his notes: "O me miserum! Assuredly the doctrine of grace, atonement, and the spirit of God interceding by groans to the spirit of God, (Rev. viii. 26.), is founded on constant experience, and even if it can be ever 'explained away', it must still remain as the rising and setting of the sun itself, as the darkness and as the light--it must needs have the most efficient character of reality,--quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus! Deeply do I both know and feel my weakness--God in his wisdom grant, that my day of visitation may not have been past." Lest some 'will-worshiping' individuals, inflated by vanity, and self-righteousness, should misunderstand or misconstrue him, the following lines are copied from his poems:-- "HUMILITY, THE MOTHER OF CHARITY." "Frail creatures are we all! To be the best, Is but the fewest faults to have:-- Look thou then to thyself, and leave the rest To God, thy conscience and the grave." 'Poetical Works.' There is not, perhaps, to be found on record a more perfect example of humility and charity, than that which he exhibited and sustained for so long a period of suffering and trial. Surely he could not be compared to the generality of his fellows--to men who, though possessing great worldly reputation, never gave him their support; but, on the contrary, were sometimes even ready to whisper down his fair name! "For whispering tongues can poison truth; And constancy lives in realms above." CHRISTOBEL. Some of these might be well meaning enough to believe, that in giving publicity to what they _erroneously_ considered moral infirmities, (not possessing the knowledge to discriminate between moral and physical infirmities), they were performing a religious duty--were displaying a beacon to deter others from the same course. But in the case of Coleridge, this was a sad misconception. Neither morally nor physically was he understood. He did all that in his state duty could exact; and had he been more favoured in his bodily constitution, he would not have been censured for frailties which did not attach to him. Alas! how little do the many know of the hearts of truly great men! Least of all could such men as Coleridge be known by modern pharisees. "It is no uncommon thing," says an affectionate and kind-hearted friend, whose genius is rarely equalled, "to see well intentioned men please themselves with the feeling that they are not as others; that they are the favorites of Heaven, and washed clean by special dispensation from the spots of frail mortality; who more-over assume that they possess the most delicate feelings; but then those feelings are under such admirable discipline, that they can, with the most exquisite suffering, cry over their own sentences, shed tears of pity and blood for their duty, make a merit of the hardness which is contrary to their nature, and live in perpetual apprehension of being too tender-hearted. It is wonderful with what ingenuity these people can reconcile their flexible consciences to acts at which their inferiors might blush or shudder, and no less fearful to reflect how many poor wretches, not wholly past hope or reformation, may have been sent to their last account, with all their imperfections on their heads, to satisfy the religious or political fears of these pharisees. The patrons and employers of spies, we may expect to make the greatest sacrifice to _expediency_,--a word which every man will explain after his own way." To have written during his life any thing like an eulogy on Coleridge would have been most painful to him, yet he must have felt, that he deserved well of his fellow beings; for fame, and fame only, he observes, is the aim and object of every good and great man, though it is too often confounded with mere reputation. When a youth, he had learnt how to value that bubble reputation, its fleeting character, but the love of which, in some men, is so injurious both to head and heart. Reputation, "the morrow's meal," the "breakfast only," the furnisher of the tinsel ornaments, or at most of some of the worldly agreeables, sown perhaps for future worldly enjoyment. 'He' laboured for riches of another kind, and _stored_ them, in the hope of receiving a more permanent reward: "By fame of course," says Coleridge, "I mean any thing rather than reputation, [6] the desire of working in the good and great permanently, through indefinite ages, the struggle to be promoted into the rank of God's fellow-labourers. For bold as this expression is, it is a quotation from Scripture, and therefore justified by God himself, for which we ought to be grateful, that he has deigned to hold out such a glory to us! This is however only one consistent part of the incomprehensible goodness of Deity in taking upon himself man." His note-books abound with "his hints and first thoughts; "as he says, his "Cogitabilia rather than actual cogitata à me,"--not always to be understood as his fixed opinions, but often merely suggestions of the disquisition, and acts of obedience to the apostolic command of "Try all things, hold fast that which is good." Among them is the following characteristic of the man and his feelings, noted down for some future disquisition. "Würde, Worthiness, VIRTUE, consist in the mastery over the sensuous and sensual impulses; but Love requires INNOCENCE. Let the lover ask his heart whether he could endure that his mistress should have 'struggled' with a sensual impulse for another, though she overcame it from a sense of duty to him? Women are LESS offended with men, from the vicious habits of men in part, and in part from the difference of bodily constitution; yet still to a pure and truly loving woman it must be a painful thought. That he should struggle with and overcome ambition, desire of fortune, superior beauty, &c. or with desire objectless, is pleasing; but 'not' that he has struggled with positive appropriated desire, i.e. desire 'with' an object. Love in short requires an absolute 'peace' and 'harmony' between all parts of human nature, such as it is, and it is offended by any war, though the battle should be decided in favour of the worthier. This is perhaps the final cause of the 'rarity' of true love, and the efficient and immediate cause of its difficulty. Ours is a life of probation, we are to contemplate and obey 'duty' for its own sake, and in order to this we, in our present imperfect state of being, must see it not merely abstracted from, but in direct opposition to the 'wish', the 'inclination'. Having perfected this, the highest possibility of human nature, he may then with safety harmonize 'all' his being with it; 'he may' LOVE!--To perform duties absolutely from the sense of duty, is the 'ideal', which perhaps no human being ever can arrive at, but which every human being ought to try to draw near unto. This is in the only wise, and verily, in a most sublime sense to see God face to face; which, alas! it seems too true, that no man can do and 'live', i.e. a 'human' life. It would become incompatible with his organization, or rather it would 'transmute' it, and the process of that transmutation to the senses of other men would be called 'death'.--Even as to caterpillars; in all probability the caterpillar dies, and he either does not see, which is most probable, or at all events he does not see the connection between the caterpillar and the butterfly, the beautiful Psyche of the Greeks. Those who in this life 'love' in perfection--if such there be--in proportion as their love has no struggles, see God darkly and through a veil:--for when duty and pleasure are absolutely coincident, the very nature of our organization necessitates that duty, will be contemplated as the symbol of pleasure, instead of pleasure being (as in a future life we have faith it will be) the symbol of duty. This then is the distinction between human and angelic 'happiness'. Human happiness--humanly happy I call him, who in enjoyment finds his duty; angelically happy he, who seeks and finds his 'duty' in enjoyment. Happiness in general may be defined--not the aggregate of pleasurable sensations, for this is either a dangerous error and the creed of sensualists, or else a mere translation or wordy paraphrase--but the state of that person who, in order to enjoy his nature in its highest manifestations of conscious 'feeling', has no need of doing wrong, and who in order to do right is under no necessity of abstaining from enjoyment." On the arrival of the new secretary at Malta, Mr. Coleridge left it, September 27, 1805, and after a day's voyage, arrived at Syracuse. He remained in Sicily a short time only, for he was eager to visit the "eternal city" (Rome,) in which he staid some months. The next date marking his progress, is the 15th December, 1806, Naples,--the usual place of the residence of travellers during summer. [7] This gap in his minutes is partly filled up by his own verbal account, repeated at various times to the writer of this memoir. While in Rome, he was actively employed in visiting the great works of art, statues, pictures, buildings, palaces, &c. &c. observations on which he minuted down for publication. Here he became acquainted with the eminent literary men at that time collected there, and here he first saw the great American painter Alston, for whom he always cherished an unfeigned regard. The German poet Tieck, he then for the first time also saw, and many others of celebrity. To one of them he was mainly indebted for his safety, otherwise he might have terminated his career in the Temple at Paris: for to Buonaparte, through one of his industrious emissaries, Coleridge had become obnoxious, in consequence of an article written by him in the Morning Post. This salutary warning he obtained from the brother of the celebrated traveller, Humboldt, of whom he had enquired, whether he could pass through Switzerland and Germany, and return by that route to England. Humboldt then informed Coleridge, that having passed through Paris on his journey to Rome, he had learnt that he, Coleridge, was a marked man, and unsafe: when within the reach of Buonaparte he advised him to be more than usually circumspect, and do, all in his power to remain unknown. [8] Rather unexpectedly, he had a visit early one morning from a noble Benedictine, with a passport signed by the Pope, in order to facilitate his departure. He left him a carriage, and an admonition for instant flight, which was promptly obeyed by Coleridge. Hastening to Leghorn, he discovered an American vessel ready to sail for England, on board of which he embarked. On the voyage she was chased by a French vessel, which so alarmed the American, that he compelled Coleridge to throw his papers overboard, and thus to his great regret, were lost the fruits of his literary labours in Rome. [9] In 1806 he returned to England, and took up his residence for a time at Keswick, but was more generally with his friend Wordsworth, then living at Grassmere. At Grassmere he planned 'The Friend', for which Mr. Wordsworth wrote a few contributions; and receiving occasionally some little assistance from other writers, he was enabled to furnish the quantity of valuable matter which appeared in that publication. Some of his earnest admirers, and those too persons best acquainted with his works, are disposed to give this the preference. His friend, Lamb, who is justly considered a man of exquisite taste, used to say, in his odd and familiar way, "Only now listen to his talk, it is as fine as an angel's!" and then, by way of a superlative, would add, "but after all, his best talk is in 'The Friend'." To the Lake Edition of this work, as it has been termed, is appended the following prospectus, addressed to a correspondent "It is not unknown to you, that I have employed almost the whole of my life in acquiring, or endeavouring to acquire, useful knowledge by study, reflection, observation, and by cultivating the society of my superiors in intellect, both at home and in foreign countries. You know too, that at different periods of my life, I have not only planned, but collected the materials for many works on various and important subjects: so many indeed, that the number of my unrealized schemes, and the mass of my miscellaneous fragments, have often furnished my friends with a subject of raillery, and sometimes of regret and reproof. Waiving the mention of all private and accidental hinderances, I am inclined to believe, that this want of perseverance has been produced in the main by an over-activity of thought, modified by a constitutional indolence, which made it more pleasant to me to continue acquiring, than to reduce what I had acquired to a regular form. Add too, that almost daily throwing off my notices or reflections in desultory fragments, I was still tempted onward by an increasing sense of the imperfection of my knowledge, and by the conviction, that in order fully to comprehend and develope any one subject, it was necessary that I should make myself master of some other, which again as regularly involved a third, and so on, with an ever-widening horizon. Yet one habit, formed during long absences from those with whom I could converse with full sympathy, has been of advantage to me--that of daily noting down, in my memorandum or common place books, both incidents and observations, whatever had occurred to me from without, and all the flux and reflux of my mind within itself. The number of these notices and their tendency, miscellaneous as they were, to one common end ('quid sumus et quid futuri gignimur,' what we are and what we are born to become; and thus from the end of our being to deduce its proper objects), first encouraged me to undertake the weekly essay, of which you will consider this letter as the prospectus. Not only did the plan seem to accord better than any other with the nature of my own mind, both in its strength and in its weakness; but conscious that, in upholding some principles both of taste and philosophy, adopted by the great men of Europe, from the middle of the fifteenth till toward the close of the seventeenth century. I must run counter to many prejudices of many of my readers (for old faith is often modern heresy). I perceived too in a periodical essay, the most likely means of winning instead of forcing my way. Supposing truth on my side, the shock of the first day might be so far lessened by reflections of the succeeding days, as to procure for my next week's essay a less hostile reception, than it would have met with, had it been only the next chapter of a present volume. I hoped to disarm the mind of those feelings, which preclude conviction by contempt, and as it were, fling the door in the face of reasoning, by a 'presumption' of its absurdity. A motion too for honourable ambition was supplied by the fact, that every periodical paper of the kind now attempted, which had been conducted with zeal and ability, was not only well received at the time, but has become permanently, and in the best sense of the word, popular. By honourable ambition, I mean the strong desire to be useful, aided by the wish to be generally acknowledged to have been so. As I feel myself actuated in no ordinary degree by this desire, so the hope of realizing it appears less and less presumptuous to me, since I have received from men of highest rank and established character in the republic of letters, not only strong encouragements as to my own fitness for the undertaking, but likewise promises of support from their own stores. The 'object' of 'The Friend' briefly and generally expressed is--to uphold those truths and those merits against the caprices of fashion, and such pleasures, as either depend on transitory and accidental causes, or are pursued from less worthy impulses. The chief 'subjects' of my own essays will be:-- The true and sole ground of morality, or virtue, as distinguished from prudence. The origin and growth of moral impulses, as distinguished from external and immediate motives. The necessary dependence of taste on moral impulses and habits; and the nature of taste (relatively to judgment in general and to genius) defined, illustrated and applied. Under this head I comprise the substance of the Lectures given, and intended to have been given, at the Royal Institution, on the distinguished English Poets, in illustration of the general principles of Poetry, together with suggestions concerning the affinity of the Fine Arts to each other, and the principles common to them all: Architecture; Gardening; Dress; Music; Painting; Poetry. The opening out of new objects of just admiration in our own language, and information of the present state and past history of Swedish, Danish, German and Italian literature, (to which, but as supplied by a friend, I may add the Spanish, Portuguese and French,) as far as the same has not been already given to English readers, or is not to be found in common French authors. Characters met with in real life; anecdotes and results of my life and travels, &c. &c. as far as they are illustrative of general moral laws, and have no immediate leaning on personal or immediate politics. Education in its widest sense, private and national sources of consolation to the afflicted in misfortune or disease, or dejection of mind from the exertion and right application of the reason, the imagination, and the moral sense; and new sources of enjoyment opened out, or an attempt (as an illustrious friend once expressed the thought to me) to add sunshine to daylight, by making the happy more happy. In the words 'dejection of mind,' I refer particularly to doubt or disbelief of the moral government of the world, and the grounds and arguments for the religious hopes of human nature." The first number, printed on stamped paper, was dated June 8th, 1809. He commences this work with the following motto: "Whenever we improve, it is right to leave room for a further improvement. It is right to consider, to look about us, to examine the effect of what we have done. Then we can proceed with confidence, because we can proceed with intelligence. Whereas, in hot reformations, is what men more zealous than considerate, call 'making clear work', the whole is generally so crude, so harsh, so indigested; mixed with so much imprudence and so much injustice; so contrary to the whole course of human nature and human institutions, that the very people who are most eager for it, are among the first to grow disgusted at what they have done. Then some part of the abdicated grievance is recalled from its exile in order to become a corrective of the correction. Then the abuse assumes all the credit and popularity of a reform. The very idea of purity and disinterestedness in politics falls into disrepute, and is considered as a vision of hot and inexperienced men; and thus disorders become incurable, not by the virulence of their own quality, but by the unapt and violent nature of the remedies." ('Burke's speech on the 11th of February, 1780'.) TO MY READERS. "Conscious that I am about to deliver my sentiments on a subject of the utmost delicacy, I have selected the general motto to all my political lucubrations, from an authority equally respected by both parties. I have taken it from an orator, whose eloquence enables Englishmen to repeat the name of Demosthenes and Cicero, without humiliation; from a statesman, who has left to our language a bequest of glory unrivalled and all our own, in the keen-eyed, yet far-sighted genius, with which he has made the profoundest general principles of political wisdom, and even the recondite laws of human passions, bear upon particular measures and passing events. While of the harangues of Pitt, Fox, and their compeers on the most important occurrences, we retain a few unsatisfactory fragments alone, the very flies and weeds of Burke shine to us through the purest amber, imperishably enshrined, and valuable from the precious material of their embalment. I have extracted the passage not from that Burke, whose latter exertions have rendered his works venerable as oracular voices from the sepulchre of a patriarch, to the upholders of the government and society in their existing state and order; but from a speech delivered by him while he was the most beloved, the proudest name with the more anxious friends of liberty; while he was the darling of those who, believing mankind to have been improved, are desirous to give to forms of government a similar progression. From the same anxiety, I have been led to introduce my opinions on this most hazardous subject, by a preface of a somewhat personal character. And though the title of my address is general, yet, I own, I direct myself more particularly to those among my readers, who, from various printed and unprinted calumnies, have judged most unfavourably of my political tenets; aid to those whose favour I have chanced to win in consequence of a similar, though not equal mistake. To both, I affirm, that the opinions and arguments, I am about to detail, have been the settled convictions of my mind for the last ten or twelve years, with some brief intervals of fluctuation, and those only in lesser points, and known only to the companions of my fire-side. From both and from all my readers, I solicit a gracious attention to the following explanations: first, on the congruity of the following numbers, with the general plan and object of 'The Friend;' and secondly, on the charge of arrogance or presumption, which may be adduced against the author for the freedom, with which in these numbers, and in others that will follow on other subjects, he presumes to dissent from men of established reputation, or even to doubt of the justice, with which the public laurel-crown, as symbolical of the 'first' class of genius and intellect, has been awarded to sundry writers since the revolution, and permitted to wither around the brows of our elder benefactors, from Hooker to Sir P. Sidney, and from Sir P. Sidney, to Jeremy Taylor and Stillingfleet." The work ceased at the 27th number, March 15th, 1810. As is usually the case when authors become their own publishers, there was a pecuniary loss; but as long as printing lasts, it must remain a record of his powers. Yet the critics, if critics they were worthy to be called, discovered only feebleness of mind, when in the attempt to make themselves acquainted with his principles, they professed, either through ignorance, or indolence, not to understand him. When his mental powers had so far advanced, he felt a conviction of the truth of the Triune power, [10] and at once saw that there was no important truth, in which this Triad was not contained. As ours was a constitutional government, composed of three great powers (of the three great estates of the realm, as Queen Elizabeth would say, the church, the nobles, and the commonalty,) when these, Coleridge observed, were exactly balanced, the government was in a healthy state, but excess in any one of these powers, disturbed the balance and produced disorder, which was attended by dissatisfaction and discord. A political writer, he laboured to maintain this balance; and when either power was threatened by any disturbance, threw in a counterweight, sometimes on one side and sometimes on another, as he, according to his philosophical opinions, thought they deserved either censure or praise. [11] For this 'apparent' fluctuation he was termed, by those men who never understood his principles, vacillating and inconsistent: but he cast his "bread upon the waters," and in due time it returned to him. There must come a time when the works of Coleridge will be fairly weighed against the agreeable time-killing publications of our day; works for which their frivolous authors have reaped an abundant harvest while this giant in literature gained scarcely a dwarf's portion. But Truth, though perhaps slowly, must finally prevail. Mr. Coleridge remarks, that for his own guidance he was greatly benefited by a resolve, which, in the antithetic and allowed quaintness of an adage or maxim he had been accustomed to word thus: "until you 'understand a writer's ignorance', presume yourself 'ignorant of his understanding'." This was for him a golden rule, and which, when he read the philosophical works of others, he applied most carefully to himself. If an unlearned individual takes up a book, and, on opening it, finds by certain characters that it is a book on Algebra, he modestly puts, it down with perhaps an equally modest observation. "I never learned the Mathematics, and am ignorant of them: they are not suited to my taste, and I do not require them." But if perchance, he should take up a philosophical work, this modesty is not exercised: though he does not comprehend it, he will not acknowledge the fact; he is piqued however, and not satisfied with a mere slighting observation, but often ends, as disappointed vanity usually does, in shallow abuse. The political, the critical, the philosophical views of Coleridge, were all grand, and from his philosophical views he never deviated; all fluctuating opinions rolled by him, not indeed unheeded, but observed with sympathy and with regret, when not founded on those permanent principles which were to benefit and give good government to man. Coleridge, it is well known, was no adept in matters of business, and so little skilled in ephemeral literature as not to be able to profit by any weekly publication. The first edition of The Friend was published weekly, on paper with the government stamp, and that reached, as before related, its twenty-seventh number. Such a work was not suited to his genius: in fact, no periodical which required rapid writing on slight amusing subjects, with punctuality in publication, which demanded steadiness of health, and the absence of those sedative causes arising, in part, from his benevolent heart and sensitive nature, ever would have suited him. To write like a novelist--to charm ennui--is that which is required of a modern author who expects pecuniary recompense. Although he needed such recompense, the character of his genius unfitted him for the attainment of it; and had he continued the work, the expenditure would have ended in still greater pecuniary loss. One of his last political essays is that taken from the Morning Post, of March 19, 1800, on the character of Pitt. [12] These Essays were soon forgotten, though this, at the time, was much read and admired as part of the history of the man and his political feelings. It was the effect which Buonaparte believed to have been produced by these on the public mind that tempted him to try to incarcerate Coleridge. Some time after, Otto, the French ambassador at our Court, was ready with a bribe, in the hope to obtain from Coleridge a complimentary essay to his sovereign. The offer of the bribe would have deterred him from writing any more on the subject. Had he been willing to sell himself--to write a flattering character of the great hero--to raise that hero in the estimation of Europe, he would have been amply recompensed. In his 'Biographia Literaria,' he says, "But I do derive a gratification from the knowledge, that my essays have contributed to introduce the practice of placing the questions and events of the day in a moral point of view, in giving dignity to particular measures by tracing their policy or impolicy to permanent principles, and an interest to principles by the application of them to individual measures. In Mr. Burke's writings, indeed, the germs of almost all political truths may be found. But I dare assume to myself the merit of having first explicitly defined and analysed the nature of Jacobinism; and that in distinguishing the jacobin from the republican, the democrat and the mere demagogue, I both rescued the word from remaining a mere term of abuse, and put on their guard many honest minds, who even in their heat of zeal against jacobinism, admitted or supported principles from which the worst part of that system may be legitimately deduced." With this view the following Essays and Observations have been republished here,--as illustrative of his early opinions to be compared with those of his more advanced life,--to shew the injustice of his political opponents, who never seemed to have troubled themselves about principle,--and the necessary growth of intellectual power giving deeper insight, with the additional value of experience and its consequences. PITT. From the Morning Post, March 19, 1800. "Plutarch, in his comparative biography of Rome and Greece, has generally chosen for each pair of lives the two contemporaries who most nearly resembled each other. His work would perhaps have been more interesting, if he had adopted the contrary arrangement, and selected those rather who had attained to the possession of similar influence, or similar fame, by means, actions, and talents the most dissimilar. For power is the sole object of philosophical attention in man, as in inanimate nature; and in the one equally as in the other, we understand it more intimately, the more diverse the circumstances are with which we have observed it co-exist. In our days, the two persons who appear to have influenced the interests and actions of men the most deeply, and the most diffusively, are beyond doubt the Chief Consul of France and the Prime Minister of Great Britain, and in these two are prerented to us similar situations, with the greatest dissimilitude of characters. William Pitt was the younger son of Lord Chatham; a fact of no ordinary importance in the solution of his character, of no mean significance in the heraldry of morals and intellect. His father's rank, fame, political connections, and parental ambition, were his mould; he was cast, rather than grew. A palpable election, a conscious predestination controlled the free agency, and transfigured the individuality of his mind; and that, which he 'might have been', was compered into that, which he 'was to be'. From his early childhood it was his father's custom to make him stand up on a chair, and declaim before a large company; by which exercise, practised so frequently, and continued for so many years, he acquired a premature and unnatural dexterity in the combination of words, which must of necessity have diverted his attention from present objects, obscured his impressions, and deadened his genuine feelings. Not the 'thing' on which he was speaking, but the praises to be gained, were present to his intuition; hence he associated all the operations of his faculties with words, and his pleasures with the surprise excited by them. But an inconceivably large portion of human knowledge and human power is involved in the science and management of 'words'; and an education of words, though it destroys genius, will often create, and always foster, talent. The young Pitt was conspicuous far beyond his fellows, both at school and at college. He was always full grown: he had neither the promise nor the awkwardness of a growing intellect. Vanity, early satiated, formed and elevated itself into a love of power; and in losing this colloquial vanity, he lost one of the prime links that connect the individual with the species, too early for the affections, though not too early for the understanding. At college he was a severe student; his mind was founded and elemented in words and generalities, and these two formed all the superstructure. That revelry and that debauchery, which are so often fatal to the powers of intellect, would probably have been serviceable to him; they would have given him a closer communion with realities, they would have induced a greater presentness to present objects. But Mr. Pitt's conduct was correct, unimpressibly correct. His after-discipline in the special pleader's office, and at the bar, carried on the scheme of his education with unbroken uniformity. His first political connections were with the reformers; but those who accuse him of sympathising or coalescing with their intemperate or visionary plans, misunderstand his character, and are ignorant of the historical facts. Imaginary situations in an imaginary state of things rise up in minds that possess a power and facility in combining images. Mr. Pitt's ambition was conversant with old situations in the old state of things, which furnish nothing to the imagination, though much to the wishes. In his endeavours to realise his father's plan of reform, he was probably as sincere as a being, who had derived so little knowledge from actual impressions, could be. But his sincerity had no living root of affection; while it was propped up by his love of praise and immediate power, so long it stood erect and no longer. He became a member of the Parliament, supported the popular opinions, and in a few years, by the influence of the popular party, was placed in the high and awful rank in which he now is. The fortunes of his country, we had almost said the fates of the world, were placed in his wardship--we sink in prostration before the inscrutable dispensations of Providence, when we reflect in whose wardship the fates of the world were placed! The influencer of his country and of his species was a young man, the creature of another's predetermination, sheltered and weather-fended from all the elements of experience; a young man, whose feet had never wandered; whose very eye had never turned to the right or to the left; whose whole track had been as curveless as the motion of a fascinated reptile! It was a young man, whose heart was solitary, because he had existed always amid objects of futurity, and whose imagination too was unpopulous, because those objects of hope to which his habitual wishes had transferred, and as it were 'projected', his existence, were all familiar and long-established objects! A plant sown and reared in a hot-house, for whom the very air, that surrounded him, had been regulated by the thermometer of previous purpose; to whom the light of nature had penetrated only through glasses and covers; who had had the sun without the breeze; whom no storm had shaken; on whom no rain had pattered; on whom the dews of Heaven had not fallen! A being who had had no feelings connected with man or nature, no spontaneous impulses, no unbiassed and desultory studies, no genuine science, nothing that constitutes individuality in intellect, nothing that teaches brotherhood in affection! Such was the man--such, and so denaturalized the spirit, on whose wisdom and philanthropy the lives and living enjoyments of so many millions of human beings were made unavoidably dependent. From this time a real enlargement of mind became almost impossible. Pre-occupations, intrigue, the undue passion and anxiety, with which all facts must be surveyed; the crowd and confusion of those facts, none of them seen, but all communicated, and by that very circumstance, and by the necessity of perpetually classifying them, transmuted into words and generalities; pride; flattery; irritation; artificial power; these, and circumstances resembling these, necessarily render the heights of office barren heights; which command indeed a vast and extensive prospect, but attract so many clouds and vapours, that most often all prospect is precluded. Still, however, Mr. Pitt's situation, however inauspicious for his real being, was favourable to his fame. He heaped period on period; persuaded himself and the nation, that extemporaneous arrangement of sentences was eloquence; and that eloquence implied wisdom. His father's struggles for freedom, and his own attempts, gave him an almost unexampled popularity; and his office necessarily associated with his name all the great events that happened during his administration. There were not however wanting men who saw through this delusion: and refusing to attribute the industry, integrity, and enterprising spirit of our merchants, the agricultural improvements of our landholders, the great inventions of our manufacturers, or the valour and skilfulness of our sailors, to the merits of a minister, they have continued to decide on his character from those acts and those merits, which belong to him, and to him alone. Judging him by this standard, they have been able to discover in him no one proof or symptom of a commanding genius. They have discovered him never controlling, never creating, events, but always yielding to them with rapid change, and sheltering himself from inconsistency by perpetual indefiniteness. In the Russian war, they saw him abandoning meanly what he had planned weakly, and threatened insolently. In the debates on the Regency, they detected the laxity of his constitutional principles, and received proofs that his eloquence consisted not in the ready application of a general system to particular questions, but in the facility of arguing for or against any question by specious generalities, without reference to any system. In these debates he combined what is most dangerous in democracy with all that is most degrading in the old superstitions of monarchy; and taught an inherency of the office in the person, in order to make the office itself a nullity, and the premiership, with its accompanying majority, the sole and permanent power of the state. And now came the French Revolution. This was a new event: the old routine of reasoning, the common trade of politics, were to become obsolete. He appeared wholly unprepared for it: half favouring, half condemning, ignorant of what he favoured, and why he condemned, he neither displayed the honest enthusiasm and fixed principle of Mr. Fox, nor the intimate acquaintance with the general nature of man, and the consequent 'prescience' of Mr. Burke. After the declaration of war, long did he continue in the common cant of office, in declamation about the Scheld and Holland, and all the vulgar causes of common contests! and when at least the immense genius of his new supporter had beat him out of these 'words' (words signifying 'places' and 'dead objects', and signifying nothing more), he adopted other words in their places, other generalities--Atheism and Jacobinism--phrases, which he learnt from Mr. Burke, but without learning the philosophical definitions and involved consequences, with which that great man accompanied those words: Since the death of Mr. Burke the forms, and the sentiments, and the tone of the French have undergone many and important changes: how, indeed, is it possible that it should be otherwise, while man is the creature of experience! But still Mr. Pitt proceeds in an endless repetition of the same 'general phrases'. This is his element: deprive him of general and abstract phrases, and you reduce him to silence; but you cannot deprive him of them. Press him to specify an 'individual' fact of advantage to be derived from a war, and he answers, Security! Call upon him to particularize a crime, and he exclaims--Jacobinism! Abstractions defined by abstractions; generalities defined by generalities! As a minister of finance he is still, as ever, the words of abstractions. Figures, custom-house reports, imports and exports, commerce and revenue--all flourishing, all splendid! Never was such a prosperous country as England under his administration! Let it be objected, that the agriculture of the country is, by the overbalance of commerce, and by various and complex causes, in such a state, that the country hangs as a pensioner for bread on its neighbours, and a bad season uniformly threatens us with famine. This (it is replied) is owing to our PROSPERITY,--all 'prosperous' nations are in great distress for food!--Still PROSPERITY, still GENERAL PHRASES, unenforced by one single image, one 'single fact' of real national amelioration; of any one comfort enjoyed, where it was not before enjoyed; of any one class of society becoming healthier, or wiser, or happier. These are 'things', these are realities, and these Mr. Pitt has neither the imagination to body forth, or the sensibility to feel for. Once, indeed, in an evil hour, intriguing for popularity, he suffered himself to be persuaded to evince a talent for the real, the individual; and he brought in his POOR BILL!! When we hear the minister's talents for finance so loudly trumpeted, we turn involuntarily to his POOR BILL--to that acknowledged abortion--that unanswerable evidence of his ignorance respecting all the fundamental relations and actions of property, and of the social union! As his reasonings, even so is his eloquence. One character pervades his whole being: words on words, finely arranged, and so dexterously consequent, that the whole bears the semblance of argument, and still keeps awake a sense of surprise; but when all is done, nothing rememberable has been said, no one philosophical remark, no one image, not even a pointed aphorism. Not a sentence of Mr. Pitt's has ever been quoted, or formed the favourite phrase of the day, a thing unexampled in any man of equal reputation; but while he speaks, the effect varies according to the character of his auditor. The man of no talent is swallowed up in surprise; and when the speech is ended, he remembers his feelings, but nothing distinct of that which produced them: (how opposite an effect to that of nature and genius, from whose works the idea still remains, when the feeling is passed away, remains to connect itself with the other feelings, and combine with new impressions!) The mere man of talent hears him with admiration; the mere man of genius with contempt; the philosopher neither admires nor contemns, but listens to him with a deep and solemn interest, tracing in the effects of his eloquence the power of words and phrases, and that peculiar constitution of human affairs in their present state, which so eminently favours this power. Such appears to us to be the prime minister of Great Britain, whether we consider him as a statesman or an orator. The same character betrays itself in his private life; the same coldness to realities, to images of realities, and to all whose excellence relates to reality: he has patronized no science, he has raised no man of genius from obscurity, he counts no one prime work of God among his friends. From the same source, he has no attachment to female society, no fondness for children, no perceptions of beauty in natural scenery; but he is fond of convivial indulgences, of that stimulation, which, keeping up the glow of self-importance, and the sense of internal power, gives feelings without the mediation of ideas. These are the elements of his mind; the accidents of his fortune, the circumstances that enabled such a mind to acquire and retain such a power, would form the subject of a philosophical history, and that too of no scanty size. We can scarcely furnish the chapter of contents to a work, which would comprise subjects so important and delicate as the causes of the diffusion and intensity of secret influence; the machinery and state intrigue of marriages; the overbalance of the commercial interest; the panic of property struck by the late revolution; the short-sightedness of the careful; the carelessness of the far-sighted; and all those many and various events which have given to a decorous profession of religion, and a seemliness of private morals, such an unwonted weight in the attainment and preservation of public power. We are unable to determine whether it be more consolatory or humiliating to human nature, that so many complexities of event, situation, character, age, and country, should be necessary in order to the production of a Mr. Pitt." On the day following the editor promised the character of Buonaparte, but the surmise of a visit from the French minister, then at our court, was sufficient to put a stop to its publication; accordingly it 'never appeared'. Coleridge was requested by the proprietor and editor to report a speech of Pitt's, which at this time was expected to be one of great éclat. Accordingly, early in the morning off Coleridge set, carrying with him his supplies for the campaign: those who are acquainted with the gallery of the house on a press night, when a man can scarcely find elbow room, will better understand how incompetent Coleridge was for such an undertaking; he, however, started by seven in the morning, but was exhausted long before night. Mr. Pitt, for the first quarter of an hour spoke fluently, and in his usual manner, and sufficiently to give a notion of his best style; this was followed by a repetition of words, and words only; he appeared to "talk against time," as the phrase is. Coleridge fell asleep, and listened occasionally only to the speeches [13] that followed. On his return, the proprietor being anxious for the report, Coleridge informed him of the result, and finding his anxiety great, immediately 'volunteered' a speech for Mr. Pitt, which he wrote off hand, and which answered the purpose exceedingly well: it is here presented. The following day, and for days after the publication, the proprietor received complimentary letters announcing the pleasure received at the report, and wishing to know who was the reporter. The secret was, however, kept, and the real author of the speech concealed; but one day Mr. Canning calling on business, made similar inquiries, and received the same answer. Canning replied, "It does more credit to the author's head than to his memory. [14] The honourable gentleman calls upon ministers to state the object of the war in one sentence. I can state it in one word: it is Security. I can state it in one word, though it is not to be explained but in many. The object of the war is security: security against a danger, the greatest that ever threatened this country; the greatest that ever threatened mankind; a danger the more terrible, because it is unexampled and novel. It is a danger which has more than menaced the safety and independence of all nations; it is a danger which has attacked the property and peace of all individuals; a danger which Europe has strained all its sinews to repel; and which no nation has repelled so successfully as the British; because no nation has acted so energetically, so sincerely, so uniformly on the broad basis of principle; because no other nation has perceived with equal clearness and decision the necessity, not only of combating the evil abroad, but of stifling it at home; because no nation has breasted with so firm a constancy the tide of jacobinical power; because no nation has pierced with so steadfast an eye, through the disguises of jacobinical hypocrisy; but now, it seems, we are at once to remit our zeal and our suspicion; that Jacobinism, which alarmed us under the stumbling and drunken tyranny of Robespierre; that Jacobinism, which insulted and roused us under the short-sighted ambition of the five Directors; that Jacobinism, to which we have sworn enmity through every shifting of every bloody scene, through all those abhorred mockeries which have profaned the name of liberty to all the varieties of usurpation; to this Jacobinism we are now to reconcile ourselves, because all its arts and all its energies are united under one person, the child and the champion of Jacobinism, who has been reared in its principles, who has fought its battles, who has systematised its ambition, at once the fiercest instrument of its fanaticism, and the gaudiest puppet of its folly! The honourable gentleman has discovered, that the danger of French power and French principles is at an end, because they are concentred, and because to uniformity of design is added an unity of direction; he has discovered that all the objects of French ambition are relinquished, because France has sacrificed even the 'appearances' of freedom to the best means of realising them; in short that now, for the first time, Jacobinism is not to be dreaded, because now, for the first time, it has superadded to itself the compactness of despotism. But the honourable gentleman presses hard, and requires me to be definite and explicit. What, says he, do you mean by destroying the power of Jacobinism? Will, you persevere in the war, until you have received evidence that it is extinct in this country, extinct in France, extinct in the mind of every man? No! I am not so shamefully ignorant of the laws that regulate the soul of man. The mind once tainted with Jacobinism can never be wholly free from the taint; I know no means of purification; when it does not break out on the surface, it still lurks in the vitals; no antidote can approach the subtlety of the venom, no length of quarantine secure us against the obstinacy of the pestilence. Those who are now telling us, that all danger from revolutionary principles is now passed by, are yet endeavouring to call up again the very arguments which they used at the commencement of the war, in the youth and rampancy of Jacobinism; and repeat the same language, with which they then attempted to lull the nation into security, combined with the same acts of popular irritation. They are telling us, that ministers disregard peace; that they are prodigal of blood; insensible to the miseries, and enemies to the liberties of mankind; that the extinction of Jacobinism is their pretext, but that personal ambition is their motive; and that we have squandered two hundred millions on an object, unattainable were it desirable, and were it not unattainable, yet still to be deprecated. Sir, will men be governed by mere words without application? This country, Sir, will not. It knows that to this war it owes its prosperity, its constitution, whatever is fair or useful in public or domestic life, the majesty of her laws, the freedom of her worship, and the sacredness of our firesides. For these it has spent two hundred millions, for these it would spend two hundred millions more; and, should it be necessary, Sir, I doubt not that I could find those two hundred millions, and still preserve her resources unimpaired. The only way to make it not necessary is to avail ourselves of the hearty co-operation of our allies, and to secure and invigorate that co-operation by the firmness and vigour of our own conduct. The honourable gentleman then comes back upon me, and presses me upon the supposed dissonance between our views and those of our allies. But surely there may allowably exist in the minds of different men different means of arriving at the same security. This difference may, without breaking the ties of effective union, exist even in this house; how much more then in different kingdoms? The Emperor of Russia may have announced the restoration of monarchy, as exclusively his object. This is not considered as the ultimate object by this country, but as the best means and most reliable pledge of a higher object, viz. our own security, and that of Europe; but we do not confine ourselves to this, as the only possible means. From this shade of difference we are required to infer the impossibility of cordial co-operation! But here the honourable gentleman falls into a strange contradiction. He affirms the restoration of monarchy an unjust object of the war, and refuses expressly and repeatedly to vote a single farthing on such a ground; and yet the supposed secession of Russia from the allied powers, the secession of that government, whose 'exclusive' object is the restoration of monarchy, is adduced by him as another and equal ground for his refusal. Had the Emperor of Russia persevered in directing his utmost forces to the attainment of that object, to which Austria will not pledge herself, and which the honourable gentleman considers as an unjust object, then the honourable gentleman would have been satisfied. But I will not press too hard on the honourable gentleman, or lay an undue weight on an inadvertence. I will deal most fairly with him if I did believe, which I do not, that Austria saw no advantages in the restoration of monarchy, yet still I would avail myself of her efforts, without changing my own object. Should the security of Britain and Europe result from the exertions of Austria, or be aided by her influence, I should think it my duty to advise his Majesty to lend the Emperor every financial assistance, however those exertions and that influence might spring from principles not in unison with our own. If the honourable gentleman will tell me, that the object of Austria is to regain the Netherlands, and to reconquer all she may leave lost in Germany and Italy, so far from feeling this as a cause of distress, I feel it a ground of consolation, as giving us the strongest assurance of his sincerity, added to that right which we possess of believing Austria sincere, from our experience that Austria, above all, must know the insecurity of peace with Jacobins. This, Sir, would be a ground of consolation and confident hope; and though we should go farther than the Emperor of Germany, and stop short of Russia, still, however, we should all travel in the same road. Yet even were less justifiable objects to animate our ally, were ambition her inspiring motive, yet even on that ground I contend that her arms and victories would conduce to our security. If it tend to strip France of territory and influence, the aggrandisement of Austria is elevated by comparison into a blessing devoutly to be wished! The aggrandisement of Austria, founded on the ruins of Jacobinism, I contend, Sir, to be a truly British object. But, Sir, the honourable gentleman says, he thinks the war neither just nor necessary, and calls upon me, without the qualifying reservations and circuitous distinctions of a special pleader; in short, without BUTS or IFS, to state the real object; and affirms that in spite of these buts and ifs, the restoration of monarchy in France is the real and sole object of ministers, and that all else contained in the official notes are unmeaning words and distinctions fallacious, and perhaps meant to deceive. Is it, Sir, to be treated as a fallacious distinction, that the restoration of monarchy is not my sole or ultimate object; that my ultimate object is security, that I think no pledge for that security so unequivocal as the restoration of monarchy, and no means so natural and so effectual? 'but' if you can present any other mode, that mode I will adopt. I am unwilling to accept an inadequate security; but the nature of the security which it may be our interest to demand, must depend on the relative and comparative dangers of continuing the war, or concluding a peace. And 'if' the danger of the war should be greater than that of a peace, and 'if' you can shew to me that there is no chance of diminishing Jacobinism by the war, and 'if' you can evince that we are exhausting our means more than our enemies are exhausting theirs, then I am ready to conclude a peace without the restoration of monarchy. These are the 'ifs' and the 'buts', which I shall continue to introduce, not the insidious and confounding subtleties of special pleading, but the just and necessary distinctions of intelligible prudence; I am conscious of sincere and honest intentions in the use of them, and I desire to be tried by no other than God and my country. But are we not weakening ourselves? Let any man calmly, and with the mind of an Englishman, look round on the state of our manufactures, our commerce, on all that forms and feeds the sources of national wealth, and to that man I can confidently leave the following questions to be answered. From the negotiations at Lisle to the present moment has England or France weakened itself in the greater degree? Whether, at the end of this campaign, France is not more likely to suffer the feebleness ensuing on exhausted finance than England? If Jacobinism, enthroned in Buonaparte, should resist both the pressure of foreign attack, and its own inherent tendencies to self-destruction, whether it must not derive such power of resistance from the use of such revolutionary and convulsive efforts, as involve, and almost imply a consequent state of feebleness? And whether therefore, if any unexpected reverse of fortune should make it expedient or necessary for us to compromise with Jacobinism, it would not be better for us to compromise with it at the end of the campaign, than at present? And by parity of reasoning, whether it be not true (even on the supposition that Jacobinism is not to be routed, disarmed, and fettered); yet, that even on this supposition, the longer we defer a peace, the safer that peace will be! Sir, we have been told that Jacobinism is extinct, or at least dying. We have been asked too, what we mean by Jacobinism? Sir, to employ arguments solely to the purposes of popular irritation is a branch of Jacobinism? It is with pain, Sir, that I have heard arguments manifestly of this tendency, and having heard them, I hear with redoubled suspicion of the assertions, that Jacobinism is extinct. By what softer name shall we characterise the attempts to connect the war by false facts and false reasoning with accidental scarcity? By what softer name shall we characterise appeals to the people on a subject which touches their feelings, and precludes their reasoning? It is this, Sir, which makes me say, that those whose eyes are now open to the horrors and absurdities of Jacobinism are nevertheless still influenced by their early partiality to it. A somewhat of the 'feeling' lurks behind, even when all the 'principle' has been sincerely abjured. If this be the case with mere spectators, who have but sympathised in the distance, and have caught disease only by 'looking on', how much more must this hold good of the actors? And with what increased caution and jealousy ought we not to listen to the affirmation, that Jacobinism is obsolete even in France? The honourable gentleman next charges me with an unbeseeming haughtiness of tone, in deeming that the House had pledged itself to the present measure by their late vote for the continuance of the war. This is not accurate. I did not deem the House pledged: I only assigned reasons of 'probability', that having voted for the continuance of war, they would deem themselves inconsistent if they refused assent to those measures by which the objects of the war were most likely to be realised. My argument was, not that the House had pledged itself to this measure directly, but only as far as they must perceive it to be a means of bringing the war to that conclusion to which they have pledged themselves: for unless gendemen will tell me, that though they cannot prevent votes in favour of the war, they will yet endeavour to palsy the arm of the country in the conduct of it; and though they cannot stifle the vast majority of suffrages to the plan, they will yet endeavour to way-lay it in its execution; unless the gentlemen will tell me so themselves, I will not impute it to them. (Here Mr. Pitt made a short reply to some observations of Mr. Bouverie in the early part of the debate, and then proceeded.) It was said of himself and friends (and often said) by a gentleman who does not now commonly honour us with his presence here, 'We are the minority who represent the opinions of the country.' In my opinion a state of universal suffrage, formal or virtual, in which, nevertheless, the few represent the many, is a true picture of Jacobinism. But, however this may be, if smallness of number is to become a mark and pledge of genuine representation, that gentleman's friends must acquire the representative character in a continual progression; for the party has been constantly decreasing in number, and both here and out of this House, they are at present fewer than they ever were before. But they vote for peace, and the people wish for peace; and therefore they represent the opinions of the people. The people wish for peace--so do I! But for what peace? Not for a peace that is made to-day and will be broken to-morrow! Not for a peace that is more insecure and hazardous than war. Why did I wish for peace at Lisle? Because war was then more hazardous than peace; because it was necessary to give to the people a palpable proof of the necessity of the war, in order to their cordial concurrence with that system of finance, without which the war could not be successfully carried on; because our allies were then but imperfectly lessoned by experience; and finally, because the state of parties then in France was less Jacobinical than at any time since that era. But will it follow that I was then insincere in negotiating for peace, when peace was less insecure, and war more hazardous; because now with decreased advantages of peace, and increased means of war, I advise against a peace? As to the other arguments, it is of less consequence to insist upon them, because the opposition implied in them holds not against this measure in particular, but against the general principle of carrying on the war with vigour. Much has been said of the defection of Russia, and every attempt made to deduce from this circumstance so misnamed causes of despair or diminished hope. It is true that Russia has withdrawn herself from confident co-operation with Austria, but she has not withdrawn herself from concert with this country. Has it never occurred, that France, compelled to make head against armies pressing on the whole of her frontiers, will be weakened and distracted in her efforts, by a moveable maritime force? What may be the ultimate extent of the Russian forces engaged in this diversion, we cannot be expected to know, cut off as we are from the continent, by the season and the weather. If the Russians, acting in maritime diversion on the coast of France, and increased by our own forces, should draw the French forces from Switzerland and Italy, it does not follow that the Russians may be greatly, and perhaps equally useful to the objects of the campaign, although they will cease to act on the eastern side of France. I do not pretend to know precisely the number and state of the French armies, but reason only on probabilities; and chiefly with the view of solving the honourable gentleman's difficulty, how the Russians can be useful, if not on the continent. It is unnecessary to occupy the time and attention of the House with a serious answer to objections, which it is indeed difficult to repeat with the same gravity with which they were originally stated. It was affirmed, gravely affirmed, that £12,000,000 would be wanted for corn! I should be happy, if, in the present scarcity, corn could be procured from any, and all parts of the world, to one-third of that amount. It will not be by such arguments as these, that the country will be induced to cease a war for security, in order to procure corn for subsistence. I do object, that there is unfairness both in these arguments in themselves, and in the spirit which produces them. The war is now reviled as unjust and unnecessary; and in order to prove it so, appeals are made to circumstances of accidental scarcity from the visitation of the seasons. The fallacy of these reasonings is equal to their mischief. It is not true that you could procure corn more easily if peace were to be made to-morrow. If this war be unjust, it ought to be stopped on its own account; but if it be indeed a war of principle and of necessity, it were useless and abject to relinquish it from terrors like these. As well might a fortress, sure of being put to the sword, surrender for want of provision. But that man, Sir, does not act wisely, if, feeling like a good citizen, he use these arguments which favour the enemy. God forbid, that an opposition in opinion among ourselves should make us forget the high and absolute duty of opposition to the enemies of our country. Sir, in the present times, it is more than ever the bounden duty of every wise and good man to use more than ordinary caution in abstaining from all arguments that appeal to passions, not facts; above all, from arguments that tend to excite popular irritation on a subject and on an occasion, on which the people can with difficulty be reasoned with, but are irritated most easily. To speak incautiously on such subjects, is an offence of no venial order; but deliberately and wilfully to connect the words, war and scarcity, were infamous, a treachery to our country, and in a peculiar degree cruel to those whom alone it can delude, the lower uneducated classes. I will not enlarge upon that subject, but retire with a firm conviction that no new facts have occurred which can have altered the opinion of this House on the necessity of the war, or the suitableness of similar measures to the present to the effectual carrying of it on, and that the opinion of the House will not be altered but by experience and the evidence of facts." The following paragraph is extracted from private memoranda, and was intended for publication ten years afterwards, in the Courier Newspaper, in which he wrote a series of Essays to Judge Fletcher, which were at that time acknowledged by the most able judges to be prophetic. But it must be remembered he never wrote for party purposes. His views were grounded on Platonic principles keeping the balance of the powers, and throwing his weight into the scale that needed assistance. OF THE PROFANATION OF THE SACRED WORD "THE PEOPLE." "Every brutal mob, assembled on some drunken St. Monday of faction, is '_the People_' forsooth, and now each leprous ragamuffin, like a circle in geometry, is at once one and all, and calls his own brutal self 'us the People.' And who are the friends of the People? Not those who would wish to elevate each of them, or at least, the child who is to take his place in the flux of life and death, into something worthy of esteem, and capable of freedom, but those who flatter and infuriate them as they do. A contradiction in the very thought. For if really they are good and wise, virtuous and well-informed, how weak must be the motives of discontent to a truly moral being!--but if the contrary, and the motives for discontent proportionally strong, how without guilt and absurdity appeal to them as judges and arbiters! He alone is entitled to a share in the government of all, who has learnt to govern himself--there is but one possible ground of a right to freedom, viz. to understand and revere its duties." As specimens of his political writings I select the following, and leave party men to criticise them--Coleridge being of no party, but guided, as will sufficiently appear to those who have read his works with attention, solely by philosophical principles, from which he never swerved. Nor did he desire the praise of men, merely because they were in power; still less that of the multitude. For this reason, I repeat, these fragments are given, as illustrative of Coleridge's political views, and to shew how easily the harmony of the constitutional balance may be disturbed by party zeal. His opinions were often misunderstood even sometimes by kindly-disposed individuals, when 'theirs' were not founded on certain data, because their principles were not derived from permanent sources. The doctrine of expediency was one he highly censured, and it had existed long enough to prove to him that it was worthless. What one set of well-intentioned men may effect, and which for a time may have produced good, another set of men by the same doctrine, 'i.e.' of expediency may effect, and then produce incalculable mischief, and, therefore, Coleridge thought there was neither guide nor safety, but in the permanent and uncontrovertible truths of the sacred writings, so that the extent of this utility will depend on faith in these truths, and with these truths, his name must 'live or perish'. But some part of Coleridge's writings requiring too much effort of thought to be at once thoroughly understood, may therefore have been found distasteful, and consequently have exposed his name to ridicule, in some cases even to contempt; but the application Coleridge has made of these truths to the duties and various circumstances of life will surely be found an inestimable blessing. They were truly his rock of support, and formed the basis of the building he was endeavouring to raise. In the year 1807, he wrote those weekly Essays of the Friend, which were published about this time, and thus gave to the world some of his rich intellectual stores. The following letter, which he addressed to Mr. Cottle, will shew the progress of his mind from Socinian to Trinitarian belief at that period of his life: "Bristol, 1807. DEAR COTTLE, To pursue our last conversation. Christians expect no outward or sensible miracles from prayer. Its effects, and its fruitions are spiritual, and accompanied, says that true Divine, Archbishop Leighton, 'not by reasons and arguments but by an inexpressible kind of evidence, which they only know who have it.' To this I would add, that even those who, like me I fear, have not attained it, may yet presume it. First, because reason itself, or rather mere human nature, in any dispassionate moment, feels the necessity of religion, but if this be not true there is no religion, no religation, or binding over again; nothing added to reason, and therefore Socinianism (misnamed Unitarianism) is not only not Christianity, it is not even 'religion', it does not religate; does not bind anew. The first outward and sensible result of prayer, is, a penitent resolution, joined with a consciousness of weakness in effecting it, yea even a dread, too well grounded, lest by breaking and falsifying it, the soul should add guilt to guilt; by the very means it has taken to escape from guilt; so pitiable is the state of unregenerate man. Are you familiar with Leighton's Works? He resigned his archbishoprick, and retired to voluntary poverty on account of the persecution of the Presbyterians, saying, 'I should not dare to introduce Christianity itself with such cruelties, how much less for a surplice, and the name of a bishop.' If there could be an intermediate space between inspired, and uninspired writings, that space would be occupied by Leighton. No show of learning, no appearance, or ostentatious display of eloquence; and yet both may be shown in him, conspicuously and holily. There is in him something that must be felt, even as the scriptures must be felt. [15] You ask me my views of the 'Trinity'. I accept the doctrine, not as deduced from human reason, in its grovelling capacity for comprehending spiritual things, but as the clear revelation of Scripture. But perhaps it may be said, the 'Socinians' do not admit this doctrine as being taught in the Bible. I know enough of their shifts and quibbles, with their dexterity at explaining away all they dislike, (and that is not a little) but though beguiled once by them, I happily, for my own peace of mind, escaped from their sophistries, and now, hesitate not to affirm, that Socinians would lose all character for honesty, if they were to explain their neighbour's will with the same latitude of interpretation, which they do the Scriptures. I have in my head some floating ideas on the 'Logos', which I hope, hereafter, to mould into a consistent form; but it is a gross perversion of the truth, in 'Socinians', to declare that we believe in 'Three Gods', and they know it to be false. They might, with equal justice, affirm that we believe in 'three suns'. The meanest peasant, who has acquired the first rudiments of Christianity, would shrink back from a thought so monstrous. Still the Trinity has its difficulties. It would be strange if otherwise. A 'Revelation' that revealed nothing, not within the grasp of human reason!--no religation, no binding over again, as before said: but these difficulties are shadows, contrasted with the substantive, and insurmountable obstacles with which they contend who admit the 'Divine authority of Scripture', with the 'superlative excellence of Christ', and yet undertake to prove that these Scriptures teach, and that Christ taught, his own 'pure humanity!' If Jesus Christ was merely a Man,--if he was not God as well as Man, be it considered, he could not have been even a 'good man'. There is no medium. The SAVIOUR 'in that case' was absolutely 'a deceiver!' one, transcendently 'unrighteous!' in advancing pretensions to miracles, by the 'Finger of God,' which he never performed; and by asserting claims, (as a man) in the most aggravated sense, blasphemous! These consequences, Socinians, to be consistent, must allow, and which impious arrogation of Divinity in Christ, (according to their faith,) as well as his false assumption of a community of 'glory' with the Father, 'before the world was,' even they will be necessitated to admit, completely exonerated the Jews, according to their law, in crucifying one, who 'being a man,' 'made himself God!' But, in the Christian, rather than in the 'Socinian', or 'Pharisaic' view, all these objections vanish, and harmony succeeds to inexplicable confusion. If Socinians hesitate in ascribing 'unrighteousness' to Christ, the inevitable result of their principles, they tremble, as well they might, at their avowed creed, and virtually renounce what they profess to uphold. The Trinity, as Bishop Leighton has well remarked, is, 'a doctrine of faith, not of demonstration,' except in a 'moral' sense. If the New Testament declare it, not in an insulated passage, but through the whole breadth of its pages, rendering, with any other admission, the Book, which is the Christian's anchor-hold of hope, dark and contradictory, then it is not to be rejected, but on a penalty that reduces to an atom, all the sufferings this earth can inflict. Let the grand question be determined; Is, or is not the Bible 'inspired?' No one Book has ever been subjected to so rigid an investigation as the Bible, by minds the most capacious, and, in the result, which has so triumphantly repelled all the assaults of Infidels. In the extensive intercourse which I have had with this class of men, I have seen their prejudices surpassed only by their ignorance. This I found conspicuously the case in Dr. D. (Vol. i. p. 167) the prince of their fraternity. Without, therefore, stopping to contend on what all dispassionate men must deem, undebatable ground, I may assume inspiration as admitted; and, equally so, that it would be an insult to man's understanding to suppose any other Revelation from God than the Christian Scriptures. If these Scriptures, impregnable in their strength; sustained in their pretensions by undeniable prophecies and miracles; and by the experience of the 'inner man', in all ages, as well as by a concatenation of arguments, all bearing upon one point, and extending, with miraculous consistency, through a series of fifteen hundred years; if all this combined proof does not establish their validity, nothing can be proved under the sun; but the world and man must be abandoned, with all its consequences to one universal scepticism! Under such sanctions, therefore, if these Scriptures, as a fundamental truth, 'do' inculcate the doctrine of the 'Trinity;' however surpassing human comprehension; then I say, we are bound to admit it on the strength of 'moral demonstration'. The supreme Governor of the world, and the Father of our spirits, has seen fit to disclose to us, much of his will, and the whole of his natural and moral perfections. In some instances he has given his 'word' only, and demanded our 'faith'; while, on other momentous subjects, instead of bestowing a full revelation; like the 'Via Lactea', he has furnished a glimpse only, through either the medium of inspiration, or by the exercise of those rational faculties with which he has endowed us. I consider the Trinity as substantially resting on the first proposition, yet deriving support from the last. I recollect when I stood on the summit of Etna, and darted my gaze down the crater; the immediate vicinity was discernible, till, lower down, obscurity gradually terminated in total darkness. Such figures exemplify many truths revealed in the Bible. We pursue them, until, from the imperfection of our faculties, we are lost in impenetrable night. All truths, however, that are essential to faith, 'honestly' interpreted; all that are important to human conduct, under every diversity of circumstance, are manifest as a blazing star. The promises also of felicity to the righteous, in the future world, though the precise nature of that felicity may not be defined, are illustrated by every image that can swell the imagination: while the misery of the 'lost', in its unutterable intensity, though the language that describes it is all necessarily figurative, is there exhibited as resulting chiefly, if not wholly, from the withdrawment of the 'light of God's countenance', and a banishment from his 'presence!'--best comprehended in this world, by reflecting on the desolations which would instantly follow the loss of the sun's vivifying and universally diffused 'warmth'. You, or rather 'all', should remember, that some truths, from their nature, surpass the scope of man's limited powers, and stand as the criteria of 'faith', determining, by their rejection, or admission, who among the sons of men can confide in the veracity of heaven. Those more ethereal truths, of which the Trinity is conspicuously the chief, without being circumstantially explained, may be faintly illustrated by material objects.--The eye of man cannot discern the satellites of Jupiter, nor become sensible of the multitudinous stars, the rays of which have never reached our planet, and, consequently, garnish not the canopy of night; yet, are they the less 'real', because their existence lies beyond man's unassisted gaze? The tube of the philosopher, and the 'celestial telescope',--the unclouded visions of heaven, will confirm the one class of truths, and irradiate the other. The 'Trinity' is a subject on which analogical reasoning may advantageously be admitted, as furnishing, at least, a glimpse of light, and with this, for the present, we must be satisfied. Infinite Wisdom deemed clearer manifestations inexpedient; and is man to dictate to his Maker? I may further remark, that where we cannot behold a desirable object distinctly, we must take the best view we can; and I think you, and every candid and inquiring mind, may derive assistance from such reflections as the following. Notwithstanding the arguments of Spinosa, and Descartes, and other advocates of the 'Material system', (or, in more appropriate language, the 'Atheistical system!') it is admitted by all men not prejudiced, not biassed by sceptical prepossessions, that 'mind' is distinct from 'matter'. The mind of man, however, is involved in inscrutable darkness, (as the profoundest metaphysicians well know) and is to be estimated, (if at all) alone, by an inductive process; that is, by its 'effects'. Without entering on the question, whether an extremely circumscribed portion of the mental process, surpassing instinct, may, or may not, be extended to quadrupeds, it is universally acknowledged, that the mind of man, alone, regulates all the voluntary actions of his corporeal frame. Mind, therefore, may be regarded as a distinct genus, in the scale ascending above brutes, and including the whole of intellectual existences; advancing from 'thought', (that mysterious thing!) in its lowest form, through all the gradations of sentient and rational beings, till it arrives at a Bacon, a Newton, and then, when unincumbered by matter, extending its illimitable sway through Seraph and Archangel, till we are lost in the GREAT INFINITE! Is it not deserving of notice, as an especial subject of meditation, that our 'limbs', in all they do, or can accomplish, implicitly obey the dictation of the 'mind'? that this operating power, whatever its name, under certain limitations, exercises a sovereign dominion, not only over our limbs, but over all our intellectual pursuits? The mind of every man is evidently the moving force, which alike regulates all his limbs and actions; and in which example, we find a strong illustration of the subordinate nature of mere 'matter'. That alone which gives direction to the organic parts of our nature, is wholly 'mind'; and one mind, if placed over a thousand limbs, could, with undiminished ease, control and regulate the whole. This idea is advanced on the supposition, that 'one mind' could command an unlimited direction over any given number of 'limbs', provided they were all connected by 'joint' and 'sinew'. But suppose, through some occult and inconceivable means, these limbs were dis-associated, as to all material connexion; suppose, for instance, one mind, with unlimited authority, governed the operations of 'two' separate persons, would not this, substantially, be only 'one person', seeing the directing principle was one? If the truth, here contended for, be admitted, that 'two persons', governed by 'one mind', is incontestably 'one person'; the same conclusion would be arrived at, and the proposition equally be justified, which affirmed that, 'three', or, otherwise, 'four' persons, owning also necessary and essential subjection to 'one mind', would only be so many diversities, or modifications of that 'one mind', and therefore the component parts, virtually collapsing into 'one whole', the person would be 'one'. Let any man ask himself, whose understanding can both reason, and become the depository of truth, whether, if 'one mind' thus regulated, with absolute authority, 'three', or, otherwise, 'four' persons, with all their congeries of material parts, would not these parts, inert in themselves, when subjected to one predominant mind, be, in the most logical sense, 'one person'? Are ligament and exterior combination indispensable pre-requisites to the sovereign influence of mind over mind? or mind over matter? [16] But perhaps it may be said, we have no instance of one mind governing more than one body. This may be, but the argument remains the same. With a proud spirit, that forgets its own contracted range of thought, and circumscribed knowledge, who is to limit the sway of Omnipotence? or, presumptuously to deny the possibility of 'that' Being, who called light out of darkness, so to exalt the dominion of 'one mind', as to give it absolute sway over other dependent minds, or (indifferently) over detached, or combined portions of organized matter? But if this superinduced quality be conferable on any order of created beings, it is blasphemy to limit the power of GOD, and to deny 'his' capacity to transfuse 'his own' Spirit, when, and to whom he will. This reasoning may now be applied in illustration of the Trinity. We are too much in the habit of viewing our Saviour Jesus Christ, through the medium of his body. 'A body was prepared for him,' but this body was mere matter; as insensible in itself, as every human frame when deserted by the soul. If therefore the Spirit that was in Christ, was the Spirit of the Father: if no thought, no vibration, no spiritual communication, or miraculous display, existed in, or proceeded from Christ, not immediately and consubstantially identified with JEHOVAH, the Great First cause; if all these operating principles were thus derived, in consistency alone with the conjoint divine attributes; of this Spirit of the Father ruled and reigned in Christ as his own manifestation, then, in the strictest sense, Christ exhibited 'the God-head bodily,' and was undeniably ''one' with the Father;' confirmatory of the Saviour's words; 'Of myself,' (my body) 'I can do nothing, the Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works.' But though I speak of the body, as inert in itself, and necessarily allied to matter, yet this declaration must not be understood as militating against the Christian doctrine of the 'resurrection of the body'. In its grosser form, the thought is not to be admitted, for, 'flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God,' but, that the body, without losing its consciousness, and individuality, may be subjected, by the illimitable power of Omnipotence, to a sublimating process, so as to be rendered compatible with spiritual association, is not opposed to reason, in its severe abstract exercises, while in attestation of this 'exhilarating belief', there are many remote analogies in nature exemplifying the same truth, while it is in the strictest accordance with that final dispensation, which must, as Christians, regulate all our speculations. I proceed now to say, that: If the postulate be thus admitted, that one mind influencing two bodies, would only involve a diversity of operations, but in reality be one in essence; or otherwise, (as an hypothetical argument, illustrative of truth) if one preeminent mind, or spiritual subsistence, unconnected with matter, possessed an undivided and sovereign dominion over two or more disembodied minds, so as to become the exclusive source of all their subtlest volitions and exercises, the 'unity', however complex the modus of its manifestation, would be fully established; and this principle extends to DEITY itself, and shows the true sense, as I conceive, in which Christ and the Father are one. In continuation of this reasoning, if God who is light, the Sun of the Moral World, should in his union of Infinite Wisdom, Power, and Goodness, and from all Eternity, have ordained that an emanation from himself (for aught we know, an essential emanation, as light is inseparable from the luminary of day) should not only have existed in his Son, in the fulness of time to be united to a mortal body, but that a like emanation from himself (also perhaps essential) should have constituted the Holy Spirit, who, without losing his ubiquity, was more especially sent to this lower earth, 'by' the SON, 'at' the impulse of the Father, then, in the most comprehensive sense, God, and his Son, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost, are ONE. 'Three Persons in one God,' and thus form the true Trinity in Unity. To suppose that more than ONE Independent Power, or Governing mind exists in the whole universe, is absolute Polytheism, against which the denunciations of all the Jewish, and Christian Canonical books were directed. And if there be but ONE directing MIND, that Mind is GOD!--operating, however, in Three Persons, according to the direct and uniform declarations of that inspiration which 'brought life and immortality to light.' Yet this divine doctrine of the Trinity is to be received, not because it is, or can be clear to finite apprehension, but, (in reiteration of the argument) because the Scriptures, in their unsophisticated interpretation expressly state it. The Trinity, therefore, from its important aspects, and Biblical prominence, is the grand article of faith, and the foundation of the whole Christian system. Who can say, as Christ [17] and the Holy Ghost proceeded from, and are still one with the Father, and as all the disciples of Christ derive their fulness from him, and, in spirit, are inviolately united to him as a branch is to the vine, who can say, but that, in one view, what was once mysteriously separated, may, as mysteriously, be recombined, and, (without interfering with the everlasting Trinity, and the individuality of the spiritual and seraphic orders) the Son, at the consummation of all things, deliver up his mediatorial kingdom to the Father, and God, in some peculiar, and infinitely sublime sense, become All 'in' All! God love you, S.T. COLERIDGE." [18] Those who are acquainted with Mr. Coleridge's maturer view of the doctrine of the Trinity, will not need to be informed that this letter does not convey his later conviction in regard to this awful mystery, and will know that his philosophic meditations rested essentially in the same faith that dictated the Article of the Church of England on this subject. Mr. De Quincey has made several mistatements in a memoir on Mr. Coleridge, which he wrote in Tait's Magazine; but it may be only fair first to quote a few interesting remarks, with which he begins: "In the summer season of 1807 I first saw this illustrious man, the largest and most spacious intellect in my judgment that has ever yet existed amongst men. My knowledge of his works as a most original genius began about the year 1799." A little before that time, Wordsworth published the "Lyrical Ballads," in which was the Ancient Mariner of Coleridge, and to which Mr. De Quincey attributes the unfolding of his own mind; this confession is by no means humiliating, for many persons of the highest reputation have made similar acknowledgments, and some there are still living who have the courage and integrity to do so now. "I found (says this gentleman) that Professor Wilson, as well as myself, saw in these poems 'the ray of a new morning;'--and to these names may be added that of the celebrated Sir Walter Scott." The admiration of Mr. De Quincey was so great that inquiring where Coleridge was to be found, and learning that he was in Malta, he contemplated an immediate visit to that island, but the fear of a French prison reconciled him to remaining in England. When on a visit in 1807 (to a relation), at the Hot Wells, he learnt that Coleridge was staying with a friend not far from Bristol. This friend was Mr. Poole of Nether Stowey, and thither he bent his steps. In this house Mr. De Quincey spent two days, and gives, from his own knowledge, a sketch of Mr. Poole's person and character very descriptive of the original. Coleridge often remarked that he was the best "ideal for a useful member of parliament he ever knew;" "a plain dressed man leading a bachelor life," as Mr. De Quincey observes, "in a rustic old fashioned house, amply furnished with modern luxuries, and a good library. Mr. Poole had travelled extensively, and had so entirely dedicated himself to his humble fellow countrymen, who resided in his neighbourhood, that for many miles round he was the general arbiter of their disputes, the guide and counsellor of their daily life; besides being appointed executor and guardian to his children by every third man who died in or about the town of Nether Stowey." Such in few words was the individual whom Coleridge, in his social hours and in the full warmth of friendship, would most eloquently and feelingly describe. [19] Mr. De Quincey having been informed that Coleridge was at Bridgewater, left Nether Stowey for that place, in search of him. The meeting and the description recall him forcibly to the minds of those who twenty years after were so intimately acquainted with him: "In Bridgewater I noticed a gateway, standing under which was a man corresponding to the description given me of Coleridge whom I shall presently describe. In height he seemed to be five feet eight inches, (he was in reality about an inch and a half taller,) though in the latter part of life, from a lateral curvature in the spine, he shortened gradually from two to three inches. His person was broad and full, and tended even to corpulence; his complexion was fair, though not what painters technically style fair, because it was associated with black hair; his eyes were large and soft in their expression, and it was by the peculiar appearance of haze or dreaminess which mixed with their light that I recognized my object. This was Coleridge; I examined him steadily for a moment or more, and it struck me he neither saw myself, nor any other object in the street. He was in a deep reverie; for I had dismounted, made two or three trifling arrangements at the inn door, and advanced close to him, before he seemed apparently conscious of my presence. The sound of my voice announcing my name first awoke him; he started, and for a moment seemed at a loss to understand my purpose, or his own situation, for he repeated rapidly a number of words which had no relation to either of us; very likely trying a metre, or making verse, a frequent practice of his, and of Mr. Wordsworth's. There was no mauvaise haute in his manner, but simple perplexity, and an apparent difficulty in recovering his position amongst daylight realities. This little scene over, he received me with a kindness of manner so marked, that it might be called gracious. The hospitable family, with whom he was domesticated, were distinguished for their amiable manners, and enlightened understandings; they were descendants from Chubb, the philosophic writer, and bore the same name. For Coleridge they all testified deep affection and esteem, sentiments which the whole town of Bridgewater seemed to share, for in the evening, when the heat of the day had declined, I walked out with him; and rarely, perhaps never, have I seen a person so much interrupted in one hour's space as Coleridge on this occasion, by the courteous attentions of young and old." [20] This appears so faithful a portraiture of Coleridge that it is impossible to read it without once more beholding him as in a mirror. Continuing his description, he speaks again of his extreme courtesy, and of his easy and gentlemanly manner of receiving strangers. A friend of mine seldom speaks of the past in connexion with Coleridge's name, but he reminds me of a visit he once made to me during my absence at the sea shore, and of the courteous grace he displayed in doing the honours of the house. In every thing wherein the comfort or happiness of others were concerned, Coleridge ever evinced how entirely he could devote himself to those he loved or who might require his sympathy: His own fair countenance, his kingly forehead, His tender smiles, love's day-dawn on his lips-- The sense, the spirit, and the light divine, At the same moment in his steadfast eye Were virtue's native crest, the innocent soul's Unconscious meek self-heraldry--to man Genial, and pleasant to his guardian angel! He suffered, nor complained; though oft with tears He mourned the oppression of his helpless brethren; Yea with a deeper and yet holier grief Mourned for th' oppressor; but this In sabbath hours--a solemn grief, Most like a cloud at sunset, Was but the veil of purest meditation, Pierced through and saturate with the intellectual rays It softened. 'Literary Remains', vol. i. 277. These were characteristic beauties, that shone forth in Coleridge, and were deeply felt by all who were attached to him. With regard to the charge made by Mr. De Quincey, of Coleridge's so borrowing the property of other writers as to be guilty of 'petty larceny'; with equal justice might we accuse the bee which flies from flower to flower in quest of food, and which, by means of the instinct bestowed upon it by the all-wise Creator, extracts its nourishment from the field and the garden, but 'digests' and 'elaborates' it by its own 'native' powers. Coleridge 'began' the use of opium from bodily pain (rheumatism), and for the same reason 'continued' it, till he had acquired a habit too difficult under his own management to control. To him it was the thorn in the flesh, which will be seen in the following notes "I have never loved evil for its own sake: no! nor ever sought pleasure for its own sake, but only as the means of escaping from pains that coiled around my mental powers, as a serpent around the body and wings of an eagle! My sole sensuality was 'not' to be in pain." 'Note from Pocket Book, "The History of my own mind for my own improvement," Dec. 23, 1804.' "I wrote a few stanzas [21] three and twenty years ago, soon after my eyes had been opened to the true nature of the habit into which I had been ignorantly deluded by the seeming magic effects of opium, in the sudden removal of a supposed rheumatic affection, attended with swellings in my knees, and palpitations of the heart, and pains all over me, by which I had been bed-ridden for nearly six months. Unhappily, among my neighbour's and landlord's books were a large parcel of medical 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 a case, which I fancied very like my own, in which a cure had been effected by the Kendal Black Drop. In an evil hour I procured it:--it worked miracles--the swellings disappeared, the pains vanished; I was all alive, and all around me being as ignorant as myself, nothing could exceed my triumph. I talked of nothing else, prescribed the newly-discovered panacea for all complaints, and carried a bottle about with me, not to lose any opportunity of administering 'instant relief and speedy cure' to all complainers, stranger or friend, gentle or simple. Need I say that my own apparent convalescence was of no long continuance; but what then?--the remedy was at hand and infallible. Alas! it is with a bitter smile, a laugh of gall and bitterness, that I recall this period of unsuspecting delusion, and how I first became aware of the Maelstrom, the fatal whirlpool, to which I was drawing just when the current was already beyond my strength to stem. The state of my mind is truly portrayed in the following effusion, for God knows! that from that moment I was the victim of pain and terror, nor had I at any time taken the flattering poison as a stimulus, or for any craving after pleasurable sensations. I needed none; and oh! with what unutterable sorrow did I read the 'Confessions of an Opium-eater,' in which the writer with morbid vanity, makes a boast of what was my misfortune, for he had been faithfully and with an agony of zeal warned of the gulf, and yet wilfully struck into the current!--Heaven be merciful to him!" 'April, 1826'. "Oh! (will a vain imagination whisper) that in the outset of life I could have 'felt' as well as known the consequences of sin and error before their tyranny had commenced! Though, compared with the average of my fellow men, not a sinful man, yet I feel enough to be assured that few indeed are there who might not from their sins or sinful infirmities gain a tongue of flame, wherewith to warn men of the deadly poison of all, even the least offence. Of all divines, Luther felt most deeply the terrors of the LAW; and for that reason, the unutterable goodness and love of the dispensation of grace!--To be one with God the Father--an awful thought beyond all utterance of the awe which it inspires, but by no means wild or mystical. On the contrary, all our experience moves in this direction. In reason, in science, who shall set bounds to the possible progress of man, as long as he is no longer in himself, but in the truth and power of truth. The moment that disease reduces himself to himself, the sage who was able to weigh the planets, and foresee their movements centuries and millenniums to come, trembles in his ignorance of the next five minutes, whether it shall be pain and terror, or relief and respite, and in spirit falls on his knees and prays. Prayer is the mediation, or rather the effort to connect the misery of self with the blessedness of God; and its voice is--Mercy! mercy! for Christ's sake, in whom thou hast opened out the fountain of mercy to sinful man. It is a sore evil to be, and not in God; but it is a still more dreadful evil and misery to will to be other than in God; and yet in every act, in which the gratification of the sensual life is the 'ultimate end', is the manifestation of such a will. Imagine a----, first in his noblest hours, in the laboratory or the observatory--an unfolder and discoverer--and then on a sick bed, from the consequences of his own indiscretions. Place both states of the same man, that of the spirit and that of the self-seeking self, clearly and in detail before your mind:--if you can do this, you need no more." 'January 7, 1830'. "There is a passage in the Samson Agonistes, in which Milton is supposed on sufficient grounds to have referred to himself, that in which the chorus speaks of strictly temperate man 'causelessly suffering' the pains and penances of inordinate days. O! what would I not give to be able to utter with truth this complaint! O! if he had or rather if he 'could' have presented to himself truly and vividly the aggravation of those pains, which the conscience of their having originated in errors and weaknesses of his own. I do not say that he would not have complained of his sufferings, for who can be in those most trying sufferances of miserable sensations and not complain of them, but his groans for the pain would have been blended with thanksgivings to the sanctifying Spirit. Even under the direful yoke of the necessity of daily poisoning by narcotics it is somewhat less horrible, through the knowledge that it was not from any craving for pleasurable animal excitement, but from pain, delusion, error, of the worst ignorance, medical sciolism, and when (alas! too late the plea of error was removed from my eyes,) from terror and utter perplexity and infirmity;--sinful infirmity, indeed, but yet not a wilful sinfulness that I brought my neck under it. Oh, may the God to whom I look for mercy through Christ, show mercy on the author of the 'Confessions of an Opium Eater,' if, as I have too strong reason to believe, his book has been the occasion of seducing others into this withering vice through wantonness. From this aggravation I have, I humbly trust, been free, as far as acts of my free will and intention are concerned; even to the author of that work I pleaded with flowing tears, and with an agony of forewarning. He utterly denied it, but I fear that I had even then to 'deter' perhaps not to forewarn. My own contrasted feelings soon after I saw the Maelstrom to which the current was absorbing me, are written in one of my paper books." [22] 'Jan. 7, 1830'. Having referred to the accusations of plagiarism brought against Coleridge, it will not, I trust, be deemed inappropriate, to introduce from the British Magazine, No. 37, the concluding part of a critique ably written by the Rev. Julius Hare, who has selected with great discrimination several passages from the "Friend," which must come home to the heart of every good man, and this I feel the more impelled to do, as it is a moral lesson to biographers--perhaps to us all: "An inquisitiveness into the minutest circumstances and casual sayings of eminent contemporaries is indeed quite natural: but so are all our follies: and the more natural they are the more caution should we exert in guarding against them. To scribble trifles, even on the perishable glass of an inn window, is the mark of an idler: but to engrave them on the marble monument sacred to the memory of the departed great, is something worse than idleness. The spirit of genuine biography is in nothing more conspicuous than in the firmness with which it withstands the cravings of worthless curiosity, as distinguished from the thirst after useful knowledge. For in the first place, such anecdotes as derive their whole and sole interest from the great name of the person concerning whom they are related, and neither illustrate his general character nor his particular actions, would scarcely have been noticed or remembered, except by men of weak minds. It is not unlikely, therefore, that they were misapprehended at the time; and it is most probable that they have been related as incorrectly, as they were noticed injudiciously. Nor are the consequences of such garrulous biography merely negative. For as insignificant stories can derive no real respectability from the eminence of the person who happens to be the subject of them, but rather an additional deformity of disproportion, they are apt to have their insipidity seasoned by the same bad passions that accompany the habit of gossiping in general: and the misapprehensions of weak men, meeting with the misinterpretations of malignant men, have not seldom formed the ground work of the most grievous calamities. In the second place, those trifles are subversive of the great end of biography, which is to fix the attention and to interest the feelings of men on those qualities and actions which have made a particular life worthy of being recorded. It is no doubt the duty of an honest biographer to portray the prominent imperfections as well as excellencies of his hero. But I am at a loss to conceive how this can be deemed an excuse for heaping together a multitude of particulars, which can prove nothing of any man, that might not be safely taken for granted of all men. In the present age--emphatically the age of personality--there are more than ordinary motives for withholding all encouragement from the mania of busying ourselves with the names of others, which is still more alarming as a symptom, than it is troublesome as a disease. The reader must be still less acquainted with contemporary literature than myself, if he needs me to inform him that there are men who, trading in the silliest anecdotes, in unprovoked abuse and senseless eulogy, think themselves nevertheless employed both worthily and honourably if only all this be done in good set terms, and from the press, and of public characters,--a class which has increased so rapidly of late, that it becomes difficult to discover what characters are to be considered as private. Alas! if these wretched misusers of language and the means of giving wings to thought, and of multiplying the presence of an individual mind, had ever known how great a thing the possession of any one simple truth is, and how mean a thing a mere fact is, except as seen in the light of some comprehensive truth--if they had but once experienced the unborrowed complacency, the inward independence, the homebred strength, with which every clear conception of the reason is accompanied,--they would shrink from their own pages as at the remembrance of a crime.--For a crime it is (and the man who hesitates in pronouncing it such, must be ignorant of what mankind owe to books, what he himself owes to them in spite of his ignorance) thus to introduce the spirit of vulgar scandal, and personal inquietude into the closet and the library, environing with evil passions the very sanctuaries to which we should flee for refuge from them. For to what do these publications appeal, whether they present themselves as biography or as anonymous criticism, but to the same feelings which the scandal bearers, and time-killers of ordinary life seem to gratify in themselves and their listeners; and both the authors and admirers of such publications, in what respect are they less truants and deserters from their own hearts, and from their appointed task of understanding and amending them, than the most garrulous female chronicler of the goings-on of yesterday in the families of her neighbours and townsfolk? 'As to my own attempt to record the life and character of the late Sir Alexander Ball, I consider myself deterred from all circumstances not pertaining to his conduct or character as a public functionary, that involve the names of the living for good or for evil. Whatever facts and incidents I relate of a private nature must, for the most part, concern Sir Alexander Ball exclusively, and as an insulated individual. But I needed not this restraint. It will be enough for me, as I write, to recollect the form and character of Sir Alexander Ball himself, to represent to my own feelings the inward contempt with which he would have abstracted his mind from worthless anecdotes and petty personalities; a contempt rising into indignation if ever an illustrious name were used as a thread to string them upon. If this recollection be my Socratic Demon, to warn and to check me, I shall, on the other hand, derive encouragement from the remembrance of the tender patience, the sweet gentleness, with which he was wont to tolerate the tediousness of well meaning men; and the inexhaustible attention, the unfeigned interest, with which he would listen for hours, when the conversation appealed to reason, and like the bee, made honey, while it murmured.' I have transcribed this passage from the original edition of the Friend, No. 21, and not from the reprint, where it stands in vol. ii. pp. 303-307; because in the latter, the last paragraph, in itself a beautiful one, and to our present purpose particularly appropriate, is left out. For if Coleridge could imagine 'the inward contempt with which Sir Alexander Ball would have abstracted his mind from worthless anecdotes and petty personalities,--a contempt rising into indignation, if ever an illustrious name was used as a thread to string them on,' well may those who knew Coleridge conceive the grief, the grief and pity, he would have felt, at seeing eminent powers and knowledge employed in ministering to the wretched love of gossip--retailing paltry anecdotes in dispraise of others, intermingled with outflowings of self-praise--and creeping into the secret chambers of great men's houses to filch out materials for tattle--at seeing great powers wasting and debasing themselves in such an ignoble task--above all, at seeing that the person who thus wasted and debased them was a scholar, and a philosopher whose talents he admired, with whom he had lived familiarly, and whom he had honoured with his friendship."[23] There is one part of Coleridge's character not to be passed by, although so overlaid by his genius as rarely to be noticed, namely, his love of humour and of wit, of which he possessed so large a share. As punsters, his dear friend Lamb and himself were inimitable. Lamb's puns had oftener more effect, from the impediment in his speech their force seemed to be increased by the pause of stuttering, and to shoot forth like an arrow from a strong bow--but being never poisoned nor envenomed, they left no pain behind. Coleridge was more humorous than witty in making puns--and in repartee, he was, according to modern phraseology, "smart and clever." Staying a few days with two friends at a farm-house, they agreed to visit a race-course in the neighbourhood. The farmer brought from his stud a horse low in stature, and still lower in flesh--a bridle corresponding in respectability of appearance, with a saddle equally suitable--stirrups once bright, but now deeply discoloured by rust. All this was the contrivance of the farmer, and prudently intended for his safety. He had heard previously of Coleridge's want of skill in riding, and had therefore provided him with a beast not likely to throw him. On this Rosinante the poet mounted, in his accustomed dress, namely, a black coat, black breeches, with black silk stockings and shoes. His friends being trusted with more active steeds, soon outstripped him. Jogging on leisurely he was met by a long-nosed knowing-looking man, attired in a 'sporting' dress, and an excellent equestrian. Seeing this whimsical horseman in shoes, he writhed, as Coleridge observed, his lithe proboscis, and thus accosted him: Pray, sir, did you meet a tailor along the road?" "A tailor?" answered Coleridge; "yes!" "Do you see, sir! he rode just such a horse as you ride! and for all the world was just like you!" "Oh! oh!" answered Coleridge, "I did meet a person answering such a description, who told me he had dropped his goose, that if I rode a little farther I should find it; and I guess by the arch-fellow's looks, he must have meant you." "Caught a tartar!" replied the man, and suddenly spurring his horse, left him to pursue his road. At length Coleridge reached the race-course, when threading his way through the crowd, he arrived at the spot of attraction to which all were hastening. Here he confronted a barouche and four, filled with smart ladies and attendant gentlemen. In it was also seated a baronet of sporting celebrity, steward of the course, and member of the House of Commons, well known as having been bought and sold in several parliaments. The baronet eyed the figure of Coleridge as he slowly passed the door of the barouche, and thus accosted him: "A pretty piece of blood, sir, you have there?" "Yes!" answered Coleridge. "Rare paces, I have no doubt, sir!" "Yes," said Coleridge he brought me here a matter of four miles an hour." He was at no loss to perceive the honourable member's drift, who wished to shew off before the ladies: so he quietly waited the opportunity of a suitable reply. "What a fore-hand he has!" continued Nimrod, "how finely he carries his tail! Bridle and saddle well suited! and appropriately appointed!" "Yes," said Coleridge. "Will you sell him?" asked the sporting baronet. "Yes!" was the answer, "if I can have my price." "Name your price, then, putting the rider into the bargain!" This was too pointed to be passed over by a simple answer, and Coleridge was ready. "My price for the 'horse, sir', if I sell him, is 'one hundred' guineas,--as to the 'rider', never having been in parliament, and never intending to go, 'his' price is not yet fixed." The baronet sat down more suddenly than he had risen--the ladies began to titter--while Coleridge quietly left him to his chagrin, and them to the enjoyment of their mirth. We are now arrived at that period of Coleridge's life, in which it may be said, he received his first great warning of approaching danger. But it will be necessary to review his previous state of health. From childhood he discovered strong symptoms of a feeble stomach. As observed in the account of his school experience, when compelled to turn over the shoes in the shoe closet, exhausted by the fatigue, and overpowered by the scent, he suffered so much, that in after years the very remembrance almost made him shudder. Then his frequent bathing in the New River was an imprudence so injurious in its consequences, as to place him for nearly twelve months in the sick ward in the hospital of the school, with rheumatism connected with jaundice. These, to a youthful constitution, were matters of so serious a nature, as to explain to those acquainted with disease the origin and cause of his subsequent bodily sufferings. His sensitiveness was consequent on these, and so was his frequent incapability of continuous sedentary employment--an employment requiring far stronger health in an individual whose intellectual powers were ever at work. When overwhelmed at College, by that irresistible alarm and despondency which caused him to leave it, and to enlist as a soldier in the army, he continued in such a state of bodily ailment as to be deprived of the power of stooping, so that 'Cumberback',--a thing unheard of before,--was compelled to depute another to perform this part of his duty. On his voyage to Malta, he had complained of suffering from shortness of breath; and on returning to his residence at the Lakes, his difficulty of breathing and his rheumatism increased to a great degree. About the year 1809, ascending Skiddaw with his younger son, he was suddenly seized in the chest, and so overpowered as to attract the notice of the child. After the relation of these circumstances to some medical friend, he was advised by him not to bathe in the sea. The love, however, which he had from a boy, for going into the water, he retained till a late period of life. Strongly impressed with this feeling, he seems to have written the poem, entitled "On Revisiting the Sea Shore:" "Dissuading spake the mild physician, Those briny waves for thee are death, But my soul fulfilled her mission, And lo! I breathe untroubled breath." [24] In the year 1810, he left the Lakes, in company with Mr. Basil Montagu, whose affectionate regard for Mr. Coleridge, though manifested upon every occasion, was more particularly shown in seasons of difficulty and affliction. By Coleridge, Mr. Montagu's friendship was deeply felt,--and his gentle manners and unremitted kindness had the most soothing effect upon the sensitive and grateful mind of Coleridge. He remained for some time at Mr. Montagu's house. He afterwards resided at Hammersmith, with an amiable and common friend of his and Mr. Southey's,--Mr. Morgan, with whom they had formed an intimacy in Bristol. Whilst here he delivered a course of lectures at the London Philosophical Society. The prospectus was as follows: "Mr. Coleridge will commence, on Monday, November 18, 1811, a Course of Lectures on Shakspeare and Milton, in illustration of the principles of poetry, and their application, as grounds of criticism, to the most popular works of later English Poets, those of the living included. After an introductory lecture on False Criticism (especially in poetry), and on its causes; two thirds of the remaining course will be assigned, 1st, to a philosophical analysis, and explanation of all the principal 'characters' of our great dramatist, as Othello, Falstaff, Richard the Third, Iago, Hamlet, &c.; and 2nd, to a critical 'comparison' of Shakspeare, in respect of diction, imagery, management of the passions, judgment in the construction of his dramas, in short, of all that belongs to him as a poet, and as a dramatic poet, with his contemporaries or immediate successors, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ford, Massinger, &c. in the endeavour to determine what of Shakspeare's merits and defects are common to him, with other writers of the same age, and what remain peculiar to his own genius. The course will extend to fifteen lectures, which will be given on Monday and Thursday evenings successively." Mr. Coleridge afterwards delivered another course of lectures at the Royal Institution. Dr. Dibdin, one of his auditors, gives the following account of the lecturer: [25] "It was during my constant and familiar intercourse with Sir T. Bernard, while 'The Director' was going on, that I met the celebrated Mr. Coleridge--himself a lecturer. He was not a 'constant' lecturer--not in constant harness like others for the business of the day. Indisposition was generally preying upon him, [26] and habitual indolence would now and then frustrate the performance of his own better wishes. I once came from Kensington in a snow-storm, to hear him lecture upon Shakspeare. I might have sat as wisely and more comfortably by my own fire-side--for no Coleridge appeared. And this I think occurred more than once at the Royal Institution. I shall never forget the effect his conversation made upon me at the first meeting. It struck me as something not only quite out of the ordinary course of things, but as an intellectual exhibition altogether matchless. The viands were unusually costly, and the banquet was at once rich and varied; but there seemed to be no dish like Coleridge's conversation to feed upon--and no information so varied and so instructive as his own. The orator rolled himself up, as it were, in his chair, and gave the most unrestrained indulgence to his speech, and how fraught with acuteness and originality was that speech, and in what copious and eloquent periods did it flow! The auditors seemed to be rapt in wonder and delight, as one conversation, more profound or clothed in more forcible language than another, fell from his tongue. A great part of the subject discussed at the first time of my meeting Mr. Coleridge, was the connexion between Lord Nelson and Lady Hamilton. The speaker had been secretary to Sir Alexander Ball, governor of Malta--and a copious field was here afforded for the exercise of his colloquial eloquence. For nearly two hours he spoke with unhesitating and uninterrupted fluency. As I retired homewards (to Kensington), I thought a second Johnson had visited the earth, to make wise the sons of men; and regretted that I could not exercise the powers of a second Boswell, to record the wisdom and the eloquence which had that evening flowed from the orator's lips. It haunted me as I retired to rest. It drove away slumber: or if I lapsed into sleep, there was Coleridge--his snuffbox, and his 'kerchief before my eyes!--his mildly beaming looks--his occasionally deep tone of voice--and the excited features of his physiognomy.--The manner of Coleridge was rather emphatic than dogmatic, and thus he was generally and satisfactorily listened to. It might be said of Coleridge, as Cowper has so happily said of Sir Philip Sidney, that he was 'the warbler of poetic prose.' There was always 'this' characteristic feature in his multifarious conversation--it was delicate, reverend, and courteous. The chastest ear could drink in no startling sound; the most serious believer never had his bosom ruffled by one sceptical or reckless assertion. Coleridge was eminently simple in his manner. Thinking and speaking were his delight; and he would sometimes seem, during the more fervid movements of discourse, to be abstracted from all and every thing around and about him, and to be basking in the sunny warmth of his own radiant imagination." The manuscript of 'The Remorse' was sent to Mr. Sheridan, who did not even acknowledge the receipt of the letter which accompanied the drama; he however observed to a friend, that he had received a play from Coleridge, but that there was one extraordinary line in the Cave Scene, 'drip, drip'--which he could not understand: "in short," said he, "it is all dripping." This was the only notice he took of the play; but the comment was at length repeated to the author, through the medium of a third party. The theatre falling afterwards into the hands of Lord Byron and Mr. Whitbread, his Lordship sent for Coleridge, was very kind to his brother poet, and requested that the play might be represented: this desire was complied with, and it received his support. Although Mr. Whitbread [27] did not give it the advantage of a single new scene, yet the popularity of the play was such, that the principal actor, who had performed in it with great success, made choice of it for his benefit-night, and it brought an overflowing house. [28] In consequence of the interest Lord Byron took in the success of this tragedy, Coleridge was frequently in his company, and on one occasion, in my presence, his Lordship said, "Coleridge, there is one passage in your poems, I have parodied fifty times, and I hope to live long enough to parody it five hundred." That passage I do not remember; but it may strike some reader. In a letter of Coleridge's to a friend, written April 10th, 1816, he thus speaks of Byron: "If you had seen Lord Byron, you could scarcely disbelieve him--so beautiful a countenance I scarcely ever saw--his teeth so many stationary smiles--his eyes the open portals of the sun--things of light, and for light--and his forehead so ample, and yet so flexible, passing from marble smoothness into a hundred wreathes and lines and dimples correspondent to the feelings and sentiments he is uttering." Coleridge, in the preface to 'The Remorse', states that the "tragedy was written in the summer and autumn of the year 1797, at Nether Stowey, in the county of Somerset. By whose recommendation, and of the manner in which both the play and the author were treated by the recommender, let me be permitted to relate: that I knew of its having been received only from a third person; that I could procure neither answer nor the manuscript; and that but for an accident, I should have had no copy of the work itself. That such treatment would damp a young man's exertions may be easily conceived: there was no need of after-misrepresentation and calumny, as an additional sedative." Coleridge contributed many pieces to Southey's 'Omniana', (all marked with an asterisk,) and was engaged in other literary pursuits; he had notwithstanding much bodily suffering. The 'cause' of this was the organic change slowly and gradually taking place in the structure of the heart itself. But it was so masked by other sufferings, though at times creating despondency, and was so generally overpowered by the excitement of animated conversation, as to leave its real cause undiscovered. [29] Notwithstanding this sad state, he rolled forth volumes from a mind ever active--at times intensely so,--still he required the support of those sympathies which "free the hollow heart from paining." Soon after the performance of 'The Remorse', he retired with his kind friend, Mr. Morgan, to the village of Calne, partly to be near the Rev. W.L. Bowles, whose sonnets so much attracted his attention in early life. While residing here, he opened a communication with Mr. Gutch, a bookseller, at Bristol, and in consequence, he collected the poems published by the title of 'The Sibylline Leaves', and also composed the greater part of the 'Biographia Literaria'. Here he likewise dictated to his friend, Mr. Morgan, the 'Zapolya', which was submitted to Mr. Douglas Kinnaird, who was then the critic for Drury Lane.--Mr. Kinnaird rejected the play, assigning some ludicrous objections to the metaphysics. The subject is alluded to by Coleridge at the end of the Biographia Literaria, and with that allusion I close the present chapter: O we are querulous creatures! Little less Than all things can suffice to make us happy: And little more than nothing is enough To make us wretched. [Footnote 1: Alas! for myself at least I know and feel, that wherever there is a wrong not to be forgiven, there is a grief that admits neither of cure nor comforting. 'Private Record, 1806.'] [Footnote 2: It appears that Mr. Alexander Macauley, the secretary, an honest and amiable man, died suddenly, without "moan or motion," and Coleridge filled his situation till the arrival of a new secretary, appointed and confirmed by the ministers in England.] [Footnote 3: 1805. "For months past so incessantly employed in official tasks, subscribing, examining, administering oaths, auditing," &c.] [Footnote 4: April 22, 1804. "I was reading when I was taken ill, and felt an oppression of my breathing, and convulsive snatching in my stomach and limbs. Mrs. Ireland noticed this laborious breathing."] [Footnote 5: I would fain request the reader to peruse the poem, entitled "A Tombless Epitaph," to be found in Coleridge's 'Poetical Works', 1834, page 200.] [Footnote 6: Coleridge when asked what was the difference between fame and reputation, would familiarly reply, "Fame is the fiat of the good and wise," and then with energy would quote the following beautiful lines from Milton:-- Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil, Nor in the glistering foil Set off to the world, nor in broad rumour lies: But lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes, And perfect witness of all-judging Jove; As he pronounces lastly on each deed, Of so much fame in Heaven expect thy meed. 'Lycidas.'] [Footnote 7: "The following memoranda written in pencil, and apparently as he journeyed along, but now scarcely legible, may perhaps have an interest for some readers:-- "Sunday, December 15th, 1805. "Naples, view of Vesuvius, the Hail-mist--Torre del Greco--bright amid darkness--the mountains above it flashing here and there from their snows; but Vesuvius, it had not thinned as I have seen at Keswick, but the air so consolidated with the massy cloud curtain, that it appeared like a mountain in basso relievo, in an interminable wall of some pantheon."] [Footnote 8: The order for Coleridge's arrest had already been sent from Paris, but his escape was so contrived by the good old Pope, as to defeat the intended indulgence of the Tyrant's vindictive appetite, which would have preyed equally on a Duc D'Enghien, and a contributor to a public journal. In consequence of Mr. Fox having asserted in the House of Commons, that the rupture of the Truce of Amiens had its origin in certain essays written in the Morning Post, which were soon known to have been Coleridge's, and that he was at Rome within reach, the ire of Buonaparte was immediately excited.] [Footnote 9: Though his Note Books are full of memoranda, not an entry or date of his arrival at Rome is to be found. To Rome itself and its magnificence, he would often refer in conversation. Unfortunately there is not a single document to recall the beautiful images he would place before your mind in perspective, when inspired by the remembrance of its wonder-striking and splendid objects. He however preserved some short essays, which he wrote when in Malta, Observations on Sicily, Cairo, &c. &c. political and statistical, which will probably form part of the literary remains in train of publication. Malta, on a first view of the subject, seemed to present a situation so well fitted for a landing place, that it was intended to have adopted this mode, as in 'The Friend', of dividing the present memoir; but this loss of MS. and the breaches of continuity, render it impracticable.] [Footnote 10: At this time all his writings were strongly tinctured with Platonism.] [Footnote 11: Each party claimed him as their own; for party without principles must ever be shifting, and therefore they found his opinions sometimes in accordance with their own, and sometimes at variance. But he was of no party--his views were purely philosophical.] [Footnote 12: The character of Buonaparte was announced in the same paper.] [Footnote 13: Those who spoke after Pitt were Wilberforce, Tierney, Sheridan, &c.] [Footnote 14: This speech of Mr. Pitt's is extracted from the 'Morning Post', February 18th, 1800.] [Footnote 15: The following exquisite image on Leighton was found in one of Coleridge's note books, and is also inserted in his Literary Remains: "Next to the inspired Scriptures, yea, and as the vibration of that once struck hour remaining on the air, stands Archbishop Leighton's commentary on the first epistle of Peter."] [Footnote 16: In his later days, Mr. Coleridge would have renounced the opinions and the incorrect reasoning of this letter]. [Footnote 17: Article ii. The Son which is the word of the Father, 'begotten' from Everlasting of the Father, &c. Art. v. The Holy Ghost 'proceeding' from the Father and the Son, &c.] [Footnote 18: It was a favourite citation with Mr. Coleridge, "I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one." Vide St. John, xvii. 2.] [Footnote 19: At Mr. Poole's house, Mr. De Quincey remained two days. Of his visit he gives a full account; at the same time charging Coleridge with the meanness of plagiarism, but which charges since their publication have been ably refuted in an article in the British Magazine, signed J.C.H. Vide No. 37, page 15.] [Footnote 20: Vide 'Tait's Magazine', No. 8.] [Footnote 21: These have not been found.] [Footnote 22: This little Paper Book has not yet been found.] [Footnote 23: In the 'Quarterly Review' for July, 1837, will be found an able article on the 'Literary Remains of S.T. Coleridge,' and on "Mr. Cottle's Early Recollections," in which are extracted these very paragraphs from the "Friend," but which had been sent to the press before this number appeared.] [Footnote 24: This poem is supposed to have been written in 1813, when on a visit to some friends at Bexhill, Sussex.] [Footnote 25: 'Reminiscences of a Literary Life', Vol. i. p. 253.] [Footnote 26: If "indisposition were generally preying upon him," as at this time was indeed the fact, could this occasional failure in the delivery of a lecture (though naturally very disappointing to his audience,) be fairly attributed to indolence?] [Footnote 27: About this time, when party spirit was running high, Coleridge was known to be the author of the following Jeu d'Esprit, "Dregs half way up and froth half way down, form Whitbread's Entire."] [Footnote 28: It was Mr. Rae who took it for his benefit, some time after Mr. Coleridge's residence at Highgate.] [Footnote 29: "'My heart', or 'some part' about it, seems breaking, as if a weight were suspended from it that stretches it, such is the 'bodily feeling', as far as I can express it by words." Letter addressed to Mr. Morgan.] CHAPTER IV. COLERIDGE'S ARRIVAL AT HIGHGATE--PUBLICATION OF CHRISTABEL--BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA, &C. I now approach one of the most eventful epochs in the Life of Coleridge, and, I may well add, of my own. In the year 1816, the following letter was addressed to me by a physician: [1] Hatton Garden, 9th April, 1816. DEAR SIR, A very learned, but in one respect an unfortunate gentleman, has applied to me on a singular occasion. He has for several years been in the habit of taking large quantities of opium. For some time past, he has been in vain endeavouring to break himself off it. It is apprehended his friends are not firm enough, from a dread, lest he should suffer by suddenly leaving it off, though he is conscious of the contrary; and has proposed to me to submit himself to any regimen, however severe. With this view, he wishes to fix himself in the house of some medical gentleman, who will have courage to refuse him any laudanum, and under whose assistance, should he be the worse for it, he may be relieved. As he is desirous of retirement, and a garden, I could think of no one so readily as yourself. Be so good as to inform me, whether such a proposal is absolutely inconsistent with your family arrangements. I should not have proposed it, but on account of the great importance of the character, as a literary man. His communicative temper will make his society very interesting, as well as useful. Have the goodness to favour me with an immediate answer; and believe me, dear sir, your faithful humble servant, JOSEPH ADAMS. I had seen the writer of this letter but twice in my life, and had no intention of receiving an inmate into my house. I however determined on seeing Dr. Adams, for whether the person referred to had taken opium from choice or necessity, to me he was equally an object of commiseration and interest. Dr. Adams informed me that the patient had been warned of the danger of discontinuing opium by several eminent medical men, who, at the same time, represented the frightful consequences that would most probably ensue. I had heard of the failure of Mr. Wilberforce's case, under an eminent physician at Bath, in addition to which, the doctor gave me an account of several others within his own knowledge. After some further conversation it was agreed that Dr. Adams should drive Coleridge to Highgate the following evening. On the following evening came Coleridge 'himself' and alone. An old gentleman, of more than ordinary acquirements, was sitting by the fireside when he entered.--We met, indeed, for the first time, but as friends long since parted, and who had now the happiness to see each other again. Coleridge took his seat--his manner, his appearance, and above all, his conversation were captivating. We listened with delight, and upon the first pause, when courtesy permitted, my visitor withdrew, saying in a low voice, "I see by your manners, an old friend has arrived, and I shall therefore retire." Coleridge proposed to come the following evening, but he 'first' informed me of the painful opinion which he had received concerning his case, especially from one medical man of celebrity. The tale was sad, and the opinion given unprofessional and cruel--sufficient to have deterred most men so afflicted from making the attempt Coleridge was contemplating, and in which his whole soul was so deeply and so earnestly engaged. In the course of our conversation, he repeated some exquisite but desponding lines of his own. It was an evening of painful and pleasurable feeling, which I can never forget. We parted with each other, understanding in a few minutes what perhaps under different circumstances, would have cost many hours to arrange; and I looked with impatience for the morrow, still wondering at the apparent chance that had brought him under my roof. I felt indeed almost spell-bound, without the desire of release. My situation was new, and there was something affecting in the thought, that one of such amiable manners, and at the same time so highly gifted, should seek comfort and medical aid in our quiet home. Deeply interested, I began to reflect seriously on the duties imposed upon me, and with anxiety to expect the approaching day. It brought me the following letter: 42, Norfolk Street, Strand, Saturday Noon. [April 13, 1816.] "MY DEAR SIR, The first half hour I was with you convinced me that I should owe my reception into your family exclusively to motives not less flattering to me than honourable to yourself. I trust we shall ever in matters of intellect be reciprocally serviceable to each other. Men of sense generally come to the same conclusions; but they are likely to contribute to each other's enlargement of view, in proportion to the distance or even opposition of the points from which they set out. Travel and the strange variety of situations and employments on which chance has thrown me, in the course of my life, might have made me a mere man of 'observation', if pain and sorrow and self-miscomplacence had not forced my mind in on itself, and so formed habits of 'meditation'. It is now as much my nature to evolve the fact from the law, as that of a practical man to deduce the law from the fact. With respect to pecuniary remuneration, allow me to say, I must not at least be suffered to make any addition to your family expences-- though I cannot offer any thing that would be in any way adequate to my sense of the service; for that indeed there could not be a compensation, as it must be returned in kind, by esteem and grateful affection. And now of myself. My ever wakeful reason, and the keenness of my moral feelings, will secure you from all unpleasant circumstances connected with me save only one, viz. the evasion of a specific madness. You will never 'hear' any thing but truth from me:--prior habits render it out of my power to tell an untruth, but unless carefully observed, I dare not promise that I should not, with regard to this detested poison, be capable of acting one. No sixty hours have yet passed without my having taken laudanum, though for the last week comparatively trifling doses. I have full belief that your anxiety need not be extended beyond the first week, and for the first week, I shall not, I must not be permitted to leave your house, unless with you. Delicately or indelicately, this must be done, and both the servants 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, the degradation, the blighted utility, almost overwhelm me. If (as I feel for the 'first time' a soothing confidence it will prove) I should leave you restored to my moral and bodily health, it is not myself only that will love and honour you; every friend I have, (and thank God! in spite of this wretched vice [2] I have many and warm ones, who were friends of my youth, and have never deserted me,) will thank you with reverence. I have taken no notice of your kind apologies. If I could not be comfortable in your house, and with your family, I should deserve to be miserable. If you could make it convenient, I should wish to be with you by Monday evening, as it would prevent the necessity of taking fresh lodgings in town. With respectful compliments to Mrs. Gillman and her sister, I remain, dear sir, Your much obliged, S.T. COLERIDGE." On the evening appointed, Coleridge came, bringing in his hand the proof sheets of 'Christabel', which was now for the first time printed. The fragment in manuscript was already known to many, for to many had Coleridge read it, who had listened to it with delight--a delight so marked that its success seemed certain. But the approbation of those whom, in the worldly acceptation of the term, we call 'friends', is not always to be relied upon. Among the most plausible connexions, there is often a rivalship, both political and literary, which constrains the sacrifice of sincerity, and substitutes secret for open censure. Of this melancholy fact Coleridge had seen proof. The Fragment had not long been published before he was informed, that an individual had been selected (who was in truth a great admirer of his writings; and whose very life had been saved through the exertions of Coleridge and Mr. Southey,) to "'cut up'" Christabel in the Edinburgh Review. The subject being afterwards mentioned in conversation, the reviewer confessed that he was the writer of the article, but observed, that as he wrote for the Edinburgh Review, he was compelled to write in accordance with the character and tone of that periodical. This confession took place after he had been extolling the Christabel as the finest poem of its kind in the language, and ridiculing the public for their want of taste and discrimination in not admiring it.--Truly has it been said, "Critics upon all writers there are many, Planters of truth or knowledge scarcely any." Sir Walter Scott always spoke in high praise of the Christabel, and more than once of his obligations to Coleridge; of this we have proof in his Ivanhoe, in which the lines by Coleridge, entitled "The Knight's Tomb," were quoted by Scott before they were published, from which circumstance, Coleridge was convinced that Sir Walter was the author of the Waverly Novels. The lines were composed as an experiment for a metre, and repeated by him to a mutual friend--this gentleman the following day dined in company with Sir Walter Scott, and spoke of his visit to Highgate, repeating Coleridge's lines to Scott, and observing at the same time, that they might be acceptable to the author of Waverley. THE KNIGHT'S TOMB. Where is the grave of Sir Arthur O'Kellyn? Where may the grave of that good man be?-- By the side of a spring, on the breast of Helvellyn, Under the twigs of a young birch tree! The Oak that in summer was sweet to hear, And rustled its leaves in the fall of the year; And whistled and roar'd in the winter alone, Is gone,--and the birch in its stead is grown.-- The Knight's bones are dust, And his good sword rust;-- His soul is with the saints, I trust. 'Poetical Works', Vol. ii. p. 64. The late Mr. Sotheby informed me, that, at his house in a large party, Sir Walter made the following remark: "I am indebted to Coleridge for the mode of telling a tale by question and answer. This was a new light to me, and I was greatly struck by it." Yet when Sir Walter said this, he must surely have forgotten many of our ancient and most beautiful ballads, in which the questions are so significant, and are made to develope the progress of the fable more clearly than could be affected by the ordinary course of narration. In fact every lover of our old poetry will recollect a hundred pieces in which the same form of evolution is observed. Thus in 'Johnie of Breadis Lee': "What news, what news, ye grey-headed carle, What news bring ye to me?" And in 'Halbert the Grim': "There is pity in many,-- Is there any in him? No! ruth is a strange guest To Halbert the Grim." Scott particularly admired Coleridge's management of the supernatural. The "flesh and blood reality," given to Geraldine, the life, the power of appearing and disappearing equally by day as by night, constitutes the peculiar merit of the Christabel: and those poets who admire, and have reflected much on the supernatural, have ever considered it one of the greatest efforts of genius. But the effect has ever been degraded by unnatural combinations. Thus on the stage, where such creations are the most frequent, it has been the custom for stage-managers to choose 'male' actors for the female parts. In 'Macbeth', men are called on to stir the caldron and other witcheries requiring muscular power. Again, when Macbeth listens to those extraordinary beings, who, with muttering spells, with charms, foreknowledge and incantations imperfectly announced to him his fate; he, with an air of command, says, "Speak!" &c. They shew their power, and give their best answer by disappearing. The manner of representing this is unnatural, as exhibited by our managers. Coleridge observed, that it would be better to withdraw the light from the stage, than to exhibit these miserable attempts at vanishing, [3] though could the thought have been well executed, he considered it a master-stroke of Shakspeare's. Yet it should be noticed, that Coleridge's opinion was, that some of the plays of our "myriad-minded" bard ought never to be acted, but looked on as poems to be read, and contemplated; and so fully was he impressed with this feeling, that in his gayer moments he would often say, "There should be an Act of Parliament to prohibit their representation." [4] Here 'he' excelled: he has no incongruities, no gross illusions. In the management of the supernatural, the only successful poets among our own countrymen have been Shakspeare and Coleridge. Scott has treated it well in the Bride of Lammermoor, and in one or two other works. Of the Christabel, as now published, Coleridge says, "The first part was composed in 1797." This was the Annus Mirabilis of this great man; in it he was in his best and strongest health. He returned from Germany in 1799, and in the year following wrote the 'second' part, in the preface to which he observes, "Till very lately my poetic powers have been in a state of suspended animation." The subject indeed remained present to his mind, though from bad health and other causes, it was left as a mere fragment of his poetic power. When in health he sometimes said, "This poem comes upon me with all the loveliness of a vision;" and he declared, that though contrary to the advice of his friends, he should finish it: At other times when his bodily powers failed him, he would then say, "I am reserved for other works than making verse." In the preface to the Christabel, he makes the following observation: "It is probable," he says, "that if the poem had been finished at either of the former periods, 'i.e'. 1797 and 1800, or if even the first and second part of this fragment had been published in the year 1800, the impression of its originality would have been much greater than I dare at present expect. But for this, I have only my own indolence to blame. The dates are mentioned for the exclusive purpose of precluding charges of plagiarism or servile imitation from myself. For there is among us a set of critics who seem to hold, that every possible thought and image is traditional; who have no notion that there are such things as fountains in the world, small as well as great; and who would therefore charitably derive every rill, they behold flowing, from a perforation made in some other man's tank. I am confident, however, that as far as the present poem is concerned, the celebrated poets whose writings I might be suspected of having imitated, either in particular passages, or in the tone and the spirit of the whole, would be among the first to vindicate me from the charge, and who, on any striking coincidence, would permit me to address them in this dogged version of two monkish Latin hexameters: 'Tis mine and it is likewise your's, But an if this will not do; Let it be mine, good friend! for I Am the poorer of the two." I have only to add, that the metre of the Christabel is not, properly speaking, irregular, though it may seem so from its being founded on a new principle; namely, that of counting in each line the accents, not the syllables. Though the latter may vary from seven to twelve, yet in each line the accents will be found to be only four. Nevertheless, this occasional variation in the number of syllables is not introduced wantonly, or for the mere ends of convenience, but in correspondence with some transition in the nature of the imagery or passion." In conversation many of his brother poets would, like the reviewer, echo his praises, while in secret, they were trying to deprive him of his fair fame. It has been said, that "Coleridge never explained the story of Christabel." To his friends he did explain it; and in the Biographia Literaria, he has given an account of its origin. [5] The story of the Christabel is partly founded on the notion, that the virtuous of this world save the wicked. The pious and good Christabel suffers and prays for "The weal of her lover that is far away," exposed to various temptations in a foreign land; and she thus defeats the power of evil represented in the person of Geraldine. This is one main object of the tale. At the opening of the poem all nature is laid under a spell: 'Tis the middle of night by the castle clock, And the owls have awak'ned the crowing cock; Tu-whit!--Tu-whoo! And hark, again! The crowing cock, How drowsily it crew-- Sir Leoline, the Baron rich, Hath a toothless mastiff-bitch, From her kennel beneath the rock Maketh answer to the clock, Four for the quarters, and twelve for the hour; Ever and aye, by shine and shower, Sixteen short howls, not over loud; Some say, she sees my lady's shroud. Is the night chilly and dark? The night is chilly, but not dark. The thin gray cloud is spread on high, It covers but not hides the sky. The moon is behind, and at the full; And yet she looks both small and dull. The night is chill, the cloud is gray: 'Tis a month before the month of May, And the Spring comes slowly up this way. The spell is laid by an evil being, not of this world, with whom Christabel, the heroine, is about to become connected; and who in the darkness of the forest is meditating the wreck of all her hopes The lovely lady, Christabel, Whom her father loves so well, What makes her in the wood so late, A furlong from the castle gate? She had dreams all yesternight Of her own betrothed knight; And she in the midnight wood will pray For the weal of her lover that's far away. She stole along, she nothing spoke, The sighs she heaved were soft and low, And naught was green upon the oak, But moss and rarest misletoe: She kneels beneath the huge oak tree, And in silence prayeth she. There are persons who have considered the description of Christabel in the act of praying, so far from the baron's castle, too great a poetical license. He was fully aware that all baronial castles had their chapels and oratories attached to them,--and that in these lawless times, for such were the middle ages, the young lady who ventured unattended beyond the precincts of the castle, would have endangered her reputation. But to such an imaginative mind, it would have been scarcely possible to pass by the interesting image of Christabel, presenting itself before him, praying by moonlight at the old oak tree. But to proceed: The lady sprang up suddenly, The lovely lady Christabel! It moaned as near, as near can be, But what it is, she cannot tell.-- On the other side it seems to be, Of the huge, broad-breasted, old oak tree. The night is chill; the forest bare; Is it the wind that moaneth bleak? There is not wind enough in the air To move away the ringlet curl From the lovely lady's cheek-- There is not wind enough to twirl The one red leaf, the last of its clan, That dances as often as dance it can, Hanging so light, and hanging so high, On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky. Hush, beating heart of Christabel! Jesu, Maria, shield her well! She folded her arms beneath her cloak, And stole to the other side of the oak. What sees she there? There she sees a damsel bright, Drest in a silken robe of white, That shadowy in the moonlight shone: The neck that made that white robe wan, Her stately neck and arms were bare; Her blue-veined feet unsandal'd were. And wildly glittered here and there The gems entangled in her hair. I guess, 'twas frightful there to see A lady so richly clad as she-- Beautiful exceedingly! This description is exquisite. Now for the mystic demon's tale of art: Mary mother, save me now! (Said Christabel,) And who art thou? The lady strange made answer meet, And her voice was faint and sweet:-- Have pity on my sore distress, I scarce can speak for weariness: Stretch forth thy hand, and have no fear! Said Christabel, How camest thou here? And the lady, whose voice was faint and sweet, Did thus pursue her answer meet:-- My sire is of a noble line, And my name is Geraldine: Five warriors seized me yestermorn, Me, even me, a maid forlorn: They chok'd my cries with force and fright, And tied me on a palfrey white. The palfrey was as fleet as wind, And they rode furiously behind. They spurred amain, their steeds were white: And once we crossed the shade of night. As sure as Heaven shall rescue me, I have no thought what men they be; Nor do I know how long it is (For I have lain entranced I wis) Since one, the tallest of the five, Took me from the palfrey's back, A weary woman, scarce alive. Some muttered words his comrades spoke He placed me underneath this oak, He swore they would return with haste; Whither they went I cannot tell-- I thought I heard, some minutes past, Sounds as of a castle bell. Stretch forth thy hand (thus ended she) And help a wretched maid to flee. Then Christabel stretched forth her hand And comforted fair Geraldine: O well, bright dame! may you command The service of Sir Leoline; And gladly our stout chivalry Will he send forth and friends withal, To guide and guard you safe and free Home to your noble father's hall. She rose: and forth with steps they passed That strove to be, and were not, fast. Her gracious stars the lady blest And thus spake on sweet Christabel: All our household are at rest, The hall as silent as the cell; Sir Leoline is weak in health, And may not well awakened be, But we will move as if in stealth, And I beseech your courtesy, This night, to share your couch with me. They crossed the moat, and Christabel Took the key that fitted well; A little door she opened straight, All in the middle of the gate; The gate that was ironed within and without, Where an army in battle array had marched out. The lady sank, belike through pain, And Christabel with might and main Lifted her up, a weary weight, Over the threshold of the gate: Then the lady rose again, And moved, as she were not in pain. So free from danger, free from fear, They crossed the court: right glad they were. Following the popular superstition that dogs are supposed to see ghosts, and therefore see the supernatural, the mastiff yells, when Geraldine appears: Outside her kennell, the mastiff old Lay fast asleep, in moonshine cold. The mastiff old did not awake, Yet she an angry moan did make! And what can ail the mastiff bitch? Never till now she uttered yell, Beneath the eye of Christabel. Geraldine had already worked upon the kindness of Christabel, so that she had lifted her over the threshold of the gate, which Geraldine's fallen power had prevented her passing of herself, the place being holy and under the influence of the Virgin. "Praise we the Virgin all divine, Who hath rescued thee from thy distress, Alas! Alas! said Geraldine, I cannot speak for weariness. They pass the hall that echoes still, Pass as lightly as you will! The brands were flat, the brands were dying, Amid their own white ashes lying; But when the lady passed there came A tongue of light, a fit of flame; And Christabel saw the lady's eye, And nothing else saw she thereby Save the boss of the shield of Sir Leoline tall, Which hung in a murky old nitch in the wall. O! softly tread, said Christabel, My father seldom sleepeth well." Geraldine, who affects to be weary, arrives at the chamber of Christabel--this room is beautifully ornamented, "Carved with figures strange and sweet, All made out of the carver's brain, For a lady's chamber meet The lamp with twofold silver chain Is fasten'd to an angel's feet." Such is the mysterious movement of this supernatural lady, that all this is visible, and when she passed the dying brands, there came a fit of flame, and Christabel saw the lady's eye. The silver lamp burns dead and dim; But Christabel the lamp will trim. She trimm'd the lamp and made it bright, And left it swinging to and fro, While Geraldine, in wretched plight, Sank down upon the floor below. O weary lady Geraldine, I pray you drink this cordial wine, It is a wine of virtuous powers; My mother made it of wild flowers. And will your mother pity me, Who am a maiden most forlorn? Christabel answer'd--Woe is me! She died the hour that I was born, I have heard the grey-hair'd friar tell, How on her death-bed she did say, That she should hear the castle bell Strike twelve upon my wedding-day. O mother dear! that thou wert here! I would, said Geraldine, she were! The poet now introduces the real object of the supernatural transformation: the spirit of evil struggles with the deceased and sainted mother of Christabel for the possession of the lady. To render the scene more impressive, the mother instantly appears, though she is invisible to her daughter. Geraldine exclaims in a commanding voice "Off, wandering mother! Peak and pine! I have power to bid thee flee?" Alas! what ails poor Geraldine? Why stares she with unsettled eye Can she the bodiless dead espy? And why with hollow voice cries she, "Off, woman, off! this hour is mine-- Though thou her guardian spirit be, "Off, woman, off! 'tis given to me." Here, Geraldine seems to be struggling with the spirit of Christabel's mother, over which for a time she obtains the mastery. Then Christabel knelt by the lady's side, And rais'd to heaven her eyes so blue-- Alas! said she, this ghastly ride-- Dear lady! it hath wilder'd you! The lady wiped her moist cold brow, And faintly said, "'Tis over now!" Again the wild-flower wine she drank, Her fair large eyes 'gan glitter bright, And from the floor whereon she sank, The lofty lady stood upright She was most beautiful to see, Like a lady of a far countrée. And thus the lofty lady spake-- All they who live in the upper sky, Do love you, holy Christabel! And you love them, and for their sake And for the good which me befell, Even I in my degree will try, Fair maiden to requite you well. But now unrobe yourself: for I Must pray, ere yet in bed I lie. Quoth Christabel, so let it be! And as the lady bade, did she. Her gentle limbs did she undress, And lay down in her loveliness. But all this had given rise to so many different thoughts and feelings, that she could not compose herself for sleep, so she sits up in her bed to look at Geraldine who drew in her breath aloud, and unbound her cincture. Her silken robe and inner vest then drop to her feet, and she discovers her hideous form: A sight to dream of, not to tell! O shield her, shield sweet Christabel! Yet Geraldine nor speaks--nor stirs; Ah! what a stricken look was hers! She then lies down by the side of Christabel, and takes her to her arms, saying in a low voice these words: In the touch of this bosom there worketh a spell, Which is lord of thy utterance, Christabel! Thou knowest to-night, and wilt know to-morrow, This mark of my shame, this seal of my sorrow; But vainly thou warrest, For this is alone in Thy power to declare, That in the dim forest Thou heardst a low moaning, And found'st a bright lady, surpassingly fair And didst bring her home with thee in love and in charity, To shield her and shelter her from the damp air. The conclusion to part the first is a beautiful and well drawn picture, slightly recapitulating some of the circumstances of the opening of the poem. THE CONCLUSION TO PART THE FIRST. It was a lovely sight to see, The lady Christabel, when she Was praying at the old oak tree. Amid the jagged shadows Of mossy leafless boughs, Kneeling in the moonlight, To make her gentle vows; Her slender palms together prest, Heaving sometimes on her breast; Her face resigned to bliss or bale-- Her face, oh call it fair, not pale, And both blue eyes more bright than clear, Each about to have a tear. With open eyes (ah woe is me!) Asleep and dreaming fearfully, Fearfully dreaming, yet I wis, Dreaming that alone which is-- O sorrow and shame! Can this be she, The lady who knelt at the old oak tree? And lo! the worker of these harms, That holds the maiden in her arms, Seems to slumber still and mild As a mother with her child. A star hath set, a star hath risen, O Geraldine! since arms of thine Have been the lovely lady's prison. O Geraldine! one hour was thine-- Thou'st had thy will! By tairn and rill, The night-birds all that hour were still. At the ceasing of the spell, the joyousness of the birds is described, and also the awakening of Christabel as from a trance.--During this rest (her mother) the guardian angel is supposed to have been watching over her. But these passages could not escape coarse minded critics, who put a construction on them which never entered the mind of the author of Christabel, whose poems are marked by delicacy. The effects of the apparition of her mother, supposed to be seen by Christabel in a vision, are thus described: What if her guardian spirit 'twere, What if she knew her mother near? But this she knows, in joys and woes, That saints will aid if men will call: For the blue sky bends over all! Here terminates the first canto. The passage from this sleep and the reappearance by day-light of Geraldine, has always been considered a master-piece. The second part begins with a moral reflection, and introduces Sir Leoline, the father of Christabel, with the following observation, on his rising in the morning: Each matin bell, the Baron saith! Knells us back to a world of death. These words Sir Leoline first said When he rose and found his lady dead. These words Sir Leoline will say Many a morn to his dying day. After a popular custom of the country, the old bard Bracy is introduced. Geraldine rises, puts on her silken vestments--tricks her hair, and not doubting her spell, she awakens Christabel, "Sleep you, sweet lady Christabel? I trust that you have rested well." And Christabel awoke and spied The same who lay down by her side-- O rather say, the same whom she Rais'd up beneath the old oak tree! Nay fairer yet, and yet more fair! For she belike hath drunken deep Of all the blessedness of sleep! And while she spake, her looks, her air Such gentle thankfulness declare; That (so it seem'd) her girded vests Grew tight beneath her heaving breasts. "Sure I have sinn'd!" said Christabel, "Now heaven be prais'd if all be well!" And in low faultering tones, yet sweet, Did she the lofty lady greet; With such perplexity of mind As dreams too lively leave behind. Christabel then leaves her couch, and having offered up her prayers, she leads fair Geraldine to meet the Baron.--They enter his presence room, when her father rises, and while pressing his daughter to his breast, he espies the lady Geraldine, to whom he gives such welcome as "Might beseem so bright a dame!" But when the Baron hears her tale, and her father's name, the poet enquires feelingly: Why wax'd Sir Leoline so pale, Murmuring o'er the name again, Lord Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine? Alas! they had been friends in youth; But whispering tongues can poison truth; And constancy lives in realms above; And life is thorny; and youth is vain; And to be wroth with one we love, Doth work like madness in the brain. And thus it chanc'd, as I divine, With Roland and Sir Leoline. Each spake words of high disdain And insult to his heart's best brother: They parted--never to meet again! But never either found another To free the hollow heart from paining-- They stood aloof, the scars remaining, Like cliffs which had been rent asunder; A dreary sea now flows between;-- But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder, Shall wholly do away, I ween, The marks of that which once hath been. Sir Leoline gazed for a moment on the face of Geraldine, and the youthful Lord of Tryermaine again came back upon his heart. He is then described as forgetting his age, and his noble heart swells with indignation. He then affectionately takes Geraldine in his arms, who meets the embrace: "Prolonging it with joyous look, Which when she viewed, a vision fell Upon the soul of Christabel, The vision of fear, the touch and pain! She shrunk and shudder'd and saw again (Ah woe is me! Was it for thee, Thou gentle maid! such sights to see?) Geraldine then appears to her in her real character, ('half' human only,) the sight of which alarms Christabel. The Baron mistakes for jealousy this alarm in his daughter, which was induced by fear of Geraldine, and had been the sole cause of her unconsciously imitating the "hissing sound:" Whereat the Knight turn'd wildly round, And nothing saw, but his own sweet maid With eyes uprais'd, as one that pray'd. This touch, this sight passed away, and left in its stead the vision of her guardian angel (her mother) which had comforted her after rest, and having sought consolation in prayer, her countenance resumes its natural serenity and sweetness. The Baron surprised at these sudden transitions, exclaims, "What ails then my beloved child?" Christabel makes answer: "All will yet be well!" I ween, she had no power to tell Aught else: so mighty was the spell. Yet the Baron seemed so captivated by Geraldine, as to "deem her a thing divine." She pretended much sorrow, and feared she might have offended Christabel, praying with humility to be sent home immediately. "Nay! Nay--by my soul!" said Leoline. "Ho!--Bracy, the bard, the charge be thine! Go thou with music sweet and loud And take two steeds with trappings proud; And take the youth whom thou lov'st best To bear thy harp and learn thy song, And clothe you both in solemn vest And over the mountains haste along. He is desired to continue his way to the castle of Tryermaine. Bracy is thus made to act in a double capacity, as bard and herald: in the first, he is to announce to Lord Roland the safety of his daughter in Langdale Hall; in the second as herald to the Baron, he is to convey an apology according to the custom of that day, "He bids thee come without delay, With all thy numerous array; And take thy lovely daughter home, And he will meet thee on the way, With all his numerous array; White with their panting palfrey's foam, And by mine honour! I will say, That I repent me of the day; When I spake words of fierce disdain, To Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine!-- For since that evil hour hath flown, Many a summer's sun hath shone; Yet ne'er found I a friend again Like Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine." The lady fell, and clasped his knees, Her face upraised, her eyes o'erflowing, And Bracy replied, with faltering voice, His gracious hail on all bestowing:-- Thy words, thou sire of Christabel, Are sweeter than my harp can tell. Yet might I gain a boon of thee, This day my journey should not be, So strange a dream hath come to me: That I had vow'd with music loud To clear yon wood from thing unblest, Warn'd by a vision in my rest! The dream is then related by Bracy; it is an outline of the past, and a prophecy of the future.--The Baron listens with a smile, turns round, and looks at Geraldine, "His eyes made up of wonder and love; And said in courtly accents fine, Sweet maid, Lord Roland's beauteous dove, With arms more strong than harp or song, Thy sire and I will crush the snake!" He kissed her forehead as he spake, And Geraldine in maiden wise, Casting down her large bright eyes; With blushing cheek and courtesy fine, She turn'd her from Sir Leoline; Softly gathering up her train, That o'er her right arm fell again; And folded her arms across her chest, And couch'd her head upon her breast. And look'd askance at Christabel-- Jesu, Maria, shield her well! Then takes place that extraordinary change which, being read in a party at Lord Byron's, is said to have caused Shelley to faint: A snake's small eye blinks dull and shy, And the lady's eyes, they shrunk in her head, Each shrunk up to a serpent's eye, And with somewhat of malice, and more of dread At Christabel she looked askance!-- One moment,--and the sight was fled! But Christabel in dizzy trance, Stumbling on the unsteady ground-- Shudder'd aloud, with a hissing sound; And Geraldine again turn'd round, And like a thing, that sought relief, Full of wonder and full of grief; She roll'd her large bright eyes divine, Wildly on Sir Leoline. The maid, alas! her thoughts are gone, She nothing sees--no sight but one! The look, those shrunken serpent eyes, had made such a deep impression on Christabel, That all her features were resign'd To the sole image in her mind: And passively did imitate That look of dull and treacherous hate. And thus she stood in dizzy trance, Still picturing that look askance. But when the trance was o'er, the maid Paus'd awhile and inly pray'd, "By my mother's soul do I entreat That thou this woman send away!" She said, and more she could not say, For what she knew she could not tell O'er master'd by the mighty spell. The poet now describes the Baron as suffering under the confused emotions of love for Christabel, and anger at her apparent jealousy, and the insult offered to the daughter of his friend, which so wrought upon him that, He roll'd his eye with stern regard Upon the gentle minstrel bard, And said in tones abrupt, austere-- "Why, Bracy? dost thou loiter here? "I bade thee hence!" The bard obey'd, And turning from his own sweet maid, The aged knight, Sir Leoline Led forth the lady Geraldine! Here ends the second canto. In the conclusion to the second canto, he speaks of a child and its father's fondness, so often expressed by "you little rogue," " you little rascal," with an endearing kiss, says: A little child, a limber elf, Singing, dancing to itself; A fairy thing with red round cheeks, That always finds and never seeks; Makes such a vision to the sight, As fills a father's eyes with light; And pleasures flow in so thick and fast Upon his heart, that he at last Must needs express his love's excess, With words of unmeant bitterness. The following relation was to have occupied a third and fourth canto, and to have closed the tale. Over the mountains, the Bard, as directed by Sir Leoline, "hastes" with his disciple; but in consequence of one of those inundations supposed to be common to this country, the spot only where the castle once stood is discovered,--the edifice itself being washed away. He determines to return. Geraldine being acquainted with all that is passing, like the Weird Sisters in Macbeth, vanishes. Re-appearing, however, she waits the return of the Bard, exciting in the mean time, by her wily arts, all the anger she could rouse in the Baron's breast, as well as that jealousy of which he is described to have been susceptible. The old Bard and the youth at length arrive, and therefore she can no longer personate the character of Geraldine, the daughter of Lord Roland de Vaux, but changes her appearance to that of the accepted though absent lover of Christabel. Next ensues a courtship most distressing to Christabel, who feels--she knows not why--great disgust for her once favoured knight. This coldness is very painful to the Baron, who has no more conception than herself of the supernatural transformation. She at last yields to her father's entreaties, and consents to approach the altar with this hated suitor. The real lover returning, enters at this moment, and produces the ring which she had once given him in sign of her betrothment. Thus defeated, the supernatural being Geraldine disappears. As predicted, the castle bell tolls, the mother's voice is heard, and to the exceeding great joy of the parties, the rightful marriage takes place, after which follows a reconciliation and explanation between the father and daughter. Lamb, who visited us soon after Coleridge's death, and not long before his own, talking of the Christabel, observed, "I was very angry with Coleridge, when I first heard that he had written a second canto, and that he intended to finish it; but when I read the beautiful apostrophe to the two friends, it calmed me." He was one of those who strongly recommended Coleridge to leave as a fragment what he had so beautifully begun. With the first edition of the Christabel was given Kubla Khan, the dream within a dream, written in harmonious and fluent rhythm. 'The Pains of Sleep' was also added. This is a poem communicating a portion of his personal sufferings. [6] All these were published in 1816. In the introduction to 'The Lay of the last Minstrel', 1830, Sir Walter says, "Were I ever to take the unbecoming freedom of censuring a man of Mr. Coleridge's extraordinary talents, it would be on account of the caprice and indolence with which he has thrown from him, as in mere wantonness, those unfinished scraps of poetry, which, like the Tasso of antiquity, defied the skill of his poetical brethren to complete them. The charming fragments which the author abandons to their fate, are surely too valuable to be treated like the proofs of careless engravers, the sweepings of whose studies often make the fortune of some pains-taking collector. And in a note to the Abbot, alluding to Coleridge's beautiful and tantalizing fragment of Christabel, he adds, Has not our own imaginative poet cause to fear that future ages will desire to summon him from his place of rest, as Milton longed 'To call up him who left half told The story of Cambuscam bold.'" Since writing the preceding pages, I have met with a critique on the Christabel, written immediately after it was published, from which I select a few passages, in the hope that they may further interest the admirers of this poem: 'The publication of Christabel cannot be an indifferent circumstance to any true lover of poetry--it is a singular monument of genius, and we doubt whether the fragmental beauty that it now possesses can be advantageously exchanged for the wholeness of a finished narrative. In its present form it lays irresistible hold of the imagination. It interests even by what it leaves untold.--The story is like a dream of lovely forms, mixed with strange and indescribable terrors. The scene, the personages, are those of old romantic superstition; but we feel intimate with them, as if they were of our own day, and of our own neighbourhood. It is impossible not to suppose that we have known "sweet Christabel," from the time when she was "a fairy thing, with red round cheeks," till she had grown up, through all the engaging prettinesses of childhood, and the increasing charms of youth, to be the pure and dignified creature, which we find her at the opening of the poem. The scene is laid at midnight, in the yet leafless wood, a furlong from the castle-gate of the rich Baron Sir Leoline, whose daughter, "the lovely Lady Christabel," has come, in consequence of a vow, to pray at the old oak tree, "for the weal of her lover that's far away." In the midst of her orisons she is suddenly alarmed by a moaning near her, which turns out to be the complaint of the Lady Geraldine, who relates, that she had been carried off by warriors, and brought to this wild wood, where they had left her with intent quickly to return. This story of Geraldine's easily obtains credence from the unsuspecting Christabel, who conducts her secretly to a chamber in the castle. There the mild and beautiful Geraldine seems transformed in language and appearance to a sorceress, contending with the spirit of Christabel's deceased mother for the mastery over her daughter; but Christabel's lips are sealed by a spell. What she knows she cannot utter; and scarcely can she herself believe that she knows it. On the return of morning, Geraldine, in all her pristine beauty, accompanies the innocent but perplexed Christabel to the presence of the Baron, who is delighted when he learns that she is the daughter of his once loved friend, Sir Roland de Vaux, of Tryermaine.--We shall not pursue the distress of Christabel, the mysterious warnings of Bracy the Bard, the assumed sorrow of Geraldine, or the indignation of Sir Leoline, at his daughter's seemingly causeless jealousy--what we have principally to remark with respect to the tale is, that, wild and romantic and visionary as it is, it has a truth of its own, which seizes on and masters the imagination from the beginning to the end. The poet unveils with exquisite skill the finer ties of imagination and feeling by which they are linked to the human heart. The elements of our sensibility, to all that concerns fair Christabel, are of the purest texture; they are not formally announced in a set description, but they accompany and mark her every movement throughout the piece--Incessu patuit Dea.--She is the support of her noble father's declining age--sanctified by the blessing of her departed mother--the beloved of a valorous and absent knight--the delight and admiration of an inspired bard--she is a being made up of tenderness, affection, sweetness, piety! There is a fine discrimination in the descriptions of Christabel and Geraldine, between the lovely and the merely beautiful. There is a moral sensitiveness about Christabel, which none but a true poet could seize. It would be difficult to find a more delicate touch of this kind in any writer, than her anxious exclamation when, in passing the hall with Geraldine, a gleam bursts from the dying embers. Next in point of merit to the power which Mr. Coleridge has displayed, in interesting us by the moral beauty of his heroine, comes the skill with which he has wrought the feelings and fictions of superstition into shape. The witchlike Geraldine lying down by the side of Christabel, and uttering the spell over her, makes the reader thrill with indefinable horror. We find another striking excellence of this poem, and which powerfully affects every reader, by placing, as it were before his eyes, a distinct picture of the events narrated, with all their appendages of sight and sound--the dim forest--the massive castle-gate--the angry moan of the sleeping mastiff--the sudden flash of the dying embers--the echoing hall--the carved chamber, with its curious lamp--in short, all that enriches and adorns this tale, with a luxuriance of imagination seldom equalled.' [7] Whilst in the full enjoyment of his creative powers, Coleridge wrote in a letter to a friend the following critique on "the Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni," which is supposed to have been composed about the time of the Christabel, though not published till 1816, in the Sibylline Leaves. It will serve to shew how freely he assented to the opinions of his friends, and with what candour he criticised his own poems, recording his opinions whether of censure or of praise:-- "In a copy of verses, entitled 'a Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni,' I describe myself under the influence of strong devotional feelings, gazing on the mountain, till as if it had been a shape emanating from and sensibly representing her own essence, my soul had become diffused through the mighty vision and there, 'As in her natural form, swell'd vast to Heaven.' Mr. Wordsworth, I remember, censured the passage as strained and unnatural, and condemned the hymn in toto, (which, nevertheless, I ventured to publish in my 'Sibylline Leaves,') as a specimen of the mock sublime. It may be so for others, but it is impossible that I should myself find it unnatural, being conscious that it was the image and utterance of thoughts and emotions in which there was no mockery. Yet, on the other hand, I could readily believe that the mood and habit of mind out of which the hymn rose, that differs from Milton's and Thomson's and from the psalms, the source of all three, in the author's addressing himself to 'individual' objects actually present to his senses, while his great predecessors apostrophize 'classes' of things presented by the memory, and generalized by the understanding; --I can readily believe, I say, that in this there may be too much of what our learned 'med'ciners' call the 'idiosyncratic' for true poetry.--For, from my very childhood, I have been accustomed to 'abstract', and as it were, unrealize whatever of more than common interest my eyes dwelt on, and then by a sort of transfusion and transmission of my consciousness to identify myself with the object; and I have often thought within the last five or six years, that if ever I should feel once again the genial warmth and stir of the poetic impulse, and refer to my own experiences, I should venture on a yet stranger and wilder allegory than of yore--that I would allegorize myself as a rock, with its summit just raised above the surface of some bay or strait in the Arctic Sea, 'while yet the stern and solitary night brooked no alternate sway'--all around me fixed and firm, methought, as my own substance, and near me lofty masses, that might have seemed to 'hold the moon and stars in fee,' and often in such wild play with meteoric lights, or with the quiet shine from above, which they made rebound in sparkles, or dispand in off-shoot, and splinters, and iridiscent needle shafts of keenest glitter, that it was a pride and a place of healing to lie, as in an apostle's shadow, within the eclipse and deep substance-seeming gloom of 'these dread ambassadors from earth to heaven, great hierarchs!' And though obscured, yet to think myself obscured by consubstantial forms, based in the same foundation as my own. I grieved not to serve them--yea, lovingly and with gladsomeness I abased myself in their presence: for they are my brothers, I said, and the mastery is theirs by right of older birth, and by right of the mightier strivings of the hidden fire that uplifted them above me." This poem has excited much discussion, and many individuals have expressed different opinions as to its origin. Some assert that it is borrowed from our own great poets; whilst German readers say, that it is little more than a free translation from a poem of Frederica Brun. That it is founded on Frederica Brun's poem cannot be doubted; but those who compare the two poems must at once feel, that to call Coleridge's a translation, containing as it does new thoughts, exciting different feelings, and being in fact a new birth, a glorification of the original, would be a misuse of words. I insert the following note of Coleridge's, which appears applicable to the subject: "In looking at objects of nature, while I am thinking, as at yonder moon dim-glimmering through the dewy window-pane, I seem rather to be seeking, as it were 'asking', a symbolical language for something within me that already and for ever exists, than observing any thing new. Even when that latter is the case, yet still I have always an obscure feeling, as if that new phoenomenon were the dim awaking of a forgotten or hidden truth of my inner nature.--It is still interesting as a word, a symbol! It is the [Greek: logos], the Creator! and the Evolver! What is the right, the virtuous feeling and consequent action, when a man having long meditated and perceived a certain truth finds another, a foreign writer, who has handled the same with an approximation to the truth, as he had previously conceived it? Joy! Let truth make her voice audible! While I was preparing the pen to write this remark I lost the train of thought which had led me to it. I meant to have asked something else, now forgotten for the above answers itself--it needed no new answer, I trust, in my heart." '15th April, 1805'. Coleridge, who was an honest man, was equally honest in literature; and had he thought himself indebted to any other author, he would have acknowledged the same. Born a poet, and a philosopher, by reflection, the mysterious depths of nature and the enquiry into these depths were among his chief delights. And from boyhood he had felt that it was the business of this life, to prepare for that which is to come. His schoolfellow, Lamb, also observed, that from his youth upward, "he hungered for eternity," sincerely and fervently praying to be so enlightened as to attain it. Though usually described "as doing nothing,"--"an idler," "a dreamer," and by many such epithets--he sent forth works which, though they had cost him years of thought, never brought him any suitable return. In a note written in 1825, speaking of himself, he says, "A man of letters, friendless, because of no faction: repeatedly, and in strong language inculpated of hiding his light under a bushel, yet destined to see publication after publication abused by the Edinburgh Review, as the representative of one party, and not even noticed by the Quarterly Review, as the representative of the other--and to receive as the meed of his labours for the cause of freedom against despotism and jacobinism, of the church against infidelity and schism; and of principle against fashion and sciolism, slander, loss, and embarrassment." If, however, we were to collect the epithets applied to Milton in his time, they would now appear incredible;--so when the misconceptions arising from slander shall have ceased, the name of Coleridge will be enrolled among those of our most illustrious men. The poet has said of Gay, "in wit, a 'man'; simplicity, a 'child'." But such was the extent and grasp of Coleridge's intellectual powers, that of him it may be said, "In wit, a giant; in simplicity, a very child." Though conscious of his own powers, with other men, he walked most humbly, and whatever their station or acquirements, he would talk to them as equals. He seemed but slightly connected with the things of the world, for which, save the love of those dear to him, he cared but little, living in this affection for his friends, and always feeling and acting in the spirit of that humility he has so beautifully described. "That humility which is the mother of charity," and which was in-woven in his being, revealing itself in all his intercourse throughout the day--for he looked on man as God's creature. All that he thought and taught was put forth in the same spirit and with the strongest sense of duty, so that they might learn of him with pleasure. Whatever be considered the faulty part of his own character, he freely acknowledged to others, with an admonition to avoid the like. His sensitive nature induced a too great proneness to a self-accusing spirit; yet in this was there no affected humility, though it might unfortunately dispose some to think evil of him where little or none existed, or form an excuse to others for their neglect of him. With respect to other men, however, all his feelings and judgments ever gave proof of the very reverse. The natural piety of his mind, led him most frequently to dwell on the thought of time and eternity, and was the cause of his discussions 'ending' generally with theology. During the first week of his residence at Highgate, he conversed frequently on the Trinity and on Unitarianism, and in one of these conversations, his eye being attracted by a large cowry, very handsomely spotted: "Observe," said he, "this shell, and the beauty of its exterior here pourtrayed. Reverse it and place it to your ear, you will find it empty, and a hollow murmuring sound issuing from the cavity in which the animal once resided. This shell, with all its beautiful spots, was secreted by the creature when living within it, but being plucked out, nothing remains save the hollow sound for the ear. Such is Unitarianism; it owes any beauty it may have left to the Christianity from which it separated itself. The teachers of Unitarianism have severed from 'their' Christianity its 'Life', [8] by removing the doctrine of St. John; and thus mutilated, 'they' call the residue the religion of Christ, implying the whole of the system, but omitting in their teaching the doctrine of redemption." This illustration reminds me of what took place between two men well known in the literary world, who were at a dinner party together, both dissenters,--one a Unitarian. In the evening, tea was brought on a large silver waiter. They were popular writers of the day. One of them observing the salver facetiously cried out, "See how we authors swim." "Read the inscription on it," said the kindhearted Unitarian: his friend did so, and seeing that it had been presented in token of satisfaction for his friend's labours in the "Improved Version of the New Testament," emphatically exclaimed, "Take it away! I am a Unitarian, because I am a Trinitarian; you have hitherto at least adopted a misnomer." Twenty-five years since the Unitarians were of two creeds; one class materialists, the other immaterialists, but both agreeing that Christ was only an inspired 'man'. If I am rightly informed, they are not more orthodox at the present day. When Coleridge was among the Unitarians, his deeper course of reasoning had not yet commenced. During his school education he became a Socinian; the personality of the Trinity had staggered him, and he in consequence preached for a short time at different Unitarian meetings; but in the course of examination, he found that the doctrines he had to deliver were mere moral truths, while he was "craving for a 'faith'," his heart being with Paul and John, though his head was with Spinoza. In after life, speaking of his conversion to Christianity, he often repeated--He did not believe in the Trinity, because to him at that time, the belief seemed contradictory to reason and scripture. "What care I," said he, "for Rabbi Paul, or Rabbi John, if they be opposed to moral sense." This was going a step beyond the Socinians, but this step was the means of his being reclaimed from error, for having by his course of reasoning gradually diminished "even this faith," that which remained with him was so small, that it altogether sank into unbelief; and he then felt compelled to retrace his steps from the point whence he had started. Led by further enquiries after truth, deeper meditation revealed to him the true value of the scriptures; and at the same time his philosophic views enlarging, he found that the doctrine of the Trinity was not contrary to reason--to reason in its highest sense; and he then discovered how far he had misbelieved, or had been, as he stated, puffed up by Socinian views. On quitting Shrewsbury and returning to Bristol, he seceded from the Unitarians, and observed, that if they had attempted to play the same tricks with a neighbour's will, which they had done with the New Testament, they would deserve to be put in the pillory. He continued attached to the writings of St. John and St. Paul, for thirty-four years of his life, [9] and having grown in strength with increase of years, he died in the faith of these apostles. And yet but lately did it appear in print, that "he was ever shifting his opinions." When at Cambridge, his acquaintance with Mr. Frend led him to study the philosophy of Hartley, and he became one of his disciples. Perhaps the love of Coleridge for his college, "the ever honoured Jesus," might have had some share in the cause of his early predilection in favour of Hartley. He too was the son of a clergyman, was admitted to Jesus at the age of fifteen, and became a fellow in 1705. According to the account given of him by his biographer, Coleridge in several respects seems to have resembled him. All his early studies were intended to fit him for the church, but scruples arose in his mind, because he could not conscientiously subscribe to the thirty-nine articles: he therefore gave up all thoughts of the clerical profession, and entered the medical, for which, as Coleridge himself states, he also had had the most ardent desire. Hartley, when he had taken his degree, practised physic; and his knowledge, his general acquirements, his sensibility, and his benevolence, made him an ornament to the profession. In this profession too, Coleridge, had circumstances allowed him to enter it, must have been pre-eminent. Hartley, like Coleridge, was formed for sympathy and all the charities of life--his countenance was benign--his manners were gentle--and his eloquence pathetic and commanding. He first practised at Newark, and afterwards removed to Bury St. Edmonds, where he ended his career, dying in 1757, at the age of fifty-two. He was much afflicted with stone, and was in part the means of procuring from the government five thousand pounds for Mrs. Stevens, as a reward for the secret of preparing the solvent, sold and advertised in her name. In 1740, he published the work on which his fame rests, under the title of 'Observations on Man, his frame, his duty, and his expectations.' In it he expounded his doctrine of vibrations, and attempted by reasoning to explain the origin and propagation of sensation, built on gratuitous assumption of certain vibrations of the brain and nerves, coupled by association. Coleridge on his visit to Germany, soon made himself master of this subject. In his Biographia Literaria, he devotes a chapter to the examination of the work, and having seen the hollowness of the argument, abandoned it. While in Germany, Coleridge also studied Des Cartes, and saw the source of Locke's Theory, from which he entirely differed. He next turned his attention to Spinoza, but with a mind so logically formed, and so energetic in the search after truth, it was impossible for him to dwell long on a philosophy thus constructed--and Coleridge was still left to yearn for a resting place on which to base his faith. After he had successively studied in the schools of Locke, Berkeley, Leibnitz, and Hartley, and could find in one of them an abiding place for his reason; "I began," says he, "to ask myself, Is a system of philosophy, as differing from mere history and classification, possible? If possible, what are its necessary conditions? I was for a while disposed to answer the first question in the negative, and to admit that the sole practicable employment for the human mind was to observe, to recollect, and to classify. Christianity however is not a theory, or a speculation, but a life--not a philosophy of life, but a life and a living process." [10] Spinoza being one of the writers which Coleridge, in his passage from Socinianism to Christianity, had studied, the reader will probably be interested with the following note, written by himself on the subject: "Paradoxical, as it assuredly is, I am convinced that Spinoza's innocence and virtue, guarded and matured into invincible habit of being, by a life of constant meditation and of intellectual pursuit, were the conditions or temptations, 'sine quibus non' of his forming and maintaining a system subversive of all virtue. He saw so clearly the 'folly' and 'absurdity' of wickedness, and felt so weakly and languidly the passions tempting to it, that he concluded, that nothing was wanting to a course of well-doing, but clear conceptions and the 'fortitudo intellectualis'; while his very modesty, a prominent feature in his character, rendered him, as it did Hartley, less averse to the system of necessity. Add to these causes his profound admiration of pure mathematics, and the vast progress made in it so unspeakably beneficial to mankind, their bodies as well as souls, and souls as well as bodies; the reflection that the essence of mathematical science consists in discovering the absolute properties of forms and proportions, and how pernicious a bewilderment was produced in this 'sublime' science by the wild attempt of the Platonists, especially the later (though Plato himself is far from blameless in this respect,) to explain the 'final' cause of mathematical 'figures' and of numbers, so as to subordinate them to a principle of origination out of themselves; and the further comparison of the progress of this SCIENCE, ('pura Mathesis') which excludes all consideration of final cause, with the unequal and equivocal progress of those branches of literature which rest on, or refer to final causes; and that the uncertainty and mixture with error, appeared in proportion to such reference--and if I mistake not, we shall have the most important parts of the history of Spinoza's mind. It is a duty which we owe to truth, to distinguish Spinoza from the Voltaires, Humes, and the whole nest of 'popular' infidels, to make manifest how precious a thing is the sincere thirst of truth for the sake of truth undebased by vanity, appetite, and the ambition of forming a sect of 'arguescents' and trumpeters--and that it is capable, to a wonderful degree, of rendering innoxious the poisonous pangs of the worst errors--nay, heaven educing good out of the very evil--the important advantages that have been derived from such men. Wise and good men would never have seen the true basis and bulwark of the right cause, if they had not been made to know and understand the whole weight and possible force of the wrong cause; nor would have even purified their own system from these admissions, on which the whole of Spinozism is built, and which admissions were common to all parties, and therefore fairly belonging to Spinoza.--Now I affirm that none but an eminently pure and benevolent mind could have constructed and perfected such a system as that of the ethics of Spinoza. Bad hearted men always 'hate' the religion and morality which they attack--but hatred dims and 'inturbidates' the logical faculties. There is likewise a sort of lurking terror in such a heart, which renders it far too painful to keep a steady gaze on the being of God and the existence of immortality--they dare only attack it as Tartars, a hot valiant inroad, and then they scour off again. Equally painful is self-examination, for if the wretch be 'callous', the 'facts' of psychology will not present themselves--if not, who could go on year after year in a perpetual process of deliberate self-torture and shame. The very torment of the process would furnish facts subversive of the system, for which the process was instituted. The mind would at length be unable to disguise from itself the unequivocal 'fact' of its own shame and remorse, and this once felt and distinctly acknowledged, Spinozism is blown up as by a mine." Coleridge had a great abhorrence of vice, and Spinoza having, in his writings, strongly marked its debasing effects, he was from sympathy on these points led to study his philosophy: but when on further research, he discovered that his ethics led to Pantheism and ended in the denial of the Deity--he abandoned these views, and gave up the study of Spinoza. Perhaps the contemplation of such writers led him to compose the following lines: But some there are who deem themselves most free, When they within this gross and visible sphere Chain down the winged thought, scoffing ascent, Proud in their meanness: and themselves they cheat With noisy emptiness of learned phrase, Their subtle fluids, impacts, essences, Self-working tools, uncaused effects, and all Those blind Omniscients, those Almighty slaves, Untenanting creation of its GOD. SIBYLLINE LEAVES--('Destiny of Nations'.) The errors of this writer, however, as before observed, produced this great advantage; he recommenced his studies with greater care and increased ardour, and in the Gospel of St. John, discovered the truth--the truth, as Wordsworth powerfully sings, "That flashed upon that inward eye, Which is the bliss of solitude." Having now discovered in the Scriptures this truth, to him at that time new and important, he pursued his philosophical researches--continually finding what he sought for in the one, borne out and elucidated by the other. After he had corrected the proof sheets of the 'Christabel', the 'Sibylline Leaves', and the 'Biographia Literaria'; they were brought to London, and published by Rest Fenner, Paternoster Row. [11] One of those periodical distresses, which usually visit this country about once in nine years, took place about this time, 1816,--and he was in consequence requested by his publisher to write on the subject. He therefore composed two Lay Sermons, addressed to the higher and to the middle classes of society, and had the intention of addressing a third to the lower classes. The first sermon he named "the Statesman's Manual, or the Bible the best guide to political skill and foresight." The pamphlet was as might have been expected, "cut up." He was an unpopular writer on an unpopular subject. Time was, when reviews directed the taste of the reading public, now, on the contrary, they judge it expedient to follow it. But it may be well to place before the reader the expression of Coleridge's own feelings, written after these several attacks, it may also serve to show the persecution to which he was liable: "I published a work a large portion of which was professedly metaphysical. (First Lay Sermon.) [12] A delay," said he, "occurred between its first annunciation and its appearance; and it was reviewed by anticipation with a malignity, so avowedly and so exclusively personal, as is, I believe, unprecedented even in the present contempt of all common humanity that disgraces and endangers the liberty of the press. 'After' its appearance the author of this lampoon was chosen to review it in the Edinburgh Review: and under the single condition, that he should have written what he himself really thought, and have criticised the work as he would have done had its author been indifferent to him, I should have chosen that man myself, both from the vigour and the originality of his mind, and from his particular acuteness in speculative reasoning, before all others. But I can truly say, that the grief with which I read this rhapsody of predetermined insult, had the rhapsodist himself for its whole and sole object: and that the indignant contempt which it excited in me was as exclusively confined to his employer and suborner. I refer to this Review at present, in consequence of information having been given me, that the innuendo of my 'potential infidelity,' grounded on one passage of my first Lay Sermon, has been received and propagated with a degree of credence, of which I can safely acquit the originator of the calumny. I give the sentences as they stand in the Sermon, premising only that I was speaking exclusively of miracles worked for the outward senses of men. It was only to overthrow the usurpation exercised in and through the senses, that the senses were miraculously appealed to. REASON AND RELIGION ARE THEIR OWN EVIDENCE. The natural sun is in this respect a symbol of the spiritual: Ere he is fully arisen, and while his glories are still under veil, he calls up the breeze to chase away the usurping vapours of the night season, and thus converts the air itself into the minister of its own purification: not surely in proof or elucidation of the light from heaven, but to prevent its interception. Wherever, therefore, similar circumstances coexist with the same moral causes, the principles revealed, and the examples recorded, in the inspired writings, render miracles superfluous: and if we neglect to apply truths in the expectation of wonders, or under pretext of the cessation of the latter, we tempt God and merit the same reply which our Lord gave to the Pharisees on a like occasion.' In the sermon and the notes both the historical truth and the necessity of the miracles are strongly and frequently asserted. 'The testimony of books of history (namely, relatively to the signs and wonders with which Christ came,) is one of the strong and stately 'pillars' of the church; but it is not the 'foundation'.' Instead, therefore, of defending myself, which I could easily effect by a series of passages, expressing the same opinion, from the fathers and the most eminent protestant divines, from the Reformation to the Revolution, I shall merely state what my belief is, concerning the true evidences of Christianity. 1st. Its consistency with right reason, I consider as the outer court of the temple, the common area within which it stands. 2ndly. The miracles, with and through which the religion was first revealed and attested, I regard as the steps, the vestibule, the portal of the temple. 3rdly. The sense, the inward feeling, in the soul of each believer, of its exceeding 'desirableness'--the experience, that he 'needs' something, joined with the strong foretokening, that the redemption and the graces propounded to us in Christ are 'what' he needs--this I hold to be the true foundation of the spiritual edifice. With the strong 'a priori' probability that flows in from 1 and 3, on the correspondent historical evidence of 2, no man can refuse or neglect to make the experiment without guilt. But, 4thly, it is the experience derived from a practical conformity to the conditions of the gospel--it is the opening eye; the dawning light; the terrors and the promises of spiritual growth; the blessedness of loving God as God, the nascent sense of sin hated as sin, and of the incapability of attaining to either without Christ; it is the sorrow that still rises up from beneath, and the consolation that meets it from above; the bosom treacheries of the principal in the warfare, and the exceeding faithfulness and long-suffering of the uninterested ally;--in a word, it is the actual _trial_ of the faith in Christ, with its accompaniments and results, that must form the arched roof, and the faith itself is the completing keystone. In order to an efficient belief in Christianity, a man must have been a Christian, and this is the seeming argumentum in circulo, incident to all spiritual truths, to every subject not presentable under the forms of time and space, as long as we attempt to master by the reflex acts of the understanding, what we can only 'know' by the act of 'becoming'. 'Do the will of my Father, and ye shall know whether I am of God.' These four evidences I believe to have been, and still to be, for the world, for the whole church, all necessary, all equally necessary; but that at present, and for the majority of Christians born in Christian countries, I believe the third and the fourth evidences to be the most operative, not as superseding, but as involving a glad undoubting faith in the two former. Credidi, ideóque intellexi, appears to me the dictate equally of philosophy and religion, even as I believe redemption to be the antecedent of sanctification, and not its consequent. All spiritual predicates may be construed indifferently as modes of action, or as states of being. Thus holiness and blessedness are the same idea, now seen in relation to act, and now to existence." Biog. Liter. Vol. ii. p. 303. His next publication was the 'Zapolya', which had a rapid sale, and he then began a second edition of the 'Friend'--if, indeed, as he observes, "a work, the greatest part of which is new in substance, and the whole in form and arrangement, can be described as an edition of the former." At the end of the autumn of 1817, Coleridge issued the following prospectus, and hoped by delivering the proposed lectures to increase his utility; they required efforts indeed which he considered it a duty to make, notwithstanding his great bodily infirmities, and the heartfelt sorrow by which he had, from early life, been more or less oppressed:-- "There are few families, at present, in the higher and middle classes of English society, in which literary topics and the productions of the Fine Arts, in some one or other of their various forms, do not occasionally take their turn in contributing to the entertainment of the social board, and the amusement of the circle at the fire-side. The acquisitions and attainments of the intellect ought, indeed, to hold a very inferior rank in our estimation, opposed to moral worth, or even to professional and specific skill, prudence, and industry. But why should they be opposed, when they may be made subservient merely by being subordinated? It can rarely happen that a man of social disposition; altogether a stranger to subjects of taste (almost the only ones on which persons of both sexes can converse with a common interest), should pass through the world without at times feeling dissatisfied with himself. The best proof of this is to be found in the marked anxiety which men, who have succeeded in life without the aid of these accomplishments, shew in securing them to their children. A young man of ingenuous mind will not wilfully deprive himself of any species of respect. He will wish to feel himself on a level with the average of the society in which he lives, though he may be ambitious of 'distinguishing' himself only in his own immediate pursuit or occupation. Under this conviction, the following Course of Lectures was planned. The several titles will best explain the particular subjects and purposes of each; but the main objects proposed, as the result of all, are the two following: I. To convey, in a form best fitted to render them impressive at the time, and remembered afterwards, rules and principles of sound judgment, with a kind and degree of connected information, such as the hearers, generally speaking, cannot be supposed likely to form, collect, and arrange for themselves, by their own unassisted studies. It might be presumption to say, that any important part of these Lectures could not be derived from books; but none, I trust, in supposing, that the same information could not be so surely or conveniently acquired from such books as are of commonest occurrence, or with that quantity of time and attention which can be reasonably expected, or even wisely desired, of men engaged in business and the active duties of the world. II. Under a strong persuasion that little of real value is derived by persons in general from a wide and various reading; but still more deeply convinced as to the actual 'mischief' of unconnected and promiscuous reading, and that it is sure, in a greater or less degree, to enervate even where it does not likewise inflate; I hope to satisfy many an ingenuous mind, seriously interested in its own development and cultivation, how moderate a number of volumes, if only they be judiciously chosen, will suffice for the attainment of every wise and desirable purpose: that is, 'in addition' to those which he studies for specific and professional purposes. It is saying less than the truth to affirm, that an excellent book (and the remark holds almost equally good of a Raphael as of a Milton) is like a well-chosen and well-tended fruit-tree. Its fruits are not of one season only. With the due and natural intervals, we may recur to it year after year, and it will supply the same nourishment and the same gratification, if only we ourselves return with the same healthful appetite. The subjects of the Lectures are indeed very 'different', but not (in the strict sense of the term) 'diverse': they are 'various', rather than 'miscellaneous'. There is this bond of connexion common to them all,--that the mental pleasure which they are calculated to excite is not dependant on accidents of fashion, place or age, or the events or the customs of the day; but commensurate with the good sense, taste, and feeling, to the cultivation of which they themselves so largely contribute, as being all in 'kind', though not all in the same 'degree', productions of GENIUS. What it would be arrogant to promise, I may yet be permitted to hope,--that the execution will prove correspondent and adequate to the plan. Assuredly my best efforts have not been wanting so to select and prepare the materials, that, at the conclusion of the Lectures, an attentive auditor, who should consent to aid his future recollection by a few notes taken either during each Lecture or soon after, would rarely feel himself, for the time to come, excluded from taking an intelligent interest in any general conversation likely to occur in mixed society. S.T. COLERIDGE." SYLLABUS OF THE COURSE. LECTURE I. 'Tuesday Evening, January' 27, 1818.--On the manners, morals, literature, philosophy, religion, and the state of society in general, in European Christendom, from the eighth to the fifteenth century (that is, from A.D. 700 to A.D. 1400), more particularly in reference to England, France, Italy, and Germany: in other words, a portrait of the (so called) dark ages of Europe. II. On the tales and metrical romances common, for the most part, to England, Germany, and the North of France; and on the English songs and ballads; continued to the reign of Charles the First.--A few selections will be made from the Swedish, Danish, and German languages, translated for the purpose by the Lecturer. III. Chaucer and Spenser; of Petrarch; of Ariosto, Pulci, and Boiardo. IV. V. and VI. On the Dramatic Works of SHAKSPEARE. In these Lectures will be comprised the substance of Mr. Coleridge's former Courses on the same subject, enlarged and varied by subsequent study and reflection. VII. On Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Massinger; with the probable causes of the cessation of Dramatic 'Poetry' in England with Shirley and Otway, soon after the Restoration of Charles the Second. VIII. Of the Life and 'all' the Works of CERVANTES, but chiefly of his Don Quixote. The Ridicule of Knight-Errantry shewn to have been but a secondary object in the mind of the Author, and not the principal Cause of the Delight which the Work continues to give in all Nations, and under all the Revolutions of Manners and Opinions. IX. On Rabelais, Swift, and Sterne: on the Nature and Constituents of genuine Humour, and on the Distinctions of the Humorous from the Witty, the Fanciful, the Droll, the Odd, &c. X. Of Donne, Dante, and Milton. XI. On the Arabian Nights Entertainments, and on the 'romantic' use of the supernatural in Poetry, and in works of fiction not poetical. On the conditions and regulations under which such Books may be employed advantageously in the earlier Periods of Education. XII. On tales of witches, apparitions, &c. as distinguished from the magic and magicians of asiatic origin. The probable sources of the former, and of the belief in them in certain ages and classes of men. Criteria by which mistaken and exaggerated facts may be distinguished from absolute falsehood and imposture. Lastly, the causes of the terror and interest which stories of ghosts and witches inspire, in early life at least, whether believed or not. XIII. On colour, sound, and form, in nature, as connected with POESY: the word, 'Poesy' used as the 'generic' or class term, including poetry, music, painting, statuary, and ideal architecture, as its species. The reciprocal relations of poetry and philosophy to each other; and of both to religion, and the moral sense. XIV. On the corruptions of the English language since the reign of Queen Anne, in our style of writing prose. A few easy rules for the attainment of a manly, unaffected, and pure language, in our genuine mother-tongue, whether for the purposes of writing, oratory, or conversation. Concluding Address." These lectures, from his own account, were the most profitable of any he had before given, though delivered in an unfavorable situation; but being near the Temple, many of the students were his auditors. It was the first time I had ever heard him in public. He lectured from notes, which he had carefully made; yet it was obvious, that his audience was more delighted when, putting his notes aside, he spoke extempore;--many of these notes were preserved, and have lately been printed in the Literary Remains. In his lectures he was brilliant, fluent, and rapid; his words seemed to flow as from a person repeating with grace and energy some delightful poem. If, however, he sometimes paused, it was not for the want of words, but that he was seeking the most appropriate, or their most logical arrangement. The attempts to copy his lectures verbatim have failed, they are but comments. Scarcely in anything could he be said to be a mannerist, his mode of lecturing was his own. Coleridge's eloquence, when he gave utterance to his rich thoughts, flowing like some great river, which winds its way majestically at its own "sweet will," though occasionally slightly impeded by a dam formed from its crumbling banks, but over which the accumulated waters pass onward with increased force, so arrested his listeners, as at times to make them feel almost breathless. Such seemed the movement of Coleridge's words in lecture or in earnest discourse, and his countenance retained the same charms of benignity, gentleness, and intelligence, though this expression varied with the thoughts he uttered, and was much modified by his sensitive nature. His quotations from the poets, of high character, were most feelingly and most luminously given, as by one inspired with the subject. In my early intimacy with this great man, I was especially struck with the store of knowledge he possessed, and on which I ever found one might safely rely. I begged him to inform me by what means the human mind could retain so much, to which he always gave the following answer: "The memory is of two kinds," (a division I have ever found useful), "the one kind I designate the passive memory, the other the creative, with the first I retain the names of 'things', 'figures', and 'numbers', &c. and this in myself I believe to be very defective. With the other I recall facts, and theories, &c. by means of their law or their principle, and in tracing these, the images or facts present themselves to me." Coleridge, as a motto to the first essay in 'The Friend', quotes the following observation from the life of Petrarch: "Believe me," says this writer, "it requires no little confidence to promise help to the struggling, counsel to the doubtful, light to the blind, hope to the desponding, refreshment to the weary; these are great things if they are accomplished, trifles if they exist but in promise. I, however, aim not so much to prescribe a law for others, as to set forth the law of my own mind." At this Coleridge always aimed, and continuing the quotation from Petrarch, "Let the man who shall approve of it, abide, and let him to whom it shall appear not reasonable, reject it. 'Tis my earnest wish, I confess, to employ my understanding and acquirements in that mode and direction in which I may be able to benefit the largest number possible of my fellow-creatures." Such was Coleridge's wish, and with this view, and with this end, he constantly employed his time. His mind was occupied with serious thoughts--thoughts connected with the deep truths he was endeavouring to inculcate. His heart was from his early youth full of sympathy and love, and so remained till his latest hour. To his friend, when in trouble or sorrow, this sympathy and solace were freely given; and when he received, or thought he received, a benefit, or a kindness, his heart overflowed with gratitude--even slight services were sometimes over-valued by him. I have selected the following from among many letters written at different periods, as characteristic of the man, and evincing those religious, grateful, and affectionate feelings which are so strongly marked in all he has ever written, for, from his youth upward, he was wedded to the lovely and the beautiful. In his letters, these feelings were occasionally expressed with much liveliness, terseness, and originality. In doing this, I believe, I must anticipate some of the incidents of his life; the first letter written was addressed to a friend, who was in great anguish of mind from the sudden death of his mother, and was written thirty years before his decease: "Your letter, my friend, struck me with a mighty horror. It rushed upon me and stupified my feelings. You bid me write you a religious letter; I am not a man who would attempt to insult the greatness of your anguish by any other consolation. Heaven knows that in the easiest fortunes there is much dissatisfaction and weariness of spirit; much that calls for the exercise of patience and resignation; but in storms, like these, that shake the dwelling and make the heart tremble, there is no middle way between despair and the yielding up of the whole spirit unto the guidance of faith. And surely it is a matter of joy, that your faith in Jesus has been preserved; the Comforter that should relieve you is not far from you. But as you are a Christian, in the name of that Saviour, who was filled with bitterness and made drunken with wormwood, I conjure you to have recourse in frequent prayer to 'his God and your God,' [13] the God of mercies, and father of all comfort. Your poor father is, I hope, almost senseless of the calamity; the unconscious instrument of Divine Providence knows it not, and your mother is in heaven. It is sweet to be roused from a frightful dream by the song of birds, and the gladsome rays of the morning. Ah, how infinitely more sweet to be awakened from the blackness and amazement of a sudden horror, by the glories of God manifest, and the hallelujahs of angels. As to what regards yourself, I approve altogether of your abandoning what you justly call vanities. I look upon you as a man, called by sorrow and anguish and a strange desolation of hopes into quietness, and a soul set apart and made peculiar to God; we cannot arrive at any portion of heavenly bliss without in some measure imitating Christ. And they arrive at the largest inheritance who imitate the most difficult parts of his character, and bowed down and crushed under foot, cry in fulness of faith, 'Father, thy will be done.' I wish above measure to have you for a little while here--no visitants shall blow on the nakedness of your feelings--you shall be quiet, and your spirit may be healed. I see no possible objection, unless your father's helplessness prevent you, and unless you are necessary to him. If this be not the case, I charge you write me that you will come. I charge you, my dearest friend, not to dare to encourage gloom or despair--you are a temporary sharer in human miseries, that you may be an eternal partaker of the Divine nature. I charge you, if by any means it be possible, come to me. I remain, your affectionate, S.T. COLERIDGE." "MY DEAR SIR, Accept my thanks for your kind remembrance of me, and for the proof of it in the present of your tribute of friendship, I have read it with uninterrupted interest, and with satisfaction scarcely less continuous. In adding the three last words, I am taking the word satisfaction in its strictest sense: for had I written pleasure, there would have been no ground for the limitation. Indeed as it was, it is a being scrupulous over much. For at the two only passages at which I made a moment's 'halt' (viz. p. 3, [14], and p. 53, last line but five,) she had seldom--oppressive awe, my not 'objection' but 'stoppage' at the latter amounted only to a doubt, a 'quære', whether the trait of character here given should not have been followed by some little comment, as for instance, that such a state of feeling, though not desirable in a regenerate person, in whom belief had wrought love, and love obedience, must yet be ranked amongst those constitutional differences that may exist between the best and wisest Christians, without any corresponding difference in their spiritual progress. One saint fixes his eyes on the 'palm', another saint thinks of the previous 'conflict', and closes them in prayer. Both are waters of the same fountain--'this' the basin, 'that' the salient column, both equally dear to God, and both may be used as examples for men, the one to invite the thoughtless sceptic, the other to alarm the reckless believer. You will see, therefore, that I do not object to the sentence itself; but as a matter of 'feeling', it met me too singly and suddenly. I had not anticipated such a trait, and the surprise counterfeited the sensation of perplexity for a moment or two. On as little objection to any thing you have said, did the 'desiderium' the sense of not being quite satisfied, proceed in regard to the 44. p. 3. In the particular instance in the application of the sentiment, I found nothing to question or qualify. It was the rule or principle which a certain class of your readers might be inclined to deduce from it, it was the possible generalization of the particular instance that made me pause. I am jealous of the disposition to turn Christianity or Religion into a particular 'business' or line. 'Well, Miss, how does your pencil go on, I was delighted with your last landscape.' 'Oh, sir, I have quite given 'up' that, I have got into the religious line.' Now, my dear sir, the rule which I have deduced from the writings of St. Paul and St. John, and (permit me also to add) of Luther, would be this. Form and endeavour to strengthen into an habitual and instinct-like feeling, the sense of the utter incompatibility of Christianity with every thing wrong or unseemly, with whatever betrays or fosters the mind of flesh, the predominence of the 'animal' within us, by having habitually present to the mind, the full and lively conviction of its perfect compatibility with whatever is innocent of its harmony, with whatever contra-distinguishes the HUMAN from the animal; of its sympathy and coalescence with the cultivation of the faculties, affections, and fruitions, which God hath made 'peculiar' to 'man', either wholly or in their ordained 'combination' with what is peculiar to humanity, the blurred, but not obliterated signatures of our original title deed, (and God said, man will we make in our own image.) What?--shall Christianity exclude or alienate us from those powers, acquisitions, and attainments, which Christianity is so pre-eminently calculated to elevate and enliven and sanctify? Far, very far, am I from suspecting in you, my dear sir, any participation in these prejudices of a shrivelled proselyting and censorious religionist. But a numerous and stirring faction there is, in the so called Religious Public, whose actual and actuating principles, with whatever vehemence they may disclaim it in words, is, that redemption is a something not yet effected--that there is neither sense nor force in our baptism--and that instead of the Apostolic command, 'Rejoice, and again I say unto you, rejoice'; baptized Christians are to be put on sackcloth and ashes, and try, by torturing themselves and others, to procure a rescue from the devil. Again, let me thank you for your remembrance of me, and believe me from the hour we first met at Bristol, with esteem and regard, Your sincere friend, S. T. COLERIDGE." Ramsgate, 28th Oct. 1822. DEAR FRIEND, Words I know are not wanted between you and me. But there are occasions so awful, there may be instances and manifestations of friendship so affecting, and drawing up with them so long a train from behind, so many folds of recollection as they come onward on one's mind, that it seems but a mere act of justice to oneself, a debt we owe to the dignity of our moral nature to give them some record; a relief which the spirit of man asks and demands to contemplate in some outward symbol, what it is inwardly solemnizing. I am still too much under the cloud of past misgivings, too much of the stun and stupor from the recent peals and thunder-crush still remains, to permit me to anticipate others than by wishes and prayers. What the effect of your unwearied kindness may be on poor M.'s mind and conduct, I pray fervently, and I feel a cheerful trust that I do not pray in vain, that on my own mind and spring of action, it will be proved not to have been wasted. I do inwardly believe, that I shall yet do something to thank you, my dear--in the way in which you would wish to be thanked--by doing myself honour.--Dear friend and brother of my soul, God only knows how truly, and in the depth, you are loved and prized by your affectionate friend, S. T. COLERIDGE." During the first lecture of the course in 1817, a young man of modest demeanor sent him a letter, and afterwards introduced himself, stating ti that he was a student in literature, and from his conversation, he struck Coleridge as one much more attached to the better part of our nature than to the love of gain. An intimacy consequently took place, and Coleridge addressed many letters to him, from which will be selected such as are critical or autobiographical. Fortunately they have been preserved, and are too valuable not to form a part of this volume. The following is an answer to the first letter Coleridge received from him: "Wednesday Morning, Jan. 28th, 1818. DEAR SIR, Your friendly letter was first delivered to me at the lecture-room door on yesterday evening, ten minutes before the lecture, and my spirits were so sadly depressed by the circumstance of my hoarseness, that I was literally incapable of reading it. I now express my acknowledgments, and with them the regret that I had not received the letter in time to have availed myself of it. When I was young I used to laugh at flattery, as, on account of its absurdity, I now abhor it, from my repeated observations of its mischievous effects. Amongst these, not the least is, that it renders honourable natures more slow and reluctant in expressing their real feelings in praise of the deserving, than, for the interests of truth and virtue, might be desired. For the weakness of our moral and intellectual being, of which the comparatively strongest are often the most, and the most painfully, conscious, needs the confirmation derived from the coincidence and sympathy of the friend, as much as the voice of honour within us denounces the pretences of the flatterer. Be assured, then, that I write as I think, when I tell you that, from the style and thoughts of your letter, I should have drawn a very different conclusion from that which you appear to have done, concerning both your talents and the cultivation which they have received. Both the matter and manner are manly, simple, and correct. Had I the time in my own power, compatibly with the performance of duties of immediate urgency, I would endeavour to give you, by letter, the most satisfactory answer to your questions that my reflections and the experience of my own fortunes could supply. But, at all events, I will not omit to avail myself of your judicious suggestion in my last lecture, in which it will form a consistent part of the subject and purpose of the discourse. Meantime, believe me, with great respect, Your obliged fellow-student of the true and the beseeming S. T. COLERIDGE." "Sept. 20th, 1818. DEAR SIR, Those who have hitherto chosen to take notice of me, as known to them only by my public character, have for the greater part taken out, not, indeed, a poetical, but a critical, license to make game of me, instead of sending game to me. Thank heaven! I am in this respect more tough than tender. But, to be serious, I heartily thank you for your polite remembrance; and, though my feeble health and valetudinarian stomach force me to attach no little value to the present itself, I feel still more obliged by the kindness that prompted it. I trust that you will not come within the purlieus of Highgate without giving me the opportunity of assuring you personally that I am, with sincere respect, Your obliged, S. T. COLERIDGE." Following the chronological order I proposed, I am led to speak again of Lamb, who having at this time collected many little poems and essays, scattered in different publications, he reprinted and published them in two small volumes, which he dedicated to Coleridge; and those of my readers who have not seen this work will, doubtless, find it interesting. The simplicity of this dedication, and above all the biographical portion of it, seem to render it appropriate to this work, and it is therefore subjoined. TO S. T. COLERIDGE, Esq. MY DEAR COLERIDGE, You will smile to see the slender labors of your friend designated by the title of 'Works'; but such was the wish of the gentlemen who have kindly undertaken the trouble of collecting them, and from their judgment could be no appeal. It would be a kind of disloyalty to offer to any one but yourself, a volume containing the 'early pieces' which were first published among your poems, and were fairly derivatives from you and them. My friend Lloyd and myself came into our first battle (authorship is a sort of warfare) under cover of the greater Ajax. How this association, which shall always be a dear and proud recollection to me, came to be broken;--who snapped the three-fold cord,--whether yourself (but I know that was not the case,) grew ashamed of your former companions,--or whether (which is by much the more probable) some ungracious bookseller was author of the separation, I cannot tell;--but wanting the support of your friendly elm, (I speak for myself,) my vine has, since that time, put forth few or no fruits; the sap (if ever it had any) has become in a manner dried up and extinct: and you will find your old associate in his second volume, dwindled into prose and criticism. Am I right in assuming this as the cause? or is it that, as years come upon us, (except with some more healthy-happy spirits,) life itself loses much of its poetry for us? we transcribe but what we read in the great volume of Nature: and, as the characters grow dim, we turn of and look another way. You, yourself, write no Christabels, nor Ancient Marriners, now. Some of the Sonnets, which shall be carelessly turned over by the general reader, may happily awaken in you remembrances, which I should be sorry should be ever totally extinct--the memory Of summer days and of delightful years. Even so far back as to those old suppers at our old----Inn, when life was fresh, and topics exhaustless,--and you first kindled in me, if not the power, yet the love of poetry, and beauty and kindliness, What words have I heard Spoke at the Mermaid? The world has given you many a shrewd nip and gird since that time, but either my eyes are grown dimmer, or my old friend is the same, who stood before me three-and-twenty years ago--his hair a little confessing the hand of time, but still shrouding the same capacious brain,--his heart not altered, scarcely where it "alteration finds." One piece, Coleridge, I have ventured to publish in its original form, though I have heard you complain of a certain over-imitation of the antique in the style. If I could see any way of getting rid of the objection, without re-writing it entirely, I would make some sacrifices. But when I wrote John Woodville, I never proposed to myself any distinct deviation from common English. I had been newly initiated in the writings of our elder dramatists; Beaumont, and Fletcher, and Massinger, were then a 'first love'; and from what I was so freshly conversant in, what wonder if my language imperceptibly took a tinge? The very 'time', which I had chosen for my story, that which immediately followed the Restoration, seemed to require in an English play, that the English should be of rather an older cast, than that of the precise year in which it happened to be written. I wish it had not some faults which I can less vindicate than the language. I remain, my dear Coleridge, Yours, with unabated esteem, C. LAMB. In Feb. 1819, application was made to Mr. Coleridge to give a course of lectures at the Russell Institution, to which he sent the following reply, addressed to Mr. Britton: Highgate, 28th Feb., 1819. DEAR SIR, First permit me to remove a very natural, indeed almost inevitable, mistake, relative to my lectures; namely, that I 'have' them, or that the lectures of one place or season are in any way repeated in another. So far from it, that on any point that I had ever studied (and on no other should I dare discourse--I mean, that I would not lecture on any subject for which I had to 'acquire' the main knowledge, even though a month's or three months' previous time were allowed me; on no subject that had not employed my thoughts for a large portion of my life since earliest manhood, free of all outward and particular purpose)--on any point within my habit of thought, I should greatly prefer a subject I had never lectured on, to one which I had repeatedly given; and those who have attended me for any two seasons successively will bear witness, that the lecture given at the London Philosophical Society, on the 'Romeo and Juliet', for instance, was as different from that given at the Crown and Anchor, as if they had been by two individuals who, without any communication with each other, had only mastered the same principles of philosophical criticism. This was most strikingly evidenced in the coincidence between my lectures and those of Schlegel; such, and so close, that it was fortunate for my moral reputation that I had not only from five to seven hundred ear witnesses that the passages had been given by me at the Royal Institution two years before Schlegel commenced his lectures at Vienna, but that notes had been taken of these by several men and ladies of high rank. The fact is this; during a course of lectures, I faithfully employ all the intervening days in collecting and digesting the materials, whether I have or have not lectured on the same subject before, making no difference. The day of the lecture, till the hour of commencement, I devote to the consideration, what of the mass before me is best fitted to answer the purposes of a lecture, that is, to keep the audience awake and interested during the delivery, and to leave a sting behind, that is, a disposition to study the subject anew, under the light of a new principle. Several times, however, partly from apprehension respecting my health and animal spirits, partly from the wish to possess copies that might afterwards be marketable among the publishers, I have previously written the lecture; but before I had proceeded twenty minutes, I have been obliged to push the MS. away, and give the subject a new turn. Nay, this was so notorious, that many of my auditors used to threaten me, when they saw any number of written papers on my desk, to steal them away; declaring they never felt so secure of a good lecture as when they perceived that I had not a single scrap of writing before me. I take far, far more pains than would go to the set composition of a lecture, both by varied reading and by meditation; but for the words, illustrations, &c., I know almost as little as any one of the audience (that is, those of anything like the same education with myself) what they will be five minutes before the lecture begins. Such is my way, for such is my nature; and in attempting any other, I should only torment myself in order to disappoint my auditors--torment myself during the delivery, I mean; for in all other respects it would be a much shorter and easier task to deliver them from writing. I am anxious to preclude any semblance of affectation; and have therefore troubled you with this lengthy preface before I have the hardihood to assure you, that you might as well ask me what my dreams were in the year 1814, as what my course of lectures was at the Surrey Institution. 'Fuimus Troes'." The following anecdote will convey to my readers a more accurate notion of Coleridge's powers, when called upon to lecture, even without previous notice. Early one morning he received two letters, which he sent me to read; one to inform him that he was 'expected' that same evening to deliver a lecture at the rooms of the London Philosophical Society, where it was supposed that four or five hundred persons would be present: the other contained a list of the gentlemen who had already given a lecture in the course; to which was added, the subject on which each had addressed the audience. I well knew that Coleridge, not expecting this sudden appeal, would be agitated, as he was always excited before delivering a lecture, and that this would probably bring on a return of his inward suffering. After consulting together, we determined to go to town at seven o'clock in the evening, to make some enquiries respecting this unexpected application, and arrived at the house of the gentleman who had written the letter. His servant informed us that he was not at home, but would return at eight o'clock, the hour fixed for the commencement of the lecture. We then proceeded to the society's room, which we found empty. It was a long one, partitioned off by a pole, the ends of which were fastened to the side-walls, and from this pole was nailed a length of baize which reached the floor, and in the centre was fixed a square piece of board to form a desk. We passed under this baize curtain to observe the other arrangements, from whence we could easily discern the audience as they entered. When we looked over the pole which formed the partition, we saw rows of benches across the room, prepared for about four or five hundred persons--on the side were some short ones, one above the other, intended for the committee. The preparations looked formidable--and Coleridge was anxiously waiting to be informed of the subject on which he was to lecture. At length the committee entered, taking their seats--from the centre of this party Mr. President arose, and put on a president's hat, which so disfigured him that we could scarcely refrain from laughter. He thus addressed the company:--"This evening, Mr. Coleridge will deliver a lecture on the 'Growth of the Individual Mind.'" Coleridge at first seemed startled, and turning round to me whispered, "a pretty stiff subject they have chosen for me." He instantly mounted his standing-place, and began without hesitation; previously requesting me to observe the effect of his lecture on the audience. It was agreed, that, should he appear to fail, I was to clasp his ancle, but that he was to continue for an hour if the countenances of his auditors indicated satisfaction. If I rightly remember his words, he thus began his address: "The lecture I am about to give this evening is purely extempore. Should you find a nominative case looking out for a verb--or a fatherless verb for a nominative case, you must excuse it. It is purely extempore, though I have thought and read much on this subject." I could see the company begin to smile, and this at once seemed to inspire him with confidence. This beginning appeared to me a sort of mental curvetting, while preparing his thoughts for one of his eagle flights, as if with an eagle's eye he could steadily look at the mid-day sun. He was most brilliant, eloquent, and logically consecutive. The time moved on so swiftly, that on looking at my watch, I found an hour and a half had passed away, and therefore waiting only a desirable moment (to use his own playful words;) I prepared myself to punctuate his oration." As previously agreed, I pressed his ancle, and thus gave hire the hint he had requested-when bowing graciously, and with a benevolent and smiling countenance he presently descended. The lecture was quite new to me, and I believe quite new to himself, at least so far as the arrangement of his words were concerned. The floating thoughts were most beautifully arranged, and delivered on the spur of the moment. What accident gave rise to the singular request, that he should deliver this lecture impromptu, I never learnt; nor did it signify, as it afforded a happy opportunity to many of witnessing in part the extent of his reading, and the extraordinary strength of his powers. At this time an intimate and highly accomplished friend of my wife's, who was also a very sensible woman, a fine musician, and considered one of the best private performers in the country, came on a visit. The conversation turned on music, and Coleridge, speaking of himself, observed, "I believe I have no ear for music, but have a taste for it." He then explained the delight he received from Mozart, and how greatly he enjoyed the dithyrambic movement of Beethoven; but could never find pleasure in the fashionable modern composers. It seemed to him "playing tricks with music--like nonsense verses--music to please me," added he, "must have a subject." Our friend appeared struck with this observation, "I understand you, sir," she replied, and immediately seated herself at the piano. "Have the kindness to listen to the three following airs, which I played on a certain occasion extempore, as substitutes for words. Will you try to guess the meaning I wished to convey, and I shall then ascertain the extent of my success." She instantly gave us the first air,--his reply was immediate. "That is clear, it is solicitation."--"When I played this air," observed the lady, "to a dear friend whom you know, she turned to me, saying, 'what do you want?'--I told her the purport of my air was to draw her attention to her dress, as she was going out with me to take a drive by the seashore without her cloak." Our visitor then called Coleridge's attention to her second air; it was short and expressive. To this he answered, "that is easily told--it is remonstrance." "Yes," replied she, "for my friend again shewing the same inattention, I played this second extemporaneous air, in order to remonstrate with her." We now listened to the third and last air. He requested her to repeat it, which she did.--"That," said he, "I cannot understand." To this she replied,--"it is I believe a failure," naming at the same time the subject she had wished to convey. Coleridge's answer was--"That is a sentiment, and cannot be well expressed in music." The evening before our friend left us, Coleridge had a long conversation with her on serious and religious subjects. Fearing, however, that he might not have been clearly understood, he the next morning brought down the following paper, written before he had retired to rest:-- 'S. T. Coleridge's confession of belief; with respect to the true grounds of Christian morality', 1817. 1. I sincerely profess the Christian faith, and regard the New Testament as containing all its articles, and I interpret the words not only in the obvious, but in the 'literal' sense, unless where common reason, and the authority of the Church of England join in commanding them to be understood FIGURATIVELY: as for instance, 'Herod is a Fox.' 2. Next to the Holy Scriptures, I revere the Liturgy, Articles, and Homilies of the Established Church, and hold the doctrines therein expressly contained. 3. I reject as erroneous, and deprecate as 'most' dangerous, the notion, that our 'feelings' are to be the ground and guide of our actions. I believe the feelings themselves to be among the things that are to be grounded and guided. The feelings are effects, not causes, a part of the 'instruments' of action, but never can without serious injury be perverted into the 'principles' of action. Under 'feelings', I include all that goes by the names of 'sentiment', sensibility, &c. &c. These, however pleasing, may be made and often are made the instruments of vice and guilt, though under proper discipline, they are fitted to be both aids and ornaments of virtue. They are to virtue what beauty is to health. 4. All men, the good as well as the bad, and the bad as well as the good, act with motives. But what is motive to one person is no motive at all to another. The pomps and vanities of the world supply 'mighty' motives to an ambitious man; but are so far from being a 'motive' to a humble Christian, that he rather wonders how they can be even a temptation to any man in his senses, who believes himself to have an immortal soul. Therefore that a title, or the power of gratifying sensual luxury, is the motive with which A. acts, and no motive at all to B.--must arise from the different state of the moral being in A. and in B.--consequently motives too, as well as 'feelings' are 'effects'; and they become causes only in a secondary or derivative sense. 5. Among the motives of a probationary Christian, the practical conviction that all his intentional acts have consequences in a future state; that as he sows here, he must reap hereafter; in plain words, that according as he does, or does not, avail himself of the light and helps given by God through Christ, he must go either to heaven or hell; is the 'most' impressive, were it only from pity to his own soul, as an everlasting sentient being. 6. But that this is a motive, and the most impressive of motives to any given person, arises from, and supposes, a commencing state of regeneration in that person's mind and heart. That therefore which 'constitutes' a regenerate STATE is the true PRINCIPLE ON which, or with a 'view' to which, actions, feelings, and motives ought to be grounded. 7. The different 'operations' of this radical principle, (which principle is called in Scripture sometimes faith, and in other places love,) I have been accustomed to call good impulses because they are the powers that impel us to do what we ought to do. 8. The impulses of a full grown Christian are 1. Love of God. 2. Love of our neighbour for the love of God. 3. An undefiled conscience, which prizes above every comprehensible advantage 'that peace' of God which passeth all understanding. 9. Every consideration, whether of hope or of fear, which is, and which 'is adopted' by 'us', poor imperfect creatures! in our present state of probation, as MEANS of 'producing' such impulses in our hearts, is so far a right and 'desirable' consideration. He that is weak must take the medicine which is suitable to his existing weakness; but then he ought to know that it is a 'medicine', the object of which is to remove the disease, not to feed and perpetuate it. 10. Lastly, I hold that there are two grievous mistakes,--both of which as 'extremes' equally opposite to truth and the Gospel,--I equally reject and deprecate. The first is, that of Stoic pride, which would snatch away his crutches from a curable cripple before he can walk without them. The second is, that of those worldly and temporizing preachers, who would disguise from such a cripple the necessary truth that crutches are not legs, but only temporary aids and substitutes." [Footnote 1: I give the letter as I received it,--of course it was never intended for the public eye.] [Footnote 2: This is too strong an expression. It was not idleness, it was not sensual indulgence, that led Coleridge to contract this habit. No, it was latent disease, of which sufficient proof is given in this memoir.] [Footnote 3: Those who have witnessed the witches scampering off the stage, cannot forget the ludicrous appearance they make.] [Footnote 4: Of the historical plays, he observes: "It would be a fine national custom to act such a series of dramatic histories in orderly succession, in the yearly Christmas holidays, and could not but tend to counteract that mock cosmopolitism, which, under a positive term, really implies nothing but a negation of, or indifference to, the particular love of our country." 'Literary Remains', Vol. ii. p. 161.] [Footnote 5: Vide Vol. ii. p. 1.--Also p. 103 of this work.] [Footnote 6: He had long been greatly afflicted with nightmare; and, when residing with us, was frequently roused from this painful sleep by any one of the family who might hear him.] [Footnote 7: From an anonymous criticism published soon after the 'Christabel'.] [Footnote 8: In the "Improved Version of the New Testament," the spirit of this Evangelist is perverted.] [Footnote 9: He used to say, in St. John is the philosophy of Christianity; in St. Paul, the moral reflex.] [Footnote 10: The last lines are in the 'Aids to Reflection'. The former six lines are from a note written from his conversation.] [Footnote 11: The 'Christabel' was published by Murray, but the 'Sibylline Leaves' and the 'Biog. Liter.' by Rest Fenner.] [Footnote 12: The first was published in 1816, and the second in 1817.] [Footnote 13: 'Vide' St. John, ch. xx. ver. 17.] 
8210	----	Samuel Taylor Coleridge's BIBLIOGRAPHIA EPISTOLARIS comprising 33 letters and being the Biographical Supplement of Coleridge's BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA with additional letters etc., edited by A. TURNBULL Vol. 1. "On the whole this was surely the mightiest genius since Milton. In poetry there is not his like, when he rose to his full power; he was a philosopher, the immensity of whose mind cannot be gauged by anything he has left behind; a critic, the subtlest and most profound of his time. Yet these vast and varied powers flowed away in the shifting sands of talk; and what remains is but what the few land-locked pools are to the receding ocean which has left them casually behind without sensible diminution of its waters." Academy, 3d October, 1903. PREFACE The work known as the Biographical Supplement of the Biographia Literaria of S. T. Coleridge, and published with the latter in 1847, was begun by Henry Nelson Coleridge, and finished after his death by his widow, Sara Coleridge. The first part, concluding with a letter dated 5th November 1796, is the more valuable portion of the Biographical Supplement. What follows, written by Sara Coleridge, is more controversial than biographical and does not continue, like the first part, to make Coleridge tell his own life by inserting letters in the narrative. Of 33 letters quoted in the whole work, 30 are contained in the section written by Henry Nelson Coleridge. Of these 11 were drawn from Cottle's Early Recollections, seven being letters to Josiah Wade, four to Joseph Cottle, and the remainder are sixteen letters to Poole, one to Benjamin Flower, one to Charles E Heath, and one to Henry Martin. From this I think it is evident that Henry Nelson Coleridge intended what was published as a Supplement to the Biographia Literaria to be a Life of Coleridge, either supplementary to the Biographia Literaria or as an independent narrative, in which most of the letters published by Cottle in 1837 and unpublished letters to Poole and other correspondents were to form the chief material. Sara Coleridge, in finishing the fragment, did not attempt to carry out the original intention of her husband. A few letters in Cottle were perhaps not acceptable to her taste, and in rejecting them she perhaps resolved to reject all remaining letters in Cottle. She thus finished the fragmentary Life of Coleridge left by her husband in her own way. But Henry Nelson Coleridge had begun to build on another plan. His intention was simply to string all Coleridge's letters available on a slim biographical thread and thus produce a work in which the poet would have been made to tell his own life. His beginning with the five Biographical Letters to Thomas Poole is a proof of this. He took these as his starting point; and, as far as he went, his "Life of Coleridge" thus constructed is the most reliable of all the early biographies of Coleridge. This edition of the Biographical Supplement is meant to carry out as far as possible the original project of its author. The whole of his narrative has been retained, and also what Sara Coleridge added to his writing; and all the non-copyright letters of Coleridge available from other sources have been inserted into the narrative, and additional biographical matter, explanatory of the letters, has been given. [1] By this retention of authentic sources I have produced as faithful a picture of the Poet-Philosopher Coleridge as can be got anywhere, for Coleridge always paints his own character in his letters. Those desirous of a fuller picture may peruse, along with this work, the letters published in the Collection of 1895, the place of which in the narrative is indicated in footnotes. [Footnote: What has been added is enclosed in square brackets.] The letters are drawn from the following sources: "Biographical Supplement", 1847 ............................................ 33 Cottle's "Reminiscences", 1847 ............................................. 78 The original "Friend", 1809 ................................................. 5 "The Watchman", 1796 ........................................................ 1 Gillman's "Life of Coleridge", 1838 ......................................... 7 Allsop's "Letters, Conversations, etc., of S. T. C"., 1836 (1864) .......... 45 "Essays on his Own Times", 1850 ............................................. 1 "Life and Correspondence of R. Southey", 1850 ............................... 7 Editorials of Poems, etc .................................................... 8 "Literary Remains of S. T. C., 1836, etc" ................................... 3 "Blackwood's Magazine", October, 1821 ....................................... 1 "Fragmentary Remains of Humphry Davy", 1858 ................................ 15 "Macmillan's Magazine", 1864 (Letters to W. Godwin) ......................... 9 Southey's "Life of Andrew Bell", 3 vols., 1844 .............................. 2 "Charles Lamb and the Lloyds", by E. V. Lucas ............................... 3 "Anima Poetae", by E. H. Coleridge, 1895 .................................... 1 The letters of Coleridge have slowly come to light. Coleridge was always fond of letter-writing, and at several periods of his career he was more active in letter-writing than at others. He commenced the publication of his letters himself. The epistolary form was as dear to him in prose as the ballad or odic form in verse. From his earliest publications we can see he loved to launch a poem with "A letter to the Editor," or to the recipient, as preface. The "Mathematical Problem", one of his juvenile facetiae in rhyme, was thus heralded with a letter addressed to his brother George explaining the import of the doggerel. His first printed poem, "To Fortune" (Dykes Campbell's Edition of the "Poems", p. 27), was also prefaced by a short letter to the editor of the "Morning Chronicle". Among Coleridge's letters are several of this sort, and each affords a glimpse into his character. Those with the "Raven" and "Talleyrand to Lord Grenville" are characteristic specimens of his drollery and irony. Coleridge's greatest triumphs in letter-writing were gained in the field of politics. His two letters to Fox, his letters on the Spaniards, and those to Judge Fletcher, are his highest specimens of epistolary eloquence, and constitute him the rival of Rousseau as an advocate of some great truth in a letter addressed to a public personage. In clearness of thought and virile precision of language they surpass the most of anything that Coleridge has written. They never wander from the point at issue; the evolution of their ideas is perfect, their idiom the purest mother-English written since the refined vocabulary of Hooker, Jeremy Taylor, and Harrington was coined. Besides the political letters, Coleridge published during his lifetime four important letters of great length written during his sojourn in Germany. Three of these appeared in the "Friend" of 1809, and indeed were the finest part of that periodical; and one was first made public in the "Amulet" of 1829. Six letters published in "Blackwood's Magazine" of 1820-21, and a few others of less importance, brought up the number of letters published by Coleridge to 46. The following is a list of them: 7th Nov. 1793, "To Fortune," Ed. "Morning Chronicle" ................ 1 22nd Sept. 1794, Dedication to "Robespierre," to H. Martin ........... 1 1st April 1796, Letter to "Caius Gracchus," "The Watchman" ........... 1 26th Dec. 1796, Dedication to the "Ode to the Departing Year," to T. Poole ........... 1 1798, Ed. "Monthly Magazine, re Monody on Chatterton"................. 1 1799, Ed. "Morning Post," with the "Raven" ........................... 1 21 Dec. 1799, Ed. "Morning Post," with "Love" ........................ 1 10th Jan. 1800, Ed. "Morning Post, Talleyrand to Lord Grenville" ..... 1 18th Nov. 1800, "Monthly Review," on "Wallenstein" ................... 1 1834, To George Coleridge, with "Mathematical Problem" ............... 1 Political Letters to the "Morning Post" and "Courier" ................ 21 1809, Letters of Satyrane, etc., in the "Friend" ..................... 8 1820-21, Letters to "Blackwood's Magazine" ........................... 6 1829, "The Amulet," "Over the Brocken" .............................. 1 -- 46 The "Literary Remains," published in 1836, added ..................... 4 Allsop, in his "Letters, Conversations, etc.", gave to the world ..... 46 Cottle followed in 1837, with his "Early Recollections", in which .... 84 letters or fragments of letters made their appearance Gillman in 1838 published 11 letters or fragments, 4 of which had already appeared in the works of Allsop and Cottle and in the "Friend", leaving a contribution of ................................. 7 The "Gentleman's Magazine" followed in 1838 with letters to Daniel Stuart ........................................17 Cottle, in 1847, re-cast his "Early Recollections", and called his work "Reminiscences of Coleridge and Southey", and added the splendid Wedgwood series of 19 letters, and a few others of less importance, in all ...................................................25 The "Biographical Supplement" to the 1847 edition of the "Biographia Literaria" contained 33 letters, 11 of which were from Cottle; leaving a contribution of ............................................22 In 1850, Coleridge's "Essays on his Own Times", consisting of his magazine and newspaper articles, contained in the Preface (p. 91), a fragment of a letter to Poole .......................................1 Making ..............................................................252 published up to 1850 by Coleridge himself and his three early biographers; and these continued to be quoted and alluded to by writers on Coleridge until 1895, when Mr. E. H. Coleridge gave to the world a collection of 260 letters. Meantime, numerous biographies, memoirs, and magazines continued to throw in a contribution now and then. The following, as far as I have been able to ascertain, is the number of letters or fragments of letters contributed by the various works enumerated: 1836-8, Lockhart's "Life of Sir Walter Scott" 1 1841, "Life of Charles Mathews" 1 " "The Mirror", Letter to George Dyer 1 1844, Southey's "Life of Dr. Andrew Bell" 5 1847, "Memoir of Carey" (Translator of Dante) 1 1848, "Memoir of William Collins, R.A." 1 1849, "Life and Correspondence of R. Southey" 7 1851, "Memoirs of W. Wordsworth" 8 1858, "Fragmentary Remains of Sir H. Davy" 15 1860, "Autobiography of C. R. Leslie" 1 1864, "Macmillan's Magazine" (Letters to Win. Godwin) 9 1869, "H. Crabb Robinson's Diary" 5 1870, "Westminster Review" (Letters to Dr. Brabant) 11 1871, Meteyard's "Group of Englishmen" 2 1873, Sara Coleridge's "Memoirs" 1 1874, "Lippincott's Magazine" 10 1876, "Life of William Godwin", by C. Regan Paul (16, less 7 of those which appeared in "Macmillan's Magazine", 1864) 9 1878, "Fraser's Magazine" (letters to Matilda Betham) 5 1880, Macmillan's Edition of "Coleridge's Poems" 1 1882, "Journals of Caroline Fox" 1 1884, "Life of Alaric Watts" 5 1886, Brandl's "Life of Coleridge" 10 1887, "Memorials of Coleorton" 20 1888, "Thomas Poole and his Friends" (Mrs. Sandford) 75 1889, Professor Knight's "Life of Wordsworth" 12 1889, "Rogers and his Contemporaries" 1 1890, "Memoir of John Murray" 4 1891, "De Quincey Memorials" 4 1893, "Life of Washington Allston" (Flagg) 4 " "Friends' Quarterly Magazine" 1 " "Illustrated London News" 19 1893, J. Dykes Campbell's Edition of "Coleridge's Poems" 8 1894, " " " Life of Coleridge" (fragments) 36 1894, "The Athenaeum" (3 letters to Wrangham) 3 1895, "Letters" of S. T. Coleridge (edited by E. H. Coleridge) 174 " "Anima Poetae" (E. H. C.), Letter to J. Tobin. 1 " "The Gillmans of Highgate" (A. W. Gillman) 3 " "Athenaeum" of 18 May, 1895 1 1897, "William Blackwood and his Sons", by Mrs. Oliphant 6 1898, "Charles Lamb and the Lloyds" (E. V. Lucas) 3 1899, "J. H. Frere and his Friends" 7 1903, "Tom Wedgwood", by R. B. Litchfield 1 1907, "Christabel", edited by E. H. Coleridge 1 1910, "The Bookman", May 1 Total 747 Besides these there are privately printed letters and letters not yet published to be taken account of. The chief collection of these is "Letters from the Lake Poets" (edited by E. H. Coleridge), containing 87 letters to Daniel Stuart, some of which are republished in the "Letters", 1895. The remainder of letters not published, from the information given by Mr. E. H. Coleridge in his Preface, I make out to be about 300. Nor does this exhaust the list of letters written by Coleridge. In Ainger's Collection of the Letters of Charles Lamb are 62 letters by Lamb to Coleridge, most of which are in answer to letters received. We may therefore estimate the letters of Coleridge to Lamb at not less than 62. In Dorothy Wordsworth's "Grasmere Journal" there are no less than 32 letters to the Wordsworths[1] mentioned as having been received during the period 1800-1803, not represented among the letters in Professor Knight's "Life of Wordsworth". The total number of letters known to have been written by Coleridge is therefore between 1,100 and 1,200. Other correspondents of Coleridge not appearing among the recipients of letters in publications are probably as follows: V. Le Grice. Sam. Le Grice. T. F. Middleton. Robert Allen. Robert Lovell. Ch. Lloyd, Jr. John Cruickshank. Dr. Beddoes. Edmund Irving. Mr. Clarkson. Mrs. Clarkson (except one small fragment in "Diary of H. C. Robinson"). [Footnote 1: The letters to Lamb and Miss Wordsworth do not now exist.] The letters of Coleridge, taken as a whole, are one of the most important contributions to English Letter-writing. They are gradually coming to light, and with every letter or group of letters put forth, the character and intellectual development of Coleridge is becoming clearer. His poems and prose works, great as these are, are not comprehensible without a study of his letters, which join together the "insulated fragments" of that grand scheme of truth which he called his "System" ("Table Talk", 12th Sept. 1831, and 26th June 1834). Coleridge, in his letters, has written his own life, for his life, after all, was a life of thought, and his finest thoughts and his most ambitious aspirations are given expression to in his letters to his numerous friends; and the true biography of Coleridge is that in which his letters are made the main source of the narrative. A Biographia Epistolaris is what we want of such a man. Coleridge's letters are often bizarre in construction and quite regardless of the conventions of style, and abound in the most curious freaks of emphasis and imagery. They resemble the letters of Cowper in that they were not written for publication; and, like Cowper's, they have a character of their own. But they far surpass the epistles of the poet of Olney in spiritual vision and intellectuality. The eighteenth century, from Pope and Swift down to Cowper, is extremely rich in letter-writing. Bolingbroke, Lord Chesterfield, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Gray, Mason, Johnson, Beattie, Burns, and Gibbon, among literary personages, have contributed to the great Epistolick Art, as Dr. Johnson called it; and this list does not include the letters of the politicians, Horace Walpole, Junius, and others. The eighteenth century, in fact, was a letter-writing age; and while the bulk of the poetry of its 300 poets, with the exception of a few masterpieces of monumental quality, has gradually gone out of fashion, its letters have risen into greater repute. Even among the poets whose verse is still read there is a hesitation in public opinion as to whether the verses or letters are superior. There are readers not a few who would not scruple to place Cowper's letters above his poems, who believe that Gray's letters are much more akin to the modern spirit than the "Elegy" and the "Ode to Eton College", and who think that Swift's fly-leaves to his friends will outlive the fame of "Gulliver" and the "Tale of a Tub". Coleridge, who stands between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, was, like the poets of the former age, a multiform letter-writer. He was often seized with letter-writing when unable to write poetry or execute those unpublished masterpieces in the composition of some of which he was engaged. Coleridge's letters are of the utmost importance as a part of the literature of the opening of the nineteenth century. It is in the letters that we see better than elsewhere the germs of the speculations which afterwards came to fruition between 1817 and 1850, when the poetical and critical principles of the Lake School gradually took the place of the Classicism of the eighteenth century, and the theology of Broad Churchism began to displace the old theology, and the school of Paley in Evidences and Locke in Philosophy gave way before the inroad of Transcendentalism. As the record of the phases of an intellectual development the letters of Coleridge stand very high; and, indeed, I do not know anything equal to them except it be the "Journal of Amiel". The resemblance between Coleridge and Amiel is very striking. Both valetudinarians and barely understood by the friends with whom they came into contact, they took refuge in the inner shrine of introspection, and clothed the most abstruse ideas in the most beautiful forms of language and imagery that is only not poetry because it is not verse. While one wrote the story of his own intellectual development in secret and retained the record of it hidden from all eyes, the other scattered his to the winds in the shape of letters, which thus, widely distributed, kept his secret until they were gathered together by later hands. The letters of Coleridge as a collection is one of the most engaging psychological studies of the history of an individual mind. The text of the letters in the present volume is reproduced from the original sources, the "Biographical Supplement", Cottle, Gillman, Allsop, and the "Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey". Fuller texts of some of the letters will be found in "Letters of S. T. C." of 1895, Litchfield's "Tom Wedgwood", and other recent publications. One of the objects of the present work is to preserve the text of the letters as presented in these authentic sources of the life of Coleridge. Letters Nos. 44, 45, and 46, from "Charles Lamb and the Lloyds", by Mr. E. V. Lucas (Smith, Elder and Co.); No. 130 from "Anima Poetae" (W. Heinemann), are printed here by arrangement with the poet's grandson, Ernest Hartley Coleridge, Esq., to whom my sincere thanks are also due for his kindness in reading the proofs. Mr. Coleridge, of course, is not responsible for any of the opinions expressed in this work; but he has taken great pains in putting me right regarding certain views of others who had written on Coleridge, and also on some of the mistakes made by Henry Nelson Coleridge and Sara Coleridge, who had insufficient data on the matters on which they wrote, and definite information on which, indeed, could not be ascertainable in 1847. Coming from Mr. Coleridge--the chief living authority on the life, letters, and published and unpublished writings of S. T. Coleridge--the corrections in the footnotes and elsewhere may be taken as authoritative; and I have to acknowledge my indebtedness to him accordingly, ARTHUR TURNBULL. KIRKCALDY, 31st January, 1911. WORKS RELATING TO COLERIDGE "Early Years and Late Reflections". By Clement Carlyon, M.D. 4 vols. 1836-1858. "Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge". With a Preface by the Editor. Moxon, 1836. 2 vols. Second Edition. By Thomas Allsop. 1858. Third Edition, 1864. "Early Recollections, chiefly relating to the late S. T. Coleridge during his long residence in Bristol". By Joseph Cottle. 2 vols. 1837. "The Letters of Charles Lamb with a Sketch of his Life". By Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd, 1837; and "Final Memorials", 1848. "Reminiscences of S. T. Coleridge and Robert Southey". By Joseph Cottle. 1847. 1 vol. "Biographia Literaria, or Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions". By S. T. Coleridge. Second Edition, prepared for publication in part by the late H. N. Coleridge: completed and published by his widow. 2 vols. 1847. "The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey". 6 vols. 1849-1850. "Essays on his own Times". By Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by his daughter. London: William Pickering. 3 vols. 1850. "Memoirs of William Wordsworth". By Christopher Wordsworth, D.D. 2 vols. 1851. "The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge". New York: Harper and Brothers. 7 vols. 1853. "Oxford and Cambridge Essays". Professor Hort on Coleridge. 1856. "Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey". 4 vols. 1856. "Fragmentary Remains, literary and scientific, of Sir Humphry Davy, Bart." Edited by his brother, John Davy, M.D. 1858. "Dissertations and Discussions". John Stuart Mill. 4 vols. 1859-1875. "Autobiographical Recollections by the late Charles Robert Leslie, R.A." Edited by Tom Taylor. 2 vols. 1860. "Beaten Paths". By T. Colley Grattan 2 vols. 1862. "Studies in Poetry and Philosophy". By J. C. Shairp. 1868. "Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson". Selected and Edited by Thomas Sadler, Ph.D. 3 vols. 1869. "A Group of Englishmen (1795-1815) being records of the younger Wedgwoods and their Friends". By Eliza Meteyard, 1 vol. 1871. "Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge", 1 vol. 1873. "Life of William Godwin". By C. Kegan Paul. 2 vols. 1876. "Journals and Letters of Caroline Fox". 2 vols. 1884. "Life and Works of William Wordsworth". By William Knight, LL.D. 11 vols. 1882-1889. "Prose Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge". Bohn Library. 6 vols. (various dates). "Memorials of Coleorton". Edited by William Knight, University of St. Andrews. 2 vols. 1887. "The Letters of Charles Lamb". Edited by Alfred Ainger. 2 vols. 1888. "Thomas Poole and his Friends". By Mrs. Henry Sandford. 2 vols. 1888. "Appreciations". By Walter Pater. 1889. "De Quincey Memorials". Edited by Alexander H. Japp, LL.D., F.R.S.E. 2 vols. 1891. "Posthumous Works of De Quincey". Edited by Alexander H. Japp, LL.D., F.R.S.E. Vol. II. 1893. "The Life of Washington Allston". By Jared B. Flagg. 1893. "The Works of Thomas De Quincey". Edited by Professor Masson. Vols. I-III. 1896. "Illustrated London News", 1893. Letters of S. T. C. edited by E. H. Coleridge. "Anima Poetae: From the unpublished note-books of Samuel Taylor Coleridge". Edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge. 1895. "The Gillmans of Highgate". By Alexander W. Gillman. 1895. "Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge". Edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge. 2 vols. 1895. (Referred to in present volume as "Letters".} "The Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth". Edited by William Knight. 2 vols. 1897. "The Early Life of William Wordsworth", 1770-1798, "A Study of the Prelude". By Emile Legouis; translated by J. W. Matthews. 1897. "Charles Lamb and the Lloyds". Edited by E. V. Lucas. 1898. "Bibliography of S. T. Coleridge". R. Heine Shepherd and Colonel Prideaux. 1900. "The German Influence on Coleridge". By John Louis Haney. 1902. "A Bibliography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge". By John Louis Haney. 1903. "Tom Wedgwood, the First Photographer". By R. B. Litchfield. 1903. "Christabel, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge; illustrated by a Facsimile of the Manuscript and by Textual and other notes". By Ernest Hartley Coleridge, Hon. F.R.S.L. Published under the direction of the Royal Society of Literature: London, Henry Frowde. 1907. (The Facsimile is that of the MS. presented by Coleridge to Sarah Hutchinson.) BIOGRAPHIES OF COLERIDGE John Thomas Cox. Memoir prefixed to Edition of the Poems of S. T. Coleridge. 1836. Life of Coleridge prefixed to Edition of the Poems by Milner and Sowerby. (No date.) James Gillman. "Life of S. T. Coleridge". Vol. I. 1838. Biographical Supplement to the Second Edition of the "Biographia Literaria". By Henry Nelson Coleridge and Sara Coleridge. 1847. F. Freiligrath. Memoir to the "Tauchnitz Edition" of the Poems of S. T. Coleridge. 1860. E. H. Norton. Poetical and Dramatic Works, with Life of the Author. 3 vols. Boston, 1864. Derwent Coleridge, Introductory Essay to Poems of S. T. C. Moxon and Sons. 1870. W. M. Rossetti. Critical Memoir to the Edition of Poems of S. T. C. in Moxon's "Popular Poets." 1872. William Bell Scott. Introduction to Edition of the Poems in "Routledge's Poets." Memoir prefixed to the Edition of the Poems of S. T. C. in "Lansdown" Poets. F. Warne and Co. 1878. R. Herne Shepherd. Life of S. T. C. prefixed to Macmillan's Edition of the Poems of S. T. C. 4 vols. 1877-1880. Memoir prefixed to the "Landscape Edition" of the Poems of S. T. Coleridge. Edinburgh, 1881. "Life of S. T. Coleridge". By H. Traill, "English Men of Letters Series." 1884. Thomas Ashe. "Life of S. T. Coleridge" prefixed to the "Aldine Edition" of the Poems of S. T. C. 2 vols. 1885. Professor Alois Brandl, Prague. "Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the English Romantic School". English Edition by Lady Eastlake. 1887. "The Life of S. T. Coleridge". By Hall Caine. "Great Writers Series." 1887. Introductory Memoir by J. Dykes Campbell, prefixed to "Poetical Works of S. T. C." Macmillan. 1893. "Samuel Taylor Coleridge". A narrative of the events of his Life. By James Dykes Campbell. 1894. "Coleridge". Bell's "Miniature Series of Great Writers." By Richard Garnett. 1904. "La Vie d'un Poete--Coleridge". Par Joseph Aynard. Paris, 1907. INTRODUCTIONS TO SELECTIONS OF THE POEMS OF S. T. C., 1869-1908 Algernon C. Swinburne. "Christabel and the Lyrical and Imaginative Poems of S. T. Coleridge" (Sampson Low, and Co.). 1869. Joseph Skipsey. Prefatory Notice to the "Canterbury Edition" of Coleridge's Poems (Walter Scott). Stopford A. Brooke. Introduction to the Golden Book of Coleridge (Dent and Co.). Andrew Lang. Introduction to Poems of S. T. C. (Longmans). Richard Garnett. "The Poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge". The "Muses" Library (Lawrence and Bullen, now Routledge). 1888. "Coleridge's Select Poems". Edited by Andrew J. George, M. A. (Heath, publisher.) "Poems". Edited by E. H. Coleridge (Heinemann). "Poems". Edited by Alice Meynell. "Red Letter Library" (Blackie). "Poems of S. T. C." Edited by Professor Knight (Newnes). "Poems of Coleridge", selected and arranged. Edited by Arthur Symons (Methuen and Co.). "The Poems of Coleridge". Illustrated by Gerald Metcalfe. With an Introduction by E. Hartley Coleridge (John Lane). 1907. "The Poems of S. T. Coleridge". "The World's Classics" (Frowde). Edited by T. Quiller-Couch. 1908. "Poems of Coleridge". "The Golden Poets." With an Introduction by Professor Edward Dowden, LL.D. (Caxton Publishing Company). BIOGRAPHICAL APPRECIATIONS 1865. Article in the "North British Review" for December of this year. 1903. "From Ottery to Highgate, the story of the childhood and later years of Samuel Taylor Coleridge". By Wilfred Brown (Coleberd and Co., Ltd., Ottery St. Mary). CONTENTS PART I.--POETRY Page CHAPTER I. EARLY YEARS I, 3 Letter 1. To Thomas Poole. -- Feby. 1797 5 2. " -- Mch. 1797 7 3. " 9 Oct. 1797 11 4. " 16 Oct. 1797 15 5. " 19 Feby. 1798 19 CHAPTER II. CAMBRIDGE AND PANTISOCRACY 29 Letter 6. To George Coleridge. 31 Mch. 1791 29 7. Robert Southey. 6 July, 1794 34 8. Henry Martin. 22 July, 1794 35 9. Southey. 6 Sept. 1794 42 10. " 18 Sept. 1794 43 11. Charles Heath. -- -- 1794 44 12. Henry Martin. 22 Sept. 1794 46 13. Southey. -- Dec. 1794 47 CHAPTER III. "THE WATCHMAN" 50 Letter 14. To Thomas Poole. 7 Oct. 1795 50 15. Joseph Cottle. -- Dec. 1795 52 16. " 1 Jany. 1796 52 17. Josiah Wade. -- Jany. 1796 55 18. " -- -- 1796 55 19. " -- -- 1796 56 20. " -- -- 1796 58 21. " 7 Jany. 1796 59 22. " -- Jany. 1796 60 23. Cottle. -- Feby. 1796 62 24. " -- -- 1796 62 25. " 22 Feby. 1796 63 26. Poole. 30 Mch. 1796 65 27. Benjamin Flower. 1 April, 1796 28. Caius Gracchus. 1 April, 1796 29. Poole. 11 April, 1796 30. Cottle. 15 April, 1796 31. " -- April, 1796 32. " -- April, 1796 33. Poole. 6 May, 1796 34. " 12 May, 1796 35. " 29 May, 1796 36. " 4 July, 1796 37. " -- Aug. 1796 38. Wade. -- Sept. 1796 39. Poole. 24 Sept. 1796 40. Charles Lamb. 29 Sept. 1796 41. Cottle. 18 Oct. 1796 42. Poole. 1 Nov. 1796 43. " 5 Nov. 1796 44. Charles Lloyd, Senr. 15 Oct. 1796 45. " 14 Nov. 1796 46. " 4 Dec. 1796 47. Poole. 26 Dec. 1796 CHAPTER IV. CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS OF COLERIDGE CHAPTER V. STOWEY Letter 48. To Cottle. Jany. 1797 49. " 3 Jany. 1797 50. " 10 Jany. 1797 51. " Jany. 1797 52. " Jany. -- 53. " Jany. -- 54. " Feby. or Mch. 1797 55. " May, 1797 56. " -- -- 57. " -- -- 58. Wade. -- -- 59. Cottle. -- -- 60. " -- June, 1797 61. " 8 June, 1797 62. " 29 -- -- 63. " 3-17 July, 1797 64. Wade. 17-20 July, 1797 Letter 65. To Cottle. --Sept. 1797 66. " 3 Sept. 1797 67. " 10-15 Sept. 1797 68. " 28 Nov. 1797 69. " 2 Dec. 1797 70. " --Jany. 1798 71. Wedgwood. --Jany. 1798 72. Cottle. 24 Jany. 1798 73. the Editor, "Monthly Mag." --Jany. 1798 CHAPTER VI. THE LYRICAL BALLADS AND GERMANY Letter 74. To Cottle. 18 Feb. 1798 75. the Editor, "Morning Post." 10 Mch. 1798 76. Cottle. 8 Mch. 1798 77. Wade. 21 Mch. 1798 78. Cottle. Mch. or Apl. 1798 79. " 14 April, 1798 80. " --April, 1798 81. " --May, 1798 82. Mrs. Coleridge. 14 Jany. 1799 83. " 23 April, 1799 CHAPTER VII. THE RELIGION OF THE PINEWOODS Letter 84. To Mrs. Coleridge. 17 May, 1799 CHAPTER VIII. RETURN TO ENGLAND, "WALLENSTEIN", AND THE "MORNING POST" Letter 85. To Josiah Wedgwood. 21 May, 1799 86. "the Editor, Morning Post." 21 Dec. 1799 87. " 10 Jany. 1800 88. Thomas Wedgwood. --Jany. 1800 89. Josiah Wedgwood. --Feby. 1800 90. Thomas Poole. --Mch. 1800 CHAPTER IX KESWICK Letter 91. To William Godwin. 21 May, 1800 92. Humphry Davy. --June, 1800 93. Josiah Wedgwood. 24 July, 1800 94. Davy. 25 July, 1800 95. Godwin. 22 Sept. 1800 96. Davy. 9 Oct. 1800 97. Godwin. 13 Oct. 1800 98. Davy. 18 Oct. 1800 99. Josiah Wedgwood. 1 Nov. 1800 100. " 12 Nov. 1800 101. the Editor, "Monthly Review."18 Nov. 1800 102. Davy. 2 Dec. 1800 103. " 3 Feby. 1801 104. Wade. 6 March, 1801 105. Godwin. 25 March, 1801 PART II.--THE PERMANENT CHAPTER X. ILL HEALTH; SOUTHEY COMES TO KESWICK Letter 106. To Southey. 13 April, 1801 107. Davy. 4 May, 1801 108. " 20 May, 1801 109. Godwin. 23 June, 1801 110. Davy. 31 Oct. 1801 111. Thos. Wedgwood. 20 Oct. 1802 112. " 3 Nov. 1802 113. " 9 Jany. l803 114. " 14 Jany. 1803 115. " 10 Feby. 1803 116. " 10 Feby. 1803 117. " 17 Feby. 1803 118. " 17 Feby. 1803 119. Godwin. 4 June, 1803 120. " 10 July, 1803 121. Southey. -- July, 1803 122. Thos. Wedgwood. 16 Sept. 1803 123. Miss Cruikshank. -- -- 1803 124. Thos. Wedgwood. -- Jany. 1804 125. " 28 Jany. 1804 126. Davy. 6 Mch. 1804 127. Sarah Hutchinson. 10 March, 1804 128. Wedgwood. 24 March, 1804 129. Davy. 25 March, 1804 PART I POETRY BIOGRAPHIA EPISTOLARIS CHAPTER I EARLY YEARS [1772 to 1791] While here, thou fed'st upon etherial beams, As if thou had'st not a terrestrial birth;-- Beyond material objects was thy sight; In the clouds woven was thy lucid robe! "Ah! who can tell how little for this sphere That frame was fitted of empyreal fire!" [1] Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the youngest child of the Reverend John Coleridge, Chaplain-Priest and Vicar of the parish of Ottery St. Mary, in the county of Devon, and Master of the Free Grammar, or King's School, as it is called, founded by Henry VIII in that town. His mother's maiden name was Ann Bowdon. He was born at Ottery on the 21st of October 1772, "about eleven o'clock in the forenoon," as his father, the Vicar, has, with rather unusual particularity, entered it in the register. John Coleridge, who was born in 1719, and finished his education at Sidney-Sussex College, Cambridge,[2] was a country clergyman and schoolmaster of no ordinary kind. He was a good Greek and Latin scholar, a profound Hebraist, and, according to the measure of his day, an accomplished mathematician. He was on terms of literary friendship with Samuel Badcock, and, by his knowledge of Hebrew, rendered material assistance to Dr. Kennicott, in his well known critical works. Some curious papers on theological and antiquarian subjects appear with his signature in the early numbers of "The Gentleman's Magazine", between the years 1745 and 1780; almost all of which have been inserted in the interesting volumes of Selections made several years ago from that work. In 1768 he published miscellaneous Dissertations arising from the 17th and 18th chapters of the Book of Judges; in which a very learned and ingenious attempt is made to relieve the character of Micah from the charge of idolatry ordinarily brought against it; and in 1772 appeared a "Critical Latin Grammar", which his son called "his best work," and which is not wholly unknown even now to the inquisitive by the proposed substitution of the terms "prior, possessive, attributive, posterior, interjective, and quale-quare-quidditive," for the vulgar names of the cases. This little Grammar, however, deserves a philologer's perusal, and is indeed in many respects a very valuable work in its kind. He also published a Latin Exercise book, and a Sermon. His school was celebrated, and most of the country gentlemen of that generation, belonging to the south and east parts of Devon, had been his pupils. Judge Buller was one. The amiable character and personal eccentricities of this excellent man are not yet forgotten amongst some of the elders of the parish and neighbourhood, and the latter, as is usual in such cases, have been greatly exaggerated. He died suddenly in the month of October 1781, after riding to Ottery from Plymouth, to which latter place he had gone for the purpose of embarking his son Francis, as a midshipman, for India. Many years afterwards, in 1797, S. T. Coleridge commenced a series of Letters to his friend Thomas Poole, of Nether Stowey, in the county of Somerset, in which he proposed to give an account of his life up to that time. Five only were written, and unfortunately they stop short of his residence at Cambridge. This series will properly find a place here. [Footnote 1: From a Sonnet To Coleridge by Sir Egerton Brydges--written 16th Feb. 1837. S. C.] [Footnote 2: He was matriculated at Sidney a sizar on the 18th of March 1748, but does not appear to have taken any degree at the University. S. C.] LETTER 1. TO MR. POOLE My Dear Poole, I could inform the dullest author how he might write an interesting book. Let him relate the events of his own life with honesty, not disguising the feelings that accompanied them. I never yet read even a Methodist's "Experience" in the Gospel Magazine without receiving instruction and amusement; and I should almost despair of that man who could peruse the Life of John Woolman without an amelioration of heart. As to my Life, it has all the charms of variety,--high life and low life, vices and virtues, great folly and some wisdom. However, what I am depends on what I have been; and you, my best friend, have a right to the narration. To me the task will be a useful one. It will renew and deepen my reflections on the past; and it will perhaps make you behold with no unforgiving or impatient eye those weaknesses and defects in my character, which so many untoward circumstances have concurred in planting there. My family on my Mother's side can be traced up, I know not how far. The Bowdons inherited a good farm and house thereon in the Exmoor country, in the reign of Elizabeth, as I have been told; and to my knowledge they have inherited nothing better since that time. My Grandfather was in the reign of George I a considerable woollen trader in Southmolton; so that I suppose, when the time comes, I shall be allowed to pass as a "Sans-culotte" without much opposition. My Father received a better education than the rest of his family in consequence of his own exertions, not of his superiour advantages. When he was not quite sixteen years of age, my grandfather, by a series of misfortunes, was reduced to great distress. My Father received the half of his last crown and his blessing, and walked off to seek his fortune. After he had proceeded a few miles, he sate him down on the side of the road, so overwhelmed with painful thoughts that he wept audibly. A gentleman passed by who knew him, and, inquiring into his sorrow, took him home and gave him the means of maintaining himself by placing him in a school. At this time he commenced being a severe and ardent student. He married his first wife, by whom he had three daughters, all now alive. While his first wife lived, having scraped up money enough, he at the age of twenty walked to Cambridge, entered himself at Sidney College, distinguished himself in Hebrew and Mathematics, and might have had a fellowship if he had not been married. He returned and settled as a schoolmaster in Southmolton where his wife died. In 1760 he was appointed Chaplain-Priest and Master of the School at Ottery St. Mary, and removed to that place; and in August, 1760, Mr. Buller, the father of the present Judge, procured for him the living from Lord Chancellor Bathurst. By my Mother, his second wife, he had ten children, of whom I am the youngest, born October 20th,[1] 1772. These facts I received from my Mother; but I am utterly unable to fill them up by any further particulars of times, or places, or names. Here I shall conclude my first Letter, because I cannot pledge myself for the accuracy of the accounts, and I will not therefore mingle it with that for the truth of which, in the minutest parts, I shall hold myself responsible. You must regard this Letter as a first chapter devoted to dim traditions of times too remote to be pierced by the eye of investigation. Yours affectionately, S. T. COLERIDGE. Feb. 1797. Monday. [Footnote 1: A mistake, should be October 21st.] LETTER 2. To MR. POOLE My Dear Poole, My Father (Vicar of, and Schoolmaster at, Ottery St. Mary, Devon) was a good mathematician, and well versed in the Greek, Latin, and Hebrew languages. He published, or rather attempted to publish, several works;--1st, Miscellaneous Dissertations arising from the 17th and 18th chapters of the Book of Judges; 2d, "Sententiae Excerptcae" for the use of his own School; and 3d, his best work, a Critical Latin Grammar, in the Preface to which he proposes a bold innovation in the names of the cases. My Father's new nomenclature was not likely to become popular, although it must be allowed to be both sonorous and expressive. "Exempli gratia", he calls the ablative case "the quare-quale-quidditive case!" He made the world his confidant with respect to his learning and ingenuity, and the world seems to have kept the secret very faithfully. His various works, uncut, unthumbed, were preserved free from all pollution in the family archives, where they may still be for anything that I know. This piece of good luck promises to be hereditary; for all "my" compositions have the same amiable home-staying propensity. The truth is, my Father was not a first-rate genius; he was, however, a first-rate Christian, which is much better. I need not detain you with his character. In learning, goodheartedness, absentness of mind, and excessive ignorance of the world, he was a perfect Parson Adams. My Mother was an admirable economist, and managed exclusively. My eldest brother's name was John. He was a Captain in the East India Company's service; a successful officer and a brave one, as I have heard. He died in India in 1786. My second brother William went to Pembroke College, Oxford. He died a clergyman in 1780, just on the eve of his intended marriage. My brother James has been in the army since the age of fifteen, and has married a woman of fortune, one of the old Duke family of Otterton in Devon. Edward, the wit of the family, went to Pembroke College, and is now a clergyman. George also went to Pembroke. He is in orders likewise, and now has the same School, a very flourishing one, which my Father had. He is a man of reflective mind and elegant talent. He possesses learning in a greater degree than any of the family, excepting myself. His manners are grave, and hued over with a tender sadness. In his moral character he approaches every way nearer to perfection than any man I ever yet knew. He is worth us all. Luke Herman was a surgeon, a severe student, and a good man. He died in 1790, leaving one child, a lovely boy still alive. [1] My only sister, Ann, died at twenty-one, a little after my brother Luke:-- Rest, gentle Shade! and wait thy Maker's will; Then rise unchang'd, and be an angel still! Francis Syndercombe went out to India as a midshipman under Admiral Graves. He accidentally met his brother John on board ship abroad, who took him ashore, and procured him a commission in the Company's army. He died in 1792, aged twenty-one, a Lieutenant, in consequence of a fever brought on by excessive fatigue at and after the siege of Seringapatam, and the storming of a hill fort, during all which his conduct had been so gallant that his Commanding Officer particularly noticed him, and presented him with a gold watch, which my Mother now has. All my brothers are remarkably handsome; but they were as inferiour to Francis as I am to them. He went by the name of "the handsome Coleridge." The tenth and last child was Samuel Taylor, the subject and author of these Epistles. From October 1772 to October 1773. Baptized Samuel Taylor, my Godfather's name being Samuel Taylor, Esquire. I had another called Evans, and two Godmothers, both named Munday. From October 1773 to October 1774. In this year I was carelessly left by my nurse, ran to the fire, and pulled out a live coal, and burned myself dreadfully. While my hand was being drest by Mr. Young, I spoke for the first time, (so my Mother informs me) and said, "nasty Dr. Young!" The snatching at fire, and the circumstance of my first words expressing hatred to professional men--are they at all ominous? This year I went to school. My Schoolmistress, the very image of Shenstone's, was named Old Dame Key. She was nearly related to Sir Joshua Reynolds. From October 1774 to 1775. I was inoculated; which I mention, because I distinctly remember it, and that my eyes were bound; at which I manifested so much obstinate indignation, that at last they removed the bandage, and unaffrighted I looked at the lancet, and suffered the scratch. At the close of this year I could read a chapter in the Bible. Here I shall end, because the remaining years of my life all assisted to form my particular mind;--the first three years had nothing in them that seems to relate to it. God bless you and your sincere S. T. COLERIDGE. Sunday, March, 1797. [Footnote 1: William Hart Coleridge, Bishop of Barbadoes and the Leeward Islands. (He was appointed to that See in 1824, retired from it in 1842; and afterwards accepted the Wardenship of St. Augustine's College, Canterbury. S. C.) [He died in 1849.] ] A letter from Francis S. Coleridge to his sister has been preserved in the family, in which a particular account is given of the chance meeting of the two brothers in India, mentioned shortly in the preceding Letter. There is something so touching and romantic in the incident that the Reader will, it is hoped, pardon the insertion of the original narrative here. Dear Nancy, You are very right, I have neglected my absent friends, but do not think I have forgot them, and indeed it would be ungrateful in me if I did not write to them. You may be sure, Nancy, I thank Providence for bringing about that meeting, which has been the cause of all my good fortune and happiness, which I now in fulness enjoy. It was an affectionate meeting, and I will inform you of the particulars. There was in our ship one Captain Mordaunt, who had been in India before, when we came to Bombay. Finding a number of his friends there he went often ashore. The day before the Fleet sailed he desired one Captain Welsh to go aboard with him, who was an intimate friend of your brother's. "I will," said Welsh, "and will write a note to Coleridge to go with us." Upon this Captain Mordaunt, recollecting me, said there was a young midshipman, a favourite of Captain Hicks, of that name on board. Upon that they agreed to inform my brother of it, which they did soon after, and all three came on board. I was then in the lower deck, and, though you won't believe it, I was sitting upon a gun and thinking of my brother, that is, whether I should ever see or hear anything of him; when seeing a Lieutenant, who had been sent to inform me of my brother's being on board, I got up off the gun: but instead of telling me about my brother, he told me that Captain Hicks was very angry with me and wanted to see me. Captain Hicks had always been a Father to me, and loved me as if I had been his own child. I therefore went up shaking like an aspen leaf to the Lieutenant's apartments, when a Gentleman took hold of my hand. I did not mind him at first, but looked round for the Captain; but the Gentleman still holding my hand, I looked, and what was my surprise, when I saw him too full to speak and his eyes full of tears. Whether crying is catching I know not, but I began a crying too, though I did not know the reason, till he caught me in his arms, and told me he was my brother, and then I found I was paying nature her tribute, for I believe I never cried so much in my life. There is a saying in Robinson Crusoe, I remember very well, viz.--sudden joy like grief confounds at first. We directly went ashore having got my discharge, and having took a most affectionate leave of Captain Hicks, I left the ship for good and all. My situation in the army is that I am one of the oldest Ensigns, and before you get this must in all probability be a Lieutenant. How many changes there have been in my life, and what lucky ones they have been, and how young I am still! I must be seven years older before I can properly style myself a man, and what a number of officers do I command, who are old enough to be my Father already! LETTER 3. To MR. POOLE October 9th, 1797. My Dearest Poole, From March to October--a long silence! But it is possible that I may have been preparing materials for future Letters, and the time cannot be considered as altogether subtracted from you. From October 1775 to October 1778. These three years I continued at the Reading School, because I was too little to be trusted among my Father's schoolboys. After break-fast I had a halfpenny given me, with which I bought three cakes at the baker's shop close by the school of my old mistress; and these were my dinner every day except Saturday and Sunday, when I used to dine at home, and wallowed in a beef and pudding dinner. I am remarkably fond of beans and bacon: and this fondness I attribute to my Father's giving me a penny for having eaten a large quantity of beans on Saturday. For the other boys did not like them, and, as it was an economic food, my Father thought my attachment to it ought to be encouraged. He was very fond of me, and I was my Mother's darling: in consequence whereof I was very miserable. For Molly, who had nursed my brother Francis, and was immoderately fond of him, hated me because my Mother took more notice of me than of Frank; and Frank hated me because my Mother gave me now and then a bit of cake when he had none,--quite forgetting that for one bit of cake which I had and he had not, he had twenty sops in the pan, and pieces of bread and butter with sugar on them from Molly, from whom I received only thumps and ill names. So I became fretful, and timorous, and a tell-tale; and the schoolboys drove me from play, and were always tormenting me. And hence I took no pleasure in boyish sports, but read incessantly. I read through all gilt-cover little books that could be had at that time, and likewise all the uncovered tales of Tom Hickathrift, Jack the Giant Killer, and the like. And I used to lie by the wall, and mope; and my spirits used to come upon me suddenly, and in a flood;--and then I was accustomed to run up and down the churchyard, and act over again all I had been reading on the docks, the nettles, and the rank grass. At six years of age I remember to have read Belisarius, Robinson Crusoe, and Philip Quarles; and then I found the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, one tale of which, (the tale of a man who was compelled to seek for a pure virgin,) made so deep an impression on me, (I had read it in the evening while my mother was at her needle,) that I was haunted by spectres, whenever I was in the dark: and I distinctly recollect the anxious and fearful eagerness, with which I used to watch the window where the book lay, and when the sun came upon it, I would seize it, carry it by the wall, and bask, and read. My father found out the effect which these books had produced, and burned them. So I became a dreamer, and acquired an indisposition to all bodily activity; and I was fretful, and inordinately passionate; and as I could not play at anything, and was slothful, I was despised and hated by the boys: and because I could read and spell, and had, I may truly say, a memory and understanding forced into almost unnatural ripeness, I was flattered and wondered at by all the old women. And so I became very vain, and despised most of the boys that were at all near my own age, and before I was eight years old I was a "character". Sensibility, imagination, vanity, sloth, and feelings of deep and bitter contempt for almost all who traversed the orbit of my understanding, were even then prominent and manifest. From October 1778 to 1779. That which I began to be from three to six, I continued to be from six to nine. In this year I was admitted into the Grammar School, and soon outstripped all of my age. I had a dangerous putrid fever this year. My brother George lay ill of the same fever in the next room. My poor brother, Francis, I remember, stole up in spite of orders to the contrary, and sat by my bedside, and read Pope's Homer to me. Frank had a violent love of beating me; but whenever that was superseded by any humour or circumstances, he was always very fond of me, and used to regard me with a strange mixture of admiration and contempt. Strange it was not, for he hated books, and loved climbing, fighting, playing, and robbing orchards, to distraction. My Mother relates a story of me, which I repeat here, because it must be reckoned as my first piece of wit.--During my fever, I asked why Lady Northcote, our neighbour, did not come and see me. My Mother said she was afraid of catching the fever. I was piqued, and answered, "Ah! Mamma! the four Angels round my bed a'n't afraid of catching it!" I suppose you know the old prayer:-- Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, Bless the bed that I lie on!-- Four good Angels round me spread, Two at my feet and two at my head. This "prayer" I said nightly, and most firmly believed the truth of it. Frequently have I, (half-awake and half-asleep; my body diseased, and fevered by my imagination,)--seen armies of ugly things bursting in upon me, and these four Angels keeping them off. In my next I shall carry on my life to my Father's death. God bless you, my dear Poole, And your affectionate, S.T. COLERIDGE. In a note written in after life Mr. Coleridge speaks of this period of his life in the following terms: "Being the youngest child, I possibly inherited the weakly state of health of my Father, who died, at the age of sixty-two, before I had reached my ninth year; and from certain jealousies of old Molly, my brother Frank's dotingly fond nurse--and if ever child by beauty and loveliness deserved to be doted on, my brother Francis was that child--and by the infusion of her jealousies into my brother's mind, I was in earliest childhood huffed away from the enjoyments of muscular activity in play, to take refuge at my Mother's side on my little stool, to read my little book, and to listen to the talk of my elders. I was driven from life in motion to life in thought and sensation. I never played except by myself, and then only acted over what I had been reading or fancying, or half one, half the other, with a stick cutting down weeds and nettles, as one of the "Seven Champions of Christendom." Alas! I had all the simplicity, all the docility of the little child, but none of the child's habits. I never thought as a child, never had the language of a child." [1] [Footnote 1: Gillman's "Life of Coleridge", p. 10.] LETTER 4. TO MR. POOLE Dear Poole, From October 1779 to 1781. I had asked my Mother one evening to cut my cheese entire, so that I might toast it. This was no easy matter, it being a "crumbly" cheese. My Mother however did it. I went into the garden for something or other, and in the mean time my brother Frank minced my cheese, to "disappoint the favourite." I returned, saw the exploit, and in an agony of passion flew at Frank. He pretended to have been seriously hurt by my blow, flung himself on the ground, and there lay with outstretched limbs. I hung over him mourning and in a great fright; he leaped up, and with a horse-laugh gave me a severe blow in the face. I seized a knife, and was running at him, when my Mother came in and took me by the arm. I expected a flogging, and, struggling from her, I ran away to a little hill or slope, at the bottom of which the Otter flows, about a mile from Ottery. There I staid; my rage died away, but my obstinacy vanquished my fears, and taking out a shilling book, which had at the end morning and evening prayers, I very devoutly repeated them--thinking at the same time with a gloomy inward satisfaction--how miserable my Mother must be! I distinctly remember my feelings, when I saw a Mr. Vaughan pass over the bridge at about a furlong's distance, and how I watched the calves in the fields beyond the river. It grew dark, and I fell asleep. It was towards the end of October, and it proved a stormy night. I felt the cold in my sleep, and dreamed that I was pulling the blanket over me, and actually pulled over me a dry thorn-bush which lay on the ground near me. In my sleep I had rolled from the top of the hill till within three yards of the river, which flowed by the unfenced edge of the bottom. I awoke several times, and finding myself wet, and cold, and stiff, closed my eyes again that I might forget it. In the meantime my Mother waited about half an hour, expecting my return when the "sulks" had evaporated. I not returning, she sent into the churchyard, and round the town. Not found! Several men and all the boys were sent out to ramble about and seek me. In vain! My Mother was almost distracted; and at ten o'clock at night I was 'cried' by the crier in Ottery, and in two villages near it, with a reward offered for me. No one went to bed;--indeed I believe half the town were up all the night. To return to myself. About five in the morning, or a little after, I was broad awake, and attempted to get up, and walk; but I could not move. I saw the shepherds and workmen at a distance, and cried, but so faintly, that it was impossible to hear me thirty yards off. And there I might have lain and died;--for I was now almost given over, the ponds and even the river, near which I was lying, having been dragged. But providentially Sir Stafford Northcote, who had been out all night, resolved to make one other trial, and came so near that he heard me crying. He carried me in his arms for nearly a quarter of a mile, when we met my father and Sir Stafford Northcote's servants. I remember, and never shall forget, my Father's face as he looked upon me while I lay in the servant's arms--so calm, and the tears stealing down his face; for I was the child of his old age. My Mother, as you, may suppose, was outrageous with joy. Meantime in rushed a young lady, crying out--"I hope you'll whip him, Mrs. Coleridge." This woman still lives at Ottery; and neither philosophy nor religion has been able to conquer the antipathy which I feel towards her, whenever I see her. I was put to bed, and recovered in a day or so. But I was certainly injured; for I was weakly and subject to ague for many years after. My Father--who had so little parental ambition in him, that, but for my Mother's pride and spirit, he would certainly have brought up his other sons to trades--had nevertheless resolved that I should be a parson. I read every book that came in my way without distinction; and my Father was fond of me, and used to take me on his knee, and hold long conversations with me. I remember, when eight years old, walking with him one winter evening from a farmer's house, a mile from Ottery; and he then told me the names of the stars, and how Jupiter was a thousand times larger than our world, and that the other twinkling stars were suns that had worlds rolling round them; and when I came home, he showed me how they rolled round. I heard him with a profound delight and admiration, but without the least mixture of wonder or incredulity. For from my early reading of fairy tales and about genii, and the like, my mind had been habituated "to the Vast"; and I never regarded "my senses" in any way as the "criteria" of my belief. I regulated all my creeds by my conceptions, not by my sight, even at that age. Ought children to be permitted to read romances, and stories of giants, magicians, and genii? I know all that has been said against it; but I have formed my faith in the affirmative. I know no other way of giving the mind a love of the Great and the Whole. Those who have been led to the same truths step by step, through the constant testimony of their senses, seem to me to want a sense which I possess. They contemplate nothing but parts, and all parts are necessarily little, and the universe to them is but a mass of little things. It is true, the mind may become credulous and prone to superstition by the former method;--but are not the experimentalists credulous even to madness in believing any absurdity, rather than believe the grandest truths, if they have not the testimony of their own senses in their favour? I have known some who have been rationally educated, as it is styled. They were marked by a microscopic acuteness; but when they looked at great things, all became a blank, and they saw nothing, and denied that anything could be seen, and uniformly put the negative of a power for the possession of a power, and called the want of imagination, judgment, and the never being moved to rapture, philosophy. Towards the latter end of September 1781, my Father went to Plymouth with my brother Francis, who was to go out as midshipman under Admiral Graves, who was a friend of my Father's. He settled Frank as he wished, and returned on the 4th of October, 1781. He arrived at Exeter about six o'clock, and was pressed to take a bed there by the friendly family of the Harts; but he refused; and to avoid their entreaties he told them that he had never been superstitious, but that the night before he had had a dream, which had made a deep impression on him. He dreamed that Death had appeared to him, as he is commonly painted, and had touched him with his dart. Well, he returned home; and all his family, I excepted, were up. He told my Mother his dream; but he was in high health and good spirits; and there was a bowl of punch made, and my Father gave a long and particular account of his travel, and that he had placed Frank under a religious Captain, and so forth. At length he went to bed, very well and in high spirits. A short time after he had lain down, he complained of a pain in his bowels, to which he was subject, from wind. My Mother got him some peppermint water, which he took, and after a pause, he said, "I am much better now, my dear!"--and lay down again. In a minute my Mother heard a noise in his throat, and spoke to him, but he did not answer; and she spoke repeatedly in vain. Her shriek awaked me, and I said--"Papa is dead!" I did not know my Father's return; but I knew that he was expected. How I came to think of his death, I cannot tell; but so it was. Dead he was. Some said it was gout in the heart;--probably it was a fit of apoplexy. He was an Israelite without guile, simple, generous, and, taking some Scripture texts in their literal sense, he was conscientiously indifferent to the good and the evil of this world. God love you and S.T. COLERIDGE. He was buried at Ottery on the 10th of October 1781. "O! that I might so pass away," said Coleridge, thirty years afterwards, "if, like him, I were an Israelite without guile! The image of my Father, very reverend, kind, learned, simple-hearted Father is a religion to me." At his Father's death Coleridge was nearly nine years old. He continued with his Mother at Ottery till the spring of 1782, when he was sent to London to wait the appointed time for admission into Christ's Hospital, to which a presentation had been procured from Mr. John Way through the influence of his father's old pupil Sir Francis Buller. Ten weeks he lived in London with an Uncle, and was entered in the books on the 8th of July 1782. LETTER 5. TO MR. POOLE From October 1781 to October 1782. After the death of my Father, we, of course, changed houses, and I remained with my Mother till the spring of 1782, and was a day scholar to Parson Warren, my Father's successor. He was not very deep, I believe; and I used to delight my poor Mother by relating little instances of his deficiency in grammar knowledge--every detraction from his merits seeming an oblation to the memory of my Father, especially as Warren did certainly "pulpitize" much better. Somewhere I think about April 1782, Judge Buller, who had been educated by my Father, sent for me, having procured a Christ's Hospital presentation. I accordingly went to London, and was received and entertained by my Mother's brother, Mr. Bowdon. He was generous as the air, and a man of very considerable talents, but he was fond, as others have been, of his bottle. He received me with great affection, and I staid ten weeks at his house, during which I went occasionally to Judge Buller's. My Uncle was very proud of me, and used to carry me from coffee-house to coffee-house, and tavern to tavern, where I drank, and talked, and disputed as if I had been a man. Nothing was more common than for a large party to exclaim in my hearing, that I was a prodigy, and so forth; so that while I remained at my Uncle's, I was most completely spoilt and pampered, both mind and body. At length the time came, and I donned the blue coat and yellow stockings, and was sent down to Hertford, a town twenty miles from London, where there are about three hundred of the younger Blue-coat boys. At Hertford I was very happy on the whole, for I had plenty to eat and drink, and we had pudding and vegetables almost every day. I remained there six weeks, and then was drafted up to the great school in London, where I arrived in September, 1782, and was placed in the second ward, then called Jefferies' Ward, and in the Under Grammar School. There are twelve wards, or dormitories, of unequal sizes, beside the sick ward, in the great school; and they contained altogether seven hundred boys, of whom I think nearly one-third were the sons of clergymen. There are five schools,--mathematical, grammar, drawing, reading, and writing--all very large buildings. When a boy is admitted, if he reads very badly, he is either sent to Hertford, or to the reading school. Boys are admissible from seven to twelve years of age. If he learns to read tolerably well before nine, he is drafted into the Lower Grammar School, if not, into the Writing School, as having given proof of unfitness for classical studies. If, before he is eleven, he climbs up to the first form of the Lower Grammar School, he is drafted into the Head Grammar School. If not, at eleven years of age, he is sent into the Writing School, where he continues till fourteen or fifteen, and is then either apprenticed or articled as a clerk, or whatever else his turn of mind or of fortune shall have provided for him. Two or three times a year the Mathematical Master beats up for recruits for the King's boys, as they are called; and all who like the navy are drafted into the Mathematical and Drawing Schools, where they continue till sixteen or seventeen years of age, and go out as midshipmen, and schoolmasters in the Navy. The boys who are drafted into the Head Grammar School, remain there till thirteen; and then, if not chosen for the University, go into the Writing School. Each dormitory has a nurse or matron, and there is a head matron to superintend all these nurses. The boys were, when I was admitted, under excessive subordination to each other according to rank in school; and every ward was governed by four Monitors,--appointed by the Steward, who was the supreme governor out of school--our temporal lord,--and by four Markers, who wore silver medals, and were appointed by the Head Grammar Master, who was our supreme spiritual lord. The same boys were commonly both Monitors and Markers. We read in classes on Sundays to our Markers, and were catechised by them, and under their sole authority during prayers, etc. All other authority was in the Monitors; but, as I said, the same boys were ordinarily both the one and the other. Our diet was very scanty. Every morning a bit of dry bread and some bad small beer. Every evening a larger piece of bread, and cheese or butter, whichever we liked. For dinner,--on Sunday, boiled beef and broth; Monday, bread and butter, and milk and water; Tuesday, roast mutton; Wednesday, bread and butter, and rice milk; Thursday, boiled beef and broth; Friday, boiled mutton and broth; Saturday, bread and butter, and pease-porridge. Our food was portioned; and, excepting on Wednesdays, I never had a belly full. Our appetites were damped, never satisfied; and we had no vegetables. [1] [Footnote 1: The above five letters are I-V of Mr. E. H. Coleridge's "Letters of S. T. C". Letter VI is dated 1785; Letter VII of "Letters" is dated "before 1790."] S. T. COLERIDGE. "O! what a change!" he writes in another note; "depressed, moping, friendless, poor orphan, half starved; at that time the portion of food to the Blue-coats was cruelly insufficient for those who had no friends to supply them." And he afterwards says:--"When I was first plucked up and transplanted from my birth-place and family, at the death of my dear Father, whose revered image has ever survived in my mind to make me know what the emotions and affections of a son are, and how ill a father's place is likely to be supplied by any other relation, Providence, (it has often occurred to me,) gave me the first intimation that it was my lot, and that it was best for me, to make or find my way of life a detached individual, a "terrae filius", who was to ask love or service of no one on any more specific relation than that of being a man, and as such to take my chance for the free charities of humanity." Coleridge continued eight years at Christ's Hospital. It was a very curious and important part of his life, giving him Bowyer for his teacher, and Lamb for his friend. [1] [Footnote 1: A few particulars of this "most remarkable and amiable man," the well-known author of "Essays of Elia, Rosamund Gray, Poems", and other works, will interest most readers of the "Biographia". He was born on the 18th of February, 1775, in the Inner Temple; died 27th December, 1834, about five months after his friend Coleridge, who continued in habits of intimacy with him from their first acquaintance till his death in July of the same year. In "one of the most exquisite of all the Essays of Elia," "The Old Benchers of the Middle Temple" ("Works", vol. ii, p. 188), Lamb has given the characters of his father, and of his father's master, Samuel Salt. The few touches descriptive of this gentleman's "unrelenting bachelorhood"--which appears in the sequel to have been a persistent mourner-hood--and the forty years' hopeless passion of mild Susan P.--which very permanence redeems and almost dignifies, is in the author's sweetest vein of mingled humour and pathos, wherein the latter, as the stronger ingredient, predominates. Mr. Lamb never married, for, as is recorded in the Memoir, "on the death of his parents, he felt himself called upon by duty to repay to his sister [a] the solicitude with which she had watched over his infancy. To her, from the age of twenty-one he devoted his existence, seeking thenceforth no connection which could interfere with her supremacy in his affections, or impair his ability to sustain and to comfort her." [[Sub-footnote a: "A word Timidly uttered, for she "lives", the meek, The self-restraining, the ever kind." From Mr. Wordsworth's memorial poem to her brother. P. W. V. P. 333.]] Mr. Coleridge speaks of Miss Lamb, to whom he continued greatly attached, in these verses, addressed to her brother: "Cheerily, dear Charles! Thou thy best friend shall cherish many a year; Such warm presages feel I of high hope! For not uninterested the dear maid I've viewed--her soul affectionate yet wise, Her polished wit as mild as lambent glories That play around a sainted infant's head." (See the single volume of Coleridge's Poems, p. 28.) Mr. Lamb has himself described his dear and only sister, whose proper name is Mary Anne, under the title of "Cousin Bridget," in the Essay called "Mackery End", a continuation of that entitled "My Relations", in which he has drawn the portrait of his elder brother. "Bridget Elia," so he commences the former, "has been my housekeeper for many a long year. I have obligations to Bridget, extending beyond the period of memory. We house together, old bachelor and maid, in a sort of double singleness; with such tolerable comfort upon the whole, that I, for one, find in myself no sort of disposition to go out upon the mountains, with the rash king's offspring, to bewail my celibacy."--("Works", vol. ii, p. 171.) He describes her intellectual tastes in this essay, but does not refer to her literary abilities. She wrote "Mrs. Leicester's School", which Mr. C. used warmly to praise for delicacy of taste and tenderness of feeling. Miss Lamb still survives, in the words of Mr. Talfourd, "to mourn the severance of a life-long association, as free from every alloy of selfishness, as remarkable for moral beauty, as this world ever witnessed in brother and sister. "I have felt desirous to place in relief, as far as might be, such an interesting union--to show how blest a fraternal marriage may be, and what sufficient helpmates a brother and sister have been to each other. Marriages of this kind would perhaps be more frequent but for the want of some pledge or solid warranty of continuance equivalent to that which rivets wedlock between husband and wife. Without the vow and the bond, formal or virtual, no society, from the least to the greatest, will hold together. Many persons are so constituted that they cannot feel rest or satisfaction of spirit without a single supreme object of tender affection, in whose heart they are conscious of holding a like supremacy,--who has common hopes, loves, and interests with themselves. Without this the breezes do not refresh nor the sunbeams gladden them. A "share" in ever so many kind hearts does not suffice to their happiness; they must have the whole of one, as no one else has any part of it, whatever love of another kind that heart may still reserve for others. There is no reason why a brother and sister might not be to each other this second-self--this dearer half--though such an attachment is beyond mere fraternal love, and must have something in it "of choice and election," superadded to the natural tie: but it is seldom found to exist, because the durable cement is wanting--the sense of security and permanence, without which the body of affection cannot be consolidated, nor the heart commit itself to its whole capacity of emotion. I believe that many a brother and sister spend their days in uncongenial wedlock, or in a restless faintly expectant-singlehood, who might form a "comfortable couple" could they but make up their minds early to take each other for better for worse. Two other poems of Mr. C. besides the one in which his sister is mentioned, are addressed to Mr. Lamb--"This Lime-tree-bower my Prison", and the lines "To a Friend, who had declared his intention of writing no more Poetry".--("Poetical Works", i, p. 201 and p. 205.) In a letter to the author ("Ainger", i, p. 121), Lamb inveighs against the soft epithet applied to him in the first of these. He hoped his ""virtues" had done "sucking""--and declared such praise fit only to be a "cordial to some greensick sonnetteer." "Yes! they wander on In gladness all; but thou, methinks, most glad, My "gentle-hearted" Charles! for thou hast pined And hungered after nature, many a year, In the great city pent, winning thy way With sad yet patient soul through evil and pain And strange calamity." In the next poem he is called "wild-eyed boy." The two epithets, "wild-eyed" and "gentle-hearted," will recall Charles Lamb to the minds of all who knew him personally. Mr. Talfourd seems to think that the special delight in the country, ascribed to him by my father, was a distinction scarcely merited. I rather imagine that his indifference to it was a sort of "mock apparel" in which it was his humour at times to invest himself. I have been told that, when visiting the Lakes, he took as much delight in the natural beauties of the region as might be expected from a man of his taste and sensibility. [b] [[Sub-footnote b: "Thou wert a scorner of the field, my Friend, But more in show than truth." From Mr. W.'s poem "To a good man of most dear memory", quoted in p. 323.]] Mr. Coleridge's expression, recorded in the "Table Talk", that he "looked on the degraded men and things around him like moonshine on a dunghill, that shines and takes no pollution," partly alludes to that tolerance of moral evil, both in men and books, which was so much remarked in Charles Lamb, and was, in so good a man, really remarkable. His toleration of it in books is conspicuous in the view he takes of the writings of Congreve and Wycherley, in his essay on the artificial comedy of the last century ("Works", vol. ii, p. 322), and in many of his other literary criticisms. His toleration of it in men--at least his faculty of merging some kinds and degrees of it in concomitant good, or even beholding certain errors rather as objects of interest, or of a meditative pity and tenderness, than of pure aversion and condemnation, Mr. Talfourd has feelingly described in his "Memoir" (vol. ii, p. 326-9), "Not only to opposite opinions," he says, "and devious habits of thought was Lamb indulgent; he discovered the soul of goodness in things evil so vividly, that the surrounding evil disappeared from his mental vision." This characteristic of his mind is not to be identified with the idolizing propensity common to many ardent and imaginative spirits. He "not only loved his friends in spite of their errors," as Mr. Talfourd observes, "but loved them, "errors and all";" which implies that he was not unconscious of their existence. He saw the failings as plainly as any one else, nay, fixed his gentle but discerning eye upon them; whereas the idolizers behold certain objects in a bedarkening blaze of light, or rather of light-confounding brightness, the multiplied and heightened reflection of whatever is best in them, to the obscurity or transmutation of all their defects. Whence it necessarily follows that the world presents itself to their eyes divided, like a chess-board, into black and white compartments--a moral and intellectual chequer-work; not that they love to make darkness, but that they luxuriate too eagerly in light: and their "over-muchness" toward some men involves an over-littleness towards others, whom they involuntarily contrast, in all their poor and peccant reality, with gorgeous idealisms. The larger half of mankind is exiled for them into a hemisphere of shadow, as dim, cold, and negative as the unlit portion of the crescent moon. Lamb's general tendency, though he too could warmly admire, was in a different direction; he was ever introducing streaks and gleams of light into darkness, rather than drowning certain objects in floods of it; and this, I think, proceeded in him from indulgence toward human nature rather than from indifference to evil. To his friend the disposition to exalt and glorify co-existed, in a very remarkable manner, with a power of severe analysis of character and poignant exhibition of it,--a power which few possess without exercising it some time or other to their own sorrow and injury. The consequence to Mr. Coleridge was that he sometimes seemed untrue to himself, when he had but brought forward, one after another, perfectly real and sincere moods of his mind. In his fine poem commemorating the deaths of several poets, Mr. Wordsworth thus joins my father's name with that of his almost life-long friend: "Nor has the rolling year twice measured, From sign to sign, its steadfast course, Since every mortal power of Coleridge Was frozen at its marvellous source; The rapt One of the godlike forehead, The heaven-eyed creature sleeps in earth; And Lamb, the frolic and the gentle, Has vanished from his lonely hearth." S. C. Footnote 1 ends: main text resumes:] Numerous retrospective notices by himself and others exist of this period; but none of his really boyish letters have been preserved. The exquisite Essay intitled, "Christ's Hospital five and thirty years ago", by Lamb, is principally founded on that delightful writer's recollections of the boy Coleridge, and that boy's own subsequent descriptions of his school days. Coleridge is Lamb's "poor friendless boy."--"My parents and those who should care for me, were far away. Those few acquaintances of theirs, which they could reckon upon being kind to me in the great city, after a little forced notice, which they had the grace to take of me on my first arrival in town, soon grew tired of my holiday visits. They seemed to them to recur too often, though I thought them few enough; and, one after another, they all failed me, and I felt myself alone among six hundred playmates. O the cruelty of separating a poor lad from his early homestead! The yearnings which I used to have toward it in those unfledged years! How, in my dreams would my native town, far in the west, come back with its church, its trees, and faces! How I would wake weeping, and in the anguish of my heart exclaim upon sweet "Calne in Wiltshire!"" Yet it must not be supposed that Coleridge was an unhappy boy. He was naturally of a joyous temperament, and in one amusement, swimming, he excelled and took singular delight. Indeed he believed, and probably with truth, that his health was seriously injured by his excess in bathing, coupled with such tricks as swimming across the New River in his clothes, and drying them on his back, and the like. But reading was a perpetual feast to him. "From eight to fourteen," he writes, "I was a playless day-dreamer, a "helluo librorum", my appetite for which was indulged by a singular incident: a stranger, who was struck by my conversation, made me free of a circulating library in King Street, Cheapside."--"Here," he proceeds, "I read through the catalogue, folios and all, whether I understood them, or did not understand them, running all risks in skulking out to get the two volumes which I was entitled to have daily. Conceive what I must have been at fourteen; I was in a continual low fever. My whole being was, with eyes closed to every object of present sense, to crumple myself up in a sunny comer, and read, read, read,--fancy myself on Robinson Crusoe's island, finding a mountain of plum-cake, and eating a room for myself, and then eating it into the shapes of tables and chairs--hunger and fancy!"--"My talents and superiority," he continues, "made me for ever at the head in my routine of study, though utterly without the desire to be so; without a spark of ambition; and as to emulation, it had no meaning for me; but the difference between me and my form-fellows, in our lessons and exercises, bore no proportion to the measureless difference between me and them in the wide, wild, wilderness of useless, unarranged book knowledge and book thoughts. Thank Heaven! it was not the age for getting up prodigies; but at twelve or fourteen I should have made as pretty a juvenile prodigy as was ever emasculated and ruined by fond and idle wonderment. Thank Heaven! I was flogged instead of being flattered. However, as I climbed up the school, my lot was somewhat alleviated." CHAPTER II CAMBRIDGE AND PANTISOCRACY (1791 to 1795) Come back into memory, like as thou wert in the day-spring of thy fancies, with Hope like a fiery column before thee--the dark pillar not yet turned--Samuel Taylor Coleridge--Logician, Metaphysician, Bard!-- S. T. Coleridge entered at Jesus College, Cambridge, the 5th of February, 1791. [He did not go into residence till October 1791.] The poems he wrote about this time and during his first vacation at College are rather conventional, and give few indications of his future deft handling of verse. His "Mathematical Problem" sent to his brother George, is a piece of droll nonsense, but the letter accompanying it is much better than the verse. It reads as follows: LETTER 6. TO GEORGE COLERIDGE, WITH A POEM ENTITLED "A MATHEMATICAL PROBLEM" Dear Brother, I have often been surprised that Mathematics, the quintessence of Truth, should have found admirers so few and so languid. Frequent consideration and minute scrutiny have at length unravelled the cause; viz. that though Reason is feasted, Imagination is starved; whilst Reason is luxuriating in its proper Paradise, Imagination is wearily travelling on a dreary desert. To assist Reason by the stimulus of Imagination is the design of the following production. In the execution of it much may be objectionable. The verse (particularly in the introduction of the ode) may be accused of unwarrantable liberties, but they are liberties equally homogeneal with the exactness of Mathematical disquisition, and the boldness of Pindaric daring. I have three strong champions to defend me against the attacks of Criticism: the Novelty, the Difficulty, and the Utility of the work. I may justly plume myself that I first have drawn the nymph Mathesis from the visionary caves of abstracted idea, and caused her to unite with Harmony. The first-born of this Union I now present to you; with interested motives indeed--as I expect to receive in return the more valuable offspring of your Muse. Thine ever S. T. C. Christ's Hospital, March 31, 1791. [1] [Footnote 1: Letters VIII-XXXI follow No. 6 of our collection.] The piece of doggerel, to which this epistle is a preface, will be found in vol. ii, p. 386, of the Aldine Edition of Coleridge's Poems. Coleridge's brother George also wrote verses, and "Mathematical Problem" is just one of the cantrips in verse that passed between the brothers.] He gained Sir William Browne's gold medal for the Greek Ode in the summer of that year. It was on the Slave Trade. The poetic force and originality of this Ode were, as he said himself, much beyond the language in which they were conveyed. In the winter of 1792-3 he stood for the University (Craven) Scholarship with Dr. Keate, the late head-master of Eton, Mr. Bethell (of Yorkshire) and Bishop Butler, who was the successful candidate. In 1793 he wrote without success for the Greek Ode on Astronomy, the prize for which was gained by Dr. Keate. The original is not known to exist, but the reader may see what is probably a very free version of it by Mr. Southey in his Minor Poems. ("Poetical Works", vol. ii, p. 170.) "Coleridge"--says a schoolfellow [1] of his who followed him to Cambridge in 1792, "was very studious, but his reading was desultory and capricious. He took little exercise merely for the sake of exercise: but he was ready at any time to unbend his mind in conversation; and, for the sake of this, his room, (the ground-floor room on the right hand of the staircase facing the great gate,) was a constant rendezvous of conversation-loving friends. I will not call them loungers, for they did not call to kill time, but to enjoy it. What evenings have I spent in those rooms! What little suppers, or "sizings", as they were called, have I enjoyed; when Aeschylus, and Plato, and Thucydides were pushed aside, with a pile of lexicons and the like, to discuss the pamphlets of the day. Ever and anon a pamphlet issued from the pen of Burke. There was no need of having the book before us;--Coleridge had read it in the morning, and in the evening he would repeat whole pages "verbatim"."--"College Reminiscences, Gentleman's Mag"., Dec. 1834. [Footnote 1: C. V. Le Grice.] In May and June, 1793, Frend's trial took place in the Vice- Chancellor's Court, and in the Court of Delegates, at Cambridge. Frend was a Fellow of Jesus, and a slight acquaintance had existed between him and Coleridge, who however soon became his partizan. Mr. C. used to relate a remarkable incident, which is thus preserved by Mr. Gillman:--"The trial was observed by Coleridge to be going against Frend, when some observation or speech was made in his favour;--a dying hope thrown out, as it appeared, to Coleridge, who in the midst of the Senate House, whilst sitting on one of the benches, extended his hands and clapped them. The Proctor in a loud voice demanded who had committed this indecorum. Silence ensued. The Proctor, in an elevated tone, said to a young man sitting near Coleridge, "Twas you, Sir!' The reply was as prompt as the accusation; for, immediately holding out the stump of his right arm, it appeared that he had lost his hand;--'I would, Sir,' said he, 'that I had the power!' That no innocent person should incur blame, Coleridge went directly afterwards to the Proctor, who told him that he saw him clap his hands, but fixed on this person, who he knew had not the power. 'You have had,' said he, 'a narrow escape.'"--"Life of S. T. C"., i, p. 55. Coleridge passed the summer of 1793 at Ottery, and whilst there wrote his "Songs of the Pixies" ("Poetical Works", i, p. 13), and some other little pieces. He returned to Cambridge in October, but, in the following month, in a moment of despondency and vexation of spirit, occasioned principally by some debts not amounting to £100 he suddenly left his college and went to London. In a few days he was reduced to want, and observing a recruiting advertisement he resolved to get bread and overcome a prejudice at the same time by becoming a soldier. He accordingly applied to the sergeant, and after some delay was marched down to Reading, where he regularly enlisted as a private in the 15th Light Dragoons on the 3d of December, 1793. He kept his initials under the names of Silas Tomkyn Comberbacke. "I sometimes," he writes in a letter, "compare my own life with that of Steele, (yet O! how unlike!)--led to this from having myself also for a brief time borne arms, and written 'private' after my name, or rather another name; for, being at a loss when suddenly asked my name, I answered "Cumberback", and verily my habits were so little equestrian, that my horse, I doubt not, was of that opinion." Coleridge continued four months a light dragoon, during which time he saw and suffered much. He rode his horse ill, and groomed him worse; but he made amends by nursing the sick, and writing letters for the sound. His education was detected by one of his officers, Captain Nathaniel Ogle, who observed the words,--"Eheu! quam infortunii miserrimum est fuisse felicem!"--freshly written in pencil on the stable-wall or door, and ascertained that Comberbacke was the writer. But the termination of his military career was brought about by a chance recognition in the street: his family was apprized of his situation, and after some difficulty he was duly discharged on the both of April, 1794, at Hounslow. Coleridge now returned to Cambridge, and remained there till the commencement of the summer vacation. But the adventures of the preceding six months had broken the continuity of his academic life, and given birth to new views of future exertion. His acquaintance with Frend had materially contributed to his adoption of the system called Unitarianism, which he now openly professed, and this alone made it imperative on his conscience to decline availing himself of any advantages dependent on his entering into holy orders, or subscribing the Articles of the English Church. He lived, nevertheless, to see and renounce his error, and to leave on record his deep and solemn faith in the catholic doctrine of Trinal Unity, and the Redemption of man through the sacrifice of Christ, both God and Man. Indeed his Unitarianism, such as it was, was not of the ordinary quality. "I can truly say"--were Coleridge's words in after life--"that I never falsified the Scripture. I always told the Unitarians that their interpretations of the Scripture were intolerable upon any principles of sound criticism; and that if they were to offer to construe the will of a neighbour as they did that of their Maker, they would be scouted out of society. I said then plainly and openly that it was clear enough that John and Paul were not Unitarians. But at that time I had a strong sense of the repugnancy of the doctrine of vicarious atonement to the moral being, and I thought nothing could counterbalance that. 'What care I,' I said, 'for the Platonisms of John, or the Rabbinisms of Paul?--My conscience revolts!' That was the ground of my Unitarianism."--"Table Talk", Bohn Library edition, p. 290. At the commencement of the Long Vacation, in June, 1794, Coleridge went to Oxford on a visit to an old school-fellow, intending probably to proceed afterwards to his mother at Ottery. But an accidental introduction to Robert Southey, then an under-graduate at Balliol College, first delayed, and ultimately prevented, the completion of this design, and became, in its consequences, the hinge on which a large part of Coleridge's after life was destined to turn. The first letter to Southey was written from Gloucester on 6th July 1794, and it shows the degree of intimacy on which the two undergraduates stood at this time. They had met only about a month before, for Southey writes on 12th June to his friend Grosvenor Bedford: "Allen is with us daily and his friend from Cambridge, Coleridge, whose poems you will oblige me by subscribing to, either at Hookam's or Edward's. He is of most uncommon merit, of the strongest genius, the clearest judgment, the best heart. My friend he already is, and must hereafter be yours," ("Life and Correspondence of Southey", i, 210). The poems mentioned were a projected volume of "Imitations from Modern Latin Poets", of which an ode after Casimir is the only relic. Coleridge's first letter to Southey reads as follows: LETTER 7. TO SOUTHEY 6 July 1794. You are averse to gratitudinarian flourishes, else would I talk about hospitality, attention, &c. &c.; however, as I must not thank you, I will thank my stars. Verily, Southey, I like not Oxford, nor the inhabitants of it. I would say thou art a nightingale among owls; but thou art so songless and heavy towards night that I will rather liken thee to the matin lark, thy "nest" is in a blighted cornfield, where the sleepy poppy nods its red-cowled head, and the weak-eyed mole plies his dark work; but thy soaring is even unto heaven. Or let me add (for my appetite for similes is truly canine at this moment), that as the Italian nobles their new-fashioned doors, so thou dost make the adamantine gate of Democracy turn on its golden hinges to most sweet music. [1] [Footnote 1: Letter XXXII gives the full text of No. 7. Letter XXXIII is dated 15 July, 1794.] For the next fifteen months Coleridge and Southey were close companions, Coleridge being the elder by two years. Upon the present occasion, however, he left Oxford with an acquaintance, Mr. Hucks, for a pedestrian tour in Wales. [2] Two other friends, Brookes and Berdmore, joined them in the course of their ramble; and at Caernarvon Mr. Coleridge wrote the following letter to Mr. Martin, of Jesus College. [Footnote 2: It is to this tour that he refers in the "Table Talk", p. 88.--"I took the thought of "grinning for joy" in that poem ("The Ancient Mariner") from my companion (Berdmore's) remark to me, when we had climbed to the top of Penmaenmaur, and were nearly dead with thirst. We could not speak from the constriction, till we found a little puddle under a stone. He said to me,--'You grinned like an idiot.' He had done the same."] LETTER 8. To HENRY MARTIN [1] July 22d, 1794. Dear Martin, From Oxford to Gloucester,+ to Ross,+ to Hereford, to Leominster, to Bishop's Castle,+ to Montgomery, to Welshpool, Llanvelling,+ Llangunnog, Bala,+ Druid House,+ Llangollin, Wrexham,++ Ruthin, Denbigh,+ St. Asaph, Holywell,+ Rudland, Abergeley,+ Aberconway,+ Abber,+ over a ferry to Beaumaris+ (Anglesea), Amlock,+ Copper Mines, Gwindu, Moeldon, over a ferry to Caernarvon, have I journeyed, now philosophizing with Hucks, 1 now melancholizing by myself, or else indulging those daydreams of fancy, that make realities more gloomy. To whatever place I have affixed the mark +, there we slept. The first part of our tour was intensely hot--the roads, white and dazzling, seemed to undulate with heat--and the country, bare and unhedged, presenting nothing but stone fences, dreary to the eye and scorching to the touch. At Ross we took up our quarters at the King's Arms, once the house of Mr. Kyrle, the celebrated Man of Ross. I gave the window-shutter a few verses, Which I shall add to the end of the letter. The walk from Llangunnog to Bala over the mountains was most wild and romantic; there are immense and rugged clefts in the mountains, which in winter must form cataracts most tremendous; now there is just enough sun-glittering water dashed down over them to soothe, not disturb the ear. I climbed up a precipice on which was a large thorn-tree, and slept by the side of one of them near two hours. At Bala I was apprehensive that I had caught the itch from a Welsh democrat, who was charmed with my sentiments; he bruised my hand with a grasp of ardour, and I trembled lest some discontented citizens of the "animalcular" republic might have emigrated. Shortly after, in came a clergyman well dressed, and with him four other gentlemen. I was asked for a public character; I gave Dr. Priestley. The clergyman whispered his neighbour, who it seems is the apothecary of the parish--"Republicans!" Accordingly when the doctor, as they call apothecaries, was to have given a name, "I gives a sentiment, gemmen! may all republicans be "gull"oteened!" Up starts the democrat; "May all fools be gulloteened, and then you will be the first!" Fool, rogue, traitor, liar, &c. flew in each other's faces in hailstorms of vociferation. This is nothing in Wales--they make if necessary vent-holes for the sulphureous fumes of their temper! I endeavoured to calm the tempest by observing that however different our political opinions might be, the appearance of a clergyman assured me that we were all Christians, though I found it rather difficult to reconcile the last sentiment with the spirit of Christianity! "Pho!" quoth the clergyman; "Christianity! Why we a'nt at "church" now, are we? The gentleman's sentiment was a very good one, because it shows him to be sincere in his principles." Welsh politics, however, could not prevail over Welsh hospitality; they all shook hands with me (except the parson), and said I was an open-speaking, honest-hearted fellow, though I was a bit of a democrat. On our road from Bala to Druid House, we met Brookes and Berdmore. Our rival pedestrians, a "Gemini" of Powells, were vigorously marching onward, in a postchaise! Berdmore had been ill. We were not a little glad to see each other. Llangollen is a village most romantically situated; but the weather was so intensely hot that we saw only what was to be admired--we could not admire. At Wrexham the tower is most magnificent; and in the church is a white marble monument of Lady Middleton, superior, "mea quidem sententia", to anything in Westminster Abbey. It had entirely escaped my memory, that Wrexham was the residence of a Miss E. Evans, a young lady with whom in happier days I had been in habits of fraternal correspondence; she lives with her grandmother. As I was standing at the window of the inn, she passed by, and with her, to my utter astonishment, her sister, Mary Evans, "quam afflictim et perdite amabam",--yea, even to anguish. They both started, and gave a short cry, almost a faint shriek; I sickened, and well nigh fainted, but instantly retired. Had I appeared to recognise her, my fortitude would not have supported me: Vivit, sed mihi non vivit--nova forte marita. Ah, dolor! alterius nunc a cervice pependit. Vos, malefida valete accensae insomnia mentis, Littora amata valete; vale ah! formosa Maria. Hucks informed me that the two sisters walked by the window four or five times, as if anxiously. Doubtless they think themselves deceived by some face strikingly like me. God bless her! Her image is in the sanctuary of my bosom, and never can it be torn from thence, but by the strings that grapple my heart to life! This circumstance made me quite ill. I had been wandering among the wild-wood scenery and terrible graces of the Welsh mountains to wear away, not to revive, the images of the past;--but love is a local anguish; I am fifty miles distant, and am not half so miserable. At Denbigh is the finest ruined castle in the kingdom; it surpassed everything I could have conceived. I wandered there two hours in a still evening, feeding upon melancholy. Two well dressed young men were roaming there. "I will play my flute here," said the first; "it will have a romantic effect." "Bless thee, man of genius and sensibility," I silently exclaimed. He sate down amid the most awful part of the ruins; the moon just began to make her rays pre-dominant over the lingering daylight; I preattuned my feelings to emotion;--and the romantic youth instantly struck up the sadly pleasing tunes of "Miss Carey"--"The British Lion is my sign--A roaring trade I drive on", &c. Three miles from Denbigh, on the road to St. Asaph, is a fine bridge with one arch of great, great grandeur. Stand at a little distance, and through it you see the woods waving on the hill-bank of the river in a most lovely point of view. A "beautiful" prospect is always more picturesque when seen at some little distance through an arch. I have frequently thought of Michael Taylor's way of viewing a landscape between his thighs. Under the arch was the most perfect echo I ever heard. Hucks sang "Sweet Echo" with great effect. At Holywell I bathed in the famous St. Winifred's Well. It is an excellent cold bath. At Rudland is a fine ruined castle. Abergeley is a large village on the sea-coast. Walking on the sea sands I was surprised to see a number of fine women bathing promiscuously with men and boys perfectly naked. Doubtless the citadels of their chastity are so impregnably strong, that they need not the ornamental bulwarks of modesty; but, seriously speaking, where sexual distinctions are least observed, men and women live together in the greatest purity. Concealment sets the imagination a-working, and as it were, "cantharadizes" our desires. Just before I quitted Cambridge, I met a countryman with a strange walking-stick, five feet in length. I eagerly bought it, and a most faithful servant it has proved to me. My sudden affection for it has mellowed into settled friendship. On the morning of our leaving Abergeley, just before our final departure, I looked for my stick in the place in which I had left it over night. It was gone. I alarmed the house; no one knew any thing of it. In the flurry of anxiety I sent for the Crier of the town, and gave him the following to cry about the town and the beach, which he did with a gravity for which I am indebted to his stupidity. "Missing from the Bee Inn, Abergeley, a curious walking-stick. On one side it displays the head of an eagle, the eyes of which represent rising suns, and the ears Turkish crescents; on the other side is the portrait of the owner in wood-work. Beneath the head of the eagle is a Welsh wig, and around the neck of the stick is a Queen Elizabeth's ruff in tin. All down it waves the line of beauty in very ugly carving. If any gentleman (or lady) has fallen in love with the above described stick, and secretly carried off the same, he (or she) is hereby earnestly admonished to conquer a passion, the continuance of which must prove fatal to his (or her) honesty. And if the said stick has slipped into such gentleman's (or lady's) hand through inadvertence, he (or she) is required to rectify the mistake with all convenient speed. God save the king." Abergeley is a fashionable Welsh watering place, and so singular a proclamation excited no small crowd on the beach, among the rest a lame old gentleman, in whose hands was descried my dear stick. The old gentleman, who lodged at our inn, felt great confusion, and walked homewards, the solemn Crier before him, and a various cavalcade behind him. I kept the muscles of my face in tolerable subjection. He made his lameness an apology for borrowing my stick, supposed he should have returned before I had wanted it, &c. &c. Thus it ended, except that a very handsome young lady put her head out of a coach-window, and begged my permission to have the bill which I had delivered to the Crier. I acceded to the request with a compliment, that lighted up a blush on her cheek, and a smile on her lip. We passed over a ferry to Aberconway. We had scarcely left the boat ere we descried Brookes and Berdmore, with whom we have joined parties, nor do we mean to separate. Our tour through Anglesea to Caernarvon has been repaid by scarcely one object worth seeing. To-morrow we visit Snowdon. Brookes, Berdmore, and myself, at the imminent hazard of our lives, scaled the very summit of Penmaenmaur. It was a most dreadful expedition. I will give you the account in some future letter. I sent for Bowles's Works while at Oxford. How was I shocked! Every omission and every alteration disgusted taste, and mangled sensibility. Surely some Oxford toad had been squatting at the poet's ear, and spitting into it the cold venom of dulness. It is not Bowles; he is still the same, (the added poems will prove it) descriptive, dignified, tender, sublime. The sonnets added are exquisite. Abba Thule has marked beauties, and the little poem at Southampton is a diamond; in whatever light you place it, it reflects beauty and splendour. The "Shakespeare" is sadly unequal to the rest. Yet in whose poems, except those of Bowles, would it not have been excellent? Direct to me, to be left at the Post Office, Bristol, and tell me everything about yourself, how you have spent the vacation, &c. Believe me, with gratitude and fraternal friendship, Your obliged S. T. COLERIDGE. [Footnote 1: Long portions of this letter appear in a letter to Southey of 15 September 1794. See "Letters", p. 74.] [Footnote 2: Hucks published, in 1795, an account of the holiday entitled "Tour in North Wales".] On his return from this excursion Coleridge went, by appointment, to Bristol for the purpose of meeting Southey, whose person and conversation had excited in him the most lively admiration. This was at the end of August or beginning of September. Southey, whose mother then lived at Bath, came over to Bristol accordingly to receive his new friend, who had left as deep an impression on him, and in that city introduced Coleridge to Robert Lovell, a young Quaker, then recently married to Mary Fricker, and residing in the Old Market. After a short stay at Bristol, where he first saw Sarah Fricker, Mrs. Lovell's elder sister, Coleridge accompanied Southey on his return to Bath. There he remained for some weeks, principally engaged in making love, and in maturing, with his friend, the plan, which he had for some time cherished, of a social community to be established in America upon what he termed a pantisocratical basis. Much discussion has taken place regarding the origin of Pantisocracy, most writers on the subject attributing the scheme to Coleridge. A perusal of the letters of Southey, however, leads to a different conclusion. Southey was enamoured during his stay at Oxford with Plato, and especially with the "Republic" of the Greek philosopher; and he frequently quotes from the work or refers to its principles in his correspondence with Grosvenor and Horace W. Bedford between 11th November 1793 and 12th June 1794. Before his meeting with Southey no trace of ideal Republicanism appears in the letters of Coleridge. His leaning notwithstanding this was already towards Republicanism, and the friendship struck up between him and Southey was a natural consequence of flint coming into contact with steel. The next two letters, to Southey, indicate the fiery nature of the young Republicans. LETTER 9. To SOUTHEY 6 Sept. 1794. The day after my arrival I finished the first act: I transcribed it. The next morning Franklin (of Pembroke Coll. Cam., a "ci-devant Grecian" of our school--so we call the first boys) called on me, and persuaded me to go with him and breakfast with Dyer, author of "The Complaints of the Poor, A Subscription", &c. &c. I went; explained our system. He was enraptured; pronounced it impregnable. He is intimate with Dr. Priestley, and doubts not that the Doctor will join us. He showed me some poetry, and I showed him part of the first act, which I happened to have about me. He liked it hugely; it was "a nail that would drive...." Every night I meet a most intelligent young man, who has spent the last five years of his life in America, and is lately come from thence as an agent to sell land. He was of our school. I had been kind to him: he remembers it, and comes regularly every evening to "benefit by conversation," he says. He says £2,000 will do; that he doubts not we can contract for our passage under £400; that we shall buy the land a great deal cheaper when we arrive at America than we could do in England; "or why," he adds, "am I sent over here?" That twelve men may "easily" clear 300 acres in four or five months; and that, for 600 dollars, a thousand acres may be cleared, and houses built on them. He recommends the Susquehanna, from its excessive beauty and its security from hostile Indians. Every possible assistance will be given us; we may get credit for the land for ten years or more, as we settle upon. That literary characters make "money" there: &c. &c. He never saw a "bison" in his life, but has heard of them: they are quite backwards. The mosquitos are not so bad as our gnats; and, after you have been there a little while, they don't trouble you much. LETTER 10. TO SOUTHEY 18 Sept. 1794. Since I quitted this room what and how important events have been evolved! America! Southey! Miss Fricker!... Pantisocracy! Oh! I shall have such a scheme of it! My head, my heart, are all alive. I have drawn up my arguments in battle array: they shall have the "tactician" excellence of the mathematician, with the enthusiasm of the poet. The head shall be the mass; the heart, the fiery spirit that fills, informs and agitates the whole. SHAD GOES WITH US: HE IS MY BROTHER!! I am longing to be with you: make Edith my sister. Surely, Southey, we shall be frendotatoi meta frendous--most friendly where all are friends. She must, therefore, be more emphatically my sister.... C----, the most excellent, the most Pantisocratic of aristocrats, has been laughing at me. Up I arose, terrible is reasoning. He fled from me, because "he would not answer for his own sanity, sitting so near a madman of genius." He told me that the strength of my imagination had intoxicated my reason, and that the acuteness of my reason had given a directing influ-* *ence to my imagination. Four months ago the remark would not have been more elegant than just: now it is nothing. [1] [Footnote 1: This letter is given in full in "Letters", No. XXXIV.] These letters show that Pantisocracy was now the all absorbing topic. The following letter written at this time by Coleridge to Mr. Charles Heath, of Monmouth, is a curious evidence of his earnestness upon this subject: LETTER 11. To CHARLES HEATH OF MONMOUTH [1] (----1794). Sir, Your brother has introduced my name to you; I shall therefore offer no apology for this letter. A small but liberalized party have formed a scheme of emigration on the principles of an abolition of individual property. Of their political creed, and the arguments by which they support and elucidate it they are preparing a few copies--not as meaning to publish them, but for private distribution. In this work they will have endeavoured to prove the exclusive justice of the system and its practicability; nor will they have omitted to sketch out the code of contracts necessary for the internal regulation of the Society; all of which will of course be submitted to the improvements and approbation of each component member. As soon as the work is printed, one or more copies shall be transmitted to you. Of the characters of the individuals who compose the party I find it embarrassing to speak; yet, vanity apart, I may assert with truth that they have each a sufficient strength of head to make the virtues of the heart respectable, and that they are all highly charged with that enthusiasm which results from strong perceptions of moral rectitude, called into life and action by ardent feelings. With regard to pecuniary matters it is found necessary, if twelve men with their families emigrate on this system, that £2,000 should be the aggregate of their contributions--but infer not from hence that each man's "quota" is to be settled with the littleness of arithmetical accuracy. No; all will strain every nerve; and then, I trust, the surplus money of some will supply the deficiencies of others. The "minutiae" of topographical information we are daily endeavouring to acquire; at present our plan is, to settle at a distance, but at a convenient distance, from Cooper's Town on the banks of the Susquehanna. This, however, will be the object of future investigation. For the time of emigration we have fixed on next March. In the course of the winter those of us whose bodies, from habits of sedentary study or academic indolence, have not acquired their full tone and strength, intend to learn the theory and practice of agriculture and carpentry, according as situation and circumstances make one or the other convenient. Your fellow Citizen, S. T. COLERIDGE. [Footnote: Letter XXXV is dated 19 Sept. 1794.] [Footnote 1: One of the Pantisocrats.] The members of the society at that time were Coleridge himself, Southey, Lovell, and George Burnett, a Somersetshire youth and fellow collegian with Southey. Toward the beginning of September, Coleridge left Bath and went, for the last time, as a student, to Cambridge, apparently with the view of taking his degree of B.A. after the ensuing Christmas. Here he published "The Fall of Robespierre" ("Lit. Remains", i, p. 1), of which the first act was written by himself, and the second and third by Mr. Southey, and the particulars of the origin and authorship of which may be found stated in an extract from a letter of Mr. Southey's there printed. The dedication to Mr. Martin is dated at Jesus College, 22nd of September 1794. [The following is the Dedication:] LETTER 12. To HENRY MARTIN, ESQ., OF JESUS COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE. DEDICATORY LETTER TO THE "FALL OF ROBESPIERRE," A DRAMA IN THREE ACTS BY COLERIDGE AND SOUTHEY. Dear Sir, Accept as a small testimony of my grateful attachment, the following Dramatic Poem, in which I have endeavoured to detail, in an interesting form, the fall of a man whose great bad actions have cast a disastrous lustre on his name. In the execution of the work, as intricacy of plot could not have been attempted without a gross violation of recent facts, it has been my sole aim to imitate the impassioned and highly figurative language of the French Orators, and to develop the characters of the chief actors on a vast stage of horrors. Yours fraternally, S. T. COLERIDGE. Jesus College, September 22, 1794. [Note: Letters XXXVI-XLII follow No. 12.] This dedicatory letter is no doubt an apology for a play destitute of dramatic art. The declamatory speeches may be an intentional imitation of the harangues of the Revolutionaries, but they are more likely to be the product of the inflation of youth. The redeeming feature of the play is the beautiful little lyric, "Domestic Peace", which is in rhythm an imitation of Collins' "How Sleep the Brave". The scheme of Pantisocracy was not much further forward at the close of 1794 than it had been in the summer; and Southey had been advised to try it in Wales instead of on the banks of the Susquehanna. Coleridge writes in December: LETTER 13. TO SOUTHEY --Dec. 1794. For God's sake, my dear fellow, tell me what we are to gain by taking a Welsh farm? Remember the principles and proposed consequences of Pantisocracy, and reflect in what degree they are attainable by Coleridge, Southey, Lovell, Burnett, and Co., some five men _going partners_ together! In the next place, supposing that we have found the preponderating utility of our aspheterising in Wales, let us by our speedy and united inquiries discover the sum of money necessary. Whether such a farm with so very large a house is to be procured without launching our frail and unpiloted bark on a rough sea of anxieties? How much money will be necessary for "furnishing" so large a house? How much necessary for the maintenance of so large a family--eighteen people--for a year at least?] [Note: Letters XLIII gives the full text of this Letter 13. Letters XLIV-L follow 13.] In January 1795, he was to return--and then with Spring breezes to repair to the banks of the Susquehanna! But his fate withstood;--he took no degree, nor ever crossed the Atlantic. Michaelmas Term, 1794, was the last he kept at Cambridge; the vacation following was passed in London with Charles Lamb, and in the beginning of 1795 he returned with Southey to Bristol, and there commenced man. The whole spring and summer of this year he devoted to public Lectures at Bristol, making in the intervals several excursions in Somersetshire, one memorial of which remains in the "Lines composed while climbing Brockley Combe". It was in one of these excursions that Mr. Coleridge and Mr.Wordsworth first met at the house of Mr. Pinney. [1] The first six of those Lectures constituted a course presenting a comparative view of the Civil War under Charles I and the French Revolution. Three of them, or probably the substance of four or five, were published at Bristol in the latter end of 1795, the first two together, with the title of "Conciones ad Populum", and the third with that of "The Plot Discovered". The eloquent passage in conclusion of the first of these Addresses was written by Mr. Southey. The tone throughout them all is vehemently hostile to the policy of the great minister of that day; but it is equally opposed to the spirit and maxims of Jacobinism. It was late in life that, after a reperusal of these "Conciones", Coleridge wrote on a blank page of one of them the following words:--"Except the two or three pages involving the doctrine of philosophical necessity and Unitarianism, I see little or nothing in these outbursts of my youthful zeal to retract; and with the exception of some flame-coloured epithets applied to persons, as to Mr. Pitt and others, or rather to personifications--(for such they really were to me)--as little to regret." Another course of six Lectures followed, "On Revealed Religion, its corruptions, and its political views". The Prospectus states--"that these Lectures are intended for two classes of men, Christians and Infidels;--the former, that they may be able to "give a reason for the hope that is in them";--the latter, that they may not determine against Christianity from arguments applicable to its corruptions only." Nothing remains of these Addresses, nor of two detached Lectures on the Slave Trade and the Hair Powder Tax, which were delivered in the interval between the two principal courses. They were all very popular amongst the opponents of the Governments; and those on religion in particular were highly applauded by his Unitarian auditors, amongst whom Dr. and Mrs. Estlin and Mr. Hort were always remembered by Coleridge with regard and esteem. The Transatlantic scheme, though still a favourite subject of conversation, was now in effect abandoned by these young Pantisocrats. Mr. C. was married at St. Mary Redcliff Church to Sarah Fricker on the 4th of October, 1795, and went to reside in a cottage at Clevedon on the Bristol Channel; and six weeks afterwards Mr. Southey was also married to Edith Fricker, and left Bristol on the same day on his route to Portugal. At Clevedon Mr. and Mrs. Coleridge resided with one of Mrs. C.'s unmarried sisters and Burnett until the beginning of December. [Footnote 1: This statement of H. N. Coleridge, and a remark by Wordsworth in a letter to Wrangham of November 20th, 1795, are the only evidence on which rests the belief that Coleridge and Wordsworth met before 1797. The letter is quoted in the "Athenaeum" of December 8th, 1894. See also Letter LXXXI, to Estlin, May 1798.] CHAPTER III THE WATCHMAN (1795 to 1796) Ah! quiet dell! dear cot, and mount sublime! I was constrained to quit you. Was it right, While my unnumbered brethren toiled and bled, That I should dream away th' entrusted hours On rose-leaf beds pampering the coward heart With feelings all too delicate for use? * * * * * I therefore go, and join head, heart and hand Active and firm, to fight the bloodless fight Of science, freedom, and the truth in Christ. Coleridge had in the course of the summer of 1795 become acquainted with that excellent and remarkable man, the late Thomas Poole of Nether Stowey, Somerset. In a letter written to him on the 7th of October, C. speaks of the prospect from his cottage, and of his future plans in the following way: LETTER 14. To THOMAS POOLE My Dear Sir, God bless you-or rather God be praised for that he has blessed you! On Sunday morning I was married at St. Mary's, Redcliff--from Chatterton's church. The thought gave a tinge of melancholy to the solemn joy which I felt, united to the woman, whom I love best of all created beings. We are settled, nay, quite domesticated, at Clevedon,--our comfortable cot! * * * The prospect around is perhaps more various than any in the kingdom: mine eye gluttonizes. The sea, the distant islands, the opposite coast!--I shall assuredly write rhymes, let the nine Muses prevent it if they can. * * * I have given up all thoughts of the Magazine for various reasons. It is a thing of monthly anxiety and quotidian bustle. To publish a Magazine for one year would be nonsense, and, if I pursue what I mean to pursue, my school-plan, I could not publish it for more than one year. In the course of half a year I mean to return to Cambridge--having previously taken my name off from the University's control--and, hiring lodgings there for myself and wife, finish my great work of "Imitations" in two volumes. My former works may, I hope, prove somewhat of genius and of erudition; this will be better; it will show great industry and manly consistency. At the end of it I shall publish proposals for a School. * * * My next letter will be long and full of something;--this is inanity and egotism. * * Believe me, dear Poole, your affectionate and mindful--friend, shall I so soon have to say? Believe me my heart prompts it. [1] S. T. COLERIDGE! In spite of this letter Coleridge had not abandoned the project of starting a magazine. His school-plan, as well as a project to become tutor to the sons of the Earl of Buchan at Edinburgh (see Letter to George Dyer, "Bookman" for May 1910), came to nothing. A meeting was held among his chief friends "one evening," says Cottle, "at the Rummer Tavern, to determine on the size, price, and time of publishing, with all other preliminaries essential to the launching this first-rate vessel on the mighty deep. Having heard of the circumstance the next day, I rather wondered at not having also been requested to attend, and while ruminating on the subject, I received from Mr. C. the following communication." [Footnote 1: Letter LI is our No. 14. LII is dated 13 November 1795.] LETTER 15. To COTTLE (--Dec. 1795). My dear Friend, I am fearful that you felt hurt at my not mentioning to you the proposed "Watchman", and from my not requesting you to attend the meeting. My dear friend, my reasons were these. All who met were expected to become subscribers to a fund; I knew there would be enough without you, and I knew, and felt, how much money had been drawn from you lately. God Almighty love you! S. T. C. "It is unknown," says Cottle, "when the following letter was received (although quite certain that it was not the evening in which Mr. Coleridge wrote his "Ode to the Departing Year"), and it is printed in this place at something of an uncertainty." The probable date is 1 January 1796. LETTER 16. To COTTLE January 1st (1796). My dear Cottle, I have been forced to disappoint not only you, but Dr. Beddoes, on an affair of some importance. Last night I was induced by strong and joint solicitation, to go to a cardclub to which Mr. Morgan belongs, and, after the playing was over, to sup, and spend the remainder of the night: having made a previous compact, that I should not drink; however just on the verge of twelve, I was desired to drink only one wine glass of punch, in honour of the departing year; and, after twelve, one other in honour of the new year. Though the glasses were very small, yet such was the effect produced during my sleep, that I awoke unwell, and in about twenty minutes after had a relapse of my bilious complaint. I am just now recovered, and with care, I doubt not, shall be as well as ever to-morrow. If I do not see you then, it will be from some relapse, which I have no reason, thank heaven, to anticipate. Yours affectionately, S. T. COLERIDGE. [The Mr. Morgan referred to in the above letter was John James Morgan with whom Coleridge afterwards lived in London, at Hammersmith, and at Calne. Dr. Beddoes was the founder of the Pneumatic Institution, and the friend of the Wedgwoods and Humphry Davy; and it was he who was instrumental in introducing Coleridge to these acquaintances.] The monthly anxiety of a Magazine justly alarmed Coleridge on the 7th of October; yet in the December following he courageously engaged to conduct a weekly political Miscellany. This was _The Watchman_, of which the following Prospectus was in that month printed and circulated. "To supply at once the places of a Review, Newspaper, and Annual Register. "On Tuesday, the ist of March, 1796, will be published No. 1. price fourpence, of a Miscellany, to be continued every eighth day, under the name of "The Watchman", by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This Miscellany will be comprised in two sheets, or thirty-two pages, closely printed in 8vo; the type, long primer. Its contents, 1:--A history of the domestic and foreign policy of the preceding days. 2:--The speeches in both Houses of Parliament; and, during the recess, select parliamentary speeches from the commencement of the reign of Charles I. to the present æra, with notes historical and biographical. 3:--Original essays and poetry. 4:--Review of interesting and important publications. Its advantages, 1. There being no advertisements, a greater quantity of original matter will be given, and the speeches in Parliament will be less abridged. 2. From its form it may be bound up at the end of a year, and become an Annual Register. 3. This last circumstance may induce men of letters to prefer this Miscellany to more perishable publications as the vehicle of their effusions. 4. Whenever the Ministerial and Opposition prints differ in their accounts of occurrences, etc. such difference will always be faithfully stated." Mr. C. went to Bristol in the beginning of December for the purpose of arranging the preliminaries of this undertaking, and at the close of the month he set off upon the tour mentioned in Chapter X of the "Biographia Literaria", to collect subscribers. It will be remembered that he was at this time a professed Unitarian; and the project of becoming a minister of that persuasion seems to have passed through his head. He had previously preached, for the first time, two sermons at Mr. Jardine's Chapel in Bath, the subjects being the Corn Laws and the Hair Powder Tax. He appeared in the pulpit in a blue coat and white waistcoat, and, according to Mr. Cottle's testimony, who was present, Coleridge delivered himself languidly, and disappointed every one. But there is no doubt that he subsequently preached upon many occasions with very remarkable effect. The following extracts are from letters written by Mr. C. in the month of January, 1796, during his tour to his early and lasting friend, Mr. Josiah Wade of Bristol, and may serve as a commentary on parts of the accounts given of the same tour in the Biographia Literaria. LETTER 17. To JOSIAH WADE Worcester, January, 1796. My dear Wade, We were five in number, and twenty-five in quantity. The moment I entered the coach, I stumbled on a huge projection, which might be called a belly with the same propriety that you might name Mount Atlas a mole-hill. Heavens! that a man should be unconscionable enough to enter a stage coach, who would want elbow room if he were walking on Salisbury Plain. The said citizen was a most violent aristocrat, but a pleasant humorous fellow in other respects, and remarkably well informed in agricultural science; so that the time passed pleasantly enough. We arrived at Worcester at half-past two: I, of course, dined at the inn, where I met Mr. Stevens. After dinner I christianized myself, that is, washed and changed, and marched in finery and clean linen to High Street. With regard to business, there is no chance of doing anything at Worcester. The aristocrats are so numerous, and the influence of the clergy is so extensive, that Mr. Barr thinks no bookseller will venture to publish "The Watchman". *** S. T. COLERIDGE. P.S.--I hope and trust the young citizeness is well, and also Mrs. Wade. Give my love to the latter, and a kiss for me to Miss Bratinella. LETTER 18 Birmingham, January, 1796. My dear Friend, *** My exertions here have been incessant, for in whatever company I go, I am obliged to be the figurante of the circle. Yesterday I preached twice, and, indeed, performed the whole service, morning and afternoon. There were about 1,400 persons present, and my sermons, (great part extempore,) were preciously peppered with politics. I have here at least double the number of subscribers I had expected. * * * [It was at Birmingham that Coleridge met the Tallow Chandler whom he has immortalized in his "Biographia Literaria". The sketch of the "taperman of lights" is one of the masterpieces of English humour.] LETTER 19. To JOSIAH WADE Nottingham, January, 1796. My dear Friend, You will perceive by this letter I have changed my route. From Birmingham on Friday last (four o'clock in the morning), I proceeded to Derby, stayed there till Monday morning, and am now at Nottingham. From Nottingham I go to Sheffield; from Sheffield to Manchester; from Manchester to Liverpool; from Liverpool to London; from London to Bristol. Ah, what a weary way! My poor crazy ark has been tossed to and fro on an ocean of business, and I long for the Mount Ararat on which it is to rest. At Birmingham I was extremely unwell; a violent cold in my head and limbs confined me for two days. Business succeeded very well;--about a hundred subscribers I think. At Derby, also, I succeeded tolerably well. Mr. (Joseph) Strutt, the successor of Sir Richard Arkwright, tells me I may count on forty or fifty in Derby. Derby is full of curiosities;--the cotton and silk mills; Wright the painter, and Dr. Darwin,[l] the every thing but Christian. Dr. Darwin possesses, perhaps, a greater range of knowledge than any other man in Europe, and is the most inventive of philosophical men. He thinks in a new train on all subjects but religion. He bantered me on the subject of religion. I heard all his arguments, and told him it was infinitely consoling to me, to find that the arguments of so great a man, adduced against the existence of a God, and the evidences of revealed religion, were such as had startled me at fifteen, but had become the objects of my smile at twenty. Not one new objection--not even an ingenious one! He boasted "that he had never read one book in favour of such stuff, but that he had read all the works of Infidels!" What would you think, Mr. Wade, of a man who, having abused and ridiculed you, should openly declare that he had heard all that your enemies had to say against you, but had scorned to inquire the truth from any one of your friends? Would you think him an honest man? I am sure you would not. Yet such are all the Infidels whom I have known. They talk of a subject, yet are proud to confess themselves profoundly ignorant of it. Dr. Darwin would have been ashamed to reject Hutton's theory of the Earth without having minutely examined it;--yet what is it to us, how the earth was made, a thing impossible to be known? This system the Doctor did not reject without having severely studied it; but all at once he makes up his mind on such important subjects, as whether we be the outcasts of a blind idiot called Nature,[2] or the children of an All wise and Infinitely Good God!--whether we spend a few miserable years on this earth, and then sink into a clod of the valley; or endure the anxieties of mortal life, only to fit us for the enjoyment of immortal happiness! These subjects are unworthy a philosopher's investigation! He deems that there is a certain self- evidence in Infidelity, and becomes an Atheist by intuition. Well did St. Paul say, "ye have an evil heart of unbelief". * * * What lovely children Mr. Barr of Worcester has! After church, in the evening, they sat round and sang hymns so sweetly that they overpowered me. It was with great difficulty that I abstained from weeping aloud; and the infant in Mrs. B.'s arms leaned forward, and stretched his little arms, and stared, and smiled. It seemed a picture of heaven, where the different Orders of the blessed join different voices in one melodious hallelujah; and the babe looked like a young spirit just that moment arrived in heaven, startled at the seraphic songs, and seized at once with wonder and rapture. * * * From your affectionate friend, S. T. COLERIDGE. [Footnote 1: Erasmus Darwin, 1731-1802.] [Footnote 2: See poem, "Human Life", written about 1815.] LETTER 20 Sheffield, January, 1796. My very dear Friend, I arrived at this place late last night by the mail from Nottingham, where I have been treated with kindness and friendship, of which I can give you but a faint idea. I preached a charity sermon there last Sunday. I preached in coloured clothes. With regard to the gown at Birmingham (of which you inquire), I suffered myself to be over-persuaded. First of all, my sermon being of so political a tendency, had I worn my blue coat, it would have impugned Edwards. They would have said, he had stuck a political lecturer in his pulpit. Secondly, the society is of all sorts,--Socinians, Arians, Trinitarians, etc., and I must have shocked a multitude of prejudices. And thirdly, there is a difference between an inn and a place of residence. In the first, your example is of little consequence; in a single instance only, it ceases to operate as example; and my refusal would have been imputed to affectation, or an unaccommodating spirit. Assuredly I would not do it in a place where I intended to preach often. And even in the vestry at Birmingham, when they at last persuaded me, I told them I was acting against my better knowledge, and should possibly feel uneasy afterwards. So these accounts of the matter you must consider as reasons and palliations, concluding, "I plead guilty, my Lord!" Indeed I want firmness; I perceive I do. I have that within me which makes it difficult to say, No, repeatedly to a number of persons who seem uneasy and anxious. * * * My kind remembrances to Mrs. Wade. God bless her and you, and (like a bad shilling slipped in between two guineas), your faithful and affectionate friend, S. T. COLERIDGE. [Note 1: Letter LIII is our 19.] LETTER 21 Manchester, January 7, 1796. My dear Friend, I arrived at Manchester last night from Sheffield, to which place I shall only send about thirty numbers. I might have succeeded there, at least equally well with the former towns, but I should injure the sale of the "Iris", the editor of which paper, (a very amiable and ingenious young man of the name of James Montgomery)[1] is now in prison for a libel on a bloody-minded magistrate there. Of course I declined publicly advertising or disposing of "The Watch man" in that town. This morning I called on Mr. -------- with H.'s letter. Mr. --------- received me as a rider, and treated me with insolence that was really amusing from its novelty. "Overstocked with these articles. "---------" People always setting up some new thing or other. "---------" I read the "Star" and another paper: what could I want with this paper, which is nothing more?"--"Well, well, I'll consider of it." To these entertaining "bons mots" I returned the following repartee--"Good morning, Sir." * * * God bless you, S. T. C. [Footnote 1: The Poet, 1771-1854.] Mr. C. went to Liverpool and was as successful there as elsewhere generally in procuring subscribers to "The Watchman". The late Dr. Crompton found him out, and became his friend and patron. His exertions, however, at Liverpool were suddenly stopped by news of the critical state of Mrs. C.'s health, and a pressing request that he would immediately return to Bristol, whither Mrs. C. had now gone from Clevedon. Coleridge accordingly gave up his plan of visiting London, and left Liverpool on his homeward trip. From Lichfield he wrote to Mr. Wade the following letter: LETTER 22 Lichfield, January, 1796. My dear Friend, * * * I have succeeded very well here at Lichfield. Belcher, bookseller, Birmingham; Sutton, Nottingham; Pritchard, Derby; and Thomson, Manchester; are the publishers. In every number of "The Watchman" there will be printed these words, "Published in Bristol by the Author, S. T. Coleridge, and sold, etc." I verily believe no poor fellow's idea-pot ever bubbled up so vehemently with fears, doubts, and difficulties, as mine does at present. Heaven grant it may not boil over, and put out the fire! I am almost heartless. My past life seems to me like a dream, a feverish dream--all one gloomy huddle of strange actions and dim-discovered motives;--friendships lost by indolence, and happiness murdered by mismanaged sensibility. The present hour I seem in a quick-set hedge of embarrassments. For shame! I ought not to mistrust God; but, indeed, to hope is far more difficult than to fear. Bulls have horns, lions have talons: The fox and statesman subtle wiles ensure, The cit and polecat stink and are secure; Toads with their venom, doctors with their drug, The priest and hedgehog in their robes are snug. Oh, Nature! cruel step-mother and hard To thy poor naked, fenceless child, the bard! No horns but those by luckless Hymen worn, And those, alas! not Amalthaea's horn! With naked feelings, and with aching pride, He bears the unbroken blast on every side; Vampire booksellers drain him to the heart, And scorpion critics cureless venom dart. S. T. C. Coleridge on his return to Bristol resided for a short time on Redcliff Hill, in a house occupied by Mrs. C.'s mother. He had procured upwards of a thousand subscribers' names to "The Watchman", and had certainly some ground for confidence in his future success. His tour had been a triumph; and the impression made by his personal demeanour and extraordinary eloquence was unprecedented, and such as was never effaced from the recollection of those who met with him at this period. He seems to have employed the interval between his arrival in Bristol and the 1st of March--the day fixed for the appearance of "The Watchman"--in preparing for that work, and also in getting ready the materials of his first volume of poems, the copyright of which was purchased by Mr. Cottle for thirty guineas. Coleridge was a student all his life; he was very rarely indeed idle in the common sense of the term; but he was constitutionally indolent, averse from continuous exertion externally directed, and consequently the victim of a procrastinating habit, the occasion of innumerable distresses to himself and of endless solicitude to his friends, and which materially impaired, though it could not destroy, the operation and influence of his wonderful abilities. Hence, also, the fits of deep melancholy which from time to time seized his whole soul, during which he seemed an imprisoned man without hope of liberty. In February, 1796, whilst his volume was in the press, he wrote the following letter to Mr. Cottle: LETTER 23 My dear Cottle, I have this night and to-morrow for you, being alone, and my spirits calm. I shall consult my poetic honour, and of course your interest, more by staying at home than by drinking tea with you. I should be happy to see my poems out even by next week, and I shall continue in stirrups, that is, shall not dismount my Pegasus, till Monday morning, at which time you will have to thank God for having done with your affectionate friend always, but author evanescent, S. T. C. [The last letter is one of many short notes to Cottle explaining why he was not making progress with the proposed volume of Poems. The next is the concluding letter of the series, still apologizing for the delay. LETTER 24. To COTTLE. Stowey, (--Feb. 1796.) My dear Cottle, I feel it much, and very uncomfortable, that, loving you as a brother, and feeling pleasure in pouring out my heart to you, I should so seldom be able to write a letter to you, unconnected with business, and uncontaminated with excuses and apologies. I give every moment I can spare from my garden and the Reviews (i.e.) from my potatoes and meat to the poem ("Religious Musings"), but I go on slowly, for I torture the poem and myself with corrections; and what I write in an hour, I sometimes take two or three days in correcting. You may depend on it, the poem and prefaces will take up exactly the number of pages I mentioned, and I am extremely anxious to have the work as perfect as possible, and which I cannot do, if it be finished immediately. The "Religious Musings" I have altered monstrously, since I read them to you and received your criticisms. I shall send them to you in my next. The Sonnets I will send you with the "Musings". God love you! From your affectionate friend, S. T. COLERIDGE.] Shortly afterwards, mistaking the object of a message from Mr. Cottle for an application for "copy" for the press, Coleridge wrote the following letter with reference to the painful subject: LETTER 25 Redcliff Hill, February 22, 1796. My dear Sir, It is my duty and business to thank God for all his dispensations, and to believe them the best possible; but, indeed, I think I should have been more thankful, if He had made me a journeyman shoemaker, instead of an author by trade. I have left my friends; I have left plenty; I have left that ease which would have secured a literary immortality, and have enabled me to give to the public works conceived in moments of inspiration, and polished with leisurely solicitude; and, alas! for what have I left them? For--who deserted me in the hour of distress, and for a scheme of virtue impracticable and romantic! So I am forced to write for bread--write the flights of poetic enthusiasm, when every minute I am hearing a groan from my wife! Groans, and complaints, and sickness! The present hour I am in a quick-set hedge of embarrassment, and, whichever way I turn, a thorn runs into me. The future is cloud and thick darkness. Poverty, perhaps, and the thin faces of them that want bread looking up to me! Nor is this all. My happiest moments for composition are broken in upon by the reflection that I must make haste. "I am too late." "I am already months behind." "I have received my pay beforehand."----O wayward and desultory spirit of Genius, ill can'st thou brook a taskmaster! The tenderest touch from the hand of obligation wounds thee like a scourge of scorpions! I have been composing in the fields this morning, and came home to write down the first rude sheet of my Preface, when I heard that your man had brought a note from you. I have not seen it, but I guess its contents. I am writing as fast as I can. Depend on it, you shall not be out of pocket for me. I feel what I owe you, and, independently of this, I love you as a friend,--indeed so much that I regret, seriously regret, that you have been my copyholder. If I have written petulantly, forgive me. God knows I am sore all over. God bless you! and believe me that, setting gratitude aside, I love and esteem you, and have your interest at heart full as much as my own. S. T. COLERIDGE. [1] On the 1st of March, 1796, "The Watchman" was published; it ended with the tenth number on the 13th of May following. In March Mr. C. removed to a house in Oxford Street in Kingsdown, and thence wrote the following letter to Mr. Poole: [1: Letter LIV is our 25.] LETTER 26 30th March, 1796. My dear Poole, For the neglect in the transmission of "The Watchman", you must blame George Burnett, who undertook the business. I however will myself see it sent this week with the preceding Numbers. I am greatly obliged to you for your communication--(on the Slave Trade in No. V);--it appears in this Number. I am anxious to receive more from you, and likewise to know what you dislike in "The Watchman", and what you like, but particularly the former. You have not given me your opinion of "The Plot Discovered". Since you last saw me, I have been well nigh distracted. The repeated and most injurious blunders of my printer out of doors, and Mrs. Coleridge's danger at home--added to the gloomy prospect of so many mouths to open and shut, like puppets, as I move the string in the eating and drinking way;--but why complain to you? Misery is an article with which every market is so glutted that it can answer no one's purpose to export it. I have received many abusive letters, post-paid, thanks to the friendly malignants! But I am perfectly callous to disapprobation, except when it tends to lessen profit. Then indeed I am all one tremble of sensibility, marriage having taught me the wonderful uses of that vulgar commodity, yclept Bread. "The Watchman" succeeds so as to yield a "bread-and-cheesish" profit. Mrs. Coleridge is recovering apace, and deeply regrets that she was deprived of the pleasure of seeing you. We are in our new house, where there is a bed at your service whenever you will please to delight us with a visit. Surely in Spring you might force a few days into a sojourning with us. Dear Poole, you have borne yourself towards me most kindly with respect to my epistolary ingratitude. But I know that you forbade yourself to feel resentment towards me, because you had previously made my neglect ingratitude. A generous temper endures a great deal from one whom it has obliged deeply. My poems are finished. I will send you two copies the moment they are published. In No. III of "The Watchman" there are a few lines entitled, "The Hour when we shall meet again" ("Dim Hour! that sleep'st on pillowing clouds afar"), which I think you will like. I have received two or three letters from different "Anonymi", requesting me to give more poetry. One of them writes thus:-- "Sir, I detest your principles; your prose I think very so so; but your poetry is so beautiful that I take in your "Watchman" solely on account of it. In justice therefore to me and some others of my stamp, I entreat you to give us more verse, and less democratic scurrility. Your Admirer,--not Esteemer." Have you read over Dr. Lardner on the Logos? It is I think, scarcely possible to read it, and not be convinced. I find that "The Watchman" comes more easy to me, so that I shall begin about my Christian Lectures (meaning a publication of the course given in the preceding year). I will immediately order for you, unless you immediately countermand it, Count Rumford's Essays; in No. V of "The Watchman" you will see why. (That number contained a critique on the Essays.) I have enclosed Dr. Beddoes's late pamphlets; neither of them as yet published. The Doctor sent them to me.... My dutiful love to your excellent Mother, whom, believe me, I think of frequently and with a pang of affection. God bless you. I'll try and contrive to scribble a line and half every time the man goes with "The Watchman" to you. N.B. The Essay on Fasting I am ashamed of--(in No. II of "The Watchman");--but it is one of my misfortunes that I am obliged to publish ex tempore as well as compose. God bless you. S. T. COLERIDGE.[1] [Footnote 1: Letter LV is our 26.] Two days afterwards Mr. Coleridge wrote to Mr. B. Flower, then the editor of the "Cambridge Intelligencer", with whom he had been acquainted at the University: LETTER 27 April 1, 1796. Dear Sir, I transmitted to you by Mr. B---- a copy of my "Conciones ad Populum", and of an Address against the Bills (meaning "The Plot Discovered"). I have taken the liberty of enclosing ten of each, carriage paid, which you may perhaps have an opportunity of disposing of for me;--if not, give them away. The one is an eighteen-penny affair;--the other ninepence. I have likewise enclosed the Numbers which have been hitherto published of "The Watchman";--some of the Poetry may perhaps be serviceable to you in your paper. That sonnet on the rejection of Mr. Wilberforce's Bill in your Chronicle the week before last was written by Southey, author of "Joan of Arc", a year and a half ago, and sent to me per letter;-how it appeared with the late signature, let the plagiarist answer.... I have sent a copy of my Poems--(they were not yet published):--will you send them to Lunn and Deighton, and ask of them whether they would choose to have their names on the title page as publishers; and would you permit me to have yours? Robinson and, I believe, Cadell, will be the London publishers. Be so kind as to send an immediate answer. Please to present one of each of my pamphlets to Mr. Hall--(the late Robert Hall, the Baptist). I wish I could reach the perfection of his style. I think his style the best in the English language; if he have a rival, it is Mrs. Barbauld. You have, of course, seen Bishop Watson's Apology for the Bible. It is a complete confutation of Paine; but that was no difficult matter. The most formidable Infidel is Lessing, the author of "Emilia Galotti";--I ought to have written, "was", for he is dead. His book is not yet translated, and is entitled, in German, "Fragments of an Anonymous Author". It unites the wit of Voltaire with the subtlety of Hume and the profound erudition of "our" Lardner. I had some thoughts of translating it with an Answer, but gave it up, lest men, whose tempers and hearts incline them to disbelief, should get hold of it; and, though the answers are satisfactory to my own mind, they may not be equally so to the minds of others. I suppose you have heard that I am married. I was married on the 4th of October. I rest all my poetical credit on the "Religious Musings". Farewell; with high esteem, yours sincerely, S. T. COLERIDGE. Benjamin Flower, the editor of the "Cambridge Intelligencer", printed the first published version of the "Monody on Chatterton" in his Edition of the Rowley Poems, 1794. He was also to have been the publisher of the "Imitations of the Latin Poets", of which Coleridge spoke so often at this time. Our next letter is from "The Watchman" of 1 April, in answer to a correspondent. Godwin, whom Coleridge had hailed in one of his sonnets in the "Morning Chronicle" (10 January, 1795) as one formed to "illume a sunless world" by his "Political Justice" (1793), is here attacked with some virulence. In after years Coleridge held a better opinion of Godwin and wrote some of his finest letters to him. LETTER 28. TO CAIUS GRACCHUS. You have attacked me because I ventured to disapprove of Mr. Godwin's Works: I notice your attack because it affords me an opportunity of expressing more fully my sentiments respecting those principles.--I must not however wholly pass over the former part of your letter. The sentence "implicating them with party and calumniating opinions," is so inaccurately worded, that I must "guess" at your meaning. In my first essay I stated that literary works were generally reviewed by personal friends or private enemies of the Authors. This I "know" to be fact; and does the spirit of meekness forbid us to tell the truth? The passage in my Review of Mr. Burke's late pamphlet, you have wilfully misquoted: "with respect to the work in question," is an addition of your own. That work in question I myself considered as mere declamation; and "therefore" deemed it wofully inferior to the former production of the venerable Fanatic.--In what manner I could add to my numerous "ideal" trophies by quoting a beautiful passage from the pages which I was reviewing, I am ignorant. Perhaps the spirit of vanity lurked in the use of the word ""I""--"ere "I" begin the task of blame." It is pleasant to observe with what absurd anxiety this little monosyllable is avoided. Sometimes "the present writer" appears as its substitute: sometimes the modest author adopts the style of royalty, swelling and multiplying himself into "We"; and sometimes to escape the egotistic phrases of "in my opinion," or, "as I think," he utters dogmas, and positively asserts--"exempli gratia": ""It is" a work, which, etc." You deem me inconsistent, because, having written in praise of the metaphysician, I afterwards appear to condemn the essay on political justice. Would an eulogist of medical men be inconsistent, if he should write against vendors of (what he deemed) poisons? Without even the formality of a "since" or a "for" or a "because," you make an unqualified assertion, that this essay will be allowed by all, except the prejudiced, to be a deep, metaphysical work, though abstruse, etc. etc. Caius Gracchus must have been little accustomed to abstruse disquisitions, if he deem Mr. Godwin's work abstruse:--A chief (and certainly not a small) merit is its perspicuous and "popular" language. My chapter on modern patriotism is that which has irritated you. You condemn me as prejudiced--O this enlightened age! when it can be seriously charged against an essayist, that he is prejudiced in favour of gratitude, conjugal fidelity, filial affection, and the belief of God and a hereafter!! Of smart pretty fellows in Bristol are numbers, some Who so modish are grown, that they think plain sense cumbersome; And lest they should seem to be queer or ridiculous, They affect to believe neither God nor "old Nicholas"![1] I do consider Mr. Godwin's principles as vicious; and his book as a pander to sensuality. Once I thought otherwise--nay, even addressed a complimentary sonnet to the author, in the "Morning Chronicle", of which I confess with much moral and poetical contrition, that the lines and the subject were equally bad. I have since "studied" his work; and long before you had sent me your contemptuous challenge, had been preparing an examination of it, which will shortly appear in "The Watchman" in a series of essays. You deem me an "enthusiast"--an enthusiast, I presume, because I am not quite convinced with yourself and Mr. Godwin that mind will be omnipotent over matter, that a plough will go into the field and perform its labour without the presence of the agriculturist, that man may be immortal in this life, and that death is an act of the will!!!--You conclude with wishing that "The Watchman" "for the future may be conducted with less prejudice and greater liberality:"--I ought to be considered in two characters--as editor of the Miscellany, and as a frequent contributor. In the latter I contribute what I believe to be the truth; let him who thinks it error, contribute likewise, that where the poison is, there the antidote may be. In my former, that is, as the editor, I leave to the public the business of canvassing the nature of the principles, and assume to myself the power of admitting or rejecting any communications according to my best judgment of their style and ingenuity. The Miscellany is open to all "ingenious" men whatever their opinions may be, whether they be the disciples of Filmer, of Locke, of Paley, or of Godwin. One word more of "the spirit of meekness." I meant by this profession to declare my intention of attacking things without expressing malignity to persons. I am young; and may occasionally write with the intemperance of a young man's zeal. Let me borrow an apology from the great and excellent Dr. Hartley, who of all men least needed it. "I can truly say, that my free and unreserved manner of speaking has flowed from the sincerity and earnestness of my heart." But I will not undertake to justify all that I have said. Some things may be too hasty and censorious; or however, be unbecoming my age and station. I heartily wish that I could have observed the true medium. For want of candour is not less an offence against the Gospel of Christ, than false shame and want of courage in his cause. S. T. COLERIDGE. [Footnote 1: The lines are by Coleridge.] LETTER 29. TO MR. POOLE. 11th April, 1796. My dear, very dear Friend, I have sent the 5th, 6th, and part of the 7th Number--all as yet printed. Your censures are all right: I wish your praises were equally so. The Essay on Fasts I am ashamed of. It was conceived in the spirit, and clothed in the harsh scoffing, of an Infidel. You wish to have one long essay;--so should I wish; but so do not my subscribers wish. I feel the perplexities of my undertaking increase daily. In London and Bristol "The Watchman" is read for its original matter,--the news and debates barely tolerated. The people of Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham, etc., take it as a newspaper, and regard the essays and poems as intruders unwished for and unwelcome. In short, each subscriber, instead of regarding himself as a point in the circumference entitled to some one diverging ray, considers me as the circumference, and himself as the centre to which all the rays ought to converge. To tell you the truth, I do not think "The Watchman" will succeed. Hitherto I have scarcely sold enough to pay the expenses;--no wonder, when I tell you that on the 200 which Parsons in Paternoster Row sells weekly, he gains eight shillings more than I do. Nay, I am convinced that at the end of the half year he will have cleared considerably more by his 200 than I by the proprietorship of the whole work. Colson has been indefatigable in my service, and writes with such zeal for my interests, and such warmth of sorrow for my sufferings, as if he wrote with fire and tears. God bless him! I wish above all things to realize a school. I could be well content to plod from morning to night, if only I could secure a secure competence; but to toil incessantly for uncertain bread weighs me down to earth. Your Night-dream has been greatly admired. Dr. Beddoes spoke in high commendation of it. Your thoughts on Elections I will insert whenever Parliament is dissolved. I will insert them as the opinions of a sensible correspondent, entering my individual protest against giving a vote in any way or for any person. If you had an estate in the swamps of Essex, you could not prudently send an aguish man there to be your manager,--he would be unfit for it;--you could not honestly send a hale hearty man there, for the situation would to a moral certainty give him the ague. So with the Parliament:--I will not send a rogue there; and I would not send an honest man, for it is twenty to one that he will become a rogue. Count Rumford's "Essays" you shall have by the next parcel. I thank you for your kind permission with respect to books. I have sent down to you "Elegiac Stanzas" by Bowles; they were given to me, but are altogether unworthy of Bowles. I have sent you Beddoes's Essay on the merits of William Pitt; you may either keep it, and I will get another for myself on your account, or if you see nothing in it to library-ize it, send it me back next Thursday, or whenever you have read it. My own "Poems" you will welcome. I pin all my poetical credit on the "Religious Musings". In the poem you so much admired in "The Watchman", for "Now life and joy," read "New life and joy." (From "The Hour when we shall meet again".) "Chatterton" shall appear modernized. Dr. Beddoes intends, I believe, to give a course of Chemistry in a most "elementary" manner,--the price, two guineas. I wish, ardently wish, you could possibly attend them, and live with me. My house is most beautifully situated; an excellent room and bed are at your service. If you had any scruple about putting me to additional expense, you should pay me seven shillings a week, and I should gain by you. Mrs. Coleridge is remarkably well, and sends her kind love. Pray, my dear, dear Poole, do not neglect to write to me every week. Your critique on "Joan of Arc" and the "Religious Musings" I expect. Your dear mother I long to see. Tell her I love her with filial respectfulness. Excellent woman! Farewell; God bless you and your grateful and affectionate S. T. COLERIDGE. Mr. C.'s first volume of poems was published by Mr. Cottle in the beginning of April, 1796, and his sense of the kind conduct of the latter to him throughout the whole affair was expressed in the following manner on a blank leaf in a copy of the work: LETTER 30. Dear Cottle, On the blank leaf of my Poems I can most appropriately write my acknowledgments to you for your too disinterested conduct in the purchase of them. Indeed, if ever they should acquire a name and character, it might be truly said the world owed them to you. Had it not been for you, none perhaps of them would have been published, and some not written. Your obliged and affectionate friend, S. T. COLERIDGE. Bristol, April 15, 1796. [Another project of Coleridge to earn a small sum to tide over financial difficulties was to "Rumfordise" the cities of England. Coleridge reviewed Rumford's Essays in "The Watchman" of 2nd April. Count Rumford (Count of the Holy Roman Empire), had cleared certain cities of Austria of beggars and vagabonds, and had established garden cities for the soldiery practising agricultural pursuits and engaging in remunerative occupations during their non-attendance at drill. What part of the "Rumfordising" Coleridge proposed to apply to his native country does not appear from the letter.] LETTER 31. TO COTTLE (Apl. 1796.) My ever dear Cottle, Since I last conversed with you on the subject, I have been thinking over again the plan I suggested to you, concerning the application of Count Rumford's plan to the city of Bristol. I have arranged in my mind the manner, and matter of the Pamphlet, which would be three sheets, and might be priced at one shilling. Considerations Addressed to the Inhabitants of Bristol, on a subject of importance, (unconnected with Politics.) BY S. T. C. Now I have by me the history of Birmingham, and the history of Manchester. By observing the names, revenues, and expenditures of their different charities, I could easily alter the calculations of the "Bristol Address", and, at a trifling expense, and a few variations, the same work might be sent to Manchester and Birmingham. "Considerations addressed to the inhabitants of Birmingham", etc. I could so order it, that by writing to a particular friend, at both places, the pamphlet should be thought to have been written at each place, as it certainly would be "for" each place. I think therefore 750 might be printed in all. Now will you undertake this? either to print it and divide the profits, or (which indeed I should prefer) would you give me three guineas, for the copyright? I would give you the first sheet on Thursday, the second on the Monday following, the third on the Thursday following. To each pamphlet I would annex the alterations to be made, when the press was stopped at 250. God love you! S. T. C. Cottle says regarding this project, "I presented Mr. C. with the three guineas, but forbore the publication."] LETTER 32. TO MR. COTTLE (April) 1796. My ever dear Cottle, I will wait on you this evening at nine o'clock, till which hour I am on "Watch." Your Wednesday's invitation I of course accept, but I am rather sorry that you should add this expense to former liberalities. Two editions of my "Poems" would barely repay you. Is it not possible to get 25 or 30 of the "Poems" ready by to-morrow, as Parsons, of Paternoster Row, has written to me pressingly about them? "People are perpetually asking after them. All admire the poetry in the "Watchman"," he says. I can send them with 100 of the first number, which he has written for. I think if you were to send half a dozen "Joans of Arc" (4to £1 1s. 0d.) on sale or return, it would not be amiss. To all the places in the North we will send my "Poems", my "Conciones", and the "Joans of Arc" together, "per" waggon. You shall pay the carriage for the London and Birmingham parcels; I for the Sheffield, Derby, Nottingham, Manchester, and Liverpool. With regard to the "Poems" I mean to give away, I wish to make it a common interest; that is, I will give away a sheet full of Sonnets. One to Mrs. Barbauld; one to Wakefield; one to Dr. Beddoes; one to Wrangham--a college acquaintance of mine,--an admirer of me, and a pitier of my principles;--one to George Augustus Pollen, Esq.; one to C. Lamb; one to Wordsworth; one to my brother George, and one to Dr. Parr. These Sonnets I mean to write on the blank leaf, respectively, of each copy. * * * * God bless you, and S. T. COLERIDGE. "The Sonnets," says Mr. Cottle, "never arrived." [But a pamphlet of 16 pages, containing 28 Sonnets, was printed, the only extant copy of which is in the Dyce Collection. "Poems", 1893, p. 544.] LETTER 33. TO MR. POOLE 6th May, 1796. My very dear Friend, The heart is a little relieved, when vexation converts itself into anger. But from this privilege I am utterly precluded by my own epistolary sins and negligences. Yet in very troth thou must be a hard-hearted fellow to let me trot for four weeks together every Thursday to the Bear Inn--to receive no letter. I have sometimes thought that Milton the carrier did not deliver my last parcel, but he assures me he did. This morning I received a truly fraternal letter from your brother Richard of Sherborne, containing good and acceptable advice. He deems my "Religious Musings" "too metaphysical for common readers." I answer--the poem was not written for common readers. In so miscellaneous a collection as I have presented to the Public, "singula cuique" should be the motto. There are, however, instances of vicious affectation in the phraseology of that poem;--"unshudder'd, unaghasted", for example. ("Not in the poem now".) Good writing is produced more effectually by rapidly glancing the language as it already exists than by a hasty recourse to the mint of invention. The "Religious Musings" has more mind than the Introduction of B. II. of "Joan of Arc", ("Destiny of Nations", Poet. W. I. p. 98) but its versification is not equally rich. It has more passages of sublimity, but it has not that diffused air of severe dignity which characterizes my epic slice. Have I estimated my own performances rightly? ... With regard to my own affairs they are as bad as the most rampant philo-despot could wish in the moment of cursing. After No. XII I shall cease to cry the state of the political atmosphere. It is not pleasant, Thomas Poole, to have worked fourteen weeks for nothing--for nothing; nay, to have given to the Public in addition to that toil, £45. When I began the Watchman I had £40 worth of paper given to me; yet with this I shall not have received a farthing at the end of the quarter. To be sure I have been somewhat fleeced and over-reached by my London publisher. In short, my tradesmen's bills for "The Watchman", including what paper I have bought since the seventh number, the printing, etc., amount exactly to £5 more than the whole of my receipts. "O Watchman, thou hast watched in vain!"--said the Prophet Ezekiel, when, I suppose, he was taking a prophetic glimpse of my sorrow-sallowed cheeks. My plans are reduced to two;--the first unpracticable,--the second not likely to succeed. Plan 1. I am studying German, and in about six weeks shall be able to read that language with tolerable fluency. Now I have some thoughts of making a proposal to Robinson, the great London bookseller, of translating all the works of Schiller, which would make a portly quarto, on condition that he should pay my journey and my wife's to and from Jena, a cheap German University where Schiller resides, and allow me two guineas each quarto sheet, which would maintain me. If I could realize this scheme, I should there study chemistry and anatomy, and bring over with me all the works of Semler and Michaelis, the German theologians, and of Kant, the great German metaphysician. On my return I would commence a school for either young men at £105 each, proposing to perfect them in the following studies in this order:--1. Man as an Animal;--including the complete knowledge of anatomy, chemistry, mechanics, and optics:--2. Man as an intellectual Being;--including the ancient metaphysics, the system of Locke and Hartley--of the Scotch philosophers--and the new Kantean system:--3. Man as a Religious Being;--including an historic summary of all religions, and of the arguments for and against natural and revealed religion. Then proceeding from the individual to the aggregate of individuals, and disregarding all chronology, except that of mind, I should perfect them: 1--in the history of savage tribes; 2--of semi-barbarous nations; 3--of nations emerging from semi-barbarism; 4--of civilized states; 5--of luxurious states; 6--of revolutionary states; 7--of colonies. During these studies I should intermix the knowledge of languages, and instruct my scholars in "belles lettres", and the principles of composition. Now, seriously, do you think that one of my scholars, thus perfected, would make a better senator than perhaps any one member in either of our Houses?--Bright bubbles of the age--ebullient brain! Gracious Heaven! that a scheme so big with advantage to this kingdom--therefore to Europe--therefore to the world--should be demolishable by one monosyllable from a bookseller's mouth! My second plan is to become a Dissenting Minister, and adjure politics and casual literature. Preaching for hire is not right; because it must prove a strong temptation to continue to profess what I may have ceased to believe, "if ever" maturer judgment with wider and deeper reading should lessen or destroy my faith in Christianity. But though not right in itself, it may become right by the greater wrongness of the only alternative--the remaining in neediness and uncertainty. That in the one case I should be exposed to temptation is a mere contingency; that under necessitous circumstances I am exposed to great and frequent temptations is a melancholy certainty. Write, my dear Poole! or I will crimp all the rampant Billingsgate of Burke to abuse you. Count Rumford is being reprinted. God bless you and S. T. COLERIDGE. On Friday, the 13th of May, 1796, the tenth and last number of "The Watchman" appeared--the Author having wisely accelerated the termination of a hopeless undertaking, the plan of which was as injudicious as the execution of it by him for any length of time impracticable. Of the 324 pages, of which "The Watchman" consists, not more than a hundred contain original matter by Coleridge, and this is perhaps more remarkable as a test of the marvellous spring of his mind almost immediately afterwards than for any very striking merit of its own. Still, however, the nascent philosopher may be discovered in parts; and the Essay on the Slave Trade, in the fourth number, may be justly distinguished as comprising a perfect summary of the arguments applicable on either side of that question. In the meantime Mr. Poole had been engaged in circulating a proposal amongst a few common friends for purchasing a small annuity and presenting it to Mr. Coleridge. The plan was not in fact carried into execution;[1] but it was communicated to Mr. C. by Mr. Poole, and the following letter refers to it:-- [Footnote 1: An error. A subscription annuity of £35 or £40 was collected and paid to Coleridge in 1796 and 1797.] LETTER 34. TO MR. POOLE 12th May, 1796. Poole! The Spirit, who counts the throbbings of the solitary heart, knows that what my feelings ought to be, such they are. If it were in my power to give you anything, which I have not already given, I should be oppressed by the letter now before me. But no! I feel myself rich in being poor; and because I have nothing to bestow, I know how much I have bestowed. Perhaps I shall not make myself intelligible; but the strong and unmixed affection which I bear to you seems to exclude all emotions of gratitude, and renders even the principle of esteem latent and inert. Its presence is not perceptible, though its absence could not be endured. Concerning the scheme itself I am undetermined. Not that I am ashamed to receive;--God forbid! I will make every possible exertion; my industry shall be at least commensurate with my learning and talents;--if these do not procure for me and mine the necessary comforts of life, I can receive as I would bestow, and, in either case--receiving or bestowing--be equally grateful to my Almighty Benefactor. I am undetermined therefore--not because I receive with pain and reluctance, but--because I suspect that you attribute to others your own enthusiasm of benevolence; as if the sun should say--"With how rich a purple those opposite windows are burning!" But with God's permission I shall talk with you on this subject. By the last page of No. X, you will perceive that I have this day dropped "The Watchman". On Monday morning I will go "per" caravan to Bridgewater, where, if you have a horse of tolerable meekness unemployed, you will let him meet me. I should blame you for the exaggerated terms in which you have spoken of me in the Proposal, did I not perceive the motive. You wished to make it appear an offering--not a favour--and in excess of delicacy have, I fear, fallen into some grossness of flattery. God bless you, my dear, very dear Friend. The widow is calm, and amused with her beautiful infant. [1] We are all become more religious than we were. God be ever praised for all things! Mrs. Coleridge begs her kind love to you. To your dear Mother my filial respects. S. T. COLERIDGE. [2] [Footnote 1: Mrs. Robert Lovell, whose husband had been carried off by a fever, about two years after his marriage with my Aunt. S. C.] [Footnote 2: Letter LVI is our 34. LVII is dated 13 May, 1796.] The visit to Mr. Poole at Stowey was paid, and Mr. C. returned to Bristol on the 20th of May, 1796. On his way back he wrote the following letter to Mr. Poole from Bridgewater:-- LETTER 35 29th May, 1796. My dear Poole, This said caravan does not leave Bridgewater till nine. In the market-place stand the hustings. I mounted, and pacing the boards, mused on bribery, false swearing, and other foibles of election times. I have wandered too by the river Parret, which looks as filthy as if all the parrots in the House of Commons had been washing their consciences therein. Dear Gutter of Stowey! Were I transported to Italian plains, and lying by the side of a streamlet which murmured through an orange grove, I would think of thee, dear Gutter of Stowey, and wish that I were poring on thee! So much by way of rant. I have eaten three eggs, swallowed sundries of tea and bread and butter, purely for the purpose of amusing myself, and I have seen the horse fed. When at Cross, where I shall dine, I shall think of your happy dinner celebrated under the auspices of humble independence, supported by brotherly love. I am writing, you understand, for no worldly purpose but that of avoiding anxious thoughts. Apropos of honey-pie:--Caligula or Heliogabalus,[1] (I forget which,) had a dish of nightingales' tongues served up. What think you of the stings of bees? God bless you. My filial love to your mother, and fraternity to your sister. Tell Ellen Cruikshanks, that in my next parcel to you I will send my Haleswood Poem to her. Heaven protect her, and you, and Sara, and your Mother, and--like a bad shilling passed off in a handful of guineas--your affectionate friend and brother, S. T. COLERIDGE. P.S. Don't forget to send by Milton my old clothes and linen that once was clean--a pretty "periphrasis" that![2] [Footnote 1: Elagabalus.] [Footnote 2: Letter LVIII is our 35. LIX is dated 22 June 1796.] The month of June, 1796, was spent in Bristol, and some negotiation took place as to Mr. C.'s settling in Nottingham, the particulars of which the Editor is unable to state. On the 4th of July Mr. Coleridge writes to Mr. Poole. LETTER 36. TO MR. POOLE 4th July, 1796. My very dear Poole, Do not attribute it to indolence that I have not written to you. Suspense has been the real cause of my silence. Day after day I have confidently expected some decisive letter, and as often have been disappointed. "Certainly I shall have one to-morrow noon, and then I will write." Thus I contemplated the time of my silence in its small component parts, forgetful into what a sum total they were swelling. As I have heard nothing from Nottingham notwithstanding I have written a pressing letter, I have, by the advice of Cottle and Dr. Beddoes, accepted a proposal of Mr. Perry's, the editor of the "Morning Chronicle",--accepted it with a heavy and reluctant heart. On Thursday Perry was at Bristol for a few hours, just time enough to attend the dying moments of his associate in the editorship, Mr. Grey, whom Dr. Beddoes attended. Perry desired Dr. B. to inform me that, if I would come up to London and write for him, he would make me a regular compensation adequate to the maintenance of myself and Mrs. Coleridge, and requested an immediate answer by the post. Mr. Estlin, and Charles Danvers, and Mr. Wade are or were all out of town;--I had no one to advise with except Dr. Beddoes and Cottle. Dr. B. thinks it a good opening on account of Grey's death; but I rather think that the intention is to employ me as a mere hackney without any share of the profits. However, as I am doing nothing, and in the prospect of doing nothing settled, I was afraid to give way to the "omenings" of my heart; and accordingly I accepted his proposal in general terms, requesting a line from him expressing the particulars both of my proposed occupation and stipend. This I shall receive to-morrow, I suppose; and if I do, I think of hiring a horse for a couple of days, and galloping down to you to have all your advice, which indeed, if it should be for rejecting the proposals, I might receive by post; but if for finally accepting them, we could not interchange letters in a time sufficiently short for Perry's needs, and so he might procure another person possibly. At all events I should not like to leave this part of England--perhaps for ever--without seeing you once more. I am very sad about it, for I love Bristol, and I do not love London; and besides, local and temporary politics have become my aversion. They narrow the understanding, and at least acidulate the heart; but those two giants, yclept Bread and Cheese, bend me into compliance. I must do something. If I go, farewell, Philosophy! farewell, the Muse! farewell, my literary Fame! My "Poems" have been reviewed. The "Monthly" has cataracted panegyric on me; the "Critical" cascaded it, and the "Analytical" dribbled it with civility. As to the "British Critic", they durst not condemn, and they would not praise--so contented themselves with commending me as a "poet", and allowed me "tenderness of sentiment and elegance of fiction." I am so anxious and uneasy that I really cannot write any further. My kind and fraternal love to your Sister, and my filial respects to your dear Mother, and believe me to be in my head, heart, and soul, yours most sincerely. S. T. COLERIDGE. The Editor can find no further trace of the proposed connection with the "Morning Chronicle"; but almost immediately after the date of the preceding letter, Mr. Coleridge received an invitation from Mrs. Evans, then of Barley, near Derby, to visit her with a view to his undertaking the education of her sons. He and Mrs. C. accordingly went to Barley, where the matter was arranged to the satisfaction of both parties; and Mr. C. returned to Bristol alone with the intention of visiting his Mother and Brother at Ottery before leaving the south of England for what promised to be a long absence. But this project, like others, ended in nothing. The other guardians of Mrs. E.'s sons considered a public education proper for them, and the announcement of this resolution to Mr. C. at Bristol stopped his further progress, and recalled him to Darley. After a stay of some ten days, he left Darley with Mrs. C., and visited Mr. Thomas Hawkes at Mosely, near Birmingham, and thence he wrote to Mr. Poole-- LETTER 37. TO MR. POOLE August, 1796. My beloved Friend, I was at Matlock, the place monodized by Bowles, when your letter arrived at Darley, and I did not receive it till near a week afterwards. My very dear Poole, I wrote to you the whole truth. After the first moment I was perfectly composed, and from that moment to the present have continued calm and lighthearted. I had just quitted you, and I felt myself rich in your love and esteem; and you do not know how rich I feel myself. O ever found the same, and trusted and beloved! The last sentences of your letter affected me more than I can well describe. Words and phrases which might perhaps have adequately expressed my feelings, the cold-blooded children of this world have anticipated and exhausted in their unmeaning gabble of flattery. I use common expressions, but they do not convey common feelings. My heart has thanked you. I preached on Faith yesterday. I said that Faith was infinitely better than Good Works, as the cause is greater than the effect,--as a fruitful tree is better than its fruits, and as a friendly heart is of far higher value than the kindnesses which it naturally and necessarily prompts. It is for that friendly heart that I now have thanked you, and which I so eagerly accept; for with regard to settlement, I am likely to be better off now than before, as I shall proceed to tell you. I arrived at Darley on the Sunday.... Monday I spent at Darley. On the Tuesday Mrs. Coleridge, Miss Willett, and I went in Mrs. Evans's carriage to Matlock, where we stayed till Saturday.... Sunday we spent at Darley, and on Monday Sara, Mrs. Evans, and myself visited Oakover, a seat famous for a few first-rates of Raffael and Titian; thence to Ilam, a quiet vale hung round with wood, beautiful beyond expression, and thence to Dovedale, a place beyond expression tremendously sublime. Here, in a cavern at the head of a divine little fountain, we dined on cold meat, and returned to Darley, quite worn out with the succession of sweet sensations. On Tuesday we were employed in packing up, and on Wednesday we were to have set off.... But on the Wednesday Dr. Crompton, who had just returned from Liverpool, called on me, and made me the following proposal:--that if I would take a house in Derby and open a day-school, confining my number to twelve scholars, he would send three of his children on these terms--till my number should be completed, he would allow me £100 a year for them;--when the number should be complete, he would give £21 a year for each of them:--the children to be with me from nine to twelve, and from two to five--the last two hours to be employed with their writing or drawing-master, who would be paid by the parents. He has no doubt but that I shall complete my number almost instantly. Now 12 x 20 guineas = £252, and my mornings and evenings at my own disposal = good things. So I accepted the offer, it being understood that if anything better offered, I should accept it. There was not a house to be got in Derby; but I engaged with a man for a house now building, and which is to be completed by the 8th of October, for £12 a year, and the landlord to pay all the taxes except the Poor Rates. The landlord is rather an intelligent fellow, and has promised me to Rumfordize the chimneys. The plan is to commence in November; the intermediate time I spend at Bristol, at which place I shall arrive, by the blessing of God, on Monday night next. This week I spend with Mr. Hawkes, at Mosely, near Birmingham; in whose shrubbery I now write. I arrived here on Friday, having left Derby on Friday. I preached here yesterday. If Sara will let me, I shall see you for a few days in the course of a month. Direct your next letter to S. T. C., Oxford Street, Bristol. My love to your dear Mother and Sister, and believe me affectionately your ever faithful friend, S. T. COLERIDGE. I shall write to my Mother and Brothers to-morrow. At the same time Mr. C. wrote to Mr. Wade in terms similar to the above, adding that at Matlock the time was completely filled up with seeing the country, eating, concerts, etc. LETTER 38 (--Sept. 1796.) "I was the first fiddle;--not in the concerts--but every where else, and the company would not spare me twenty minutes together. Sunday I dedicated to the drawing up my sketch of education, which I meant to publish, to try to get a school!" He speaks of "the thrice lovely valley of Ilam; a vale hung with beautiful woods all round, except just at its entrance, where, as you stand at the other end of the valley, you see a bare bleak mountain standing as it were to guard the entrance. It is without exception the most beautiful place I ever visited." ... He concludes:--"I have seen a letter from Mr. William Roscoe, author of the "Life of Lorenzo the Magnificent"; a work in two 4to volumes (of which the whole first edition sold in a month); it was addressed to Mr. Edwards, the minister here, and entirely related to me. Of me and my compositions he writes in terms of high admiration, and concludes by desiring Mr. Edwards to let him know my situation and prospects, and saying that if I would come and settle at Liverpool, he thought a comfortable situation might be procured for me. This day Edwards will write to him." Whilst at Birmingham, on "The Watchman" tour, Mr. C. had been introduced to Mr. Charles Lloyd, the eldest son of Mr. Lloyd, an eminent banker of that place. At Mosely they met again, and the result of an intercourse for a few days together was an ardent desire on the part of Lloyd to domesticate himself permanently with a man whose conversation was to him a revelation from Heaven. Nothing, however, was settled on this occasion, and Mr. and Mrs. C. returned to Bristol in the beginning of September. On the 24th of September he writes to Mr. Poole:-- LETTER 39. TO MR. POOLE 24th September, 1796. My dear, very dear Poole, The heart thoroughly penetrated with the flame of virtuous friendship is in a state of glory; but lest it should be exalted above measure, there is given to it a thorn in the flesh. I mean that where the friendship of any person forms an essential part of a man's happiness, he will at times be pestered with the little jealousies and solicitudes of imbecile humanity. Since we last parted I have been gloomily dreaming that you did not leave me so affectionately as you were wont to do. Pardon this littleness of heart, and do not think the worse of me for it. Indeed my soul seems so mantled and wrapped round with your love and esteem, that even a dream of losing but the smallest fragment of it makes me shiver, as if some tender part of my nature were left uncovered and in nakedness. Last week I received a letter from Lloyd, informing me that his parents had given their joyful concurrence to his residence with me, but that, if it were possible that I could be absent from home for three or four days, his father wished particularly to see me. I consulted Mrs. Coleridge, who advised me to go.... Accordingly on Saturday night I went by the mail to Birmingham, and was introduced to the father, who is a mild man, very liberal in his ideas, and in religion an allegorizing Quaker.[1] I mean that all the apparently irrational parts of his sect he allegorizes into significations, which for the most part you or I might assent to. We became well acquainted, and he expressed himself thankful to Heaven, "that his son was about to be with me." He said he would write to me concerning money matters, after his son had been some time under my roof. On Tuesday morning I was surprised by a letter from Mr. Maurice, our medical attendant, informing me that Mrs. C. was delivered on Monday, 19th September, 1796, half-past two in the morning, of a son, and that both she and the child were uncommonly well. I was quite annihilated with the suddenness of the information, and retired to my room to address myself to my Maker, but I could only offer up to Him the silence of stupified feelings. I hastened home, and Charles Lloyd returned with me. When I first saw the child, I did not feel that thrill and overflowing of affection which I expected. I looked on it with a melancholy gaze; my mind was intensely contemplative, and my heart only sad. But when two hours after, I saw it at the bosom of its mother--on her arm--and her eye tearful and watching its little features--then I was thrilled and melted, and gave it the kiss of a Father. * * * * The baby seems strong, and the old nurse has over-persuaded my wife to discover a likeness to me in its face,--no great compliment to me; for in truth I have seen handsomer babies in my lifetime. Its name is David Hartley Coleridge. I hope that ere he be a man, if God destines him for continuance in this life, his head will be convinced of, and his heart saturated with, the truths so ably supported by that great master of Christian Philosophy. Charles Lloyd wins upon me hourly; his heart is uncommonly pure, his affections delicate, and his benevolence enlivened, but not sicklied, by sensibility. He is assuredly a man of great genius; but it must be in a "tete-a-tete" with one whom he loves and esteems that his colloquial powers open:--and this arises not from reserve or want of simplicity, but from having been placed in situations, where for years together he met with no congenial minds, and where the contrariety of his thoughts and notions to the thoughts and notions of those around him induced the necessity of habitually suppressing his feelings. His joy and gratitude to Heaven for the circumstance of his domestication with me, I can scarcely describe to you; and I believe his fixed plans are of being always with me. His father told me, that if he saw that his son had formed habits of severe economy, he should not insist upon his adopting any profession; as then his fair share of his (the father's) wealth would be sufficient for him. My dearest Poole, can you conveniently receive Lloyd and me in the course of a week? I have much, very much, to say to you, and to consult with you about; for my heart is heavy respecting Derby; and my feelings are so dim and huddled, that though I can, I am sure, communicate them to you by my looks and broken sentences, I scarcely know how to convey them in a letter. C. Lloyd also wishes much to know you personally. I shall write on the other side of the paper two of his sonnets, composed by him in one evening at Birmingham. The latter of them alludes to the conviction of the truth of Christianity, which he had received from me. Let me hear from you by post immediately, and give my kind love to your sister and dear mother, and likewise my love to that young man with the soul-beaming face, which I recollect much better than I do his name. ("Mr. Thomas Ward of Over Stowey".) God bless you, my dear friend, and believe me with deep affection yours, S. T. COLERIDGE.[2] [Footnote 1: The relationship of Coleridge and the Lloyds is told fully in "Charles Lamb and the Lloyds", by E. V. Lucas, 1898.] [Footnote 2: Letter LX is our 39.] The reader of Coleridge's Poems will remember the beautiful lines "To a young friend, on his proposing to domesticate with the Author". They were written at this time and addressed to Lloyd; and it may be easily conceived what a deep impression of delight they would make on a mind and temperament so refined and enthusiastic as his. The Sonnet "To a Friend who asked how I felt when the Nurse first presented my infant to me"--is the metrical version of a passage in the foregoing letter. A short time before the birth of little Hartley C., Mr. Southey had returned to Bristol from Portugal, and was in lodgings nearly opposite to Mr. Coleridge's house in Oxford Street. There had been a quarrel between them on the occasion of the abandonment of the American scheme, which was first announced by Mr. Southey, and he and Coleridge had ceased to have any intercourse. But a year's absence had dissipated all angry feelings, and after Mr. C.'s return from Birmingham in the end of September, Southey took the first step, and sent over a slip of paper with a word or two of conciliation.[1] This was immediately followed by an interview, and in an hour's time these two extraordinary youths were arm in arm again. They were indeed of essentially opposite tempers, powers, and habits; yet each well knew and appreciated the other,--perhaps even the more deeply from the contrast between them. Circumstances separated them in after life; but Mr. Coleridge recorded his testimony to Southey's character in the "Biographia Literaria", and in his Will referred to it as expressive of his latest convictions. [In Ainger's "Letters of Charles Lamb" will be found a series of letters by Lamb to Coleridge on various matters, literary and domestic, which affords a good insight into the doings of Coleridge at this time. The following beautiful letter by Coleridge was written on the occasion of the death of Lamb's mother. [Footnote 1: The paper contained a sentence in English from Schiller's Conspiracy of Fiesco at Genoa. "Fiesko! Fiesko! du Sumst einen Platz in meiner Brust, den das Menschengeschlecht, dreifach genommen, nicht mehr besetzen wird". "Fiesco! Fiesco! thou leavest a void in my bosom, which the human race, thrice told, will never fill up." Act V, Sc. 16. S. C.] LETTER 40. TO CHARLES LAMB[1] (29 Sept. 1796.) Your letter, my friend, struck me with a mighty horror. It rushed upon me and stupified my feelings. You bid me write you a religious letter; I am not a man who would attempt to insult the greatness of your anguish by any other consolation. Heaven knows that in the easiest fortunes there is much dissatisfaction and weariness of spirit; much that calls for the exercise of patience and resignation; but in storms, like these, that shake the dwelling and make the heart tremble, there is no middle way between despair and the yielding up of the whole spirit unto the guidance of faith. And surely it is a matter of joy, that your faith in Jesus has been preserved; the Comforter that should relieve you is not far from you. But as you are a Christian, in the name of that Saviour, who was filled with bitterness and made drunken with wormwood, I conjure you to have recourse in frequent prayer to "his God and your God," [2] the God of mercies, and father of all comfort. Your poor father is, I hope, almost senseless of the calamity; the unconscious instrument of Divine Providence knows it not, and your mother is in heaven. It is sweet to be roused from a frightful dream by the song of birds, and the gladsome rays of the morning. Ah, how infinitely more sweet to be awakened from the blackness and amazement of a sudden horror, by the glories of God manifest, and the hallelujahs of angels. As to what regards yourself, I approve altogether of your abandoning what you justly call vanities. I look upon you as a man, called by sorrow and anguish and a strange desolation of hopes into quietness, and a soul set apart and made peculiar to God; we cannot arrive at any portion of heavenly bliss without in some measure imitating Christ. And they arrive at the largest inheritance who imitate the most difficult parts of his character, and bowed down and crushed under foot, cry in fulness of faith, "Father, thy will be done." I wish above measure to have you for a little while here--no visitants shall blow on the nakedness of your feelings--you shall be quiet, and your spirit may be healed. I see no possible objection, unless your father's helplessness prevent you, and unless you are necessary to him. If this be not the case, I charge you write me that you will come. I charge you, my dearest friend, not to dare to encourage gloom or despair--you are a temporary sharer in human miseries, that you may be an eternal partaker of the Divine Nature. I charge you, if by any means it be possible, come to me. I remain, your affectionate, S. T. COLERIDGE.[3] Of the next letter Cottle says:--"A second edition of Mr. Coleridge's poems being demanded, I was under no obligation, the copyright being mine, in publishing a second edition, to make Mr. Coleridge any payment, alterations or additions being optional with him; but in his circumstances, and to show that my desire was to consider Mr. C. even more than myself, I promised him, on the sale of the second edition of 500, twenty guineas. The following was his reply: (not viewing the subject quite in the right light; but this was of little consequence)." [Footnote 1: The letter to which this is an answer is No. VIII of Canon Ainger's "Letters of Lamb".] [Footnote 2: "Vide" St. John, ch. xx, ver. 17.] [Footnote 3: Letter LXI is our 40.] LETTER 41. TO COTTLE Stowey, Oct. 18th, 1796. My dear Cottle, I have no mercenary feelings, I verily believe; but I hate bartering at any time, and with any person; with you it is absolutely intolerable. I clearly perceive that by giving me twenty guineas, on the sale of the second edition, you will get little or nothing by the additional poems, unless they should be sufficiently popular to reach a third edition, which soars above our[1] wildest expectations. The only advantage you can derive therefore from the purchase of them on such terms, is, simply, that my poetry is more likely to sell when the whole may be had in one volume, price 5 shillings., than when it is scattered in two volumes; the one 4 shillings., the other possibly 3 shillings. In short, you will get nothing directly, but only indirectly, from the probable circumstance, that these additional poems added to the former, will give a more rapid sale to the second edition than could otherwise be expected, and cause it possibly to be reviewed at large. Add to this, that by omitting every thing political, I widen the sphere of my readers. So much for you. Now for myself. You must see, Cottle, that whatever money I should receive from you, would result from the circumstances that would give me the same, or more--if I published them on my own account. I mean the sale of the poems. I can therefore have no motive to make such conditions with you, except the wish to omit poems unworthy of me, and the circumstance that our separate properties would aid each other by the union; and whatever advantage this might be to me, it would, of course, be equally so to you. The only difference between my publishing the poems on my own account, and yielding them up to you; the only difference, I say, independent of the above stated differences, is, that, in one case, I retain the property for ever, in the other case, I lose it after two editions. However, I am not solicitous to have any thing omitted, except the sonnet to Lord Stanhope and the ludicrous poem;[1] only I should like to publish the best pieces together, and those of secondary splendour, at the end of the volume, and think this is the best quietus of the whole affair. Yours affectionately, S. T. COLERIDGE.] [Footnote 1: "my" in "Early Recollections".] [Footnote 2: "Written before Supper".] On the 1st of November, 1796, Coleridge wrote the following letter to his friend: LETTER 42 November 1, 1796. My beloved Poole, Many "causes" have concurred to prevent my writing to you, but all together they do not amount to a "reason". I have seen a narrow-necked bottle, so full of water, that when turned up side down not a drop has fallen out--something like this has been the case with me. My heart has been full, yea, crammed with anxieties about my residence near you. I so ardently desire it, that any disappointment would chill all my faculties, like the fingers of death. And entertaining wishes so irrationally strong, I necessarily have "day"-mair dreams that something will prevent it--so that since I quitted you, I have been gloomy as the month which even now has begun to lower and rave on us. I verily believe, or rather I have no doubt that I should have written to you within the period of my promise, if I had not pledged myself for a certain gift of my Muse to poor Tommy: and alas! she has been too "sunk on the ground in dimmest heaviness" to permit me to trifle. Yet intending it hourly I deferred my letter "a la mode" the procrastinator! Ah! me, I wonder not that the hours fly so sweetly by me--for they pass unfreighted with the duties which they came to demand! * * * I wrote a long letter to Dr. Crompton, and received from him a very kind letter, which I will send you in the parcel I am about to convey by Milton. My "Poems" are come to a second edition, that is the first edition is sold. I shall alter the lines of the "Joan of Arc", and make "one" poem entitled "Progress of European Liberty, a Vision";--the first line "Auspicious Reverence! hush all meaner song," etc. and begin the volume with it. Then the "Chatterton,--Pixies' Parlour,--Effusions 27 and 28--To a young Ass--Tell me on what holy ground--The Sigh--Epitaph on an Infant--The Man of Ross--Spring in a Village--Edmund--Lines with a poem on the French Revolution"--Seven Sonnets, namely, those at pp. 45, 59, 60, 61, 64, 65, 66--"Shurton Bars--My pensive Sara--Low was our pretty Cot--Religious Musings";--these in the order I have placed them. Then another title-page with "Juvenilia" on it, and an advertisement signifying that the Poems were retained by the desire of some friends, but that they are to be considered as being in the Author's own opinion of very inferiour merit. In this sheet will be "Absence--La Fayette--Genevieve--Kosciusko--Autumnal Moon--To the Nightingale--Imitation of Spenser--A Poem written in early youth". All the others will be finally and totally omitted. It is strange that in the "Sonnet to Schiller" I should have written--"that hour I would have wished to 'die'--Lest--aught more mean might stamp me 'mortal';"--the bull never struck me till Charles Lloyd mentioned it. The sense is evident enough, but the word is ridiculously ambiguous. Lloyd is a very good fellow, and most certainly a young man of great genius. He desires his kindest love to you. I will write again by Milton, for I really can write no more now--I am so depressed. But I will fill up the letter with poetry of mine, or Lloyd's, or Southey's. Is your Sister married? May the Almighty bless her!--may he enable her to make all her new friends as pure, and mild, and amiable as herself!--I pray in the fervency of my soul. Is your dear Mother well? My filial respects to her. Remember me to Ward. David Hartley Coleridge is stout, healthy, and handsome. He is the very miniature of me. Your grateful and affectionate friend and brother, S. T. COLERIDGE. Speaking of lines by Mr. Southey, called "Inscription for the Cenotaph at Ermenonville",[1] written in his letter, Mr. C. says, "This is beautiful, but instead of Ermenonville and Rousseau put Valchiusa and Petrarch. I do not particularly admire Rousseau. Bishop Taylor, old Baxter, David Hartley, and the Bishop of Cloyne are my men." The following Sonnet, transcribed in the foregoing Letter, has not been printed. "It puts in," he says, "no claim to poetry, but it is a most faithful picture of my feelings on a very interesting event." See the Letter to Mr. Poole of 24th September, 1796. This Sonnet shows in a remarkable way how little the Unitarianism, which Mr. C. professed at this time, operated on his fundamental "feelings" as a catholic Christian. "On receiving a Letter informing me of the birth of a Son." When they did greet me Father, sudden awe Weigh'd down my spirit: I retir'd and knelt Seeking the throne of grace, but inly felt No heavenly visitation upwards draw My feeble mind, nor cheering ray impart. Ah me! before the Eternal Sire I brought Th' unquiet silence of confused thought And hopeless feelings: my o'erwhelmed heart Trembled, and vacant tears stream'd down my face. And now once more, O Lord! to thee I bend, Lover of souls! and groan for future grace, That, ere my babe youth's perilous maze have trod, Thy overshadowing Spirit may descend, And he be born again, a child of God! It was not till the summer of 1797 that the second edition Of Mr. C.'s Poems actually appeared, before which time he had seen occasion to make many alterations in the proposed arrangement of, and had added some of his most beautiful compositions to, the collection. It is curious, however, that he never varied the diction of the Sonnet to Schiller in the particular to which he refers in the preceding Letter. [2] [Footnote 1: Afterwards included among the "Minor Poems" of Mr. S.--S. C.] [Footnote 2: See Dykes-Campbell's edition of Coleridge's "Poems", p. 572.] LETTER 43. To MR. POOLE 5, November, 1796. Thanks, my heart's warm thanks to you, my beloved Friend, for your tender letter! Indeed I did not deserve so kind a one; but by this time you have received my last. To live in a beautiful country, and to enure myself as much as possible to the labours of the field, have been for this year past my dream of the day, my sigh at midnight. But to enjoy these blessings near you, to see you daily, to tell you all my thoughts in their first birth, and to hear yours, to be mingling identities with you, as it were!--the vision-weaving Fancy has indeed often pictured such things, but Hope never dared whisper a promise. Disappointment! Disappointment! dash not from my trembling hand this bowl, which almost touches my lips. Envy me not this immortal draught, and I will forgive thee all thy persecutions! Forgive thee! Impious! I will bless thee, black-vested minister of Optimism, stern pioneer of happiness! Thou hast been the cloud before me from the day that I left the flesh-pots of Egypt, and was led through the way of a wilderness--the cloud that had been guiding me to a land flowing with milk and honey--the milk of innocence, the honey of friendship! I wanted such a letter as yours, for I am very unwell. On Wednesday night I was seized with an intolerable pain from my right temple to the tip of my right shoulder, including my right eye, cheek, jaw, and that side of the throat. I was nearly frantic, and ran about the house almost naked, endeavouring by every means to excite sensation in different parts of my body, and so to weaken the enemy by creating a division. It continued from one in the morning till half-past five, and left me pale and fainty. It came on fitfully, but not so violently, several times on Thursday, and began severer threats towards night; but I took between 60 and 70 drops of laudanum, and sopped the Cerberus just as his mouth began to open. On Friday it only niggled, as if the Chief had departed, as from a conquered place, and merely left a small garrison behind, or as if he had evacuated the Corsica, and a few straggling pains only remained. But this morning he returned in full force, and his name is Legion. Giant-Fiend of a hundred hands, with a shower of arrowy death-pangs he transpierced me, and then he became a Wolf and lay gnawing my bones!--I am not mad, most noble Festus! but in sober sadness I have suffered this day more bodily pain than I had before a conception of. My right cheek has certainly been placed with admirable exactness under the focus of some invisible burning-glass, which concentrated all the rays of a Tartarean sun. My medical attendant decides it to be altogether nervous, and that it originates either in severe application, or excessive anxiety. My beloved Poole, in excessive anxiety I believe it might originate. I have a blister under my right ear, and I take 25 drops of laudanum every five hours, the ease and spirits gained by which have enabled me to write to you this flighty, but not exaggerating, account. With a gloomy wantonness of imagination I had been coquetting with the hideous possibles of disappointment. I drank fears like wormwood--yea--made myself drunken with bitterness; for my ever-shaping and distrustful mind still mingled gall-drops, till out of the cup of Hope I almost poisoned myself with Despair. Your letter is dated 2. November; I wrote to you on the 1st. Your Sister was married on that day; and on that day I several times felt my heart overflowed with such tendernesses for her, as made me repeatedly ejaculate prayers in her behalf. Such things are strange. It may be superstition to think about such correspondences; but it is a superstition which softens the heart and leads to no evil. We will call on your dear Sister as soon as I am quite well, and in the mean time I will write a few lines to her. I am anxious beyond measure to be in the country as soon as possible. I would it were possible to get a temporary residence till Adscombe is ready for us. I wish we could have three rooms in William Poole's large house for the winter. Will you try to look out for a fit servant for us,--simple of heart, physiognomically handsome, and scientific in vaccimulgence. That last word is a new one, but soft in sound, and full of expression. Vaccimulgence! I am pleased with the word. Write to me all things about yourself; where I cannot advise, I can console; and communication, which doubles joy, halves sorrow. Tell me whether you think it at all possible to make any terms with ----.[1] You know, I would not wish to touch with the edge of the nail of my great toe the line which should be but half a barley-corn out of the circle of the most trembling delicacy! I will write to Cruikshank tomorrow, if God permit me. God bless and protect you Friend! Brother! Beloved! Sara's best love and Lloyd's. David Hartley is well. My filial love to your dear Mother. Love to Ward. Little Tommy! I often think of thee! S. T. COLERIDGE.[2] [Footnote 1: William Poole.] [Footnote 2: Letter LXII is our 43. Letters LXIII-LXX follow.] Charles Lloyd, spoken of in a letter of my father's in the last chapter as "a young man of great genius," was born Feb. 12th, 1775, died at Versailles Jan. 15th, 1839. He published sonnets and other poems in conjunction with my Father and Mr. Lamb, in 1797, and these and Mr. Lamb's were published together, apart from my Father's, the year afterwards. "While Lamb," says Sergeant Talfourd, "was enjoying habits of the closest intimacy with Coleridge in London, he was introduced by him to a young poet whose name has often been associated with his-- Charles Lloyd--the son of a wealthy banker at Birmingham, who had recently cast off the trammels of the Society of Friends, and, smitten with the love of poetry, had become a student at the University of Cambridge. There he had been attracted to Coleridge by the fascination of his discourse; and, having been admitted to his regard, was introduced by him to Lamb. Lloyd was endeared both to Lamb and Coleridge by a very amiable disposition and a pensive cast of thought; but his intellect had little resemblance to that of either. He wrote, indeed, pleasing verses and with great facility,--a facility fatal to excellence; but his mind was chiefly remarkable for the fine power of analysis which distinguishes his "London", and other of his later compositions. In this power of discriminating and distinguishing-- carried to a pitch almost of painfulness--Lloyd has scarcely ever been equalled, and his poems, though rugged in point of versification, will be found by those who will read them with the calm attention they require, replete with critical and moral suggestions of the highest value." Besides three or four volumes of poetry Mr. Lloyd wrote novels:--"Edmund Oliver", published soon after he became acquainted with my Father, and "Isabel" of later date. After his marriage he settled at the lakes. "At Brathay," (the beautiful river Brathay near Ambleside,) says Mr. De Quincey, "lived Charles Lloyd, and he could not in candour be considered a common man. He was somewhat too Rousseauish, but he had in conversation very extraordinary powers for analysis of a certain kind, applied to the philosophy of manners, and the most delicate 'nuances' of social life; and his Translations of Alfieri together with his own poems, shew him to have been an accomplished scholar." My Mother has often told me how amiable Mr. Lloyd was as a youth; how kind to her little Hartley; how well content with cottage accommodation; how painfully sensitive in all that related to the affections. I remember him myself, as he was in middle life, when he and his excellent wife were most friendly to my brothers, who were school-fellows with their sons. I did not at that time fully appreciate Mr. Lloyd's intellectual character, but was deeply impressed by the exceeding refinement and sensibility marked in his countenance and manners,--(for he was a gentleman of the old school without its formality,)--by the fluent elegance of his discourse, and, above all, by the eloquent pathos, with which he described his painful mental experiences and wild waking dreams, caused by a deranged state of the nervous system. _Le ciel nous vend toujours les biens qu'il nous prodigue_. Nervous derangement is a dear price to pay even for genius and sensibility. Too often, even if not the direct effect of these privileges, it is the accompanying drawback; hypochondria may almost be called the intellectual man's malady. "The Duke D'Ormond", which was written 24 years before its publication in 1822, that is in 1798, soon after Mr, Lloyd's residence at Stowey, has great merit as a dramatic poem, in the delineation of character and states of mind; the plot is forced and unnatural; not only that, but what is worse, in point of effect, it is tediously subjective; and we feel the actions of the piece to be improbable while the feelings are true to nature; yet there is tragic effect in the scenes of the 'denouement'. I understand what it was in Mr. Lloyd's mind which Mr. De Quincey calls 'Rousseauish'. He dwelt a good deal on the temptations to which human nature is subject, when passions, not in themselves unworthy, become, from circumstances, sins if indulged, and the source of sin and misery; but the effect of this piece is altogether favourable to virtue, and to the parent and nurse of virtue, a pious conviction of the moral government of the world. The play contains an 'anatomy' of passion, not a 'picture' of it in a concrete form, such as the works of Richardson and of Rousseau present, a picture fitted to excite 'feelings' of baneful effect upon the mind, rather than to awaken 'thought', which counteracts all such mischief. Indeed I think no man would have sought my Father's daily society who was not predominantly given to reflection. What is very striking in this play is the character of the heroine, whose earnest and scrupulous devotion to her mother occasions the partial estrangement of her lover, d'Ormond, and, in its consequences, an overwhelming misery, which overturns her reason and causes her death, and thus, through remorse, works the conversion of those guilty persons of the drama, who have been slaves to passion, but are not all "enslaved, nor wholly vile." Strong is the contrast which this play presents, in its exhibition of the female character, with that of the celebrated French and German writers, who have treated similar subjects. Men write,--I have heard a painter say, men even paint,--as they feel and as they are. Goethe's Margaret has been thought equal to Shakespeare's Ophelia and Desdemona; in some respects it is so; but it is like a pot of sweet ointment into which some tainting matter has fallen. I think no Englishman of Goethe's genius and sensibility would have described a maiden, whom it was his intention to represent, though frail on one point, yet lovely and gentle-hearted, as capable of being induced to give her poor old mother a sleeping potion. "It will do her no harm." But the risk!--affection gives the wisdom of the serpent where there would else be but the simplicity of the dove. A true Englishman would have felt that such an act, so bold and undaughterly, blighted at once the lily flower, making it "put on darkness" and "fall into the portion of weeds and out-worn faces." In Mr. Lloyd's youthful drama even the dissipated Marchioness, who tempts and yields to temptation, is made to play a noble part in the end, won back from sin by generous feeling and strong sense: and the description of Julia Villeneuve's tender care of her mother is so characteristic of the author, that I cannot help quoting a part of it here, though it is not among the powerful parts of the play. Describing how her aged parent's extreme infirmity rendered her incapable, without a sacrifice, of leaving the small dwelling to which she had been accustomed, and how this had prevented her even from hinting her lover's proposal for their union, Julia says, "Though blind She loved this little spot. A happy wife There lived she with her lord. It was a home In which an only brother, long since dead, And I, were educated: 'twas to her As the whole world. Its scanty garden plot, The hum of bees hived there, which still she heard On a warm summer's day, the scent of flowers, The honey-suckle which trailed around its porch, Its orchard, field, and trees, her universe!-- I knew she could not long be spared to me. Her sufferings, when alleviated best, Were most acute: and I could best perform That sacred task. I wished to lengthen out,-- By consecrating to her every moment,-- Her being to myself! etc." "Could I leave her?-- I might have seen her,--such was D'Ormond's plea-- Each day. But who her evening hours could cheer? Her long and solitary evening hours?-- Talk her, or haply sing her, to her sleep? Read to her? Smooth her pillow? Lastly make Morning seem morning with a daughter's welcome? For morning's light ne'er visited her eyes!-- Well! I refused to quit her! D'Ormond grew Absent, reserved, nay splenetic and petulant! He left the Province, nor has he once sent A kind enquiry so t' alleviate His heavy absence." "Beritola" is Italian in form, as much as Wieland's "Oberon", but the spirit is that of the Englishman, Charles Lloyd; it contains the same vivid descriptions of mental suffering, the same reflective display of the lover's passion, the same sentiments of deep domestic tenderness, uttered as from the heart and with a special air of reality, as "The Duke D'Ormond" and the author's productions in general. The versification is rather better than that of his earlier poems, but the want of ease and harmony in the flow of the verse is a prevailing defect in Mr. Lloyd's poetry, and often makes it appear prosaic, even where the thought is not so. This pathetic sonnet is one of a very interesting set, on the death of Priscilla Farmer, the author's maternal grandmother, included in the joint volume: "Oh, She was almost speechless! nor could hold Awakening converse with me! (I shall bless No more the modulated tenderness Of that dear voice!) Alas, 'twas shrunk and cold Her honour'd face! yet, when I sought to speak, Through her half-open'd eyelids She did send Faint looks, that said, 'I would be yet thy friend!' And (O my chok'd breast!) e'en on that shrunk cheek I saw one slow tear roll! my hand She took, Placing it on her heart--I heard her sigh 'Tis too, too much!' 'Twas Love's last agony! I tore me from Her! 'Twas her latest look, Her latest accents--Oh my heart, retain That look, those accents, till we meet again!" S. C. Meantime Coleridge had written to Charles Lloyd's father three letters about his son, highly interesting as glimpses of his own character. These letters were first published in "Charles Lamb and the Lloyds", by E. V. Lucas. They are as follows: LETTER 44. To CHARLES LLOYD, SEN. Dear Sir, As the father of Charles Lloyd you are of course in some measure interested in any alteration of my schemes of life; and I feel it a kind of Duty to give you my reasons for any such alteration. I have declined my Derby connection, and determined to retire once for all and utterly from cities and towns: and am about to take a cottage and half a dozen acres of land in an enchanting Situation about eight miles from Bridgewater. My reasons are--that I have cause to believe my Health would be materially impaired by residing in a town, and by the close confinement and anxieties incident to the education of children; that as my days would be dedicated to Dr. Crompton's children, and my evenings to a course of study with my admirable young friend, I should have scarcely a snatch of time for literary occupation; and, above all, because I am anxious that my children should be bred up from earliest infancy in the simplicity of peasants, their food, dress, and habits completely rustic. I never shall, and I never will, have any fortune to leave them: I will leave them therefore hearts that desire little, heads that know how little is to be desired, and hands and arms accustomed to earn that little. I am peculiarly delighted with the 2ist verse of the 4th chapter of Tobit, "And fear not, my son! that we are made poor: for thou hast much wealth, if thou fear God, and depart from all sin and do that which is pleasing in His sight." Indeed, if I live in cities, my children (if it please the All-good to preserve the one I have, and to give me more), my children, I say, will necessarily become acquainted with politicians and politics--a set of men and a kind of study which I deem highly unfavourable to all Christian graces. I have myself erred greatly in this respect; but, I trust, I have now seen my error. I have accordingly snapped my squeaking baby-trumpet of sedition, and have hung up its fragments in the chamber of Penitences. Your son and I are happy in our connection--our opinions and feelings are as nearly alike as we can expect: and I rely upon the goodness of the All-good that we shall proceed to make each other better and wiser. Charles Lloyd is greatly averse from the common run of society--and so am I--but in a city I could scarcely avoid it. And this, too, has aided my decision in favour of my rustic scheme. We shall reside near a very dear friend of mine, a man versed from childhood in the toils of the Garden and the Field, and from whom I shall receive every addition to my comfort which an earthly friend and adviser can give. My Wife requests to be remembered to you, if the word "remember" can be properly used. You will mention my respects to your Wife and your children, and believe that I am with no mean esteem and regard Your Friend, S. T. COLERIDGE. Saturday, 15th Oct., 1796. LETTER 45. To CHARLES LLOYD, SEN. Dear Sir, I received your letter, and thank you for that interest which you take in my welfare. The reasons which you urge against my present plan are mostly well-founded; but they would apply equally against any other scheme of life which 'my' Conscience would permit me to adopt. I might have a situation as a Unitarian minister, I might have lucrative offices as an active Politician; but on both of these the Voice within puts a firm and unwavering negative. Nothing remains for me but schoolmastership in a large town or my present plan. To the success of both, and indeed even to my 'subsisting' in either, health and the possession of my faculties are necessary Requisites. While I possess these Requisites, 'I know', I can maintain myself and family in the COUNTRY; the task of educating children suits not the activity of my mind, and the anxieties and confinement incident to it, added to the living in a town or city, would to a moral certainty ruin that Health and those faculties which, as I said before, are necessary to my gaining my livelihood in 'any' way. Undoubtedly, without fortune, or trade, or profession it is 'impossible' that I should be in any situation in which I must not be dependent on my own health and exertions for the bread of my family. I do not regret it--it will make me 'feel' my dependence on the Almighty, and it will prevent my affections from being made earthly altogether. I praise God in all things, and feel that to His grace alone it is owing that I am 'enabled' to praise Him in all things. You think my scheme 'monastic rather than Christian'. Can he be deemed monastic who is married, and employed in rearing his children?--who 'personally' preaches the truth to his friends and neighbours, and who endeavours to instruct tho' Absent by the Press? In what line of Life could I be more 'actively' employed? and what titles, that are dear and venerable, are there which I shall not possess, God permit my present resolutions to be realised? Shall I not be an Agriculturist, an Husband, a Father, and a 'Priest' after the order of 'Peace'? an 'hireless' Priest? "Christianity teaches us to let our lights shine before men." It does so--but it likewise bids us say, Our Father, lead us not [into] temptation! which how can he say with a safe conscience who voluntarily places himself in those circumstances in which, if he believe Christ, he must acknowledge that it would be easier for a Camel to go thro' the eye of a needle than for HIM to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven? Does not that man 'mock' God who daily prays against temptations, yet daily places himself in the midst of the most formidable? I meant to have written a few lines only respecting myself, because I have much and weighty matter to write concerning my friend, Charles Lloyd; but I have been seduced into many words from the importance of the general truths on which I build my conduct. While your Son remains with me, he will, of course, be acquiring that knowledge and those powers of Intellect which are necessary as the 'foundation' of excellence in all professions, rather than the immediate science of 'any'. 'Languages' will engross one or two hours in every day: the 'elements' of Chemistry, Geometry, Mechanics, and Optics the remaining hours of study. After tolerable proficiency in these, we shall proceed to the study of 'Man' and of 'Men'--I mean, Metaphysics and History--and finally, to a thorough examination of the Jewish and Christian Dispensations, their doctrines and evidences: an examination necessary for all men, but peculiarly so to your son, if he be destined for a medical man. A Physician who should be even a Theist, still more a 'Christian', would be a rarity indeed. I do not know 'one'--and I know a 'great many' Physicians. They are 'shallow' Animals: having always employed their minds about Body and Gut, they imagine that in the whole system of things there is nothing but Gut and Body. * * * I hope your Health is confirmed, and that your Wife and children are well. Present my well-wishes. You are blessed with children who are 'pure in Heart'--add to this Health, Competence, Social Affections, and Employment, and you have a complete idea of Human Happiness. Believe me, With esteem and friendly-heartedness, Your obliged S. T. COLERIDGE. Monday, November 14th (1796). LETTER 46. To CHARLES LLOYD, SEN. Dear Sir, I think it my duty to acquaint you with the nature of my connection with your Son. If he be to stay with me, I can neither be his tutor or fellow-student, nor in any way impart a regular system of knowledge. My 'days' I shall devote to the acquirement of 'practical' husbandry and horticulture, that as "to beg I am ashamed," I may at least be able "to dig": and my evenings will be fully employed in fulfilling my engagements with the 'Critical Review' and 'New Monthly Magazine'. If, therefore, your Son occupy a room in my cottage, he will be there merely as a Lodger and Friend; and the only money I shall 'receive' from him will be the sum which his 'board' and 'lodging' will cost 'me', and which, by an accurate calculation, I find will amount to half a guinea a week, 'exclusive' of his washing, porter, cyder, spirits, in short any potation beyond table-beer--these he must provide himself with. I shall keep no servant. I must add that Charles Lloyd must 'furnish' his own bed-room. It is not in my power to do it myself without running into debt; from which may heaven amid its most angry dispensations preserve me! When I mentioned the circumstances which rendered my literary engagement impracticable, when, I say, I first mentioned them to Charles Lloyd, and described the severe process of simplification which I had determined to adopt, I never dreamt that he would have desired to continue with me: and when at length he did manifest such a desire, I dissuaded him from it. But his feelings became vehement, and in the present state of his health it would have been as little prudent as humane in me to have given an absolute refusal. Will you permit me, Sir! to write of Charles Lloyd with freedom? I do not think he ever will endure, whatever might be the consequences, to practise as a physician, or to undertake any commercial employment. What weight your authority might have, I know not: I doubt not he would struggle to submit to it--but would he 'succeed' in any attempt to which his temper, feelings, and principles are inimical? * * * What then remains? I know of nothing but agriculture. If his attachment to it 'should' prove permanent, and he really acquired the steady dispositions of a practical farmer, I think you could wish nothing better for him than to see him married, and settled 'near you' as a farmer. I love him, and do not think he will be well or happy till he is married and settled. I have written plainly and decisively, my dear Sir! I wish to avoid not only evil, but the 'appearances' of evil. This is a world of calumnies! Yea! there is an imposthume in the large tongue of this world ever ready to break, and it is well to prevent the contents from being sputtered into one's face. My Wife thanks you for your kind inquiries respecting her. She and our Infant are well--only the latter has met with a little accident--a burn, which is doing well. To Mrs. Lloyd and all your children present my remembrances, and believe me in all esteem and friendliness, Yours sincerely, S. T. COLERIDGE. [1] Sunday, December 4, 1796. [Footnote 1: To this letter Mr. Lloyd seems to have returned the question, How could Coleridge live without companions? The answer came quickly, as we learn from a letter from Coleridge to Poole {'Letters', I, p. 186}, in which he mentions Mr. Lloyd's query and quotes his own characteristic reply: "I shall have six companions: My Sara, my babe, my own shaping and disquisitive mind, my books, my beloved friend Thomas Poole, and lastly, Nature looking at me with a thousand looks of beauty, and speaking to me in a thousand melodies of love. If I were capable of being tired with all these, I should then detect a vice in my nature, and would fly to habitual solitude to eradicate it." Coleridge's letter to Mr. Lloyd, containing this passage, seems to have been lost. Note by E. V. Lucas.] The 'Ode to the Departing Year,' Coleridge tells us, was written on 24th, 25th, and 26th December, 1796. It was first printed in the 'Cambridge Intelligencer' of 31st December, and then republished, along with the 'Lines to a Young Man who abandoned himself to a Causeless Melancholy' (probably Charles Lloyd), in quarto form of 16 pages. It was then prefaced by the following letter: LETTER 47. TO THOMAS POOLE, OF STOWEY. DEDICATION TO THE "ODE TO THE DEPARTING YEAR." My dear Friend, Soon after the commencement of this month, the editor of the 'Cambridge Intelligencer' (a newspaper conducted with so much ability, and such unmixed and fearless zeal for the interests of piety and freedom, that I cannot but think my poetry honoured by being permitted to appear in it) requested me, by letter, to furnish him with some lines for the last day of this year. I promised him that I would make the attempt; but almost immediately after, a rheumatic complaint seized on my head, and continued to prevent the possibility of poetic composition till within the last three days. So in the course of the last three days the following Ode was produced. In general, when an author informs the public that his production was struck off in a great hurry, he offers an insult, not an excuse. But I trust that the present case is an exception, and that the peculiar circumstances which obliged me to write with such unusual rapidity give a propriety to my professions of it: "nec nunc eam apud te jacto, sed et ceteris indico; ne quis asperiore limae carmen examinet, et a confuso scriptum et quod frigidum erat ni statim traderem." (I avail myself of the words of Statius, and hope that I shall likewise be able to say of any weightier publication, what 'he' has declared of his Thebaid, that it had been tortured with a laborious polish.) For me to discuss the 'literary' merits of this hasty composition were idle and presumptuous. If it be found to possess that impetuosity of transition, and that precipitation of fancy and feeling, which are the 'essential' excellencies of the sublimer Ode, its deficiency in less important respects will be easily pardoned by those from whom alone praise could give me pleasure: and whose minuter criticisms will be disarmed by the reflection, that these lines were conceived "not in the soft obscurities of retirement, or under the shelter of Academic Groves, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow."[1] I am more anxious lest the 'moral' spirit of the Ode should be mistaken. You, I am sure, will not fail to recollect that among the ancients, the Bard and the Prophet were one and the same character; and you 'know' that although I prophesy curses, I pray fervently for blessings. Farewell, Brother of my Soul! --O ever found the same And trusted and beloved! Never without an emotion of honest pride do I subscribe myself Your grateful and affectionate friend, S. T. COLERIDGE. [Bristol, December 26, 1796.] [Footnote 1: From the Preface to the first Edition of Johnson's _Dictionary of the English Language._] CHAPTER IV CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS OF COLERIDGE (From Mr. Wordsworth's Stanzas written in my Pocket-copy of Thomson's 'Castle of Indolence'.) With him there often walked in friendly guise, Or lay upon the moss by brook or tree, A noticeable Man with large grey eyes, And a pale face that seemed undoubtedly As if a blooming face it ought to be; Heavy his low-hung lip did oft appear, Deprest by weight of musing Phantasy; Profound his forehead was, though not severe; Yet some did think that he had little business here: Sweet heaven forefend! his was a lawful right: Noisy he was, and gamesome as a boy; His limbs would toss about him with delight, Like branches when strong winds the trees annoy. Nor lacked his calmer hours device or toy To banish listlessness and irksome care; He would have taught you how you might employ Yourself; and many did to him repair,-- And certes not in vain; he had inventions rare. For Josiah Wade, the gentleman to whom the letters, placed at the beginning of the last chapter, were written, the fine portrait of Mr. Coleridge by Allston, (nearly full length, in oils,) was painted at Rome in 1806,[1]--I believe in the spring of that year. Mr. Allston himself spoke of it, as in his opinion faithfully representing his friend's features and expression, such as they commonly appeared. His countenance, he added, in his high poetic mood, was quite beyond the painter's art: "it was indeed "spirit made visible"." Mr. Coleridge was thirty-three years old when this portrait was painted, but it would be taken for that of a man of forty. The youthful, even boyish look, which the original retained for some years after boyhood, must rather suddenly have given place, to a premature appearance, first of middle-agedness, then of old age, at least in his general aspect, though in some points of personal appearance,--his fair smooth skin and "large grey eyes," "at once the clearest and the deepest"--so a friend lately described them to me,--"that I ever saw," he grew not old to the last. Sergeant Talfourd thus speaks of what he was at three or four and forty. "Lamb used to say that he was inferior to what he had been in his youth; but I can scarcely believe it; at least there is nothing in his early writing which gives any idea of the richness of his mind so lavishly poured out at this time in his happiest moods. Although he looked much older than he was, his hair being silvered all over, and his person tending to corpulency, there was about him no trace of bodily sickness or mental decay, but rather an air of voluptuous repose. His benignity of manner placed his auditors entirely at their ease; and inclined them to listen delighted to the sweet low tone in which he began to discourse on some high theme. At first his tones were conversational: he seemed to dally with the shallows of the subject and with fantastic images which bordered it: but gradually the thought grew deeper, and the voice deepened with the thought; the stream gathering strength, seemed to bear along with it all things which opposed its progress, and blended them with its current; and stretching away among regions tinted with etherial colours, was lost at airy distance in the horizon of fancy. Coleridge was sometimes induced to repeat portions of 'Christabel', then enshrined in manuscript from eyes profane, and gave a bewitching effect to its wizard lines. But more peculiar in its beauty than this was his recitation of 'Kubla Khan'. As he repeated the passage-- A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw: It was an Abyssinian maid, And on her dulcimer she played Singing of Mount Abora! --his voice seemed to mount and melt into air, as the images grew more visionary, and the suggested associations more remote."[2] Mr. De Quincey thus describes him at thirty-four, in the summer season of 1807, about a year and a half after the date of Mr. Allston's portrait. "I had received directions for finding out the house where Coleridge was visiting; and in riding down a main street of Bridgewater, I noticed a gateway corresponding to the description given me. Under this was standing, and gazing about him, a man whom I shall describe. In height he might seem to be above five feet eight: (he was in reality about an inch and a half taller;) his person was broad and full, and tended even to corpulence: his complexion was fair, though not what painters technically style fair, because it was associated with black hair: his eyes were large and soft in their expression: and it was from the peculiar appearance of haze or dreaminess, which mixed with their light, that I recognised my object. This was Coleridge. I examined him steadfastly for a minute or more: and it struck me that he saw neither myself nor any object in the street. He was in a deep reverie, for I had dismounted, made two or three trifling arrangements at an inn door, and advanced close to him, before he had apparently become conscious of my presence. The sound of my voice, announcing my own name, first awoke him; he started, and for a moment, seemed at a loss to understand my purpose or his own situation; for he repeated rapidly a number of words which had no relation to either of us. There was no 'mauvaise honte' in his manner, but simple perplexity, and an apparent difficulty in recovering his position among daylight realities. This little scene over, he received me with a kindness of manner so marked that it might be called gracious. Coleridge led me to a drawing room and rang the bell for refreshments, and omitted no point of a courteous reception. He told me that there would be a very large dinner party on that day, which perhaps might be disagreeable to a perfect stranger; but, if not, he could assure me of a most hospitable welcome from the family. I was too anxious to see him, under all aspects, to think of declining this invitation. And these little points of business being settled, Coleridge, like some great river, the Orellana, or the St. Lawrence, that had been checked and fretted by rocks or thwarting islands, and suddenly recovers its volume of waters, and its mighty music, swept, at once, as if returning to his natural business, into a continuous strain of eloquent dissertation, certainly the most novel, the most finely illustrated, and traversing the most spacious fields of thought, by transitions, the most just and logical, that it was possible to conceive." I will now present him as he appeared to William Hazlitt in the February of 1798, when he was little more than five and twenty. "It was in January, 1798, that I rose one morning before daylight, to walk ten miles in the mud, to hear this celebrated person preach. Never, the longest day I have to live, shall I have such another walk as this cold, raw, comfortless one, in the winter of the year 1798. 'Il y a des impressions que ni le temps ni les circonstances peuvent effacer. Dusse-je vivre des siecles entiers, le doux temps de majeunesse ne pent renatre pour moi, ni s'effacer jamais dans ma memoire.' When I got there, the organ was playing the hundredth psalm, and when it was done, Mr. Coleridge rose and gave out his text. "He departed again into a mountain 'himself alone'." As he gave out this text his voice 'rose like a stream of rich distilled perfumes;' and when he came to the two last words, which he pronounced loud, deep, and distinct, it seemed to me, who was then young, as if the sounds had echoed from the bottom of the human heart, and as if that prayer might have floated in solemn silence through the universe. The idea of St. John came into my mind, of one crying in the wilderness, who had his loins girt about, and whose food was locusts, and wild honey. The preacher then launched into his subject, like an eagle dallying with the wind. The sermon was upon peace and war--upon church and state--not their alliance, but their separation--on the spirit of the world, and the spirit of Christianity, not as the same, but as opposed to one another. He talked of those who had inscribed the cross of Christ on banners dripping with human gore. He made a poetical and pastoral excursion,--and to shew the fatal effects of war, drew a striking contrast between the simple shepherd boy, driving his team afield, or sitting under the hawthorn, piping to his flock, as though he should never be old, and the same poor country lad, crimped, kidnapped, brought into town, made drunk at an alehouse, turned into a wretched drummer-boy, with his hair sticking on end with powder and pomatum, a long cue at his back, and tricked out in the finery of the profession of blood. Such were the notes our once loved poet sung: and for myself, I could not have been more delighted if I had heard the music of the spheres. Poetry and Philosophy had met together, Truth and Genius had embraced, under the eye and with the sanction of Religion. This was even beyond my hopes. I returned home well satisfied. The sun that was still labouring pale and wan through the sky, obscured by thick mists, seemed an emblem of the 'good cause'; and the cold dank drops of dew, that hung half melted on the beard of the thistle, had something genial and refreshing in them." [3] A glowing dawn was his, but noon's full blaze Of 'perfect day' ne'er fill'd his heav'n with radiance. Scarce were the flow'rets on their stems upraised When sudden shadows cast an evening gloom O'er those bright skies!--yet still those skies were lovely; The roses of the morn yet lingered there When stars began to peep,--nor yet exhaled Fresh dew-drops glittered near the glowworm's lamp, And many a snatch of lark-like melody Birds of the shade trilled forth'mid plaintive warbling. The principal portraits of Coleridge are, besides the one by Allston referred to by Sara Coleridge, engraved by Samuel Cousins, one by Peter Vandyke, painted in 1795; one by Hancock, drawn in 1796; another by Allston, unfinished, painted in Rome; one by C. R. Leslie, taken before 1819, one by T. Phillips, belonging to Mr. John Murray, engraved for the frontispiece of Murray's edition of the 'Table Talk'; another by Phillips, in the possession of William Rennell Coleridge, of Salston, Ottery St. Mary; and a crayon sketch by George Dawe, now at The Chanter's House. These portraits have often been engraved for biographies and editions of Coleridge's 'Poems'. Vandyke's portrait appears in Brandl's Life and Dykes-Campbell's edition of the 'Poems'; Hancock's in the Aldine edition of the 'Poems'; and Leslie's in the Bohn Library 'Friend' and in E. H. Coleridge's 'Letters of S. T. C'. Allston's portrait of 1814 is given in Flagg's 'Life of Allston'. The two best reproductions of Vandyke's and Hancock's portraits are to be found in Cottle's 'Early Recollections'. A small portrait in oils (three replicas), taken by a Bristol artist, 'circ.' 1798, engraved for Moxon's edition of 1863. A portrait in oils by James Northcote, taken in 1804 for Sir G. Beaumont, engraved in mezzotint by William Say. A portrait in oils taken at the Argyll Baths, 'circ.' 1828 (see 'Letters', 1895, ii, 758). A pencil sketch of S. T. C., et. 61, by J. Kayser (see 'Letters', ii, frontispiece). [Bust by Spurzheim. Bust by Hamo Thornycroft, Westminster Abbey.] [Footnote 1: An error of Sara Coleridge. This portrait was painted for Wade in Bristol, 1814: and is now in the National Portrait Gallery (Flagg's 'Life of Allston', pp. 105-7). The portrait of 1806 was given to Allston's niece, Miss R. Charlotte Dana, Boston.] [Footnote 2: Talfourd's full description is found in "Final Memorials of Ch. Lamb", last chapter.] [Footnote 3: Hazlitt's full description is found in 'Essays of William Hazlitt', Camelot Series, pp. 18-38.] CHAPTER V STOWEY Learning, power, and time, (Too much of all) thus wasting in vain war Of fervid colloquy. "Sickness,'tis true, 'Whole years of weary days, besieged him close, Even to the gates and inlets of his life!' But it is true, no less, that strenuous, firm, And with a natural gladness, he maintained The citadel unconquered, and in joy Was strong to follow the delightful Muse." With the letter of Nov. 5, [1] the biographical sketch left by Mr. Coleridge's late Editor comes to an end, and at the present time I can carry it no further than to add, that in January, 1797, my Father removed with his wife and child, the latter then four months' old, to a cottage at Stowey, which was his home for three years; that from that home, in company with Mr. and Miss Wordsworth, he went, in September, 1798, to Germany, and that he spent fourteen months in that country, during which period the Letters called Satyrane's were written. [Footnote 1: No. 43. Sara Coleridge now continues the narrative for ten lines.] Cottle, in his 'Reminiscences', says Mr. Coleridge sent him the following letter from Stowey: LETTER 48 (January, 1797.) Dear Cottle, I write under great agony of mind, Charles Lloyd being very ill. He has been seized with his fits three times in the space of seven days: and just as I was in bed last night, I was called up again; and from twelve o'clock at night, to five this morning, he remained in one continued state of agonized delirium. What with bodily toil, exerted in repressing his frantic struggles, and what with the feelings of agony for his sufferings, you may suppose that I have forced myself from bed, with aching temples, and a feeble frame.* * * We offer petitions, not as supposing we influence the Immutable; but because to petition the Supreme Being, is the way most suited to our nature, to stir up the benevolent affections in our hearts. Christ positively commands it, and in St. Paul you will find unnumbered instances of prayer for individual blessings; for kings, rulers, etc. etc. We indeed should all join to our petitions: "But thy will be done, Omniscient, All-loving Immortal God!" Believe [1] me to have towards you, the inward and spiritual gratitude and affection, though I am not always an adept in the outward and visible signs. God bless you, S. T. C. [Footnote 1: "My respects to your good mother, and to your father and believe me," etc.--"Early Recollections".] The next letter refers to the second edition of the poems, and must have been written early in January, 1797. LETTER 49 (3 January, 1797.) My dear Cottle, If you delay the press it will give me the opportunity I so much wish, of sending my "Visions of the Maid of Arc" to Wordsworth, who lives [1] not above twenty miles from this place; and to Charles Lamb, whose taste and judgment, I see reason to think more correct and philosophical than my own, which yet I place pretty high. * * * We arrived safe. Our house is set to rights. We are all--wife, bratling, and self, remarkably well. Mrs. Coleridge likes Stowey, and loves Thomas Poole and his mother, who love her. A communication has been made from our orchard into T. Poole's garden, and from thence to Cruikshank's, a friend of mine, and a young married man, whose wife is very amiable, and she and Sara are already on the most cordial terms; from all this you will conclude we are happy. By-the-bye, what a delightful poem, is Southey's "Musings on a Landscape of Caspar Poussin". I love it almost better than his "Hymn to the Penates". In his volume of poems, the following, namely, "The Six Sonnets on the Slave Trade.--The Ode to the Genius of Africa.--To my own Miniature Picture.--The Eight Inscriptions.--Elinor, Botany-bay Eclogue.--Frederick", ditto.--"The Ten Sonnets". (pp. 107-116.) "On the death of an Old Spaniel.--The Soldier's Wife, Dactylics,--The Widow, Sapphics.--The Chapel Bell.--The Race of Banco.--"Rudiger". All these Poems are worthy the Author of "Joan of Arc". And "The Musings on a Landscape", etc. and "The Hymn to the Penates", deserve to have been published after "Joan of Arc", as proofs of progressive genius. God bless you, S. T. C. [Footnote 1: Mr. Wordsworth lived at Racedown, before he removed to Allfoxden. (Cottle.)] [The dates of Letters 49 and 50 are determined by that of a letter from Lamb to Coleridge of 5th January 1797 ("Ainger", i, 57). Letter 49 implies that Coleridge was now acquainted with Wordsworth. A letter from Mrs. Wordsworth to Sara Coleridge of 7th Nov. 1845 (Knight's "Life of Wordsworth", i, iii) gives the date of the first meeting of the poets as "about the year 1795." Professor Knight thinks this should be 1796. In the letter of Wordsworth to Wrangham, referred to in Note to Letter 13, Wordsworth does not say that he knew Coleridge personally. Letter 49 is the only trustworthy "contemporary" evidence on the subject.] After receiving Lamb's answer of 5th January, in which Lamb criticises unfavourably the "Joan of Arc" lines ("Ainger", i, 57), Coleridge writes: LETTER 50. TO COTTLE (10 January 1797). My dear Cottle, The lines which I added to my lines in the "Joan of Arc", have been so little approved by Charles Lamb, to whom I sent them, that although I differ from him in opinion, I have not heart to finish the poem. "Mr. Coleridge in the same letter," says Cottle, "thus refers to his "Ode to the Departing Year"." * * * So much for an "Ode", which some people think superior to the "Bard" of Gray, and which others think a rant of turgid obscurity; and the latter are the more numerous class. It is not obscure. My "Religious Musings" I know are, but not this "Ode". Coleridge, in 1797, as in 1796, was invariably behind time with his "copy" for the second edition. He thus writes Cottle: LETTER 51. TO COTTLE (Jany 1797). My dear Cottle, * * * On Thursday morning, by Milton, the Stowey carrier, I shall send you a parcel, containing the book of my Poems interleaved, with the alterations, and likewise the prefaces, which I shall send to you, for your criticisms. * * * LETTER 52. TO COTTLE Stowey, Friday Morning (1797). My dear Cottle. * * * If you do not like the following verses, or if you do not think them worthy of an edition in which I profess to give nothing but my choicest fish, picked, gutted, and cleaned, please to get some one to write them out and send them, with my compliments to the editor of the "New Monthly Magazine". But if you think as well of them as I do (most probably from parental dotage for my last born) let them immediately follow "The Kiss". God love you, S. T. C. TO AN UNFORTUNATE YOUNG WOMAN. WHOM I HAD KNOWN IN THE DAYS OF HER INNOCENCE. Maiden! that with sullen brow, Sitt'st behind those virgins gay; Like a scorched, and mildew'd bough, Leafless mid the blooms of May. Inly gnawing, thy distresses Mock those starts of wanton glee; And thy inmost soul confesses Chaste Affection's majesty. Loathing thy polluted lot, Hie thee, Maiden! hie thee hence! Seek thy weeping mother's cot, With a wiser innocence! Mute the Lavrac [1] and forlorn While she moults those firstling plumes That had skimm'd the tender corn, Or the bean-field's od'rous blooms; Soon with renovating wing, Shall she dare a loftier flight, Upwards to the day-star sing, And embathe in heavenly light. ALLEGORICAL LINES ON THE SAME SUBJECT. Myrtle Leaf, that, ill besped, Pinest in the gladsome ray, Soiled beneath the common tread, Far from thy protecting spray; When the scythes-man o'er his sheaf, Caroll'd in the yellow vale, Sad, I saw thee, heedless leaf, Love the dalliance of the gale. Lightly didst thou, poor fond thing! Heave and flutter to his sighs While the flatterer on his wing, Woo'd, and whisper'd thee to rise. Gaily from thy mother stalk Wert thou danced and wafted high; Soon on this unsheltered walk, Flung to fade, and rot, and die! [Footnote 1: The Skylark.] Cottle subjected the two poems to severe criticism, and Coleridge replied: LETTER 53. TO COTTLE Wednesday morning, 10 o'clock. (January, 1797.) My dearest Cottle, * * * "Ill besped" is indeed a sad blotch; but after having tried at least a hundred ways, before I sent the Poem to you, and often since, I find it incurable. This first Poem is but a so so composition. I wonder I could have been so blinded by the ardour of recent composition, as to see anything in it. Your remarks are "perfectly just" on the "Allegorical lines", except that, in this district, corn is as often cut with a scythe, as with a hook. However, for ""Scythes-man"" read "Rustic". For ""poor fond thing"," read "foolish thing", and for ""flung to fade, and rot, and die"," read "flung to wither and to die". * * * * * Milton (the carrier) waits impatiently. S. T. C. [1] [Footnote 1: Letters LXXI-LXXII follow Letter 53.] Only the second poem was included in the second edition. The next letter, which contains an unrealized prophecy regarding Southey, speaks of the joint partnership of the volume of 1797. LETTER 54. TO COTTLE Stowey,--(Feby. or Mch. 1797.) My dear Cottle, * * * Public affairs are in strange confusion. I am afraid that I shall prove, at least, as good a Prophet as Bard. Oh, doom'd to fall, my country! enslaved and vile! But may God make me a foreboder of evils never to come! I have heard from Sheridan, desiring me to write a tragedy. I have no genius that way; Robert Southey has. I think highly of his "Joan of Arc", and cannot help prophesying that he will be known to posterity, as Shakspeare's great grandson. I think he will write a tragedy or tragedies. Charles Lloyd has given me his Poems, which I give to you, on condition that you print them in this Volume, after Charles Lamb's Poems; the title page, "Poems, by S. T. Coleridge. Second Edition: to which are added Poems, by C. Lamb, and C. Lloyd". C. Lamb's poems will occupy about forty pages; C. Lloyd's at least one hundred, although only his choice fish. P.S. I like your "Lines on Savage". God bless you, S. T. COLERIDGE." During his stay at Stowey, Coleridge remained a subscriber to Catcott's Library, Bristol; and the following letter to the librarian is worth preserving. LETTER 55. TO COTTLE Stowey, May, 1797. My dear Cottle, I have sent a curious letter to George Catcott. He has altogether made me pay five shillings! for postage, by his letters sent all the way to Stowey, requiring me to return books to the Bristol Library. * * * * "Mr. Catcott, "I beg your acceptance of all the enclosed letters. You must not think lightly of the present, as they cost me, who am a very poor man, five shillings. "With respect to the "Bruck. Hist. Crit." although by accident they were registered on the 23d of March, yet they were not removed from the Library for a fortnight after; and when I received your first letter, I had had the books just three weeks. Our learned and ingenious Committee may read through two quartos, that is, one thousand and four hundred pages of close printed Latin and Greek, in three weeks, for aught I know to the contrary. I pretend to no such intenseness of application, or rapidity of genius. "I must beg you to inform me, by Mr. Cottle, what length of time is allowed by the rules and customs of our institution for each book. Whether their contents, as well as their size, are consulted, in apportioning the time; or whether, customarily, any time at all is apportioned, except when the Committee, in individual cases, choose to deem it proper. I subscribe to your library, Mr. Catcott, not to read novels, or books of quick reading and easy digestion, but to get books which I cannot get elsewhere,--books of massy knowledge; and as I have few books of my own, I read with a common-place book, so that if I be not allowed a longer period of time for the perusal of such books, I must contrive to get rid of my subscription, which would be a thing perfectly useless, except so far as it gives me an opportunity of reading your little expensive notes and letters. "Yours in Christian fellowship, "S. T. COLERIDGE." Whether Coleridge had given Southey the opportunity to try his skill at the drama or not does not appear; but the following letter to Cottle shows that he had addressed himself to the task of composing a tragedy, evidently "Osorio". LETTER 56. TO COTTLE Stowey, May, 1797. My dearest Cottle, I love and respect you as a brother, and my memory deceives me woefully, if I have not evidenced, by the animated tone of my conversation when we have been tete-a-tete, how much your conversation interested me. But when last in Bristol, the day I meant to devote to you, was such a day of sadness, I could do nothing. On the Saturday, the Sunday, and ten days after my arrival at Stowey, I felt a depression too dreadful to be described. So much I felt my genial spirits droop, My hopes all flat; Nature within me seemed In all her functions, weary of herself, Wordsworth's [1] conversation aroused me somewhat, but even now I am not the man I have been, and I think I never shall. A sort of calm hopelessness diffuses itself over my heart. Indeed every mode of life which has promised me bread and cheese, has been, one after another, torn away from me, but God remains. I have no immediate pecuniary distress, having received ten pounds from Lloyd. I employ myself now on a book of morals in answer to Godwin, and on my tragedy... There are some poets who write too much at their ease, from the facility with which they please themselves. They do not often enough Feel their burdened breast Heaving beneath incumbent Deity. So that to posterity their wreaths will look unseemly. Here, perhaps, an everlasting Amaranth, and, close by its side, some weed of an hour, sere, yellow, and shapeless. Their very beauties will lose half their effect, from the bad company they keep. They rely too much on story and event, to the neglect of those lofty imaginings that are peculiar to, and definite of the Poet. The story of Milton might be told in two pages. It is this which distinguishes an epic poem from a romance in metre. Observe the march of Milton; his severe application; his laborious polish; his deep metaphysical researches; his prayer to God before he began his great work; all that could lift and swell his intellect, became his daily food. I should not think of devoting less than twenty years to an epic poem. Ten years to collect materials and warm my mind with universal science. I would be a tolerable Mathematician. I would thoroughly understand Mechanics; Hydrostatics; Optics and Astronomy; Botany; Metallurgy; Fossilism; Chemistry; Geology; Anatomy; Medicine; then the mind of man; then the minds of men, in all Travels, Voyages, and Histories. So I would spend ten years; the next five in the composition of the poem, and the five last in the correction of it. So would I write, haply not unhearing of that divine and nightly-whispering voice, which speaks to mighty minds, of predestinated garlands, starry and unwithering. God love you. S. T. COLERIDGE. P.S. David Hartley is well and grows. Sara is well, and desires a sister's love to you. [Footnote 1: Mr. Wordsworth at this time resided at Allfoxden House, two or three miles from Stowey.--[Note by Cottle.]] "The following letter of Mr. C," says Cottle, "was in answer to a request for some long-promised copy, and for which the printer importuned." LETTER 57. TO COTTLE Stowey (May), 1797. My dear, dear Cottle, Have patience, and everything shall be done. I think now entirely of your brother:[1] in two days I will think entirely for you. By Wednesday next you shall have Lloyd's other Poems, with all Lamb's, etc. etc. * * * S. T. C. "A little before this time," says Cottle, "a singular occurrence happened to Mr. C. during a pedestrian excursion into Somersetshire, as detailed in the following letter to Mr. Wade." [Footnote 1: My brother, when at Cambridge, had written a Latin poem for the prize: the subject, "Italia, Vastata," and sent it to Mr. Coleridge, with whom he was on friendly terms, in MS. requesting the favour of his remarks; and this he did about six weeks before it was necessary to deliver it in. Mr. C. in an immediate letter, expressed his approbation of the Poem, and cheerfully undertook the task; but with a little of his procrastination, he returned the MS. with his remarks, just one day after it was too late to deliver the poem in!--[Note by Cottle.]] LETTER 58. TO WADE (May, 1797.) My dear friend, I am here after a most tiresome journey; in the course of which, a woman asked me if I knew one Coleridge, of Bristol. I answered, I had heard of him. "Do you know, (quoth she) that that vile jacobin villain drew away a young man of our parish, one Burnett," etc. and in this strain did the woman continue for near an hour; heaping on me every name of abuse that the parish of Billingsgate could supply. I listened very particularly; appeared to approve all she said, exclaiming, "dear me!" two or three times, and, in fine, so completely won the woman's heart by my civilities, that I had not courage enough to undeceive her. * * * S. T. COLERIDGE. P.S. You are a good prophet. Oh, into what a state have the scoundrels brought this devoted kingdom. If the House of Commons would but melt down their faces, it would greatly assist the copper currency--we should have brass enough. Coleridge, like all the Return-to-Nature poets of the eighteenth century, Thomson, Cowper, Burns, and others, was given to that humanitarian regard for the lower creatures which brought forth such poems as Burns's "Address to a Mouse" and Coleridge's own lines to a "Young Ass". The following letter to Cottle is an amusing sample of that humanitarianism. George Burnett, one of the pantisocrats, occasionally resided with Coleridge, and during the latter's temporary absence from Stowey had taken ill. On reaching Stowey, Coleridge wrote to Cottle. LETTER 59. TO COTTLE Stowey (May, 1797). My dear friend, I found George Burnett ill enough, heaven knows, Yellow Jaundice--the introductory symptoms very violent. I return to Bristol on Thursday, and shall not leave till "all be done". Remind Mrs. Coleridge of the kittens, and tell her that George's brandy is just what smuggled spirits might be expected to be, execrable! The smack of it remains in my mouth, and I believe will keep me most horribly temperate for half a century. He (Burnett) was bit, but I caught the Brandiphobia.[1] (obliterations * * * * * * * --scratched out, well knowing that you never allow such things to pass, uncensured. A good joke, and it slipped out most impromptu--ishly.) The mice play the very devil with us. It irks me to set a trap. By all the whiskers of all the pussies that have mewed plaintively, or amorously, since the days of Whittington, it is not fair. 'Tis telling a lie. 'Tis as if you said, "Here is a bit of toasted cheese; come little mice! I invite you!" when, oh, foul breach of the rites of hospitality! I mean to assassinate my too credulous guests! No, I cannot set a trap, but I should vastly like to make a Pitt--fall. (Smoke the Pun!) But concerning the mice, advise thou, lest there be famine in the land. Such a year of scarcity! Inconsiderate mice! Well, well, so the world wags. Farewell, S. T. C. P.S. A mad dog ran through our village, and bit several dogs. I have desired the farmers to be attentive, and tomorrow shall give them, in writing, the first symptoms of madness in a dog. I wish my pockets were as yellow as George's Phiz! [Footnote 1: It appears that Mr. Burnett had been prevailed upon by smugglers to buy some prime cheap brandy, but which Mr. Coleridge affirmed to be a compound of Hellebore, kitchen grease, and Assafoetida! or something as bad.--[Cottle's note.]] The next letter must belong to the end of May or beginning of June. Cottle's note shows that the second edition of the poems was now published. LETTER 60. TO COTTLE Stowey (June), 1797. My dear Cottle, I deeply regret, that my anxieties and my slothfulness, acting in a combined ratio, prevented me from finishing my "Progress of Liberty, or Visions of the Maid of Orleans", with that Poem at the head of the volume, with the "Ode" in the middle, and the "Religious Musings" at the end. * * * In the "Lines on the Man of Ross", immediately after these lines, He heard the widow's heaven-breathed prayer of praise, He mark'd the shelter'd orphan's tearful gaze. Please to add these two lines. And o'er the portion'd maiden's snowy cheek, Bade bridal love suffuse its blushes meek. And for the line, Beneath this roof, if thy cheer'd moments pass. I should be glad to substitute this, If near this roof thy wine-cheer'd moments pass. "These emendations," Cottle adds, "came too late for admission in the second edition; nor have they appeared in the last edition. They will remain therefore for insertion in any future edition of Mr. Coleridge's Poems." The exact date on which Coleridge and Wordsworth met in the year 1796 has not been ascertained; but Coleridge speaks in the next letter as if he was now well acquainted with Wordsworth. Coleridge had been at Taunton early in June ('Letters, 220). On the 8th of June he wrote to Cottle. LETTER 61. TO COTTLE (8th) June, 1797. My dear Cottle, I am sojourning for a few days at Racedown, Dorset, the mansion of our friend Wordsworth; who presents his kindest respects to you. * * * Wordsworth admires my tragedy, which gives me great hopes. Wordsworth has written a tragedy himself. I speak with heartfelt sincerity, and I think, unblinded judgment, when I tell you that I feel myself a little man by his side, and yet I do not think myself a less man than I formerly thought myself. His drama is absolutely wonderful. You know I do not commonly speak in such abrupt and unmingled phrases, and therefore will the more readily believe me. There are, in the piece, those profound touches of the human heart, which I find three or four times in the 'Robbers' of Schiller, and often in Shakespeare, but in Wordsworth there are no inequalities. * * * God bless you, and eke [1] S. T. COLERIDGE. [2] [Footnote 1: The reader will have observed a peculiarity in most of Mr. Coleridge's conclusions to his letters. He generally says, "God bless you, and, or eke, S. T. C." so as to involve a compound blessing.--[Cottle.]] [Footnote 2: Letter LXXIII is our 61.] Shakespeare evidently occupied an important place in Coleridge's mind even at this early date. His discovery of rivals to the prince of English dramatists in his friends Southey and Wordsworth only indicates how largely Shakespeare already bulked in his view of the dramatic art. The next letter to Cottle is of a milder type, and leads up to an interesting meeting, famous in the lives of Lamb, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. LETTER 62. TO COTTLE Stowey, June 29th, 1797. My very dear Cottle, ***Charles Lamb will probably be here in about a fortnight. Could you not contrive to put yourself in a Bridgwater coach, and T. Poole would fetch you in a one-horse chaise to Stowey. What delight would it not give us. *** Still more interesting is the often quoted letter describing Dorothy Wordsworth. LETTER 63. TO COTTLE Stowey (3-17 July), 1797. My dear Cottle, Wordsworth and his exquisite sister are with me. She is a woman indeed! in mind I mean, and heart; for her person is such, that if you expected to see a pretty woman, you would think her rather ordinary; if you expected to see an ordinary woman, you would think her pretty! but her manners are simple, ardent, impressive. In every motion, her most innocent soul outbeams so brightly, that who saw would say, Guilt was a thing impossible in her. Her information various. Her eye watchful in minutest observation of nature; and her taste, a perfect electrometer. It bends, protrudes, and draws in, at subtlest beauties, and most recondite faults. She and W. desire their kindest respects to you. Give my love to your brother Amos. I condole with him in the loss of the prize, but it is the fortune of war. The finest Greek Poem I ever wrote lost the prize, and that which gained it was contemptible. An Ode may sometimes be too bad for the prize, but very often too good. Your ever affectionate friend. S. T. C.[1] [Footnote 1: Letter LXXIV follows 63.] Dorothy Wordsworth's description of Coleridge whom she met now for the first time is as follows: "You had a great loss," she wrote to a friend, "in not seeing Coleridge. He is a wonderful man. His conversation teems with soul, mind, and spirit. Then he is so benevolent, so good tempered and cheerful, and, like William, interests himself so much about every little trifle. At first I thought him very plain, that is, for about three minutes. He is pale, thin, has a wide mouth, thick lips, and not very good teeth, longish, loose-growing, half curling, rough, black hair. But if you hear him speak for five minutes you think no more of them. His eye is large and full, and not very dark, but grey, such an eye as would receive from a heavy soul the dullest expression; but it speaks every emotion of his animated mind: it has more of 'the poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling' than I ever witnessed. He has fine dark eyebrows, and an overhanging forehead. "The first thing that was read after he came was William's new poem, "The Ruined Cottage", with which he was much delighted; and after tea he repeated to us two acts and a half of his tragedy, "Osorio". The next morning William read his tragedy, "The Borderers"." (Knight's "Life of Wordsworth", i, 111-112.) The line Coleridge quotes in his description of Dorothy: Guilt is a thing impossible in her occurs in the additional verses Coleridge had written to the "Joan of Arc" lines sent to Lamb. John Thelwall, one of the sturdy democrats of the time who had made no small commotion with his Revolutionary principles, had also visited Coleridge at Stowey in the summer of 1797. Coleridge had corresponded with him before knowing him personally ("Letters", 202), chiefly about politics, religion and books. Coleridge thus describes Thelwall to Wade. LETTER 64. TO WADE Stowey (17-20 July), 1797. My very dear friend, * * * John Thelwall is a very warm-hearted, honest man; and disagreeing as we do, on almost every point of religion, of morals, of politics, and philosophy, we like each other uncommonly well. He is a great favorite with Sara. Energetic activity of mind and of heart, is his master feature. He is prompt to conceive, and still prompter to execute; but I think he is deficient in that patience of mind which can look intensely and frequently at the same subject. He believes and disbelieves with impassioned confidence. I wish to see him doubting, and doubting. He is intrepid, eloquent, and honest. Perhaps, the only acting democrat that is honest, for the patriots are ragged cattle; a most execrable herd. Arrogant because they are ignorant, and boastful of the strength of reason, because they have never tried it enough to know its weakness. Oh! my poor country! The clouds cover thee. There is not one spot of clear blue in the whole heaven! My love to all whom you love, and believe me, with brotherly affection, with esteem and gratitude, and every warm emotion of the heart, Your faithful S. T. COLERIDGE. The next letter closes the visit of Thelwall. LETTER 65. TO COTTLE Stowey, Sept. 1797. My very dear Cottle, Your illness afflicts me, and unless I receive a full account of you by Milton, I shall be very uneasy, so do not fail to write. Herbert Croft is in Exeter gaol! This is unlucky. Poor devil! He must now be unpeppered. We are all well. Wordsworth is well. Hartley sends a grin to you? He has another tooth! In the wagon, there was brought from Bath, a trunk, in order to be forwarded to Stowey, directed, "S. T. Coleridge, Stowey, near Bridgwater." This, we suppose, arrived in Bristol on Tuesday or Wednesday, last week. It belonged to Thelwall. If it be not forwarded to Stowey, let it be stopped, and not sent. Give my kind love to your brother Robert, and "ax" him to put on his hat, and run, without delay to the inn, or place, by whatever bird, beast, fish, or man distinguished, where Parson's Bath wagon sets up. From your truly affectionate friend, S. T. COLERIDGE. In the beginning of September Coleridge was meditating a visit to his favourite Bowles, whom, in spite of his youthful admiration, he had not seen since he first saw him in Salisbury when a mere boy. ("Letters", 211.) LETTER 66. TO COTTLE (3 Sept., 1797.) I shall now stick close to my tragedy (called "Osorio"), and when I have finished it, shall walk to Shaftesbury to spend a few days with Bowles. From thence I go to Salisbury, and thence to Christchurch, to see Southey. "This letter," Cottle says, "as was usual, has no date, but a letter from Wordsworth determines about the time when Mr. C. had nearly finished his Tragedy." September 13, 1797. "* * * Coleridge is gone over to Bowles with his Tragedy, which he has finished to the middle of the 5th Act. He set off a week ago." J. Dykes Campbell in his Life of Coleridge asserts that the Tragedy of "Osorio" was sent to Drury Lane "without much hope that it would be accepted."[1] This, however, is inaccurate. The play was not sent; Coleridge went to London with it, for he writes to Cottle in the beginning of September: [Footnote 1: "Life", p. 78.] LETTER 67. TO COTTLE London (10-15 Sept.) 1797. Dear Cottle, If Mrs. Coleridge be in Bristol, pray desire her to write to me immediately, and I beg you, the moment you receive this letter, to send to No. 17, Newfoundland Street, to know whether she be there. I have written to Stowey, but if she be in Bristol, beg her to write to me of it by return of post, that I may immediately send down some cash for her travelling expenses, etc. We shall reside in London for the next four months. God bless you, Cottle, I love you, S. T. COLERIDGE. P. S. The volume (second edition, Coleridge, Lloyd, and Lamb) is a most beautiful one. You have determined that the three Bards shall walk up Parnassus, in their best bib and tucker. [l] Coleridge's beautiful Sonnet to W. Linley, Sheridan's brother-in-law and secretary, is dated 12 September, 1797, and Coleridge must have been in London from about that date to 3 December, with perhaps an interval of return between. The sonnet is dated from Donhead, in Wilts, whither Coleridge had probably gone on a visit from London. Wordsworth's play was presented to Covent Garden. An undated letter of Coleridge to Cottle, which must have been written about the end of November, informs us that it was through Coleridge the play was tried at Covent Garden. [Footnote 1: Letters LXXV-LXXVII follow 67.] LETTER 68. TO COTTLE (28 Nov. 1797.) I have procured for Wordsworth's tragedy, an introduction to Harris, the manager of Covent Garden, who has promised to read it attentively, and give his answer immediately; and if he accepts it, to put it in preparation without an hour's delay. A letter by Dorothy Wordsworth of 20th November[1] confirms the fact that "The Borderers" was sent to Covent Garden. Both plays were rejected, that of Coleridge on account of the obscurity of the last three acts; and Coleridge wrote to Cottle his feelings on the occasion. [Footnote 1: Knight's "Life of Wordsworth", i, 127.] LETTER 69. To COTTLE (2 Dec. 1797.) Dear Cottle, I have heard nothing of my Tragedy, except some silly remarks of Kemble's, to whom a friend showed it; it does not appear to me that there is a shadow of probability that it will be accepted. It gave me no pain, and great pleasure, in finding that it gave me no pain. I had rather hoped than believed that I was possessed of so much philosophical capability. Sheridan most certainly has not used me with common justice. The proposal came from himself, and although this circumstance did not bind him to accept the tragedy, it certainly bound him to every, and that the earliest, attention to it. I suppose it is snugly in his green bag, if it have not emigrated to the kitchen. I sent to the "Monthly Magazine" (1797), three mock Sonnets, in ridicule of my own Poems, and Charles Lloyd's, and Lamb's, etc. etc. exposing that affectation of unaffectedness, of jumping and misplaced accent, in common-place epithets, flat lines forced into poetry by italics, (signifying how well and mouthishly the author would read them) puny pathos, etc. etc. The instances were almost all taken from myself, and Lloyd, and Lamb. I signed them 'Nehemiah Higginbotham.' I think they may do good to our young Bards. God love you, S. T. C. P. S. I am translating the "Oberon" of Wieland; it is a difficult language, and I can translate at least as fast as I can construe. I have made also a very considerable proficiency in the French language, and study it daily, and daily study the German; so that I am not, and have not been idle. * * * Coleridge had been introduced through Poole to the Wedgwoods; and hearing that Coleridge was in need of funds, Tom Wedgwood offered Coleridge £100, sending an order for the amount. Coleridge was now meditating entering the Unitarian ministry, and was perplexed whether to remain with Poetry or enter the pulpit. He writes to Cottle on the occasion: LETTER 70. TO COTTLE Stowey (January, 1798.) My very dear friend, This last fortnight has been very eventful. I received one hundred pounds from Josiah Wedgwood, in order to prevent the necessity of my going into the ministry. I have received an invitation from Shrewsbury, to be minister there; and after fluctuations of mind, which have for nights together robbed me of sleep, and I am afraid of health, I have at length returned the order to Mr. Wedgwood, with a long letter, explanatory of my conduct, and accepted the Shrewsbury invitation. * * The next letter Cottle says refers to the Wedgwood Pension, but may be about the rejection of the £100.[l] [Footnote 1: See Litchfield's "Tom Wedgwood", pp. 54-56.] LETTER 71. TO THOMAS WEDGWOOD[1] Shrewsbury, Friday night, (--January), 1798. My dear sir, I have this moment received your letter, and have scarcely more than a moment to answer it by return of post. If kindly feeling can be repaid by kindly feeling, I am not your debtor. I would wish to express the same thing which is big at my heart, but I know not how to do it without indelicacy. As much abstracted from personal feeling as possible, I honor and esteem you for that which you have done. I must of necessity stay here till the close of Sunday next. On Monday morning I shall leave it, and on Tuesday will be with you at Cote-House. Very affectionately yours, S. T. COLERIDGE. T. Wedgwood, Esq. [Footnote 1: Not in "Early Recollections".] The next letter refers to the offer of the Pension of £150 a year, which the Wedgwoods conferred on Coleridge. LETTER 72. TO COTTLE (24 January, 1798). My very dear Cottle, The moment I received Mr. T. Wedgwood's letter, I accepted his offer. How a contrary report could arise, I cannot guess.... I hope to see you at the close of next week. I have been respectfully and kindly treated at Shrewsbury. I am well, and now, and ever, Your grateful and affectionate friend, S. T. COLERIDGE. [1] [Footnote 1: Letter LXXVIII follows 72.] The next letter is an amusing one coming from Coleridge. It is an apology for the "Monody on the Death of Chatterton", which he wished to discard from the second edition of his poems, but which Cottle insisted on retaining among the poet's "choice fish, picked, gutted, and cleaned." LETTER 73. TO THE EDITOR OF THE "MONTHLY MAGAZINE" January 1798. Sir, I hope this letter may arrive time enough to answer its purpose. I cannot help considering myself as having been placed in a very ridiculous light by the gentlemen who have remarked, answered, and rejoined concerning my "Monody on Chatterton". I have not seen the compositions of my competitors (unless indeed the exquisite poem of Warton's, entitled "The Suicide", refer to this subject), but this I know, that my own is a very poor one. It was a school exercise, somewhat altered; and it would have been omitted in the last edition of my poems but for the request of my friend Mr. Cottle, whose property those poems are. If it be not in your intention to exhibit my name on any future month, you will accept my best thanks, and not publish this letter. But if Crito and the Alphabet-men should continue to communicate on this subject, and you should think it proper for reasons best known to yourself to publish their communications, then I depend on your kindness for the insertion of my letter; by which it is possible those your correspondents may be induced to expend their remarks, whether panegyrical or vituperative, on nobler game than on a poem which was, in truth, the first effort of a young man, all whose poems a candid critic will only consider as first efforts. Yours, with due respect, S. T. COLERIDGE. Shrewsbury. Coleridge, even at this date, shows signs of a Catholicism in literary taste beyond the average man of his time; but it is an Intellectual Hospitality to all sorts and conditions of minds and men rather than a wide or deep enlightenment. He already manifested a tendency to read the most abstruse and out-of-the-way books. He commissioned Thelwall to purchase for him Iamblichus, Proclus, Sidonius Apollinaris, Plotinus, Ficino; and he read Dupuis' huge "Origine de tous les Cultes", a fantastic work tracing the genesis of all religions to the worship of the stars ("Letters", 181-2). This love of recondite lore remained with him through life; but it was his meeting with William and Dorothy Wordsworth that helped most at this juncture to develop the possibilities within him. Wordsworth was one of those who are lofty rather than wide, but who, by their self concentration, act as a healthy corrective to the over-diffusiveness of the Shakespearian type of mind.) CHAPTER VI THE LYRICAL BALLADS; GERMANY Cottle's acquaintance with Coleridge led to his making friends with Wordsworth, and in his "Early Recollections" and "Reminiscences", the Bristol bookseller tells a few amusing tales about the poets. The following is the best: "A visit to Mr. Coleridge, at Stowey, in the year 1797, had been the means of my introduction to Mr. Wordsworth. Soon after our acquaintance had commenced, Mr. W. happened to be in Bristol, and asked me to spend a day or two with him at Allfoxden. I consented, and drove him down in a gig. We called for Mr. Coleridge, Miss Wordsworth, and the servant, at Stowey, and they walked, while we rode on to Mr. W.'s house at Allfoxden, distant two or three miles, where we purposed to dine. A London alderman would smile at our prepation, or bill of fare. It consisted of philosophers' viands; namely, a bottle of brandy, a noble loaf, and a stout piece of cheese; and as there were plenty of lettuces in the garden, with all these comforts we calculated on doing very well. "Our fond hopes, however, were somewhat damped, by finding, that our 'stout piece of cheese' had vanished! A sturdy "rat" of a beggar, whom we had relieved on the road, with his olfactories all alive, no doubt, "smelt" our cheese, and while we were gazing at the magnificent clouds, contrived to abstract our treasure! Cruel tramp! An ill return for our pence! We both wished the rind might not choke him! The mournful fact was ascertained a little before we drove into the courtyard of the house. Mr. Coleridge bore the loss with great fortitude, observing, that we should never starve with a loaf of bread and a bottle of brandy. He now, with the dexterity of an adept, admired by his friends around, unbuckled the horse, and, putting down the shafts with a jerk, as a triumphant conclusion of his work, lo! the bottle of brandy that had been placed most carefully behind us on the seat, from the force of gravity, suddenly rolled down, and before we could arrest this spirituous avalanche, pitching right on the stones, was dashed to pieces. We all beheld the spectacle, silent and petrified! We might have collected the broken fragments of glass, but the brandy; that was gone! clean gone! "One little untoward thing often follows another, and while the rest stood musing, chained to the place, regaling themselves with the Cognac effluvium, and all miserably chagrined, I led the horse to the stable, when a fresh perplexity arose. I removed the harness without difficulty, but after many strenuous attempts, I could not get off the collar. In despair, I called for assistance, when aid soon drew near. Mr. Wordsworth first brought his ingenuity into exercise, but after several unsuccessful efforts, he relinquished the achievement, as a thing altogether impracticable. Mr. Coleridge now tried his hand, but showed no more grooming skill than his predecessors; for after twisting the poor horse's neck almost to strangulation, and to the great danger of his eyes, he gave up the useless task, pronouncing that the horse's head must have grown, (gout or dropsy!) since the collar was put on! 'for,' he said 'It was a downright impossibility for such a huge Os Frontis to pass through so narrow a collar!' Just at this instant the servant girl came near, and understanding the cause of our consternation, 'La, Master,' said she, 'you do not go about the work in the right way. You should do like as this,' when turning the collar completely upside down, she slipped it off in a moment, to our great humiliation and wonderment; each satisfied, afresh, that there were heights of knowledge in the world, to which we had not yet attained. "We were now summoned to dinner, and a dinner it was, such as every "blind" and starving man in the three kingdoms would have rejoiced to "behold". At the top of the table stood a superb brown loaf. The centre dish presented a pile of the true coss lettuces, and at the bottom appeared an empty plate, where the 'stout piece of cheese' "ought" to have stood! (cruel mendicant!) and though the brandy was 'clean gone,' yet its place was well, if not "better" supplied by an abundance of fine sparkling Castalian champagne! A happy thought at this time started into one of our minds, that some condiment would render the lettuces a little more palatable, when an individual in the company, recollected a question, once propounded by the most patient of men, 'How can that which is unsavoury be eaten without "salt"?' and asked for a little of that valuable culinary article. 'Indeed, sir,' Betty replied, 'I quite forgot to buy salt.' A general laugh followed the announcement, in which our host heartily joined. This was nothing. We had plenty of other good things, and while crunching our succulents, and munching our crusts, we pitied the far worse condition of those, perchance as hungry as ourselves, who were forced to dine, off aether alone. For our next meal, the mile-off village furnished all that could be desired, and these trifling incidents present the sum and the result of half the little passing disasters of life. "The "Lyrical Ballads" were published about Midsummer, 1798. In September of the same year, Mr. Coleridge and Mr. Wordsworth left England for Germany, and I quitted the business of a bookseller. Had I not once been such, this book would never have appeared." The reference in the following letter to a ballad of 340 lines has never been explained by any biographer of Coleridge. The "Ancient Mariner" in its first form extended to 658 lines. Some have surmised that the "Three Graves" is meant; but this poem was 318 lines as published in 1809-1817. LETTER 74. TO COTTLE Feb. 18, 1798. My dear Cottle, I have finished my Ballad, it is 340 lines; I am going on with my "Visions": altogether (for I shall print two scenes of my Tragedy, as fragments) I can add 1500 lines; now what do you advise? Shall I add my Tragedy, and so make a second volume? or shall I pursue my first intention of inserting 1500 in the third edition? If you should advise a second volume, should you wish, "i.e.", find it convenient, to be the purchaser? I ask this question, because I wish you to know the true state of my present circumstances. I have received nothing yet from the Wedgwoods, and my money is utterly expended. A friend of mine wanted five guineas for a little while, which I borrowed of Poole, as for myself, I do not like therefore to apply to him. Mr. Estlin has some little money I believe in his hands, but I received from him before I went to Shrewsbury, fifteen pounds, and I believe that this was an anticipation of the five guinea presents, which my friends would have made in March. But (this affair of the Messrs. Wedgwoods turning out) the money in Mr. Estlin's hand must go towards repaying him that sum which he suffered me to anticipate. Meantime I owe Biggs £5, which is heavy on my thoughts, and Mrs. F. has not been paid her last quarter which is still heavier. As to myself, I can continue to go on here, but this £10 I must pay somehow, that is £5 to Biggs, and £5 to Mrs. F.... God bless you, S. T. COLERIDGE. P.S. This week I purpose offering myself to the Bridgwater Socinian congregation, as assistant minister, without any salary, directly, or indirectly; but of this say not a word to any one, unless you see Mr. Estlin. Coleridge sent his poem of the "Raven" to the "Morning Post" at this time with the following curious letter to the Editor. The poem appeared in the paper of 10th March. LETTER 75. TO THE EDITOR OF THE "MORNING POST", WITH THE "RAVEN", A POEM. 10 March, 1798. Sir, I am not absolutely certain that the following poem was written by Edmund Spenser, and found by an angler buried in a fishing-box: Under the foot of Mole, that Mountain hoar, Mid the green alders, by the Mulla's shore; but a learned Antiquarian of my acquaintance has given it as his opinion that it resembles Spenser's minor poems as nearly as "Vortigern" and "Rowena" the Tragedies of William Shakespeare. This poem must be read in recitative, in the same manner as the "AEgloga Secunda" of the "Shepherd's Calendar". CUDDY. "The Latin motto," Cottle says, "prefixed to the second edition of Mr. C.'s poems, puzzled everybody to know from what author it was derived. One and another inquired of me, to no purpose, and expressed a wish that Mr. C. had been clearer in his citation, as 'no one could understand it.' On my naming this to Mr. Coleridge, he laughed heartily, and said, "It was all a hoax. Not meeting," said he, "with a suitable motto, I invented one, and with references purposely obscure, as will be explained in the next letter." LETTER 76. TO COTTLE March 8th, 1798. My dear Cottle, I have been confined to my bed for some days, through a fever occasioned by the stump of a tooth, which baffled chirurgical efforts to eject, and which, by affecting my eye, affected my stomach, and through that my whole frame. I am better, but still weak, in consequence of such long sleeplessness and wearying pains; weak, very weak. I thank you, my dear friend, for your late kindness, and in a few weeks will either repay you in money, or by verses, as you like. With regard to Lloyd's verses, it is curious that I should be applied to, "to be persuaded to resign," and in hopes that I might "consent to give up" (unknown by whom) a number of poems which were published at the earnest request of the author, who assured me, that the circumstance was of "no trivial import to his happiness!" Times change and people change; but let us keep our souls in quietness! I have no objection to any disposal of Lloyd's poems except that of their being republished with mine. The motto which I had prefixed--"Duplex, etc." from Groscollias, has placed me in a ridiculous situation, but it was a foolish and presumptuous start of affectionateness, and I am not unwilling to incur the punishment due to my folly. By past experiences we build up our moral being. The Giant Wordsworth--God love him! When I speak in the terms of admiration due to his intellect, I fear lest these terms should keep out of sight the amiableness of his manners. He has written near twelve hundred lines of a blank verse, [1] superior, I hesitate not to aver, to anything in our language which any way resembles it. God bless you, S. T. COLERIDGE. [2] [Footnote 1: "The Ruined Cottage", or "Tale of Margaret", afterwards incorporated in the "Excursion".] [Footnote 2: Letter LXXIX is our 76, which see for full text.] LETTER 77. TO WADE March 21st, 1798. My very dear friend, I have even now returned from a little excursion that I have taken for the confirmation of my health, which had suffered a rude assault from the anguish of the stump of a tooth which had baffled the attempts of our surgeon here, and which confined me to my bed. I suffered much from the disease, and more from the doctor; rather than again put my mouth into his hands, I would put my hands into a lion's mouth. I am happy to hear of, and should be most happy to see, the plumpness and progression of your dear boy; but--yes, my dear Wade, it must be a but, much as I hate the word but. Well,--but I cannot attend the chemical lectures. I have many reasons, but the greatest, or at least the most ostensible reason, is, that I cannot leave Mrs. C. at that time; our house is an uncomfortable one; our surgeon may be, for aught I know, a lineal descendant of Esculapius himself, but if so, in the repeated transfusion of life from father to son, through so many generations, the wit and knowledge, being subtle spirits, have evaporated.... Ever your grateful and affectionate friend, S. T. COLERIDGE. LETTER 78. TO COTTLE (Mch. or Apl. 1798.) My dear Cottle, I regret that aught should have disturbed our tranquillity; respecting Lloyd, I am willing to believe myself in part mistaken, and so let all things be as before. I have no wish respecting these poems, either for or against re-publication with mine. As to the third edition, if there be occasion for it immediately, it must be published with some alterations, but no additions or omissions. The "Pixies", "Chatterton", and some dozen others, shall be printed at the end of the volume, under the title of Juvenile Poems, and in this case I will send you the volume immediately. But if there be no occasion for the volume to go to press for ten weeks, at the expiration of that time, I would make it a volume worthy of me, and omit utterly near one-half of the present volume--a sacrifice to pitch black oblivion. Whichever be the case, I will repay you the money you have paid for me, in money, and in a few weeks; or if you should prefer the latter proposal, "i.e.", the not sending me to the press for ten weeks, I should insist on considering the additions, however large, as my payment to you for the omissions, which, indeed, would be but strict justice. I am requested by Wordsworth, to put to you the following questions. What could you, conveniently and prudently, and what would you give for--first, our two Tragedies, with small prefaces, containing an analysis of our principal characters? Exclusive of the prefaces, the tragedies are, together, five thousand lines; which, in printing, from the dialogue form, and directions respecting actors and scenery, are at least equal to six thousand. To be delivered to you within a week of the date of your answer to this letter; and the money which you offer, to be paid to us at the end of four months from the same date; none to be paid before, all to be paid then. Second.--Wordsworth's "Salisbury Plain", and "Tale of a Woman"; which two poems, with a few others which he will add, and the notes, will make a volume. This to be delivered to you within three weeks of the date of your answer, and the money to be paid as before, at the end of four months from the present date. Do not, my dearest Cottle, harass yourself about the imagined great merit of the compositions, or be reluctant to offer what you can prudently offer, from an idea that the poems are worth more. But calculate what you can do, with reference simply to yourself, and answer as speedily as you can; and believe me your sincere, grateful, and affectionate friend and brother, S. T. COLERIDGE. Cottle offered thirty guineas each to Wordsworth and Coleridge for their tragedies; but this offer, says Cottle, "after some hesitation was declined from the hope of introducing one or both on the stage." Cottle received the following letter soon after: LETTER 79. TO COTTLE (14 Apl., 1798.) My dear Cottle, I never involved you in bickering, and never suspected you, in any one action of your life, of practising guile against any human being, except yourself. Your letter supplied only one in a link of circumstances, that informed me of some things, and perhaps deceived me in others. I shall write to-day to Lloyd. I do not think I shall come to Bristol for these lectures of which you speak.[1] I ardently wish for the knowledge, but Mrs. Coleridge is within a month of her confinement, and I cannot, I ought not to leave her; especially as her surgeon is not a John Hunter, nor my house likely to perish from a plethora of comforts. Besides, there are other things that might disturb that evenness of benevolent feeling, which I wish to cultivate. I am much better, and at present at Allfoxden, and my new and tender health is all over me like a voluptuous feeling. God bless you, S. T. COLERIDGE. [Footnote 1: "Chemical Lectures," by Dr. Beddoes, delivered at the Red Lodge [Cottle].] The origin of the volume of lyrical ballads is best told in Cottle's own words. "Wordsworth," says Cottle, on his introduction by Coleridge at Stowey, "read me many of his Lyrical Pieces, when I immediately perceived in them extraordinary merit, and advised him to publish them, expressing a belief that they would be well received. I further said he should be at no risk; that I would give him the same sum which I had given to Mr. Coleridge and to Mr. Southey, and that it would be a gratifying circumstance to me, to have been the publisher of the first volumes of three such poets as Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth; such a distinction might never again occur to a Provincial bookseller. "To the idea of publishing he expressed a strong objection, and after several interviews, I left him, with an earnest wish that he would reconsider his determination. "Soon after Mr. Wordsworth sent me the following letter. 'Allfoxden, 12th April, 1798. 'My dear Cottle, '...You will be pleased to hear that I have gone on very rapidly adding to my stock of poetry. Do come and let me read it to you, under the old trees in the park. We have a little more than two months to stay in this place. Within these four days the season has advanced with greater rapidity than I ever remember, and the country becomes almost every hour more lovely. God bless you, 'Your affectionate friend, 'W. WORDSWORTH.' "A little time after, I received an invitation from Mr. Coleridge to pay himself and Mr. Wordsworth another visit. At about the same time, I received the following corroborative invitation from Mr. Wordsworth. 'Dear Cottle, 'We look for you with great impatience. We will never forgive you if you do not come. I say nothing of the "Salisbury Plain" till I see you. I am determined to finish it, and equally so that you shall publish. 'I have lately been busy about another plan, which I do not wish to mention till I see you; let this be very, very soon, and stay a week if possible; as much longer as you can. God bless you, dear Cottle, 'Yours sincerely, 'W. WORDSWORTH. 'Allfoxden, 9th May, 1798.' "The following letter also on this subject, was received from Mr. Coleridge. LETTER 80. TO COTTLE (April, 1798.) My dear Cottle, Neither Wordsworth nor myself could have been otherwise than uncomfortable, if any but yourself had received from us the first offer of our Tragedies, and of the volume of Wordsworth's Poems. At the same time, we did not expect that you could with prudence and propriety, advance such a sum as we should want at the time we specified. In short, we both regard the publication of our Tragedies as an evil. It is not impossible but that in happier times, they may be brought on the stage: and to throw away this chance for a mere trifle, would be to make the present moment act fraudulently and usuriously towards the future time. My Tragedy employed and strained all my thoughts and faculties for six or seven months; Wordsworth consumed far more time, and far more thought, and far more genius. We consider the publication of them an evil on any terms; but our thoughts were bent on a plan for the accomplishment of which, a certain sum of money was necessary, (the whole) at that particular time, and in order to this we resolved, although reluctantly, to part with our Tragedies: that is, if we could obtain thirty guineas for each, and at less than thirty guineas Wordsworth will not part with the copyright of his volume of Poems. We shall offer the Tragedies to no one, for we have determined to procure the money some other way. If you choose the volume of Poems, at the price mentioned, to be paid at the time specified, "i.e." thirty guineas, to be paid sometime in the last fortnight of July, you may have them; but remember, my dear fellow! I write to you now merely as a bookseller, and intreat you, in your answer, to consider yourself only; as to us, although money is necessary to our plan, (that of visiting Germany) yet the plan is not necessary to our happiness; and if it were, W. could sell his Poems for that sum to someone else, or we could procure the money without selling the Poems. So I entreat you, again and again, in your answer, which must be immediate, consider yourself only. Wordsworth has been caballed against "so long and so loudly", that he has found it impossible to prevail on the tenant of the Allfoxden estate, to let him the house, after their first agreement is expired, so he must quit it at Midsummer. Whether we shall be able to procure him a house and furniture near Stowey, we know not, and yet we must: for the hills, and the woods, and the streams, and the sea, and the shores would break forth into reproaches against us, if we did not strain every nerve, to keep their poet among them. Without joking, and in serious sadness, Poole and I cannot endure to think of losing him. At all events, come down, Cottle, as soon as you can, but before Midsummer, and we will procure a horse easy as thy own soul, and we will go on a roam to Linton and Linmouth, which, if thou comest in May, will be in all their pride of woods and waterfalls, not to speak of its august cliffs, and the green ocean, and the vast Valley of Stones, all which live disdainful of the seasons, or accept new honours only from the winter's snow. At all events come down, and cease not to believe me much and affectionately your friend. S. T. COLERIDGE. [1] [Footnote 1: Letters LXXX-LXXXV follow letter 80.] "In consequence of these conjoint invitations, I spent a week with Mr. C. and Mr. W. at Allfoxden house, and during this time, (beside the reading of MS. poems) they took me to Linmouth, and Linton, and the Valley of Stones.... "At this interview it was determined, that the volume should be published under the title of "Lyrical Ballads" on the terms stipulated in a former letter: that this volume should not contain the poem of "Salisbury Plain", but only an extract from it; that it should not contain the poem of "Peter Bell", but consist rather of sundry shorter poems, and, for the most part, of pieces more recently written. I had recommended two volumes, but one was fixed on, and that to be published anonymously. It was to be begun immediately, and with the "Ancient Mariner"; which poem I brought with me to Bristol. A day or two after I received the following:" LETTER 81. TO COTTLE (May, 1798.) My dear Cottle, You know what I think of a letter, how impossible it is to argue in it. You must therefore take simple statements, and in a week or two, I shall see you, and endeavour to reason with you. Wordsworth and I have duly weighed your proposal, and this is an answer. He would not object to the publishing of "Peter Bell" or the "Salisbury Plain", singly; but to the publishing of his poems in two volumes, he is decisively repugnant and oppugnant. He deems that they would want variety, etc., etc. If this apply in his case, it applies with ten-fold more force to mine. We deem that the volumes offered to you, are, to a certain degree, one work in kind, though not in degree, as an ode is one work; and that our different poems are, as stanzas, good, relatively rather than absolutely: mark you, I say in kind, though not in degree. As to the Tragedy, when I consider it in reference to Shakespeare's, and to "one" other Tragedy, it seems a poor thing, and I care little what becomes of it. When I consider it in comparison with modern dramatists, it rises: and I think it too bad to be published, too good to be squandered. I think of breaking it up; the planks are sound, and I will build a new ship of the old materials. The dedication to the Wedgwoods, which you recommend, would be indelicate and unmeaning. If, after four or five years, I shall have finished some work of importance, which could not have been written, but in an unanxious seclusion, to them I will dedicate it; for the public will have owed the work to them who gave me the power of that unanxious seclusion. As to anonymous publications, depend on it, you are deceived. Wordsworth's name is nothing to a large number of persons; mine stinks. The "Essay on Man", the "Botanic Garden", the "Pleasures of Memory", and many other most popular works, were published anonymously. However, I waive all reasoning, and simply state it as an unaltered opinion, that you should proceed as before, with the "Ancient Mariner". The picture shall be sent.[1] For your love gifts and bookloans accept our hearty love. The "Joan of Arc" is a divine book; it opens lovelily. I hope that you will take off some half dozen of our "Poems" on great paper, even as the "Joan of Arc". Cottle, my dear Cottle, I meant to have written you an Essay on the Metaphysics of Typography, but I have not time. Take a few hints, without the abstruse reasons for them, with which I mean to favour you. 18 lines in a page, the line closely printed, certainly more closely printed than those of the "Joan";[2] ("Oh, by all means, closer, "W. Wordsworth"") equal ink, and large margins; that is beauty; it may even, under your immediate care, mingle the sublime! And now, my dear Cottle, may God love you and me, who am, with most unauthorish feelings, Your true friend, S. T. COLERIDGE. P.S.--I walked to Linton the day after you left us, and returned on Saturday. I walked in one day, and returned in one.[3] [Footnote 1: A portrait of Mr. Wordsworth, correctly and beautifully executed, by an artist then at Stowey; now in my possession. [Cottle's note.]] [Footnote 2: "Joan of Arc", 4to first edition, had twenty lines in a page. [Cottle.]] [Footnote 3: Letters LXXXVI-XCII follow 81.] Coleridge has given his account of the origin of the "Lyrical Ballads" in the fourteenth chapter of the "Biographia Literaria", and Wordsworth's account is found in the Fenwick Note to "We are Seven". An estrangement with Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd at this time took place which has been the subject of many surmises as to its origin among the biographers of Coleridge. The coldness with Lamb passed off by the beginning of 1800 when Charles wrote to Coleridge in his customary humorous vein; but Lloyd was not so soon taken back to favour. Southey joined the cabal against Coleridge and encouraged the estrangement; but he too was on friendly terms with Coleridge in the autumn of 1799. On the l4th May Coleridge's second child was born, named Berkeley, after the idealist philosopher who had now displaced Hartley, who had been in the ascendant when the first child was born. With the adoption of Berkeley as his pet philosopher, we can understand Coleridge's determination to visit Germany. He had heard rumours of the Kantean Philosophy, and wished to acquire thoroughly a knowledge of the language of the Germans principally to be able to read Kant in the original. This project Coleridge speaks of as early as 6th May, 1796 (Letter 33); but it was only now when he enjoyed the support of the Wedgwoods that he could afford to put it into execution. The volume of "Lyrical Ballads" was published in the early part of the autumn of 1798; and along with William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge set sail from Yarmouth. John Chester, a resident of Stowey, also accompanied them. Coleridge arrived at Cuxhaven on 19th September, from which place he wrote Mrs. Coleridge an account of the voyage and his first impressions of Germany. This account is more fully given in the "Letters of Satyrane" in the "Biographia Literaria". He took up his quarters at Ratzeburg, staying with the pastor of that town; while Wordsworth and his sister went to Goslar. From Ratzeburg Coleridge repaired to G�ttingen on 12th February, 1799, to attend lectures at the University. He worked hard while in Göttingen to acquire a knowledge of the literature of Germany, and made himself proficient in the dialects as well as of classical German. He met two of the Parrys, brothers of the Arctic explorer, at G�ttingen; and, later, Clement Carlyon, an Englishman from Pembroke College, joined the group. Carlyon afterwards in later life, in his "Early Years and Late Reflections", depicted Coleridge as the life and soul of the party, incessantly talking, discussing, and philosophizing, and diving into his pocket German Dictionary for the right word. Carlyon devotes 270 pages of the first volume of his book to Coleridge. Berkeley Coleridge died in February, and the news depressed Coleridge and threw his studies for some time into disorder; but the Wordsworths visited him at G�ttingen, and they had some talk about the future place of their abode in England. The Wordsworths were desirous of staying in the North of England; but Coleridge at this time had resolved to remain at Stowey, to be near Poole, in whom he felt his "anchor", as he expressed it. (J. Dykes-Campbell's "Life", chap, v.) Coleridge during his stay in Germany wrote a good many letters to his wife, to Poole, and the Wedgwoods. We can quote only two fragments from those to his wife, and the long one, "Over the Brocken". LETTER 82. TO MRS. COLERIDGE 14 Jany., 1799. The whole Lake of Ratzeburg is one mass of thick transparent ice--a spotless Mirror of nine miles in extent! The lowness of the Hills, which rise from the shores of the Lake, preclude the awful sublimity of Alpine scenery, yet compensate for the want of it by beauties, of which this very lowness is a necessary condition. Yester-morning I saw the lesser Lake completely hidden by Mist; but the moment the Sun peeped over the Hill, the mist broke in the middle, and in a few seconds stood divided, leaving a broad road all across the Lake; and between these two Walls of mist the sunlight "burnt" upon the ice, forming a road of golden fire, intolerably bright! and the mist-walls themselves partook of the blaze in a multitude of shining colours. This is our second Frost. About a month ago, before the Thaw came on, there was a storm of wind; during the whole night, such were the thunders and howlings of the breaking ice, that they have left a conviction on my mind, that there are Sounds more sublime than any Sight "can" be, more absolutely suspending the power of comparison, and more utterly absorbing the mind's self-consciousness in its total attention to the object working upon it. Part of the ice which the vehemence of the wind had shattered, was driven shore-ward and froze anew. On the evening of the next day, at sun-set, the shattered ice thus frozen, appeared of a deep blue, and in shape like an agitated sea; beyond this, the water, that ran up between the great Islands of ice which had preserved their masses entire and smooth, shone of a yellow green; but all these scattered Ice-islands, themselves, were of an intensely bright blood colour--they seemed blood and light in union! On some of the largest of these Islands, the Fishermen stood pulling out their immense Nets through the holes made in the ice for this purpose, and the Men, their Net-Poles, and their huge Nets, were a part of the glory; say rather, it appeared as if the rich crimson light had shaped itself into these forms, figures, and attitudes, to make a glorious vision in mockery of earthly things. The lower Lake is now all alive with Skaters, and with Ladies driven onward by them in their ice cars. Mercury, surely, was the first maker of Skates, and the wings at his feet are symbols of the invention. In skating there are three pleasing circumstances: the infinitely subtle particles of Ice, which the Skate cuts up, and which creep and run before the Skate like a low mist, and in sun-rise or sun-set become coloured; second, the shadow of the Skater in the water seen through the transparent Ice; and third, the melancholy undulating sound from the Skate, not without variety; and when very many are skating together, the sounds and the noises give an impulse to the icy Trees, and the woods all round the Lake "tinkle"![1] [Footnote 1: Letter XCIII repeats 82, XCIV-XCVI follow.] LETTER 83. TO MRS. COLERIDGE Ratzeburg, 23 April, 1799. There is a Christmas custom here which pleased and interested me.--The Children make little presents to their Parents, and to each other; and the Parents to the Children. For three or four months before Christmas the Girls are all busy, and the Boys save up their pocket-money, to make or purchase these presents. What the Present is to be is cautiously kept secret, and the Girls have a world of contrivances to conceal it--such as working when they are out on visits and the others are not with them; getting up in the morning before day-light, etc. Then on the evening before Christmas day one of the Parlours is lighted up by the Children, into which the Parents must not go: a great yew bough is fastened on the Table at a little distance from the wall, a multitude of little Tapers are fastened in the bough, but not so as to burn it till they are nearly burnt out, and coloured paper, etc. hangs and flutters from the twigs.--Under this Bough the Children lay out in great order the presents they mean for their Parents, still concealing in their pockets what they intend for each other. Then the Parents are introduced--and each presents his little Gift--and then bring out the rest one by one from their pockets, and present them with kisses and embraces.--Where I witnessed this scene, there were eight or nine Children, and the eldest Daughter and the Mother wept aloud for joy and tenderness; and the tears ran down the face of the Father, and he clasped all his Children so tight to his breast--it seemed as if he did it to stifle the sob that was rising within him.--I was very much affected.--The Shadow of the Bough and its appendages on the wall, and arching over on the Ceiling, made a pretty Picture--and then the raptures of the "very" little Ones, when at last the twigs and their needles began to take fire and "snap"--O it was a delight for them!--On the next day, in the great Parlour, the Parents lay out on the table the Presents for the Children: a scene of more sober joy succeeds, as on this day, after an old custom, the Mother says privately to each of her Daughters, and the Father to his Sons, that which he has observed most praise-worthy and that which was most faulty in their conduct.--Formerly, and still in all the smaller Towns and Villages throughout North Germany, these Presents were sent by all the Parents to some one Fellow who in high Buskins, a white Robe, a Mask, and an enormous flax Wig, personates Knecht Rupert, i.e. the Servant Rupert. On Christmas Night he goes round to every House and says, that Jesus Christ, his Master, sent him thither--the Parents and elder Children receive him with great pomp of reverence, while the little ones are most terribly frightened--He then enquires for the Children, and according to the character which he hears from the Parent, he gives them the intended Present, as if they came out of Heaven from Jesus Christ.--Or, if they should have been bad Children, he gives the Parents a Rod, and in the name of his Master, recommends them to use it frequently.--About seven or eight years old the Children are let into the secret, and it is curious how faithfully they keep it![1] ["Over the Brocken" must occupy a chapter of itself.] [Footnote 1: Letter XCVII repeats 83, XCVIII follows.] CHAPTER VII THE RELIGION OF THE PINEWOODS Coleridge called the letters from Germany which he published in "The Friend" of 1809 the "Letters of Satyrane". He was fond of masquerading under the name of this allegorical personage of the "Faery Queen"; and in his "Tombless Epitaph" he described himself as Idolocrastes Satyrane. Under this disguise he looked upon himself as the spokesman of the Idea of the Omnipresence of the Deity. In order to appreciate the following beautiful letter, one of the finest Coleridge ever wrote, the reader should peruse Coleridge's "Aeolian Harp", "Lines written on leaving a Place of Retirement", "The Lime-Tree Bower", and Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey". Wordsworth's sonnet, "It is a beauteous evening", and Coleridge's own "Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni", also belong to the same feeling for the God of Nature, but they were composed after the letter "Over the Brocken". Clement Carlyon, who is the chief authority for the life of Coleridge during his stay at G�ttingen, gives a lively account of the ascent of the Brocken, which took place on Whit Sunday, 12th May 1799. The party visited the "magic circle of stones where the fairies assembled," and halted for the first time at the village of Satzfeld, a romantic village, "a bright moonlight at night, and the nightingale heard." Coleridge was in high spirits, and kept talking all the way, discoursing on his favourite topics. Sublimity was defined as a "suspension of the powers of comparison"; "no animal but man can be struck with wonder"; Shakespeare owed his success largely to the cheering breath of popular applause, the enthusiastic gale of admiration. The English Divines were applauded by Coleridge, Jeremy Taylor prominently; and a play by Hans Sachs was preferred to a play of Kotzebue; from which he launched into a discourse on Miracle plays. Coleridge's conversation was peppered with puns, some of which Carlyon quotes. Carlyon also notices that their course up the mountain was impeded by stunted firs; and he describes the dancing party of peasants with whom Coleridge was so much taken. The party returned to Gottingen on 18th May. Coleridge had written the day before to his wife. LETTER 84. TO MRS. COLERIDGE Clausthal, 17 May 1799. Through roads no way rememberable, we came to Gieloldshausen, over a bridge, on which was a mitred statue with a great crucifix in its arms. The village, long and ugly; but the church, like most Catholic churches, interesting; and this being Whitsun Eve, all were crowding to it, with their mass-books and rosaries, the little babies commonly with coral crosses hanging on the breast. Here we took a guide, left the village, ascended a hill, and now the woods rose up before us in a verdure which surprised us like a sorcery. The spring had burst forth with the suddenness of a Russian summer. As we left Gottingen there were buds, and here and there a tree half green; but here were woods in full foliage, distinguished from summer only by the exquisite freshness of their tender green. We entered the wood through a beautiful mossy path; the moon above us blending with the evening light, and every now and then a nightingale would invite the others to sing, and some or other commonly answered, and said, as we suppose, "It is yet somewhat too early!" for the song was not continued. We came to a square piece of greenery, completely walled on all four sides by the beeches; again entered the wood, and having travelled about a mile, emerged from it into a grand plain--mountains in the distance, but ever by our road the skirts of the green woods. A very rapid river ran by our side; and now the nightingales were all singing, and the tender verdure grew paler in the moonlight, only the smooth parts of the river were still deeply purpled with the reflections from the fiery light in the west. So surrounded and so impressed, we arrived at Prele, a dear little cluster of houses in the middle of a semicircle of woody hills; the area of the semicircle scarcely broader than the breadth of the village. * * * * * We afterwards ascended another hill, from the top of which a large plain opened before us with villages. A little village, Neuhoff, lay at the foot of it: we reached it, and then turned up through a valley on the left hand. The hills on both sides the valley were prettily wooded, and a rapid lively river ran through it. So we went for about two miles, and almost at the end of the valley, or rather of its first turning, we found the village of Lauterberg. Just at the entrance of the village, two streams come out from two deep and woody coombs, close by each other, meet, and run into a third deep woody coomb opposite; before you a wild hill, which seems the end and barrier of the valley; on the right hand, low hills, now green with corn, and now wooded; and on the left a most majestic hill indeed--the effect of whose simple outline painting could not give, and how poor a thing are words! We pass through this neat little town--the majestic hill on the left hand soaring over the houses, and at every interspace you see the whole of it--its beeches, its firs, its rocks, its scattered cottages, and the one neat little pastor's house at the foot, embosomed in fruit-trees all in blossom, the noisy coomb-brook dashing close by it. We leave the valley, or rather, the first turning on the left, following a stream; and so the vale winds on, the river still at the foot of the woody hills, with every now and then other smaller valleys on right and left crossing our vale, and ever before you the woody hills running like groves one into another. We turned and turned, and entering the fourth curve of the vale, we found all at once that we had been ascending. The verdure vanished! All the beech trees were leafless, and so were the silver birches, whose boughs always, winter and summer, hang so elegantly. But low down in the valley, and in little companies on each bank of the river, a multitude of green conical fir trees, with herds of cattle wandering about, almost every one with a cylindrical bell around its neck, of no inconsiderable size, and as they moved--scattered over the narrow vale, and up among the trees on the hill--the noise was like that of a great city in the stillness of a sabbath morning, when the bells all at once are ringing for church. The whole was a melancholy and romantic scene, that was quite new to me. Again we turned, passed three smelting houses, which we visited; a scene of terrible beauty is a furnace of boiling metal, darting, every moment blue, green, and scarlet lightning, like serpents' tongues!--and now we ascended a steep hill, on the top of which was St. Andrias Berg, a town built wholly of wood. We descended again, to ascend far higher; and now we came to a most beautiful road, which winded on the breast of the hill, from whence we looked down into a deep valley, or huge basin, full of pines and firs; the opposite hills full of pines and frs; and the hill above us, on whose breast we were winding, likewise full of pines and firs. The valley, or basin, on our right hand, into which we looked down, is called the Wald Rauschenbach, that is, the Valley of the Roaring Brook; and roar it did, indeed, most solemnly! The road on which we walked was weedy with infant fir-trees, an inch or two high; and now, on our left hand, came before us a most tremendous precipice of yellow and black rock, called the Rehberg, that is, the Mountain of the Roe. Now again is nothing but firs and pines above, below, around us! How awful is the deep unison of their undividable murmur; what a one thing it is--it is a sound that impresses the dim notion of the Omnipresent! In various parts of the deep vale below us, we beheld little dancing waterfalls gleaming through the branches, and now, on our left hand, from the very summit of the hill above us, a powerful stream flung itself down, leaping and foaming, and now concealed, and now not concealed, and now half concealed by the fir-trees, till, towards the road, it became a visible sheet of water, within whose immediate neighbourhood no pine could have permanent abiding place. The snow lay every where on the sides of the roads, and glimmered in company with the waterfall foam, snow patches and waterbreaks glimmering through the branches in the hill above, the deep basin below, and the hill opposite. Over the high opposite hills, so dark in their pine forests, a far higher round barren stony mountain looked in upon the prospect from a distant country. Through this scenery we passed on, till our road was crossed by a second waterfall, or rather, aggregation of little dancing waterfalls, one by the side of the other for a considerable breadth, and all came at once out of the dark wood above, and rolled over the mossy rock fragments, little firs, growing in islets, scattered among them. The same scenery continued till we came to the Oder Seich, a lake, half made by man, and half by nature. It is two miles in length, and but a few hundred yards in breadth, and winds between banks, or rather through walls, of pine trees. It has the appearance of a most calm and majestic river. It crosses the road, goes into a wood, and there at once plunges itself down into a most magnificent cascade, and runs into the vale, to which it gives the name of the "Vale of the Roaring Brook." We descended into the vale, and stood at the bottom of the cascade, and climbed up again by its side. The rocks over which it plunged were unusually wild in their shape, giving fantastic resemblances of men and animals, and the fir-boughs by the side were kept almost in a swing, which unruly motion contrasted well with the stern quietness of the huge forest-sea every where else. * * * * * In nature all things are individual, but a word is but an arbitrary character for a whole class of things; so that the same description may in almost all cases be applied to twenty different appearances; and in addition to the difficulty of the thing itself, I neither am, nor ever was, a good hand at description. I see what I write, but, alas! I cannot write what I see. From the Oder Seich we entered a second wood; and now the snow met us in large masses, and we walked for two miles knee-deep in it, with an inexpressible fatigue, till we came to the mount called Little Brocken; here even the firs deserted us, or only now and then a patch of them, wind-shorn, no higher than one's knee, matted and cowering to the ground, like our thorn bushes on the highest sea-hills. The soil was plashy and boggy; we descended and came to the foot of the Great Brocken without a river--the highest mountain in all the north of Germany, and the seat of innumerable superstitions. On the first of May all the witches dance here at midnight; and those who go may see their own ghosts walking up and down, with a little billet on the back, giving the names of those who had wished them there; for "I wish you on the top of the Brocken," is a common curse throughout the whole empire. Well, we ascended--the soil boggy--and at last reached the height, which is 573 toises [1] above the level of the sea. We visited the Blocksberg, a sort of bowling-green, enclosed by huge stones, something like those at Stonehenge, and this is the witches' ball-room; thence proceeded to the house on the hill, where we dined; and now we descended. In the evening about seven we arrived at Elbingerode. At the inn they brought us an album, or stammbuch, requesting that we would write our names, and something or other as a remembrance that we had been there. I wrote the following lines, which contain a true account of my journey from the Brocken to Elbingerode. I stood on Brocken's sovran height, and saw Woods crowding upon woods, hills over hills; A surging scene, and only limited By the blue distance. Wearily my way Downward I dragged, through fir groves evermore Where bright green moss moved in sepulchral forms, Speckled with sunshine; and, but seldom heard, The sweet bird's song become a hollow sound; And the gale murmuring indivisibly, Reserved its solemn murmur, more distinct From many a note of many a waterbreak, And the brook's chatter; on whose islet stones The dingy kidling, with its tinkling bell, Leapt frolicksome, or old romantic goat Sat, his white beard slow waving. I moved on With low and languid thought, for I had found That grandest scenes have but imperfect charms Where the eye vainly wanders, nor beholds One spot with which the heart associates Holy remembrances of child or friend, Or gentle maid, our first and early love, Or father, or the venerable name Of our adored country. O thou Queen, Thou delegated Deity of Earth, O "dear, dear" England! how my longing eyes Turned westward, shaping in the steady clouds Thy sands and high white cliffs! Sweet native isle, This heart was proud, yea, mine eyes swam with tears To think of thee; and all the goodly view From sovran Brocken, woods and woody hills Floated away, like a departing dream, Feeble and dim. Stranger, these impulses Blame thou not lightly; nor will I profane, With hasty judgment or injurious doubt, That man's sublimer spirit, who can feel That God is every where, the God who framed Mankind to be one mighty brotherhood, Himself our Father, and the world our home. We left Elbingerode, May 14th, and travelled for half a mile through a wild country, of bleak stony hills by our side, with several caverns, or rather mouths of caverns, visible in their breasts; and now we came to Rubilland,--Oh, it was a lovely scene! Our road was at the foot of low hills, and here were a few neat cottages; behind us were high hills, with a few scattered firs, and flocks of goats visible on the topmost crags. On our right hand a fine shallow river about thirty yards broad, and beyond the river a crescent hill clothed with firs, that rise one above another, like spectators in an amphitheatre. We advanced a little farther,--the crags behind us ceased to be visible, and now the whole was one and complete. All that could be seen was the cottages at the foot of the low green hill, (cottages embosomed in fruit trees in blossom,) the stream, and the little crescent of firs. I lingered here, and unwillingly lost sight of it for a little while. The firs were so beautiful, and the masses of rocks, walls, and obelisks started up among them in the very places where, if they had not been, a painter with a poet's feeling would have imagined them. Crossed the river (its name Bodi), entered the sweet wood, and came to the mouth of the cavern, with the man who shews it. It was a huge place, eight hundred feet in length, and more in depth, of many different apartments; and the only thing that distinguished it from other caverns was, that the guide, who was really a character, had the talent of finding out and seeing uncommon likenesses in the different forms of the stalactite. Here was a nun;--this was Solomon's temple;--that was a Roman Catholic Chapel;--here was a lion's claw, nothing but flesh and blood wanting to make it completely a claw! This was an organ, and had all the notes of an organ, etc. etc. etc.; but, alas! with all possible straining of my eyes, ears, and imagination, I could see nothing but common stalactite, and heard nothing but the dull ding of common cavern stones. One thing was really striking;--a huge cone of stalactite hung from the roof of the largest apartment, and, on being struck, gave perfectly the sound of a death-bell. I was behind, and heard it repeatedly at some distance, and the effect was very much in the fairy kind,--gnomes, and things unseen, that toll mock death-bells for mock funerals. After this, a little clear well and a black stream pleased me the most; and multiplied by fifty, and coloured ad libitum, might be well enough to read of in a novel or poem. We returned, and now before the inn, on the green plat around the Maypole, the villagers were celebrating Whit-Tuesday. This Maypole is hung as usual with garlands on the top, and, in these garlands, spoons, and other little valuables, are placed. The high smooth round pole is then well greased; and now he who can climb up to the top may have what he can get,--a very laughable scene as you may suppose, of awkwardness and agility, and failures on the very brink of success. Now began a dance. The women danced very well, and, in general, I have observed throughout Germany that the women in the lower ranks degenerate far less from the ideal of a woman, than the men from that of man. The dances were reels and waltzes; but chiefly the latter. This dance is, in the higher circles, sufficiently voluptuous; but here the emotions of it were far more faithful interpreters of the passion, which, doubtless, the dance was intended to shadow; yet, ever after the giddy round and round is over, they walked to music, the woman laying her arm, with confident affection, on the man's shoulders, or around his neck. The first couple at the waltzing was a very fine tall girl, of two or three and twenty, in the full bloom and growth of limb and feature, and a fellow with huge whiskers, a long tail, and woollen night-cap; he was a soldier, and from the more than usual glances of the girl, I presumed was her lover. He was, beyond compare, the gallant and the dancer of the party. Next came two boors: one of whom, in the whole contour of his face and person, and, above all, in the laughably would-be frolicksome kick out of his heel, irresistibly reminded me of Shakespeare's Slender, and the other of his Dogberry. Oh! two such faces, and two such postures! O that I were an Hogarth! What an enviable gift it is to have a genius in painting! Their partners were pretty lasses, not so tall as the former, and danced uncommonly light and airy. The fourth couple was a sweet girl of about seventeen, delicately slender, and very prettily dressed, with a full-blown rose in the white ribbon that went round her head, and confined her reddish-brown hair; and her partner waltzed with a pipe in his mouth, smoking all the while; and during the whole of this voluptuous dance, his countenance was a fair personification of true German phlegm. After these, but, I suppose, not actually belonging to the party, a little ragged girl and ragged boy, with his stockings about his heels, waltzed and danced;--waltzing and dancing in the rear most entertainingly. But what most pleased me, was a little girl of about three or four years old, certainly not more than four, who had been put to watch a little babe, of not more than a year old (for one of our party had asked), and who was just beginning to run away, the girl teaching him to walk, and who was so animated by the music, that she began to waltz with him, and the two babes whirled round and round, hugging and kissing each other, as if the music had made them mad. There were two fiddles and a bass viol. The fiddlers,--above all, the bass violer,--most Hogarthian phizzes! God love them! I felt far more affection for them than towards any other set of human beings I have met with since I have been in Germany, I suppose because they looked so happy! [Footnote 1: marked with an asterisk in the proofing (not the original text), but not explained further.] CHAPTER VIII RETURN TO ENGLAND; "WALLENSTEIN", AND THE "MORNING POST" On the 21st May, Coleridge wrote the following letter in which he informs Josiah Wedgwood what he had done in Germany, and what he expected to do with the knowledge which he had acquired there. LETTER 85. TO JOSIAH WEDGWOOD May 21st, 1799. Gottingen. My dear sir, I have lying by my side six huge letters, with your name on each of them, and all, excepting one, have been written for these three months. About this time Mr. Hamilton, by whom I send this and the little parcel for my wife, was, as it were, setting off for England; and I seized the opportunity of sending them by him, as without any mock-modesty I really thought that the expense of the postage to me and to you would be more than their worth. Day after day, and week after week, was Hamilton going, and still delayed. And now that it is absolutely settled that he goes to-morrow, it is likewise absolutely settled that I shall go this day three weeks, and I have therefore sent only this and the picture by him, but the letters I will now take myself, for I should not like them to be lost, as they comprise the only subject on which I have had an opportunity of making myself thoroughly informed, and if I carry them myself, I can carry them without danger of their being seized at Yarmouth, as all my letters were, yours to ---- excepted, which were, luckily, not sealed. Before I left England, I had read the book of which you speak. [1] I must confess that it appeared to me exceedingly illogical. Godwin's and Condorcet's extravagancies were not worth confuting; and yet I thought that the Essay on "Population" had not confuted them. Professor Wallace, Derham, and a number of German statistic and physico-theological writers had taken the same ground, namely, that population increases in a geometrical, but the accessional nutriment only in arithmetical ratio--and that vice and misery, the natural consequences of this order of things, were intended by providence as the counterpoise. I have here no means of procuring so obscure a book, as Rudgard's; but to the best of my recollection, at the time that the Fifth Monarchy enthusiasts created so great a sensation in England, under the Protectorate, and the beginning of Charles the Second's reign, Rudgard, or Rutgard (I am not positive even of the name) wrote an Essay to the same purpose, in which he asserted, that if war, pestilence, vice, and poverty, were wholly removed, the world could not exist two hundred years, etc. Seiffmilts, [2] in his great work concerning the divine order and regularity in the destiny of the human race, has a chapter entitled a confutation of this idea; I read it with great eagerness, and found therein that this idea militated against the glory and goodness of God, and must therefore be false,--but further confutation found I none!--This book of Seiffmilts has a prodigious character throughout Germany; and never methinks did a work less deserve it. It is in three huge octavos, and wholly on the general laws that regulate the population of the human species--but is throughout most unphilosophical, and the tables, which he has collected with great industry, prove nothing. My objections to the Essay on Population you will find in my sixth letter at large--but do not, my dear sir, suppose that because unconvinced by this essay, I am therefore convinced of the contrary. No, God knows, I am sufficiently sceptical, and in truth more than sceptical, concerning the possibility of universal plenty and wisdom; but my doubts rest on other grounds. I had some conversation with you before I left England, on this subject; and from that time I had purposed to myself to examine as thoroughly as it was possible for me, the important question. Is the march of the human race progressive, or in cycles? But more of this when we meet. What have I done in Germany? I have learned the language, both high and low German, I can read both, and speak the former so fluently, that it must be a fortune for a German to be in my company, that is, I have words enough and phrases enough, and I arrange them tolerably; but my pronunciation is hideous. 2ndly, I can read the oldest German, the Frankish, and the Swabian. 3rdly. I have attended the lectures on Physiology, Anatomy, and Natural History, with regularity, and have endeavoured to understand these subjects. 4thly, I have read and made collections for a history of the "Belles Lettres," in Germany, before the time of Lessing: and 5thly, very large collections for a "Life of Lessing"; to which I was led by the miserably bad and unsatisfactory biographies that have been hitherto given, and by my personal acquaintance with two of Lessing's friends. Soon after I came into Germany, I made up my mind fully not to publish anything concerning my Travels, as people call them; yet I soon perceived that with all possible economy, my expenses would be greater than I could justify, unless I did something that would to a moral certainty repay them. I chose the "Life of Lessing" for the reasons above assigned, and because it would give me an opportunity of conveying under a better name than my own ever will be, opinions which I deem of the highest importance. Accordingly, my main business at Gottingen has been to read all the numerous controversies in which Lessing was engaged, and the works of all those German poets before the time of Lessing, which I could not afford to buy. For these last four months, with the exception of last week, in which I visited the Hartz, I have worked harder than I trust in God Almighty I shall ever have occasion to work again: this endless transcription is such a body-and-soul-wearying purgatory. I shall have bought thirty pounds' worth of books, chiefly metaphysics, and with a view to the one work, to which I hope to dedicate in silence, the prime of my life; but I believe and indeed doubt not, that before Christmas I shall have repaid myself. [3] I never, to the best of my recollection, felt the fear of death but once; that was yesterday when I delivered the picture to Hamilton. I felt, and shivered as I felt it, that I should not like to die by land or water before I see my wife and the little one; that I hope yet remains to me. But it was an idle sort of feeling, and I should not like to have it again. Poole half mentioned, in a hasty way, a circumstance that depressed my spirits for many days:--that you and Thomas were on the point of settling near Stowey, but had abandoned it. "God Almighty! what a dream of happiness it held out to me!" writes Poole. I felt disappointment without having had hope. In about a month I hope to see you. Till then may heaven bless and preserve us! Believe me, my dear sir, with every feeling of love, esteem, and gratitude, Your affectionate friend, S. T. COLERIDGE. (Josiah Wedgwood, Esq.) [4] [Footnote l: Malthas on Population, 1798.] [Footnote 2: Should be Syssmilch.] [Footnote 3: Cottle here omits a part of this letter about pecuniary matters.] [Footnote 4: Letters XCIX-CIII follow Letter 85.] It is interesting to compare this letter with that to Poole of 6th May 1796; it will be seen that Coleridge thus carried out his project of three years before. He had been able to convince the Wedgwoods of the desirability of introducing a knowledge of the German philosophy into England to refute the philosophy of Hume and expose the shallowness of the metaphysics of Locke and the Paley School of Theology. Tom Wedgwood was himself a philosopher, and saw in Coleridge the champion of a new basis of faith, and hence the friendship between them, and the support of the Wedgwoods to Coleridge in carrying out his self-education. Coleridge returned to England about a month after the Wordsworths, in July, 1799, and he reached Stowey before the 29th, when he wrote to Southey, and the two worked in concert for the publication of an annual started as the 'Annual Anthology', of which two volumes appeared, one in 1799 and one in 1800, Coleridge contributing some of his poems to the latter. 'The Devil's Thoughts', a conjoint squib which caused some sensation was sent to the 'Morning Post' on 6th September. Coleridge spent a part of the Autumn of 1799 at Ottery St. Mary visiting his mother and brothers. Coleridge then went to Southey at Exeter, and they visited the ash dells round about Dartmoor together ('Letters', 305). Coleridge also saw Josiah Wedgwood at his seat of Upcott on his way home; and on 15th October we find him back at Stowey ('Letters', 307). Still later he went north to see Wordsworth who was staying at Sockburn on the Tees with the Hutchinsons. Cottle accompanied them as far as Greta Bridge, where John Wordsworth joined their company. Coleridge and William and John Wordsworth then went on tour to the Lake District, visiting Grasmere, when Wordsworth made arrangements to take a house at Townend (now known as Dove Cottage), and came back to Sockburn (Knight's 'Life of Wordsworth', chap. xii). It was at Sockburn that Coleridge first met Sarah Hutchinson; and here it is conjectured he wrote his beautiful poem 'Love', which appeared in its first form in the 'Morning Post', on 21st December 1799, prefaced with the following letter. LETTER 86. TO THE EDITOR OF THE 'MORNING POST' WITH THE POEM 'LOVE', FIRST PUBLISHED AS 'INTRODUCTION TO THE TALE OF THE DARK LADIE'. 21 December, 1799. Sir, The following poem is the introduction to a somewhat longer one, for which I shall solicit insertion on your next open day. The use of the old ballad word 'Ladie' for Lady, is the only piece of obsoleteness in it; and as it is professedly a tale of ancient times, I trust that "the affectionate lovers of venerable antiquity," (as Cambden says) will grant me their pardon, and perhaps may be induced to admit a force and propriety in it. A heavier objection may be adduced against the Author, that in these times of fear and expectation, when novelties 'explode' around us in all directions, he should presume to offer to the public a silly tale of old-fashioned love; and five years ago, I own, I should have allowed and felt the force of this objection. But, alas! explosion has succeeded explosion so rapidly that novelty itself ceases to appear new; and it is possible that now, even a simple story wholly unspiced with politics or personality, may find some attention amid the hubbub of Revolutions, as to those who have remained a long time by the falls of Niagara, the lowest whispering becomes distinctly audible. S. T. COLERIDGE.[1] [Footnote 1: Letter CIV follows 86.] This was followed on 10th January 1800 by the political verses 'Talleyrand to Lord Grenville', heralded by a letter as good as, if not better than, the verses. LETTER 87. TO THE EDITOR OF THE 'MORNING POST'. WITH 'TALLEYRAND TO LORD GRENVILLE', A METRICAL EPISTLE. 10 January, 1800. Mr. Editor, An unmetrical letter from Talleyrand to Lord Grenville has already appeared, and from an authority too high to be questioned: otherwise I could adduce some arguments for the exclusive authenticity of the following metrical epistle. The very epithet which the wise ancients used, "'aurea carmina'" might have been supposed likely to have determined the choice of the French minister in favour of verse; and the rather when we recollect that this phrase of "golden verses" is applied emphatically to the works of that philosopher who imposed 'silence' on all with whom he had to deal. Besides, is it not somewhat improbable that Talleyrand should have preferred prose to rhyme, when the latter alone 'has got the chink'? Is it not likewise curious that in our official answer no notice whatever is taken of the Chief Consul, Bonaparte, as if there had been no such person existing; notwithstanding that his existence is pretty generally admitted, nay that some have been so rash as to believe that he has created as great a sensation in the world as Lord Grenville, or even the Duke of Portland? But the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Talleyrand, 'is' acknowledged, which, in our opinion, could not have happened had he written only that insignificant prose letter, which seems to precede Bonaparte's, as in old romances a dwarf always ran before to proclaim the advent or arrival of knight or giant. That Talleyrand's character and practices more resemble those of some 'regular' Governments than Bonaparte's I admit; but this of itself does not appear a satisfactory explanation. However, let the letter speak for itself. The second line is supererogative in syllables, whether from the oscitancy of the transcriber, or from the trepidation which might have overpowered the modest Frenchman, on finding himself in the act of writing to so 'great' a man, I shall not dare to determine. A few notes are added by, Your servant, GNOME. P.S.--As mottoes are now fashionable, especially if taken from out of the way books, you may prefix, if you please, the following lines from Sidonius Apollinaris: Saxa, et robora, corneasque fibras Mollit dulciloquiâ canorus arte! Coleridge had arrived in London in the end of November (Dyke-Campbell's 'Life', 105); and Mrs. Coleridge and Hartley were also at 21, Buckingham Street, Strand, on 9th December ('Letters', 318). He was now a regular contributor to the 'Morning Post', Stuart, the proprietor paying all expenses ('Letters', 310),[1] Coleridge, too, had made the acquaintance of Godwin ('Letters', p. 316), whom he had castigated in the 'Watchman', and who, he says, "is no great things in intellects; but in heart and manner he is all the better for having been the husband of Mary Wollstonecraft" ('Letters', 316). He began a correspondence with Godwin, and of the eighteen letters by Coleridge to him we are enabled to give nine. Lamb was the means of drawing Coleridge and Godwin together, and in Lamb's letters of this period ('Ainger', i, 111, 113, 115), we find glimpses of Coleridge while engaged on his translation of 'Wallenstein'. While in London Coleridge did not neglect his friends elsewhere; we have interesting letters to the Wedgwoods, Poole, and Southey. The next three letters are from London. [Footnote 1: For an account of Coleridge as a journalist see Mr. H. D. Traill's 'Life of Coleridge', p. 79.] LETTER 88. TO THOMAS WEDGWOOD 21, Buckingham Street, Strand, January, 1800. My dear sir, I am sitting by a fire in a rug great coat. Your room is doubtless to a greater degree air tight than mine, or your notions of Tartarus would veer round to the Greenlander's creed. It is most barbarously cold, and you, I fear, can shield yourself from it, only by perpetual imprisonment. If any place in the southern climates were in a state of real quiet, and likely to continue so, should you feel no inclination to migrate? Poor Southey, from over great industry, as I suspect, the industry too of solitary composition, has reduced himself to a terrible state of weakness, and is determined to leave this country as soon as he has finished the poem on which he is now employed. 'Tis a melancholy thing that so young a man, and one whose life has ever been so simple and self-denying * * * O, for a peace, and the south of France! I could almost wish for a Bourbon king, if it were only that Sieyes and Buonaparte might finish their career in the old orthodox way of hanging. Thank God, "I have my health perfectly", and I am working hard; yet the present state of human affairs presses on me for days together, so as to deprive me of all my cheerfulness. It is probable that a man's private and personal connexions and interests ought to be uppermost in his daily and hourly thoughts, and that the dedication of much hope and fear to subjects which are perhaps disproportionate to our faculties and powers, is a disease. But I have had this disease so long, and my early education was so undomestic, that I know not how to get rid of it; or even to wish to get rid of it. Life were so flat a thing without enthusiasm, that if for a moment it leaves me, I have a sort of stomach sensation attached to all my thoughts, "like those which succeed to the pleasurable operations of a dose of opium". Now I make up my mind to a sort of heroism in believing the progressiveness of all nature, during the present melancholy state of humanity, and on this subject "I am now writing"; and no work on which I ever employed myself makes me so happy while I am writing. I shall remain in London till April. The expenses of my last year made it necessary for me to exert my industry, and many other good ends are answered at the same time. Where I next settle I shall continue, and that must be in a state of retirement and rustication. It is therefore good for me to have a run of society, and that various and consisting of marked characters. Likewise, by being obliged to write without much elaboration, I shall greatly improve myself in naturalness and facility of style, and the particular subjects on which I write for money are nearly connected with my future schemes. My mornings I give to compilations which I am sure cannot be wholly useless, and for which, by the beginning of April I shall have earned nearly £150. My evenings to the "Theatres", as I am to conduct a sort of Dramaturgy or series of Essays on the Drama, both its general principles, and likewise in reference to the present state of the English Theatres. This I shall publish in the "Morning Post". My attendance on the theatres costs me nothing, and Stuart, the Editor, covers my expenses in London. Two mornings, and one whole day, I dedicate to these Essays on the possible progressiveness of man, and on the principles of population. In April I retire to my greater works,--"The Life of Lessing". My German chests are arrived, but I have them not yet, but expect them from Stowey daily; when they come I shall send a letter. I have seen a good deal of Godwin, who has just published a Novel. I like him for thinking so well of Davy. He talks of him every where as the most extraordinary of human beings he had ever met with. I cannot say that, for I know "one" whom I feel to be the superior, but I never met with so extraordinary a "young man". I have likewise dined with Horne Tooke. He is a clear-headed old man, as every man must needs be who attends to the real import of words, but there is a sort of charlatanry in his manner that did not please me. He makes such a mystery out of plain and palpable things, and never tells you any thing without first exciting, and detaining your curiosity. But it were a bad heart that could not pardon worse faults than these in the author of "The Diversions of Purley". Believe me, my dear sir, with much affection Yours, S. T. COLERIDGE. [1] Thomas Wedgwood, Esq. [Footnote 1: Letter CV follows our No. 88.] LETTER 89. TO JOSIAH WEDGWOOD 21, Buckingham Street, Feb. 1800. My dear sir, Your brother's health (Mr. Thomas Wedgwood) outweighs all other considerations. Beyond a doubt he has made himself acquainted with the degree of heat which he is to experience there (the West Indies). The only objections that I see are so obvious, that it is idle in me to mention them: the total want of men with whose pursuits your brother can have a fellow feeling: the length and difficulty of the return, in case of a disappointment; and the necessity of sea-voyages to almost every change of scenery. I will not think of the yellow fever; that I hope is quite out of all probability. Believe me, my dear friend, I have some difficulty in suppressing all that is within me of affection and grief. God knows my heart, wherever your brother is, I shall follow him in spirit; follow him with my thoughts and most affectionate wishes. I read your letter, and did as you desired me. ---- [1] is very cool to me. Whether I have still any of the leaven of the "Citizen," and visionary about me--too much for his present zeal, or whether he is incapable of attending * * * * As to his views, he is now gone to Cambridge to canvass for a Fellowship in Trinity Hall. Mackintosh has kindly written to Dr. Lawrence, who is very intimate with the Master, and he has other interest. He is also trying hard, and in expectation of a Commissionership of Bankruptcy, and means to pursue the law with all ardour and steadiness. As to the state of his mind, it is that which it was and will be. God love him! He has a most incurable forehead. ---- [2] called on him and looking on his table, saw by accident a letter directed to himself. Said he, "Why ---- [3] what letter is this for me? and from ----." [4] "Yes I have had it some time." "Why did you not give it me?" "Oh, it wants some explanation first. You must not read it now, for I can't give you the explanation now." And ----,[5] who you know is a right easy-natured man, has not been able to get his own letter from him to this hour! Of his success at Cambridge, Caldwell, is doubtful, or more than doubtful. * * * So much of ----.[6] All that I know, and all I suspect that is to be known. A kind, gentlemanly, affectionate hearted man, possessed of an absolute talent for industry. Would to God, he had never heard of Philosophy! I have been three times to the House of Commons; each time earlier than the former; and each time hideously crowded. The two first days the debate was put off. Yesterday I went at a quarter before eight, and remained till three this morning, and then sat writing and correcting other men's writing till eight--a good twenty four hours of unpleasant activity! I have not felt myself sleepy yet. Pitt and Fox completely answered my pre-formed ideas of them. The elegance and high finish of Pitt's periods, even in the most sudden replies, is "curious," but that is all. He argues but so so, and does not reason at all. Nothing is rememberable of what he says. Fox possesses all the full and overflowing eloquence of a man of clear head, clear heart, and impetuous feelings. He is to my mind a great orator; all the rest that spoke were mere creatures. I could make a better speech myself than any that I heard, except Pitt and Fox. I reported that part of Pitt's which I have enclosed in brackets, not that I report ex-officio, but my curiosity having led me there, I did Stuart a service by taking a few notes. I work from morning to night, but in a few weeks I shall have completed my purpose, and then adieu to London for ever. We newspaper scribes are true galley-slaves. When the high winds of events blow loud and frequent then the sails are hoisted, or the ship drives on of itself. When all is calm and sunshine then to our oars. Yet it is not unflattering to a man's vanity to reflect that what he writes at twelve at night, will before twelve hours are over, have perhaps, five or six thousand readers! To trace a happy phrase, good image, or new argument, running through the town and sliding into all the papers. Few wine merchants can boast of creating more sensation. Then to hear a favourite and often-urged argument, repeated almost in your own particular phrases, in the House of Commons; and, quietly in the silent self-complacence of your own heart, chuckle over the plagiarism, as if you were monopolist of all good reasons. But seriously, considering that I have newspapered it merely as means of subsistence, while I was doing other things, I have been very lucky. "The New Constitution; The Proposal for Peace; The Irish Union;" etc. etc.; they are important in themselves, and excellent vehicles for general truths. I am not ashamed of what I have written. I desired Poole to send you all the papers antecedent to your own; I think you will like the different analyses of the French constitution. I have attended Mackintosh's lectures regularly; he was so kind as to send me a ticket, and I have not failed to profit by it. I remain, with grateful and most affectionate esteem, Your faithful friend S. T. COLERIDGE. Josiah Wedgwood, Esq.[7] [Footnote 1: Basil Montagu.] [Footnote 2: John Pinney.] [Footnote 3: Montagu.] [Footnote 4: Wordsworth.] [Footnote 5: Pinney.] [Footnote 6: Montagu.] [Footnote 7: Letters CVI-CIX follow 89.] LETTER 90. TO POOLE March, 1800. If I had the least love of money I could make almost sure of £2,000 a year, for Stuart has offered me half shares in the two papers, the "Morning Post" and "Courier", if I would devote myself with him to them. But I told him that I would not give up the country, and the lazy reading of old folios for two thousand times two thousand pound--in short that beyond £250 a year I considered money as a real evil.-- I think there are but two good ways of writing--one for immediate and wide impression, though transitory--the other for permanence. Newspapers are the first--the best one can do is the second. That middle class of translating books is neither the one nor the other. When I have settled myself "clear", I shall write nothing for money but for the newspaper. You of course will not hint a word of Stuart's offer to me. He has behaved with abundant honour and generosity. CHAPTER IX KESWICK Coleridge had determined not to live in London; his engagement with Stuart he regarded as only a temporary shift to clear off some debt which he had incurred in his visit to Germany. After a short stay with Lamb ("Ainger", i, 113), and a tour to the North to see Wordsworth (J. Dykes Campbell's "Life", 113), he returned to Stowey, writing to Godwin on 21st May. LETTER 91. TO GODWIN Wednesday, May 21, 1800. Dear Godwin, I received your letter this morning, and had I not, still I am almost confident that I should have written to you before the end of the week. Hitherto the translation of the "Wallenstein" has prevented me, not that it engrossed my time, but that it wasted and depressed my spirits, and left a sense of wearisomeness and disgust which unfitted me for anything but sleeping or immediate society. I say this because I ought to have written to you first; yet, as I am not behind you in affectionate esteem, so I would not be thought to lag in those outward and visible signs that both show and verify the inward spiritual grace. Believe me, you recur to my thoughts frequently, and never without pleasure, never without my making out of the past a little day-dream for the future. I left Wordsworth on the 4th of this month; if I cannot procure a suitable house at Stowey I return to Cumberland and settle at Keswick, in a house of such prospect that if, according to you and Hume, impressions constitute our being, I shall have a tendency to become a god, so sublime and beautiful will be the series of my visual existence. But, whether I continue here or migrate thither, I shall be in a beautiful country, and have house-room and heart-room for you, and you must come and write your next work at my house. My dear Godwin! I remember you with so much pleasure, and our conversations so distinctly, that, I doubt not, we have been mutually benefited; but as to your poetic and physiopathic feelings, I more than suspect that dear little Fanny and Mary have had more to do in that business than I. Hartley sends his love to Mary. [1] "What, and not to Fanny?" "Yes, and to Fanny, but I'll 'have' Mary." He often talks about them. My poor Lamb, how cruelly afflictions crowd upon him! I am glad that you think of him as I think: he has an affectionate heart, a mind "sui generis"; his taste acts so as to appear like the unmechanic simplicity of an instinct; in brief, he is worth an hundred men of mere talents. Conversation with the latter tribe is like the use of leaden bells--one wearies by exercise. Lamb every now and then "irradiates", and the beam, though single and fine as a hair, yet is rich with colours, and I both see and feel it. In Bristol I was much with Davy, almost all day. He always talks of you with great affection, and defends you with a friendly zeal. If I settle at Keswick he will be with me in the fall of the year, and so must you: and let me tell you, Godwin, that four such men as you, I, Davy, and Wordsworth, do not meet together in one house every day in the year--I mean four men so distinct with so many sympathies. I received yesterday a letter from Southey. He arrived at Lisbon after a prosperous voyage, on the last day of April; his letter to me is dated May-Day. He girds up his loins for a great history of Portugal, which will be translated into Portuguese in the first year of the Lusitanian Republic. Have you seen Mrs. Robinson [2] lately--how is she? Remember me in the kindest and most respectful phrases to her. I wish I knew the particulars of her complaint; for Davy has discovered a perfectly new acid by which he has restored the use of limbs to persons who had lost it for many years (one woman nine years), in cases of supposed rheumatism. At all events, Davy says, it can do no harm in Mrs. Robinson's case, and, if she will try it, he will make up a little parcel and write her a letter of instructions, etc. Tell her, and it is the truth, that Davy is exceedingly delighted with the two poems in the "Anthology". N.B. Did you get my attempt at a tragedy from Mrs. Robinson? To Mrs. Smith I am about to write a letter, with a book; be so kind as to inform me of her direction. Mrs. Inchbald I do not like at all; every time I recollect her I like her less. That segment of a look at the corner of her eye--O God in heaven! it is so cold and cunning. Through worlds of wildernesses I would run away from that look, that "heart-picking" look! 'Tis marvellous to me that you can like that woman. I shall remain here about ten days for certain. If you have leisure and inclination in that time, write; if not, I will write to you where I am going, or at all events whither I am gone. God bless you, and Your sincerely affectionate S. T. COLERIDGE. Mr. T. Poole's, N[ether] Stowey, Bridgwater. Sara desires to be remembered kindly to you, and sends a kiss to Fanny, and "dear meek little Mary." [Footnote 1: Mrs. Shelley.] [Footnote 2: The celebrated Perdita. She died in the following December.] Next month Coleridge wrote to Davy. LETTER 92. TO HUMPHRY DAVY Saturday Morning, Mr. T. Poole's, Nether Stowey, Somerset. My dear Davy, I received a very kind letter from Godwin, in which he says that he never thinks of you but with a brother's feeling of love and expectation. Indeed, I am sure he does not. I think of translating Blumenbach's Manual of Natural History: it is very well written, and would, I think, be useful both to students, as an admirable direction to their studies, and to others it would supply a general knowledge of the subject. I will state the contents of the book: 1. Of the naturalia in general, and their divisions into three kingdoms. 2. Of organised bodies in general. 3. Of animals in general. 4. Of the mammalia. 5. Birds. 6. Amphibious. 7. Fishes. 8. Insects. 9. Worms. 10. Plants. 11. Of minerals in general. 12. Of stones and earthy fossils. 13. Of mineral salts. 14. Combustible minerals. 15. Of metals. 16. Petrifactions. At the end there is an alphabetical index, so that it is at once a natural history and a dictionary of natural history. To each animal, etc., all the European names are given, with of course the scientific characteristics. I have the last edition, "i.e.", that of April, 1799. Now, I wish to know from you, whether there is in English already any work of one volume (this would make 800 pages), that renders this useless. In short, should I be right in advising Longman to undertake it? Answer me as soon as you conveniently can. Blumenbach has been no very great discoverer, though he has done some respectable things in that way, but he is a man of enormous knowledge, and has an "arranging" head. Ask Beddoes, if you do not know. When you have leisure, you would do me a great service, if you would briefly state your metaphysical system of impressions, ideas, pleasures, and pains, the laws that govern them, and the reasons which induce you to consider them as essentially distinct from each other. My motive for this request is the following:--As soon as I "settle", I shall read Spinoza and Leibnitz, and I particularly wish to know wherein they agree with, and wherein differ from you. If you will do this, I promise you to send you the result, and with it my own creed. God bless you! S. T. COLERIDGE. Blumenbach's book contains references to all the best writers on each subject. My friend, T. Poole, begs me to ask what, in your opinion, are the parts or properties in the oak which tan skins? and is cold water a complete menstruum for these parts or properties? I understand from Poole that nothing is so little understood as the chemical theory of tan, though nothing is of more importance in the circle of manufactures; in other words, does oak bark give out to cold water all those of its parts which tan? Coleridge and his family at last settled down at Greta Hall in July, 1800, and he thus writes to Josiah Wedgwood of the event. LETTER 93. To JOSIAH WEDGWOOD July 24, 1800. My dear sir, I find your letter on my arrival at Grasmere, namely, dated on the 29th of June, since which time to the present, with the exception of the last few days, I have been more unwell than I have ever been since I left school. For many days I was forced to keep my bed, and when released from that incarceration, I suffered most grievously from a brace of swollen eyelids, and a head into which, on the least agitation, the blood was felt as rushing in and flowing back again, like the raking of the tide on a coast of loose stones. However, thank God, I am now coming about again. That Tom receives such pleasure from natural scenery strikes me as it does you. The total incapability which I have found in myself to associate any but the most languid feelings, with the God-like objects which have surrounded me, and the nauseous efforts to impress my admiration into the service of nature, has given me a sympathy with his former state of health, which I never before could have had. I wish, from the bottom of my soul, that he may be enjoying similar pleasures with those which I am now enjoying with all that newness of sensation; that voluptuous correspondence of the blood and flesh about me with breeze and sun-heat, which makes convalescence more than repay one for disease. I parted from Poole with pain and dejection, for him, and for myself in him. I should have given Stowey a decided preference for a residence. It was likewise so conveniently situated, that I was in the way of almost all whom I love and esteem. But there was no suitable house, and no prospect of a suitable house. * * * These things would have weighed as nothing, could I have remained at Stowey, but now they come upon me to diminish my regret. Add to this, Poole's determination to spend a year or two on the continent, in case of a peace and his mother's death. God in heaven bless her! I am sure she will not live long. This is the first day of my arrival at Keswick. My house is roomy, situated on an eminence, a furlong from the town; before it an enormous garden, more than two-thirds of which is rented as a garden for sale articles; but the walks are ours. Completely behind the house are shrubberies, and a declivity planted with flourishing trees of ten or fifteen years' growth, at the bottom of which is a most delightful shaded walk, by the river Greta, a quarter of a mile in length. The room in which I sit commands from one window the Bassenthwaite lake, woods, and mountains. From the opposite, the Derwentwater and fantastic mountains of Borrowdale. Straight before is a wilderness of mountains, catching and streaming lights and shadows at all times. Behind the house, and entering into all our views, is Skiddaw. My acquaintances here are pleasant, and at some distance is Sir Guilfred Lawson's seat, with a very large and expensive library, to which I have every reason to hope that I shall have free access. But when I have been settled here a few days longer, I will write you a minute account of my situation. Wordsworth lives twelve miles distant. In about a year's time he will probably settle at Keswick likewise. It is no small advantage here, that for two-thirds of the year we are in complete retirement. The other third is alive and swarms with tourists of all shapes, and sizes, and characters. It is the very place I would recommend to a novelist or farce writer. Besides, at that time of the year there is always hope that a friend may be among the number and miscellaneous crowd, whom this place attracts. So much for Keswick. Have you seen my translation of "Wallenstein". It is a dull heavy play, but I entertain hopes that you will think the language for the greater part, natural, and good common sense English; to which excellence, if I can lay fair claim in any work of poetry or prose, I shall be a very singular writer, at least. I am now working at my "Introduction of the Life of Lessing", which I trust will be in the press before Christmas, that is, the "Introduction", which will be published first. God bless you, S. T. COLERIDGE. Josiah Wedgwood, Esq. To Davy Coleridge wrote on the succeeding day. LETTER 94. TO DAVY Keswick, Friday Evening, July 25, 1800. My dear Davy Work hard, and if success do not dance up like the bubbles in the salt (with the spirit lamp under it), may the Devil and his dam take success! My dear fellow! from the window before me there is a great "camp" of mountains. Giants seem to have pitched their tents there. Each mountain is a giant's tent, and how the light streams from them. Davy! I "ache" for you to be with us. W. Wordsworth is such a lazy fellow, that I bemire myself by making promises for him: the moment I received your letter, I wrote to him. He will, I hope, write immediately to Biggs and Cottle. At all events, those poems must not as yet be delivered up to them, because that beautiful poem, "The Brothers", which I read to you in Paul Street, I neglected to deliver to you, and that must begin the volume. I trust, however, that I have invoked the sleeping bard with a spell so potent, that he will awake and deliver up that sword of Argantyr, which is to rive the enchanter "Gaudyverse" from his crown to his foot. What did you think of that case I translated for you from the German? That I was a well-meaning sutor who had ultra-crepidated[1] with more zeal than wisdom!! I give myself credit for that word "ultra- crepidated," it started up in my brain like a creation. I write to Tobin by this post. Godwin is gone Irelandward, on a visit to Curran, says the "Morning Post"; to Grattan, writes C. Lamb. We drank tea the night before I left Grasmere, on the island in that lovely lake; our kettle swung over the fire, hanging from the branch of a fir-tree, and I lay and saw the woods, and mountains, and lake all trembling, and as it were idealized through the suble smoke, which rose up from the clear, red embers of the fir-apples which we had collected: afterwards we made a glorious bonfire on the margin, by some elder bushes, whose twigs heaved and sobbed in the uprushing column of smoke, and the image of the bonfire, and of us that danced round it, ruddy, laughing faces in the twilight; the image of this in a lake, smooth as that sea, to whose waves the Son of God had said, "Peace!" May God, and all his sons, love you as I do. S. T. COLERIDGE. Sara desires her kind remembrances. Hartley is a spirit that dances on an aspen leaf; the air that yonder sallowfaced and yawning tourist is breathing, is to my babe a perpetual nitrous oxide. Never was more joyous creature born. Pain with him is so wholly transubstantiated by the joys that had rolled on before, and rushed on after, that oftentimes five minutes after his mother has whipt him, he has gone up and asked her to whip him again.[2] [Footnote 1: "Ne sutor ultra crepidam."] [Footnote 2: Letter CX follows No. 94.] Coleridge was now as enamoured of the Lake District as he had been of Stowey. On 22nd September he wrote to Godwin. LETTER 95. TO GODWIN Monday, Sept. 22, 1800. Dear Godwin, I received your letter, and with it the enclosed note,[1] which shall be punctually re-delivered to you on the first of October. Your tragedy [2] to be exhibited at Christmas! I have, indeed, merely read through your letter; so it is not strange that my heart continues beating out of time. Indeed, indeed Godwin, such a stream of hope and fear rushed in on me, as I read the sentence, as you would not permit yourself to feel! If there be anything yet undreamt of in our philosophy; if it be, or if it be possible, that thought can impel thought out of the usual limit of a man's own skull and heart; if the cluster of ideas which constitute an identity, do ever connect and unite into a greater whole; if feelings could ever propagate themselves without the servile ministrations of undulating air or reflected light; I seem to feel within myself a strength and a power of desire that might dart a modifying, commanding impulse on a whole theatre. What does all this mean? Alas! that sober sense should know no other way to construe all this, than by the tame phrase, I wish you success! That which Lamb informed you is founded on truth. Mr. Sheridan sent, through the medium of Stuart, a request to Wordsworth to present a tragedy to his stage; and to me a declaration, that the failure of my piece was owing to my obstinacy in refusing any alteration. I laughed and Wordsworth smiled; but my tragedy will remain at Keswick, and Wordsworth's is not likely to emigrate from Grasmere. Wordsworth's drama is, in its present state, not fit for the stage, and he is not well enough to submit to the drudgery of making it so. Mine is fit for nothing, except to excite in the minds of good men the hope "that the young man is likely to do better." In the first moments I thought of re-writing it, and sent to Lamb for the copy with this intent. I read an Act, and altered my opinion, and with it my wish. Your feelings respecting Baptism are, I suppose, much like mine! At times I dwell on Man with such reverence, resolve all his follies into such grand primary laws of intellect, and in such wise so contemplate them as ever-varying incarnations of the Eternal Life--that the Llama's dung-pellet, or the cow-tail which the dying Brahmin clutches convulsively, become sanctified and sublime by the feelings which cluster round them. In that mood I exclaim, my boys shall be christened! But then another fit of moody philosophy attacks me. I look at my doted-on Hartley--he moves, he lives, he finds impulses from within and from without, he is the darling of the sun and of the breeze. Nature seems to bless him as a thing of her own. He looks at the clouds, the mountains, the living beings of the earth, and vaults and jubilates! Solemn looks and solemn words have been hitherto connected in his mind with great and magnificent objects only: with lightning, with thunder, with the waterfall blazing in the sunset. Then I say, shall I suffer him to see grave countenances and hear grave accents, while his face is sprinkled? Shall I be grave myself, and tell a lie to him? Or shall I laugh, and teach him to insult the feelings of his fellow men? Besides, are we not all in this present hour, fainting beneath the duty of Hope? From such thoughts I stand up, and vow a book of severe analysis, in which I shall tell "all" I believe to be truth in the nakedest language in which it can be told. My wife is now quite comfortable. Surely you might come and spend the very next four weeks, not without advantage to both of us. The very glory of the place is coming on; the local genius is just arraying himself in his higher attributes. But, above all, I press it because my mind has been busied with speculations that are closely connected with those pursuits that have hitherto constituted your utility and importance: and, ardently as I wish you success on the stage, I yet cannot frame myself to the thought that you should cease to appear as a bold moral thinker. I wish you to write a book on the power of words, and the processes by which human feelings form affinities with them--in short, I wish you to "philosophize" Horne Tooke's system, and to solve the great questions--whether there be reason to hold that an action bearing the semblance of predesigning consciousness may yet be simply organic, and whether a series of such actions are possible--and close on the heels of this question would follow the old, "Is logic the essence of thinking?"--in other words, "Is thinking possible without arbitrary signs? or how far is the word arbitrary a misnomer? are not words, etc., parts and germinations of the plant, and what is the law of their growth?" In something of this order I would endeavour to destroy the old antithesis of Words and Things, elevating, as it were, Words into Things, and living things too. All the nonsense of vibrations, etc., you would, of course, dismiss. If what I have here written appear nonsense to you, or common sense in a harlequinade of "outre" expressions, suspend your judgment till we see each other. Yours sincerely, S. T. COLERIDGE. I was in the country when "Wallenstein" was published. Longman sent me down half-a-dozen--the carriage back the book was not worth. [Footnote 1: A loan often pounds.] [Footnote 2: "Antonio."] Coleridge had asked Godwin to stand godfather to his child, which compliment Godwin declined. Hence the passage in the above letter on Baptism. Davy now occupied a large part of Coleridge's attention. On 9th October he wrote: LETTER 96. To DAVY Thursday night, October 9, 1800. My dear Davy, I was right glad, glad with a "stagger" of the heart, to see your writing again. Many a moment have I had all my France and England curiosity suspended and lost, looking in the advertisement front column of the "Morning Post Gazetteer", for "Mr. Davy's Galvanic habitudes of charcoal. ..." Upon my soul, I believe there is not a letter in those words round which a world of imagery does not circumvolve; your room, the garden, the cold bath, the moonlight rocks, Barristed, Moore, and simple-looking Frere, and dreams of wonderful things attached to your name--and Skiddaw, and Glaramara, and Eagle Crag, and you, and Wordsworth, and me, on the top of them! I pray you do write to me immediately, and tell me what you mean by the possibility of your assuming a new occupation; [1] have you been successful to the extent of your expectations in your late chemical inquiries? In your poem,[2] "impressive" is used for "impressible" or passive, is it not? If so, it is not English; life "diffusive" likewise is not English. The last stanza introduces "confusion" into my mind, and despondency--and has besides been so often said by the materialists, etc., that it is not worth repeating. If the poem had ended more originally, in short, but for the last stanza, I will venture to affirm that there were never so many lines which so uninterruptedly combined natural and beautiful words with strict philosophic truths, "i.e.", scientifically philosophic. Of the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh stanzas, I am doubtful which is the most beautiful. Do not imagine that I cling to a fond love of future identity, but the thought which you have expressed in the last stanzas might be more grandly, and therefore more consolingly exemplified. I had forgot to say that sameness and identity are words too etymologically the same to be placed so close to each other. As to myself, I am doing little worthy the relation. I write for Stuart in the "Morning Post", and I am compelled by the god Pecunia, which was one name of the supreme Jupiter, to give a volume of letters from Germany, which will be a decent "lounge" book, and not an atom more. The "Christabel" was running up to 1,300 lines, and was so much admired by Wordsworth, that he thought it indelicate to print two volumes with his name, in which so much of another man's was included; and which was of more consequence, the poem was in direct opposition to the very purpose for which the lyrical ballads were published, viz., an experiment to see how far those passions which alone give any value to extraordinary incidents were capable of interesting in and for themselves in the incidents of common life. We mean to publish the "Christabel", therefore, with a long blank-verse poem of Wordsworth's, entitled "The Pedlar".[3] I assure you I think very differently of "Christabel". I would rather have written "Ruth", and "Nature's Lady",[4] than a million such poems. But why do I calumniate my own spirit by saying I would rather? God knows it is as delightful to me that they "are" written. I "know" that at present, and I "hope" that it "will" be so; my mind has "disciplined" itself into a willing exertion of its powers, without any reference to their comparative value. I cannot speak favourably of W.'s health, but indeed he has not done common justice to Dr. Beddoes's kind prescriptions. I saw his countenance darken, and all his hopes vanish, when he saw the "prescriptions"--his "scepticism" concerning medicines! nay, it is not enough "scepticism"! Yet, now that peas and beans are over, I have hopes that he will in good earnest make a fair and full trial. I rejoice with sincere joy at Beddoes's recovery. Wordsworth is fearful you have been much teazed by the printers on his account, but you can sympathise with him. The works which I gird myself up to attack as soon as money concerns will permit me, are the "Life of Lessing", and the "Essay on Poetry". The latter is still more at my heart than the former: its title would be an essay on the elements of poetry--it would in reality be a "disguised" system of morals and politics. When you write, and do write soon, tell me how I can get your essay on the nitrous oxide. If you desired Johnson to have one sent to Lackington's, to be placed in Mr. Crosthwaite's monthly parcel for Keswick, I should receive it. Are your galvanic discoveries important? What do they lead to? All this is "ultra crepidation", but would to heaven I had as much knowledge as I have sympathy! My wife and children are well; the baby was dying some weeks ago, so the good people would have it baptized; his name is Derwent Coleridge, so called from the river, for fronting our house the Greta runs into the Derwent. Had it been a girl, the name should have been Greta. By the by, Greta, or rather Grieta, is exactly the Cocytus of the Greeks; the word, literally rendered in modern English, is, "The loud Lamenter;" to griet, in the Cambrian dialect, signifying to roar aloud for grief or pain, and it does "roar" with a vengeance! I will say nothing about Spring--a thirsty man tries to think of anything but the stream when he knows it to be ten miles off! God bless you! Your most affectionate S. T. COLERIDGE.[5] Another letter to Godwin at this time indicates that Coleridge was still expecting to be able to finish "Christabel", which as a completed poem, Coleridge, as we have already seen, calculated would run up to 1,300 lines. [Footnote 1: No doubt the leaving of the Pneumatic for the Royal Institution.] [Footnote 2: That entitled, "Written after Recovery from a Dangerous Illness." It is to be found in the "Memoirs of his Life", vol. i, p. 390. Coleridge's critical remarks apply to it as it was first written; the words objected to are not to be found in it in its corrected printed state.] [Footnote 1: A name changed to "The Excursion".] [Footnote 2: "Three years she grew in sun and shower."] [Footnote 5: Letter CXI is our 96.] LETTER 97. TO GODWIN Monday, Oct. 13, 1800. Dear Godwin, I have been myself too frequently a grievous delinquent in the article of letter-writing to feel any inclination to reproach my friends when, peradventure, they have been long silent. But, this out of the question, I did not expect a speedier answer; for I had anticipated the circumstances which you assign as the causes of your delay. An attempt to finish a poem of mine for insertion in the second volume of the "Lyrical Ballads", has thrown me so fearfully back in my bread and beef occupations, that I shall scarcely be able to justify myself in putting you to the expense of the few lines which I may be able to scrawl in the present paper--but some parts in your letter interested me deeply, and I wished to tell you so. First, then, you know Kemble, and I do not. But my conjectural judgments concerning his character lead me to persuade an absolute passive obedience to his opinion, and this, too, because I would leave to every man his own trade. "Your" trade has been, in the present instance, "first" to furnish a wise pleasure to your fellow-beings in general, and, "secondly", to give Mr. Kemble and his associates the power of delighting that part of your fellow-beings assembled in a theatre. As to what relates to the first point, I should be sorry indeed if greater men than Mr. Kemble could induce you to alter a "but" to a "yet" contrary to your own convictions. Above all things, an author ought to be sincere to the public; and, when William Godwin stands in the title-page, it implies that W. G. approves that which follows. Besides, the mind and finer feelings are blunted by such obsequiousness. But in the theatre it is Godwin and Co. "ex professo". I should regard it in almost the same light as if I had written a song for Haydn to compose and Mara to sing; I know, indeed, what is poetry, but I do not know so well as he and she what will suit his notes or her voice. That actors and managers are often wrong is true, but still their trade is "their" trade, and the presumption is in favour of their being right. For the press, I should wish you to be solicitously nice; because you are to exhibit before a larger and more respectable multitude than a theatre presents to you, and in a new part, that of a poet employing his philosophical knowledge practically. If it be possible, come, therefore, and let us discuss every page and every line. Now for something which, I would fain believe, is still more important, namely, the propriety of your future philosophical speculations. Your second objection, derived from the present "ebb" of opinion, will be best answered by the fact that Mackintosh and his followers have the "flow". This is greatly in your favour, for mankind are at present gross reasoners. They reason in a perpetual antithesis; Mackintosh is an oracle, and Godwin therefore a fool. Now it is morally impossible that Mackintosh and the sophists of his school can retain this opinion. You may well exclaim with Job, "O that my adversary would write a book!" When he publishes, it will be all over with him, and then the minds of men will incline strongly to those who would point out in intellectual perceptions a source of moral progressiveness. Every man in his heart is in favour of your general principles. A party of dough-baked democrats of fortune were weary of being dissevered from their fellow rich men. They want to say something in defence of turning round. Mackintosh puts that something into their mouths, and for awhile they will admire and be-praise him. In a little while these men will have fallen back into the ranks from which they had stepped out, and life is too melancholy a thing for men in general for the doctrine of unprogressiveness to remain popular. Men cannot long retain their faith in the Heaven "above" the blue sky, but a Heaven they will have, and he who reasons best on the side of the universal wish will be the most popular philosopher. As to your first objection, that you are a logician, let me say that your habits are analytic, but that you have not read enough of travels, voyages, and biography--especially men's lives of themselves--and you have too soon submitted your notions to other men's censures in conversation. A man should nurse his opinions in privacy and self-fondness for a long time, and seek for sympathy and love, not for detection or censure. Dismiss, my dear fellow, your theory of Collision of Ideas, and take up that of Mutual Propulsion. I wish to write more, and state to you a lucrative job, which would, I think, be eminently serviceable to your own mind, and which you would have every opportunity of doing here. I now express a serious wish that you would come and look out for a house. Did Stuart remit you £10. on my account? S. T. COLERIDGE. I would gladly write any verses, but to a prologue or epilogue I am absolutely incompetent. Coleridge was a tremendous walker and hill climber. The following letter narrates a curious adventure in a storm among the mountains. LETTER 98. TO DAVY October 18, 1800. My dear Davy, Our mountains northward end in the mountain Carrock--one huge, steep, enormous bulk of stones, desolately variegated with the heath plant; at its foot runs the river Calder, and a narrow vale between it and the mountain Bowscale, so narrow, that in its greatest width it is not more than a furlong. But that narrow vale is "so" green, "so" beautiful, there are moods in which a man might weep to look at it, On this mountain Carrock, at the summit of which are the remains of a vast Druid circle of stones, I was wandering, when a thick cloud came on, and wrapped me in such darkness, that I could not see ten yards before me, and with the cloud a storm of wind and hail, the like of which I had never before seen and felt. At the very summit is a cone of stones, built by the shepherds, and called the Carrock Man. Such cones are on the tops of almost all our mountains, and they are all called "men". At the bottom of the Carrock Man I seated myself for shelter, but the wind became so fearful and tyrannous, that I was apprehensive some of the stones might topple down upon me, so I groped my way farther down and came to three rocks, placed on this wise 1/3\2*** each one supported by the other like a child's house of cards, and in the hollow and screen which they made, I sate for a long while sheltered, as if I had been in my own study in which I am now writing: there I sate with a total feeling worshipping the power and "eternal link" of energy. The darkness vanished as by enchantment; far off, far, far off to the south, the mountains of Glaramara and Great Gable and their family appeared distinct, in deepest, sablest "blue". I rose, and behind me was a rainbow bright as the brightest. I descended by the side of a torrent, and passed, or rather crawled (for I was forced to descend on all fours), by many a naked waterfall, till fatigued and hungry (and with a finger almost broken, and which remains swelled to the size of two fingers), I reached the narrow vale, and the single house nestled in ash and sycamores. I entered to claim the universal hospitality of this country; but instead of the life and comfort usual in these lonely houses, I saw dirt, and every appearance of misery--a pale woman sitting by a peat fire. I asked her for bread and milk, and she sent a small child to fetch it, but did not rise herself. I ate very heartily of the black, sour bread, and drank a bowl of milk, and asked her to permit me to pay her. "Nay," says she, "we are not so scant as that--you are right welcome; but do you know any help for the rheumatics, for I have been so long ailing that I am almost fain to die?" So I advised her to eat a great deal of mustard, having seen in an advertisement something about essence of mustard curing the most obstinate cases of rheumatism. But do write me, and tell me some cure for the rheumatism; it is in her shoulders, and the small of her back chiefly. I wish much to go off with some bottles of stuff to the poor creature. I should walk the ten miles as ten yards. With love and honour, My dear Davy, yours, S. T. COLERIDGE. [1] [Footnote 1: Letter CXII is our 98.] The next letter relates how Coleridge wrote the Second Part of "Christabel", which had been composed before 4th October (Dorothy Wordsworth's "Journals", i, 51). LETTER 99. TO JOSIAH WEDGWOOD Keswick, Nov. 1, 1800. My dear Sir, I would fain believe that the experiment which your brother has made in the West Indies is not wholly a discouraging one. If a warm climate did nothing but only prevented him from getting worse, it surely evidenced some power; and perhaps a climate equally favourable in a country of more various interest, Italy, or the South of France, may tempt your brother to make a longer trial. If (disciplining myself into silent cheerfulness) I could be of any comfort to him by being his companion and attendant, for two or three months, on the supposition that he should wish to travel, and was at a loss for a companion more fit, I would go with him with a willing affection. You will easily see, my dear friend, that I say this only to increase the range of your brother's choice--for even in choosing there is some pleasure. There happen frequently little odd coincidences in time, that recall momentary faith in the notion of sympathies acting in absence. I heard of your brother's return, for the first time, on Monday last, the day on which your letter is dated, from Stoddart. Had it rained on my naked skin I could not have felt more strangely. The 300 or 400 miles that are between us seemed converted into a moral distance; and I knew that the whole of this silence I was myself accountable for; for I ended my last letter by promising to follow it with a second and longer one, before you could answer the first. But immediately on my arrival in this country I undertook to finish a poem which I had begun, entitled "Christabel", for a second volume of the "Lyrical Ballads". I tried to perform my promise, but the deep unutterable disgust which I had suffered in the translation of the accursed "Wallenstein", seemed to have stricken me with barrenness; for I tried and tried, and nothing would come of it. I desisted with a deeper dejection than I am willing to remember. The wind from the Skiddaw and Borrowdale was often as loud as wind need be, and many a walk in the clouds in the mountains did I take; but all would not do, till one day I dined out at the house of a neighbouring clergyman, and some how or other drank so much wine, that I found some effort and dexterity requisite to balance myself on the hither edge of sobriety. The next day my verse-making faculties returned to me, and I proceeded successfully, till my poem grew so long, and in Wordsworth's opinion so impressive, that he rejected it from his volume, as disproportionate both in size and merit, and as discordant in its character. In the mean time I had gotten myself entangled in the old sorites of the old sophist,--procrastination. I had suffered my necessary businesses to accumulate so terribly, that I neglected to write to any one, till the pain I suffered from not writing made me waste as many hours in dreaming about it as would have sufficed for the letter writing of half a life. But there is something beside time requisite for the writing of a letter--at least with me. My situation here is indeed a delightful situation; but I feel what I have lost--feel it deeply--it recurs more often and more painfully than I had anticipated, indeed so much so, that I scarcely ever feel myself impelled, that is to say, pleasurably impelled to write to Poole. I used to feel myself more at home in his great windy parlour than in my own cottage. We were well suited to each other--my animal spirits corrected his inclination to melancholy; and there was something both in his understanding and in his affections, so healthy and manly, that my mind freshened in his company, and my ideas and habits of thinking acquired day after day more of substance and reality. Indeed, indeed, my dear, sir, with tears in my eyes, and with all my heart and soul, I wish it were as easy for us all to meet as it was when you lived at Upcott. Yet when I revise the step I have taken, I know not how I could have acted otherwise than I did act. Everything I promised myself in this country has answered far beyond my expectation. The room in which I write commands six distinct landscapes--the two lakes, the vale, the river and mountains, and mists, and clouds and sunshine, make endless combinations, as if heaven and earth were for ever talking to each other. Often when in a deep study, I have walked to the window and remained there looking without seeing; all at once the lake of Keswick and the fantastic mountains of Borrowdale, at the head of it, have entered into my mind, with a suddenness as if I had been snatched out of Cheapside and placed for the first time, in the spot where I stood--and that is a delightful feeling--these fits and trances of novelty received from a long known object. The river Greta flows behind our house, roaring like an untamed son of the hills, then winds round and glides away in the front, so that we live in a peninsula. But besides this etherial eye-feeding we have very substantial conveniences. We are close to the town, where we have respectable and neighbourly acquaintance, and a most sensible and truly excellent medical man. Our garden is part of a large nursery garden, which is the same to us and as private as if the whole had been our own, and thus too we have delightful walks without passing our garden gates. My landlord who lives in the sister house, for the two houses are built so as to look like one great one, is a modest and kind man, of a singular character. By the severest economy he raised himself from a carrier into the possession of a comfortable independence. He was always very fond of reading, and has collected nearly 500 volumes, of our most esteemed modern writers, such as Gibbon, Hume, Johnson, etc. etc. His habits of economy and simplicity, remain with him, and yet so very disinterested a man I scarcely ever knew. Lately, when I wished to settle with him about the rent of our house, he appeared much affected, told me that my living near him, and the having so much of Hartley's company were great comforts to him and his housekeeper, that he had no children to provide for, and did not mean to marry; and in short, that he did not want any rent at all from me. This of course I laughed him out of; but he absolutely refused to receive any rent for the first half-year, under the pretext that the house was not completely furnished. Hartley quite lives at the house, and it is as you may suppose, no small joy to my wife to have a good affectionate motherly woman divided from her only by a wall. Eighteen miles from our house lives Sir Guilfred Lawson, who has a princely library, chiefly of natural history--a kind and generous, but weak and ostentatious sort of man, who has been abundantly civil to me. Among other raree shows, he keeps a wild beast or two, with some eagles, etc. The master of the beasts at the Exeter 'Change, sent him down a large bear,--with it a long letter of directions, concerning the food, etc. of the animal, and many solicitations respecting other agreeable quadrupeds which he was desirous to send to the baronet, at a moderate price, and concluding in this manner: "and remain your honour's most devoted humble servant, J.P. Permit me, sir Guilfred, to send you a buffalo and a rhinoceros." As neat a postscript as I ever heard--the tradesmanlike coolness with which these pretty little animals occurred to him just at the finishing of his letter! You will in three weeks see the letters on the 'Rise and Condition of the German Boors'. I found it convenient to make up a volume out of my journey, etc. in North Germany--and the letters (your name of course erased) are in the printer's hands. I was so weary of transcribing and composing, that when I found those more carefully written than the rest, I even sent them off as they were. * * * * * My littlest one is a very stout boy indeed. He is christened by the name of "Derwent,"--a sort of sneaking affection you see for the poetical and novellish, which I disguised to myself under the show, that my brothers had so many children Johns, Jameses, Georges, etc. etc., that a handsome Christian-like name was not to be had except by encroaching on the names of my little nephews. If you are at Gunville at Christmas, I hold out hopes to myself that I shall be able to pass a week with you there. I mentioned to you at Upcott a kind of comedy that I had committed to writing in part. This is in the wind. Wordsworth's second vol. of the 'Lyrical Ballads' will, I hope, and almost believe, afford you as unmingled pleasure as is in the nature of a collection of very various poems to afford to one individual mind. Sheridan has sent to him too--requests him to write a tragedy for Drury Lane. But W. will not be diverted by anything from the prosecution of his great work. Southey's 'Thalaba', in twelve books, is going to the press. Remember me with great affection to your brother, and present my kindest respects to Mrs. Wedgwood. Your late governess wanted one thing, which where there is health is I think indispensable in the moral character of a young person--a light and cheerful heart. She interested me a good deal. She appears to me to have been injured by going out of the common way without any of that imagination, which if it be a Jack o' Lanthorn to lead us out of our way, is however, at the same time a torch to light us whither we are going. A whole essay might be written on the danger of thinking without images. God bless you, my dear sir, and him who is with grateful and affectionate esteem, Yours ever, S. T. COLERIDGE Josiah Wedgwood. Coleridge was still in money difficulties, and the following letter is chiefly about his indebtedness to the Wedgwoods. LETTER 100. TO JOSIAH WEDGWOOD November 12, 1800. My dear sir, I received your kind letter, with the £20. My eyes are in such a state of inflammation that I might as well write blindfold, they are so blood-red. I have had leeches twice, and have now a blister behind my right ear. How I caught the cold, in the first instance, I can scarcely guess; but I improved it to its present glorious state, by taking long walks all the mornings, spite of the wind, and writing late at night, while my eyes were weak. I have made some rather curious observations on the rising up of spectra in the eye, in its inflamed state, and their influence on ideas, etc., but I cannot see to make myself intelligible to you. Present my kindest remembrance to Mrs. W. and your brother. Pray did you ever pay any particular attention to the first time of your little ones smiling and laughing? Both I and Mrs. C. have carefully watched our little one, and noticed down all the circumstances, under which he smiled, and under which he laughed, for the first six times, nor have we remitted our attention; but I have not been able to derive the least confirmation of Hartley's or Darwin's Theory. You say most truly, my dear sir, that a pursuit is necessary. Pursuit, for even praiseworthy employment, merely for good, or general good, is not sufficient for happiness, nor fit for man. I have not at present made out how I stand in pecuniary ways, but I believe that I have anticipated on the next year to the amount of Thirty or Forty pounds, probably more. God bless you, my dear sir, and your sincerely Affectionate friend, S. T. COLERIDGE. Josiah Wedgwood, Esq. The publication of the "Wallenstein" had brought on Coleridge the odium of being an advocate of the German Theatre, at this time identified with the melo-dramatic sentimentalism of Kotzbue and his school. English opinion did not then discriminate between a Schiller and a Kotzebue. The following curious disclaimer appeared in the "Monthly Review" on 18th November 1800. LETTER 101. TO THE EDITOR OF THE "MONTHLY REVIEW". Greta Hall, Keswick, Nov. 18, 1800. In the review of my translation of Schiller's "Wallenstein" ("Rev". for October), I am numbered among the partisans of the German theatre. As I am confident there is no passage in my preface or notes from which such an opinion can be legitimately formed, and as the truth would not have been exceeded if the direct contrary had been affirmed, I claim it of your justice that in your Answers to Correspondents you would remove this misrepresentation. The mere circumstance of translating a manuscript play is not even evidence that I admired that one play, much less that I am a general admirer of the plays in that language. I remain, etc., S. T. COLERIDGE. During the latter half of 1800 Dorothy Wordsworth's "Journal" contains many entries showing that Coleridge and the Wordsworths were in frequent communication with each other. Coleridge thought nothing of traversing the dozen miles between Keswick and Dove Cottage by the highway, or over the hill passes. Wordsworth and Dorothy, too, went often to Keswick, and occasionally stayed with the Coleridges ("Grasmere Journals", i, 43-60). Amid these literary and poetic meetings between the poets and their families, other correspondents were not forgotten by Coleridge. The following two letters to Davy indicate that the poets were taking some interest in science. LETTER 102. TO DAVY Greta Hall, Tuesday night, December 2, 1800. My dear Davy, By an accident I did not receive your letter till this evening. I would that you had added to the account of your indisposition the probable causes of it. It has left me anxious whether or no you have not exposed yourself to unwholesome influences in your chemical pursuits. There are "few" beings both of hope and performance, but few who combine the "are" and the "will be." For God's sake, therefore, my dear fellow, do not rip open the bird that lays the golden eggs. I have not received your book. I read yesterday a sort of medical review about it. I suppose Longman will send it to me when he sends down the "Lyrical Ballads" to Wordsworth. I am solicitous to read the latter part. Did there appear to you any remote analogy between the case I translated from the German Magazine and the effects produced by your gas? Did Carlisle[1] ever communicate to you, or has he in any way published his facts concerning "pain", which he mentioned when we were with him? It is a subject which "exceedingly interests" me. I want to read something by somebody expressly on "pain", if only to give an "arrangement" to my own thoughts, though if it were well treated, I have little doubt it would revolutionize them. For the last month I have been trembling on through sands and swamps of evil and bodily grievance. My eyes have been inflamed to a degree that rendered reading and writing scarcely possible; and strange as it seems, the act of metre composition, as I lay in bed, perceptibly affected them, and my voluntary ideas were every minute passing, more or less transformed into vivid spectra. I had leeches repeatedly applied to my temples, and a blister behind my ear--and my eyes are now my own, but in the place where the blister was, six small but excruciating boils have appeared, and harass me almost beyond endurance. In the meantime my darling Hartley has been taken with a stomach illness, which has ended in the yellow jaundice; and this greatly alarms me. So much for the doleful! Amid all these changes, and humiliations, and fears, the sense of the Eternal abides in me, and preserves unsubdued my cheerful faith, that all I endure is full of blessings! At times, indeed, I would fain be somewhat of a more tangible utility than I am; but so I suppose it is with all of us--one while cheerful, stirring, feeling in resistance nothing but a joy and a stimulus; another while drowsy, self-distrusting, prone to rest, loathing our own self-promises, withering our own hopes--our hopes, the vitality and cohesion of our being! I purpose to have 'Christabel' published by itself--this I publish with confidence--but my travels in Germany come from me now with mortal pangs. Nothing but the most pressing necessity could have induced me--and even now I hesitate and tremble. Be so good as to have all that is printed of 'Christabel' sent to me per post. Wordsworth has nearly finished the concluding poem. It is of a mild, unimposing character, but full of beauties to those short-necked men who have their hearts sufficiently near their heads--the relative distance of which (according to citizen Tourder, the French translator of Spallanzani) determines the sagacity or stupidity of all bipeds and quadrupeds. There is a deep blue cloud over the heavens; the lake, and the vale, and the mountains, are all in darkness; only the 'summits' of all the mountains in long ridges, covered with snow, are bright to a dazzling excess. A glorious scene! Hartley was in my arms the other evening, looking at the sky; he saw the moon glide into a large cloud. Shortly after, at another part of the cloud, several stars sailed in. Says he, "Pretty creatures! they are going in to see after their mother moon." Remember me kindly to King. Write as often as you can; but above all things, my loved and honoured dear fellow, do not give up the idea of letting me and Skiddaw see you. God love you! S. T. COLERIDGE. Tobin writes me that Thompson [2] has made some lucrative discovery. Do you know aught about it? Have you seen T. Wedgwood since his return? [3] [Footnote 1: Afterwards Sir Antony, a distinguished surgeon.] [Footnote 2: The late Mr. James Thompson, of Clitheroe.] [Footnote 3: Letter CXIII is our 102; CXIV follows 102] LETTER 103. TO DAVY February 3, 1801. My dear Davy-- I can scarcely reconcile it to my conscience to make you pay postage for another letter. O, what a fine unveiling of modern politics it would be if there were published a minute detail of all the sums received by Government from the Post establishment, and of all the outlets in which the sums so received flowed out again; and, on the other hand, all the domestic affections that had been stifled, all the intellectual progress that would have been, but is not, on account of the heavy tax, etc., etc. The letters of a nation ought to be paid for as an article of national expense. Well! but I did not take up this paper to flourish away in splenetic politics. A gentleman resident here, his name Calvert, an idle, good-hearted, and ingenious man, has a great desire to commence fellow-student with me and Wordsworth in chemistry. He is an intimate friend of Wordsworth's, and he has proposed to W. to take a house which he (Calvert) has nearly built, called Windy Brow, in a delicious situation, scarce half a mile from Greta Hall, the residence of S. T. Coleridge, Esq., and so for him (Calvert) to live with them, 'i.e.', Wordsworth and his sister. In this case he means to build a little laboratory, etc. Wordsworth has not quite decided, but is strongly inclined to adopt the scheme, because he and his sister have before lived with Calvert on the same footing, and are much attached to him: because my health is so precarious and so much injured by wet, and his health, too, is like little potatoes, no great things, and therefore Grasmere ("thirteen" miles from Keswick) is too great a distance for us to enjoy each other's society, without inconvenience, as much as it would be profitable for us both: and likewise because he feels it more necessary for him to have some intellectual pursuit less closely connected with deep passion than poetry, and is of course desirous, too, not to be so wholly ignorant of knowledge so exceedingly important. However, whether Wordsworth come or no, Calvert and I have determined to begin and go on. Calvert is a man of sense and some originality, and is besides what is well called a handy man. He is a good practical mechanic, etc., and is desirous to lay out any sum of money that is necessary. You know how long, how ardently I have wished to initiate myself in Chemical science, both for its own sake, and in no small degree likewise, my beloved friend, that I may be able to sympathize with all that you do and think. Sympathize blindly with it all I do even "now", God knows! from the very middle of my heart's heart, but I would fain sympathize with you in the light of knowledge. This opportunity is exceedingly precious to me, as on my own account I could not afford the least additional expense, having been already, by long and successive illnesses, thrown behindhand, so much, that for the next four or five months, I fear, let me work as hard as I can, I shall not be able to do what my heart within me "burns" to do, that is, to "concenter" my free mind to the affinities of the feelings with words and ideas under the title of "Concerning Poetry, and the nature of the Pleasures derived from it". I have faith that I do understand the subject, and I am sure that if I write what I ought to do on it, the work would supersede all the books of metaphysics, and all the books of morals too. To whom shall a young man utter "his pride", if not to a young man whom he loves? I beg you, therefore, my dear Davy, to write to me a long letter when you are at leisure, informing me:--Firstly, What books it will be well for me and Calvert to purchase. Secondly, Directions for a convenient little laboratory. Thirdly, To what amount apparatus would run in expense, and whether or no you would be so good as to superintend its making at Bristol. Fourthly, Give me your advice how to "begin". And, fifthly, and lastly, and mostly, do send a "drop" of hope to my parched tongue, that you will, if you can, come and visit me in the spring. Indeed, indeed, you ought to see this country, this beautiful country, and then the joy you would send into me! The shape of this paper will convince you with what eagerness I began this letter; I really did not see that it was not a sheet. I have been 'thinking' vigorously during my illness, so that I cannot say that my long, long wakeful nights have been all lost to me. The subject of my meditations has been the relations of thoughts to things--in the language of Hume, of ideas to impressions. I may be truly described in the words of Descartes: I have been "res cogitans, id est, dubitans, affirmans, negans, pauca intelligens, multa ignorans, volens, nolens, imaginans etiam, et sentiens." I please myself with believing that you will receive no small pleasure from the result of these broodings, although I expect in you (in some points) a determined opponent, but I say of my mind in this respect: "Manet imperterritus ille hostem magnanimum opperiens, et mole sua stat." Every poor fellow has his proud hour sometimes, and this I suppose is mine. I am better in every respect than I was, but am still 'very feeble'. The weather has been woefully against me for the last fortnight, having rained here almost incessantly. I take quantities of bark, but the effect is (to express myself with the dignity of science) "x" = 0000000, and I shall not gather strength, or that little suffusion of bloom which belongs to my healthy state, till I can walk out. God bless you, my dear Davy! and Your ever affectionate friend, S. T. COLERIDGE. P.S.--An electrical machine, and a number of little nicknacks connected with it, Mr. Calvert has.--"Write".[1] [Footnote l: Letter CXV is our 103.] Josiah Wade, the early Bristol friend of Coleridge, who probably was one of the three friends who assisted him with funds to start 'The Watchman', was now intending to travel in Germany. He applied to Coleridge for advice regarding the mode of travelling, and Coleridge tendered his counsel in the following characteristic epistle. LETTER 104. To JOSIAH WADE March 6, 1801. My very dear friend, I have even now received your letter. My habits of thinking and feeling, have not hitherto inclined me to personify commerce in any such shape, so as to tempt me to turn pagan, and offer vows to the goddess of our isle. But when I read that sentence in your letter, "The time will come I trust, when I shall be able to pitch my tent in your neighbourhood," I was most potently commanded [1] to a breach of the second commandment, and on my knees, to entreat the said goddess to touch your bank notes and guineas with her magical multiplying wand. I could offer such a prayer for you, with a better conscience than for most men, because I know that you have never lost that healthy common sense, which regards money only as the means of independence, and that you would sooner than most men cry out, enough! enough! To see one's children secured against want, is doubtless a delightful thing; but to wish to see them begin the world as rich men, is unwise to ourselves, for it permits no close of our labours, and is pernicious to them; for it leaves no motive to their exertions, none of those sympathies with the industrious and the poor, which form at once the true relish and proper antidote of wealth. * * * Is not March rather a perilous month for the voyage from Yarmouth to Hamburg? Danger there is very little, in the packets, but I know what inconvenience rough weather brings with it; not from my own feelings, for I am never sea-sick, but always in exceeding high spirits on board ship, but from what I see in others. But you are an old sailor. At Hamburg I have not a shadow of acquaintance. My letters of introduction produced for me, with one exception, viz., Klopstock, the brother of the poet, no real service, but merely distant and ostentatious civility. And Klopstock will by this time have forgotten my name, which indeed he never properly knew, for I could speak only English and Latin, and he only French and German. At Ratzeburg, 35 English miles N.E. from Hamburg, on the road to Lubec, I resided four months; and I should hope, was not unbeloved by more than one family, but this is out of your route. At Gottingen I stayed near five months, but here I knew only students, who will have left the place by this time, and the high learned professors, only one of whom could speak English; and they are so wholly engaged in their academical occupations, that they would be of no service to you. Other acquaintance in Germany I have none, and connexion I never had any. For though I was much entreated by some of the Literati to correspond with them, yet my natural laziness, with the little value I attach to literary men, as literary men, and with my aversion from those letters which are to be made up of studied sense, and unfelt compliments, combined to prevent me from availing myself of the offer. Herein, and in similar instances, with English authors of repute, I have ill consulted the growth of my reputation and fame. But I have cheerful and confident hopes of myself. If I can hereafter do good to my fellow-creatures as a poet, and as a metaphysician, they will know it; and any other fame than this, I consider as a serious evil, that would only take me from out the number and sympathy of ordinary men, to make a coxcomb of me. As to the inns or hotels at Hamburg, I should recommend you to some German inn. Wordsworth and I were at the "Der Wilde Man," and dirty as it was, I could not find any inn in Germany very much cleaner, except at Lubec. But if you go to an English inn, for heaven's sake, avoid the "Shakspeare," at Altona, and the "King of England," at Hamburg. They are houses of plunder rather than entertainment. "The Duke of York" hotel, kept by Seaman, has a better reputation, and thither I would advise you to repair; and I advise you to pay your bill every morning at breakfast time: it is the only way to escape imposition. What the Hamburg merchants may be I know not, but the tradesmen are knaves. Scoundrels, with yellow-white phizzes, that bring disgrace on the complexion of a bad tallow candle. Now as to carriage, I know scarcely what to advise; only make up your mind to the very worst vehicles, with the very worst horses, drawn by the very worst postillions, over the very worst roads, and halting two hours at each time they change horses, at the very worst inns; and you have a fair, unexaggerated picture of travelling in North Germany. The cheapest way is the best; go by the common post wagons, or stage coaches. What are called extraordinaries, or post-chaises, are little wicker carts, uncovered, with moveable benches or forms in them, execrable in every respect. And if you buy a vehicle at Hamburg, you can get none decent under thirty or forty guineas, and very probably it will break to pieces on the infernal roads. The canal boats are delightful, but the porters everywhere in the United Provinces, are an impudent, abominable, and dishonest race. You must carry as little luggage as you well can with you, in the canal boats, and when you land, get recommended to an inn beforehand, and bargain with the porters first of all, and never lose sight of them, or you may never see your portmanteau or baggage again. My Sarah desires her love to you and yours. God bless your dear little ones! Make haste and get rich, dear friend! and bring up the little creatures to be playfellows and school-fellows with my little ones! Again and again, sea serve you, wind speed you, all things turn out good to you! God bless you, S. T. COLERIDGE. [2] John Stoddart, a friend of Coleridge, visited him while at Keswick in the month of October, 1800, and saw the Wordsworths at Grasmere (Dorothy Wordsworth's 'Journal', i, 55)--It was then that Stoddart obtained a copy of 'Christabel', and read it shortly afterwards [3] to Sir Walter Scott, then busy with his 'Border Minstrelsy'. The beauty of 'Christabel' touched Sir Walter's romantic imagination, and echoes of the poem are discernible in the 'Lay of the Last Minstrel' and the 'Bridal of Tryermain'. But Coleridge, in spite of many attempts, could not complete the piece, and had to give up the endeavour. In a letter to Godwin of 25th March 1801, Coleridge thus laments what was practically the end of his career as a poet: [Footnote 1: "Tempted," E.R., ii, 18.] [Footnote 2: Letters CXVI-CXVII follow 104.] [Footnote 3: In 1802.] LETTER 105. To GODWIN. Wednesday, March 25, 1801. Dear Godwin, I fear your tragedy [1] will find me in a very unfit state of mind to sit in judgment on it. I have been during the last three months undergoing a process of intellectual exsiccation. During my long illness I had compelled into hours of delight many a sleepless painful hour of darkness by chasing down metaphysical game, and since then I have continued the hunt, till I found myself, unaware, at the root of pure mathematics, and up that tall smooth tree, whose few poor branches are all at the very summit, am I climbing by pure adhesive strength of arms and thighs, still slipping down, still renewing my ascent. You would not know me! All sounds of similitude keep at such a distance from each other in my mind, that I have forgotten how to make a rhyme. I look at the mountains (that visible God Almighty that looks in at all my windows)--I look at the mountains only for the curves of their outlines; the stars, as I behold them, form themselves into triangles; and my hands are scarred with scratches from a cat, whose back I was rubbing in the dark in order to see whether the sparks from it were refrangible by a prism. The Poet is dead in me; my imagination (or rather the Somewhat that had been imaginative) lies like a cold snuff on the circular rim of a brass candlestick, without even a stink of tallow to remind you that it was once clothed and mitred with flame. That is past by. I was once a volume of gold leaf, rising and riding on every breath of Fancy, but I have beaten myself back into weight and density, and now I sink in quicksilver and remain squat and square on the earth amid the hurricane that makes oaks and straws join in one dance, fifty yards high in the element. However I will do what I can. Taste and feeling have I none, but what I have, give I unto thee. But I repeat that I am unfit to decide on any but works of severe logic. I write now to beg that, if you have not sent your tragedy, you may remember to send 'Antonio' with it, which I have not yet seen, and likewise my Campbell's 'Pleasures of Hope', which Wordsworth wishes to see. Have you seen the second volume of the 'Lyrical Ballads', and the preface prefixed to the first? I should judge of a man's heart and intellect precisely according to the degree and intensity of the admiration with which he read these poems. Perhaps, instead of heart I should have said Taste; but, when I think of 'The Brothers', of 'Ruth', and of 'Michael', I recur to the expression and am enforced to say heart. If I die, and the booksellers will give you anything for ray life, be sure to say, "Wordsworth descended on him like the [Greek: Gnothi seauton] from heaven; by showing to him what true poetry was, he made him know that he himself was no Poet." In your next letter you will, perhaps, give me some hints respecting your prose plans. God bless you, and S. T. COLERIDGE. Greta Hall, Keswick. P.S.--What is a fair price--what might an author of reputation fairly ask from a bookseller, for one edition, of a thousand copies, of a five-shilling book? [I congratulate you on the settlement of Davy in London. I hope that his enchanting manners will not draw too many idlers about him, to harass and vex his mornings.] [Footnote: 1 This tragedy was entitled Abbas.] PART II THE PERMANENT I will write for "The Permanent", or not at all." (Letter to Sir G. Beaumont, "Coleorton Memorials", ii, 162.) "Woe is me! that at 46 I am under the necessity of appearing as a lecturer, and obliged to regard every hour given to "The Permanent", whether as poet or philosopher, an hour stolen from others as well as from my own maintenance." (Letter to Mudford, Brandl's "Life of Coleridge", p. 359.) * * * * * The conventional view of Coleridge that opium killed the poet in him does not commend itself to the scientific consciousness. Opium has the tendency to stimulate rather than to deaden the poetic imagination, as the history of De Quincey can testify; and one of Coleridge's most imaginative pieces, "Kubla Khan", is said to have been occasioned by an overdose of the drug. The poet in Coleridge was extinguished by a very different thing than opium. Coleridge's poetic faculty was suspended by the loss of hope and also by the growth of his intellect, by the development of his reasoning and philosophic powers, and by the multiplication of the interests which appealed to him, and the many problems which presented themselves for his solution. He was, constitutionally, the most comprehensive mind of a new age, and just because he was its greatest thinker he was perplexed and attracted by the majority of the problems which arose around him, and which he himself helped to raise. Poetry, the poetry of the Romantic Movement, in which he far excelled all his contemporaries, was no longer capable of grappling with the philosophic, theological, political and social questions now on the horizon or which Coleridge felt would soon, by the development of international affinities, be on the horizon of the English mind. Hence Coleridge's thirst for the new lore of the German philosophy, which seemed to him to supply a want in the Intellectualism of his native country. In spite of this, Coleridge knew that in being deserted by the poetic spirit, he was leaving a high artistic realm for one of lesser glory; and hence his letter to Godwin of 25th March 1801, and, later on, his dirge over himself in "Dejection". Coleridge, in choosing to follow Wordsworth to the Lake District in preference to remaining at Nether Stowey with Poole, had experienced some contrition, for Poole, after all, was a more profound appreciator of his many-sidedness and the Cervantean vein of his character than Wordsworth, who appreciated Coleridge only from that side of him which resembled himself. Tom Poole regretted, like others, that Coleridge had no permanent calling, or could not fix upon an undertaking worthy of his powers. Poole looked upon Coleridge's devotion to journalism while he was engaged upon the "Morning Post" as a "turning aside of his powers from higher ends" ("T. Poole and his Friends", ii, 2), and wished him to give himself up to something more "permanently" useful to society ("T. Poole and his Friends", ii, 3). The correspondence of Coleridge and Poole from 1800 onwards, often turns upon the subject ("T. Poole and his Friends", ii, 66, 68, 122, 177, 187, 205, 226, 247); and Coleridge admitted a "distracting manifoldness" in his objects and attainments ("T. Poole and his Friends", ii, 122). "You," said Coleridge, "are nobly employed--most worthy of you. "You" are made to endear yourself to mankind as an immediate benefactor: I must throw my bread on the waters" ("T. Poole and his Friends", ii, 122). While engaged in these argumentations with his best friend, Coleridge was striving to think out in his deep philosophic and musing mind many problems of the time; and there arose in his imagination the Idea of the Permanent. He was henceforth no longer the Poet of Romanticism, whose significance he had exhausted, but the philosopher of the Permanent, which presented itself as a splendid possibility in all departments of human knowledge and activity. In his prose works and letters we find a continual reference to what Coleridge now calls "The Permanent"--the permanent principles of Morals, Philosophy, and Religion, and of the permanent principles of criticism as applied to Poetry and the Fine Arts. Everything is now adjusted by Coleridge to this idea. Art, morals, religion, and politics are tried by its standard, to find if they are founded in the permanent principles of human nature. It is in the light of this Idea, the ideal of Coleridge's later life, that we must judge Coleridge and weigh him. To continue to see in opium the sole or even the principal cause of his failure, is to misjudge him altogether. To compare him with others of different powers who accomplished more in one direction in the matter of literary output, with Sir Walter Scott or Byron, for instance, is misleading. It is the man of profound genius, who in his own time, is feeling on all sides into the Future, who is least likely to give forth "finished productions," as they are called, in which the subjects of which they treat are often exhausted, and please the ear of the Present. Coleridge is such a man of genius; nearly all his works are fragmentary, unfinished, suggestive rather than "complete," just because they verge upon that Transcendentalism which he was the first to make audible to English ears in his day. Ill health, and opium in conjunction with ill health, contributed no doubt to enfeeble his utterance; but to assert that opium was the cause or the main cause of Coleridge's inability to do what he wanted himself to do, or what his friends and contemporaries expected him to do, is a gross perversion of the facts of the case. Coleridge's inability arose from his multiplicity of motive, his visionary faculty of seeing in the light of a new principle a host of problems rise up on all sides, all claiming recognition and solution. "That is the disease of my mind--it is comprehensive in its conceptions, and wastes itself in the contemplations of the many things which it might do." (Letter to Poole, 4th January 1799, "Letters", p. 270). A greater than Coleridge had felt this tendency before him, and created as its embodiment "Hamlet"; and Coleridge has been called the Hamlet of literature. CHAPTER X ILL HEALTH; SOUTHEY COMES TO KESWICK On 13th April 1801 Coleridge wrote to Southey the following letter, and Southey replied in cordial terms, from which it will be gathered a reconciliation had been made since the Lloyd and Lamb quarrel. [1] [Footnote 1: See "Letters", vol. i, 304.] LETTER 106. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY, ESQ. Greta Hall, Keswick; April 13. 1801. My dear Southey, I received your kind letter on the evening before last, and I trust that this will arrive at Bristol just in time to rejoice with them that rejoice. Alas! you will have found the dear old place sadly "minus"ed by the removal of Davy. It is one of the evils of long silence, that when one recommences the correspondence, one has so much to say that one can say nothing. I have enough, with what I have seen, and with what I have done, and with what I have suffered, and with what I have heard, exclusive of all that I hope and all that I intend--I have enough to pass away a great deal of time with, were you on a desert isle, and I your "Friday". But at present I purpose to speak only of myself relatively to Keswick and to you. Our house stands on a low hill, the whole front of which is one field and an enormous garden, nine-tenths of which is a nursery garden. Behind the house is an orchard, and a small wood on a steep slope, at the foot of which flows the river Greta, which winds round and catches the evening lights in the front of the house. In front we have a giant's camp--an encamped army of tent-like mountains, which by an inverted arch gives a view of another vale. On our right the lovely vale and the wedge-shaped lake of Bassenthwaite; and on our left Derwentwater and Lodore full in view, and the fantastic mountains of Borrodale. Behind us the massy Skiddaw, smooth, green, high, with two chasms and a tentlike ridge in the larger. A fairer scene you have not seen in all your wanderings. Without going from our own grounds we have all that can please a human being. As to books, my landlord, who dwells next door,[1] has a very respectable library, which he has put with mine; histories, encyclopaedias, and all the modern gentry. But then I can have, when I choose, free access to the princely library of Sir Guilfred Lawson, which contains the noblest collection of travels and natural history of, perhaps, any private library in England; besides this, there is the Cathedral library of Carlisle, from whence I can have any books sent to me that I wish; in short, I may truly say that I command all the libraries in the county. ... Our neighbour is a truly good and affectionate man, a father to my children, and a friend to me. He was offered fifty guineas for the house in which we are to live, but he preferred me for a tenant at twenty-five; and yet the whole of his income does not exceed, I believe, £200 a year. A more truly disinterested man I never met with; severely frugal, yet almost carelessly generous; and yet he got all his money as a common carrier[2], by hard labour, and by pennies. He is one instance among many in this country of the salutary effect of the love of knowledge--he was from a boy a lover of learning. The house is full twice as large as we want; it hath more rooms in it than Allfoxden; you might have a bed-room, parlour, study, etc., etc., and there would always be rooms to spare for your or my visitors. In short, for situation and convenience,--and when I mention the name of Wordsworth, for society of men of intellect,--I know no place in which you and Edith would find yourselves so well suited. S. T. C. [Footnote 1: Greta Hall was at this time divided into two houses, which were afterwards thrown together.] [Footnote 2: This person, whose name was Jackson, was the "master" in Wordsworth's poem of 'The Waggoner', the circumstances of which are accurately correct.] The remainder of this letter, as well as another of later date, was filled with a most gloomy account of his own health, to which Southey refers in the commencement of his reply. SOUTHEY TO COLERIDGE Bristol, July 11, 1801. Yesterday I arrived, and found your letters; they did depress me, but I have since reasoned or dreamt myself into more cheerful anticipations. I have persuaded myself that your complaint is gouty; that good living is necessary, and a good climate. I also move to the south; at least so it appears: and if my present prospects ripen, we may yet live under one roof. ... You may have seen a translation of "Persius", by Drummond, an M.P. This man is going ambassador, first to Palermo and then to Constantinople: if a married man can go as his secretary, it is probable that I shall accompany him. I daily expect to know. It is a scheme of Wynn's to settle me in the south, and I am returned to look about me. My salary will be small--a very trifle; but after a few years I look on to something better, and have fixed my mind on a consulship. Now, if we go, you must join us as soon as we are housed, and it will be marvellous if we regret England. I shall have so little to do, that my time may be considered as wholly my own: our joint amusements will easily supply us with all expenses. So no more of the Azores; for we will see the Great Turk, and visit Greece, and walk up the Pyramids, and ride camels in Arabia. I have dreamt of nothing else these five weeks. As yet every thing is so uncertain, for I have received no letter since we landed, that nothing can be said of our intermediate movements. If we are not embarked too soon, we will set off as early as possible for Cumberland, unless you should think, as we do, that Mahomet had better come to the mountain; that change of all externals may benefit you; and that bad as Bristol weather is, it is yet infinitely preferable to northern cold and damp. Meet we must, and will. You know your old Poems are a third time in the press; why not set forth a second volume? * * * Your "Christabel", your "Three Graces",[1] which I remember as the very consummation of poetry. I must spur you to something, to the assertion of your supremacy; if you have not enough to muster, I will aid you in any way--manufacture skeletons that you may clothe with flesh, blood, and beauty; write my best, or what shall be bad enough to be popular;--we will even make plays "a-la-mode" Robespierre. * * * Drop all task-work, it is ever unprofitable; the same time, and one twentieth part of the labour, would produce treble emolument. For "Thalaba" I received £115; it was just twelve months' "intermitting" work, and the after-editions are my own. ... I feel here as a stranger; somewhat of Leonard's feeling. God bless Wordsworth for that poem![2] What tie have I to England? My London friends? There, indeed, I have friends. But if you and yours were with me, eating dates in a garden at Constantinople, you might assert that we were in the best of all possible places; and I should answer, Amen: and if our wives rebelled, we would send for the chief of the black eunuchs, and sell them to the Seraglio. Then should Moses [3] learn Arabic, and we would know whether there was anything in the language or not. We would drink Cyprus wine and Mocha coffee, and smoke more tranquilly than ever we did in the Ship in Small Street. Time and absence make strange work with our affections; but mine are ever returning to rest upon you. I have other and dear friends, but none with whom the whole of my being is intimate--with whom every thought and feeling can amalgamate. Oh! I have yet such dreams! Is it quite clear that you and I were not meant for some better star, and dropped, by mistake, into this world of pounds, shillings, and pence? ... God bless you! ROBERT SOUTHEY. [Footnote 1: "The Three Graves".] [Footnote 2: "The Brothers" is the title of this poem.] [Footnote 3: Hartley Coleridge.] SOUTHEY TO COLERIDGE July 25. In about ten days we shall be ready to set forward for Keswick; where, if it were not for the rains, and the fogs, and the frosts, I should, probably, be content to winter; but the climate deters me. It is uncertain when I may be sent abroad, or where, except that the south of Europe is my choice. The appointment hardly doubtful, and the probable destination Palermo or Naples. We will talk of the future, and dream of it, on the lake side. * * * I may calculate upon the next six months at my own disposal; so we will climb Skiddaw this year, and scale Etna the next; and Sicilian air will keep us alive till Davy has found out the immortalising elixir, or till we are very well satisfied to do without it, and be immortalised after the manner of our fathers. My pocket-book contains more plans than will ever be filled up; but whatever becomes of those plans, this, at least, is feasible. * * * Poor H----, he has literally killed himself by the law: which, I believe, kills more than any disease that takes its place in the bills of mortality. Blackstone is a needful book, and my Coke is a borrowed one; but I have one law book whereof to make an auto-da-fe; and burnt he shall be: but whether to perform that ceremony, with fitting libations, at home, or fling him down the crater of Etna directly to the Devil, is worth considering at leisure. I must work at Keswick; the more willingly, because with the hope, hereafter, the necessity will cease. My Portuguese materials must lie dead, and this embarrasses me. It is impossible to publish any thing about that country now, because I must one day return there,--to their libraries and archives; otherwise I have excellent stuff for a little volume; and could soon set forth a first vol. of my History, either civil or literary. In these labours I have incurred a heavy and serious expense. I shall write to Hamilton, and review again, if he chooses to employ me. * * * It was Cottle who told me that your Poems were reprint"ing" in a "third" edition: this cannot allude to the "Lyrical Ballads", because of the number and the participle present. * * * I am bitterly angry to see one new poem [1] smuggled into the world in the "Lyrical Ballads", where the 750 purchasers of the first can never get at it. At Falmouth I bought Thomas Dermody's "Poems", for old acquaintance sake; alas! the boy wrote better than the man! * * * Pye's "Alfred" (to distinguish him from Alfred the pious [2]) I have not yet inspected; nor the wilful murder of Bonaparte, by Anna Matilda; nor the high treason committed by Sir James Bland Burgess, Baronet, against our lion-hearted Richard. Davy is fallen stark mad with a play, called the "Conspiracy of Gowrie", which is by Rough; an imitation of "Gebir", with some poetry; but miserably and hopelessly deficient in all else: every character reasoning, and metaphorising, and metaphysicking the reader most nauseously. By the by, there is a great analogy between hock, laver, pork pie, and the "Lyrical Ballads",--all have a "flavour", not beloved by those who require a taste, and utterly unpleasant to dram-drinkers, whose diseased palates can only feel pepper and brandy. I know not whether Wordsworth will forgive the stimulant tale of "Thalaba",--'tis a turtle soup, highly seasoned, but with a flavour of its own predominant. His are sparagrass (it ought to be spelt so) and artichokes, good with plain butter, and wholesome. I look on "Madoc" with hopeful displeasure; probably it must be corrected, and published now; this coming into the world at seven months is a bad way; with a Doctor Slop of a printer's devil standing ready for the forced birth, and frightening one into an abortion. * * * Is there an emigrant at Keswick, who may make me talk and write French? And I must sit at my almost forgotten Italian, and read German with you; and we must read Tasso together. God bless you! Yours, R. S. [Footnote 1: Coleridge's poem of "Love".] [Footnote 2: This alludes to Mr. Cottle's "Alfred".] The next two letters to Davy indicate that Coleridge's health was now of the worst, and that he was thinking seriously of emigrating for some time. LETTER 107. TO DAVY Monday, May 4, 1801. My dear Davy, I heard from Tobin the day before yesterday--nay, it was Friday. From him I learn that you are giving lectures on galvanism. Would to God I were one of your auditors! My motive muscles tingled and contracted at the news, as if you had bared them, and were 'zincifying' their life-mocking fibres. When you have leisure and impulse--perfect leisure and a complete impulse--write to me, but only then. For though there does not exist a man on earth who yields me greater pleasure by writing to me, yet I have neither pain nor disquietude from your silence. I have a deep faith in the guardianship of Nature over you--of the Great Being whom you are manifesting. Heaven bless you, my dear Davy! I have been rendered uneasy by an account of the Lisbon packet's non-arrival, lest Southey should have been on board it. Have you heard from him lately? It would seem affectation to write to you and say nothing of my health; but in truth I am weary of giving useless pain. Yesterday I should have been incapable of writing you this scrawl, and to-morrow I may be as bad. "'Sinking, sinking, sinking!' I feel that I am 'sinking'." My medical attendant says that it is irregular gout, with nephritic symptoms. 'Gout', in a young man of twenty-nine!! Swollen knees, and knotty fingers, a loathing stomach, and a dizzy head. Trust me, friend, I am at times an object of moral disgust to my own mind! But that this long illness has impoverished me, I should immediately go to St. Miguels, one of the Azores--the baths and the delicious climate might restore me--and if it were possible, I would afterwards send over for my wife and children, and settle there for a few years; it is exceedingly cheap. On this supposition Wordsworth and his sister have with generous friendship offered to settle there with me--and happily our dear Southey would come too. But of this I pray you, my dear fellow, do not say a syllable to any human being, for the scheme, from the present state of my circumstances, is rather the thing of a "wish" than of a "hope". If you write to me, pray in a couple of sentences tell me whether Herschell's thermometric "spectrum" (in the "Philos. Trans.") will lead to any revolution in the chemical philosophy. As far as "words" go, I have become a formidable chemist--having got by heart a prodigious quantity of terms, etc., to which I attach "some" ideas, very scanty in number, I assure you, and right meagre in their individual persons. That which must discourage me in it is, that I find all "power" of vital attributes to depend on modes of "arrangement", and that chemistry throws not even a distant rushlight glimmer upon this subject. The "reasoning", likewise, is always unsatisfactory to me. I am perpetually saying, probably there are many agents hitherto undiscovered. This cannot be reasoning: we must have a deep conviction that all the "terms" have been exhausted. This is saying no more than that (with Dr. Beddoes's leave) chemistry can never possess the same kind of certainty with the mathematics--in truth, it is saying nothing. I grow, however, exceedingly interested in the subject. God love you, my dear friend! From Tobin's account, I fear that I must give up a very sweet vision--that of seeing you this summer. The summer after, my ghost perhaps may be a gas. Yours affectionately, S. T. COLERIDGE. [1] [Footnote 1: Letter CXVIII follows No. 107.] LETTER 108. TO DAVY Greta Hall, Keswick, May 20, 1801. My dear Davy, Though we of the north must forego you, yet I shall rejoice when I receive a letter from you from Cornwall. I must believe that you have made some important discoveries in galvanism, and connected the facts with other more interesting ones, or I should be puzzled to conceive how that subject could furnish matter for more than one lecture. If I recollect aright, you have identified it with electricity, and that indeed is a wide field. I shall dismiss my 'British Critic' and take in 'Nicholson's Journal', and then I shall know something about you. I am sometimes apprehensive that my passion for science is scarcely true and genuine--it is but 'Davyism'! that is, I fear that I am more delighted at 'your' having discovered facts than at the facts having been discovered. My health is better. I am indeed eager to believe that I am really beginning to recover, though I have had so many short recoveries followed by severe relapses, that I am at times almost afraid to hope. But cheerful thoughts come with genial sensations; and hope is itself no mean medicine. I am anxious respecting Robert Southey. Why is he not in England? Remember me kindly to Tobin. As soon as I have anything to communicate I will write to him. But, alas! sickness turns large districts of time into dreary uniformity of sandy desolation. Alas, for Egypt--and Menou! However, I trust the 'English' will keep it, if they take it, and something will be gained to the cause of human nature. Heaven bless you! S. T. COLERIDGE. The next letter to Godwin renews his complaints about health. LETTER 109. To GODWIN Greta Hall, Keswick. Dear Godwin, I have had, during the last three weeks, such numerous interruptions of my "uninterrupted rural retirement," such a succession of visitors, both indigenous and exotic, that verily I wanted both the time and composure necessary to answer your letter of the first of June--at present I am writing to you from my bed. For, in consequence of a very sudden change in the weather from intense heat to a raw and scathing chillness, my bodily health has suffered a relapse as severe as it was unexpected.... I have not yet received either "Antonio", or your pamphlet, in answer to Dr. Parr and the Scotch gentleman [1] (who is to be professor of morals to the young nabobs at Calcutta, with an establishment of £3,000 a year!). Stuart was so kind as to send me Fenwick's review of it in a paper called the "Albion", and Mr. Longman has informed me that, by your orders, the pamphlet itself has been left for me at his house. The extracts which I saw pleased me much, with the exception of the introduction, which is incorrectly and clumsily worded. But, indeed, I have often observed that, whatever you write, the first page is always the worst in the book. I wish that instead of six days you had employed six months, and instead of a half-crown pamphlet, had given us a good half-guinea octavo. But you may yet do this. It strikes me, that both in this work, and in the second edition of the "Political Justice", your retractations have been more injudicious than the assertions or dogmas retracted. But this is no fit subject for a mere letter. If I had time, which I have not, I would write two or three sheets for your sole inspection, entitled "History of the Errors and Blunders of the Literary Life of William Godwin". To the world it would appear a paradox to say that you are at all too persuadable, but you yourself know it to be the truth. I shall send back your manuscript on Friday, with my criticisms. You say in your last, "How I wish you were here!" When I see how little I have written of what I could have talked, I feel with you that a letter is but "a mockery" to a full and ardent mind. In truth I feel this so forcibly that, if I could be certain that I should remain in this country, I should press you to come down, and finish the whole in my house. But, if I can by any means raise the moneys, I shall go in the first vessel that leaves Liverpool for the Azores (St. Michael's, to wit), and these sail at the end of July. Unless I can escape one English winter and spring I have not any rational prospect of recovery. You "cannot help regarding uninterrupted rural retirement as a principal cause" of my ill health. My ill health commenced at Liverpool, in the shape of blood-shot eyes and swollen eyelids, while I was in the daily habit of visiting the Liverpool literati--these, on my settling at Keswick, were followed by large boils in my neck and shoulders; these, by a violent rheumatic fever; this, by a distressing and tedious hydrocele; and, since then, by irregular gout, which promises at this moment to ripen into a legitimate fit. What uninterrupted rural retirement can have had to do in the production of these outward and visible evils, I cannot guess; what share it has had in consoling me under them, I know with a tranquil mind and feel with a grateful heart. O that you had now before your eyes the delicious picture of lake, and river, and bridge, and cottage, and spacious field with its pathway, and woody hill with its spring verdure, and mountain with the snow yet lingering in fantastic patches upon it, even the same which I had from my sick bed, even without raising my head from the pillow! O God! all but dear and lovely things seemed to be known to my imagination only as words; even the forms which struck terror into me in my fever-dreams were still forms of beauty. Before my last seizure I bent down to pick something from the ground, and when I raised my head, I said to Miss Wordsworth, "I am sure, Rotha, that I am going to be ill;" for as I bent my head there came a distinct, vivid spectrum upon my eyes; it was one little picture--a rock, with birches and ferns on it, a cottage backed by it, and a small stream. Were I a painter I would give an outward existence to this, but it will always live in my memory. By-the-bye, our rural retirement has been honoured by the company of Mr. Sharp, and the poet Rogers; the latter, though not a man of very vigorous intellect, won a good deal both on myself and Wordsworth, for what he said evidently came from his own feelings, and was the result of his own observation. My love to your dear little one. I begin to feel my knee preparing to make ready for the reception of the Lady Arthritis. God bless you and S. T. COLERIDGE. Tuesday Evening, June 23, 1801. [2] [Footnote 1: Mackintosh] [Footnote 2: Letters CXIX-CXXII follow No. 109.] Coleridge, for want of funds, was unable for the present to carry out his project of going abroad, and the next letter to Davy tells us that he had resolved to go to London instead, and write for the daily papers again. LETTER 110. To DAVY Greta Hall, Keswick, Cumberland, October 31, 1801. My dear Davy, I do not know by what fatality it has happened, but so it is; that I have thought more often of you, and I may say, "yearned" after your society more for the last three months than I ever before did, and yet I have not written to you. But you know that I honour you, and that I love whom I honour. Love and esteem with me have no dividual being; and wherever this is not the case, I suspect there must be some lurking moral superstition which nature gets the better of; and that the real meaning of the phrase "I love him though I cannot esteem him," is--I esteem him, but not according to my system of esteem. But you, my dear fellow, 'all' men love and esteem--which is the only suspicious part of your character--at least according to the 5th chapter of St. Matthew.--God bless you. And now for the business of this letter. 'If I can', I leave this place so as to be in London on Wednesday, the 11th of next month; in London I shall stay a fortnight; but as I am in feeble health, and have a perfect 'phobia' of inns and coffee-houses, I should rejoice if you or Southey should be able to offer me a bed-room for the fortnight aforesaid. From London I move southward. Now for the italicized words 'if I can'. The cryptical and implicit import of which is--I have a damned thorn in my leg, which the surgeon has not been yet able to extract--and but that I have metaphysicized most successfully on 'Pain', in consequence of the accident, by the Great Scatterer of Thoughts, I should have been half mad. But as it is I have borne it 'like a woman', which, I believe, to be two or three degrees at least beyond a 'stoic'. A suppuration is going on, and I endure in hope. I have redirected some of Southey's letters to you, taking it for granted that you will see him immediately on his arrival in town; he left us yesterday afternoon. Let me hear from you, if it be only to say what I know already, that you will be glad to see me. O, dear friend, thou one of the two human beings of whom I dare hope with a hope, that elevates my own heart. O bless you! S.T. COLERIDGE. [1] [Footnote 1: Letters CXXIII-CXXXI follow No. 110.] Sir Humphry Davy's description of Coleridge at this date is well known, and we must quote it; "Coleridge has left London for Keswick. During his stay in town I saw him seldomer than usual; when I did see him, it was generally in the midst of large companies, where he is the image of power and activity. His eloquence is unimpaired: perhaps it is softer and stronger. His will is less than ever commensurate with his ability. Brilliant images of greatness float upon his mind, like images of the morning clouds on the waters. Their forms are changed by the motions of the waves, they are agitated by every breeze, and modified by every sunbeam. He talked in the course of an hour of beginning three works; he recited the poem of 'Christabel' unfinished, and as I had before heard it. What talent does he not waste in forming visions, sublime, but unconnected with the real world! I have looked to his efforts, as to the efforts of a creating being; but as yet he has not laid the foundation for the new world of intellectual forms" ('Fragmentary Remains', p. 74). Southey had now returned from Portugal, and was also in London ('Southey's Letters', i, 183). It was not till September, 1803, that Southey came to Keswick ('Southey's Letters', i, 229-31). During the interval Coleridge had written various things for the 'Morning Post', the most outstanding contributions being the two powerful letters to Fox of 4th and 9th November 1802, written on the occasion of that statesman going to Paris and paying court to Napoleon. The next eight letters to Thomas Wedgwood give the best impression of Coleridge between October 1802 and February 1803. Letter 111 To Thomas Wedgwood Keswick, Oct. 20, 1802. My dear sir, This is my birthday, my thirtieth. It will not appear wonderful to you, when I tell you, that before the arrival of your letter, I had been thinking with a great weight of different feelings, concerning you, and your dear brother, for I have good reason to believe, that I should not now have been alive, if in addition to other miseries, I had had immediate poverty pressing upon me. I will never again remain silent so long. It has not been altogether indolence, or my habit of procrastination which have [1] kept me from writing, but an eager wish,--I may truly say, a thirst of spirit, to have something honourable to tell you of myself. At present I must be content to tell you something cheerful. My health is very much better. I am stronger in every respect, and am not injured by study, or the act of sitting at my writing desk; but my eyes suffer if at any time I have been intemperate in the use of candle-light. This account supposes another, namely, that my mind is calm, and more at ease. My dear sir, when I was last with you at Stowey, my heart was often full, and I could scarcely keep from communicating to you the tale of my distresses, but could I add to your depression, when you were low? or how interrupt, or cast a shade on your good spirits, that were so rare, and so precious to you? ... I found no comfort but in the driest speculations;--in the 'Ode to Dejection', which you were pleased with. These lines, in the original, followed the line "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 And that which suits a part infests the whole, And now is almost grown the temper [2] of my soul. I give you these lines for the spirit, and not for the poetry. ... But better days are arrived, and are still to come, I have had Visitations of Hope--that I may yet be something of which those who love me may be proud. I cannot write that without recalling dear Poole. I have heard twice, and written twice, and I fear by a strange fatality, one of the letters will have missed him. Leslie [3] was here some time ago. I was very much pleased with him. And now I will tell you what I am doing. I dedicate three days in the week to the 'Morning Post', and shall hereafter write, for the far greater part, such things as will be of as permanent interest as any thing I can hope to write; and you will shortly see a little essay of mine, justifying the writing in a newspaper. My comparison of the French with the Roman Empire was very favourably received. The poetry which I have sent is merely the emptying out of my desk. The epigrams are wretched indeed, but they answered Stuart's purpose, better than better things. I ought not to have given any signature to them whatsoever. I never dreamt of acknowledging either them, or the 'Ode to the Rain'. As to feeble expressions, and unpolished lines--there is the rub! Indeed, my dear sir, I do value your opinion very highly. I think your judgment on the sentiment, the imagery, the flow of a poem, decisive; at least, if it differed from my own, and if after frequent consideration mine remained different, it would leave me at least perplexed. For you are a perfect electrometer in these things--but in point of poetic diction, I am not so well satisfied that you do not require a certain aloofness from the language of real life, which I think deadly to poetry. Very soon however I shall present you from the press with my opinions full on the subject of style, both in prose and verse; and I am confident of one thing, that I shall convince you that I have thought much and patiently on the subject, and that I understand the whole strength of my antagonist's cause. For I am now busy on the subject, and shall in a very few weeks go to press with a volume on the prose writings of Hall, Milton, and Taylor; and shall immediately follow it up with an essay on the writings of Dr. Johnson and Gibbon, and in these two volumes I flatter myself I shall present a fair history of English Prose. If my life and health remain, and I do but write half as much, and as regularly as I have done during the last six weeks, this will be finished by January next; and I shall then put together my memorandum-book on the subject of Poetry. In both I have endeavoured sedulously to state the facts and the differences clearly and accurately; and my reasons for the preference of one style to another are secondary to this. Of this be assured, that I will never give any thing to the world in 'propria persona' in my own name which I have not tormented with the file. I sometimes suspect that my foul copy would often appear to general readers more polished than my fair copy. Many of the feeble and colloquial expressions have been industriously substituted for others which struck me as artificial, and not standing the test; as being neither the language of passion, nor distinct conceptions. Dear sir, indulge me with looking still further on in my literary life. I have, since my twentieth year, meditated an heroic poem on the 'Siege of Jerusalem', by Titus. This is the pride and the stronghold of my hope, but I never think of it except in my best moods. The work to which I dedicate the ensuing years of my life, is one which highly pleased Leslie, in prospective, and my paper will not let me prattle to you about it. I have written what you more wished me to write, all about myself. Our climate (in the north) is inclement, and our houses not as compact as they might be, but it is a stirring climate, and the worse the weather, the more unceasingly entertaining are my study windows, and the month that is to come is the glory of the year with us. A very warm bed-room I can promise you, and one at the same time which commands the finest lake and mountain view. If Leslie could not go abroad with you, and I could in any way mould my manners and habits to suit you, I should of all things like to be your companion. Good nature, an affectionate disposition, and so thorough a sympathy with the nature of your complaint, that I should feel no pain, not the most momentary, at being told by you what your feelings require at the time in which they required it; this I should bring with me. But I need not say that you may say to me,--"You don't suit me," without inflicting the least mortification. Of course this letter is for your brother, as for you; but I shall write to him soon. God bless you, S. T. COLERIDGE. Thomas Wedgwood, Esq. [Footnote 1: 'Sic.'] [Footnote 2: Cottle prints "temple," an error.] [Footnote 3: The eminent Edinburg Professor. For three years the private tutor of Mr. T. Wedgwood (Cottle). [For further information regarding John, aftwards Sir John, Leslie (1766-1832) see 'Tom Wedgwood' by Lichfield.]] LETTER 112. TO THOMAS WEDGWOOD Keswick, November 3, 1802. Dear Wedgwood, It is now two hours since I received your letter; and after the necessary consultation, Mrs. Coleridge herself is fully of opinion that to lose time is merely to lose spirits. Accordingly I have resolved not to look the children in the face, (the parting from whom is the downright bitter in the thing) but to go to London by to-morrow's mail. Of course I shall be in London, God permitting, on Saturday morning. I shall rest that day, and the next, and proceed to Bristol by the Monday night's mail. At Bristol I will go to "Cote-House"[1] At all events, barring serious illness, serious fractures, and the et cetera of serious unforeseens, I shall be at Bristol, Tuesday noon, November 9. You are aware that my whole knowledge of French does not extend beyond the power of limping slowly, not without a dictionary crutch, through an easy French book: and that as to pronunciation, all my organs of speech, from the bottom of the Larynx to the edge of my lips, are utterly and naturally anti-Gallican. If only I shall have been any comfort, any alleviation to you I shall feel myself at ease--and whether you go abroad or no, while I remain with you, it will greatly contribute to my comfort, if I know you will have no hesitation, nor pain, in telling me what you wish me to do, or not to do. I regard it among the blessings of my life, that I have never lived among men whom I regarded as my artificial superiors: that all the respect I have at any time paid, has been wholly to supposed goodness, or talent. The consequence has been that I have no alarms of pride; no "cheval de frise" of independence. I have always lived among equals. It never occurs to me, even for a moment, that I am otherwise. If I have quarrelled with men, it has been as brothers or as school-fellows quarrel. How little any man can give me, or take from me, save in matters of kindness and esteem, is not so much a thought or conviction with me, or even a distinct feeling, as it is my very nature. Much as I dislike all formal declarations of this kind, I have deemed it well to say this. I have as strong feelings of gratitude as any man. Shame upon me if in the sickness and the sorrow which I have had, and which have been kept unaggravated and supportable by your kindness, and your brother's (Mr. Josiah Wedgwood) shame upon me if I did not feel a kindness, not unmixed with reverence towards you both. But yet I never should have had my present impulses to be with you, and this confidence, that I may become an occasional comfort to you, if, independently of all gratitude, I did not thoroughly esteem you; and if I did not appear to myself to understand the nature of your sufferings; and within the last year, in some slight degree to have felt myself, something of the same. Forgive me, my dear sir, if I have said too much. It is better to write it than to say it, and I am anxious in the event of our travelling together that you should yourself be at ease with me, even as you would with a younger brother, to whom, from his childhood you had been in the habit of saying, "Do this Col." or "don't do that." All good be with you. S. T. COLERIDGE. Thomas Wedgwood, Esq.[2] [Footnote: 1 Westbury, near Bristol, the then residence of Mr. John Wedgwood.] [Footnote 2: Letters CXXXII-CXXXIV follow 112.] LETTER 113. To THOMAS WEDGWOOD Keswick, January 9, 1803. My dear Wedgwood, I send you two letters, one from your dear sister, the second from Sharp, by which you will see at what short notice I must be off, if I go to the "Canaries", If your last plan continue in full force, I have not even the phantom of a wish thitherward struggling, but if aught have happened to you, in the things without, or in the world within, to induce you to change the place, or the plan, relatively to me, I think I could raise the money. But I would a thousand-fold rather go with you whithersoever you go. I shall be anxious to hear how you have gone on since I left you. You should decide in favour of a better climate somewhere or other. The best scheme I can think of, is to go to some part of Italy or Sicily, which we both liked. I would look out for two houses. Wordsworth and his family would take the one, and I the other, and then you might have a home either with me, or if you thought of Mr. and Mrs. Luff, under this modification, one of your own; and in either case you would have neighbours, and so return to England when the home sickness pressed heavy upon you, and back to Italy when it was abated, and the climate of England began to poison your comforts. So you would have abroad in a genial climate, certain comforts of society among simple and enlightened men and women; and I should be an alleviation of the pang which you will necessarily feel, as often as you quit your own family. I know no better plan: for travelling in search of objects is at best a dreary business, and whatever excitement it might have had, you must have exhausted it. God bless you, my dear friend. I write with dim eyes, for indeed, indeed, my heart is very full of affectionate sorrowful thoughts toward you. I write with difficulty, with all the fingers but one of my right hand very much swollen. Before I was half up the "Kirkstone" mountain, the storm had wetted me through and through, and before I reached the top it was so wild and outrageous, that it would have been unmanly to have suffered the poor woman (guide) to continue pushing on, up against such a torrent of wind and rain: so I dismounted and sent her home with the storm in her back. I am no novice in mountain mischiefs, but such a storm as this was, I never witnessed, combining the intensity of the cold, with the violence of the wind and rain. The rain drops were pelted or slung against my face by the gusts, just like splinters of flint, and I felt as if every drop cut my flesh. My hands were all shrivelled up like a washer-woman's, and so benumbed that I was obliged to carry my stick under my arm. O, it was a wild business! Such hurry skurry of clouds, such volleys of sound! In spite of the wet and the cold, I should have had some pleasure in it, but for two vexations; first, an almost intolerable pain came into my right eye, a smarting and burning pain; and secondly, in consequence of riding with such cold water under my seat, extremely uneasy and burthensome feelings attacked my groin, so that, what with the pain from the one, and the alarm from the other, I had "no enjoyment at all"! Just at the brow of the hill I met a man dismounted, who could not sit on horse-back. He seemed quite scared by the uproar, and said to me, with much feeling, "O sir, it is a perilous buffeting, but it is worse for you than for me, for I have it at my back." However I got safely over, and immediately all was calm and breathless, as if it was some mighty fountain put on the summit of Kirkstone, that shot forth its volcano of air, and precipitated huge streams of invisible lava down the road to Patterdale. I went on to Grasmere. [1] I was not at all unwell, when I arrived there, though wet of course to the skin. My right eye had nothing the matter with it, either to the sight of others, or to my own feelings, but I had a bad night, with distressful dreams, chiefly about my eye; and waking often in the dark I thought it was the effect of mere recollection, but it appeared in the morning that my right eye was blood-shot, and the lid swollen. That morning however I walked home, and before I reached Keswick, my eye was quite well, but "I felt unwell all over". Yesterday I continued unusually unwell all over me till eight o'clock in the evening. I took no "laudanum or opium", but at eight o'clock, unable to bear the stomach uneasiness and achings of my limbs, I took two large tea-spoons full of Ether in a wine glass of camphorated gum-water, and a third teaspoon full at ten o'clock, and I received complete relief; my body calmed; my sleep placid; but when I awoke in the morning, my right hand, with three of the fingers, was swollen and inflamed. The swelling in the hand is gone down, and of two of the fingers somewhat abated, but the middle finger is still twice its natural size, so that I write with difficulty. This has been a very rough attack, but though I am much weakened by it, and look sickly and haggard, yet I am not out of heart. Such a 'bout'; such a "periless buffetting," was enough to have hurt the health of a strong man. Few constitutions can bear to be long wet through in intense cold. I fear it will tire you to death to read this prolix scrawled story. Affectionately dear Friend, Yours ever, S. T. COLERIDGE.[2] [Footnote 1: The then residence of Mr. Wordsworth. [Cottle.]] [Footnote 2: Letter CXXXV is our No. 110.] LETTER 114. TO THOMAS WEDGWOOD Friday night, Jan. 14, 1803 Dear Friend, I was glad at heart to receive your letter, and still more gladdened by the reading of it. The exceeding kindness which it breathed was literally medicinal to me, and I firmly believe, cured me of a nervous rheumatic affection, the acid and the oil, very completely at Patterdale; but by the time it came to Keswick, the oil was all atop. You ask me, "Why, in the name of goodness, I did not return when I saw the state of the weather?" The true reason is simple, though it may be somewhat strange. The thought never once entered my head. The cause of this I suppose to be, that (I do not remember it at least) I never once in my whole life turned back in fear of the weather. Prudence is a plant, of which I no doubt possess some valuable specimens, but they are always in my hothouse, never out of the glasses, and least of all things would endure the climate of the mountains. In simple earnestness, I never find myself alone, within the embracement of rocks and hills, a traveller up an alpine road, but my spirit careers, drives, and eddies, like a leaf in autumn; a wild activity of thoughts, imaginations, feelings, and impulses of motion rises up from within me; a sort of bottom wind, that blows to no point of the compass, comes from I know not whence, but agitates the whole of me; my whole being is filled with waves that roll and stumble, one this way, and one that way, like things that have no common master. I think that my soul must have pre-existed in the body of a chamois chaser. The simple image of the old object has been obliterated, but the feelings, and impulsive habits, and incipient actions, are in me, and the old scenery awakens them. The further I ascend from animated nature, from men, and cattle, and the common birds of the woods and fields, the greater becomes in me the intensity of the feeling of life. Life seems to me then an universal spirit, that neither has, nor can have an opposite. "God is everywhere," I have exclaimed, and works everywhere, and where is there room for death? In these moments it has been my creed, that death exists only because ideas exist; that life is limitless sensation; that death is a child of the organic senses, chiefly of the sight; that feelings die by flowing into the mould of the intellect becoming ideas, and that ideas passing forth into action, reinstate themselves again in the world of life. And I do believe that truth lies in these loose generalizations. I do not think it possible that any bodily pains could eat out the love of joy, that is so substantially part of me, towards hills, and rocks, and steep waters; and I have had some trial. On Monday night I had an attack in my stomach and right side, which in pain, and the length of its continuance appeared to me by far the severest I ever had. About one o'clock the pain passed out of my stomach, like lightning from a cloud, into the extremities of my right foot. My toe swelled and throbbed, and I was in a state of delicious ease, which the pain in my toe did not seem at all to interfere with. On Tuesday I was uncommonly well all the morning, and ate an excellent dinner; but playing too long and too rompingly with Hartley and Derwent, I was very unwell that evening. On Wednesday I was well, and after dinner wrapped myself up warm, and walked with Sarah Hutchinson, to Lodore. I never beheld anything more impressive than the wild outline of the black masses of mountain over Lodore, and so on to the gorge of Borrowdale. Even through the bare twigs of a grove of birch trees, through which the road passes; and on emerging from the grove a red planet, so very red that I never saw a star so red, being clear and bright at the same time. It seemed to have sky behind it. It started, as it were from the heavens, like an eye-ball of fire. I wished aloud at that moment that you had been with me. The walk appears to have done me good, but I had a wretched night; shocking pains in my head, occiput, and teeth, and found in the morning that I had two blood-shot eyes. But almost immediately after the receipt and perusal of your letter the pains left me, and I am bettered to this hour; and am now indeed as well as usual saving that my left eye is very much blood-shot. It is a sort of duty with me, to be particular respecting facts that relate to my health. I have retained a good sound appetite through the whole of it, without any craving after exhilarants or narcotics, and I have got well as in a moment. Rapid recovery is constitutional with me; but the former circumstances, I can with certainty refer to the system of diet, abstinence from vegetables, wine, spirits, and beer, which I have adopted by your advice. I have no dread or anxiety respecting any fatigue which either of us is likely to undergo, even in continental travelling. Many a healthy man would have been laid up with such a bout of thorough wet, and intense cold at the same time, as I had at Kirkstone. Would to God that also for your sake I were a stronger man, but I have strong wishes to be with you. I love your society, and receiving much comfort from you, and believing likewise that I receive much improvement, I find a delight very great, my dear friend! indeed it is, when I have reason to imagine that I am in return an alleviation to your destinies, and a comfort to you. I have no fears and am ready to leave home at a two days' warning. For myself I should say two hours, but bustle and hurry might disorder Mrs. Coleridge. She and the three children are quite well.[1] I grieve that there is a lowering in politics. The 'Moniteur' contains almost daily some bitter abuse of our minister and parliament, and in London there is great anxiety and omening. I have dreaded war from the time that the disastrous fortunes of the expedition to Saint Domingo, under Le Clerc, was known in France. Write me one or two lines, as few as you like. I remain, my dear Wedgwood, with most affectionate esteem, and grateful attachment, Your sincere friend, S. T. COLERIDGE. Thomas Wedgwood, Esq. [Footnote 1: Sara had been born 23rd December 1802.] LETTER 115. TO THOMAS WEDGWOOD Nether Stowey, Feb. 10, 1803. Dear Wedgwood, Last night Poole and I fully expected a few lines from you. When the newspaper came in, without your letter, we felt as if a dull neighbour had been ushered in after a knock at the door which had made us rise up and start forward to welcome some long absent friend. Indeed in Poole's case, this simile is less over-swollen than in mine, for in contempt of my convictions and assurance to the contrary, Poole, passing off the Brummagem coin of his wishes for sterling reasons, had persuaded himself fully that he should see you in 'propria persona'. The truth is, we had no right to expect a letter from you, and I should have attributed your not writing to your having nothing to write, to your bodily dislike of writing, or, though with reluctance, to low spirits, but that I have been haunted with the fear that your sister is worse, and that you are at Cote-House, in the mournful office of comforter to your brother. God keep us from idle dreams. Life has enough of real pains. I wrote to Captain Wordsworth to get me some Bang. The captain in an affectionate letter answers me: "The Bang if possible shall be sent. If any country ship arrives I shall certainly get it. We have not got anything of the kind in our China ships." If you would rather wait till it can be brought by Captain Wordsworth himself from China, give me a line that I may write and tell him. We shall hope for a letter from you to-night. I need not say, dear Wedgwood, how anxious I am to hear the particulars of your health and spirits. Poole's account of his conversations, etc., in France, are very interesting and instructive. If your inclination lead you hither you would be very comfortable here. But I am ready at an hour's warning; ready in heart and mind, as well as in body and moveables. I am, dear Wedgwood, most truly yours, S. T. COLERIDGE. Thomas Wedgwood, Esq. LETTER 116. TO THOMAS WEDGWOOD. Stowey, Feb. 10, 1803. My dear Wedgwood, With regard to myself and my accompanying you, let me say thus much. My health is not worse than it was in the North; indeed it is much better. I have no fears. But if you fear that, my health being what you know it to be, the inconveniences of my being with you will be greater than the advantages; (I feel no reluctance in telling you so) [1] it is so entirely an affair of spirits and feeling that the conclusion must be made by you, not in your reason, but purely in your spirit and feeling. Sorry indeed should I be to know that you had gone abroad with one, to whom you were comparatively indifferent. Sorry if there should be no one with you, who could with fellow-feeling and general like-mindedness, yield you sympathy in your sunshiny moments. Dear Wedgwood, my heart swells within me as it were. I have no other wish to accompany you than what arises immediately from my personal attachment, and a deep sense in my own heart, that let us be as dejected as we will, a week together cannot pass in which a mind like yours would not feel the want of affection, or be wholly torpid to its pleasurable influences. I cannot bear to think of your going abroad with a mere travelling companion; with one at all influenced by salary, or personal conveniences. You will not suspect me of flattering you, but indeed dear Wedgwood, you are too good and too valuable a man to deserve to receive attendance from a hireling, even for a month together, in your present state. If I do not go with you, I shall stay in England only such time as may be necessary for me to raise the travelling money, and go immediately to the south of France. I shall probably cross the Pyrenees to Bilboa, see the country of Biscay, and cross the north of Spain to Perpignan, and so on to the north of Italy, and pass my next winter at Nice. I have every reason to believe that I can live, even as a traveller, as cheap as I can in England. God bless you. I will repeat no professions, even in the superscription of a letter. You know me, and that it is my serious, simple wish, that in everything respecting me, you would think altogether of yourself, and nothing of me, and be assured that no resolve of yours, however suddenly adopted, or however nakedly communicated, will give me any pain, any at least arising from my own bearings. Yours ever, S. T. COLERIDGE. Thomas Wedgwood, Esq. P. S. Perhaps Leslie will go with you. [Footnote 1: Should be "Feel no reluctance in telling me so."] LETTER 117. TO THOMAS WEDGWOOD. Poole's, Feb. 17, 1803. My dear Wedgwood, I do not know that I have anything to say that justifies me in troubling you with the postage and perusal of this scrawl. I received a short and kind letter from Josiah last night. He is named the sheriff. Poole, who has received a very kind invitation from your brother John, in a letter of last Monday, and which was repeated in last night's letter, goes with me, I hope in the full persuasion that you will be there (at Cote-House) before he be under the necessity of returning home. Poole is a very, very good man, I like even his incorrigibility in little faults and deficiencies. It looks like a wise determination of nature to let well alone. Are you not laying out a scheme which will throw your travelling in Italy, into an unpleasant and unwholesome part of the year? From all I can gather, you ought to leave this country at the first of April at the latest. But no doubt you know these things better than I. If I do not go with you, it is very probable we shall meet somewhere or other. At all events you will know where I am, and I can come to you if you wish it. And if I go with you, there will be this advantage, that you may drop me where you like, if you should meet any Frenchman, Italian, or Swiss, whom you liked, and who would be pleasant and profitable to you. But this we can discuss at Gunville. As to ----,[1] I never doubted that he means to fulfil his engagements with you, but he is one of those weak moralled men, with whom the meaning to do a thing means nothing. He promises with ninety parts out of a hundred of his whole heart, but there is always a speck of cold at the core that transubstantiates the whole resolve into a lie. I remain in comfortable health,--warm rooms, an old friend, and tranquillity, are specifics for my complaints. With all my ups and downs I have a deal of joyous feeling, and I would with gladness give a good part of it to you, my dear friend. God grant that spring may come to you with healing on her wings. God bless you, my dear Wedgwood. I remain with most affectionate esteem, and regular attachment, and good wishes. Yours ever, S. T. COLERIDGE. Thomas Wedgwood, Esq. P. S. If Southey should send a couple of bottles, one of the red sulphate, and one of the compound acids for me, will you be so good as to bring them with you? [Footnote 1: Mackintosh.] LETTER 118. TO THOMAS WEDGWOOD. Stowey, Feb. 17, 1803. My dear Wedgwood, Last night I received a four ounce parcel letter, by the post, which Poole and I concluded was the mistake or carelessness of the servant, who had put the letter into the post office, instead of the coach office. I should have been indignant, if dear Poole had not set me laughing. On opening it, it contained my letter from Gunville, and a small parcel of "Bang," from Purkis. I will transcribe the parts of his letter which relate to it. Brentford, Feb. 7, 1803. My dear Coleridge, I thank you for your letter, and am happy to be the means of obliging you. Immediately on the receipt of yours, I wrote to Sir Joseph Banks, who I verily believe is one of the most excellent and useful men of this country, requesting a small quantity of Bang, and saying it was for the use of Mr. T. Wedgwood. I yesterday received the parcel which I now send, accompanied with a very kind letter, and as part of it will be interesting to you and your friend, I will transcribe it. "The Bang you ask for is the powder of the leaves of a kind of hemp that grows in the hot climates. It is prepared, and I believe used, in all parts of the east, from Morocco to China. In Europe it is found to act very differently on different constitutions. Some it elevates in the extreme; others it renders torpid, and scarcely observant of any evil that may befal them. In Barbary it is always taken, if it can be procured, by criminals condemned to suffer amputation, and it is said, to enable those miserables to bear the rough operations of an unfeeling executioner, more than we Europeans can the keen knife of our most skilful chirurgeons. This it may be necessary to have said to my friend Mr. T. Wedgwood, whom I respect much, as his virtues deserve, and I know them well. I send a small quantity only as I possess but little. If however, it is found to agree, I will instantly forward the whole of my stock, and write without delay to Barbary, from whence it came, for more." Sir Joseph adds, in a postscript: "It seems almost beyond a doubt, that the Nepenthe was a preparation of the Bang, known to the Ancients." Now I had better take the small parcel with me to Gunville; if I send it by the post, besides the heavy expense, I cannot rely on the Stowey carriers, who are a brace of as careless and dishonest rogues as ever had claims on that article of the hemp and timber trade, called the gallows. Indeed I verily believe that if all Stowey, Ward excepted, does not go to hell, it will be by the supererogation of Poole's sense of honesty.--Charitable! We will have a fair trial of Bang. Do bring down some of the Hyoscyamine pills, and I will give a fair trial of Opium, Henbane, and Nepenthe. By-the-bye I always considered Homer's account of the Nepenthe as a 'Banging' lie. God bless you, my dear friend, and S.T. COLERIDGE. [1] [Footnote 1: Letter CXXXVI follows 118.] The last four letters were written from Stowey, whither Coleridge had gone on a visit to Poole. During the same period some events had taken place which changed the aspect of things. He had become acquainted with William Sotheby, the poet, translator of Homer and Wieland, to whom he communicated in long letters his views on Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction, indicating a widening divergence from his brother poet. He had also made for the satisfaction of Sotheby a translation in blank verse of Gessner's 'Erste Schiffer', which has been lost ('Letters', 369-401). He had likewise paraphrased one of Gessner's Idylls, published as the 'Picture of The Lover's Resolution', in the 'Morning Post' of 6th September 1802. 'Dejection, an Ode', the 'Hymn before Sunrise', and the beautiful dramatic fragment, the 'Night Scene', are the last products of Coleridge's chilled poetic imagination. A third edition (1803) of the Early Poems was issued under the superintendence of Lamb ('Ainger', i, 199-206). He had made a second tour in Wales in company with Tom Wedgwood in November and December 1802 ('Letters', 410-417) returning to find that Sara had been born on 23rd December 1802. In August 1803 Coleridge went on tour to Scotland with the Wordsworths ('Letters', 451, and Dorothy Wordsworth's 'Journal'). It is impossible for us to give all the correspondence of this busy, mental period, but on 4th June 1803, Coleridge writes to Godwin. LETTER 119. To GODWIN Saturday Night, June 4, 1803. Greta Hall, Keswick. My dear Godwin, I trust that my dear friend, C. Lamb, will have informed you how seriously ill I have been. I arrived at Keswick on Good Friday, caught the influenza, have struggled on in a series of convalescence and relapse, the disease still assuming new shapes and symptoms; and, though I am certainly better than at any former period of the disease, and more steadily convalescent, yet it is not mere 'low spirits' that makes me doubt whether I shall ever wholly surmount the effects of it. I owe, then, explanation to you, for I quitted town, with strong feelings of affectionate esteem towards you, and a firm resolution to write to you within a short time after my arrival at my home. During my illness I was exceedingly affected by the thought that month had glided away after month, and year after year, and still had found and left me only 'preparing' for the experiments which are to ascertain whether the hopes of those who have hoped proudly of me have been auspicious omens or mere delusions; and the anxiety to realize something, and finish something, has, no doubt, in some measure retarded my recovery. I am now, however, ready to go to the press with a work which I consider as introductory to a 'system', though to the public it will appear altogether a thing by itself. I write now to ask your advice respecting the time and manner of its publication, and the choice of a publisher, I entitle it 'Organum Vera Organum, or an Instrument of Practical Reasoning in the Business of Real Life'; [1] to which will be prefixed, 1. A familiar introduction to the common system of Logic, namely, that of Aristotle and the Schools. 2. A concise and simple, yet full statement of the Aristotelian Logic, with reference annexed to the authors, and the name and page of the work to which each part may be traced, so that it may be at once seen what is Aristotle's, what Porphyry's, what the addition of the Greek Commentators, and what of the Schoolmen. 3. An outline of the History of Logic in general, 1st Chapter. The Origin of Philosophy in general, and of Logic 'speciatim'. 2d Chap. Of the Eleatic and Megaric Logic. 3d Chap. of the Platonic Logic. 4th Chap, of Aristotle, containing a fair account of the "*[Greek: Orhganon]--of which Dr. Reid, in 'Kaimes' Sketches of Man', has given a most false, and not only erroneous, but calumnious statement--in as far as the account had not been anticipated in the second part of my work, namely, the concise and simple, yet full, etc. etc. 5th Chap. A philosophical examination of the truth and of the value of the Aristotelian System of Logic, including all the after-additions to it. 6th Chap. On the characteristic merits and demerits of Aristotle and Plato as philosophers in general, and an attempt to explain the fact of the vast influence of the former during so many ages; and of the influence of Plato's works on the restoration of the Belles Lettres, and on the Reformation. 7th Chap. Raymund Lully. 8th Chap. Peter Ramus. 9th Chap. Lord Bacon, or the Verulamian Logic. both Chap. Examination of the same, and comparison of it with the Logic of Plato (in which I attempt to make it probable that, though considered by Bacon himself as the antithesis and the antidote of Plato, it is 'bona fide' the same, and that Plato has been misunderstood).[2] 10th Chap. Descartes, 11th Chap. Condillac, and a philosophical examination of 'his' logic, 'i.e.' the logic which he basely purloined from Hartley. Then follows my own 'Organum Vera Organum', which consists of a *[Greek: Eustaema] of all 'possible' modes of true, probable, and false reasoning, arranged philosophically, 'i.e.' on a strict analysis of those operations and passions of the mind in which they originate, or by which they act; with one or more striking instances annexed to each, from authors of high estimation, and to each instance of false reasoning, the manner in which the sophistry is to be detected, and the words in which it may be exposed. The whole will conclude with considerations of the value of the work, or its practical utility in scientific investigations (especially the first part, which contains the strictly demonstrative reasonings, and the analysis of all the acts and passions of the mind which may be employed to the discovery of truth) in the arts of healing, especially in those parts that contain a catalogue, etc. of probable reasoning; lastly, to the senate, the pulpit, and our law courts, to whom the whole--but especially the latter three-fourths of the work, on the probable and the false--will be useful, and finally instructive, how to form a commonplace book by the aid of this Instrument, so as to read with practical advantage, and (supposing average talents) to 'ensure' a facility and rapidity in proving and in computing. I have thus amply detailed the contents of my work, which has not been the labour of one year or of two, but the result of many years' meditations, and of very various reading. The size of the work will, printed at thirty lines a page, form one volume octavo, 500 pages to the volume; and I shall be ready with the first half of the work for the printer at a fortnight's notice. Now, my dear friend, give me your thoughts on the subject: would you have me to offer it to the booksellers, or, by the assistance of my friends, print and publish on my own account? If the former, would you advise me to sell the copyright at once, or only one or more editions? Can you give me a general notion what terms I have a right to insist on in either case? And, lastly, to whom would you advise me to apply? Phillips is a pushing man, and a book is sure to have fair play if it be his 'property'; and it could not be other than pleasant to me to have the same publisher with yourself, 'but'----. Now if there be anything of impatience, that whether truth and justice ought to follow that "'but'" you will inform me. It is not my habit to go to work so seriously about matters of pecuniary business; but my ill health makes my life more than ordinarily uncertain, and I have a wife and three little ones. If your judgment leads you to advise me to offer it to Phillips, would you take the trouble of talking with him on the subject, and give him your real opinion, whatever it may be, of the work and of the powers of the author? When this book is fairly off my hands, I shall, if I live and have sufficient health, set seriously to work in arranging what I have already written, and in pushing forward my studies and my investigations relative to the 'omne scibile' of human nature--'what' we are, and 'how we become' what we are; so as to solve the two grand problems--how, being acted upon, we shall act; how, acting, we shall be acted upon. But between me and this work there may be death. I hope your wife and little ones are well. I have had a sick family. At one time every individual--master, mistress, children, and servants--were all laid up in bed, and we were waited on by persons hired from the town for the week. But now all are well, I only excepted. If you find my paper smell, or my style savour of scholastic quiddity, you must attribute it to the infectious quality of the folio on which I am writing--namely, 'Scotus Erigena de Divisione Naturae', the forerunner, by some centuries, of the schoolmen. I cherish all kinds of honourable feelings towards you; and I am, dear Godwin, Yours most sincerely, S. T. COLERIDGE. [Footnote 1 Extant in MS. See 'Athenaeum', 26th October 1895.] [Footnote 2: See the 'Friend', Bohn Library, pp. 319-345.] You know the high character and present scarcity of 'Tuckers Light of Nature'. "I have found in this writer" (says Paley, in his preface to his 'Moral and Political Philosophy') "more original thinking and observation upon the several subjects he has taken in hand than in any other, not to say in all others put together". His talent also for illustration is unrivalled. But his thoughts are diffused through a long, various, and irregular work. And a friend of mine, every way calculated by his taste and private studies for such a work,[1] is willing to abridge and systematize that work from eight to two volumes--in the words of Paley, "to dispose into method, to collect into heads and articles, and to exhibit in more compact and tangible masses, what in that otherwise excellent performance is spread over too much surface." I would prefix to it an essay containing the whole substance of the first volume of Hartley; entirely defecated from all the corpuscular hypothesis, with more illustrations. I give my name to the essay. Likewise I will revise every sheet of the abridgment. I should think the character of the work, and the above quotations from so high an authority (with the present public, I mean) as Paley, would ensure its success. If you will read or transcribe, and send this to Mr. Phillips, or to any other publisher (Longman and Rees excepted) you would greatly oblige me; that is to say, my dear Godwin, you would essentially serve a young man of profound genius and original mind, who wishes to get his 'Sabine' subsistence by some employment from the booksellers, while he is employing the remainder of his time in nursing up his genius for the destiny which he believes appurtenant to it. "Qui cito facit, bis facit." Impose any task on me in return. [2] [Footnote 1: Hazlitt. The abridgment was made, and published in 1807.] [Footnote 2: Letter CXXXVII follows 119.] Godwin published his 'Life of Chaucer' in 1803. The next letter refers to this work. LETTER 120. TO GODWIN Friday, July 10, 1803. Greta Hall. My dear Godwin, Your letter has this moment reached me, and found me writing for Stuart, to whom I am under a positive engagement to produce three essays by the beginning of next week. To promise, therefore, to do what I could not do would be worse than idle; and to attempt to do what I could not do well, from distraction of mind, would be trifling with my time and your patience. If I could convey to you any tolerably distinct notion of the state of my spirits of late, and the train or the sort of my ideas consequent on that state, you would feel instantly that my non-performance of the promise is matter of 'regret' with me indeed, but not of 'compunction'. It was my full intention to have prepared immediately a second volume of poems for the press; but, though the poems are all either written or composed, excepting only the conclusion of one poem (equal to four days' common work) and a few corrections, and though I had the most pressing motives for sending them off, yet after many attempts I was obliged to give up the very hope--the attempts acted so perniciously on my disorder. Wordsworth, too, wished, and in a very particular manner expressed the wish, that I should write to him at large on a poetic subject, which he has at present 'sub malleo ardentem et ignitum'. I made the attempt, but I could not command my recollections. It seemed a dream that I had ever 'thought' on poetry, or had ever written it, so remote were my trains of ideas from composition or criticism on composition. These two instances will, in some manner, explain my non-performance; but, indeed, I have been very ill, and that I have done anything in any way is a subject of wonder to myself, and of no causeless self-complacency. Yet I am anxious to do something which may convince you of my sincerity by zeal: and, if you think that it will be of any service to you, I will send down for the work; I will instantly give it a perusal 'con amore'; and partly by my reverential love of Chaucer, and partly from my affectionate esteem for his biographer (the summer, too, bringing increase of health with it), I doubt not that my old mind will recur to me; and I will forthwith write a series of letters, containing a critique on Chaucer, and on the 'Life of Chaucer', by W. Godwin, and publish them, with my name, either at once in a small volume, or in the 'Morning Post' in the first instance, and republish them afterwards. The great thing to be done is to present Chaucer stripped of all his adventitious matter, his translations, etc.; to analyse his own real productions, to deduce his province and his rank; then to compare him with his contemporaries, or with immediate prede- and suc- cessors, first as an Englishman, and secondly as a European; then with Spenser and with Shakespeare, between whom he seems to stand mid-way, with, however, a manner of his own which belongs to neither, with a manner and an excellence; lastly, to compare Dante and Chaucer, and inclusively Spenser and Shakespere, with the ancients, to abstract the characteristic differences, and to develop the causes of such differences. (For instance, in all the writings of the ancients I recollect nothing that, strictly examined, can be called humour; yet Chaucer abounds with it, and Dante, too, though in a very different way. Thus, too, the passion for personifications and, "me judice", strong, sharp, practical good sense, which I feel to constitute a strikingly characteristic difference in favour of the "feudal" poets.) As to information, I could give you a critical sketch of poems, written by contemporaries of Chaucer, in Germany; an epic to compare with his "Palamon", and tales with his Tales, descriptive and fanciful poems with those of the same kind in our own poet. In short, a Life of Chaucer ought, in the work itself, and in the appendices of the work, to make the poet explain his age, and to make the age both explain the poet, and evince the superiority of the poet over his age. I think that the publication of such a work would do "your" work some little service, in more ways than one. It would occasion, necessarily, a double review of it in all the Reviews; and there is a large class of fashionable men who have been pleased of late to take me into high favour, and among whom even my name might have some influence, and my praises of you weight. But let me hear from you on the subject. Now for my own business. As soon as you possibly can do something respecting the abridgment of Tucker,[1] do so; you will, on my honour, be doing "good", in the best sense of the word! Of course I cannot wish you to do anything till after the 24th, unless it should be "put" in your way to read that part of the letter to Phillips. As to my own work, let me correct one or two conceptions of yours respecting it. I could, no doubt, induce my friends to publish the work for me, but I am possessed of facts that deter me. I know that the booksellers not only do not encourage, but that they use unjustifiable artifices to injure works published on the authors' own account. It never answered, as far as I can find, in any instance. And even the sale of a first edition is not without objections on this score--to this, however, I should certainly adhere, and it is my resolution. But I must do something immediately. Now, if I knew that any bookseller would purchase the first edition of this work, as numerous as he pleased, I should put the work out of hand at once, "totus in illo". But it was never my intention to send one single sheet to the press till the whole was "bona fide" ready for the printer--that is, both written, and fairly written. The work is half written "out", and the materials of the other half are all in paper, or rather on papers. I should not expect one farthing till the work was delivered entire; and I would deliver it at once, if it were wished. But, if I cannot engage with a bookseller for this, I must do something else "first", which I should be sorry for. Your division of the sorts of works acceptable to booksellers is just, and what has been always my own notion or rather knowledge; but, though I detailed the whole of the contents of my work so fully to you, I did not mean to lay any stress with the bookseller on the first half, but simply state it as preceded by a familiar introduction, and critical history of logic. On the work itself I meant to lay all the stress, as a work really in request, and non-existent, either well or ill-done, and to put the work in the "same class" with "Guthrie" and books of practical instruction--for the universities, classes of scholars, lawyers, etc. etc. Its profitable sale will greatly depend on the pushing of the booksellers, and on its being considered as a "practical" book, "Organum vere Organum", a book by which the reader is to acquire not only knowledge, but likewise "power". I fear that it may extend to seven hundred pages; and would it be better to publish the Introduction of History separately, either after or before? God bless you, and all belonging to you, and your Chaucer. All happiness to you and your wife. Ever yours, S. T. C. P.S. If you read to Phillips any part of my letter respecting my own work, or rather detailed it to him, you would lay all the stress on the "practical". [Footnote 1: Godwin exerted himself actively in the matter, as appears by the correspondence of Charles Lamb.] The ambitious scheme of the letters to Godwin did not exhaust Coleridge's projects at this season. To Southey he wrote: LETTER 121. To SOUTHEY [1] Keswick, July, 1803. My dear Southey, ... I write now to propose a scheme, or rather a rude outline of a scheme, of your grand work. What harm can a proposal do? If it be no pain to you to reject it, it will be none to me to have it rejected. I would have the work entitled "Bibliotheca Britannica", or an History of British Literature, bibliographical, biographical, and critical. The two "last" volumes I would have to be a chronological catalogue of all noticeable or extant books; the others, be the number six or eight, to consist entirely of separate treatises, each giving a critical biblio-biographical history of some one subject. I will, with great pleasure, join you in learning Welsh and Erse: and you, I, Turner, and Owen, might dedicate ourselves for the first half year to a complete history of all Welsh, Saxon, and Erse books that are not translations, that are the native growth of Britain. If the Spanish neutrality continues, I will go in October or November to Biscay, and throw light on the Basque. Let the next volume contain the history of "English" poetry and poets, in which I would include all prose truly poetical. The first half of the second volume should be dedicated to great single names, Chaucer and Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton and Taylor, Dryden and Pope; the poetry of witty logic,--Swift, Fielding, Richardson, Sterne: I write "par hasard", but I mean to say all great names as have either formed epochs in our taste, or such, at least, as are representative; and the great object to be in each instance to determine, first, the true merits and demerits of the "books"; secondly, what of these belong to the age--what to the author "quasi peculium". The second half of the second volume should be a history of poetry and romances, everywhere interspersed with biography, but more flowing, more consecutive, more bibliographical, chronological, and complete. The third volume I would have dedicated to English prose, considered as to style, as to eloquence, as to general impressiveness; a history of styles and manners, their causes, their birth-places and parentage, their analysis. These three volumes would be so generally interesting, so exceedingly entertaining, that you might bid fair for a sale of the work at large. Then let the fourth volume take up the history of metaphysics, theology, medicine, alchemy, common, canon, and Roman law, from Alfred to Henry VII.; in other words, a history of the dark ages in Great Britain. The fifth volume--carry on metaphysics and ethics to the present day in the first half; the second half, comprise the theology of all the reformers. In the fourth volume there would be a grand article on the philosophy of the theology of the Roman Catholic religion. In this (fifth volume), under different names,--Hooker, Baxter, Biddle, and Fox,--the spirit of the theology of all the other parts of Christianity. The sixth and seventh volumes must comprise all the articles you can get, on all the separate arts and sciences that have been treated of in books since the Reformation; and, by this time, the book, if it answered at all, would have gained so high a reputation, that you need not fear having whom you liked to write the different articles--medicine, surgery, chemistry, etc., etc., navigation, travellers, voyagers, etc., etc. If I go into Scotland, shall I engage Walter Scott to write the history of Scottish poets? Tell me, however, what you think of the plan. It would have one prodigious advantage: whatever accident stopped the work, would only prevent the future good, not mar the past; each volume would be a great and valuable work "per se". Then each volume would awaken a new interest, a new set of readers, who would buy the past volumes of course; then it would allow you ample time and opportunities for the slavery of the catalogue volumes, which should be at the same time an index to the work, which would be, in very truth, a pandect of knowledge, alive and swarming with human life, feeling, incident. By the bye, what a strange abuse has been made of the word encyclopaedia! It signifies, properly, grammar, logic, rhetoric, and ethics and metaphysics, which last, explaining the ultimate principles of grammar--log., rhet., and eth.--formed a circle of knowledge. * * * To call a huge unconnected miscellany of the "omne scibile", in an arrangement determined by the accident of initial letters, an encyclopaedia, is the impudent ignorance of your Presbyterian bookmakers. Good night! God bless you! S. T. C. [Footnote 1: Southey's biographer says regarding this scheme: "Soon after the date of the letter, my father paid a short visit to London, the chief purpose of which was to negotiate with Messrs. Longman and Rees respecting 'the management of a "Bibliotheca Britannica" upon a very extensive scale, to be arranged chronologically, and made a readable book by biography, criticism, and connecting chapters, to be published like the Cyclopaedia in parts.'"] SOUTHEY TO S. T. COLERIDGE, ESQ. Bristol, Aug. 3, 1803. Dear Coleridge, I meant to have written sooner; but those little units of interruption and preventions, which sum up to as ugly an aggregate as the items in a lawyer's bill, have come in the way. ... Your plan is too good, too gigantic, quite beyond my powers. If you had my tolerable state of health, and that love of steady and productive employment which is now grown into a necessary habit with me, if you were to execute and would execute it, it would be, beyond all doubt, the most valuable work of any age or any country; but I cannot fill up such an outline. No man can better feel where he fails than I do; and to rely upon you for whole quartos! Dear Coleridge, the smile that comes with that thought is a very melancholy one; and if Edith saw me now, she would think my eyes were weak again, when, in truth, the humour that covers them springs from another cause. For my own comfort, and credit, and peace of mind, I must have a plan which I know myself strong enough to execute. I can take author by author as they come in their series, and give his life and an account of his works quite as well as ever it has yet been done. I can write connecting paragraphs and chapters shortly and pertinently, in my way; and in this way the labour of all my associates can be more easily arranged. ... And, after all, this is really nearer the actual design of what I purport by a bibliotheca than yours would be,--a book of reference, a work in which it may be seen what has been written upon every subject in the British language: this has elsewhere been done in the dictionary form; whatever we get better than that form--"ponemus lucro". [1] [Footnote 1: Letter CXXXVIII is our 121. CXXXIX-CXLII follow 121.] To Thomas Wedgwood Coleridge, on his return from the Scotch tour, wrote: LETTER 122. To THOMAS WEDGWOOD Keswick, September 16, 1803. My dear Wedgwood, I reached home on yesterday noon. William Hazlitt, is a thinking, observant, original man; of great power as a painter of character-portraits, and far more in the manner of the old painters than any living artist, but the objects must be before him. He has no imaginative memory; so much for his intellectuals. His manners are to ninety-nine in one hundred singularly repulsive; brow-hanging; shoe-contemplating--strange. Sharp seemed to like him, but Sharp saw him only for half an hour, and that walking. He is, I verily believe, kindly-natured: is very fond of, attentive to, and patient with children, but he is jealous, gloomy, and of an irritable pride. With all this there is much good in him. He is disinterested; an enthusiastic lover of the great men who have been before us. He says things that are his own, in a way of his own: and though from habitual shyness, and the outside of bear skin, at least of misanthropy, he is strangely confused and dark in his conversation, and delivers himself of almost all his conceptions with a "Forceps", yet he "says" more than any man I ever knew (you yourself only excepted) of that which is his own, in a way of his own; and often times when he has warmed his mind, and the juice is come out, and spread over his spirits, he will gallop for half an hour together, with real eloquence. He sends well-feathered thoughts straight forward to the mark with a twang of the bow-string. If you could recommend him as a portrait painter, I should be glad. To be your companion, he is, in my opinion utterly unfit. His own health is fitful. I have written as I ought to do: to you most freely. You know me, both head and heart, and I will make what deductions your reasons may dictate to me. I can think of no other person (for your travelling companion)--what wonder? For the last years, I have been shy of all new acquaintance. To live beloved is all I need, And when I love, I love indeed. I never had any ambition, and now, I trust I have almost as little vanity. For five months past my mind has been strangely shut up. I have taken the paper with the intention to write to you many times, but it has been one blank feeling;--one blank idealess feeling. I had nothing to say;--could say nothing. How dearly I love you, my very dreams make known to me. I will not trouble you with the gloomy tale of my health. When I am awake, by patience, employment, effort of mind, and walking, I can keep the Fiend at arm's length, but the night is my Hell!--sleep my tormenting Angel. Three nights out of four, I fall asleep, struggling to lie awake, and my frequent night-screams have almost made me a nuisance in my own house. Dreams with me are no shadows, but the very calamities of my life. * * * In the hope of drawing the gout, if gout it should be, into my feet, I walked previously to my getting into the coach at Perth, 263 miles, in eight days, with no unpleasant fatigue; and if I could do you any service by coming to town, and there were no coaches, I would undertake to be with you, on foot in seven days. I must have strength somewhere. My head is indefatigably strong: my limbs too are strong: but acid or not acid, gout or not gout, something there is in my stomach. * * * To diversify this dusky letter, I will write an "Epitaph", which I composed in my sleep for myself while dreaming that I was dying. To the best of my recollection I have not altered a word. Here sleeps at length poor Col. and without screaming Who died, as he had always lived, a dreaming: Shot dead, while sleeping, by the gout within, Alone, and all unknown, at E'nbro' in an Inn. It was Tuesday night last, at the Black Bull, Edinburgh. Yours, dear Wedgwood, gratefully, and Most affectionately, S. T. COLERIDGE. Thomas Wedgwood, Esq. The character of Hazlitt in this letter is as good as anything in La Bruyere. The next letter (without date in Cottle's "Reminiscences", but which must be 1803) is to Miss Cruikshank, of Nether Stowey. The Penelope referred to is Penelope Poole, the cousin of Tom Poole. LETTER 123. To MISS CRUIKSHANK (No date, supposed to be 1803.[1]) My dear Miss Cruikshank, With the kindest intentions, I fear you have done me some little disservice, in borrowing the first edition of my poems from Miss B--. I never held any principles indeed, of which, considering my age, I have reason to be ashamed. The whole of my public life may be comprised in eight or nine months of my 22nd year; and the whole of my political sins during that time, consisted in forming a plan of taking a large farm in common, in America, with other young men of my age. A wild notion indeed, but very harmless. As to my principles, they were, at all times, decidedly anti-jacobin and anti-revolutionary, and my American scheme is a proof of this. Indeed at that time, I seriously held the doctrine of passive obedience, though a violent enemy of the first war. Afterwards, and for the last ten years of my life, I have been fighting incessantly in the good cause, against French ambition, and French principles; and I had Mr. Addington's suffrage, as to the good produced by my Essays, written in the "Morning Post", in the interval of the peace of Amiens, and the second war, together with my two letters to Mr. Fox. [2] Of my former errors, I should be no more ashamed, than of my change of body, natural to increase of age; but in that first edition, there was inserted (without my consent!) a Sonnet to Lord Stanhope, in direct contradiction, equally, to my "then", as to my present principles. A Sonnet written by me in ridicule and mockery of the bloated style of French jacobinical declamation, and inserted by Biggs, (the fool of a printer,) in order forsooth, that he might send the book, and a letter to Earl Stanhope; who, to prove that he was not mad in all things, treated both book and letter with silent contempt. I have therefore sent Mr. Poole's second edition, and if it be in your power, I could wish you to read the "dedication to my brother," at the beginning, to Lady E. Perceval, to obtain whose esteem, so far at least as not to be confounded with the herd of vulgar mob flatterers, I am not ashamed to confess myself solicitous. I would I could be with you, and your visitors. Penelope, you know, is very high in my esteem. With true warmth of heart, she joins more strength of understanding; and, to steady principle, more variety of accomplishments, than it has often been my lot to meet with among the fairer sex. When I praise one woman to another I always mean a compliment to both. My tenderest regards to your dear mother, whom I really long to spend a few hours with, and believe me with sincere good wishes, Yours, etc., S. T. COLERIDGE [3] [Footnote 1: Dated "1807" in "Early Recollections".] [Footnote 2: It appears from Sir James Macintosh's Life, published by his son, that a diminution of respect towards Sir James was entertained by Mr. Fox, arising from the above two letters of Mr. Coleridge, which appeared in the "Morning Post". Some enemy of Sir James had informed Mr. Fox that these two letters were written by Macintosh, and which exceedingly wounded his mind. Before the error could be corrected, Mr. Fox died. This occurrence was deplored by Sir James, in a way that showed his deep feeling of regret, but which, as might be supposed, did not prevent him from bearing the amplest testimony to the social worth and surpassing talents of that great statesman. Mr. Coleridge's Bristol friends will remember that once Mr. Fox was idolized by him as the paragon of political excellence; and Mr. Pitt depressed in the same proportion. [Note by Cottle.]] [Footnote 3: Letter CXLIII follows 123.] In the beginning of 1804 we find Coleridge in London, whither Poole, too, had gone to superintend the compilation of an Abstract on the condition of the Poor Laws. LETTER 124. TO THOMAS WEDGWOOD 16, Abingdon Street, Westminster, Jan. 1804. My dear friend, Some divines hold, that with God to think, and to create, are one and the same act. If to think, and even to compose had been the same as to write with me, I should have written as much too much as I have written too little. The whole truth of the matter is, that I have been very, very ill. Your letter remained four days unread, I was so ill. What effect it had upon me I cannot express by words. It lay under my pillow day after day. I should have written forty times, but as it often and often happens with me, my heart was too full, and I had so much to say that I said nothing. I never received a delight that lasted longer upon me--"Brooded on my mind and made it pregnant," than (from) the six last sentences of your last letter,--which I cannot apologize for not having answered, for I should be casting calumnies against myself; for, for the last six or seven weeks, I have both thought and felt more concerning you, and relating to you, than of all other men put together. Somehow or other, whatever plan I determined to adopt, my fancy, good-natured pander of our wishes, always linked you on to it; or I made it your plan, and linked myself on. I left my home, December 20, 1803, intending to stay a day and a half at Grasmere, and then to walk to Kendal, whither I had sent all my clothes and viatica; from thence to go to London, and to see whether or no I could arrange my pecuniary matters, so as leaving Mrs. Coleridge all that was necessary to her comforts, to go myself to Madeira, having a persuasion, strong as the life within me, that one winter spent in a really warm, genial climate, would completely restore me. Wordsworth had, as I may truly say, forced on me a hundred pounds, in the event of my going to Madeira; and Stuart had kindly offered to befriend me. During the days and affrightful nights of my disease, when my limbs were swollen, and my stomach refused to retain the food--taken in in sorrow, then I looked with pleasure on the scheme: but as soon as dry frosty weather came, or the rains and damps passed off, and I was filled with elastic health, from crown to sole, then the thought of the weight of pecuniary obligation from so many people reconciled me; but I have broken off my story. I stayed at Grasmere (Mr. Wordsworth's) a month; three fourths of the time bed-ridden;--and deeply do I feel the enthusiastic kindness of Wordsworth's wife and sister, who sat up by me, one or the other, in order to awaken me at the first symptoms of distressful feeling; and even when they went to rest, continued often and often to weep and watch for me even in their dreams. I left them January the 14th, and have spent a very pleasant week at Dr. Crompton's, at Liverpool, and arrived in London, at Poole's lodgings, last night at eight o'clock. Though my right hand is so much swollen that I can scarcely keep my pen steady between my thumb and finger, yet my stomach is easy, and my breathing comfortable, and I am eager to hope all good things of my health. That gained, I have a cheering, and I trust prideless confidence that I shall make an active, and perseverant use of the faculties and requirements that have been entrusted to my keeping, and a fair trial of their height, depth, and width. Indeed I look back on the last four months with honest pride, seeing how much I have done, with what steady attachment of mind to the same subject, and under what vexations and sorrows, from without, and amid what incessant sufferings. So much of myself. When I know more, I will tell you more. I find you are still at Cote-house. Poole tells me you talk of Jamaica as a summer excursion. If it were not for the voyage, I would that you would go to Madeira, for from the hour I get on board the vessel, to the time that I once more feel England beneath my feet, I am as certain as past and present experience can make me, that I shall be in health, in high health; and then I am sure, not only that I should be a comfort to you, but that I should be so without diminution of my activity, or professional usefulness. Briefly, dear Wedgwood! I truly and at heart love you, and of course it must add to my deeper and moral happiness to be with you, if I can be either assistance or alleviation. If I find myself so well that I defer my Madeira plan, I shall then go forthwith to Devonshire to see my aged mother, once more before she dies, and stay two or three months with my brothers. But, wherever I am, I never suffer a day, (except when I am travelling) to pass without doing something. Poole made me promise that I would leave one side for him. God bless him! He looks so worshipful in his office, among his clerks, that it would give you a few minutes' good spirits to look in upon him. Pray you as soon as you can command your pen, give me half a score lines, and now that I am loose, say whether or no I can be any good to you. S. T. COLERIDGE. [1] [Footnote 1: Letters CXLIV-CXLVI follow 124.] LETTER 125. TO THOMAS WEDGWOOD 16, Abingdon Street, Westminster, Jan. 28, 1804. My dear friend, It is idle for me to say to you, that my heart and very soul ache with the dull pain of one struck down and stunned. I write to you, for my letter cannot give you unmixed pain, and I would fain say a few words to dissuade you. What good can possibly come of your plan? Will not the very chairs and furniture of your room be shortly more, far more intolerable to you than new and changing objects! more insufferable reflectors of pain and weariness of spirit? Oh, most certainly they will! You must hope, my dearest Wedgwood; you must act as if you hoped. Despair itself has but that advice to give you. Have you ever thought of trying large doses of opium, a hot climate, keeping your body open by grapes, and the fruits of the climate? Is it possible that by drinking freely, you might at last produce the gout, and that a violent pain and inflammation in the extremities might produce new trains of motion and feeling in your stomach, and the organs connected with the stomach, known and unknown? Worse than what you have decreed for yourself cannot well happen. Say but a word and I will come to you, will be with you, will go with you to Malta, to Madeira, to Jamaica, or (if the climate, of which, and its strange effects, I have heard wonders, true or not) to Egypt. At all events, and at the worst even, if you do attempt to realize the scheme of going to and remaining at Gunville, for God's sake, my dear dear friend, do keep up a correspondence with one or more; or if it were possible for you, with several. I know by a little what your sufferings are, and that to shut the eyes, and stop up the ears, is to give one's self up to storm and darkness, and the lurid forms and horrors of a dream. I scarce know why it is; a feeling I have, and which I can hardly understand. I could not endure to live if I had not a firm faith that the life within you will pass forth out of the furnace, for that you have borne what you have borne, and so acted beneath such pressure--constitutes you an awful moral being. I am not ashamed to pray aloud for you. Your most affectionate friend, S. T. COLERIDGE. [1] [Footnote 1: Letters CXLVII-CXLIX follow 125.] These letters on the Pains of Sleep are followed by one to Davy on the non-sympathy of the well with the sick. LETTER 126. TO DAVY Tuesday morning, 7, Barnard's Inn, Holborn. [1] My dear Davy, I trusted my cause last Sunday, I fear, to an unsympathizing agent. To Mr. Tuffin I can scarcely think myself bound to make a direct apology, as my promise was wholly conditional. This I did, not only from general foresight, but from the possibility of hearing from you, that you had not been able to untie your former engagement. To you, therefore, I owe the apology: and on you I expressly and earnestly desired Tobin to call and to explain for me, that I had been in an utterly incompatible state of bodily feeling the whole evening at Mr. Renny's; that I was much hurt by the walk home through the wet; instantly on my return here had an attack in my bowels; that this had not wholly left me, and therefore that I could not come, unless the weather altered. By which I did not mean merely its 'holding up' (though even this it did not do at four o'clock at Barnard's Inn, the sleety rain was still falling, though slightly), but the drying up of the rawness and dampness, which would infallibly have diseased me, before I had reached the Institution--not to mention the effect of sitting a long evening in damp clothes and shoes on an invalid, scarcely recovered from a diarrhoea. I have thought it fit to explain at large, both as a mark of respect to you, and because I have very unjustly acquired a character for breaking engagements, entirely from the non-sympathy of the well with the sick, the robust with the weakly. It must be difficult for most men to conceive the extreme reluctance with which I go at all into 'company', and the unceasing depression which I am struggling up against during the whole time I am in it, which too often makes me drink more 'during dinner' than I ought to do, and as often forces me into efforts of almost obtrusive conversation, 'acting' the opposite of my real state of mind in order to arrive at a medium, as we roll paper the opposite way in order to smoothe it. Be so good as to tell me what hour you expect Mr. Sotheby on Thursday. I am, my dear Davy, with sincere and affectionate esteem, yours ever, S. T. COLERIDGE. [Footnote 1: The twopenny post-mark is that of 6th March, 1804.] Amid these letters, complaining of ill health and full of apologies for broken engagements, Coleridge could write genuine literary criticisms of the first order. The following letter addressed to Sarah Hutchinson is his opinion of Sir Thomas Browne. He had presented her with a copy of 'Religio Medici' with copious annotations (see 'Athenaeum', 30 May 1896, p. 714). LETTER 127. TO SARAH HUTCHINSON March 10th, 1804, Sat. night, 12 o'clock. My dear---- Sir Thomas Browne is among my first favorites, rich in various knowledge, exuberant in conceptions and conceits, contemplative, imaginative; often truly great and magnificent in his style and diction, though doubtless too often big, stiff, and hyperlatinistic: thus I might without admixture of falsehood, describe Sir T. Browne and my description would have only this fault, that it would be equally, or almost equally, applicable to half a dozen other writers, from the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth to the end of Charles II. He is indeed all this; and what he has more than all this peculiar to himself, I seem to convey to my own mind in some measure by saying,--that he is a quiet and sublime enthusiast with a strong tinge of the fantast,--the humourist constantly mingling with, and flashing across, the philosopher, as the darting colours in shot silk play upon the main dye. In short, he has brains in his head which is all the more interesting for a little twist in the brains. He sometimes reminds the reader of Montaigne, but from no other than the general circumstances of an egotism common to both; which in Montaigne is too often a mere amusing gossip, a chit-chat story of whims and peculiarities that lead to nothing,--but which in Sir Thomas Browne is always the result of a feeling heart conjoined with a mind of active curiosity,--the natural and becoming egotism of a man, who, loving other men as himself, gains the habit, and the privilege of talking about himself as familiarly as about other men. Fond of the curious, and a hunter of oddities and strangenesses, while he conceived himself, with quaint and humourous gravity a useful inquirer into physical truth and fundamental science,--he loved to contemplate and discuss his own thoughts and feelings, because he found by comparison with other men's, that they too were curiosities, and so with a perfectly graceful and interesting ease he put them too into his museum and cabinet of varieties. In very truth he was not mistaken:--so completely does he see every thing in a light of his own, reading nature neither by sun, moon, nor candle light, but by the light of the faery glory around his own head; so that you might say that nature had granted to him in perpetuity a patent and monopoly for all his thoughts. Read his "Hydriotaphia" above all:--and in addition to the peculiarity, the exclusive Sir-Thomas-Browne-ness of all the fancies and modes of illustration, wonder at and admire his entireness in every subject, which is before him--he is "totus in illo"; he follows it; he never wanders from it,--and he has no occasion to wander;--for whatever happens to be his subject, he metamorphoses all nature into it. In that "Hydriotaphia" or Treatise on some Urns dug up in Norfolk--how earthy, how redolent of graves and sepulchres is every line! You have now dark mould, now a thigh-bone, now a scull, then a bit of mouldered coffin! a fragment of an old tombstone with moss in its "hic jacet";--a ghost or a winding sheet--or the echo of a funeral psalm wafted on a November wind! and the gayest thing you shall meet with shall be a silver nail or gilt "Anno Domini" from a perished coffin top. The very same remark applies in the same force to the interesting, though the far less interesting, Treatise on the Quincuncial Plantations of the Ancients. There is the same attention to oddities, to the remotenesses and "minutiae" of vegetable terms,--the same entireness of subject. You have quincunxes in heaven above, quincunxes in earth below, and quincunxes in the water beneath the earth; quincunxes in deity, quincunxes in the mind of man, quincunxes in bones, in the optic nerves, in roots of trees, in leaves, in petals, in every thing. In short, first turn to the last leaf of this volume, and read out aloud to yourself the last seven paragraphs of Chap. V. beginning with the words "More considerables," etc. But it is time for me to be in bed, in the words of Sir Thomas, which will serve you, my dear, as a fair specimen of his manner.--"But the quincunx of heaven--(the Hyades or five stars about the horizon at midnight at that time)--runs low, and 'tis time we close the five ports of knowledge: we are unwilling to spin out our waking thoughts into the phantasmes of sleep, which often continueth precogitations,--making tables of cobwebbes, and wildernesses of handsome groves. To keep our eyes open longer were but to act our Antipodes. The huntsmen are up in America, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia." Think you, my dear Friend, that there ever was such a reason given before for going to bed at midnight;--to wit, that if we did not, we should be acting the part of our Antipodes! And then "the huntsmen are up in America."--What life, what fancy!--Does the whimsical knight give us thus a dish of strong green tea, and call it an opiate! I trust that you are quietly asleep-- And that all the stars hang bright above your dwelling, Silent as tho' they watched the sleeping earth! [1] S. T. COLERIDGE. [Footnote 1: From 'Dejection: An Ode', the "Lady" of the later version of which was Sarah Hutchinson. See Knight's 'Life of Wordsworth', ii. 86.] Coleridge now wrote to Tom Wedgwood of his determination to go to Malta. Stoddart, his old friend, had invited him thither. LETTER 128. TO THOMAS WEDGWOOD (24) March, 1804. My dear friend, Though fearful of breaking in upon you after what you have written to me, I could not have left England without having written both to you and your brother, at the very moment I received a note from Sharp, informing me that I must instantly secure a place in the Portsmouth mail for Tuesday, and if I could not, that I must do so in the light coach for Tuesday's early coach. I am agitated by many things, and only write now because you desired an answer by return of post. I have been dangerously ill, but the illness is going about, and not connected with my immediate ill health, however it may be with my general constitution. It was the cholera-morbus. But for a series of the merest accidents I should have been seized in the streets, in a bitter east wind, with cold rain; at all events have walked through it struggling. It was Sunday-night. I have suffered it at Tobin's; Tobin sleeping out at Woolwich. No fire, no wine or spirits, or medicine of any kind, and no person being within call, but luckily, perhaps the occasion would better suit the word providentially, Tuffin, calling, took me home with him. * * * I tremble at every loud sound I myself utter. But this is rather a history of the past than of the present. I have only enough for memento, and already on Wednesday I consider myself in clear sunshine, without the shadow of the wings of the destroying angel. What else relates to myself, I will write on Monday. Would to heaven you were going with me to Malta, if it were but for the voyage! With all other things I could make the passage with an unwavering mind. But without cheerings of hope. Let me mention one thing; Lord Cadogan was brought to absolute despair, and hatred of life, by a stomach complaint, being now an old man. The symptoms, as stated to me, were strikingly like yours, excepting the nervous difference of the two characters; the flittering fever, etc. He was advised to reduce lean beef to a pure jelly, by Papin's digester, with as little water as could secure it from burning, and of this to take half a wine glass 10 or 14 times a day. This and nothing else. He did so. Sir George Beaumont saw, within a few weeks a letter from himself to Lord St. Asaph, in which he relates the circumstance of his perseverence in it, and rapid amelioration, and final recovery. "I am now," he says, "in real good health; as good, and in as cheerful spirits as I ever was when a young man." May God bless you, even here, S. T. COLERIDGE. Before Coleridge left for Malta, Humphry Davy wrote the following beautiful letter to Coleridge, and Coleridge replied in a letter equally beautiful in its self-portraiture. Royal Institution, Twelve o'clock, Monday. My dear Coleridge, My mind is disturbed, and my body harassed by many labours; yet I cannot suffer you to depart, without endeavouring to express to you some of the unbroken and higher feelings of my spirit, which have you at once for their cause and object. Years have passed since we first met; and your presence, and recollections in regard to you, have afforded me continued sources of enjoyment. Some of the better feelings of my nature have been elevated by your converse; and thoughts which you have nursed, have been to me an eternal source of consolation. In whatever part of the world you are, you will often live with me, not as a fleeting idea, but as a recollection possessed of creative energy,--as an imagination winged with fire, inspiring and rejoicing. You must not live much longer without giving to all men the proof of power, which those who know you feel in admiration. Perhaps at a distance from the applauding and censuring murmurs of the world, you will be best able to execute those great works which are justly expected from you: you are to be the historian of the philosophy of feeling. Do not in any way dissipate your noble nature! Do not give up your birthright! May you soon recover perfect health--the health of strength and happiness! May you soon return to us, confirmed in all the powers essential to the exertion of genius. You were born for your country, and your native land must be the scene of your activity. I shall expect the time when your spirit, bursting through the clouds of ill health, will appear to all men, not as an uncertain and brilliant flame, but as a fair and permanent light, fixed, though constantly in motion,--as a sun which gives its fire, not only to its attendant planets, but which sends beams from all its parts into all worlds. May blessings attend you, my dear friend! Do not forget me: we live for different ends, and with different habits and pursuits; but our feelings with regard to each other have, I believe, never altered. They must continue; they can have no natural death; and, I trust, they can never be destroyed by fortune, chance, or accident. H. DAVY. LETTER 129. TO DAVY Sunday, March 25, 1804. My dear Davy, I returned from Mr. Northcote's, having been diseased by the change of weather too grievously to permit me to continue sitting, for in those moods of body brisk motion alone can prevent me from falling into distempered sleep. I came in meditating a letter to you, or rather the writing of the letter, which I had meditated yesterday, even while you were yet sitting with us. But it would be the merest confusion of my mind to force it into activity at present. Yours of this morning must have sunken down first, and must have found its abiding resting-place. O, dear friend! blessed are the moments, and if not moments of "humility", yet as distant from whatever is opposite to humility, as humility itself, when I am able to hope of myself as you have dared hope of and for me. Alas! they are neither many nor of quick recurrence. There "is" a something, an essential something, wanting in me. I feel it, I "know" it--though what it is, I can but guess. I have read somewhere, that in the tropical climates there are annuals as lofty and of as an ample girth as forest trees:--So by a very dim likeness I seem to myself to distinguish Power from Strength--and to have only the former. But of this I will speak again: for if it be no reality, if it be no more than a disease of my mind, it is yet deeply rooted and of long standing, and requires help from one who loves me in the light of knowledge. I have written these lines with a compelled understanding, my feelings otherwhere at work--and I fear, unwell as I am, to indulge my [1] deep emotion, however ennobled or endeared. Dear Davy! I have always loved, always honoured, always had faith in you, in every part of my being that lies below the surface; and whatever changes may have now and then "rippled" even upon the surface, have been only jealousies concerning you in behalf of all men, and fears from exceeding great hope. I cannot be prevented from uttering and manifesting the strongest convictions and best feelings of my nature by the incident, that they of whom I think so highly, esteem me in return, and entertain reciprocal hopes. No! I would to God, I thought it myself even as you think of me, but.... So far had I written, my dear Davy, yesterday afternoon, with all my faculties beclouded, writing mostly about myself--but, Heaven knows! thinking wholly about you. I am too sad, too much dejected to write what I could wish. Of course I shall see you this evening here at a quarter after nine. When I mentioned it to Sir George, "Too late," said he; "no, if it were twelve o'clock, it would be better than his not coming." They are really kind and good [Sir George and Lady Beaumont]. Sir George is a remarkably 'sensible' man, which I mention, because it 'is' somewhat REMARKABLE in a painter of genius, who is at the same time a man of rank and an exceedingly amusing companion. I am still but very indifferent--but that is so old a story that it affects me but little. To see 'you' look so very unwell on Saturday, was a new thing to me, and I want a word something short of affright, and a little beyond anxiety, to express the feeling that haunted me in consequence. I trust that I shall have time, and the greater spirit, to write to you from Portsmouth, a part at least of what is in and upon me in my more genial moments. But always I am and shall be, my dear Davy, with hope, and esteem, and affection, the aggregate of many Davys, Your sincere friend, S. T. COLERIDGE. [2] [Footnote 1: Perhaps "any" is the right word here.] [Footnote 2: Letter CL follows, 129.] 
8489	----	[The Greek transliterations throughout this file are either missing or very suspect.] [Illustration: F. Finden sculp. _London, John Murray, Albernarle St. 1837_] [autographed: Dear Sir, Your obliged servant. S. T. Coleridge] SPECIMENS OF THE TABLE TALK OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. TO JAMES GILLMAN, ESQUIRE, OF THE GROVE, HIGHGATE, AND TO MRS. GILLMAN, This Volume IS GRATEFULLY INSCRIBED. PREFACE. * * * * * It is nearly fifteen years since I was, for the first time, enabled to become a frequent and attentive visitor in Mr. Coleridge's domestic society. His exhibition of intellectual power in living discourse struck me at once as unique and transcendant; and upon my return home, on the very first evening which I spent with him after my boyhood, I committed to writing, as well as I could, the principal topics of his conversation in his own words. I had no settled design at that time of continuing the work, but simply made the note in something like a spirit of vexation that such a strain of music as I had just heard, should not last forever. What I did once, I was easily induced by the same feeling to do again; and when, after many years of affectionate communion between us, the painful existence of my revered relative on earth was at length finished in peace, my occasional notes of what he had said in my presence had grown to a mass, of which this volume contains only such parts as seem fit for present publication. I know, better than any one can tell me, how inadequately these specimens represent the peculiar splendour and individuality of Mr. Coleridge's conversation. How should it be otherwise? Who could always follow to the turning-point his long arrow-flights of thought? Who could fix those ejaculations of light, those tones of a prophet, which at times have made me bend before him as before an inspired man? Such acts of spirit as these were too subtle to be fettered down on paper; they live--if they can live any where--in the memories alone of those who witnessed them. Yet I would fain hope that these pages will prove that all is not lost;--that something of the wisdom, the learning, and the eloquence of a great man's social converse has been snatched from forgetfulness, and endowed with a permanent shape for general use. And although, in the judgment of many persons, I may incur a serious responsibility by this publication; I am, upon the whole, willing to abide the result, in confidence that the fame of the loved and lamented speaker will lose nothing hereby, and that the cause of Truth and of Goodness will be every way a gainer. This sprig, though slight and immature, may yet become its place, in the Poet's wreath of honour, among flowers of graver hue. If the favour shown to several modern instances of works nominally of the same description as the present were alone to be considered, it might seem that the old maxim, that nothing ought to be said of the dead but what is good, is in a fair way of being dilated into an understanding that every thing is good that has been said by the dead. The following pages do not, I trust, stand in need of so much indulgence. Their contents may not, in every particular passage, be of great intrinsic importance; but they can hardly be without some, and, I hope, a worthy, interest, as coming from the lips of one at least of the most extraordinary men of the age; whilst to the best of my knowledge and intention, no living person's name is introduced, whether for praise or for blame, except on literary or political grounds of common notoriety. Upon the justice of the remarks here published, it would be out of place in me to say any thing; and a commentary of that kind is the less needed, as, in almost every instance, the principles upon which the speaker founded his observations are expressly stated, and may be satisfactorily examined by themselves. But, for the purpose of general elucidation, it seemed not improper to add a few notes, and to make some quotations from Mr. Coleridge's own works; and in doing so, I was in addition actuated by an earnest wish to call the attention of reflecting minds in general to the views of political, moral, and religious philosophy contained in those works, which, through an extensive, but now decreasing, prejudice, have hitherto been deprived of that acceptance with the public which their great preponderating merits deserve, and will, as I believe, finally obtain. And I can truly say, that if, in the course of the perusal of this little work, any one of its readers shall gain a clearer insight into the deep and pregnant principles, in the light of which Mr. Coleridge was accustomed to regard God and the World,--I shall look upon the publication as fortunate, and consider myself abundantly rewarded for whatever trouble it has cost me. A cursory inspection will show that this volume lays no claim to be ranked with those of Boswell in point of dramatic interest. Coleridge differed not more from Johnson in every characteristic of intellect, than in the habits and circumstances of his life, during the greatest part of the time in which I was intimately conversant with him. He was naturally very fond of society, and continued to be so to the last; but the almost unceasing ill health with which he was afflicted, after fifty, confined him for many months in every year to his own room, and, most commonly, to his bed. He was then rarely seen except by single visiters; and few of them would feel any disposition upon such occasions to interrupt him, whatever might have been the length or mood of his discourse. And indeed, although I have been present in mixed company, where Mr. Coleridge has been questioned and opposed, and the scene has been amusing for the moment--I own that it was always much more delightful to me to let the river wander at its own sweet will, unruffled by aught but a certain breeze of emotion which the stream itself produced. If the course it took was not the shortest, it was generally the most beautiful; and what you saw by the way was as worthy of note as the ultimate object to which you were journeying. It is possible, indeed, that Coleridge did not, in fact, possess the precise gladiatorial power of Johnson; yet he understood a sword-play of his own; and I have, upon several occasions, seen him exhibit brilliant proofs of its effectiveness upon disputants of considerable pretensions in their particular lines. But he had a genuine dislike of the practice in himself or others, and no slight provocation could move him to any such exertion. He was, indeed, to my observation, more distinguished from other great men of letters by his moral thirst after the Truth--the ideal truth--in his own mind, than by his merely intellectual qualifications. To leave the everyday circle of society, in which the literary and scientific rarely-- the rest never--break through the spell of personality;--where Anecdote reigns everlastingly paramount and exclusive, and the mildest attempt to generalize the Babel of facts, and to control temporary and individual phenomena by the application of eternal and overruling principles, is unintelligible to many, and disagreeable to more;--to leave this species of converse--if converse it deserves to be called--and pass an entire day with Coleridge, was a marvellous change indeed. It was a Sabbath past expression deep, and tranquil, and serene. You came to a man who had travelled in many countries and in critical times; who had seen and felt the world in most of its ranks and in many of its vicissitudes and weaknesses; one to whom all literature and genial 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-drawn summer's day would this man talk to you in low, equable, but clear and musical, tones, concerning things human and divine; marshalling all history, harmonizing all experiment, probing the depths of your consciousness, and revealing visions of glory and of terror to the imagination; but pouring withal such floods of light upon the mind, that you might, for a season, like Paul, become blind in the very act of conversion. And this he would do, without so much as one allusion to himself, without a word of reflection on others, save when any given act fell naturally in the way of his discourse,--without one anecdote that was not proof and illustration of a previous position;--gratifying no passion, indulging no caprice, but, with a calm mastery over your soul, leading you onward and onward for ever through a thousand windings, yet with no pause, to some magnificent point in which, as in a focus, all the party-coloured rays of his discourse should converge in light. In all this he was, in truth, your teacher and guide; but in a little while you might forget that he was other than a fellow student and the companion of your way,--so playful was his manner, so simple his language, so affectionate the glance of his pleasant eye! There were, indeed, some whom Coleridge tired, and some whom he sent asleep. It would occasionally so happen, when the abstruser mood was strong upon him, and the visiter was narrow and ungenial. I have seen him at times when you could not incarnate him,--when he shook aside your petty questions or doubts, and burst with some impatience through the obstacles of common conversation. Then, escaped from the flesh, he would soar upwards into an atmosphere almost too rare to breathe, but which seemed proper to _him_, and there he would float at ease. Like enough, what Coleridge then said, his subtlest listener would not understand as a man understands a newspaper; but upon such a listener there would steal an influence, and an impression, and a sympathy; there would be a gradual attempering of his body and spirit, till his total being vibrated with one pulse alone, and thought became merged in contemplation;-- And so, his senses gradually wrapt In a half sleep, he'd dream of better worlds, And dreaming hear thee still, O singing lark, That sangest like an angel in the clouds! But it would be a great mistake to suppose that the general character of Mr. Coleridge's conversation was abstruse or rhapsodical. The contents of the following pages may, I think, be taken as pretty strong presumptive evidence that his ordinary manner was plain and direct enough; and even when, as sometimes happened, he seemed to ramble from the road, and to lose himself in a wilderness of digressions, the truth was, that at that very time he was working out his fore-known conclusion through an almost miraculous logic, the difficulty of which consisted precisely in the very fact of its minuteness and universality. He took so large a scope, that, if he was interrupted before he got to the end, he appeared to have been talking without an object; although, perhaps, a few steps more would have brought you to a point, a retrospect from which would show you the pertinence of all he had been saying. I have heard persons complain that they could get no answer to a question from Coleridge. The truth is, he answered, or meant to answer, so fully that the querist should have no second question to ask. In nine cases out of ten he saw the question was short or misdirected; and knew that a mere _yes_ or _no_ answer could not embrace the truth--that is, the whole truth--and might, very probably, by implication, convey error. Hence that exhaustive, cyclical mode of discoursing in which he frequently indulged; unfit, indeed, for a dinner- table, and too long-breathed for the patience of a chance visiter,--but which, to those who knew for what they came, was the object of their profoundest admiration, as it was the source of their most valuable instruction. Mr. Coleridge's affectionate disciples learned their lessons of philosophy and criticism from his own mouth. He was to them as an old master of the Academy or Lyceum. The more time he took, the better pleased were such visiters; for they came expressly to listen, and had ample proof how truly he had declared, that whatever difficulties he might feel, with pen in hand, in the expression of his meaning, he never found the smallest hitch or impediment in the utterance of his most subtle reasonings by word of mouth. How many a time and oft have I felt his abtrusest thoughts steal rhythmically on my soul, when chanted forth by him! Nay, how often have I fancied I heard rise up in answer to his gentle touch, an interpreting music of my own, as from the passive strings of some wind-smitten lyre! Mr. Coleridge's conversation at all times required attention, because what he said was so individual and unexpected. But when he was dealing deeply with a question, the demand upon the intellect of the hearer was very great; not so much for any hardness of language, for his diction was always simple and easy; nor for the abstruseness of the thoughts, for they generally explained, or appeared to explain, themselves; but preeminently on account of the seeming remoteness of his associations, and the exceeding subtlety of his transitional links. Upon this point it is very happily, though, according to my observation, too generally, remarked, by one whose powers and opportunities of judging were so eminent that the obliquity of his testimony in other respects is the more unpardonable;--"Coleridge, to many people--and often I have heard the complaint--seemed to wander; and he seemed then 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 moved, travelled 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 to admire the separate beauty of the thoughts, but did not see their relations to the dominant theme. * * * * However, I can assert, upon my long and intimate knowledge of Coleridge's mind, that logic the most severe was as inalienable from his modes of thinking, as grammar from his language." [Footnote: Tait's Mag. Sept. 1834, p. 514.] True: his mind was a logic-vice; let him fasten it on the tiniest flourish of an error, he never slacked his hold, till he had crushed body and tail to dust. He was _always_ ratiocinating in his own mind, and therefore sometimes seemed incoherent to the partial observer. It happened to him as to Pindar, who in modern days has been called a rambling rhapsodist, because the connections of his parts, though never arbitrary, are so fine that the vulgar reader sees them not at all. But they are there nevertheless, and may all be so distinctly shown, that no one can doubt their existence; and a little study will also prove that the points of contact are those which the true genius of lyric verse naturally evolved, and that the entire Pindaric ode, instead of being the loose and lawless out-burst which so many have fancied, is, without any exception, the most artificial and highly wrought composition which Time has spared to us from the wreck of the Greek Muse. So I can well remember occasions, in which, after listening to Mr. Coleridge for several delightful hours, I have gone away with divers splendid masses of reasoning in my head, the separate beauty and coherency of which I deeply felt, but how they had produced, or how they bore upon, each other, I could not then perceive. In such cases I have mused sometimes even for days afterwards upon the words, till at length, spontaneously as it seemed, "the fire would kindle," and the association, which had escaped my utmost efforts of comprehension before, flash itself all at once upon my mind with the clearness of noon-day light. It may well be imagined that a style of conversation so continuous and diffused as that which I have just attempted to describe, presented remarkable difficulties to a mere reporter by memory. It is easy to preserve the pithy remark, the brilliant retort, or the pointed anecdote; these stick of themselves, and their retention requires no effort of mind. But where the salient angles are comparatively few, and the object of attention is a long-drawn subtle discoursing, you can never recollect, except by yourself thinking the argument over again. In so doing, the order and the characteristic expressions will for the most part spontaneously arise; and it is scarcely credible with what degree of accuracy language may thus be preserved, where practice has given some dexterity, and long familiarity with the speaker has enabled, or almost forced, you to catch the outlines of his manner. Yet with all this, so peculiar were the flow and breadth of Mr. Coleridge's conversation, that I am very sensible how much those who can best judge will have to complain of my representation of it. The following specimens will, I fear, seem too fragmentary, and therefore deficient in one of the most distinguishing properties of that which they are designed to represent; and this is true. Yet the reader will in most instances have little difficulty in understanding the course which the conversation took, although my recollections of it are thrown into separate paragraphs for the sake of superior precision. As I never attempted to give dialogue--indeed, there was seldom much dialogue to give --the great point with me was to condense what I could remember on each particular topic into intelligible _wholes_ with as little injury to the living manner and diction as was possible. With this explanation, I must leave it to those who still have the tones of "that old man eloquent" ringing in their ears, to say how far I have succeeded in this delicate enterprise of stamping his winged words with perpetuity. In reviewing the contents of the following pages, I can clearly see that I have admitted some passages which will be pronounced illiberal by those who, in the present day, emphatically call themselves liberal--_the_ liberal. I allude of course to Mr. Coleridge's remarks on the Reform Bill and the Malthusian economists. The omission of such passages would probably have rendered this publication more generally agreeable, and my disposition does not lead me to give gratuitous offence to any one. But the opinions of Mr. Coleridge on these subjects, however imperfectly expressed by me, were deliberately entertained by him; and to have omitted, in so miscellaneous a collection as this, what he was well known to have said, would have argued in me a disapprobation or a fear, which I disclaim. A few words, however, may be pertinently employed here in explaining the true bearing of Coleridge's mind on the politics of our modern days. He was neither a Whig nor a Tory, as those designations are usually understood; well enough knowing that, for the most part, half-truths only are involved in the Parliamentary tenets of one party or the other. In the common struggles of a session, therefore, he took little interest; and as to mere personal sympathies, the friend of Frere and of Poole, the respected guest of Canning and of Lord Lansdowne, could have nothing to choose. But he threw the weight of his opinion--and it was considerable--into the Tory or Conservative scale, for these two reasons:--First, generally, because he had a deep conviction that the cause of freedom and of truth is now seriously menaced by a democratical spirit, growing more and more rabid every day, and giving no doubtful promise of the tyranny to come; and secondly, in particular, because the national Church was to him the ark of the covenant of his beloved country, and he saw the Whigs about to coalesce with those whose avowed principles lead them to lay the hand of spoliation upon it. Add to these two grounds, some relics of the indignation which the efforts of the Whigs to thwart the generous exertions of England in the great Spanish war had formerly roused within him; and all the constituents of any active feeling in Mr. Coleridge's mind upon matters of state are, I believe, fairly laid before the reader. The Reform question in itself gave him little concern, except as he foresaw the present attack on the Church to be the immediate consequence of the passing of the Bill; "for let the form of the House of Commons," said he, "be what it may, it will be, for better or for worse, pretty much what the country at large is; but once invade that truly national and essentially popular institution, the Church, and divert its funds to the relief or aid of individual charity or public taxation--how specious soever that pretext may be--and you will never thereafter recover the lost means of perpetual cultivation. Give back to the Church what the nation originally consecrated to its use, and it ought then to be charged with the education of the people; but half of the original revenue has been already taken by force from her, or lost to her through desuetude, legal decision, or public opinion; and are those whose very houses and parks are part and parcel of what the nation designed for the general purposes of the Clergy, to be heard, when they argue for making the Church support, out of her diminished revenues, institutions, the intended means for maintaining which they themselves hold under the sanction of legal robbery?" Upon this subject Mr. Coleridge did indeed feel very warmly, and was accustomed to express himself accordingly. It weighed upon his mind night and day, and he spoke upon it with an emotion, which I never saw him betray upon any topic of common politics, however decided his opinion might be. In this, therefore, he was _felix opportunitate mortis; non enim vidit_----; and the just and honest of all parties will heartily admit over his grave, that as his principles and opinions were untainted by any sordid interest, so he maintained them in the purest spirit of a reflective patriotism, without spleen, or bitterness, or breach of social union. It would require a rare pen to do justice to the constitution of Coleridge's mind. It was too deep, subtle, and peculiar, to be fathomed by a morning visiter. Few persons knew much of it in any thing below the surface; scarcely three or four ever got to understand it in all its marvellous completeness. Mere personal familiarity with this extraordinary man did not put you in possession of him; his pursuits and aspirations, though in their mighty range presenting points of contact and sympathy for all, transcended in their ultimate reach the extremest limits of most men's imaginations. For the last thirty years of his life, at least, Coleridge was really and truly a philosopher of the antique cast. He had his esoteric views; and all his prose works from the "Friend" to the "Church and State" were little more than feelers, pioneers, disciplinants for the last and complete exposition of them. Of the art of making hooks he knew little, and cared less; but had he been as much an adept in it as a modern novelist, he never could have succeeded in rendering popular or even tolerable, at first, his attempt to push Locke and Paley from their common throne in England. A little more working in the trenches might have brought him closer to the walls with less personal damage; but it is better for Christian philosophy as it is, though the assailant was sacrificed in the bold and artless attack. Mr. Coleridge's prose works had so very limited a sale, that although published in a technical sense, they could scarcely be said to have ever become _publici juris_. He did not think them such himself, with the exception, perhaps, of the "Aids to Reflection," and generally made a particular remark if he met any person who professed or showed that he had read the "Friend" or any of his other books. And I have no doubt that had he lived to complete his great work on "Philosophy reconciled with Christian Religion," he would without scruple have used in that work any part or parts of his preliminary treatises, as their intrinsic fitness required. Hence in every one of his prose writings there are repetitions, either literal or substantial, of passages to be found in some others of those writings; and there are several particular positions and reasonings, which he considered of vital importance, reiterated in the "Friend," the "Literary Life," the "Lay Sermons," the "Aids to Reflection," and the "Church and State." He was always deepening and widening the foundation, and cared not how often he used the same stone. In thinking passionately of the principle, he forgot the authorship--and sowed beside many waters, if peradventure some chance seedling might take root and bear fruit to the glory of God and the spiritualization of Man. His mere reading was immense, and the quality and direction of much of it well considered, almost unique in this age of the world. He had gone through most of the Fathers, and, I believe, all the Schoolmen of any eminence; whilst his familiarity with all the more common departments of literature in every language is notorious. The early age at which some of these acquisitions were made, and his ardent self-abandonment in the strange pursuit, might, according to a common notion, have seemed adverse to increase and maturity of power in after life: yet it was not so; he lost, indeed, for ever the chance of being a popular writer; but Lamb's _inspired charity-boy_ of twelve years of age continued to his dying day, when sixty-two, the eloquent centre of all companies, and the standard of intellectual greatness to hundreds of affectionate disciples far and near. Had Coleridge been master of his genius, and not, alas! mastered by it;-- had he less romantically fought a single-handed fight against the whole prejudices of his age, nor so mercilessly racked his fine powers on the problem of a universal Christian philosophy,--he might have easily won all that a reading public can give to a favourite, and have left a name--not greater nor more enduring indeed--but--better known, and more prized, than now it is, amongst the wise, the gentle, and the good, throughout all ranks of society. Nevertheless, desultory as his labours, fragmentary as his productions at present may seem to the cursory observer--my undoubting belief is, that in the end it will be found that Coleridge did, in his vocation, the day's work of a giant. He has been melted into the very heart of the rising literatures of England and America; and the principles he has taught are the master-light of the moral and intellectual being of men, who, if they shall fail to save, will assuredly illustrate and condemn, the age in which they live. As it is, they 'bide their time. Coleridge himself--blessings on his gentle memory!--Coleridge was a frail mortal. He had indeed his peculiar weaknesses as well as his unique powers; sensibilities that an averted look would rack, a heart which would have beaten calmly in the tremblings of an earthquake. He shrank from mere uneasiness like a child, and bore the preparatory agonies of his death- attack like a martyr. Sinned against a thousand times more than sinning, he himself suffered an almost life-long punishment for his errors, whilst the world at large has the unwithering fruits of his labours, his genius, and his sacrifice. _Necesse est tanquam immaturam mortem ejus defleam; si tamen fas est aut flere, aut omnino mortem vocare, qua tanti viri mortalitas magis finita quam vita est. Vivit enim, vivetque semper, atque etiam latius in memoria hominum et sermone versabitur, postquam ab oculis recessit._ * * * * * Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the youngest child of the Reverend John Coleridge, Vicar of the Parish of Ottery St. Mary, in the county of Devon, and master of Henry the Eighth's Free Grammar School in that town. His mother's maiden name was Ann Bowdon. He was born at Ottery on the 21st of October, 1772, "about eleven o'clock in the forenoon," as his father the vicar has, with rather a curious particularity, entered it in the register. He died on the 25th of July, 1834, in Mr. Gillman's house, in the Grove, Highgate, and is buried in the old church-yard, by the road side. [Greek: ----] H. N. C. CONTENTS * * * * * Character of Othello Schiller's Robbers Shakspeare Scotch Novels Lord Byron John Kemble Mathews Parliamentary Privilege Permanency and Progression of Nations Kant's Races of Mankind Materialism Ghosts Character of the Age for Logic Plato and Xenophon Greek Drama Kotzebue Burke St. John's Gospel Christianity Epistle to the Hebrews The Logos Reason and Understanding Kean Sir James Mackintosh Sir H. Davy Robert Smith Canning National Debt Poor Laws Conduct of the Whigs Reform of the House of Commons Church of Rome Zendavesta Pantheism and Idolatry Difference between Stories of Dreams and Ghosts Phantom Portrait Witch of Endor Socinianism Plato and Xenophon Religions of the Greeks Egyptian Antiquities Milton Virgil Granville Penn and the Deluge Rainbow English and Greek Dancing Greek Acoustics Lord Byron's Versification and Don Juan Parental Control in Marriage Marriage of Cousins Differences of Character Blumenbach and Kant's Races Iapetic and Semitic Hebrew Solomon Jewish History Spinozistic and Hebrew Schemes Roman Catholics Energy of Man and other Animals Shakspeare _in minimis_ Paul Sarpi Bartram's Travels The Understanding Parts of Speech Grammar Magnetism Electricity Galvanism Spenser Character of Othello Hamlet Polonius Principles and Maxims Love Measure for Measure Ben Jonson Beaumont and Fletcher Version of the Bible Craniology Spurzheim Bull and Waterland The Trinity Scale of Animal Being Popedom Scanderbeg Thomas à Becket Pure Ages of Greek, Italian, and English Luther Baxter Algernon Sidney's Style Ariosto and Tasso Prose and Poetry The Fathers Rhenferd Jacob Behmen Non-perception of Colours Restoration Reformation William III. Berkeley Spinosa Genius Envy Love Jeremy Taylor Hooker Ideas Knowledge Painting Prophecies of the Old Testament Messiah Jews The Trinity Conversion of the Jews Jews in Poland Mosaic Miracles Pantheism Poetic Promise Nominalists and Realists British Schoolmen Spinosa Fall of Man Madness Brown and Darwin Nitrous Oxide Plants Insects Men Dog Ant and Bee Black, Colonel Holland and the Dutch Religion Gentilizes Women and Men Biblical Commentators Walkerite Creed Horne Tooke Diversions of Purley Gender of the Sun in German Horne Tooke Jacobins Persian and Arabic Poetry Milesian Tales Sir T. Monro Sir S. Raffles Canning Shakspeare Milton Homer Reason and Understanding Words and Names of Things The Trinity Irving Abraham Isaac Jacob Origin of Acts Love Lord Eldon's Doctrine as to Grammar Schools Democracy The Eucharist St. John, xix. 11. Divinity of Christ Genuineness of Books of Moses Mosaic Prophecies Talent and Genius Motives and Impulses Constitutional and functional Life Hysteria Hydro-carbonic Gas Bitters and Tonics Specific Medicines Epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians Oaths Flogging Eloquence of Abuse The Americans Book of Job Translation of the Psalms Ancient Mariner Undine Martin Pilgrim's Progress Prayer Church-singing Hooker Dreams Jeremy Taylor English Reformation Catholicity Gnosis Tertullian St. John Principles of a Review Party Spirit Southey's Life of Bunyan Laud Puritans and Cavaliers Presbyterians, Independents, and Bishops Study of the Bible Rabelais Swift Bentley Burnet Giotto Painting Seneca Plato Aristotle Duke of Wellington Monied Interest Canning Bourrienne Jews The Papacy and the Reformation Leo X. Thelwall Swift Stella Iniquitous Legislation Spurzheim and Craniology French Revolution, 1830 Captain B. Hall and the Americans English Reformation Democracy Idea of a State Church Government French Gendarmerie Philosophy of young Men at the present Day Thucydides and Tacitus Poetry Modern Metre Logic Varro Socrates Greek Philosophy Plotinus Tertullian Scotch and English Lakes Love and Friendship opposed Marriage Characterlessness of Women Mental Anarchy Ear and Taste for Music different English Liturgy Belgian Revolution Galileo, Newton, Kepler, Bacon The Reformation House of Commons Government Earl Grey Government Popular Representation Napier Buonaparte Southey Patronage of the Fine Arts Old Women Pictures Chillingworth Superstition of Maltese, Sicilians, and Italians Asgill The French The Good and the True Romish Religion England and Holland Iron Galvanism Heat National Colonial Character, and Naval Discipline England Holland and Belgium Greatest Happiness Principle Hobbism The Two Modes of Political Action Truths and Maxims Drayton and Daniel Mr. Coleridge's System of Philosophy Keenness and Subtlety Duties and Needs of an Advocate Abolition of the French Hereditary Peerage Conduct of Ministers on the Reform Bill Religion Union with Ireland Irish Church A State Persons and Things History Beauty Genius Church State Dissenters Gracefulness of Children Dogs Ideal Tory and Whig The Church Ministers and the Reform Bill Disfranchisement Genius feminine Pirates Astrology Alchemy Reform Bill Crisis John, Chap. III. Ver. 4. Dictation and Inspiration Gnosis New Testament Canon Unitarianism--Moral Philosophy Moral Law of Polarity Epidemic Disease Quarantine Harmony Intellectual Revolutions Modern Style Genius of the Spanish and Italians Vico Spinosa Colours Destruction of Jerusalem Epic Poem Vox Populi Vox Dei Black Asgill and Defoe Horne Tooke Fox and Pitt Horner Adiaphori Citizens and Christians Professor Park English Constitution Democracy Milton and Sidney De Vi Minimorum Hahnemann Luther Sympathy of old Greek and Latin with English Roman Mind War Charm for Cramp Greek Dual, neuter pleural *sic*, and verb singular Theta Talented Homer Valcknaer Principles and Facts Schmidt Puritans and Jacobins Wordsworth French Revolution Infant Schools Mr. Coleridge's Philosophy Sublimity Solomon Madness C. Lamb Faith and Belief Dobrizhoffer Scotch and English Criterion of Genius Dryden and Pope Milton's disregard of Painting Baptismal Service Jews' Division of the Scripture Sanskrit Hesiod Virgil Genius Metaphysical Don Quixote Steinmetz Keats Christ's Hospital Bowyer St. Paul's Melita English and German Best State of Society Great Minds Androgynous Philosopher's Ordinary Language Juries Barristers' and Physicians' Fees Quacks Cæsarean Operation Inherited Disease Mason's Poetry Northern and Southern States of the American Union All and the Whole Ninth Article Sin and Sins Old Divines Preaching extempore Church of England Union with Ireland Faust Michael Scott, Goethe, Schiller, and Wordsworth Beaumont and Fletcher Ben Jonson Massinger House of Commons appointing the officers of the Army and Navy Penal Code in Ireland Churchmen Coronation Oaths Divinity Professions and Trades Modern Political Economy National Debt Property Tax Duty of Landholders Massinger Shakspeare Hieronimo Love's Labour Lost Gifford's Massinger Shakspeare The Old Dramatists Statesmen Burke Prospect of Monarchy or Democracy The Reformed House of Commons United States of America Captain B. Hall Northern and Southern States Democracy with Slavery Quakers Land and Money Methods of Investigation Church of Rome Celibacy of the Clergy Roman Conquest of Italy Wedded Love in Shakspeare and his Contemporary Dramatists Tennyson's Poems Rabelais and Luther Wit and Madness Colonization Machinery Capital Roman Conquest Constantine Papacy and the Schoolmen Civil War of the Seventeenth Century Hampden's Speech Reformed House of Commons Food Medicine Poison Obstruction Wilson Shakspeare's Sonnets Wickliffe Love Luther Reverence for Ideal Truths Johnson the Whig Asgill James I. Sir P. Sidney Things are finding their Level German Goethe God's Providence Man's Freedom Dom Miguel and Dom Pedro Working to better one's condition Negro Emancipation Fox and Pitt Revolution Virtue and Liberty Epistle to the Romans Erasmus Luther Negro Emancipation Hackett's Life of Archbishop Williams Charles I. Manners under Edward III. Richard II. and Henry VIII. Hypothesis Suffiction Theory Lyell's Geology Gothic Architecture Gerard's Douw's "Schoolmaster" and Titian's "Venus" Sir J. Scarlett Mandeville's Fable of the Bees Bestial Theory Character of Bertram Beaumont and Fletcher's Dramas Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides Milton Style Cavalier Slang Junius Prose and Verse Imitation and Copy Dr. Johnson Boswell Burke Newton Milton Painting Music Poetry Public Schools Scott and Coleridge Nervous Weakness Hooker and Bull Faith Quakers Philanthropists Jews Sallust Thucydides Herodotus Gibbon Key to the Decline of the Roman Empire Dr. Johnson's Political Pamphlets Taxation Direct Representation Universal Suffrage Right of Women to vote Horne Tooke Etymology of the final _Ive_ "The Lord" in the English Version of the Psalms, etc. Scotch Kirk and Irving Milton's Egotism Claudian Sterne Humour and Genius Great Poets good Men Diction of the Old and New Testament Version Hebrew Vowels and Consonants Greek Accent and Quantity Consolation in Distress Mock Evangelicals Autumn Day Rosetti on Dante Laughter: Farce and Tragedy Baron Von Humboldt Modern Diplomatists Man cannot be stationary Fatalism and Providence Characteristic Temperament of Nations Greek Particles Latin Compounds Propertius Tibullus Lucan Statius Valerius Flaccus Claudian Persius Prudentius Hermesianax Destruction of Jerusalem Epic Poem German and English Paradise Lost Modern Travels The Trinity Incarnation Redemption Education Elegy Lavacrum Pallados Greek and Latin Pentameter Milton's Latin Poems Poetical Filter Gray and Cotton Homeric Heroes in Shakspeare Dryden Dr. Johnson Scott's Novels Scope of Christianity Times of Charles I. Messenger of the Covenant Prophecy Logic of Ideas and of Syllogisms W. S. Lander's Poetry Beauty Chronological Arrangement of Works Toleration Norwegians Articles of Faith Modern Quakerism Devotional Spirit Sectarianism Origen Some Men like Musical Glasses Sublime and Nonsense Atheist Proof of Existence of God Kant's attempt Plurality of Worlds A Reasoner Shakspeare's Intellectual Action Crabbe and Southey Peter Simple and Tom Cringle's Log Chaucer Shakspeare Ben Jonson Beaumont and Fletcher Daniel Massinger Lord Byron and H. Walpole's "Mysterious Mother" Lewis's Jamaica Journal Sicily Malta Sir Alexander Ball Cambridge Petition to admit Dissenters Corn Laws Christian Sabbath High Prizes and Revenues of the Church Sir Charles Wetherell's Speech National Church Dissenters Papacy Universities Schiller's Versification German Blank Verse Roman Catholic Emancipation Duke of Wellington Coronation Oath Corn Laws Modern Political Economy Socinianism Unitarianism Fancy and Imagination Mr. Coleridge's System Biographia Literaria Dissenters Lord Brooke Barrow and Dryden Peter Wilkins and Stothard Fielding and Richardson Bishop Sandford Roman Catholic Religion Euthanasia Recollections, by Mr. Justice Coleridge Address to a God-child TABLE TALK December 29, 1822 CHARACTER OF OTHELLO--SCHILLER'S ROBBERS-SHAKSPEARE --SCOTCH NOVELS--LORD BYRON--JOHN KEMMBLE--MATHEWS Othello must not be conceived as a negro, but a high and chivalrous Moorish chief. Shakspeare learned the sprit of the character from the Spanish poetry, which was prevalent in England in his time.[1] Jelousy does not strike me as the point in his passion; I take it to be rather an agony that the creature, whom he had believed angelic, with whom he had garnered up his heart, and whom he could not help still loving, should be proved impure and worthless. It was the struggle _not_ to love her. It was a moral indignation and regret that virture should so fall:--"But yet the _pity_ of it, Iago!--O Iago! the _pity_ of it, Iago!" In addition to this, his hourour was concerned: Iago would not have succeeded but by hinting that this honour was compromised. There is no ferocity in Othello; his mind is majestic and composed. He deliberately determines to die; and speaks his last speech with a view of showing his attachment to the Venetian state, though it had superseded him. [Footnote 1: Caballaeros Granadinos, Aunque Moros, hijos d'algo--ED.] * * * * * Schiller has the material Sublime; to produce an effect he sets you a whole town on fire, and throws infants with their mothers into the flames, or locks up a father in an old tower.[1] But Shakspeare drops a handkerchief, and the same or greater effects follow. [Footnote 1: This expression--"material sublime"--like a hundred others which have slipped into general use, came originally from Mr. Coleridege, and was by him, in the first instatnce, applied to Schiller's Robbers-- See Act iv, sc. 5.--ED.] Lear is the most tremendous effort of Shakspeare as a poet; Hamlet as a philosopher or meditater; and Othello is the union of the two. There is something gigantic and unformed in the former two; but in the latter, every thing assumes its due place and proportion, and the whole mature powers of his mind are displayed in admirable equilibrium. I think Old Mortality and Guy Mannering the best of the Scotch novels. It seems, to my ear, that there is a sad want of harmony in Lord Byron's verses. Is it not unnatural to be always connecting very great intellectual power with utter depravity? Does such a combination often really exist in rerum naturae? I always had a great liking--I may say, a sort of nondescript reverence-- for John Kemble. What a quaint creature he was! I remember a party, in which he was discoursing in his measured manner after dinner, when the servant announced his carriage. He nodded, and went on. The announcement took place twice afterwards; Kemble each time nodding his head a little more impatiently, but still going on. At last, and for the fourth time, the servant entered, and said,--"Mrs. Kemble says, sir, she has the rheumat_ise_, and cannot stay." "Add_ism!_" dropped John, in a parenthesis, and proceeded quietly in his harangue. * * * * * Kemble would correct any body, at any time, and in any place. Dear Charles Mathews--a true genius in his line, in my judgment--told me he was once performing privately before the King. The King was much pleased with the imitation of Kemble, and said,--"I liked Kemble very much. He was one of my earliest friends. I remember once he was talking, and found himself out of snuff. I offered him my box. He declined taking any--'he, a poor actor, could not put his fingers into a royal box.' I said, 'Take some, pray; you will obl_ee_ge me.' Upon which Kemble replied,--'It would become your royal mouth better to say, obl_i_ge me;' and took a pinch." * * * * * It is not easy to put me out of countenance, or interrupt the feeling of the time by mere external noise or circumstance; yet once I was thoroughly _done up_, as you would say. I was reciting, at a particular house, the "Remorse;" and was in the midst of Alhadra's description of the death of her husband, [1] when a scrubby boy, with a shining face set in dirt, burst open the door and cried out,--"Please, ma'am, master says, Will you ha'; or will you _not_ ha', the pin-round?" [Footnote 1: "ALHADRA. This night your chieftain arm'd himself, And hurried from me. But I follow'd him At distance, till I saw him enter _there_! NAOMI. The cavern? ALHADRA. Yes, the mouth of yonder cavern. After a while I saw the son of Valdez Rush by with flaring torch: he likewise enter'd. There was another and a longer pause; And once, methought, I heard the clash of swords! And soon the son of Valdez re-appear'd: He flung his torch towards the moon in sport, And seem'd as he were mirthful! I stood listening, Impatient for the footsteps of my husband. NAOMI. Thou calledst him? ALHADRA. I crept into the cavern-- 'Twas dark and very silent. What saidst thou? No! No! I did not dare call Isidore, Lest I should hear no answer! A brief while, Belike, I lost all thought and memory Of that for which I came! After that pause, O Heaven! I heard a groan, and follow'd it; And yet another groan, which guided me Into a strange recess--and there was light, A hideous light! his torch lay on the ground; Its flame burnt dimly o'er a chasm's brink: I spake; and whilst I spake, a feeble groan Came from that chasm! it was his last--his death-groan! NAOMI. Comfort her, Allah! ALHADRA. I stood in unimaginable trance And agony that cannot be remember'd, Listening with horrid hope to hear a groan! But I had heard his last;--my husband's death-groan! NAOMI. Haste! let us onward! ALHADRA. I look'd far down the pit-- My sight was bounded by a jutting fragment; And it was stain'd with blood. Then first I shriek'd; My eyeballs burnt, my brain grew hot as fire, And all the hanging drops of the wet roof Turn'd into blood--I saw them turn to blood! And I was leaping wildly down the chasm, When on the further brink I saw his sword, And it said, Vengeance!--Curses on my tongue! The moon hath moved in heaven, and I am here, And he hath not had vengeance!--Isidore! Spirit of Isidore, thy murderer lives! Away, away!"--Act iv. sc. 3.] _January_ 1. 1823. PARLIAMENTARY PRIVILEGE.---PERMANENCY AND PROGRESSION OF NATIONS.--KANT'S RACES OF MANKIND. Privilege is a substitution for Law, where, from the nature of the circumstances, a law cannot act without clashing with greater and more general principles. The House of Commons must, of course, have the power of taking cognizance of offences against its own rights. Sir Francis Burdett might have been properly sent to the Tower for the speech he made in the House [1]; but when afterwards he published it in Cobbett, and they took cognizance of it as a breach of privilege, they violated the plain distinction between privilege and law. As a speech in the House, the House could alone animadvert upon it, consistently with the effective preservation of its most necessary prerogative of freedom of debate; but when that speech became a book, then the law was to look to it; and there being a law of libel, commensurate with every possible object of attack in the state, privilege, which acts, or ought to act, only as a substitute for other laws, could have nothing to do with it. I have heard that one distinguished individual said,--"That he, for one, would not shrink from affirming, that if the House of Commons chose to _burn_ one of their own members in Palace Yard, it had an inherent power and right by the constitution to do so." This was said, if at all, by a moderate-minded man; and may show to what atrocious tyranny some persons may advance in theory, under shadow of this word privilege. [Footnote 1: March 12. 1810. Sir Francis Burdett made a motion in the House of Commons for the discharge of Mr. Gale Jones, who had been committed to Newgate by a resolution of the House on the 21st of February preceding. Sir Francis afterwards published, in Cobbett's Political Register, of the 24th of the same month of March, a "Letter to his Constituents, denying the power of the House of Commons to imprison the people of England," and he accompanied the letter with an argument in support of his position. On the 27th of March a complaint of breach of privilege, founded on this publication, was made in the House by Mr. (now Sir Thomas) Lethbridge, and after several long debates, a motion that Sir Francis Burdett should be committed to the Tower was made on the 5th of April, 1810, by Sir Robert Salisbury, and carried by a majority of 38.--ED.] * * * * * There are two principles in every European and Christian state: Permanency and Progression.[1] In the civil wars of the seventeenth century in England, which are as new and fresh now as they were a hundred and sixty years ago, and will be so for ever to us, these two principles came to a struggle. It was natural that the great and the good of the nation should he found in the ranks of either side. In the Mohammedan states, there is no principle of permanence; and, therefore, they sink directly. They existed, and could only exist, in their efforts at progression; when they ceased to conquer, they fell in pieces. Turkey would long since have fallen, had it not been supported by the rival and conflicting interests of Christian Europe. The Turks have no church; religion and state are one; hence there is no counterpoise, no mutual support. This is the very essence of their Unitarianism. They have no past; they are not an historical people; they exist only in the present. China is an instance of a permanency without progression. The Persians are a superior race: they have a history and a literature; they were always considered by the Greeks as quite distinct from the other barbarians. The Afghans are a remarkable people. They have a sort of republic. Europeans and Orientalists may be well represented by two figures standing back to back: the latter looking to the east, that is, backwards; the former looking westward, or forwards. [Footnote 1: See this position stated and illustrated in detail in Mr. Coleridge's work, "On the Constitution of the Church and State, according to the Idea of each," p. 21. 2d edit. 1830. Well acquainted as I am with the fact f the comparatively small acceptation which Mr. Coleridge's prose works have ever found in the literary world, and with the reasons, and, what is more, with the causes, of it, I still wonder that this particular treatise has not been more noticed: first, because it is a little book; secondly, because it is, or at least nineteen-twentieths of it are, written in a popular style; and thirdly, because it is the only work, that I know or have ever heard mentioned, that even attempts a solution of the difficulty in which an ingenious enemy of the church of England may easily involve most of its modern defenders in Parliament, or through the press, upon their own principles and admissions. Mr. Coleridge himself prized this little work highly, although he admitted its incompleteness as a composition:--"But I don't care a rush about it," he said to me, "as an author. The saving distinctions are plainly stated in it, and I am sure nothing is wanted to make them _tell_, but that some kind friend should steal them from their obscure hiding-place, and just tumble them down before the public as _his own_."--ED.] * * * * * Kant assigns three great races of mankind. If two individuals of distinct races cross, a third, or _tertium aliquid_, is _invariably_ produced, different from either, as a white and a negro produce a mulatto. But when different varieties of the same race cross, the offspring is according to what we call chance; it is now like one, now like the other parent. Note this, when you see the children of any couple of distinct European complexions,--as English and Spanish, German and Italian, Russian and Portuguese, and so on. _January_ 3. 1823. MATERIALISM.--GHOSTS. Either we have an immortal soul, or we have not. If we have not, we are beasts; the first and wisest of beasts, it may be; but still true beasts. [1] We shall only differ in degree, and not in kind; just as the elephant differs from the slug. But by the concession of all the materialists of all the schools, or almost all, we are not of the same kind as beasts--and this also we say from our own consciousness. Therefore, methinks, it must be the possession of a soul within us that makes the difference. [Footnote 1: "Try to conceive a _man_ without the ideas of God, eternity, freedom, will, absolute truth; of the good, the true, the beautiful, the infinite. An _animal_ endowed with a memory of appearances and facts might remain. But the _man_ will have vanished, and you have instead a creature more subtle than any beast of the field, but likewise cursed above every beast of the field; upon the belly must it go, and dust must it eat all the days of its life."--_Church and State_, p. 54. n.] * * * * * Read the first chapter of Genesis without prejudice, and you will be convinced at once. After the narrative of the creation of the earth and brute animals, Moses seems to pause, and says:--"And God said, Let us make man in _our image_, after _our likeness_." And in the next chapter, he repeats the narrative:--"And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life;" and then he adds these words,--"_and man became a living soul_." Materialism will never explain those last words. * * * * * Define a vulgar ghost with reference to all that is called ghost-like. It is visibility without tangibility; which is also the definition of a shadow. Therefore, a vulgar ghost and a shadow would be the same; because two different things cannot properly have the same definition. A _visible substance_ without susceptibility of impact, I maintain to be an absurdity. Unless there be an external substance, the bodily eye _cannot_ see it; therefore, in all such cases, that which is supposed to be seen is, in fact, _not_ seen, but is an image of the brain. External objects naturally produce sensation; but here, in truth, sensation produces, as it were, the external object. In certain states of the nerves, however, I do believe that the eye, although not consciously so directed, may, by a slight convulsion, see a portion of the body, as if opposite to it. The part actually seen will by common association seem the whole; and the whole body will then constitute an external object, which explains many stories of persons seeing themselves lying dead. Bishop Berkeley once experienced this. He had the presence of mind to ring the bell, and feel his pulse; keeping his eye still fixed on his own figure right opposite to him. He was in a high fever, and the brain image died away as the door opened. I observed something very like it once at Grasmere; and was so conscious of the cause, that I told a person what I was experiencing, whilst the image still remained. Of course, if the vulgar ghost be really a shadow, there must be some substance of which it is the shadow. These visible and intangible shadows, without substances to cause them, are absurd. January 4. 1828. CHARACTER OF THE AGE FOR LOGIC.--PLATO AND XENOPHON.----GREEK DRAMA.---- KOTZEBUE.--BURKE.--PLAGIARISTS. This is not a logical age. A friend lately gave me some political pamphlets of the times of Charles I. and the Cromwellate. In them the premisses are frequently wrong, but the deductions are almost always legitimate; whereas, in the writings of the present day, the premisses are commonly sound, but the conclusions false. I think a great deal of commendation is due to the University of Oxford for preserving the study of logic in the schools. It is a great mistake to suppose geometry any substitute for it. * * * * * Negatively, there may be more of the philosophy of Socrates in the Memorabilia of Xenophon than in Plato: that is, there is less of what does not belong to Socrates; but the general spirit of, and impression left by, Plato, are more Socratic.[1] [Footnote 1: See p. 26. Mr. Coleridge meant in both these passages, that Xenophon had preserved the most of the _man_ Socrates; that he was the best Boswell; and that Socrates, as a _persona dialogi_, was little more than a poetical phantom in Plato's hands. On the other hand, he says that Plato is more _Socratic_, that is, more of a philosopher in the Socratic _mode_ of reasoning (Cicero calls the Platonic writings generally, _Socratici libri_); and Mr. C. also says, that in the metaphysical disquisitions Plato is Pythagorean, meaning, that he worked on the supposed ideal or transcendental principles of the extraordinary founder of the Italian school.] * * * * * In �schylus religion appears terrible, malignant, and persecuting: Sophocles is the mildest of the three tragedians, but the persecuting aspect is still maintained: Euripides is like a modern Frenchman, never so happy as when giving a slap at the gods altogether. * * * * * Kotzebue represents the petty kings of the islands in the Pacific Ocean exactly as so many Homeric chiefs. Riches command universal influence, and all the kings are supposed to be descended from the gods. * * * * * I confess I doubt the Homeric genuineness of [Greek: dakruoen gelaschsa]. [1] It sounds to me much more like a prettiness of Bion or Moschus. [Footnote 1: [Greek: hos eipon, alochoio thilaes en chersin ethaeke paid eon hae d ara min chaeodei dexato cholpo, dachruoen gelasasa.]--Illiad. Z. vi. 482] * * * * * The very greatest writers write best when calm, and exerting themselves upon subjects unconnected with party. Burke rarely shows all his powers, unless where he is in a passion. The French Revolution was alone a subject fit for him. We are not yet aware of all the consequences of that event. We are too near it. * * * * * Goldsmith did every thing happily. * * * * * You abuse snuff! Perhaps it is the final cause of the human nose. * * * * * A rogue is a roundabout fool; a fool _in circumbendibus_. * * * * * _Omne ignotum pro magnifico_. A dunghill at a distance sometimes smells like musk, and a dead dog like elder-flowers. * * * * * Plagiarists are always suspicious of being stolen from,--as pickpockets are observed commonly to walk with their hands in their breeches' pockets. _January 6_. 1823. ST. JOHN'S GOSPEL.--CHRISTIANITY--EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS.--THE LOGOS.-- REASON AND UNDERSTANDING. St. John had a twofold object in his Gospel and his Epistles,--to prove the divinity, and also the actual human nature and bodily suffering, of Jesus Christ,--that he was God and Man. The notion that the effusion of blood and water from the Saviour's side was intended to prove the real _death_ of the sufferer originated, I believe, with some modern Germans, and seems to me ridiculous: there is, indeed, a very small quantity of water occasionally in the præcordia: but in the pleura, where wounds are not generally mortal, there is a great deal. St. John did not mean, I apprehend, to insinuate that the spear-thrust made the _death_, merely as such, certain or evident, but that the effusion showed the human nature. "I saw it," he would say, "with my own eyes. It was real blood, composed of lymph and crassamentum, and not a mere celestial ichor, as the Phantasmists allege." * * * * * I think the verse of the three witnesses (1 John, v. 7.) spurious, not only because the balance of external authority is against it, as Porson seems to have shown; but also, because, in my way of looking at it, it spoils the reasoning. * * * * * St. John's logic is Oriental, and consists chiefly in position and parallel; whilst St. Paul displays all the intricacies of the Greek system. * * * * * Whatever may be thought of the genuineness or authority of any part of the book of Daniel, it makes no difference in my belief in Christianity; for Christianity is within a man, even as he is a being gifted with reason; it is associated with your mother's chair, and with the first-remembered tones of her blessed voice. * * * * * I do not believe St. Paul to be the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews. Luther's conjecture is very probable, that it was by Apollos, an Alexandrian Jew. The plan is too studiously regular for St. Paul. It was evidently written during the yet existing glories of the Temple. For three hundred years the church did not affix St. Paul's name to it; but its apostolical or catholic character, independently of its genuineness as to St. Paul, was never much doubted. * * * * * The first three Gospels show the history, that is, the fulfilment of the prophecies in the facts. St. John declares explicitly the doctrine, oracularly, and without comment, because, being pure reason, it can only be proved by itself. For Christianity proves itself, as the sun is seen by its own light. Its evidence is involved in its existence. St. Paul writes more particularly for the dialectic understanding; and proves those doctrines, which were capable of such proof, by common logic. * * * * * St. John used the term [Greek: ho Logos] technically. Philo-Judæus had so used it several years before the probable date of the composition of this Gospel; and it was commonly understood amongst the Jewish Rabbis at that time, and afterwards, of the manifested God. * * * * * Our translators, unfortunately, as I think, render the clause [Greek: pros ton Theos] "_with_ God;" that would be right, if the Greek were [Greek: syn to Theo].[1] By the preposition [Greek: pros] in this place, is meant the utmost possible _proximity_, without _confusion_; likeness, without sameness. The Jewish Church understood the Messiah to be a divine person. Philo expressly cautions against any one's supposing the Logos to be a mere personification, or symbol. He says, the Logos is a substantial, self- existent Being. The Gnostics, as they were afterwards called, were a kind of Arians; and thought the Logos was an after-birth. They placed [Greek: Abyssos] and [Greek: Sigae] (the Abyss and Silence) before him. Therefore it was that St. John said, with emphasis, [Greek: en archae aen ho Logos]-- "In the _beginning_ was the Word." He was begotten in the first simultaneous burst of Godhead, if such an expression may be pardoned, in speaking of eternal existence. [Footnote 1: John, ch. i. v. 1, 2.] * * * * * The Understanding suggests the materials of reasoning: the Reason decides upon them. The first can only say,--This _is_, or _ought_ to be so. The last says,--It _must_ be so.[1] [Footnote 1: I have preserved this, and several other equivalent remarks, out of a dutiful wish to popularize, by all the honest means in my power, this fundamental distinction; a thorough mastery of which Mr. Coleridge considered necessary to any sound system of psychology; and in the denial or neglect of which, he delighted to point out the source of most of the vulgar errors in philosophy and religion. The distinction itself is implied throughout almost all Mr. C.'s works, whether in verse or prose; but it may be found minutely argued in the "Aids to Reflection," p. 206, &c. 2d edit. 1831.--ED.] _April_ 27. 1823. KEAN.--SIR JAMES MACKINTOSH.--SIR H. DAVY.--ROBERT SMITH.--CANNING.-- NATIONAL DEBT.--POOR LAWS. Kean is original; but he copies from himself. His rapid descents from the hyper-tragic to the infra-colloquial, though sometimes productive of great effect, are often unreasonable. To see him act, is like reading Shakspeare by flashes of lightning. I do not think him thorough-bred gentleman enough to play Othello. * * * * * Sir James Mackintosh is the king of the men of talent. He is a most elegant converger. How well I remember his giving breakfast to me and Sir Humphry Davy, at that time an unknown young man, and our having a very spirited talk about Locke and Newton, and so forth! When Davy was gone, Mackintosh said to me, "That's a very extraordinary young man; but he is gone wrong on some points." But Davy was, at that time at least, a man of genius; and I doubt if Mackintosh ever heartily appreciated an eminently original man. He is uncommonly powerful in his own line; but it is not the line of a first- rate man. After all his fluency and brilliant erudition, you can rarely carry off any thing worth preserving. You might not improperly write on his forehead, "Warehouse to let!" He always dealt too much in generalities for a lawyer. He is deficient in power in applying his principles to the points in debate. I remember Robert Smith had much more logical ability; but Smith aimed at conquest by any gladiatorial shift; whereas Mackintosh was uniformly candid in argument. I am speaking now from old recollections. * * * * * Canning is very irritable, surprisingly so for a wit who is always giving such hard knocks. He should have put on an ass's skin before he went into parliament. Lord Liverpool is the single stay of this ministry; but he is not a man of a directing mind. He cannot ride on the whirlwind. He serves as the isthmus to connect one half of the cabinet with the other. He always gives you the common sense of the matter, and in that it is that his strength in debate lies. * * * * * The national debt has, in fact, made more men rich than have a right to be so, or, rather, any ultimate power, in case of a struggle, of actualizing their riches. It is, in effect, like an ordinary, where three hundred tickets have been distributed, but where there is, in truth, room only for one hundred. So long as you can amuse the company with any thing else, or make them come in successively, all is well, and the whole three hundred fancy themselves sure of a dinner; but if any suspicion of a hoax should arise, and they were all to rush into the room at once, there would be two hundred without a potato for their money; and the table would be occupied by the landholders, who live on the spot. * * * * * Poor-laws are the inevitable accompaniments of an extensive commerce and a manufacturing system. In Scotland, they did without them, till Glasgow and Paisley became great manufacturing places, and then people said, "We must subscribe for the poor, or else we shall have poor-laws." That is to say, they enacted for themselves a poor-law in order to avoid having a poor-law enacted for them. It is absurd to talk of Queen Elizabeth's act as creating the poor-laws of this country. The poor-rates are the consideration paid by, or on behalf of, capitalists for having labour at demand. It is the price, and nothing else. The hardship consists in the agricultural interest having to pay an undue proportion of the rates; for although, perhaps, in the end, the land becomes more valuable, yet, at the first, the landowners have to bear all the brunt. I think there ought to be a fixed revolving period for the equalization of rates. _April_ 28. 1823. CONDUCT OF THE WHIGS.--REFORM OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. The conduct of the Whigs is extravagantly inconsistent. It originated in the fatal error which Fox committed, in persisting, after the first three years of the French Revolution, when every shadow of freedom in France had vanished, in eulogizing the men and measures of that shallow-hearted people. So he went on gradually, further and further departing from all the principles of English policy and wisdom, till at length he became the panegyrist, through thick and thin, of a military frenzy, under the influence of which the very name of liberty was detested. And thus it was that, in course of time, Fox's party became the absolute abettors of the Buonapartean invasion of Spain, and did all in their power to thwart the generous efforts of this country to resist it. Now, when the invasion is by a Bourbon, and the cause of the Spanish nation neither united nor, indeed, sound in many respects, the Whigs would precipitate this country into a crusade to fight up the cause of a faction. I have the honour of being slightly known to my lord Darnley. In 1808-9, I met him accidentally, when, after a few words of salutation, he said to me, "Are you mad, Mr. Coleridge?"--"Not that I know, my lord," I replied; "what have I done which argues any derangement of mind?"--"Why, I mean," said he, "those letters of yours in the Courier, 'On the Hopes and Fears of a People invaded by foreign Armies.' The Spaniards are absolutely conquered; it is absurd to talk of their chance of resisting."--"Very well, my lord," I said, "we shall see. But will your lordship permit me, in the course of a year or two, to retort your question upon you, if I should have grounds for so doing?"--"Certainly!" said he; "that is fair!" Two years afterwards, when affairs were altered in Spain, I met Lord Darnley again, and, after some conversation, ventured to say to him, "Does your lordship recollect giving me leave to retort a certain question upon you about the Spaniards? Who is mad now?"--"Very true, very true, Mr. Coleridge," cried he: "you are right. It is very extraordinary. It was a very happy and hold guess." Upon which I remarked, "I think '_guess_' is hardly a fair term. For, has any thing happened that has happened, from any other causes, or under any other conditions, than such as I laid down Beforehand?" Lord Darnley, who was always very courteous to me, took this with a pleasant nod of his head. * * * * * Many votes are given for reform in the House of Commons, which are not honest. Whilst it is well known that the measure will not he carried in parliament, it is as well to purchase some popularity by voting for it. When Hunt and his associates, before the Six Acts, created a panic, the ministers lay on their oars for three or four months, until the general cry, even from the opposition, was, "Why don't the ministers come forward with some protective measure?" The present Ministry exists on the weakness and desperate character of the Opposition. The sober part of the nation are afraid of the latter getting into power, lest they should redeem some of their pledges. * * * * * _April_ 29. 1823. CHURCH OF ROME. The present adherents of the church of Rome are not, in my judgment, Catholics. We are the Catholics. We can prove that we hold the doctrines of the primitive church for the first three hundred years. The council of Trent made the Papists what they are. [1] A foreign Romish bishop has declared, that the Protestants of his acquaintance were more like what he conceived the enlightened Catholics to have been before the council of Trent, than the best of the latter in his days. Perhaps you will say, this bishop was not a _good Catholic_.[2] I cannot answer for that. The course of Christianity and the Christian church may not unaptly be likened to a mighty river, which filled a wide channel, and bore along with its waters mud, and gravel, and weeds, till it met a great rock in the middle of its stream. By some means or other, the water flows purely, and separated from the filth, in a deeper and narrower course on one side of the rock, and the refuse of the dirt and troubled water goes off on the other in a broader current, and then cries out, "_We_ are the river!" [Footnote 1: See Aids to Reflection, p. 180. note.] [Footnote 2: Mr. Coleridge named him, but the name was strange to me, and I have been unable to recover it--ED.] * * * * * A person said to me lately, "But you will, for civility's sake, _call_ them _Catholics_, will you not?" I answered, that I would not; for I would not tell a lie upon any, much less upon so solemn an occasion. "The adherents of the church of Rome, I repeat, are not _Catholic_ Christians. If they are, then it follows that we Protestants are heretics and schismatics, as, indeed, the Papists very logically, from their own premisses, call us. And '_Roman_ Catholics' makes no difference. Catholicism is not capable of degrees or local apportionments. There can be but one body of Catholics, _ex vi termini_. To talk strictly of _Irish_ or _Scotch Roman_ Catholics is a mere absurdity." * * * * * It is common to hear it said, that, if the legal disabilities are removed, the Romish church will lose ground in this country. I think the reverse: the Romish religion is, or, in certain hands, is capable of being made, so flattering to the passions and self-delusion of men, that it is impossible to say how far it would spread, amongst the higher orders of society especially, if the secular disadvantages now attending its profession were removed.[1] [Footnote 1: Here, at least, the prophecy has been fulfilled. The wisdom of our ancestors, in the reign of King William III., would have been jealous of the daily increase in the numbers of the Romish church in England, of which every attentive observer must be aware. See _Sancti Dominici Pallium_, in vol. ii. p. 80. of Mr. Coleridge's Poems.-Ed.] April 30. 1823. ZENDAVESTA.--PANTHEISM AND IDOLATRY. The Zendavesta must, I think, have been copied in parts from the writings of Moses. In the description of the creation, the first chapter of Genesis is taken almost literally, except that the sun is created _before_ the light, and then the herbs and the plants after the sun; which are precisely the two points they did not understand, and therefore altered as errors.[1] There are only two acts of creation, properly so called, in the Mosaic account,--the material universe and man. The intermediate acts seem more as the results of secondary causes, or, at any rate, of a modification of prepared materials. [Footnote 1: The Zend, or Zendavesta, is the sacred book ascribed to Zoroaster, or Zerdusht, the founder or reformer of the Magian religion. The modern edition or paraphrase of this work, called the Sadda, written in the Persian of the day, was, I believe, composed about three hundred years ago --Ed.] * * * * * Pantheism and idolatry naturally end in each other; for all extremes meet. The Judaic religion is the exact medium, the true compromise. _May_ 1. 1823. DIFFERENCE BETWEEN STORIES OF DREAMS AND GHOSTS. --PHANTOM PORTRAIT.--WITCH OF ENDOR.--SOCINIANISM. There is a great difference in the credibility to be attached to stories of dreams and stories of ghosts. Dreams have nothing in them which are absurd and nonsensical; and, though most of the coincidences may be readily explained by the diseased system of the dreamer, and the great and surprising power of association, yet it is impossible to say whether an inner sense does not really exist in the mind, seldom developed, indeed, but which may have a power of presentiment. [1] All the external senses have their correspondents in the mind; the eye can see an object before it is distinctly apprehended;--why may there not be a corresponding power in the soul? The power of prophecy might have been merely a spiritual excitation of this dormant faculty. Hence you will observe that the Hebrew seers sometimes seem to have required music, as in the instance of Elisha before Jehoram:--"But now bring me a minstrel. And it came to pass, when the minstrel played, that the hand of the Lord came upon him." [2] Every thing in nature has a tendency to move in cycles; and it would be a miracle if, out of such myriads of cycles moving concurrently, some coincidences did not take place. No doubt, many such take place in the daytime; but then our senses drive out the remembrance of them, and render the impression hardly felt; but when we sleep, the mind acts without interruption. Terror and the heated imagination will, even in the daytime, create all sorts of features, shapes, and colours out of a simple object possessing none of them in reality. But ghost stories are absurd. Whenever a real ghost appears,--by which I mean some man or woman dressed up to frighten another,--if the supernatural character of the apparition has been for a moment believed, the effects on the spectator have always been most terrible,--convulsion, idiocy, madness, or even death on the spot. Consider the awful descriptions in the Old Testament of the effects of a spiritual presence on the prophets and seers of the Hebrews; the terror, the exceeding great dread, the utter loss of all animal power. But in our common ghost stories, you always find that the seer, after a most appalling apparition, as you are to believe, is quite well the next day. Perhaps, he may have a headach; but that is the outside of the effect produced. Alston, a man of genius, and the best painter yet produced by America, when he was in England told me an anecdote which confirms what I have been saying. It was, I think, in the university of Cambridge, near Boston, that a certain youth took it into his wise head to endeavour to convert a Tom-Painish companion of his by appearing as a ghost before him. He accordingly dressed himself up in the usual way, having previously extracted the ball from the pistol which always lay near the head of his friend's bed. Upon first awaking, and seeing the apparition, the youth who was to be frightened, A., very coolly looked his companion the ghost in the face, and said, "I know you. This is a good joke; but you see I am not frightened. Now you may vanish!" The ghost stood still. "Come," said A., "that is enough. I shall get angry. Away!" Still the ghost moved not. "By ----," ejaculated A., "if you do not in three minutes go away, I'll shoot you." He waited the time, deliberately levelled the pistol, fired, and, with a scream at the immobility of the figure, became convulsed, and afterwards died. The very instant he believed it _to be_ a ghost, his human nature fell before it. [Footnote 1: See this point suggested and reasoned with extraordinary subtlety in the third essay (marked C), in the Appendix to the Statesman's Manual, Or first Lay Sermon, p. 19, &c. One beautiful paragraph I will venture to quote:-- "Not only may we expect that men of strong religious feelings, but little religious knowledge, will occasionally be tempted to regard such occurrences as supernatural visitations; but it ought not to surprise us if such dreams should sometimes be confirmed by the event, as though they had actually possessed a character of divination. For who shall decide how far a perfect reminiscence of past experiences (of many, perhaps, that had escaped our reflex consciousness at the time)--who shall determine to what extent this reproductive imagination, unsophisticated by the will, and undistracted by intrusions from the senses, may or may not be concentred and sublimed into foresight and presentiment? There would be nothing herein either to foster superstition on the one hand, or to justify contemptuous disbelief on the other. Incredulity is but Credulity seen from behind, bowing and nodding assent to the Habitual and the Fashionable"-ED.] [Footnote 2: 2 Kings, iii. 15., and see 1 Sam. x. 5.--ED.] * * * * * [What follows in the text within commas was written about this time, and communicated to me by Mr. Justice Coleridge.--ED.] "Last Thursday my uncle, S. T. C., dined with us, and several men came to meet him. I have heard him more brilliant, but he was very fine, and delighted every one very much. It is impossible to carry off, or commit to paper, his long trains of argument; indeed, it is not always possible to understand them, he lays the foundation so deep, and views every question in so original a manner. Nothing can be finer than the principles which he lays down in morals and religion. His deep study of Scripture is very astonishing; the rest of the party were but as children in his hands, not merely in general views of theology, but in nice verbal criticism. He thinks it clear that St. Paul did not write the Epistle to the Hebrews, but that it must have been the work of some Alexandrian Greek, and he thinks Apollos. It seemed to him a desirable thing for Christianity that it should have been written by some other person than St. Paul; because, its inspiration being unquestioned, it added another independent teacher and expounder of the faith. "We fell upon ghosts, and he exposed many of the stories physically and metaphysically. He seemed to think it impossible that you should really see with the bodily eye what was impalpable, unless it were a shadow; and if what you fancied you saw with the bodily eye was in fact only an impression on the imagination, then you were seeing something _out of your senses_, and your testimony was full of uncertainty. He observed how uniformly, in all the best-attested stories of spectres, the appearance might be accounted for from the disturbed state of the mind or body of the seer, as in the instances of Dion and Brutus. Upon some one's saying that he _wished_ to believe these stories true, thinking that they constituted a useful subsidiary testimony of another state of existence, Mr. C. differed, and said, he thought it a dangerous testimony, and one not wanted: it was Saul, with the Scriptures and the Prophet before him, calling upon the witch of Endor to certify him of the truth! He explained very ingeniously, yet very naturally, what has often startled people in ghost stories--such as Lord Lyttelton's--namely, that when a real person has appeared, habited like the phantom, the ghost-seer has immediately seen two, the real man and the phantom. He said that such must be the case. The man under the morbid delusion sees with the eye of the imagination, and sees with the bodily eye too; if no one were really present, he would see the spectre with one, and the bed-curtains with the other. When, therefore, a real person comes, he sees the real man as he would have seen any one else in the same place, and he sees the spectre not a whit the less: being perceptible by different powers of vision, so to say, the appearances do not interfere with each other. "He told us the following story of the Phantom Portrait [1]:-- "A stranger came recommended to a merchant's house at Lubeck. He was hospitably received; but, the house being full, he was lodged at night in an apartment handsomely furnished, but not often used. There was nothing that struck him particularly in the room when left alone, till he happened to cast his eyes on a picture, which immediately arrested his attention. It was a single head; but there was something so uncommon, so frightful and unearthly, in its expression, though by no means ugly, that he found himself irresistibly attracted to look at it. In fact, he could not tear himself from the fascination of this portrait, till his imagination was filled by it, and his rest broken. He retired to bed, dreamed, and awoke from time to time with the head glaring on him. In the morning, his host saw by his looks that he had slept ill, and inquired the cause, which was told. The master of the house was much vexed, and said that the picture ought to have been removed, that it was an oversight, and that it always was removed when the chamber was used. The picture, he said, was, indeed, terrible to every one; but it was so fine, and had come into the family in so curious a way, that he could not make up his mind to part with it, or to destroy it. The story of it was this:--'My father,' said he, 'was at Hamburgh on business, and, whilst dining at a coffee-house, he observed a young man of a remarkable appearance enter, seat himself alone in a corner, and commence a solitary meal. His countenance bespoke the extreme of mental distress, and every now and then he turned his head quickly round, as if he heard something, then shudder, grow pale, and go on with his meal after an effort as before. My father saw this same man at the same place for two or three successive days; and at length became so much interested about him, that he spoke to him. The address was not repulsed, and the stranger seemed to find some comfort in the tone of sympathy and kindness which my father used. He was an Italian, well informed, poor but not destitute, and living economically upon the profits of his art as a painter. Their intimacy increased; and at length the Italian, seeing my father's involuntary emotion at his convulsive turnings and shuddering, which continued as formerly, interrupting their conversation from time to time, told him his story. He was a native of Rome, and had lived in some familiarity with, and been much patronized by, a young nobleman; but upon some slight occasion they had fallen out, and his patron, besides using many reproachful expressions, had struck him. The painter brooded over the disgrace of the blow. He could not challenge the nobleman, on account of his rank; he therefore watched for an opportunity, and assassinated him. Of course he fled from his country, and finally had reached Hamburgh. He had not, however, passed many weeks from the night of the murder, before, one day, in the crowded street, he heard his name called by a voice familiar to him: he turned short round, and saw the face of his victim looking at him with a fixed eye. From that moment he had no peace: at all hours, in all places, and amidst all companies, however engaged he might be, he heard the voice, and could never help looking round; and, whenever he so looked round, he always encountered the same face staring close upon him. At last, in a mood of desperation, he had fixed himself face to face, and eye to eye, and deliberately drawn the phantom visage as it glared upon him; and _this_ was the picture so drawn. The Italian said he had struggled long, but life was a burden which he could now no longer bear; and he was resolved, when he had made money enough to return to Rome, to surrender himself to justice, and expiate his crime on the scaffold. He gave the finished picture to my father, in return for the kindness which he had shown to him.'" [Footnote 1: This is the story which Mr. Washington Irving has dressed up very prettily in the first volume of his "Tales of a Traveller," pp. 84-119.; professing in his preface that he could not remember whence he had derived the anecdote.--ED.] * * * * * I have no doubt that the Jews believed generally in a future state, independently of the Mosaic law. The story of the witch of Endor is a proof of it. What we translate "_witch_," or "familiar spirit," is, in the Hebrew, Ob, that is, a bottle or bladder, and means a person whose belly is swelled like a leathern bottle by divine inflation. In the Greek it is [Greek: engastrimuthos], a ventriloquist. The text (1 Sam. ch. xxviii.) is a simple record of the facts, the solution of which the sacred historian leaves to the reader. I take it to have been a trick of ventriloquism, got up by the courtiers and friends of Saul, to prevent him, if possible, from hazarding an engagement with an army despondent and oppressed with bodings of defeat. Saul is not said to have seen Samuel; the woman only pretends to see him. And then what does this Samuel do? He merely repeats the prophecy known to all Israel, which the true Samuel had uttered some years before. Read Captain Lyon's account of the scene in the cabin with the Esquimaux bladder, or conjurer; it is impossible not to be reminded of the witch of Endor. I recommend you also to look at Webster's admirable treatise on Witchcraft. * * * * * The pet texts of a Socinian are quite enough for his confutation with acute thinkers. If Christ had been a mere man, it would have been ridiculous in _him_ to call himself "the Son of man;" but being God and man, it then became, in his own assumption of it, a peculiar and mysterious title. So, if Christ had been a mere man, his saying, "My Father is greater than I," (John, xv. 28.) would have been as unmeaning. It would be laughable enough, for example, to hear me say, "My 'Remorse' succeeded, indeed, but Shakspeare is a greater dramatist than I." But how immeasurably more foolish, more monstrous, would it not be for a _man_, however honest, good, or wise, to say, "But Jehovah is greater than I!" _May_ 8. 1824. PLATO AND XENOPHON.--RELIGIONS OF THE GREEKS.--EGYPTIAN ANTIQUITIES.-- MILTON.--VIRGIL. Plato's works are logical exercises for the mind. Little that is positive is advanced in them. Socrates may be fairly represented by Plato in the more moral parts; but in all the metaphysical disquisitions it is Pythagoras. Xenophon's representation of his master is quite different.[1] [Footnote 1: See p. 9. n.--ED.] * * * * * Observe the remarkable contrast between the religion of the tragic and other poets of Greece. The former are always opposed in heart to the popular divinities. In fact, there are the popular, the sacerdotal, and the mysterious religions of Greece, represented roughly by Homer, Pindar, and �schylus. The ancients had no notion of a _fall_ of man, though they had of his gradual degeneracy. Prometheus, in the old mythus, and for the most part in AEschylus, is the Redeemer and the Devil jumbled together. * * * * * I cannot say I expect much from mere Egyptian antiquities. Almost every thing really, that is, intellectually, great in that country seems to me of Grecian origin. * * * * * I think nothing can be added to Milton's definition or rule of poetry,-- that it ought to be simple, sensuous, and impassioned; that is to say, single in conception, abounding in sensible images, and informing them all with the spirit of the mind. Milton's Latin style is, I think, better and easier than his English. His style, in prose, is quite as characteristic of him as a philosophic republican, as Cowley's is of _him_ as a first-rate gentleman. If you take from Virgil his diction and metre, what do you leave him? * * * * * _June_ 2. 1824. CRANVILLE PENN AND THE DELUGE.--RAINBOW. I confess I have small patience with Mr. Granville Penn's book against Professor Buckland. Science will be superseded, if every phenomenon is to be referred in this manner to an actual miracle. I think it absurd to attribute so much to the Deluge. An inundation, which left an olive-tree standing, and bore up the ark peacefully on its bosom, could scarcely have been the sole cause of the rents and dislocations observable on the face of the earth. How could the tropical animals, which have been discovered in England and in Russia in a perfectly natural state, have been transported thither by such a flood? Those animals must evidently have been natives of the countries in which they have been found. The climates must have been altered. Assume a sudden evaporation upon the retiring of the Deluge to have caused an intense cold, the solar heat might not be sufficient afterwards to overcome it. I do not think that the polar cold is adequately explained by mere comparative distance from the sun. * * * * * You will observe, that there is no mention of rain previously to the Deluge. Hence it may be inferred, that the rainbow was exhibited for the first time after God's covenant with Noah. However, I only suggest this. * * * * * The Earth with its scarred face is the symbol of the Past; the Air and Heaven, of Futurity. _June_ 5. 1824. ENGLISH AND GREEK DANCING.--GREEK ACOUSTICS. The fondness for dancing in English women is the reaction of their reserved manners. It is the only way in which they can throw themselves forth in natural liberty. We have no adequate conception of the perfection of the ancient tragic dance. The pleasure which the Greeks received from it had for its basis Difference and the more unfit the vehicle, the more lively was the curiosity and intense the delight at seeing the difficulty overcome. * * * * * The ancients certainly seem to have understood some principles in acoustics which we have lost, or, at least, they applied them better. They contrived to convey the voice distinctly in their huge theatres by means of pipes, which created no echo or confusion. Our theatres--Drury Lane and Covent Garden--are fit for nothing: they are too large for acting, and too small for a bull-fight. * * * * * _June_ 7. 1824. LORD BYRON'S VERSIFICATION, AND DON JUAN. How lamentably the _art_ of versification is neglected by most of the poets of the present day!--by Lord Byron, as it strikes me, in particular, among those of eminence for other qualities. Upon the whole, I think the part of Don Juan in which Lambro's return to his home, and Lambro himself, are described, is the best, that is, the most individual, thing in all I know of Lord B.'s works. The festal abandonment puts one in mind of Nicholas Poussin's pictures.[1] [Footnote 1: Mr. Coleridge particularly noticed, for its classical air, the 32d stanza of this Canto (the third):-- "A band of children, round a snow-white ram, There wreathe his venerable horns with flowers, While, peaceful as if still an unwean'd lamb, The patriarch of the flock all gently cowers His sober head, majestically tame, Or eats from out the palm, or playful lowers His brow, as if in act to butt, and then Yielding to their small hands, draws back again." But Mr. C. said that _then_, and _again_, made no rhyme to his ear. Why should not the old form _agen_ be lawful in verse? We wilfully abridge ourselves of the liberty which our great poets achieved and sanctioned for us in innumerable instances.--ED.] _June_ 10. 1824. PARENTAL CONTROL IN MARRIAGE.--MARRIAGE OF COUSINS.--DIFFERENCE OF CHARACTER. Up to twenty-one, I hold a father to have power over his children as to marriage; after that age, authority and influence only. Show me one couple unhappy merely on account of their limited circumstances, and I will show you ten that are wretched from other causes. * * * * * If the matter were quite open, I should incline to disapprove the intermarriage of first cousins; but the church has decided otherwise on the authority of Augustine, and that seems enough upon such a point. * * * * * You may depend upon it, that a slight contrast of character is very material to happiness in marriage. _February_ 24. 1827. BLUMENBACH AND KANT'S RACES.--IAPETIC AND SEMITIC.--HEBREW.--SOLOMON. Blumenbach makes five races; Kant, three. Blumenbach's scale of dignity may be thus figured:-- 1. Caucasian or European. 2. Malay ================= 2. American 3. Negro ========================== 3. Mongolian, Asiatic There was, I conceive, one great Iapetic original of language, under which Greek, Latin, and other European dialects, and, perhaps, Sanscrit, range as species. The Iapetic race, [Greek: Iaones]; separated into two branches; one, with a tendency to migrate south-west,--Greeks, Italians, &c.; and the other north-west,--Goths, Germans, Swedes, &c. The Hebrew is Semitic. * * * * * Hebrew, in point of force and purity, seems at its height in Isaiah. It is most corrupt in Daniel, and not much less so in Ecclesiastes; which I cannot believe to have been actually composed by Solomon, but rather suppose to have been so attributed by the Jews, in their passion for ascribing all works of that sort to their _grand monurque_. _March_ 10. 1827. JEWISH HISTORY.--SPINOZISTIC AND HEBREW SCHEMES. The people of all other nations, but the Jewish, seem to look backwards and also to exist for the present; but in the Jewish scheme every thing is prospective and preparatory; nothing, however trifling, is done for itself alone, but all is typical of something yet to come. * * * * * I would rather call the book of Proverbs Solomonian than as actually a work of Solomon's. So I apprehend many of the Psalms to be Davidical only, not David's own compositions. * * * * * You may state the Pantheism of Spinosa, in contrast with the Hebrew or Christian scheme, shortly, as thus:-- Spinosism. W-G = 0; _i.e._ the World without God is an impossible idea. G-W = 0; _i.e._ God without the World is so likewise. Hebrew or Christian scheme. W-G = 0; _i.e._ The same as Spinosa's premiss. But G-W = G; _i.e._ God without the World is God the self-subsistent. * * * * * _March_ 12. 1827. ROMAN CATHOLICS.--ENERGY OF MAN AND OTHER ANIMALS.--SHAKSPEARE _IN MINIMIS_.--PAUL SARPI.--BARTRAM'S TRAVELS. I have no doubt that the real object closest to the hearts of the leading Irish Romanists is the destruction of the Irish Protestant church, and the re-establishment of their own. I think more is involved in the manner than the matter of legislating upon the civil disabilities of the members of the church of Rome; and, for one, I should he willing to vote for a removal of those disabilities, with two or three exceptions, upon a solemn declaration being made legislatively in parliament, that at no time, nor under any circumstances, could or should a branch of the Romish hierarchy, as at present constituted, become an estate of this realm.[1] [Footnote 1: See Church and State, second part, p. 189.] * * * * * Internal or mental energy and external or corporeal modificability are in inverse proportions. In man, internal energy is greater than in any other animal; and you will see that he is less changed by climate than any animal. For the highest and lowest specimens of man are not one half as much apart from each other as the different kinds even of dogs, animals of great internal energy themselves. * * * * * For an instance of Shakspeare's power _in minimis_, I generally quote James Gurney's character in King John. How individual and comical he is with the four words allowed to his dramatic life! [1] And pray look at Skelton's Richard Sparrow also! Paul Sarpi's History of the Council of Trent deserves your study. It is very interesting. [Footnote 1: "_Enter Lady FALCONBRIDGE and JAMES GURNEY._ BAST. O me! it is my mother:--How now, good lady? What brings you here to court so hastily? LADY F. Where is that slave, thy brother? where is he? That holds in chase mine honour up and down? BAST. My brother Robert? Old Sir Robert's son? Colbrand the giant, that same mighty man? Is it Sir Robert's son that you seek so? LADY F. Sir Robert's son! Ay, thou unreverend boy, Sir Robert's son: why scorn'st thou at Sir Robert? He is Sir Robert's son; and so art thou. BAST. James Gurney, wilt thou give us leave a while? GUR. _Good leave, good Philip._ BAST. Philip?--Sparrow! James, There's toys abroad; anon I'll tell thee more. [_Exit_ GURNEY." The very _exit Gurney_ is a stroke of James's character.--ED.]] * * * * * The latest book of travels I know, written in the spirit of the old travellers, is Bartram's account of his tour in the Floridas. It is a work of high merit every way.[1] [Footnote 1: "Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the extensive territories of the Muscogulges, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws, &c. By William Bartram." Philadelphia, 1791. London, 1792. 8vo. The expedition was made at the request of Dr. Fothergill, the Quaker physician, in 1773, and was particularly directed to botanical discoveries.--ED.] * * * * * _March_ 13. 1827. THE UNDERSTANDING. A pun will sometimes facilitate explanation, as thus;--the Understanding is that which _stands under_ the phenomenon, and gives it objectivity. You know _what_ a thing is by it. It is also worthy of remark, that the Hebrew word for the understanding, _Bineh_, comes from a root meaning _between_ or _distinguishing_. * * * * * _March_ 18. 1827. PARTS OF SPEECH.--GRAMMAR. There are seven parts of speech, and they agree with the five grand and universal divisions into which all things finite, by which I mean to exclude the idea of God, will be found to fall; that is, as you will often see it stated in my writings, especially in the Aids to Reflection[1]:-- Prothesis. 1. Thesis. Mesothesis. Antithesis. 2. 4. 3. Synthesis. 5. Conceive it thus:-- 1. Prothesis, the noun-verb, or verb-substantive, _I am_, which is the previous form, and implies identity of being and act. 2. Thesis, the noun. 3. Antithesis, the verb. Note, each of these may be converted; that is, they are only opposed to each other. 4. Mesothesis, the infinitive mood, or the indifference of the verb and noun, it being either the one or the other, or both at the same time, in different relations. 5. Synthesis, the participle, or the community of verb and noun; being and acting at once. Now, modify the noun by the verb, that is, by an act, and you have-- 6. The adnoun, or adjective. Modify the verb by the noun, that is, by being, and you have-- 7. The adverb. Interjections are parts of sound, not of speech. Conjunctions are the same as prepositions; but they are prefixed to a sentence, or to a member of a sentence, instead of to a single word. The inflections of nouns are modifications as to place; the inflections of verbs, as to time. The genitive case denotes dependence; the dative, transmission. It is absurd to talk of verbs governing. In Thucydides, I believe, every case has been found absolute.[2] Dative:--[Greek: ----] Thuc.VIII. 24. This is the Latin usage. Accusative.--I do not remember an instance of the proper accusative absolute in Thucydides; but it seems not uncommon in other authors: [Greek: ----] Yet all such instances may be nominatives; for I cannot find an example of the accusative absolute in the masculine or feminine gender, where the difference of inflexion would show the case.--ED.] The inflections of the tenses of a verb are formed by adjuncts of the verb substantive. In Greek it is obvious. The E is the prefix significative of a past time. [Footnote 1: P. 170. 2d edition.] [Footnote 2: Nominative absolute:--[Greek: theon de phozos ae anthropon nomos, oudeis apeirge, to men krinontes en homoio kai sezein kai mae--ton de hamartaematon.]--Thuc. II. 53.] _June 15. 1827. MAGNETISM.--ELECTRICITY.--GALVANISM. Perhaps the attribution or analogy may seem fanciful at first sight, but I am in the habit of realizing to myself Magnetism as length; Electricity as breadth or surface; and Galvanism as depth. _June 24. 1827._ SPENSER.--CHARACTER Of OTHELLO.--HAMLET.--POLONIUS.--PRINCIPLES AND MAXIMS.--LOVE.--MEASURE FOR MEASURE.--BEN JONSON.--BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.-- VERSION OF THE BIBLE.--SPURZHEIM.--CRANIOLOGY. Spenser's Epithalamion is truly sublime; and pray mark the swan-like movement of his exquisite Prothalamion. [1] His attention to metre and rhythm is sometimes so extremely minute as to be painful even to my ear, and you know how highly I prize good versification. [Footnote 1: How well I remember this Midsummer-day! I shall never pass such another. The sun was setting behind Caen Wood, and the calm of the evening was so exceedingly deep that it arrested Mr. Coleridge's attention. We were alone together in Mr. Gillman's drawing-room, and Mr. C. left off talking, and fell into an almost trance-like state for ten minutes whilst contemplating the beautiful prospect before us. His eyes swam in tears, his head inclined a little forward, and there was a slight uplifting of the fingers, which seemed to tell me that he was in prayer. I was awestricken, and remained absorbed in looking at the man, in forgetfulness of external nature, when he recovered himself, and after a word or two fell by some secret link of association upon Spenser's poetry. Upon my telling him that I did not very well recollect the Prothalamion: "Then I must read you a bit of it," said he; and, fetching the book from the next room, he recited the whole of it in his finest and most musical manner. I particularly bear in mind the sensible diversity of tone and rhythm with which he gave:-- "Sweet Thames! run softly till I end my song," the concluding line of each of the ten strophes of the poem. When I look upon the scanty memorial, which I have alone preserved of this afternoon's converse, I am tempted to burn these pages in despair. Mr. Coleridge talked a volume of criticism that day, which, printed verbatim as he spoke it, would have made the reputation of any other person but himself. He was, indeed, particularly brilliant and enchanting; and I left him at night so thoroughly _magnetized_, that I could not for two or three days afterwards reflect enough to put any thing on paper,--ED.] * * * * * I have often told you that I do not think there is any jealousy, properly so called, in the character of Othello. There is no predisposition to suspicion, which I take to be an essential term in the definition of the word. Desdemona very truly told Emilia that he was not jealous, that is, of a jealous habit, and he says so as truly of himself. Iago's suggestions, you see, are quite new to him; they do not correspond with any thing of a like nature previously in his mind. If Desdemona had, in fact, been guilty, no one would have thought of calling Othello's conduct that of a jealous man. He could not act otherwise than he did with the lights he had; whereas jealousy can never be strictly right. See how utterly unlike Othello is to Leontes, in the Winter's Tale, or even to Leonatus, in Cymbeline! The jealousy of the first proceeds from an evident trifle, and something like hatred is mingled with it; and the conduct of Leonatus in accepting the wager, and exposing his wife to the trial, denotes a jealous temper already formed. * * * * * Hamlet's character is the prevalence of the abstracting and generalizing habit over the practical. He does not want courage, skill, will, or opportunity; but every incident sets him thinking; and it is curious, and at the same time strictly natural, that Hamlet, who all the play seems reason itself, should he impelled, at last, by mere accident to effect his object. I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so. * * * * * A Maxim is a conclusion upon observation of matters of fact, and is merely retrospective: an Idea, or, if you like, a Principle, carries knowledge within itself, and is prospective. Polonius is a man of maxims. Whilst he is descanting on matters of past experience, as in that excellent speech to Laertes before he sets out on his travels, he is admirable; but when he comes to advise or project, he is a mere dotard. [1] You see Hamlet, as the man of ideas, despises him. [Footnote 1: Act i. sc. 3] * * * * * A man of maxims only is like a Cyclops with one eye, and that eye placed in the back of his head. * * * * * In the scene with Ophelia, in the third act,[1] Hamlet is beginning with great and unfeigned tenderness; but, perceiving her reserve and coyness, fancies there are some listeners, and then, to sustain his part, breaks out into all that coarseness. Love is the admiration and cherishing of the amiable qualities of the beloved person, upon the condition of yourself being the object of their action. The qualities of the sexes correspond. The man's courage is loved by the woman, whose fortitude again is coveted by the man. His vigorous intellect is answered by her infallible tact. Can it be true, what is so constantly affirmed, that there is no sex in souls?--I doubt it, I doubt it exceedingly. [2] [Footnote 1: Sc. 1.] [Footnote 2: Mr. Coleridge was a great master in the art of love, but he had not studied in Ovid's school. Hear his account of the matter:-- "Love, truly such, is itself not the most common thing in the world, and mutual love still less so. But that enduring personal attachment, so beautifully delineated by Erin's sweet melodist, and still more touchingly, perhaps, in the well-known ballad, 'John Anderson, my Jo, John,' in addition to a depth and constancy of character of no every-day occurrence, supposes a peculiar sensibility and tenderness of nature; a constitutional communicativeness and utterancy of heart and soul; a delight in the detail of sympathy, in the outward and visible signs of the sacrament within,--to count, as it were, the pulses of the life of love. But, above all, it supposes a soul which, even in the pride and summer-tide of life, even in the lustihood of health and strength, had felt oftenest and prized highest that which age cannot take away, and which in all our lovings is _the_ love; I mean, that willing sense of the unsufficingness of the self for itself, which predisposes a generous nature to see, in the total being of another, the supplement and completion of its own; that quiet perpetual seeking which the presence of the beloved object modulates, not suspends, where the heart momently finds, and, finding again, seeks on; lastly, when 'life's changeful orb has passed the full,' a confirmed faith in the nobleness of humanity, thus brought home and pressed, as it were, to the very bosom of hourly experience; it supposes, I say, a heartfelt reverence for worth, not the less deep because divested of its solemnity by habit, by familiarity, by mutual infirmities, and even by a feeling of modesty which will arise in delicate minds, when they are conscious of possessing the same, or the correspondent, excellence in their own characters. In short, there must be a mind, which, while it feels the beautiful and the excellent in the beloved as its own, and by right of love appropriates it, can call goodness its playfellow; and dares make sport of time and infirmity, while, in the person of a thousand-foldly endeared partner, we feel for aged virtue the caressing fondness that belongs to the innocence of childhood, and repeat the same attentions and tender courtesies which had been dictated by the same affection to the same object when attired in feminine loveliness or in manly beauty." (Poetical Works, vol. ii. p. 120.)--ED.] Measure for Measure is the single exception to the delightfulness of Shakspeare's plays. It is a hateful work, although Shakspearian throughout. Our feelings of justice are grossly wounded in Angelo's escape. Isabella herself contrives to be unamiable, and Claudio is detestable. * * * * * I am inclined to consider The Fox as the greatest of Ben Jonson's works. But his smaller works are full of poetry. * * * * * Monsieur Thomas and the little French Lawyer are great favourites of mine amongst Beaumont and Fletcher's plays. How those plays overflow with wit! And yet I scarcely know a more deeply tragic scene any where than that in Rollo, in which Edith pleads for her father's life, and then, when she cannot prevail, rises up and imprecates vengeance on his murderer. [1] [Footnote 1: Act iii. sc. 1.:-- "ROLLO. Hew off her hands! HAMOND. Lady, hold off! EDITH. No! hew 'em; Hew off my innocent hands, as he commands you! They'll hang the faster on for death's convulsion.-- Thou seed of rocks, will nothing move thee, then? Are all my tears lost, all my righteous prayers Drown'd in thy drunken wrath? I stand up thus, then, Thou boldly bloody tyrant, And to thy face, in heav'n's high name defy thee! And may sweet mercy, when thy soul sighs for it,-- When under thy black mischiefs thy flesh trembles,-- When neither strength, nor youth, nor friends, nor gold, Can stay one hour; when thy most wretched conscience, Waked from her dream of death, like fire shall melt thee,-- When all thy mother's tears, thy brother's wounds, Thy people's fears, and curses, and my loss, My aged father's loss, shall stand before thee-- ROLLO. Save him, I say; run, save him, save her father; Fly and redeem his head! EDITH. May then that pity," &c.] * * * * * Our version of the Bible is to be loved and prized for this, as for a thousand other things,--that it has preserved a purity of meaning to many terms of natural objects. Without this holdfast, our vitiated imaginations would refine away language to mere abstractions. Hence the French have lost their poetical language; and Mr. Blanco White says the same thing has happened to the Spanish. * * * * * I have the perception of individual images very strong, but a dim one of the relation of place. I remember the man or the tree, but where I saw them I mostly forget.[1] [Footnote 1: There was no man whose opinion in morals, or even in a matter of general conduct in life, if you furnished the pertinent circumstances, I would have sooner adopted than Mr. Coleridge's; but I would not take him as a guide through streets or fields or earthly roads. He had much of the geometrician about him; but he could not find his way. In this, as in many other peculiarities of more importance, he inherited strongly from his learned and excellent father, who deserves, and will, I trust, obtain, a separate notice for himself when his greater son's life comes to be written. I believe the beginning of Mr. C.'s liking for Dr. Spurzheim was the hearty good humour with which the Doctor bore the laughter of a party, in the presence of which he, unknowing of his man, denied any _Ideality_, and awarded an unusual share of _Locality_, to the majestic silver-haired head of my dear uncle and father-in-law. But Mr. Coleridge immediately shielded the craniologist under the distinction preserved in the text, and perhaps, since that time, there may be a couple of organs assigned to the latter faculty.--ED.] * * * * * Craniology is worth some consideration, although it is merely in its rudiments and guesses yet. But all the coincidences which have been observed could scarcely be by accident. The confusion and absurdity, however, will be endless until some names or proper terms are discovered for the organs, which are not taken from their mental application or significancy. The forepart of the head is generally given up to the higher intellectual powers; the hinder part to the sensual emotions. * * * * * Silence does not always mark wisdom. I was at dinner, some time ago, in company with a man, who listened to me and said nothing for a long time; but he nodded his head, and I thought him intelligent. At length, towards the end of the dinner, some apple dumplings were placed on the table, and my man had no sooner seen them, than he burst forth with--"Them's the jockies for me!" I wish Spurzheim could have examined the fellow's head. * * * * * Some folks apply epithets as boys do in making Latin verses. When I first looked upon the Falls of the Clyde, I was unable to find a word to express my feelings. At last, a man, a stranger to me, who arrived about the same time, said:--"How majestic!"--(It was the precise term, and I turned round and was saying--"Thank you, Sir! that _is_ the exact word for it"--when he added, _eodem flatu_)--"Yes! how very _pretty_!" * * * * * _July_ 8. 1827. BULL AND WATERLAND.--THE TRINITY. Bull and Waterland are the classical writers on the Trinity.[1] In the Trinity there is, 1. Ipseity. 2. Alterity. 3. Community. You may express the formula thus:-- God, the absolute Will or Identity, = Prothesis. The Father = Thesis. The Son = Antithesis. The Spirit = Synthesis. [Footnote 1: Mr. Coleridge's admiration of Bull and Waterland as high theologians was very great. Bull he used to read in the Latin Defensio Fidei Nicaenae, using the Jesuit Zola's edition of 1784, which, I think, he bought at Rome. He told me once, that when he was reading a Protestant English Bishop's work on the Trinity, in a copy edited by an Italian Jesuit in Italy, he felt proud of the church of England, and in good humour with the church of Rome.--ED.] * * * * * The author of the Athanasian Creed is unknown. It is, in my judgment, heretical in the omission, or implicit denial, of the Filial subordination in the Godhead, which is the doctrine of the Nicene Creed, and for which Bull and Waterland have so fervently and triumphantly contended; and by not holding to which, Sherlock staggered to and fro between Tritheism and Sabellianism. This creed is also tautological, and, if not persecuting, which I will not discuss, certainly containing harsh and ill-conceived language. * * * * * How much I regret that so many religious persons of the present day think it necessary to adopt a certain cant of manner and phraseology as a token to each other. They must _improve_ this and that text, and they must do so and so in a _prayerful_ way; and so on. Why not use common language? A young lady the other day urged upon me that such and such feelings were the _marrow_ of all religion; upon which I recommended her to try to walk to London upon her marrow-bones only. * * * * * _July_ 9. 1827. SCALE OF ANIMAL BEING. In the very lowest link in the vast and mysterious chain of Being, there is an effort, although scarcely apparent, at individualization; but it is almost lost in the mere nature. A little higher up, the individual is apparent and separate, but subordinate to any thing in man. At length, the animal rises to be on a par with the lowest power of the human nature. There are some of our natural desires which only remain in our most perfect state on earth as means of the higher powers' acting.[1] [Footnote 1: These remarks seem to call for a citation of that wonderful passage, transcendant alike in eloquence and philosophic depth, which the readers of the Aids to Reflection have long since laid up in cedar:-- "Every rank of creatures, as it ascends in the scale of creation, leaves death behind it or under it. The metal at its height of being seems a mute prophecy of the coming vegetation, into a mimic semblance of which it crystallizes. The blossom and flower, the acme of vegetable life, divides into correspondent organs with reciprocal functions, and by instinctive motions and approximations seems impatient of that fixture, by which it is differenced in kind from the flower-shaped Psyche that flutters with free wing above it. And wonderfully in the insect realm doth the irritability, the proper seat of instinct, while yet the nascent sensibility is subordinate thereto,--most wonderfully, I say, doth the muscular life in the insect, and the musculo-arterial in the bird, imitate and typically rehearse the adaptive understanding, yea, and the moral affections and charities of man. Let us carry ourselves back, in spirit, to the mysterious week, the teeming work-days of the Creator, as they rose in vision before the eye of the inspired historian "of the generations of the heaven and earth, in the days that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens." And who that hath watched their ways with an understanding heart, could, as the vision evolving still advanced towards him, contemplate the filial and loyal bee; the home building, wedded, and divorceless swallow; and, above all, the manifoldly intelligent ant tribes, with their commonwealth and confederacies, their warriors and miners, the husband-folk, that fold in their tiny flocks on the honied leaf, and the virgin sisters with the holy instincts of maternal love, detached and in selfless purity, and not say to himself, Behold the shadow of approaching Humanity, the sun rising from behind, in the kindling morn of creation! Thus all lower natures find their highest good in semblances and seekings of that which is higher and better. All things strive to ascend, and ascend in their striving. And shall man alone stoop? Shall his pursuits and desires, the reflections of his inward life, be like the reflected image of a tree on the edge of a pool, that grows downward, and seeks a mock heaven in the unstable element beneath it, in neighbourhood with the slim water-weeds and oozy bottom-grass that are yet better than itself and more noble, in as far as substances that appear as shadows are preferable to shadows mistaken for substance? No! it must be a higher good to make you happy. While you labour for any thing below your proper humanity, you seek a happy life in the region of death. Well saith the moral poet:-- 'Unless above himself he can Erect himself, how mean a thing is man!'" P. 105. 2d ed.--ED.] July 12. 1827. POPEDOM.--SCANDERBEG.--THOMAS � BECKET.--PURE AGES OF GREEK, ITALIAN, AND ENGLISH.--LUTHER.--BAXTER.--ALGERNON SIDNEY'S STYLE.--ARIOSTO AND TASSO.-- PROSE AND POETRY.--THE FATHERS.--RHENFERD.--JACOB BEHMEN. What a grand subject for a history the Popedom is! The Pope ought never to have affected temporal sway, but to have lived retired within St. Angelo, and to have trusted to the superstitious awe inspired by his character and office. He spoiled his chance when he meddled in the petty Italian politics. * * * * * Scanderbeg would be a very fine subject for Walter Scott; and so would Thomas à Becket, if it is not rather too much for him. It involves in essence the conflict between arms, or force, and the men of letters. * * * * * Observe the superior truth of language, in Greek, to Theocritus inclusively; in Latin, to the Augustan age exclusively; in Italian, to Tasso exclusively; and in English, to Taylor and Barrow inclusively. * * * * * Luther is, in parts, the most evangelical writer I know, after the apostles and apostolic men. * * * * * Pray read with great attention Baxter's Life of himself. It is an inestimable work. [1] I may not unfrequently doubt Baxter's memory, or even his competence, in consequence of his particular modes of thinking; but I could almost as soon doubt the Gospel verity as his veracity. [Footnote 1: This, a very thick folio of the old sort, was one of Mr. Coleridge's text books for English church history. He used to say that there was _no_ substitute for it in a course of study for a clergyman or public man, and that the modern political Dissenters, who affected to glory in Baxter as a leader, would read a bitter lecture on themselves in every page of it. In a marginal note I find Mr. C. writing thus: "Alas! in how many respects does my lot resemble Baxter's! But how much less have my bodily evils been, and yet how very much greater an impediment have I suffered them to be! But verily Baxter's labours seem miracles of supporting grace."--ED.] * * * * * I am not enough read in Puritan divinity to know the particular objections to the surplice, over and above the general prejudice against the _retenta_ of Popery. Perhaps that was the only ground,--a foolish one enough. In my judgment Bolingbroke's style is not in any respect equal to that of Cowley or Dryden. Read Algernon Sidney; his style reminds you as little of books as of blackguards. What a gentleman he was! * * * * * Burke's Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful seems to me a poor thing; and what he says upon Taste is neither profound nor accurate. * * * * * Well! I am for Ariosto against Tasso; though I would rather praise Aristo's poetry than his poem. * * * * * I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order;--poetry = the _best_ words in the best order. * * * * * I conceive Origen, Jerome, and Augustine to be the three great fathers in respect of theology, and Basil, Gregory Nazianzen, and Chrysostom in respect of rhetoric. * * * * * Rhenferd possessed the immense learning and robust sense of Selden, with the acuteness and wit of Jortin. * * * * * Jacob Behmen remarked, that it was not wonderful that there were separate languages for England, France, Germany, &c.; but rather that there was not a different language for every degree of latitude. In confirmation of which, see the infinite variety of languages amongst the barbarous tribes of South America. _July_ 20. 1827. NON-PERCEPTION OF COLOURS. What is said of some persons not being able to distinguish colours, I believe. It may proceed from general weakness, which will render the differences imperceptible, just as the dusk or twilight makes all colours one. This defect is most usual in the blue ray, the negative pole. * * * * * I conjecture that when finer experiments have been applied, the red, yellow, and orange rays will be found as capable of communicating magnetic action as the other rays, though, perhaps, under different circumstances. Remember this, if you are alive twenty years hence, and think of me. _July_ 21. 1827. RESTORATION.--REFORMATION. The elements had been well shaken together during the civil wars and interregnum under the Long Parliament and Protectorate; and nothing but the cowardliness and impolicy of the Nonconformists, at the Restoration, could have prevented a real reformation on a wider basis. But the truth is, by going over to Breda with their stiff flatteries to the hollow-hearted King, they put Sheldon and the bishops on the side of the constitution. * * * * * The Reformation in the sixteenth century narrowed Reform. As soon as men began to call themselves names, all hope of further amendment was lost. _July_ 23. 1827. WILLIAM III.--BERKELEY.--SPINOSA.--GENIUS.--ENVY.--LOVE. William the Third was a greater and much honester man than any of his ministers. I believe every one of them, except Shrewsbury, has now been detected in correspondence with James. * * * * * Berkeley can only be confuted, or answered, by one sentence. So it is with Spinosa. His premiss granted, the deduction is a chain of adamant. * * * * * Genius may co-exist with wildness, idleness, folly, even with crime; but not long, believe me, with selfishness, and the indulgence of an envious disposition. Envy is *[Greek: kakistos kai dikaiotatos theos], as I once saw it expressed somewhere in a page of Stobaeus: it dwarfs and withers its worshippers. * * * * * The man's desire is for the woman; but the woman's desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.[1] [Footnote 1: "A woman's friendship," I find written by Mr. C. on a page dyed red with an imprisoned rose-leaf, "a woman's friendship borders more closely on love than man's. Men affect each other in the reflection of noble or friendly acts; whilst women ask fewer proofs, and more signs and expressions of attachment."--ED.] August 29. 1827. JEREMY TAYLOR.--HOOKER.--IDEAS.--KNOWLEDGE. Jeremy Taylor is an excellent author for a young man to study, for the purpose of imbibing noble principles, and at the same time of learning to exercise caution and thought in detecting his numerous errors. * * * * * I must acknowledge, with some hesitation, that I think Hooker has been a little over-credited for his judgment. Take as an instance of an idea the continuity and coincident distinctness of nature; or this,--vegetable life is always striving to be something that it is not; animal life to be itself.[1] Hence, in a plant the parts, as the root, the stem, the branches, leaves, &c. remain after they have each produced or contributed to produce a different _status_ of the whole plant: in an animal nothing of the previous states remains distinct, but is incorporated into, and constitutes progressively, the very self. [Footnote 1: The reader who has never studied Plato, Bacon, Kant, or Coleridge in their philosophic works, will need to be told that the word Idea is not used in this passage in the sense adopted by "Dr. Holofernes, who in a lecture on metaphysics, delivered at one of the Mechanics' Institutions, explodes all _ideas_ but those of sensation; whilst his friend, deputy Costard, has no _idea_ of a better-flavoured haunch of venison, than he dined off at the London Tavern last week. He admits (for the deputy has travelled) that the French have an excellent _idea_ of cooking in general; but holds that their most accomplished _maîtres de cuisine_ have no more _idea_ of dressing a turtle, than the Parisian gourmands themselves have any _real idea_ of the true _taste_ and _colour_ of the fat." Church and State, p. 78. No! what Mr. Coleridge meant by an idea in this place may be expressed in various ways out of his own works. I subjoin a sufficient definition from the Church and State, p. 6. "That which, contemplated _objectively_, (that is, as existing _externally_ to the mind,) we call a law; the same contemplated _subjectively_, (that is, as existing in a subject or mind,) is an idea. Hence Plato often names Ideas, Laws; and Lord Bacon, the British Plato, describes the laws of the material universe as the ideas in nature. "Quod in natura _naturata_ Lex, in natura _naturante_ Idea dicitur." A more subtle limitation of the word may be found in the last paragraph of Essay (E) in the Appendix to the Statesman's Manual.--ED.] * * * * * To know any thing for certain is to have a clear insight into the inseparability of the predicate from the subject (the matter from the form), and _vice versâ_. This is a verbal definition,--a _real_ definition of a thing absolutely known is impossible. I _know_ a circle, when I perceive that the equality of all possible radii from the centre to the circumference is inseparable from the idea of a circle. _August_ 30. 1827. PAINTING. Painting is the intermediate somewhat between a thought and a thing. April 13. 1830. PROPHECIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.--MESSIAH.--JEWS.--THE TRINITY. If the prophecies of the Old Testament are not rightly interpreted of Jesus our Christ, then there is no prediction whatever contained in it of that stupendous event--the rise and establishment of Christianity--in comparison with which all the preceding Jewish history is as nothing. With the exception of the book of Daniel, which the Jews themselves never classed among the prophecies, and an obscure text of Jeremiah, there is not a passage in all the Old Testament which favours the notion of a temporal Messiah. What moral object was there, for which such a Messiah should come? What could he have been but a sort of virtuous Sesostris or Buonaparte? * * * * * I know that some excellent men--Israelites without guile--do not, in fact, expect the advent of any Messiah; but believe, or suggest, that it may possibly have been God's will and meaning, that the Jews should remain a quiet light among the nations for the purpose of pointing at the doctrine of the unity of God. To which I say, that this truth of the essential unity of God has been preserved, and gloriously preached, by Christianity alone. The Romans never shut up their temples, nor ceased to worship a hundred or a thousand gods and goddesses, at the bidding of the Jews; the Persians, the Hindus, the Chinese, learned nothing of this great truth from the Jews. But from Christians they did learn it in various degrees, and are still learning it. The religion of the Jews is, indeed, a light; but it is as the light of the glow-worm, which gives no heat, and illumines nothing but itself. * * * * * It has been objected to me, that the vulgar notions of the Trinity are at variance with this doctrine; and it was added, whether as flattery or sarcasm matters not, that few believers in the Trinity thought of it as I did. To which again humbly, yet confidently, I reply, that my superior light, if superior, consists in nothing more than this,--that I more clearly see that the doctrine of Trinal Unity is an absolute truth transcending my human means of understanding it, or demonstrating it. I may or may not be able to utter the formula of my faith in this mystery in more logical terms than some others; but this I say, Go and ask the most ordinary man, a professed believer in this doctrine, whether he believes in and worships a plurality of Gods, and he will start with horror at the bare suggestion. He may not be able to explain his creed in exact terms; but he will tell you that he _does_ believe in one God, and in one God only,-- reason about it as you may. * * * * * What all the churches of the East and West, what Romanist and Protestant believe in common, that I call Christianity. In no proper sense of the word can I call Unitarians and Socinians believers in Christ; at least, not in the only Christ of whom I have read or know any thing. April 14, 1830. CONVERSION OF THE JEWS.--JEWS IN POLAND. There is no hope of converting the Jews in the way and with the spirit unhappily adopted by our church; and, indeed, by all other modern churches. In the first age, the Jewish Christians undoubtedly considered themselves as the seed of Abraham, to whom the promise had been made; and, as such, a superior order. Witness the account of St. Peter's conduct in the Acts [1], and the Epistle to the Galatians.[2] St. Paul protested against this, so far as it went to make Jewish observances compulsory on Christians who were not of Jewish blood, and so far as it in any way led to bottom the religion on the Mosaic covenant of works; but he never denied the birthright of the chosen seed: on the contrary, he himself evidently believed that the Jews would ultimately be restored; and he says,--If the Gentiles have been so blest by the rejection of the Jews, how much rather shall they be blest by the conversion and restoration of Israel! Why do we expect the Jews to abandon their national customs and distinctions? The Abyssinian church said that they claimed a descent from Abraham; and that, in virtue of such ancestry, they observed circumcision: but declaring withal, that they rejected the covenant of works, and rested on the promise fulfilled in Jesus Christ. In consequence of this appeal, the Abyssinians were permitted to retain their customs. If Rhenferd's Essays were translated--if the Jews were made acquainted with the real argument--if they were addressed kindly, and were not required to abandon their distinctive customs and national type, but were invited to become Christians _as of the seed of Abraham_--I believe there would be a Christian synagogue in a year's time. As it is, the Jews of the lower orders are the very lowest of mankind; they have not a principle of honesty in them; to grasp and be getting money for ever is their single and exclusive occupation. A learned Jew once said to me, upon this subject:--"O Sir! make the inhabitants of Hollywell Street and Duke's Place Israelites first, and then we may debate about making them Christians."[3] In Poland, the Jews are great landholders, and are the worst of tyrants. They have no kind of sympathy with their labourers and dependants. They never meet them in common worship. Land, in the hand of a large number of Jews, instead of being, what it ought to be, the organ of permanence, would become the organ of rigidity, in a nation; by their intermarriages within their own pale, it would be in fact perpetually entailed. Then, again, if a popular tumult were to take place in Poland, who can doubt that the Jews would be the first objects of murder and spoliation? [Footnote 1: Chap. xv.] [Footnote 2 : Chap. ii.] [Footnote 3: Mr. Coleridge had a very friendly acquaintance with several learned Jews in this country, and he told me that, whenever he had fallen in with a Jew of thorough education and literary habits, he had always found him possessed of a strong natural capacity for metaphysical disquisitions. I may mention here the best known of his Jewish friends, one whom he deeply respected, Hyman Hurwitz.--ED.] April 17. 1830. MOSAIC MIRACLES.--PANTHEISM. In the miracles of Moses, there is a remarkable intermingling of acts, which we should now-a-days call simply providential, with such as we should still call miraculous. The passing of the Jordan, in the 3d chapter of the book of Joshua, is perhaps the purest and sheerest miracle recorded in the Bible; it seems to have been wrought for the miracle's sake, and so thereby to show to the Jews--the descendants of those who had come out of Egypt-- that the _same_ God who had appeared to their fathers, and who had by miracles, in many respects providential only, preserved them in the wilderness, was _their_ God also. The manna and quails were ordinary provisions of Providence, rendered miraculous by certain laws and qualities annexed to them in the particular instance. The passage of the Red Sea was effected by a strong wind, which, we are told, drove hack the waters; and so on. But then, again, the death of the first-born was purely miraculous. Hence, then, both Jews and Egyptians might take occasion to learn, that it was _one and the same God_ who interfered specially, and who governed all generally. * * * * * Take away the first verse of the hook of Genesis, and then what immediately follows is an exact history or sketch of Pantheism. Pantheism was taught in the mysteries of Greece; of which the Samothracian or Cabeiric were probably the purest and the most ancient. _April_ 18. 1830. POETIC PROMISE. In the present age it is next to impossible to predict from specimens, however favourable, that a young man will turn out a great poet, or rather a poet at all. Poetic taste, dexterity in composition, and ingenious imitation, often produce poems that are very promising in appearance. But genius, or the power of doing something new, is another thing. Mr. Tennyson's sonnets, such as I have seen, have many of the characteristic excellencies of those of Wordsworth and Southey. _April 19. 1830._ It is a small thing that the patient knows of his own state; yet some things he _does_ know better than his physician. * * * * * I never had, and never could feel, any horror at death, simply as death. * * * * * Good and bad men are each less so than they seem. _April 30. 1830._ NOMINALISTS AND REALISTS.--BRITISH SCHOOLMEN.--SPINOSA. The result of my system will be, to show, that, so far from the world being a goddess in petticoats, it is rather the Devil in a strait waistcoat. * * * * * The controversy of the Nominalists and Realists was one of the greatest and most important that ever occupied the human mind. They were both right, and both wrong. They each maintained opposite poles of the same truth; which truth neither of them saw, for want of a higher premiss. Duns Scotus was the head of the Realists; Ockham,[1] his own disciple, of the Nominalists. Ockham, though certainly very prolix, is a most extraordinary writer. [Footnote 1: John Duns Scotus was born in 1274, at Dunstone in the parish of Emildune, near Alnwick. He was a fellow of Merton College, and Professor of Divinity at Oxford. After acquiring an uncommon reputation at his own university, he went to Paris, and thence to Cologne, and there died in 1308, at the early age of thirty-four years. He was called the Subtle Doctor, and found time to compose works which now fill twelve volumes in folio. See the Lyons edition, by Luke Wadding, in 1639. William Ockham was an Englishman, and died about 1347; but the place and year of his birth are not clearly ascertained. He was styled the Invincible Doctor, and wrote bitterly against Pope John XXII. We all remember Butler's account of these worthies:-- "He knew what's what, and that's as high As metaphysic wit can fly; In school divinity as able As he that hight Irrefragable, A second Thomas, or at once To name them all, another _Dunse_; Profound in all the Nominal And Real ways beyond them all; For he a rope of sand could twist As tough as learned Sorbonist." HUDIBRAS. Part I. Canto I. v. 149. The Irrefragable Doctor was Alexander Hales, a native of Gloucestershire, who died in 1245. Amongst his pupils at Paris, was Fidanza, better known by the name of Bonaventura, the Seraphic Doctor. The controversy of the Realists and the Nominalists cannot he explained in a note; but in substance the original point of dispute may be thus stated. The Realists held _generally_ with Aristotle, that there were universal _ideas_ or essences impressed upon matter, and covëal with, and inherent in, their objects. Plato held that these universal forms existed as exemplars in the divine mind previously to, and independently of, matter; but both maintained, under one shape or other, the real existence of universal forms. On the other hand, Zeno and the old Stoics denied the existence of these universals, and contended that they were no more than mere tenms and nominal representatives of their particular objects. The Nominalists were the followers of Zeno, and held that universal forms are merely modes of conception, and exist solely in and for the mind. It does not require much reflection to see how great an influence these different systems might have upon the enunciation of the higher doctrines of Christianity.--ED.] * * * * * It is remarkable, that two thirds of the eminent schoolmen were of British birth. It was the schoolmen who made the languages of Europe what they now are. We laugh at the quiddities of those writers now, but, in truth, these quiddities are just the parts of their language which we have rejected; whilst we never think of the mass which we have adopted, and have in daily use. * * * * * One of the scholastic definitions of God is this,--_Deus est, cui omne quod est est esse omne quod est:_ as long a sentence made up of as few words, and those as oligosyllabic, as any I remember. By the by, that _oligosyllabic_ is a word happily illustrative of its own meaning, _ex opposito_. * * * * * Spinosa, at the very end of his life, seems to have gained a glimpse of the truth. In the last letter published in his works, it appears that he began to suspect his premiss. His _unica substantia_ is, in fact, a mere notion, --a _subject_ of the mind, and no _object_ at all. * * * * * Plato's works are preparatory exercises for the mind. He leads you to see, that propositions involving in themselves contradictory conceptions, are nevertheless true; and which, therefore, must belong to a higher logic-- that of ideas. They are contradictory only in the Aristotelian logic, which is the instrument of the understanding. I have read most of the works of Plato several times with profound attention, but not all his writings. In fact, I soon found that I had read Plato by anticipation. He was a consummate genius.[1] [Footnote 1: "This is the test and character of a truth so affirmed (--a truth of the reason, an Idea)--that in its own proper form it is _inconceivable_. For to _conceive_, is a function of the understanding, which can he exercised only on subjects subordinate thereto. And yet to the forms of the understanding all truth must be reduced, that is to be fixed as an object of reflection, and to be rendered _expressible_. And here we have a second test and sign of a truth so affirmed, that it can come forth out of the moulds of the understanding only in the disguise of two contradictory conceptions, each of which is partially true, and the conjunction of both conceptions becomes the representative or _expression_ (--the _exponent_) of a truth beyond conception and inexpressible. Examples: _before_ Abraham WAS, I AM. God is a circle, the centre of which is every where, and the circumference no where. The soul is all in every part." Aids to Reflection, n. 224.n. See also _Church and State_, p. 12.--ED.] * * * * * My mind is in a state of philosophical doubt as to animal magnetism. Von Spix, the eminent naturalist, makes no doubt of the matter, and talks coolly of giving doses of it. The torpedo affects a third or external object, by an exertion of its own will: such a power is not properly electrical; for electricity acts invariably under the same circumstances. A steady gaze will make many persons of fair complexions blush deeply. Account for that. [1] [Footnote 1: I find the following remarkable passage in p. 301. vol. i. of the richly annotated copy of Mr. Southey's Life of Wesley, which Mr. C. bequeathed as his "darling book and the favourite of his library" to its great and honoured author and donor:-- "The coincidence throughout of all these Methodist cases with those of the Magnetists makes me wish for a solution that would apply to all. Now this sense or appearance of a sense of the distant, both in time and space, is common to almost all the _magnetic_ patients in Denmark, Germany, France, and North Italy, to many of whom the same or a similar solution could not apply. Likewise, many cases have been recorded at the same time, in different countries, by men who had never heard of each other's names, and where the simultaneity of publication proves the independence of the testimony. And among the Magnetisers and Attesters are to be found names of men, whose competence in respect of integrity and incapability of intentional falsehood is fully equal to that of Wesley, and their competence in respect of physio- and psychological insight and attainments incomparably greater. Who would dream, indeed, of comparing Wesley with a Cuvier, Hufeland, Blumenbach, Eschenmeyer, Reil, &c.? Were I asked, what _I_ think, my answer would be,--that the evidence enforces scepticism and a _non liquet_;--too strong and consentaneous for a candid mind to be satisfied of its falsehood, or its solvibility on the supposition of imposture or casual coincidence;--too fugacious and unfixable to support any theory that supposes the always potential, and, under certain conditions and circumstances, occasionally active, existence of a correspondent faculty in the human soul. And nothing less than such an hypothesis would be adequate to the _satisfactory_ explanation of the facts;--though that of a _metastasis_ of specific functions of the nervous energy, taken in conjunction with extreme nervous excitement, _plus_ some delusion, _plus_ some illusion, _plus_ some imposition, _plus_ some chance and accidental coincidence, might determine the direction in which the scepticism should vibrate. Nine years has the subject of Zoo-magnetism been before me. I have traced it historically, collected a mass of documents in French, German, Italian, and the Latinists of the sixteenth century, have never neglected an opportunity of questioning eye-witnesses, _ex. gr._ Tieck, Treviranus, De Prati, Meyer, and others of literary or medical celebrity, and I remain where I was, and where the first perusal of Klug's work had left me, without having moved an inch backward or forward. The reply of Treviranus, the famous botanist, to me, when he was in London, is worth recording:--'Ich habe gesehen was (ich weiss das) ich nicht würde geglaubt haben auf _ihren_ erzählung,' &c. 'I have seen what I am certain I would not have believed on your telling; and in all reason, therefore, I can neither expect nor wish that you should believe on _mine_.'"--ED.] _May_ 1. 1830. FALL OF MAN.--MADNESS.--BROWN AND DARWIN.--NITROUS OXIDE. A Fall of some sort or other--the creation, as it were, of the non- absolute--is the fundamental postulate of the moral history of man. Without this hypothesis, man is unintelligible; with it, every phenomenon is explicable. The mystery itself is too profound for human insight. * * * * * Madness is not simply a bodily disease. It is the sleep of the spirit with certain conditions of wakefulness; that is to say, lucid intervals. During this sleep, or recession of the spirit, the lower or bestial states of life rise up into action and prominence. It is an awful thing to be eternally tempted by the perverted senses. The reason may resist--it does resist--for a long time; but too often, at length, it yields for a moment, and the man is mad for ever. An act of the will is, in many instances, precedent to complete insanity. I think it was Bishop Butler who said, that he was "all his life struggling against the devilish suggestions of his senses," which would have maddened him, if he had relaxed the stern wakefulness of his reason for a single moment. * * * * * Brown's and Darwin's theories are both ingenious; but the first will not account for sleep, and the last will not account for death: considerable defects, you must allow. * * * * * It is said that every excitation is followed by a commensurate exhaustion. That is not so. The excitation caused by inhaling nitrous oxide is an exception at least; it leaves no exhaustion on the bursting of the bubble. The operation of this gas is to prevent the decarbonating of the blood; and, consequently, if taken excessively, it would produce apoplexy. The blood becomes black as ink. The voluptuous sensation attending the inhalation is produced by the compression and resistance. _May_ 2. 1830. PLANTS.--INSECTS.--MEN.--DOG.--ANT AND BEE. Plants exist _in_ themselves. Insects _by_, or by means of, themselves. Men, _for_ themselves. The perfection of irrational animals is that which is best for _them_; the perfection of man is that which is absolutely best. There is growth only in plants; but there is irritability, or, a better word, instinctivity, in insects. * * * * * You may understand by _insect_, life in sections--diffused generally over all the parts. * * * * * The dog alone, of all brute animals, has a [*Greek: storgae], or affection _upwards_ to man. * * * * * The ant and the bee are, I think, much nearer man in the understanding or faculty of adapting means to proximate ends than the elephant.[1] [Footnote 1: I remember Mr. C. was accustomed to consider the ant, as the most intellectual, and the dog as the most affectionate, of the irrational creatures, so far as our present acquaintance with the facts of natural history enables us to judge.--ED.] _May_ 3. 1830. BLACK COLONEL. What an excellent character is the black Colonel in Mrs. Bennett's "Beggar Girl!"[1] If an inscription be put upon my tomb, it may be that I was an enthusiastic lover of the church; and as enthusiastic a hater of those who have betrayed it, be they who they may.[2] [Footnote 1: This character was frequently a subject of pleasant description and enlargement with Mr. Coleridge, and he generally passed from it to a high commendation of Miss Austen's novels, as being in their way perfectly genuine and individual productions.--ED.] [Footnote 2: This was a strong way of expressing a deep-rooted feeling. A better and a truer character would be, that Coleridge was a lover of the church, and a defender of the faith! This last expression is the utterance of a conviction so profound that it can patiently wait for time to prove its truth.--ED.] _May_ 4. 1830. HOLLAND AND THE DUTCH. Holland and the Netherlands ought to be seen once, because no other country is like them. Every thing is artificial. You will be struck with the combinations of vivid greenery, and water, and building; but every thing is so distinct and rememberable, that you would not improve your conception by visiting the country a hundred times over. It is interesting to see a country and a nature _made_, as it were, by man, and to compare it with God's nature.[1] If you go, remark, (indeed you will be forced to do so in spite of yourself,) remark, I say, the identity (for it is more than proximity) of a disgusting dirtiness in all that concerns the dignity of, and reverence for, the human person; and a persecuting painted cleanliness in every thing connected with property. You must not walk in their gardens; nay, you must hardly look into them. [Footnote 1: In the summer of 1828, Mr. Coleridge made an excursion with Mr. Wordsworth in Holland, Flanders, and up the Rhine, as far as Bergen. He came back delighted, especially with his stay near Bonn, but with an abiding disgust at the filthy habits of the people. Upon Cologne, in particular, he avenged himself in two epigrams. See Poet. Works, vol. ii. p. 144.--ED.] * * * * * The Dutch seem very happy and comfortable, certainly; but it is the happiness of _animals_. In vain do you look for the sweet breath of hope and advancement among them. [1]In fact, as to their villas and gardens, they are not to be compared to an ordinary London merchant's box. [Footnote 1: "For every gift of noble origin Is breathed upon by Hope's perpetual breath." _Wordsworth._] _May 5. 1830._ RELIGION GENTILIZES.--WOMEN AND MEN.--BIBLICAL COMMENTATORS.--WALKERITE CREED. You may depend upon it, religion is, in its essence, the most gentlemanly thing in the world. It will _alone_ gentilize, if unmixed with cant; and I know nothing else that will, _alone_. Certainly not the army, which is thought to be the grand embellisher of manners. * * * * * A woman's head is usually over ears in her heart. Man seems to have been designed for the superior being of the two; but as things are, I think women are generally better creatures than men. They have, taken universally, weaker appetites and weaker intellects, but they have much stronger affections. A man with a bad heart has been sometimes saved by a strong head; but a corrupt woman is lost for ever. * * * * * I never could get much information out of the biblical commentators. Cocceius has told me the most; but he, and all of them, have a notable trick of passing _siccissimis pedibus_ over the parts which puzzle a man of reflection. The Walkerite creed, or doctrine of the New Church, as it is called, appears to be a miscellany of Calvinism and Quakerism; but it is hard to understand it. * * * * * _May_ 7, 1830. HORNE TOOKE.----DIVERSIONS OF PURLEY.----GENDER OF THE SUN IN GERMAN. Horne Tooke was pre-eminently a ready-witted man. He had that clearness which is founded on shallowness. He doubted nothing; and, therefore, gave you all that he himself knew, or meant, with great completeness. His voice was very fine, and his tones exquisitely discriminating. His mind had no progression or developement. All that is worth any thing (and that is but little) in the Diversions of Purley is contained in a short pamphlet-letter which he addressed to Mr. Dunning; then it was enlarged to an octavo, hut there was not a foot of progression beyond the pamphlet; at last, a quarto volume, 1 believe, came out; and yet, verily, excepting newspaper lampoons and political insinuations, there was no addition to the argument of the pamphlet, It shows a base and unpoetical mind to convert so beautiful, so divine, a subject as language into the vehicle or make-weight of political squibs. All that is true in Horne Tooke's book is taken from Lennep, who gave it for so much as it was worth, and never pretended to make a system of it. Tooke affects to explain the origin and whole philosophy of language by what is, in fact, only a mere accident of the history of one language, or one or two languages. His abuse of Harris is most shallow and unfair. Harris, in the Hermes, was dealing--not very profoundly, it is true,--with the philosophy of language, the moral, physical, and metaphysical causes and conditions of it, &c. Horne Tooke, in writing about the formation of words only, thought he was explaining the philosophy of language, which is a very different thing. In point of fact, he was very shallow in the Gothic dialects. I must say, all that _decantata fabula_ about the genders of the sun and moon in German seems to me great stuff. Originally, I apprehend, in the _Platt-Deutsch_ of the north of Germany there were only two definite articles--_die_ for masculine and feminine, and _das_ for neuter. Then it was _die sonne_, in a masculine sense, as we say with the same word as article, _the_ sun. Luther, in constructing the _Hoch-Deutsch_ (for really his miraculous and providential translation of the Bible was the fundamental act of construction of the literary German), took for his distinct masculine article the _der_ of the _Ober-Deutsch_, and thus constituted the three articles of the present High German, _der, die, das_. Naturally, therefore, it would then have been, _der sonne_; but here the analogy of the Greek grammar prevailed, and as _sonne_ had the arbitrary feminine termination of the Greek, it was left with its old article _die_, which, originally including masculine and feminine both, had grown to designate the feminine only. To the best of my recollection, the Minnesingers and all the old poets always use the sun as masculine; and, since Luther's time, the poets feel the awkwardness of the classical gender affixed to the sun so much, that they more commonly introduce Phoebus or some other synonyme instead. I must acknowledge my doubts, whether, upon more accurate investigation, it can be shown that there ever was a nation that considered the sun in itself, and apart from language, as the feminine power. The moon does not so clearly demand a feminine as the sun does a masculine sex: it might be considered negatively or neuter;--yet if the reception of its light from the sun were known, that would have been a good reason for making her feminine, as being the recipient body. * * * * * As our _the_ was the German _die_, so I believe our _that_ stood for _das_, and was used as a neuter definite article. The _Platt-Deutsch_ was a compact language like the English, not admitting much agglutination. The _Ober-Deutsch_ was fuller and fonder of agglutinating words together, although it was not so soft in its sounds. _May 8. 1830._ HORNE TOOKE.--JACOBINS. Horne Tooke said that his friends might, if they pleased, go as far as Slough,--he should go no farther than Hounslow; but that was no reason why he should not keep them company so far as their roads were the same. The answer is easy. Suppose you know, or suspect, that a man is about to commit a robbery at Slough, though you do not mean to be his accomplice, have you a moral right to walk arm in arm with him to Hounslow, and, by thus giving him your countenance, prevent his being taken up? The history of all the world tells us, that immoral means will ever intercept good ends. * * * * * Enlist the interests of stern morality and religious enthusiasm in the cause of political liberty, as in the time of the old Puritans, and it will be irresistible; but the Jacobins played the whole game of religion, and morals, and domestic happiness into the hands of the aristocrats. Thank God! that they did so. England was saved from civil war by their enormous, their providential, blundering. * * * * * Can a politician, a statesman, slight the feelings and the convictions of the whole matronage of his country? The women are as influential upon such national interests as the men. * * * * * Horne Tooke was always making a butt of Mr. Godwin; who, nevertheless, had that in him which Tooke could never have understood. I saw a good deal of Tooke at one time: he left upon me the impression of his being a keen, iron man. _May_ 9. 1830. PERSIAN AND ARABIC POETRY.--MILESIAN TALES. I must acknowledge I never could see much merit in the Persian poetry, which I have read in translation. There is not a ray of imagination in it, and but a glimmering of fancy. It is, in fact, so far as I know, deficient in truth. Poetry is certainly something more than good sense, but it must be good sense, at all events; just as a palace is more than a house, but it must be a house, at least. The Arabian Nights' Tales are a different thing --they are delightful, but I cannot help surmising that there is a good deal of Greek fancy in them. No doubt we have had a great loss in the Milesian Tales.[1] The book of Job is pure Arab poetry of the highest and most antique cast. Think of the sublimity, I should rather say the profundity, of that passage in Ezekiel, [2]"Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest." I know nothing like it. [Footnote 1: The Milesiacs were so called, because written or composed by Aristides of Miletus, and also because the scene of all or most of them was placed in that rich and luxurious city. Harpocration cites the sixth book of this collection. Nothing, I believe, is now known of the age or history of this Aristides, except what may be inferred from the fact that Lucius Cornelius Sisenna translated the tales into Latin, as we learn from Ovid:-- Junxit Aristides _Milesia crimina_ secum-- and afterwards, Vertit Aristidem Sisenna, nec obfuit illi Historiae turpes inseruisse jocos:-- _Fasti_, ii. 412-445. and also from the incident mentioned in the _Plutarchian_ life of Crassus, that after the defeat at Carrhae, a copy of the Milesiacs of Aristides was found in the baggage of a Roman officer, and that Surena (who, by the by, if history has not done him injustice, was not a man to be over scrupulous in such a case,) caused the book to be brought into the senate house of Seleucia, and a portion of it read aloud, for the purpose of insulting the Romans, who, even during war, he said, could not abstain from the perusal of such _infamous compositions_,--c. 32. The immoral character of these tales, therefore, may be considered pretty clearly established; they were the Decameron and Heptameron of antiquity.--ED.] [Footnote 2: Chap. xxxvii. v. 3.] _May_ 11. 1830. SIR T. MONRO.--SIR S. RAFFLES.--CANNING. Sir Thomas Monro and Sir Stamford Raffles were both great men; but I recognise more genius in the latter, though, I believe, the world says otherwise. * * * * * I never found what I call an idea in any speech or writing of ----'s. Those enormously prolix harangues are a proof of weakness in the higher intellectual grasp. Canning had a sense of the beautiful and the good; --- rarely speaks but to abuse, detract, and degrade. I confine myself to institutions, of course, and do not mean personal detraction. In my judgment, no man can rightly apprehend an abuse till he has first mastered the idea of the use of an institution. How fine, for example, is the idea of the unhired magistracy of England, taking in and linking together the duke to the country gentleman in the primary distribution of justice, or in the preservation of order and execution of law at least throughout the country! Yet some men never seem to have thought of it for one moment, but as connected with brewers, and barristers, and tyrannical Squire Westerns! From what I saw of Homer, I thought him a superior man, in real intellectual greatness. * * * * * Canning flashed such a light around the constitution, that it was difficult to see the ruins of the fabric through it. _May_ 12. 1830. SHAKSPEARE.--MILTON.--HOMER. Shakspeare is the Spinosistic deity--an omnipresent creativeness. Milton is the deity of prescience; he stands _ab extra_, and drives a fiery chariot and four, making the horses feel the iron curb which holds them in. Shakspeare's poetry is characterless; that is, it does not reflect the individual Shakspeare; but John Milton himself is in every line of the Paradise Lost. Shakspeare's rhymed verses are excessively condensed,-- epigrams with the point every where; but in his blank dramatic verse he is diffused, with a linked sweetness long drawn out. No one can understand Shakspeare's superiority fully until he has ascertained, by comparison, all that which he possessed in common with several other great dramatists of his age, and has then calculated the surplus which is entirely Shakspeare's own. His rhythm is so perfect, that you may be almost sure that you do not understand the real force of a line, if it does not run well as you read it. The necessary mental pause after every hemistich or imperfect line is always equal to the time that would have been taken in reading the complete verse. * * * * * I have no doubt whatever that Homer is a mere concrete name for the rhapsodies of the Iliad.[1] Of course there was _a_ Homer, and twenty besides. I will engage to compile twelve books with characters just as distinct and consistent as those in the Iliad, from the metrical ballads, and other chronicles of England, about Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. I say nothing about moral dignity, but the mere consistency of character. The different qualities were traditional. Tristram is always courteous, Lancelot invincible, and so on. The same might be done with the Spanish romances of the Cid. There is no subjectivity whatever in the Homeric poetry. There is a subjectivity of the poet, as of Milton, who is himself before himself in everything he writes; and there is a subjectivity of the _persona_, or dramatic character, as in all Shakspeare's great creations, Hamlet, Lear, &c. [Footnote 1: Mr. Coleridge was a decided Wolfian in the Homeric question; but he had never read a word of the famous Prolegomena, and knew nothing of Wolf's reasoning, but what I told him of it in conversation. Mr. C. informed me, that he adopted the conclusion contained in the text upon the first perusal of Vico's Scienza Nuova; "not," he said, "that Vico has reasoned it out with such learning and accuracy as you report of Wolf, but Vico struck out all the leading hints, and I soon filled up the rest out of my own head."-- ED.] _May_ 14. 1830. REASON AND UNDERSTANDING.--WORDS AND NAMES OF THINGS. Until you have mastered the fundamental difference, in kind, between the reason and the understanding as faculties of the human mind, you cannot escape a thousand difficulties in philosophy. It is pre-eminently the _Gradus ad Philosophiam_. * * * * * The general harmony between the operations of the mind and heart, and the words which express them in almost all languages, is wonderful; whilst the endless discrepancies between the names of _things_ is very well deserving notice. There are nearly a hundred names in the different German dialects for the alder-tree. I believe many more remarkable instances are to be found in Arabic. Indeed, you may take a very pregnant and useful distinction between _words_ and mere arbitrary _names of things_. _May 15. 1830._ THE TRINITY.--IRVING. The Trinity is, 1. the Will; 2. the Reason, or Word; 3. the Love, or Life. As we distinguish these three, so we must unite them in one God. The union must be as transcendant as the distinction. Mr. Irving's notion is tritheism,--nay, rather in terms, tri-daemonism. His opinion about the sinfulness of the humanity of our Lord is absurd, if considered in one point of view; for body is not carcass. How can there be a sinful carcass? But what he says is capable of a sounder interpretation. Irving caught many things from me; but he would never attend to any thing which he thought he could not use in the pulpit. I told him the certain consequence would be, that he would fall into grievous errors. Sometimes he has five or six pages together of the purest eloquence, and then an outbreak of almost madman's babble.[1] [Footnote 1: The admiration and sympathy which Mr. Coleridge felt and expressed towards the late Mr. Irving, at his first appearance in London, were great and sincere; and his grief at the deplorable change which followed was in proportion. But, long after the tongues shall have failed and been forgotten, Irving's name will live in the splendid eulogies of his friend. See _Church and State_, p. 180. n.--ED.] _May 16. 1830._ ABRAHAM.--ISAAC.--JACOB. How wonderfully beautiful is the delineation of the characters of the three patriarchs in Genesis! To be sure, if ever man could, without impropriety, be called, or supposed to be, "the friend of God," Abraham was that man. We are not surprised that Abimelech and Ephron seem to reverence him so profoundly. He was peaceful, because of his conscious relation to God; in other respects, he takes fire, like an Arah sheikh, at the injuries suffered by Lot, and goes to war with the combined kinglings immediately. * * * * * Isaac is, as it were, a faint shadow of his father Abraham. Born in possession of the power and wealth which his father had acquired, he is always peaceful and meditative; and it is curious to observe his timid and almost childish imitation of Abraham's stratagem about his wife. [1] Isaac does it before-hand, and without any apparent necessity. [Footnote 1: Gen. xxvi. 6.] * * * * * Jacob is a regular Jew, and practises all sorts of tricks and wiles, which, according to our modern notions of honour, we cannot approve. But you will observe that all these tricks are confined to matters of prudential arrangement, to worldly success and prosperity (for such, in fact, was the essence of the birthright); and I think we must not exact from men of an imperfectly civilized age the same conduct as to mere temporal and bodily abstinence which we have a right to demand from Christians. Jacob is always careful not to commit any violence; he shudders at bloodshed. See his demeanour after the vengeance taken on the Schechemites. [1] He is the exact compound of the timidity and gentleness of Isaac, and of the underhand craftiness of his mother Rebecca. No man could be a bad man who loved as he loved Rachel. I dare say Laban thought none the worse of Jacob for his plan of making the ewes bring forth ring-streaked lambs. [Footnote 1: Gen. xxxiv.] _May 17. 1830._ ORIGIN OF ACTS.--LOVE. If a man's conduct cannot be ascribed to the angelic, nor to the bestial within him, what is there left for us to refer to it, but the fiendish? Passion without any appetite is fiendish. * * * * * The best way to bring a clever young man, who has become sceptical and unsettled, to reason, is to make him _feel_ something in any way. Love, if sincere and unworldly, will, in nine instances out of ten, bring him to a sense and assurance of something real and actual; and that sense alone will make him _think_ to a sound purpose, instead of dreaming that he is thinking. * * * * * "Never marry but for love," says William Penn in his Reflexions and Maxims; "but see that thou lovest what is lovely." _May 18. 1830._ LORD ELDON'S DOCTRINE AS TO GRAMMAR SCHOOLS.--DEMOCRACY. Lord Eldon's doctrine, that grammar schools, in the sense of the reign of Edward VI. and Queen Elizabeth, must necessarily mean schools for teaching Latin and Greek, is, I think, founded on an insufficient knowledge of the history and literature of the sixteenth century. Ben Jonson uses the term "grammar" without any reference to the learned languages. * * * * * It is intolerable when men, who have no other knowledge, have not even a competent understanding of that world in which they are always living, and to which they refer every thing. * * * * * Although contemporary events obscure past events in a living man's life, yet as soon as he is dead, and his whole life is a matter of history, one action stands out as conspicuously as another. A democracy, according to the prescript of pure reason, would, in fact, be a church. There would he focal points in it, but no superior. _May 20. 1830._ THE EUCHARIST.--ST. JOHN, xix. 11.--GENUINENESS OF BOOKS OF MOSES.-- DIVINITY OF CHRIST.--MOSAIC PROPHECIES. No doubt, Chrysostom, and the other rhetorical fathers, contributed a good deal, by their rash use of figurative language, to advance the superstitious notion of the eucharist; but the beginning had been much earlier. [1] In Clement, indeed, the mystery is treated as it was treated by Saint John and Saint Paul; but in Hermas we see the seeds of the error, and more clearly in Irenaeus; and so it went on till the idea was changed into an idol. [Footnote 1: Mr. Coleridge made these remarks upon my quoting Selden's well-known saying (Table Talk), "that transubstantiation was nothing but rhetoric turned into logic."--ED.] * * * * * The errors of the Sacramentaries, on the one hand, and of the Romanists on the other, are equally great. The first have volatilized the eucharist into a metaphor; the last have condensed it into an idol. Jeremy Taylor, in his zeal against transubstantiation, contends that the latter part of the sixth chapter of St. John's Gospel has no reference to the eucharist. If so, St. John wholly passes over this sacred mystery; for he does not include it in his notice of the last supper. Would not a total silence of this great apostle and evangelist upon this mystery be strange? A mystery, I say; for it _is_ a mystery; it is the only mystery in our religious worship. When many of the disciples left our Lord, and apparently on the very ground that this saying was hard, he does not attempt to detain them by any explanation, but simply adds the comment, that his words were spirit. If he had really meant that the eucharist should he a mere commemorative celebration of his death, is it conceivable that he would let these disciples go away from him upon such a gross misunderstanding? Would he not have said, "You need not make a difficulty; I only mean so and so?" * * * * * Arnauld, and the other learned Romanists, are irresistible against the low sacramentary doctrine. * * * * * The sacrament of baptism applies itself, and has reference to the faith or conviction, and is, therefore, only to be performed once;--it is the light of man. The sacrament of the eucharist is a symbol of _all_ our religion;-- it is the life of man. It is commensurate with our will, and we must, therefore, want it continually. * * * * * The meaning of the expression, [Greek: ei m_e _en soi didomenon an_othen], "except it were given thee _from above_," in the 19th chapter of St. John, ver. 11., seems to me to have been generally and grossly mistaken. It is commonly understood as importing that Pilate could have no power to deliver Jesus to the Jews, unless it had been given him _by God_, which, no doubt, is true; but if that is the meaning, where is the force or connection of the following clause, [Greek: dia touto], "_therefore_ he that delivered me unto thee hath the greater sin?" In what respect were the Jews more sinful in delivering Jesus up, _because_ Pilate could do nothing except by God's leave? The explanation of Erasmus and Clarke, and some others, is very dry- footed. I conceive the meaning of our Lord to have been simply this, that Pilate would have had no power or jurisdiction--[Greek: exousian]--over him, if it had not been given by the Sanhedrin, the [Greek: an_o boul_e], and _therefore_ it was that the Jews had the greater sin. There was also this further peculiar baseness and malignity in the conduct of the Jews. The mere assumption of Messiahship, as such, was no crime in the eyes of the Jews; they hated Jesus, because he would not be _their sort_ of Messiah: on the other hand, the Romans cared not for his declaration that he was the Son of God; the crime in _their_ eyes was his assuming to be a king. Now, here were the Jews accusing Jesus before the Roman governor of _that_ which, in the first place, they knew that Jesus denied in the sense in which they urged it, and which, in the next place, had the charge been true, would have been so far from a crime in their eyes, that the very gospel history itself, as well as all the history to the destruction of Jerusalem, shows it would have been popular with the whole nation. They wished to destroy him, and for that purpose charge him falsely with a crime which yet was no crime in their own eyes, if it had been true; but only so as against the Roman domination, which they hated with all their souls, and against which they were themselves continually conspiring! * * * * * Observe, I pray, the manner and sense in which the high-priest understands the plain declaration of our Lord, that he was the Son of God. [Footnote: Matt. xxvi. v. 63. Mark, xiv. 61.] "I adjure thee by the living God, that thou tell us whether thou be the Christ, the Son of God," or "the Son of the Blessed," as it is in Mark. Jesus said, "I am,--and hereafter ye shall see the Son of man (or me) sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven." Does Caiaphas take this explicit answer as if Jesus meant that he was full of God's spirit, or was doing his commands, or walking in his ways, in which sense Moses, the prophets, nay, all good men, were and are the sons of God? No, no! He tears his robes in sunder, and cries out, "He hath spoken blasphemy. What further need have we of witnesses? Behold, now ye have heard his blasphemy." What blasphemy, I should like to know, unless the assuming to be the "Son of God" was assuming to be of the _divine nature_? * * * * * One striking proof of the genuineness of the Mosaic books is this,--they contain precise prohibitions--by way of predicting the consequences of disobedience--of all those things which David and Solomon actually did, and gloried in doing,--raising cavalry, making a treaty with Egypt, laying up treasure, and polygamising. Now, would such prohibitions have been fabricated in those kings' reigns, or afterwards? Impossible. * * * * * The manner of the predictions of Moses is very remarkable. He is like a man standing on an eminence, and addressing people below him, and pointing to things which he can, and they cannot, see. He does not say, You will act in such and such a way, and the consequences will be so and so; but, So and so will take place, because you will act in such a way! May 21. 1830. TALENT AND GENIUS.--MOTIVES AND IMPULSES. Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited; genius, being the action of reason and imagination, rarely or never. * * * * * Motives imply weakness, and the existence of evil and temptation. The angelic nature would act from impulse alone. A due mean of motive and impulse is the only practicable object of our moral philosophy. _May_ 23. 1830. CONSTITUTIONAL AND FUNCTIONAL LIFE.--HYSTERIA.--HYDRO-CARBONIC GAS.-- BITTERS AND TONICS.--SPECIFIC MEDICINES. It is a great error in physiology not to distinguish between what may be called the general or fundamental life--the _principium vitae_, and the functional life--the life in the functions. Organization must presuppose life as anterior to it: without life, there could not be or remain any organization; but then there is also _a_ life in the organs, or functions, distinct from the other. Thus, a flute presupposes,--demands the existence of a musician as anterior to it, without whom no flute could ever have existed; and yet again, without the instrument there can be no music. * * * * * It often happens that, on the one hand, the _principium vitae_, or constitutional life, may be affected without any, or the least imaginable, affection of the functions; as in inoculation, where one pustule only has appeared, and no other perceptible symptom, and yet this has so entered into the constitution, as to indispose it to infection under the most accumulated and intense contagion; and, on the other hand, hysteria, hydrophobia, and gout will disorder the functions to the most dreadful degree, and yet often leave the life untouched. In hydrophobia, the mind is quite sound; but the patient feels his muscular and cutaneous life forcibly removed from under the control of his will. * * * * * Hysteria may be fitly called _mimosa_, from its counterfeiting so many diseases,--even death itself. * * * * * Hydro-carbonic gas produces the most death-like exhaustion, without any previous excitement. I think this gas should be inhaled by way of experiment in cases of hydrophobia. There is a great difference between bitters and tonics. Where weakness proceeds from excess of irritability, there bitters act beneficially; because all bitters are poisons, and operate by stilling, and depressing, and lethargizing the irritability. But where weakness proceeds from the opposite cause of relaxation, there tonics are good; because they brace up and tighten the loosened string. Bracing is a correct metaphor. Bark goes near to be a combination of a bitter and a tonic; but no perfect medical combination of the two properties is yet known. * * * * * The study of specific medicines is too much disregarded now. No doubt the hunting after specifics is a mark of ignorance and weakness in medicine, yet the neglect of them is proof also of immaturity; for, in fact, all medicines will be found specific in the perfection of the science. _May_ 25. 1830. EPISTLES TO THE EPHESIANS AND COLOSSIANS.--OATHS. The Epistle to the Ephesians is evidently a catholic epistle, addressed to the whole of what might be called St. Paul's diocese. It is one of the divinest compositions of man. It embraces every doctrine of Christianity;-- first, those doctrines peculiar to Christianity, and then those precepts common to it with natural religion. The Epistle to the Colossians is the overflowing, as it were, of St. Paul's mind upon the same subject. * * * * * The present system of taking oaths is horrible. It is awfully absurd to make a man invoke God's wrath upon himself, if he speaks false; it is, in my judgment, a sin to do so. The Jews' oath is an adjuration by the judge to the witness: "In the name of God, I ask you." There is an express instance of it in the high-priest's adjuring or exorcising Christ by the living God, in the twenty-sixth chapter of Matthew, and you will observe that our Lord answered the appeal.[1] You may depend upon it, the more oath-taking, the more lying, generally among the people. [Footnote 1: See this instance cited, and the whole history and moral policy of the common system of judicial swearing examined with clearness and good feeling, in Mr. Tyler's late work on Oaths.--ED.] May 27. 1830. FLOGGING.--ELOQUENCE OF ABUSE. I had _one_ just flogging. When I was about thirteen, I went to a shoemaker, and begged him to take me as his apprentice. He, being an honest man, immediately brought me to Bowyer, who got into a great rage, knocked me down, and even pushed Crispin rudely out of the room. Bowyer asked me why I had made myself such a fool? to which I answered, that I had a great desire to be a shoemaker, and that I hated the thought of being a clergyman. "Why so?" said he.--"Because, to tell you the truth, sir," said I, "I am an infidel!" For this, without more ado, Bowyer flogged me,-- wisely, as I think,--soundly, as I know. Any whining or sermonizing would have gratified my vanity, and confirmed me in my absurdity; as it was, I was laughed at, and got heartily ashamed of my folly. * * * * * How rich the Aristophanic Greek is in the eloquence of abuse!-- [Greek: 'O Bdelyre, kanaischunte, kai tolmaere su, Kai miare, kai pammiare, kai miarotate.][1] We are not behindhand in English. Fancy my calling you, upon a fitting occasion,--Fool, sot, silly, simpleton, dunce, blockhead, jolterhead, clumsy-pate, dullard, ninny, nincompoop, lackwit, numpskull, ass, owl, loggerhead, coxcomb, monkey, shallow-brain, addle-head, tony, zany, fop, fop-doodle; a maggot-pated, hare-brained, muddle-pated, muddle-headed, Jackan-apes! Why I could go on for a minute more! [Footnote 1: In The Frogs.--ED.] _May_ 28. 1830. THE AMERICANS. I deeply regret the anti-American articles of some of the leading reviews. The Americans regard what is said of them in England a thousand times more than they do any thing said of them in any other country. The Americans are excessively pleased with any kind or favourable expressions, and never forgive or forget any slight or abuse. It would be better for them if they were a trifle thicker-skinned. * * * * * The last American war was to us only something to talk or read about; but to the Americans it was the cause of misery in their own homes. * * * * * I, for one, do not call the sod under my feet my country. But language, religion, laws, government, blood,--identity in these makes men of one country. _May_ 29. 1830. BOOK OF JOB. The Book of Job is an Arab poem, antecedent to the Mosaic dispensation. It represents the mind of a good man not enlightened by an actual revelation, but seeking about for one. In no other book is the desire and necessity for a Mediator so intensely expressed. The personality of God, the I AM of the Hebrews, is most vividly impressed on the book, in opposition to pantheism. * * * * * I now think, after many doubts, that the passage, "I know that my Redeemer liveth," &c. may fairly be taken as a burst of determination, a _quasi_ prophecy. [1] "I know not _how_ this can be; but in spite of all my difficulties, this I _do_ know, that I shall be recompensed." [Footnote 1: Chap. xix. 25, 26.] * * * * * It should be observed, that all the imagery in the speeches of the men is taken from the East, and is no more than a mere representation of the forms of material nature. But when God speaks, the tone is exalted; and almost all the images are taken from Egypt, the crocodile, the war-horse, and so forth. Egypt was then the first monarchy that had a splendid court. * * * * * Satan, in the prologue, does not mean the devil, our Diabolus. There is no calumny in his words. He is rather the _circuitor_, the accusing spirit, a dramatic attorney-general. But after the prologue, which was necessary to bring the imagination into a proper state for the dialogue, we hear no more of this Satan. * * * * * Warburton's notion, that the Book of Job was of so late a date as Ezra, is wholly groundless. His only reason is this appearance of Satan. _May_ 30. 1830. TRANSLATION OF THE PSALMS. I wish the Psalms were translated afresh; or, rather, that the present version were revised. Scores of passages are utterly incoherent as they now stand. If the primary visual images had been oftener preserved, the connection and force of the sentences would have been better perceived.[1] [Footnote 1: Mr. Coleridge, like so many of the elder divines of the Christian church, had an _affectionate_ reverence for the moral and evangelical portion of the Book of Psalms. He told me that, after having studied every page of the Bible with the deepest attention, he had found no other part of Scripture come home so closely to his inmost yearnings and necessities. During many of his latter years he used to read ten or twelve verses every evening, ascertaining (for his knowledge of Hebrew was enough for that) the exact visual image or first radical meaning of every noun substantive; and he repeatedly expressed to me his surprise and pleasure at finding that in nine cases out of ten the bare primary sense, if literally rendered, threw great additional light on the text. He was not disposed to allow the prophetic or allusive character so largely as is done by Horne and others; but he acknowledged it in some instances in the fullest manner. In particular, he rejected the local and temporary reference which has been given to the 110th Psalm, and declared his belief in its deep mystical import with regard to the Messiah. Mr. C. once gave me the following note upon the _22d_ Psalm written by him, I believe, many years previously, but which, he said, he approved at that time. It will find as appropriate a niche here as any where else:-- "I am much delighted and instructed by the hypothesis, which I think probable, that our Lord in repeating _Eli, Eli, lama sabacthani_, really recited the whole or a large part of the 22d Psalm. It is impossible to read that psalm without the liveliest feelings of love, gratitude, and sympathy. It is, indeed, a wonderful prophecy, whatever might or might not have been David's notion when he composed it. Whether Christ did audibly repeat the whole or not, it is certain. I think, that he did it mentally, and said aloud what was sufficient to enable his followers to do the same. Even at this day to repeat in the same manner but the first line of a common hymn would be understood as a reference to the whole. Above all, I am thankful for the thought which suggested itself to my mind, whilst I was reading this beautiful psalm, namely, that we should not exclusively think of Christ as the Logos united to human nature, but likewise as a perfect man united to the Logos. This distinction is most important in order to conceive, much more, appropriately to _feel_, the conduct and exertions of Jesus."--ED.] _May_ 31. 1830. ANCIENT MARINER.--UNDINE.--MARTIN.--PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. Mrs. Barbauld once told me that she admired the Ancient Mariner very much, but that there were two faults in it,--it was improbable, and had no moral. As for the probability, I owned that that might admit some question; but as to the want of a moral, I told her that in my own judgment the poem had too much; and that the only, or chief fault, if I might say so, was the obtrusion of the moral sentiment so openly on the reader as a principle or cause of action in a work of such pure imagination. It ought to have had no more moral than the Arabian Nights' tale of the merchant's sitting down to eat dates by the side of a well, and throwing the shells aside, and lo! a genie starts up, and says he _must_ kill the aforesaid merchant, _because_ one of the date shells had, it seems, put out the eye of the genie's son.[1] I took the thought of "_grinning for joy_," in that poem, from my companion's remark to me, when we had climbed to the top of Plinlimmon, and were nearly dead with thirst. We could not speak from the constriction, till we found a little puddle under a stone. He said to me,--"You grinned like an idiot!" He had done the same. [Footnote 1: "There he found, at the foot of a great walnut-tree, a fountain of a very clear running water, and alighting, tied his horse to a branch of a tree, and sitting clown by the fountain, took some biscuits and dates out of his portmanteau, and, as he ate his dates, threw the shells about on both sides of him. When he had done eating, being a good Mussulman, he washed his hands, his face, and his feet, and said his prayers. He had not made an end, but was still on his knees, when he saw a genie appear, all white with age, and of a monstrous bulk; who, advancing towards him with a cimetar in his hand, spoke to him in a terrible voice thus:--'Rise up, that I may kill thee with this cimetar as you have killed my son!' and accompanied these words with a frightful cry. The merchant being as much frightened at the hideous shape of the monster as at these threatening words, answered him trembling:--'Alas! my good lord, of what crime can I be guilty towards you that you should take away my life?'--'I will,' replies the genie, 'kill thee, as thou hast killed my son!'--'O heaven!' says the merchant, 'how should I kill your son? I did not know him, nor ever saw him.'--'Did not you sit down when you came hither?' replies the genie. 'Did not you take dates out of your portmanteau, and, as you ate them, did not you throw the shells about on both sides?'--'I did all that you say,' answers the merchant, 'I cannot deny it.'--'If it be so,' replied the genie, 'I tell thee that thou hast killed my son; and the way was thus: when you threw the nutshells about, my son was passing by, and you threw one of them into his eye, which killed him, _therefore_ I must kill thee.'--'Ah! my good lord, pardon me!' cried the merchant.--'No pardon,' answers the genie, 'no mercy! Is it not just to kill him that has killed another?'--'I agree to it,' says the merchant, 'but certainly I never killed your son, and if I have, it was unknown to me, and I did it innocently; therefore I beg you to pardon me, and suffer me to live.'--'No, no,' says the genie, persisting in his resolution, 'I must kill thee, since thou hast killed my son;' and then taking the merchant by the arm, threw him with his face upon the ground, and lifted up his cimetar to cut off his head!"--The Merchant and the Genie. First night.--Ed.] * * * * * Undine is a most exquisite work. It shows the general want of any sense for the fine and the subtle in the public taste, that this romance made no deep impression. Undine's character, before she receives a soul, is marvellously beautiful.[1] [Footnote 1: Mr. Coleridge's admiration of this little romance was unbounded. He read it several times in German, and once in the English translation, made in America, I believe; the latter he thought inadequately done. Mr. C. said that there was something in Undine even beyond Scott,--that Scott's best characters and conceptions were _composed_; by which I understood him to mean that Baillie Nicol Jarvie, for example, was made up of old particulars, and received its individuality from the author's power of fusion, being in the result an admirable product, as Corinthian brass was said to be the conflux of the spoils of a city. But Undine, he said, was one and single in projection, and had presented to his imagination, what Scott had never done, an absolutely new idea--ED.] * * * * * It seems to me, that Martin never looks at nature except through bits of stained glass. He is never satisfied with any appearance that is not prodigious. He should endeavour to school his imagination into the apprehension of the true idea of the Beautiful.[1] The wood-cut of Slay-good[2] is admirable, to be sure; but this new edition of the Pilgrim's Progress is too fine a book for it. It should be much larger, and on sixpenny coarse paper. The Pilgrim's Progress is composed in the lowest style of English, without slang or false grammar. If you were to polish it, you would at once destroy the reality of the vision. For works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain. This wonderful work is one of the few books which may be read over repeatedly at different times, and each time with a new and a different pleasure. I read it once as a theologian--and let me assure you, that there is great theological acumen in the work--once with devotional feelings--and once as a poet. I could not have believed beforehand that Calvinism could be painted in such exquisitely delightful colours.[3] [Footnote 1: Mr. Coleridge said this, after looking at the engravings of Mr. Martin's two pictures of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and the Celestial City, published in the beautiful edition of the Pilgrim's Progress by Messrs. Murray and Major, in 1830. I wish Mr. Martin could have heard the poet's lecture: he would have been flattered, and at the same time, I believe, instructed; for in the philosophy of painting Coleridge was a master.--ED.] [Footnote 2: P. 350., by S. Mosses from a design by Mr. W. Harvey. "When they came to the place where he was, they found him with one _Feeble-mind_ in his hand, whom his servants had brought unto him, having taken him in the way. Now the giant was rifling him, with a purpose, after that, to pick his bones; for he was of the nature of flesh eaters."--ED.] [Footnote 3: I find written on a blank leaf of my copy of this edition of the P.'s P. the following note by Mr. C.:--"I know of no book, the Bible excepted as above all comparison, which I, according to _my_ judgment and experience, could so safely recommend as teaching and enforcing the whole saving truth according to the mind that was in Christ Jesus, as the Pilgrim's Progress. It is, in my conviction, incomparably the best _summa theologiae evangalicae_ ever produced by a writer not miraculously inspired." June 14. 1830.--ED.] _June_ 1. 1830. PRAYER.--CHURCH-SINGING.--HOOKER.--DREAMS. There are three sorts of prayer:--1. Public; 2. Domestic; 3. Solitary. Each has its peculiar uses and character. I think the church ought to publish and authorise a directory of forms for the latter two. Yet I fear the execution would be inadequate. There is a great decay of devotional unction in the numerous books of prayers put out now-a-days. I really think the hawker was very happy, who blundered New Form of Prayer into New _former_ Prayers.[1] I exceedingly regret that our church pays so little attention to the subject of congregational singing. See how it is! In that particular part of the public worship in which, more than in all the rest, the common people might, and ought to, join,--which, by its association with music, is meant to give a fitting vent and expression to the emotions,--in that part we all sing as Jews; or, at best, as mere men, in the abstract, without a Saviour. You know my veneration for the Book of Psalms, or most of it; but with some half dozen exceptions, the Psalms are surely not adequate vehicles of Christian thanksgiving and joy! Upon this deficiency in our service, Wesley and Whitfield seized; and you know it is the hearty congregational singing of Christian hymns which keeps the humbler Methodists together. Luther did as much for the Reformation by his hymns as by his translation of the Bible. In Germany, the hymns are known by heart by every peasant: they advise, they argue from the hymns, and every soul in the church praises God, like a Christian, with words which are natural and yet sacred to his mind. No doubt this defect in our service proceeded from the dread which the English Reformers had of being charged with introducing any thing into the worship of God but the text of Scripture. [Footnote 1: "I will add, at the risk of appearing to dwell too long on religious topics, that on this my first introduction to Coleridge he reverted with strong compunction to a sentiment which he had expressed in earlier days upon prayer. In one of his youthful poems, speaking of God, he had said-- --'Of whose all-seeing eye Aught to demand were impotence of mind.' This sentiment he now so utterly condemned, that, on the contrary, he told me, as his own peculiar opinion, that the act of praying was the very highest energy of which the human heart was capable, praying, that is, with the total concentration of the faculties; and the great mass of worldly men and of learned men he pronounced absolutely incapable of prayer."--_Tait's Magazine_, September, 1834, p. 515. Mr. Coleridge within two years of his death very solemnly declared to me his conviction upon the same subject. I was sitting by his bedside one afternoon, and he fell, an unusual thing for him, into a long account of many passages of his past life, lamenting some things, condemning others, but complaining withal, though very gently, of the way in which many of his most innocent acts had been cruelly misrepresented. "But I have no difficulty," said he, "in forgiveness; indeed, I know not how to say with sincerity the clause in the Lord's Prayer, which asks forgiveness _as we forgive_. I feel nothing answering to it in my heart. Neither do I find, or reckon, the most solemn faith in God as a real object, the most arduous act of the reason and will. O no, my dear, it is _to pray, to pray_ as God would have us; this is what at times makes me turn cold to my soul. Believe me, to pray with all your heart and strength, with the reason and the will, to believe vividly that God will listen to your voice through Christ, and verily do the thing he pleaseth thereupon--this is the last, the greatest achievement of the Christian's warfare upon earth. _Teach_ us to pray, O Lord!" And then he burst into a flood of tears, and begged me to pray for him. O what a sight was there!--ED.] * * * * * Hooker said,--That by looking for that in the Bible which it is impossible that _any book_ can have, we lose the benefits which we might reap from its being the best of all books. * * * * * You will observe, that even in dreams nothing is fancied without an antecedent _quasi_ cause. It could not be otherwise. _June_ 4. 1830. JEREMY TAYLOR.--ENGLISH REFORMATION. Taylor's was a great and lovely mind; yet how much and injuriously was it perverted by his being a favourite and follower of Laud, and by his intensely popish feelings of church authority. [1] His Liberty of Prophesying is a work of wonderful eloquence and skill; but if we believe the argument, what do we come to? Why to nothing more or less than this, that--so much can be said for every opinion and sect,--so impossible is it to settle any thing by reasoning or authority of Scripture,--we must appeal to some positive jurisdiction on earth, _ut sit finis controversiarum_. In fact, the whole book is the precise argument used by the Papists to induce men to admit the necessity of a supreme and infallible head of the church on earth. It is one of the works which preeminently gives countenance to the saying of Charles or James II., I forget which:--"When you of the Church of England contend with the Catholics, you use the arguments of the Puritans; when you contend with the Puritans, you immediately adopt all the weapons of the Catholics." Taylor never speaks with the slightest symptom of affection or respect of Luther, Calvin, or any other of the great reformers--at least, not in any of his learned works; but he _saints_ every trumpery monk and friar, down to the very latest canonizations by the modern popes. I fear you will think me harsh, when I say that I believe Taylor was, perhaps unconsciously, half a Socinian in heart. Such a strange inconsistency would not be impossible. The Romish church has produced many such devout Socinians. The cross of Christ is dimly seen in Taylor's works. Compare him in this particular with Donne, and you will feel the difference in a moment. Why are not Donne's volumes of sermons reprinted at Oxford?[2] [Footnote 1: Mr. Coleridge placed Jeremy Taylor amongst the four great geniuses of old English literature. I think he used to reckon Shakspeare and Bacon, Milton and Taylor, four-square, each against each. In mere eloquence, he thought the Bishop without any fellow. He called him Chrysostom. Further, he loved the man, and was anxious to find excuses for some weak parts in his character. But Mr. Coleridge's assent to Taylor's views of many of the fundamental positions of Christianity was very limited; and, indeed, he considered him as the least sound in point of doctrine of any of the old divines, comprehending, within that designation, the writers to the middle of Charles II.'s reign. He speaks of Taylor in "The Friend" in the following terms:--"Among the numerous examples with which I might enforce this warning, I refer, not without reluctance, to the most eloquent, and one of the most learned, of our divines; a rigorist, indeed, concerning the authority of the church, but a latitudinarian in the articles of its faith; who stretched the latter almost to the advanced posts of Socinianism, and strained the former to a hazardous conformity with the assumptions of the Roman hierarchy." Vol. ii. p. 108.--ED.] [Footnote 2: Why not, indeed! It is really quite unaccountable that the sermons of this great divine of the English church should be so little known as they are, even to very literary clergymen of the present day. It might have been expected, that the sermons of the greatest preacher of his age, the admired of Ben Jonson, Selden, and all that splendid band of poets and scholars, would even as curiosities have been reprinted, when works, which are curious for nothing, are every year sent forth afresh under the most authoritative auspices. Dr. Donne was educated at both universities, at Hart Hall, Oxford, first, and afterwards at Cambridge, but at what college Walton does not mention--ED.] * * * * * In the reign of Edward VI., the Reformers feared to admit almost any thing on human authority alone. They had seen and felt the abuses consequent on the popish theory of Christianity; and I doubt not they wished and intended to reconstruct the religion and the church, as far as was possible, upon the plan of the primitive ages? But the Puritans pushed this bias to an absolute bibliolatry. They would not put on a corn-plaster without scraping a text over it. Men of learning, however, soon felt that this was wrong in the other extreme, and indeed united itself to the very abuse it seemed to shun. They saw that a knowledge of the Fathers, and of early tradition, was absolutely necessary; and unhappily, in many instances, the excess of the Puritans drove the men of learning into the old popish extreme of denying the Scriptures to be capable of affording a rule of faith without the dogmas of the church. Taylor is a striking instance how far a Protestant might be driven in this direction. _June_ 6. 1830. CATHOLICITY.--GNOSIS.--TERTULLIAN.--ST. JOHN. In the first century, catholicity was the test of a book or epistle-- whether it were of the Evangelicon or Apostolicon--being canonical. This catholic spirit was opposed to the gnostic or peculiar spirit,--the humour of fantastical interpretation of the old Scriptures into Christian meanings. It is this gnosis, or _knowingness,_ which the Apostle says puffeth up,--not _knowledge_, as we translate it. The Epistle of Barnabas, of the genuineness of which I have no sort of doubt, is an example of this gnostic spirit. The Epistle to the Hebrews is the only instance of gnosis in the canon: it was written evidently by some apostolical man before the destruction of the Temple, and probably at Alexandria. For three hundred years, and more, it was not admitted into the canon, especially not by the Latin church, on account of this difference in it from the other Scriptures. But its merit was so great, and the gnosis in it is so kept within due bounds, that its admirers at last succeeded, especially by affixing St. Paul's name to it, to have it included in the canon; which was first done, I think, by the council of Laodicea in the middle of the fourth century. Fortunately for us it was so. * * * * * I beg Tertullian's pardon; but amongst his many _bravuras_, he says something about St. Paul's autograph. Origen expressly declares the reverse. * * * * * It is delightful to think, that the beloved apostle was born a Plato. To him was left the almost oracular utterance of the mysteries of the Christian religion while to St. Paul was committed the task of explanation, defence, and assertion of all the doctrines, and especially of those metaphysical ones touching the will and grace;[1] for which purpose his active mind, his learned education, and his Greek logic, made him pre-eminently fit. [Footnote 1: "The imperative and oracular form of the inspired Scripture is the form of reason itself, in all things purely rational and moral."--_Statesman's Manual_, p. 22.] June 7. 1830. PRINCIPLES OF A REVIEW.--PARTY-SPIRIT. Notwithstanding what you say, I am persuaded that a review would amply succeed even now, which should be started upon a published code of principles, critical, moral, political, and religious; which should announce what sort of books it would review, namely, works of literature as contradistinguished from all that offspring of the press, which in the present age supplies food for the craving caused by the extended ability of reading without any correspondent education of the mind, and which formerly was done by conversation, and which should really give a fair account of what the author intended to do, and in his own words, if possible, and in addition, afford one or two fair specimens of the execution,--itself never descending for one moment to any personality. It should also be provided before the commencement with a dozen powerful articles upon fundamental topics to appear in succession. You see the great reviewers are now ashamed of reviewing works in the old style, and have taken up essay writing instead. Hence arose such publications as the Literary Gazette and others, which are set up for the purpose--not a useless one--of advertizing new books of all sorts for the circulating libraries. A mean between the two extremes still remains to be taken. * * * * * Party men always hate a slightly differing friend more than a downright enemy. I quite calculate on my being one day or other holden in worse repute by many Christians than the Unitarians and open infidels. It must be undergone by every one who loves the truth for its own sake beyond all other things. * * * * * Truth is a good dog; but beware of barking too close to the heels of an error, lest you get your brains kicked out. _June_ 10. 1830. SOUTHEY'S LIFE OF BUNYAN.--LAUD.--PURITANS AND CAVALIERS.--PRESBYTERIANS, INDEPENDENTS, AND BISHOPS. Southey's Life of Bunyan is beautiful. I wish he had illustrated that mood of mind which exaggerates, and still more, mistakes, the inward depravation, as in Bunyan, Nelson, and others, by extracts from Baxter's Life of himself. What genuine superstition is exemplified in that bandying of texts and half texts, and demi-semi-texts, just as memory happened to suggest them, or chance brought them before Bunyan's mind! His tract, entitled, "Grace abounding to the Chief of Sinners"[1] is a study for a philosopher. [Footnote 1: "Grace abounding to the Chief of Sinners, in a faithful Account of the Life and Death of John Bunyan, &c." Is it not, however, an historical error to call the Puritans dissenters? Before St. Bartholomew's day, they were essentially a part of the church, and had as determined opinions in favour of a church establishment as the bishops themselves. * * * * * Laud was not exactly a Papist to be sure; but he was on the road with the church with him to a point, where declared popery would have been inevitable. A wise and vigorous Papist king would very soon, and very justifiably too, in that case, have effected a reconciliation between the churches of Rome and England, when the line of demarcation had become so very faint. * * * * * The faults of the Puritans were many; but surely their morality will, in general, bear comparison with that of the Cavaliers after the Restoration. * * * * * The Presbyterians hated the Independents much more than they did the bishops, which induced them to cooperate in effecting the Restoration. * * * * * The conduct of the bishops towards Charles, whilst at Breda, was wise and constitutional. They knew, however, that when the forms of the constitution were once restored, all their power would revive again as of course. June 14. 1830. STUDY OF THE BIBLE. Intense study of the Bible will keep any writer from being _vulgar_, in point of style. June 15. 1830. RABELAIS.--SWIFT.--BENTLEY.--SUBNET. Rabelais is a most wonderful writer. Pantagruel is the Reason; Panurge the Understanding,--the pollarded man, the man with every faculty except the reason. I scarcely know an example more illustrative of the distinction between the two. Rabelais had no mode of speaking the truth in those days but in such a form as this; as it was, he was indebted to the King's protection for his life. Some of the commentators talk about his book being all political; there are contemporary politics in it, of course, but the real scope is much higher and more philosophical. It is in vain to look about for a hidden meaning in all that he has written; you will observe that, after any particularly deep thrust, as the Papimania[1] for example, Rabelais, as if to break the blow, and to appear unconscious of what he has done, writes a chapter or two of pure buffoonery. He, every now and then, flashes you a glimpse of a real face from his magic lantern, and then buries the whole scene in mist. The morality of the work is of the most refined and exalted kind; as for the manners, to be sure, I cannot say much. Swift was _anima Rabelaisii habitans in sicco_,--the soul of Rabelais dwelling in a dry place. Yet Swift was rare. Can any thing beat his remark on King William's motto, --_Recepit, non rapuit_,--"that the receiver was as bad as the thief?" [Footnote 1: B. iv. c. 48. "Comment Pantagruel descendit en l'Isle de Papimanes." See the five following chapters, especially c. 50.; and note also c. 9. of the fifth book; "Comment nous fut monstré Papegaut à grande difficulté."--ED.] * * * * * The effect of the Tory wits attacking Bentley with such acrimony has been to make them appear a set of shallow and incompetent scholars. Neither Bentley nor Burnet suffered from the hostility of the wits. Burnet's "History of his own Times" is a truly valuable book. His credulity is great, but his simplicity is equally great; and he never deceives you for a moment. _June_ 25. 1830. GIOTTO.--PAINTING. The fresco paintings by Giotto[1] and others, in the cemetery at Pisa, are most noble. Giotto was a contemporary of Dante: and it is a curious question, whether the painters borrowed from the poet, or _vice versa_. Certainly M. Angelo and Raffael fed their imaginations highly with these grand drawings, especially M. Angelo, who took from them his bold yet graceful lines. [Footnote 1: Giotto, or Angiolotto's birth is fixed by Vasari in 1276, but there is some reason to think that he was born a little earlier. Dante, who was his friend, was born in 1265. Giotto was the pupil of Cimabue, whom he entirely eclipsed, as Dante testifies in the well-known lines in the Purgatorio:-- "O vana gloria dell'umane posse! Com' poco verde in su la cima dura, Se non e giunta dall' etati grosse! Credette Cirnabue nella pintura Tener lo campo: ed ora ha Giotto il grido, Si che la fama di colui oscura."--C. xi. v. 91. His six great frescos in the cemetery at Pisa are upon the sufferings and patience of Job.--ED.] * * * * * People may say what they please about the gradual improvement of the Arts. It is not true of the substance. The Arts and the Muses both spring forth in the youth of nations, like Minerva from the front of Jupiter, all armed: manual dexterity may, indeed, he improved by practice. * * * * * Painting went on in power till, in Raffael, it attained the zenith, and in him too it showed signs of a tendency downwards by another path. The painter began to think of overcoming difficulties. After this the descent was rapid, till sculptors began to work inveterate likenesses of perriwigs in marble,--as see Algarotti's tomb in the cemetery at Pisa,--and painters did nothing but copy, as well as they could, the external face of nature. Now, in this age, we have a sort of reviviscence,--not, I fear, of the power, but of a taste for the power, of the early times. _June_ 26. 1830. SENECA. You may get a motto for every sect in religion, or line of thought in morals or philosophy, from Seneca; but nothing is ever thought _out_ by him. _July_ 2. 1830. PLATO.--ARISTOTLE. Every man is born an Aristotelian, or a Platonist. I do not think it possible that any one born an Aristotelian can become a Platonist; and I am sure no born Platonist can ever change into an Aristotelian. They are the two classes of men, beside which it is next to impossible to conceive a third. The one considers reason a quality, or attribute; the other considers it a power. I believe that Aristotle never could get to understand what Plato meant by an idea. There is a passage, indeed, in the Eudemian Ethics which looks like an exception; but I doubt not of its being spurious, as that whole work is supposed by some to be. With Plato ideas are constitutive in themselves.[1] Aristotle was, and still is, the sovereign lord of the understanding; the faculty judging by the senses. He was a conceptualist, and never could raise himself into that higher state, which was natural to Plato, and has been so to others, in which the understanding is distinctly contemplated, and, as it were, looked down upon from the throne of actual ideas, or living, inborn, essential truths. Yet what a mind was Aristotle's--only not the greatest that ever animated the human form!--the parent of science, properly so called, the master of criticism, and the founder or editor of logic! But he confounded science with philosophy, which is an error. Philosophy is the middle state between science, or knowledge, and sophia, or wisdom. [Footnote 1: Mr. Coleridge said the Eudemian Ethics; but I half suspect he must have meant the Metaphysics, although I do not know that _all_ the fourteen books under that title have been considered non-genuine. The [Greek: Aethicha Eusaemeia] are not Aristotle's. To what passage in particular allusion is here made, I cannot exactly say; many might be alleged, but not one seems to express the true Platonic idea, as Mr. Coleridge used to understand it; and as, I believe, he ultimately considered ideas in his own philosophy. Fourteen or fifteen years previously, he seems to have been undecided upon this point. "Whether," he says, "ideas are regulative only, according to Aristotle and Kant, or likewise _constitutive_, and one with the power and life of nature, according to Plato and Plotinus [Greek:--eg logo zoae aeg, chai ae zoae aeg to phos tog agthwpog] is the highest problem of philosophy, and not part of its nomenclature." Essay (E) in the Appendix to the _Statesman's Manual_, 1816.--ED.] _July_ 4. 1830. DUKE OF WELLINGTON.--MONEYED INTEREST.--CANNING. I sometimes fear the Duke of Wellington is too much disposed to imagine that he can govern a great nation by word of command, in the same way in which he governed a highly disciplined army. He seems to be unaccustomed to, and to despise, the inconsistencies, the weaknesses, the bursts of heroism followed by prostration and cowardice, which invariably characterise all popular efforts. He forgets that, after all, it is from such efforts that all the great and noble institutions of the world have come; and that, on the other hand, the discipline and organization of armies have been only like the flight of the cannon-ball, the object of which is destruction.[1] [Footnote 1: Straight forward goes The lightning's path, and straight the fearful path Of the cannon-ball. Direct it flies and rapid, Shattering that it may reach, and shattering what it reaches. _Wallenstein_, Part I, act i, sc. 4] * * * * * The stock-jobbing and moneyed interest is so strong in this country, that it has more than once prevailed in our foreign councils over national honour and national justice. The country gentlemen are not slow to join in this influence. Canning felt this very keenly, and said he was unable to contend against the city trained-bands. _July_ 6, 1830. BOURRIENNE. Bourienne is admirable. He is the French Pepys,--a man with right feelings, but always wishing to participate in what is going on, be it what it may. He has one remark, when comparing Buonaparte with Charlemagne, the substance of which I have attempted to express in "The Friend"[1] but which Bourrienne has condensed into a sentence worthy of Tacitus, or Machiavel, or Bacon. It is this; that Charlemagne was above his age, whilst Buonaparte was only above his competitors, but under his age! Bourrienne has done more than any one else to show Buonaparte to the world as he really was,--always contemptible, except when acting a part, and that part not his own. [Footnote 1: Vol. i. Essay 12. p. 133.] _July_ 8. 1830. JEWS. The other day I was what you would call _floored_ by a Jew. He passed me several times crying out for old clothes in the most nasal and extraordinary tone I ever heard. At last I was so provoked, that I said to him, "Pray, why can't you say 'old clothes' in a plain way as I do now?" The Jew stopped, and looking very gravely at me, said in a clear and even fine accent, "Sir, I can say 'old clothes' as well as you can; but if you had to say so ten times a minute, for an hour together, you would say _Ogh Clo_ as I do now;" and so he marched off. I was so confounded with the justice of his retort, that I followed and gave him a shilling, the only one I had. * * * * * I have had a good deal to do with Jews in the course of my life, although I never borrowed any money of them. Once I sat in a coach opposite a Jew--a symbol of old clothes' bags--an Isaiah of Hollywell Street. He would close the window; I opened it. He closed it again; upon which, in a very solemn tone, I said to him, "Son of Abraham! thou smellest; son of Isaac! thou art offensive; son of Jacob! thou stinkest foully. See the man in the moon! he is holding his nose at thee at that distance; dost thou think that I, sitting here, can endure it any longer?" My Jew was astounded, opened the window forthwith himself, and said, "he was sorry he did not know before I was so great a gentleman." _July_ 24. 1830. THE PAPACY AND THE REFORMATION.--LEO X. During the early part of the middle ages, the papacy was nothing, in fact, but a confederation of the learned men in the west of Europe against the barbarism and ignorance of the times. The Pope was chief of this confederacy; and so long as he retained that character exclusively, his power was just and irresistible. It was the principal mean of preserving for us and for our posterity all that we now have of the illumination of past ages. But as soon as the Pope made a separation between his character as premier clerk in Christendom and as a secular prince; as soon as he began to squabble for towns and castles; then he at once broke the charm, and gave birth to a revolution. From that moment, those who remained firm to the cause of truth and knowledge became necessary enemies to the Roman See. The great British schoolmen led the way; then Wicliffe rose, Huss, Jerome, and others;--in short, every where, but especially throughout the north of Europe, the breach of feeling and sympathy went on widening,--so that all Germany, England, Scotland, and other countries started like giants out of their sleep at the first blast of Luther's trumpet. In France, one half of the people--and that the most wealthy and enlightened-- embraced the Reformation. The seeds of it were deeply and widely spread in Spain and in Italy; and as to the latter, if James I. had been an Elizabeth, I have no doubt at all that Venice would have publicly declared itself against Rome. It is a profound question to answer, why it is, that since the middle of the sixteenth century the Reformation has not advanced one step in Europe. * * * * * In the time of Leo X. atheism, or infidelity of some sort, was almost universal in Italy amongst the high dignitaries of the Romish church. _July_ 27. 1830. THELWALL.--SWIFT.--STELLA. John Thelwall had something very good about him. We were once sitting in a beautiful recess in the Quantocks, when I said to him, "Citizen John, this is a fine place to talk treason in!"--"Nay! Citizen Samuel," replied he, "it is rather a place to make a man forget that there is any necessity for treason!" Thelwall thought it very unfair to influence a child's mind by inculcating any opinions before it should have come to years of discretion, and be able to choose for itself. I showed him my garden, and told him it was my botanical garden. "How so?" said he, "it is covered with weeds."--"Oh," I replied, "_that_ is only because it has not yet come to its age of discretion and choice. The weeds, you see, have taken the liberty to grow, and I thought it unfair in me to prejudice the soil towards roses and strawberries." * * * * * I think Swift adopted the name of Stella, which is a man's name, with a feminine termination, to denote the mysterious epicene relation in which poor Miss Johnston stood to him. _July_ 28. 1830. INIQUITOUS LEGISLATION. That legislation is iniquitous which sets law in conflict with the common and unsophisticated feelings of our nature. If I were a clergyman in a smuggling town, I would _not_ preach against smuggling. I would not be made a sort of clerical revenue officer. Let the government, which by absurd duties fosters smuggling, prevent it itself, if it can. How could I show my hearers the immorality of going twenty miles in a boat, and honestly buying with their money a keg of brandy, except by a long deduction which they could not understand? But were I in a place where wrecking went on, see if I would preach on any thing else! _July_ 29. 1830. SPURZHEIM AND CRANIOLOOY. Spurzheim is a good man, and I like him; but he is dense, and the most ignorant German I ever knew. If he had been content with stating certain remarkable coincidences between the moral qualities and the configuration of the skull, it would have been well; but when he began to map out the cranium dogmatically, he fell into infinite absurdities. You know that every intellectual act, however you may distinguish it by name in respect of the originating faculties, is truly the act of the entire man; the notion of distinct material organs, therefore, in the brain itself, is plainly absurd. Pressed by this, Spurzheim has, at length, been guilty of some sheer quackery; and ventures to say that he has actually discovered a different material in the different parts or organs of the brain, so that he can tell a piece of benevolence from a bit of destructiveness, and so forth. Observe, also, that it is constantly found, that so far from there being a concavity in the interior surface of the cranium answering to the convexity apparent on the exterior--the interior is convex too. Dr. Baillie thought there was something in the system, because the notion of the brain being an extendible net helped to explain those cases where the intellect remained after the solid substance of the brain was dissolved in water.[1] That a greater or less development of the forepart of the head is generally coincidedent with more or less of reasoning power, is certain. The line across the forehead, also, denoting musical power, is very common. [Footnote 1: "The very marked, _positive_ as well as comparative, magnitude and prominence of the bump, entitled _benevolence_ (see Spurzheim's _map of the human skull_) on the head of the late Mr. John Thurtell, has woefully unsettled the faith of many ardent phrenologists, and strengthened the previous doubts of a still greater number into utter disbelief. On _my_ mind this fact (for a _fact_ it is) produced the directly contrary effect; and inclined me to suspect, for the first time, that there may be some truth in the Spurzheimian scheme. Whether future craniologists may not see cause to _new-name_ this and one or two others of these convex gnomons, is quite a different question. At present, and according to the present use of words, any such change would be premature; and we must be content to say, that Mr. Thurtell's benevolence was insufficiently modified by the unprotrusive and unindicated convolutes of the brain, that secrete honesty and common sense. The organ of destructiveness was indirectly _potentiated_ by the absence or imperfect development of the glands of reason and conscience in this '_unfortunate gentleman.'"--_Aids to Reflection_, p. 143. n.] _August_ 20. 1830. FRENCH REVOLUTION, 1830.--CAPTAIN R. AND THE AMERICANS. The French must have greatly improved under the influence of a free and regular government (for such it, in general, has been since the restoration), to have conducted themselves with so much moderation in success as they seem to have done, and to be disposed to do. * * * * * I must say I cannot see much in Captain B. Hall's account of the Americans, but weaknesses--some of which make me like the Yankees all the better. How much more amiable is the American fidgettiness and anxiety about the opinion of other nations, and especially of the English, than the sentiments of the rest of the world.[1] As to what Captain Hall says about the English loyalty to the person of the King--I can only say, I feel none of it. I respect the man while, and only while, the king is translucent through him: I reverence the glass case for the Saint's sake within; except for that it is to me mere glazier's work,-- putty, and glass, and wood. [Footnote 1: "There exists in England a _gentlemanly_ character, a _gentlemanly_ feeling, very different even from that which is most like it,--the character of a well-born Spaniard, and unexampled in the rest of Europe. This feeling _originated_ in the fortunate circumstance, that the titles of our English nobility follow the law of their property, and are inherited by the eldest sons only. From this source, under the influences of our constitution and of our astonishing trade, it has diffused itself in different modifications through the whole country. The uniformity of our dress among all classes above that of the day labourer, while it has authorized all ranks to assume the appearance of gentlemen, has at the same time inspired the wish to conform their manners, and still more their ordinary actions in social intercourse, to their notions of the gentlemanly the most commonly received attribute of which character is a certain generosity in trifles. On the other hand, the encroachments of the lower classes on the higher, occasioned and favoured by this resemblance in exteriors, by this absence of any cognizable marks of distinction, have rendered each class more reserved and jealous in their general communion; and, far more than our climate or natural temper, have caused that haughtiness and reserve in our outward demeanour, which is so generally complained of among foreigners. Far be it from me to depreciate the value of this gentlemanly feeling: I respect it under all its forms and varieties, from the House of Commons * to the gentleman in the one-shilling gallery. It is always the ornament of virtue, and oftentimes a support; but it is a wretched substitute for it. Its _worth_, as a moral good, is by no means in proportion to its _value_ as a social advantage. These observations are not irrelevant: for to the want of reflection that this diffusion of gentlemanly feeling among us is not the growth of our moral excellence, but the effect of various accidental advantages peculiar to England; to our not considering that it is unreasonable and uncharitable to expect the same consequences, where the same causes have not existed to produce them; and lastly, to our prorieness to regard the absence of this character (which, as I have before said, does, for the greater part, and in the common apprehension, consist in a certain frankness and generosity in the detail of action) as decisive against the sum total of personal or national worth; we must, I am convinced, attribute a large portion of that conduct, which in many instances has left the inhabitants of countries conquered or appropriated by Great Britain doubtful whether the various solid advantages which they have derived from our protection and just government were not bought dearly by the wounds inflicted on their feelings and prejudices, by the contemptuous and insolent demeanour of the English, as individuals."--_Friend_, vol. iii. p, 322. This was written long before the Reform Act.--ED.] _September 8. 1830._ ENGLISH REFORMATION. The fatal error into which the peculiar character of the English Reformation threw our Church, has borne bitter fruit ever since,--I mean that of its clinging to court and state, instead of cultivating the people. The church ought to be a mediator between the people and the government, between the poor and the rich. As it is, I fear the Church has let the hearts of the common people be stolen from it. See how differently the Church of Rome--wiser in its generation--has always acted in this particular. For a long time past the Church of England seems to me to have been blighted with prudence, as it is called. I wish with all my heart we had a little zealous imprudence. _September 19. 1830._ DEMOCRACY.----IDEA OF A STATE.----CHURCH. It has never yet been seen, or clearly announced, that democracy, as such, is no proper element in the constitution of a state. The idea of a state is undoubtedly a government [Greek: ek ton aristou]--an aristocracy. Democracy is the healthful life-blood which circulates through the veins and arteries, which supports the system, but which ought never to appear externally, and as the mere blood itself. A state, in idea, is the opposite of a church. A state regards classes, and not individuals; and it estimates classes, not by internal merit, but external accidents, as property, birth, &c. But a church does the reverse of this, and disregards all external accidents, and looks at men as individual persons, allowing no gradation of ranks, but such as greater or less wisdom, learning, and holiness ought to confer. A church is, therefore, in idea, the only pure democracy. The church, so considered, and the state, exclusively of the church, constitute together the idea of a state in its largest sense. _September_ 20. 1830. GOVERNMENT.----FRENCH GEND'ARMERIE. All temporal government must rest on a compromise of interests and abstract rights. Who would listen to the county of Bedford, if it were to declare itself disannexed from the British empire, and to set up for itself? * * * * * The most desirable thing that can happen to France, with her immense army of gensd'armes, is, that the service may at first become very irksome to the men themselves, and ultimately, by not being called into real service, fall into general ridicule, like our trained bands. The evil in France, and throughout Europe, seems now especially to be, the subordination of the legislative power to the direct physical force of the people. The French legislature was weak enough before the late revolution; now it is absolutely powerless, and manifestly depends even for its existence on the will of a popular commander of an irresistible army. There is now in France a daily tendency to reduce the legislative body to a mere deputation from the provinces and towns. September 21. 1830. PHILOSOPHY OF YOUNG MEN AT THE PRESENT DAY. I do not know whether I deceive myself, but it seems to me that the young men, who were my contemporaries, fixed certain principles in their minds, and followed them out to their legitimate consequences, in a way which I rarely witness now. No one seems to have any distinct convictions, right or wrong; the mind is completely at sea, rolling and pitching on the waves of facts and personal experiences. Mr. ---- is, I suppose, one of the rising young men of the day; yet he went on talking, the other evening, and making remarks with great earnestness, some of which were palpably irreconcilable with each other. He told me that facts gave birth to, and were the absolute ground of, principles; to which I said, that unless he had a principle of selection, he would not have taken notice of those facts upon which he grounded his principle. You must have a lantern in your hand to give light, otherwise all the materials in the world are useless, for you cannot find them; and if you could, you could not arrange them. "But then," said Mr. ----, "_that_ principle of selection came from facts!"--"To be sure!" I replied; "but there must have been again an antecedent light to see those antecedent facts. The relapse may be carried in imagination backwards for ever,--but go back as you may, you cannot come to a man without a previous aim or principle." He then asked me what I had to say to Bacon's induction: I told him I had a good deal to say, if need were; but that it was perhaps enough for the occasion to remark, that what he was evidently taking for the Baconian _in_duction was mere _de_duction--a very different thing.[1] [Footnote 1: As far as I can judge, the most complete and masterly thing ever done by Mr. Coleridge in prose, is the analysis and reconcilement of the Platonic and Baconian methods of philosophy, contained in the third volume of the Friend, from p. 176 to 216. No edition of the Novum Organum should ever be published without a transcript of it.--ED.] _September_ 22. 1830. THUCYDIDES AND TACITUS.----POETRY.----MODERN METRE. The object of Thucydides was to show the ills resulting to Greece from the separation and conflict of the spirits or elements of democracy and oligarchy. The object of Tacitus was to demonstrate the desperate consequences of the loss of liberty on the minds and hearts of men. * * * * * A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket: let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection; and trust more to your imagination than to your memory. * * * * * Really the metre of some of the modern poems I have read, bears about the same relation to metre properly understood, that dumb bells do to music; both are for exercise, and pretty severe too, I think. * * * * * Nothing ever left a stain on that gentle creature's mind, which looked upon the degraded men and things around him like moonshine on a dunghill, which shines and takes no pollution. All things are shadows to him, except those which move his affections. September 23. 1830. LOGIC. There are two kinds of logic: 1. Syllogistic. 2. Criterional. How any one can by any spinning make out more than ten or a dozen pages about the first, is inconceivable to me; all those absurd forms of syllogisms are one half pure sophisms, and the other half mere forms of rhetoric. All syllogistic logic is--1. _Se_clusion; 2. _In_clusion; 3. _Con_clusion; which answer to the understanding, the experience, and the reason. The first says, this _ought_ to be; the second adds, this _is_; and the last pronounces, this must be so. The criterional logic, or logic of premisses, is, of course, much the most important; and it has never yet been treated. * * * * * The object of rhetoric is persuasion,--of logic, conviction,--of grammar, significancy. A fourth term is wanting, the rhematic, or logic of sentences. _September_ 24. 1830. VARRO.--SOCRATES.--GREEK PHILOSOPHY.--PLOTINUS.--TERTULLIAN. What a loss we have had in Varro's mythological and critical works! It is said that the works of Epicurus are probably amongst the Herculanean manuscripts. I do not feel much interest about them, because, by the consent of all antiquity, Lucretius has preserved a complete view of his system. But I regret the loss of the works of the old Stoics, Zeno and others, exceedingly. * * * * * Socrates, as such, was only a poetical character to Plato, who worked upon his own ground. The several disciples of Socrates caught some particular points from him, and made systems of philosophy upon them according to their own views. Socrates himself had no system. * * * * * I hold all claims set up for Egypt having given birth to the Greek philosophy, to be groundless. It sprang up in Greece itself, and began with physics only. Then it took in the idea of a living cause, and made pantheism out of the two. Socrates introduced ethics, and taught duties; and then, finally, Plato asserted or re-asserted the idea of a God the maker of the world. The measure of human philosophy was thus full, when Christianity came to add what before was wanting--assurance. After this again, the Neo-Platonists joined theurgy with philosophy, which ultimately degenerated into magic and mere mysticism. Plotinus was a man of wonderful ability, and some of the sublimest passages I ever read are in his works. I was amused the other day with reading in Tertullian, that spirits or demons dilate and contract themselves, and wriggle about like worms-- lumbricix similes. _September_ 26. 1830. SCOTCH AND ENGLISH LAKES. The five finest things in Scotland are--1. Edinburgh; 2. The antechamber of the Fall of Foyers; 3. The view of Loch Lomond from Inch Tavannach, the highest of the islands; 4. The Trosachs; 5. The view of the Hebrides from a point, the name of which I forget. But the intervals between the fine things in Scotland are very dreary;--whereas in Cumberland and Westmoreland there is a cabinet of beauties,--each thing being beautiful in itself, and the very passage from one lake, mountain, or valley, to another, is itself a beautiful thing again. The Scotch lakes are so like one another, from their great size, that in a picture you are obliged to read their names; but the English lakes, especially Derwent Water, or rather the whole vale of Keswick, is so rememberable, that, after having been once seen, no one ever requires to be told what it is when drawn. This vale is about as large a basin as Loch Lomond; the latter is covered with water; but in the former instance, we have two lakes with a charming river to connect them, and lovely villages at the foot of the mountain, and other habitations, which give an air of life and cheerfulness to the whole place. * * * * * The land imagery of the north of Devon is most delightful. _September_ 27. 1830. LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP OPPOSED.--MARRIAGE.--CHARACTERLESSNESS OF WOMEN. A person once said to me, that he could make nothing of love, except that it was friendship accidentally combined with desire. Whence I concluded that he had never been in love. For what shall we say of the feeling which a man of sensibility has towards his wife with her baby at her breast! How pure from sensual desire! yet how different from friendship! Sympathy constitutes friendship; but in love there is a sort of antipathy, or opposing passion. Each strives to be the other, and both together make up one whole. Luther has sketched the most beautiful picture of the nature, and ends, and duties of the wedded life I ever read. St. Paul says it is a great symbol, not mystery, as we translate it.[1] [Footnote 1: Greek: ---- ] * * * * * "Most women have no character at all," said Pope[1] and meant it for satire. Shakspeare, who knew man and woman much better, saw that it, in fact, was the perfection of woman to be characterless. Every one wishes a Desdemona or Ophelia for a wife,--creatures who, though they may not always understand you, do always feel you, and feel with you. [Footnote 1: "Nothing so true as what you once let fall-- 'Most women have no character at all,'-- Matter too soft a lasting mark to bear, And best distinguish'd by black, brown, and fair." _Epist. to a Lady_, v. I.], _September_ 28. 1830. MENTAL ANARCHY. Why need we talk of a fiery hell? If the will, which is the law of our nature, were withdrawn from our memory, fancy, understanding, and reason, no other hell could equal, for a spiritual being, what we should then feel, from the anarchy of our powers. It would be conscious madness--a horrid thought! October 5. 1830. EAR AND TASTE FOR MUSIC DIFFERENT.----ENGLISH LITURGY.----BELGIAN REVOLUTION. In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly. * * * * * An ear for music is a very different thing from a taste for music. I have no ear whatever; I could not sing an air to save my life; but I have the intensest delight in music, and can detect good from bad. Naldi, a good fellow, remarked to me once at a concert, that I did not seem much interested with a piece of Rossini's which had just been performed. I said, it sounded to me like nonsense verses. But I could scarcely contain myself when a thing of Beethoven's followed. * * * * * I never distinctly felt the heavenly superiority of the prayers in the English liturgy, till I had attended some kirks in the country parts of Scotland, I call these strings of school boys or girls which we meet near London--walking advertisements. * * * * * The Brussels riot--I cannot bring myself to dignify it with a higher name --is a wretched parody on the last French revolution. Were I King William, I would banish the Belgians, as Coriolanus banishes the Romans in Shakspeare.[1] It is a wicked rebellion without one just cause. [Footnote 1: "You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate As reek o' the rotten fens, whose loves I prize As the dead carcasses of unburied men That do corrupt my air, I banish you; And here remain with _your uncertainty!_" Act iii. sc. 3.] _October_ 8. 1830. GALILEO, NEWTON, KEPLER, BACON. Galileo was a great genius, and so was Newton; but it would take two or three Galileos and Newtons to make one Kepler.[1] It is in the order of Providence, that the inventive, generative, constitutive mind--the Kepler-- should come first; and then that the patient and collective mind--the Newton--should follow, and elaborate the pregnant queries and illumining guesses of the former. The laws of the planetary system are, in fact, due to Kepler. There is not a more glorious achievement of scientific genius upon record, than Kepler's guesses, prophecies, and ultimate apprehension of the law[2] of the mean distances of the planets as connected with the periods of their revolutions round the sun. Gravitation, too, he had fully conceived; but, because it seemed inconsistent with some received observations on light, he gave it up, in allegiance, as he says, to Nature. Yet the idea vexed and haunted his mind; _"Vexat me et lacessit,"_ are his words, I believe. We praise Newton's clearness and steadiness. He was clear and steady, no doubt, whilst working out, by the help of an admirable geometry, the idea brought forth by another. Newton had his ether, and could not rest in--he could not conceive--the idea of a law. He thought it a physical thing after all. As for his chronology, I believe, those who are most competent to judge, rely on it less and less every day. His lucubrations on Daniel and the Revelations seem to me little less than mere raving. [Footnote 1: Galileo Galilei was born at Pisa, on the 15th of February, 1564. John Kepler was born at Weil, in the duchy of Wirtemberg, on the 2lst of December, 1571.--ED.] [Footnote 2: Namely, that the squares of their times vary as the cubes of their distances,--ED.] * * * * * Personal experiment is necessary, in order to correct our own observation of the experiments which Nature herself makes for us--I mean, the phenomena of the universe. But then observation is, in turn, wanted to direct and substantiate the course of experiment. Experiments alone cannot advance knowledge, without observation; they amuse for a time, and then pass off the scene and leave no trace behind them. * * * * * Bacon, when like himself--for no man was ever more inconsistent--says, _"Prudens qiuestio--dimidium scientiæ est."_ _October_ 20. 1830. THE REFORMATION. At the Reformation, the first reformers were beset with an almost morbid anxiety not to be considered heretical in point of doctrine. They knew that the Romanists were on the watch to fasten the brand of heresy upon them whenever a fair pretext could be found; and I have no doubt it was the excess of this fear which at once led to the burning of Servetus, and also to the thanks offered by all the Protestant churches, to Calvin and the Church of Geneva, for burning him. _November_ 21. 1830. HOUSE OF COMMONS. ---- never makes a figure in quietude. He astounds the vulgar with a certain enormity of exertion; he takes an acre of canvass, on which he scrawls every thing. He thinks aloud; every thing in his mind, good, bad, or indifferent, out it comes; he is like the Newgate gutter, flowing with garbage, dead dogs, and mud. He is preeminently a man of many thoughts, with no ideas: hence he is always so lengthy, because he must go through every thing to see any thing. * * * * * It is a melancholy thing to live when there is no vision in the land. Where are our statesmen to meet this emergency? I see no reformer who asks himself the question, _What_ is it that I propose to myself to effect in the result? Is the House of Commons to be re-constructed on the principle of a representation of interests, or of a delegation of men? If on the former, we may, perhaps, see our way; if on the latter, you can never, in reason, stop short of universal suffrage; and in that case, I am sure that women have as good a right to vote as men.[1] [Footnote 1: In Mr. Coleridge's masterly analysis and confutation of the physiocratic system of the early French revolutionists, in the Friend, he has the following passage in the nature of a _reductio ad absurdum_. "Rousseau, indeed, asserts that there is an inalienable sovereignty inherent in every human being possessed of reason; and from this the framers of the Constitution of 1791 deduce, that the people itself is its own sole rightful legislator, and at most dare only recede so far from its right as to delegate to chosen deputies the power of representing and declaring the general will. But this is wholly without proof; for it has been already fully shown, that, according to the principle out of which this consequence is attempted to be drawn, it is not the actual man, but the abstract reason alone, that is the sovereign and rightful lawgiver. The confusion of two things so different is so gross an error, that the Constituent Assembly could scarce proceed a step in their declaration of rights, without some glaring inconsistency. Children are excluded from all political power; are they not human beings in whom the faculty of reason resides? Yes! but|in _them_ the faculty is not yet adequately developed. But are not gross ignorance, inveterate superstition, and the habitual tyranny of passion and sensuality, equally preventives of the developement, equally impediments to the rightful exercise, of the reason, as childhood and early youth? Who would not rely on the judgment of a well-educated English lad, bred in a virtuous and enlightened family, in preference to that of a brutal Russian, who believes that he can scourge his wooden idol into good humour, or attributes to himself the merit of perpetual prayer, when he has fastened the petitions, which his priest has written for him, on the wings of a windmill? Again: women are likewise excluded; a full half, and that assuredly the most innocent, the most amiable half, of the whole human race is excluded, and this too by a Constitution which boasts to have no other foundations but those of universal reason! Is reason, then, an affair of sex? No! but women are commonly in a state of dependence, and are not likely to exercise their reason with freedom. Well! and does not this ground of exclusion apply with equal or greater force to the poor, to the infirm, to men in embarrassed circumstances, to all, in short, whose maintenance, be it scanty, or be it ample, depends on the will of others? How far are we to go? Where must we stop? What classes should we admit? Whom must we disfranchise? The objects concerning whom we are to determine these questions, are all human beings, and differenced from each other by _degrees_ only, these degrees, too, oftentimes changing. Yet the principle on which the whole system rests, is that reason is not susceptible of degree. Nothing, therefore, which subsists wholly in degrees, the changes of which do not obey any necessary law, can be the object of pure science, or determinate by mere reason,"--Vol. i. p. 341, ED.] _March_ 20. 1831. GOVERNMENT.--EARL GREY. Government is not founded on property, taken merely as such, in the abstract; it is founded on _unequal_ property; the inequality is an essential term in the position. The phrases--higher, middle, and lower classes, with reference to this point of representation--are delusive; no such divisions as classes actually exist in society. There is an indissoluble blending and interfusion of persons from top to bottom; and no man can trace a line of separation through them, except such a confessedly unmeaning and unjustifiable line of political empiricism as 10_l_. householders. I cannot discover a ray of principle in the government plan, --not a hint of the effect of the change upon the balance of the estates of the realm,--not a remark on the nature of the constitution of England, and the character of the property of so many millions of its inhabitants. Half the wealth of this country is purely artificial,--existing only in and on the credit given to it by the integrity and honesty of the nation. This property appears, in many instances, a heavy burthen to the numerical majority of the people, and they believe that it causes all their distress: and they are now to have the maintenance of this property committed to their good faith--the lamb to the wolves! Necker, you remember, asked the people to come and help him against the aristocracy. The people came fast enough at his bidding; but, somehow or other, they would not go away again when they had done their work. I hope Lord Grey will not see himself or his friends in the woeful case of the conjuror, who, with infinite zeal and pains, called up the devils to do something for him. They came at the word, thronging about him, grinning, and howling, and dancing, and whisking their long tails in diabolic glee; but when they asked him what he wanted of them, the poor wretch, frightened out his of wits, could only stammer forth,--"I pray you, my friends, be gone down again!" At which the devils, with one voice, replied,-- "Yes! yes! we'll go down! we'll go down!-- But we'll take _you_ with us to swim or to drown!"[1] [Footnote 1: Mr. Coleridge must have been thinking of that "very pithy and profitable" ballad by the Laureate, wherein is shown how a young man "would read unlawful books, and how he was punished:"-- "The _young_ man, he began to read He knew not what, but he would proceed, When there was heard a sound at the door, Which as he read on grew more and more. "And more and more the knocking grew, The young man knew not what to do: But trembling in fear he sat within, _Till the door was broke, and the devil came in_. "'What would'st thou with me?' the wicked one cried; But not a word the young man replied; Every hair on his head was standing upright, And his limbs like a palsy shook with affright. "'What would'st thou with me?' cried the author of ill; But the wretched young man was silent still," &c. The catastrophe is very terrible, and the moral, though addressed by the poet to young men only, is quite as applicable to old men, as the times show. "Henceforth let all young men take heed How in a conjuror's books they read!" _Southey's Minor Poems_, vol. iii. p. 92.--ED.] * * * * * _June_ 25. 1831. GOVERNMENT.--POPULAR REPRESENTATION. The three great ends which a statesman ought to propose to himself in the government of a nation, are,--1. Security to possessors; 2. Facility to acquirers; and; 3. Hope to all. * * * * * A nation is the unity of a people. King and parliament are the unity made visible. The king and the peers are as integral portions of this manifested unity as the commons.[1] In that imperfect state of society in which our system of representation began, the interests of the country were pretty exactly commensurate with its municipal divisions. The counties, the towns, and the seaports, accurately enough represented the only interests then existing; that is say,--the landed, the shop-keeping or manufacturing, and the mercantile. But for a century past, at least, this division has become notoriously imperfect, some of the most vital interests of the empire being now totally unconnected with any English localities. Yet now, when the evil and the want are known, we are to abandon the accommodations which the necessity of the case had worked out for itself, and begin again with a rigidly territorial plan of representation! The miserable tendency of all is to destroy our nationality, which consists, in a principal degree, in our representative government, and to convert it into a degrading delegation of the populace. There is no unity for a people but in a representation of national interests; a delegation from the passions or wishes of the individuals themselves is a rope of sand. Undoubtedly it is a great evil, that there should be such an evident discrepancy between the law and the practice of the constitution in the matter of the representation. Such a direct, yet clandestine, contravention of solemn resolutions and established laws is immoral, and greatly injurious to the cause of legal loyalty and general subordination in the minds of the people. But then a statesman should consider that these very contraventions of law in practice point out to him the places in the body politic which need a remodelling of the law. You acknowledge a certain necessity for indirect representation in the present day, and that such representation has been instinctively obtained by means contrary to law; why then do you not approximate the useless law to the useful practice, instead of abandoning both law and practice for a completely new system of your own? [Footnote 1: Mr. Coleridge was very fond of quoting George Withers's fine lines:-- "Let not your king and parliament in one, Much less apart, mistake themselves for that Which is most worthy to be thought upon: Nor think _they_ are, essentially, The STATE. Let them not fancy that th' authority And privileges upon them bestown, Conferr'd are to set up a majesty, A power, or a glory, of their own! But let them know, 't was for a deeper life, Which they but _represent_-- That there's on earth a yet auguster thing, Veil'd though it be, than parliament and king!"--ED.] * * * * * The malignant duplicity and unprincipled tergiversations of the specific Whig newspapers are to me detestable. I prefer the open endeavours of those publications which seek to destroy the church, and introduce a republic in effect: there is a sort of honesty in _that_ which I approve, though I would with joy lay down my life to save my country from the consummation which is so evidently desired by that section of the periodical press. _June_ 26. 1831. NAPIER.--BUONAPARTE.--SOUTHEY. I have been exceedingly impressed with the evil precedent of Colonel Napier's History of the Peninsular War. It is a specimen of the true French military school; not a thought for the justice of the war,--not a consideration of the damnable and damning iniquity of the French invasion. All is looked at as a mere game of exquisite skill, and the praise is regularly awarded to the most successful player. How perfectly ridiculous is the prostration of Napier's mind, apparently a powerful one, before the name of Buonaparte! I declare I know no book more likely to undermine the national sense of right and wrong in matters of foreign interference than this work of Napier's. If A. has a hundred means of doing a certain thing, and B. has only one or two, is it very wonderful, or does it argue very transcendant superiority, if A. surpasses B.? Buonaparte was the child of circumstances, which he neither originated nor controlled. He had no chance of preserving his power but by continual warfare. No thought of a wise tranquillization of the shaken elements of France seems ever to have passed through his mind; and I believe that at no part of his reign could be have survived one year's continued peace. He never had but one obstacle to contend with--physical force; commonly the least difficult enemy a general, subject to courts- martial and courts of conscience, has to overcome. * * * * * Southey's History[1] is on the right side, and starts from the right point; but he is personally fond of the Spaniards, and in bringing forward their nationality in the prominent manner it deserves, he does not, in my judgment, state with sufficient clearness the truth, that the nationality of the Spaniards was not founded on any just ground of good government or wise laws, but was, in fact, very little more than a rooted antipathy to all strangers as such. In this sense every thing is national in Spain. Even their so called Catholic religion is exclusively national in a genuine Spaniard's mind; he does not regard the religious professions of the Frenchman or Italian at all in the same light with his own. [Footnote 1: Mr. Coleridge said that the conclusion of this great work was the finest specimen of historic eulogy he had ever read in English;--that it was more than a campaign to the duke's fame.--ED.] _July_ 7. 1831. PATRONAGE OF THE FINE ARTS.--OLD WOMEN. The darkest despotisms on the Continent have done more for the growth and elevation of the fine arts than the English government. A great musical composer in Germany and Italy is a great man in society, and a real dignity and rank are universally conceded to him. So it is with a sculptor, or painter, or architect. Without this sort of encouragement and patronage such arts as music and painting will never come into great eminence. In this country there is no general reverence for the fine arts; and the sordid spirit of a money-amassing philosophy would meet any proposition for the fostering of art, in a genial and extended sense, with the commercial maxim,--_Laissez faire_. Paganini, indeed, will make a fortune, because he can actually sell the tones of his fiddle at so much a scrape; but Mozart himself might have languished in a garret for any thing that would have been done for him here. * * * * * There are three classes into which all the women past seventy that ever I knew were to be divided:--1. That dear old soul; 2. That old woman; 3. That old witch. _July_ 24. 1831. PICTURES.[1] Observe the remarkable difference between Claude and Teniers in their power of painting vacant space. Claude makes his whole landscape a _plenum:_ the air is quite as substantial as any other part of the scene. Hence there are no true distances, and every thing presses at once and equally upon the eye. There is something close and almost suffocating in the atmosphere of some of Claude's sunsets. Never did any one paint air, the thin air, the absolutely apparent vacancy between object and object, so admirably as Teniers. That picture of the Archers[2] exemplifies this excellence. See the distances between those ugly louts! how perfectly true to the fact! But oh! what a wonderful picture is that Triumph of Silenus![3] It is the very revelry of hell. Every evil passion is there that could in any way be forced into juxtaposition with joyance. Mark the lust, and, hard by, the hate. Every part is pregnant with libidinous nature without one spark of the grace of Heaven. The animal is triumphing--not over, but--in the absence, in the non-existence, of the spiritual part of man. I could fancy that Rubens had seen in a vision-- All the souls that damned be Leap up at once in anarchy, Clap their hands, and dance for glee! That landscape[4] on the other side is only less magnificent than dear Sir George Beaumont's, now in the National Gallery. It has the same charm. Rubens does not take for his subjects grand or novel conformations of objects; he has, you see, no precipices, no forests, no frowning castles,-- nothing that a poet would take at all times, and a painter take in these times. No; he gets some little ponds, old tumble-down cottages, that ruinous château, two or three peasants, a hay-rick, and other such humble images, which looked at in and by themselves convey no pleasure and excite no surprise; but he--and he Peter Paul Rubens alone--handles these every- day ingredients of all common landscapes as they are handled in nature; he throws them into a vast and magnificent whole, consisting of heaven and earth and all things therein. He extracts the latent poetry out of these common objects,--that poetry and harmony which every man of genius perceives in the face of nature, and which many men of no genius are taught to perceive and feel after examining such a picture as this. In other landscape painters the scene is confined and as it were imprisoned;--in Rubens the landscape dies a natural death; it fades away into the apparent infinity of space. So long as Rubens confines himself to space and outward figure--to the mere animal man with animal passions--he is, I may say, a god amongst painters. His satyrs, Silenuses, lions, tigers, and dogs, are almost godlike; but the moment he attempts any thing involving or presuming the spiritual, his gods and goddesses, his nymphs and heroes, become beasts, absolute, unmitigated beasts. [Footnote 1: All the following remarks in this section were made at the exhibition of ancient masters at the British Gallery in Pall Mall. The recollection of those two hours has made the rooms of that Institution a melancholy place for me. Mr. Coleridge was in high spirits, and seemed to kindle in his mind at the contemplation of the splendid pictures before him. He did not examine them all by the catalogue, but anchored himself before some three or four great works, telling me that he saw the rest of the Gallery _potentially_. I can yet distinctly recall him, half leaning on his old simple stick, and his hat off in one hand, whilst with the fingers of the other he went on, as was his constant wont, figuring in the air a commentary of small diagrams, wherewith, as he fancied, he could translate to the eye those relations of form and space which his words might fail to convey with clearness to the ear. His admiration for Rubens showed itself in a sort of joy and brotherly fondness; he looked as if he would shake hands with his pictures. What the company, which by degrees formed itself round this silver-haired, bright-eyed, music-breathing, old man, took him for, I cannot guess; there was probably not one there who knew him to be that Ancient Mariner, who held people with his glittering eye, and constrained them, like three years' children, to hear his tale. In the midst of his speech, he turned to the right hand, where stood a very lovely young woman, whose attention he had involuntarily arrested;--to her, without apparently any consciousness of her being a stranger to him, he addressed many remarks, although I must acknowledge they were couched in a somewhat softer tone, as if he were soliciting her sympathy. He was, verily, a gentle-hearted man at all times; but I never was in company with him in my life, when the entry of a woman, it mattered not who, did not provoke a dim gush of emotion, which passed like an infant's breath over the mirror of his intellect.--ED.] [Footnote 2: "Figures shooting at a Target," belonging, I believe, to Lord Bandon.--ED.] [Footnote 3: This belongs to Sir Robert Peel.--ED.] [Footnote 4: "Landscape with setting Sun,"--Lord Farnborough's picture.--ED.] * * * * * The Italian masters differ from the Dutch in this--that in their pictures ages are perfectly ideal. The infant that Raffael's Madonna holds in her arms cannot be guessed of any particular age; it is Humanity in infancy. The babe in the manger in a Dutch painting is a fac-simile of some real new-born bantling; it is just like the little rabbits we fathers have all seen with some dismay at first burst. * * * * * Carlo Dolce's representations of our Saviour are pretty, to be sure; but they are too smooth to please me. His Christs are always in sugar-candy. * * * * * That is a very odd and funny picture of the Connoisseurs at Rome[1] by Reynolds. [Footnote 1: "Portraits of distinguished Connoisseurs painted at Rome,"--belonging to Lord Burlington.--ED.] * * * * * The more I see of modern pictures, the more I am convinced that the ancient art of painting is gone, and something substituted for it,--very pleasing, but different, and different in kind and not in degree only. Portraits by the old masters,--take for example the pock-fritten lady by Cuyp[1]--are pictures of men and women: they fill, not merely occupy, a space; they represent individuals, but individuals as types of a species. Modern portraits--a few by Jackson and Owen, perhaps, excepted--give you not the man, not the inward humanity, but merely the external mark, that in which Tom is different from Bill. There is something affected and meretricious in the Snake in the Grass[2] and such pictures, by Reynolds. [Footnote 1: I almost forget, but have some recollection that the allusion is to Mr. Heneage Finch's picture of a Lady with a Fan.--ED.] [Footnote 2: Sir Robert Peel's.--ED.] July 25. 1831. CHILLINGWORTH.--SUPERSTITION OF MALTESE, SICILIANS, AND ITALIANS. It is now twenty years since I read Chillingworth's book[1]; but certainly it seemed to me that his main position, that the mere text of the Bible is the sole and exclusive ground of Christian faith and practice, is quite untenable against the Romanists. It entirely destroys the conditions of a church, of an authority residing in a religious community, and all that holy sense of brotherhood which is so sublime and consolatory to a meditative Christian. Had I been a Papist, I should not have wished for a more vanquishable opponent in controversy. I certainly believe Chillingworth to have been in some sense a Socinian. Lord Falkland, his friend, said so in substance. I do not deny his skill in dialectics; he was more than a match for Knott[2] to be sure. I must be bold enough to say, that I do not think that even Hooker puts the idea of a church on the true foundation. [Footnote 1: "The Religion of Protestants a safe Way to Salvation; or, an Answer to a Booke entitled 'Mercy and Truth; or, Charity maintained by Catholicks,' which pretends to prove the contrary."] [Footnote 2: Socinianism, or some inclination that way, is an old and clinging charge against Chillingworth. On the one hand, it is well known that he subscribed the articles of the church of England, in the usual form, on the 20th of July, 1638; and on the other, it is equally certain that within two years immediately previous, he wrote the letter to some unnamed correspondent, beginning "Dear Harry," and printed in all the Lives of Chillingworth, in which letter he sums up his arguments upon the Arian doctrine in this passage:--"In a word, whosoever shall freely and impartially consider of this thing, and how on the other side the ancient fathers' weapons against the Arrians are in a manner only places of Scripture (and these now for the most part discarded as importunate and unconcluding), and how in the argument drawn from the authority of the ancient fathers, they are almost always defendants, and scarse ever opponents, _he shall not choose but confesses or at least be very inclinable to beleeve, that the doctrine of Arrius is eyther a truth, or at least no damnable heresy_." The truth is, however, that the Socinianism of Chillingworth, such as it may have been, had more reference to the doctrine of the redemption of man than of the being of God. Edward Knott's real name was Matthias Wilson.--ED.] * * * * * The superstition of the peasantry and lower orders generally in Malta, Sicily, and Italy exceeds common belief. It is unlike the superstition of Spain, which is a jealous fanaticism, having reference to their catholicism, and always glancing on heresy. The popular superstition of Italy is the offspring of the climate, the old associations, the manners, and the very names of the places. It is pure paganism, undisturbed by any anxiety about orthodoxy, or animosity against heretics. Hence, it is much more good-natured and pleasing to a traveller's feelings, and certainly not a whit less like the true religion of our dear Lord than the gloomy idolatry of the Spaniards. * * * * * I well remember, when in Valetta in 1805, asking a boy who waited on me, what a certain procession, then passing, was, and his answering with great quickness, that it was Jesus Christ, _who lives here (sta di casa qui)_, and when he comes out, it is in the shape of a wafer. But, "Eccelenza," said he, smiling and correcting himself, "non è Cristiano."[1] [Footnote 1: The following anecdote related by Mr. Coleridge, in April, 1811, was preserved and communicated to me by Mr. Justice Coleridge:--"As I was descending from Mount AEtna with a very lively talkative guide, we passed through a village (I think called) Nicolozzi, when the host happened to be passing through the street. Every one was prostrate; my guide became so; and, not to be singular, I went down also. After resuming our journey, I observed in my guide an unusual seriousness and long silence, which, after many _hums_ and _hahs_, was interrupted by a low bow, and leave requested to ask a question. This was of course granted, and the ensuing dialogue took place. Guide. "Signor, are you then a Christian?" Coleridge. "I hope so." G. "What! are all Englishmen Christians?" C. "I hope and trust they are." G. "What! are you not Turks? Are you not damned eternally?" C. "I trust not, through Christ." G. "What! you believe in Christ then?" C. "Certainly." This answer produced another long silence. At length my guide again spoke, still doubting the grand point of my Christianity. G. "I'm thinking, Signor, what is the difference between you and us, that you are to be certainly damned?" C. "Nothing very material; nothing that can prevent our both going to heaven, I hope. We believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost." G. (interrupting me) "Oh those damned priests! what liars they are! But (pausing) we can't do without them; we can't go to heaven without them. But tell me, Signor, what _are_ the differences?" C. "Why, for instance, we do not worship the Virgin." G. "And why not, Signor?" C. "Because, though holy and pure, we think her still a woman, and, therefore, do not pay her the honour due to God." G. "But do you not worship Jesus, who sits on the right hand of God?" C. "We do." G. "Then why not worship the Virgin, who sits on the left?" C. "I did not know she did. If you can show it me in the Scriptures, I shall readily agree to worship her." "Oh," said my man, with uncommon triumph, and cracking his fingers, "sicuro, Signor! sicuro, Signor!""--ED.] _July_ 30. 1831. ASGILL.--THE FRENCH. Asgill was an extraordinary man, and his pamphlet[1] is invaluable. He undertook to prove that man is literally immortal; or, rather, that any given living man might probably never die. He complains of the cowardly practice of dying. He was expelled from two Houses of Commons for blasphemy and atheism, as was pretended;--really I suspect because he was a staunch Hanoverian. I expected to find the ravings of an enthusiast, or the sullen snarlings of an infidel; whereas I found the very soul of Swift--an intense half self-deceived humorism. I scarcely remember elsewhere such uncommon skill in logic, such lawyer-like acuteness, and yet such a grasp of common sense. Each of his paragraphs is in itself a whole, and yet a link between the preceding and following; so that the entire series forms one argument, and yet each is a diamond in itself. [Footnote 1: "An argument proving, that, according to the covenant of eternal life, revealed in the Scriptures, man may be translated from hence, without passing through death, although the human nature of Christ himself could not be thus translated, till he had passed through death." Asgill died in the year 1738, in the King's Bench prison, where he had been a prisoner for debt thirty years.--ED.] * * * * * Was there ever such a miserable scene as that of the exhibition of the Austrian standards in the French house of peers the other day?[1] Every other nation but the French would see that it was an exhibition of their own falsehood and cowardice. A man swears that the property intrusted to him is burnt, and then, when he is no longer afraid, produces it, and boasts of the atmosphere of "_honour_," through which the lie did not transpire. Frenchmen are like grains of gunpowder,--each by itself smutty and contemptible, but mass them together and they are terrible indeed. [Footnote 1: When the allies were in Paris in 1815, all the Austrian standards were reclaimed. The answer was that they had been burnt by the soldiers at the Hôtel des Invalides. This was untrue. The Marquis de Semonville confessed with pride that he, knowing of the fraud, had concealed these standards, taken from Mack at Ulm in 1805, in a vault under the Luxemburg palace. "An inviolable asylum," said the Marquis in his speech to the peers, "formed in the vault of this hall has protected this treasure from every search. Vainly, during this long space of time, have the most authoritative researches endeavoured to penetrate the secret. It would have been culpable to reveal it, as long as we were liable to the demands of haughty foreigners. No one in this atmosphere of honour is capable of so great a weakness," &c.--ED.] _August_ 1. 1831. As there is much beast and some devil in man; so is there some angel and some God in him. The beast and the devil may be conquered, but in this life never destroyed. * * * * * I will defy any one to answer the arguments of a St. Simonist, except on the ground of Christianity--its precepts and its assurances. _August_ 6. 1831. THE GOOD AND THE TRUE.--ROMISH RELIGION. There is the love of the good for the good's sake, and the love of the truth for the truth's sake. I have known many, especially women, love the good for the good's sake; but very few, indeed, and scarcely one woman, love the truth for the truth's sake. Yet; without the latter, the former may become, as it has a thousand times been, the source of persecution of the truth,--the pretext and motive of inquisitorial cruelty and party zealotry. To see clearly that the love of the good and the true is ultimately identical--is given only to those who love both sincerely and without any foreign ends. * * * * * Look through the whole history of countries professing the Romish religion, and you will uniformly find the leaven of this besetting and accursed principle of action--that the end will sanction any means. _August_ 8. 1831. ENGLAND AND HOLLAND. The conduct of this country to King William of Holland has been, in my judgment, base and unprincipled beyond any thing in our history since the times of Charles the Second. Certainly, Holland is one of the most important allies that England has; and we are doing our utmost to subject it, and Portugal, to French influence, or even dominion! Upon my word, the English people, at this moment, are like a man palsied in every part of his body but one, in which one part he is so morbidly sensitive that he cannot bear to have it so much as breathed upon, whilst you may pinch him with a hot forceps elsewhere without his taking any notice of it. _August_ 8. 1831. IRON.--GALVANISM.--HEAT. Iron is the most ductile of all hard metals, and the hardest of all ductile metals. With the exception of nickel, in which it is dimly seen, iron is the only metal in which the magnetic power is visible. Indeed, it is almost impossible to purify nickel of iron. * * * * * Galvanism is the union of electricity and magnetism, and, by being continuous, it exhibits an image of life;--I say, an image only: it is life in death. * * * * * Heat is the mesothesis or indifference of light and matter. _August_ 14. 1831. NATIONAL COLONIAL CHARACTER, AND NAVAL DISCIPLINE. The character of most nations in their colonial dependencies is in an inverse ratio of excellence to their character at home. The best people in the mother-country will generally be the worst in the colonies; the worst at home will be the best abroad. Or, perhaps, I may state it less offensively thus:--The colonists of a well governed-country will degenerate; those of an ill-governed country will improve. I am now considering the natural tendency of such colonists if left to themselves; of course, a direct act of the legislature of the mother-country will break in upon this. Where this tendency is exemplified, the cause is obvious. In countries well governed and happily conditioned, none, or very few, but those who are desperate through vice or folly, or who are mere trading adventurers, will be willing to leave their homes and settle in another hemisphere; and of those who do go, the best and worthiest are always striving to acquire the means of leaving the colony, and of returning to their native land. In ill-governed and ill-conditioned countries, on the contrary, the most respectable of the people are willing and anxious to emigrate for the chance of greater security and enlarged freedom; and if they succeed in obtaining these blessings in almost any degree, they have little inducement, on the average, to wish to abandon their second and better country. Hence, in the former case, the colonists consider themselves as mere strangers, sojourners, birds of passage, and shift to live from hand to mouth, with little regard to lasting improvement of the place of their temporary commerce; whilst, in the latter case, men feel attached to a community to which they are individually indebted for otherwise unattainable benefits, and for the most part learn to regard it as their abode, and to make themselves as happy and comfortable in it as possible. I believe that the internal condition and character of the English and French West India islands of the last century amply verified this distinction; the Dutch colonists most certainly did, and have always done. Analogous to this, though not founded on precisely the same principle, is the fact that the severest naval discipline is always found in the ships of the freest nations, and the most lax discipline in the ships of the most oppressed. Hence, the naval discipline of the Americans is the sharpest; then that of the English;[1] then that of the French (I speak as it used to be); and on board a Spanish ship, there is no discipline at all. At Genoa, the word "Liberty" is, or used to be, engraved on the chains of the galley-slaves, and the doors of the dungeons. [Footnote 1: This expression needs explanation. It _looks_ as if Mr. Coleridge rated the degree of liberty enjoyed by the English, _after_ that of the citizens of the United States; but he meant no such thing. His meaning was, that the form of government of the latter was more democratic, and formally assigned more power to each individual. The Americans, as a nation, had no better friend in England than Coleridge; he contemplated their growth with interest, and prophesied highly of their destiny, whether under their present or other governments. But he well knew their besetting faults and their peculiar difficulties, and was most deliberately of opinion that the English had, for 130 years last past, possessed a measure of individual freedom and social dignity which had never been equalled, much less surpassed, in any other country ancient or modern. There is a passage in Mr. Coleridge's latest publication (Church and State}, which clearly expresses his opinion upon this subject: "It has been frequently and truly observed that in England, where the ground-plan, the skeleton, as it were, of the government is a monarchy, at once buttressed and limited by the aristocracy (the assertions of its popular character finding a better support in the harangues and theories of popular men, than in state documents, and the records of clear history), afar greater degree of liberty is, and long has been, enjoyed, than ever existed in, the ostensibly freest, that is, most democratic, commonwealths of ancient or modern times; greater, indeed, and with a more decisive predominance of the spirit of freedom, than the wisest and most philanthropic statesmen of antiquity, or than the great commonwealth's men,--the stars of that narrow interspace of blue sky between the black clouds of the first and second Charles's reigns--believed compatible, the one with the safety of the state, the other with the interests of morality. Yes! for little less than a century and a half, Englishmen have, collectively and individually, lived and acted with fewer restraints on their free-agency, than the citizens of any known republic, past or present." (p. 120.) Upon which he subjoins the following note: "It will be thought, perhaps, that the United States of North America should have been excepted. But the identity of stock, language, customs, manners, and laws scarcely allows us to consider this an exception, even though it were quite certain both that it is and that it will continue such. It was at all events a remark worth remembering, which I once heard from a traveller (a prejudiced one, I must admit), that where every man may take, liberties, there is little liberty for any man; or, that where every man takes liberties, no man can enjoy any." (p. 121.) See also a passage to the like effect in the _Friend_, vol. i. p. 129--ED.] August 15. 1831. ENGLAND.--HOLLAND AND BELGIUM. I cannot contain my indignation at the conduct of our government towards Holland. They have undoubtedly forgotten the true and well-recognized policy of this country in regard to Portugal in permitting the war faction in France to take possession of the Tagus, and to bully the Portuguese upon so flimsy--indeed, false--a pretext[1] yet, in this instance, something may be said for them. Miguel is such a wretch, that I acknowledge a sort of morality in leaving him to be cuffed and insulted; though, of course, this is a poor answer to a statesman who alleges the interest and policy of the country. But, as to the Dutch and King William: the first, as a nation, the most ancient ally, the _alter idem_ of England, the best deserving of the cause of freedom and religion and morality of any people in Europe; and the second, the very best sovereign now in Christendom, with, perhaps, the single exception of the excellent king of Sweden[2]--was ever any thing so mean and cowardly as the behaviour of England! The Five Powers have, throughout this conference, been actuated exclusively by a selfish desire to preserve peace--I should rather say, to smother war --at the expense of a most valuable but inferior power. They have over and over again acknowledged the justice of the Dutch claims, and the absurdity of the Belgian pretences; but as the Belgians were also as impudent as they were iniquitous,--as they would not yield _their_ point, why then--that peace may be preserved--the Dutch must yield theirs! A foreign prince comes into Belgium, pending these negotiations, and takes an unqualified oath to maintain the Belgian demands:--what could King William or the Dutch do, if they ever thereafter meant to call themselves independent, but resist and resent this outrage to the uttermost? It was a crisis in which every consideration of state became inferior to the strong sense and duty of national honour. When, indeed, the French appear in the field, King William retires. "I now see," he may say, "that the powers of Europe are determined to abet the Belgians. The justice of such a proceeding I leave to their conscience and the decision of history. It is now no longer a question whether I am tamely to submit to rebels and a usurper; it is no longer a quarrel between Holland and Belgium: it is an alliance of all Europe against Holland,--in which case I yield. I have no desire to sacrifice my people." [Footnote 1: Meaning, principally, the whipping, so richly deserved, inflicted on a Frenchman called Bonhomme, for committing a disgusting breach of common decency in the cathedral of Coimbra, during divine service in Passion Week.--ED.]; [Footnote 2: "Every thing that I have heard or read of this sovereign has contributed to the impression on my mind, that he is a good and a wise man, and worthy to be the king of a virtuous people, the purest specimen of the Gothic race."--_Church and State_, p. 125. n.--ED.] * * * * * When Leopold said that he was called to "_reign over_ four millions of noble Belgians," I thought the phrase would have been more germane to the matter, if he had said that he was called to "_rein in_ four million restive asses." _August_ 20. 1831. GREATEST HAPPINESS PRINCIPLE.----HOBBISM. O. P. Q. in the Morning Chronicle is a clever fellow. He is for the greatest possible happiness for the greatest possible number, and for the longest possible time! So am I; so are you, and every one of us, I will venture to say, round the tea-table. First, however, what does O. P. Q. mean by the word _happiness_? and, secondly, how does he propose to make other persons agree in _his_ definition of the term? Don't you see the ridiculous absurdity of setting up _that_ as a principle or motive of action, which is, in fact, a necessary and essential instinct of our very nature--an inborn and inextinguishable desire? How can creatures susceptible of pleasure and pain do otherwise than desire happiness? But, _what_ happiness? That is the question. The American savage, in scalping his fallen enemy, pursues _his_ happiness naturally and adequately. A Chickasaw, or Pawnee Bentham, or O. P. Q., would necessarily hope for the most frequent opportunities possible of scalping the greatest possible number of savages, for the longest possible time. There is no escaping this absurdity, unless you come back to a standard of reason and duty, imperative upon our merely pleasurable sensations. Oh! but, says O. P. Q., I am for the happiness of _others!_ Of others! Are you, indeed? Well, I happen to be one of those _others_, and, so far as I can judge from what you show me of your habits and views, I would rather be excused from your banquet of happiness. _Your_ mode of happiness would make _me_ miserable. To go about doing as much _good_ as possible to as many men as possible, is, indeed, an excellent object for a man to propose to himself; but then, in order that you may not sacrifice the real good and happiness of others to your particular views, which may be quite different from your neighbour's, you must do _that_ good to others which the reason, common to all, pronounces to be good for all. In this sense your fine maxim is so very true as to be a mere truism. * * * * * So you object, with old Hobbes, that I do good actions _for_ the pleasure of a good conscience; and so, after all, I am only a refined sensualist! Heaven bless you, and mend your logic! Don't you see that if conscience, which is in its nature a consequence, were thus anticipated and made an antecedent--a party instead of a judge--it would dishonour your draft upon it--it would not pay on demand? Don't you see that, in truth, the very fact of acting with this motive properly and logically destroys all claim upon conscience to give you any pleasure at all? August 22. 1831. THE TWO MODES OF POLITICAL ACTION. There are many able and patriotic members in the House of Commons--Sir Robert Inglis, Sir Robert Peel, and some others. But I grieve that they never have the courage or the wisdom--I know not in which the failure is-- to take their stand upon duty, and to appeal to all men as men,--to the Good and the True, which exist for _all_, and of which _all_ have an apprehension. They always set to work--especially, his great eminence considered, Sir Robert Peel--by addressing themselves to individual interests; the measure will be injurious to the linen-drapers, or to the bricklayers; or this clause will bear hard on bobbin-net or poplins, and so forth. Whereas their adversaries--the demagogues--always work on the opposite principle: they always appeal to men as men; and, as you know, the most terrible convulsions in society have been wrought by such phrases as _Rights of Man_, _Sovereignty of the People_, _&c_., which no one understands, which apply to no one in particular, but to all in general.[1] The devil works precisely in the same way. He is a very clever fellow; I have no acquaintance with him, but I respect his evident talents. Consistent truth and goodness will assuredly in the end overcome every thing; but inconsistent good can never be a match for consistent evil. Alas! I look in vain for some wise and vigorous man to sound the word Duty in the ears of this generation. [Footnote 1: "It is with nations as with individuals. In tranquil moods and peaceable times we are quite _practical_; facts only, and cool common sense, are then in fashion. But let the winds of passion swell, and straightway men begin to generalize, to connect by remotest analogies, to express the most universal positions of reason in the most glowing figures of fancy; in short, to feel particular truths and mere facts as poor, cold, narrow, and incommensurate with their feelings."--_Statesman's Manual_, p. 18. "It seems a paradox only to the unthinking, and it is a fact that none but the unread in history will deny, that, in periods of popular tumult and innovation, the more abstract a notion is, the more readily has it been found to combine, the closer has appeared its affinity, with the feelings of a people, and with all their immediate impulses to action. At the commencement of the French Revolution, in the remotest villages every tongue was employed in echoing and enforcing the almost geometrical abstractions of the physiocratic politicians and economists. The public roads were crowded with armed enthusiasts, disputing on the inalienable sovereignty of the people, the imprescriptible laws of the pure reason, and the universal constitution, which, as rising out of the nature and rights of man as man, all nations alike were under the obligation of adopting."-- _Statesman's Manual_.] _August_ 24. 1831. TRUTHS AND MAXIMS. The English public is not yet ripe to comprehend the essential difference between the reason and the understanding--between a principle and a maxim-- an eternal truth and a mere conclusion generalized from a great number of facts. A man, having seen a million moss roses all red, concludes from his own experience and that of others that all moss roses are red. That is a maxim with him--the _greatest_ amount of his knowledge upon the subject. But it is only true until some gardener has produced a white moss rose,-- after which the maxim is good for nothing. Again, suppose Adam watching the sun sinking under the western horizon for the first time; he is seized with gloom and terror, relieved by scarce a ray of hope that he shall ever see the glorious light again. The next evening, when it declines, his hopes are stronger, but still mixed with fear; and even at the end of a thousand years, all that a man can feel is a hope and an expectation so strong as to preclude anxiety. Now compare this in its highest degree with the assurance which you have that the two sides of any triangle are together greater than the third. This, demonstrated of one triangle, is seen to be eternally true of all imaginable triangles. This is a truth perceived at once by the intuitive reason, independently of experience. It is and must ever be so, multiply and vary the shapes and sizes of triangles as you may. * * * * * It used to be said that four and five _make_ nine. Locke says, that four and five _are_ nine. Now I say, that four and five _are not_ nine, but that they will _make_ nine. When I see four objects which will form a square, and five which will form a pentagon, I see that they are two different things; when combined, they will form a third different figure, which we call nine. When separate they _are not_ it, but will _make_ it. _September_ 11. 1831. DRAYTON AND DANIEL. Drayton is a sweet poet, and Selden's notes to the early part of the Polyolbion are well worth your perusal. Daniel is a superior man; his diction is pre-eminently pure,--of that quality which I believe has always existed somewhere in society. It is just such English, without any alteration, as Wordsworth or Sir George Beaumont might have spoken or written in the present day. Yet there are instances of sublimity in Drayton. When deploring the cutting down of some of our old forests, he says, in language which reminds the reader of Lear, written subsequently, and also of several passages in Mr. Wordsworth's poems:-- ----"our trees so hack'd above the ground, That where their lofty tops the neighbouring countries crown'd, Their trunks (like aged folks) now bare and naked stand, _As for revenge to Heaven each held a wither'd hand._" [1] That is very fine. [Footnote 1: Polyol VII. "He (Drayton) was a poet by nature, and carefully improved his talent; one who sedulously laboured to deserve the approbation of such as were capable of appreciating and cared nothing for the censures which others might pass upon him." 'Like me that list,' he says, ----'my honest rhymes Nor care for critics, nor regard the times.' And though he is not a poet _virum volitarc per ora_, nor one of those whose better fortune it is to live in the hearts of their devoted admirers,--yet what he deemed his greatest work will be preserved by its subject; some of his minor poems have merit enough in their execution to ensure their preservation; and no one who studies poetry as an art will think his time misspent in perusing the whole, if he have any real love for the art he is pursuing. The youth who enters upon that pursuit without a feeling of respect and gratitude for those elder poets, who by their labours have prepared the way for him, is not likely to produce any thing himself that will be held in remembrance by posterity."-_The Doctor_, &c. c. 36. P.I. I heartily trust that the author or authors, as the case may be, of this singularly thoughtful and diverting book will in due time continue it. Let some people say what they please, there has not been the fellow of it published for many a long day.--ED.] _September_ 12. 1831. MR. COLERIDGE'S SYSTEM OF PHILOSOPHY. My system, if I may venture to give it so fine a name, is the only attempt, I know, ever made to reduce all knowledges into harmony. It opposes no other system, but shows what was true in each; and how that which was true in the particular, in each of them became error, _because_ it was only half the truth. I have endeavoured to unite the insulated fragments of truth, and therewith to frame a perfect mirror. I show to each system that I fully understand and rightfully appreciate what that system means; but then I lift up that system to a higher point of view, from which I enable it to see its former position, where it was, indeed, but under another light and with different relations;--so that the fragment of truth is not only acknowledged, but explained. Thus the old astronomers discovered and maintained much that was true; but, because they were placed on a false ground, and looked from a wrong point of view, they never did, they never could, discover the truth--that is, the whole truth. As soon as they left the earth, their false centre, and took their stand in the sun, immediately they saw the whole system in its true light, and their former station remaining, but remaining as a part of the prospect. I wish, in short, to connect by a moral _copula_ natural history with political history; or, in other words, to make history scientific, and science historical--to take from history its accidentality, and from science its fatalism. * * * * * I never from a boy could, under any circumstances, feel the slightest dread of death as such. In all my illnesses I have ever had the most intense desire to be released from this life, unchecked by any but one wish, namely, to be able to finish my work on Philosophy. Not that I have any author's vanity on the subject: God knows that I should be absolutely glad, if I could hear that the thing had already been done before me. * * * * * Illness never in the smallest degree affects my intellectual powers. I can _think_ with all my ordinary vigour in the midst of pain; but I am beset with the most wretched and unmanning reluctance and shrinking from action. I could not upon such occasions take the pen in hand to write down my thoughts for all the wide world. _October 26._ 1831. KEENNESS AND SUBTLETY. Few men of genius are keen; but almost every man of genius is subtle. If you ask me the difference between keenness and subtlety, I answer that it is the difference between a point and an edge. To split a hair is no proof of subtlety; for subtlety acts in distinguishing differences--in showing that two things apparently one are in fact two; whereas, to split a hair is to cause division, and not to ascertain difference. _October_ 27. 1831. DUTIES AND NEEDS OF AN ADVOCATE. There is undoubtedly a limit to the exertions of an advocate for his client. He has a right, it is his bounden duty, to do every thing which his client might honestly do, and to do it with all the effect which any exercise of skill, talent, or knowledge of his own may be able to produce. But the advocate has no right, nor is it his duty, to do that for his client which his client _in foro conscientiae_ has no right to do for himself; as, for a gross example, to put in evidence a forged deed or will, knowing it to be so forged. As to mere confounding of witnesses by skilful cross-examination, I own I am not disposed to be very strict. The whole thing is perfectly well understood on all hands, and it is little more in general than a sort of cudgel-playing between the counsel and the witness, in which, I speak with submission to you, I think I have seen the witness have the best of it as often as his assailant. It is of the utmost importance in the administration of justice that knowledge and intellectual power should be as far as possible equalized between the crown and the prisoner, or plaintiff and defendant. Hence especially arises the necessity for an order of advocates,--men whose duty it ought to be to know what the law allows and disallows; but whose interests should be wholly indifferent as to the persons or characters of their clients. If a certain latitude in examining witnesses is, as experience seems to have shown, a necessary mean towards the evisceration of the truth of matters of fact, I have no doubt, as a moralist, in saying, that such latitude within the bounds, now existing is justifiable. We must be content with a certain quantum in this life, especially in matters of public cognizance; the necessities of society demand it; we must not be righteous overmuch, or wise overmuch; and, as an old father says, in what vein may there not be a plethora, when the Scripture tells us that there may under circumstances be too much of virtue and of wisdom? Still I think that, upon the whole, the advocate is placed in a position unfavourable to his moral being, and, indeed, to his intellect also, in its higher powers. Therefore I would recommend an advocate to devote a part of his leisure time to some study of the metaphysics of the mind, or metaphysics of theology; something, I mean, which shall call forth all his powers, and centre his wishes in the investigation of truth alone, without reference to a side to be supported. No studies give such a power of distinguishing as metaphysical, and in their natural and unperverted tendency they are ennobling and exalting. Some such studies are wanted to counteract the operation of legal studies and practice, which sharpen, indeed, but, like a grinding-stone, narrow whilst they sharpen. _November_ 19. 1831. ABOLITION OF THE FRENCH HEREDITARY PEERAGE. I cannot say what the French peers _will_ do; but I can tell you what they _ought_ to do. "So far," they might say, "as our feelings and interests, as individuals, are concerned in this matter--if it really be the prevailing wish of our fellow-countrymen to destroy the hereditary peerage--we shall, without regret, retire into the ranks of private citizens: but we are bound by the provisions of the existing constitution to consider ourselves collectively as essential to the well-being of France: we have been placed here to defend what France, a short time ago at least, thought a vital part of its government; and, if we did not defend it, what answer could we make hereafter to France itself, if she should come to see, what we think to be an error, in the light in which we view it? We should be justly branded as traitors and cowards, who had deserted the post which we were specially appointed to maintain. As a House of Peers, therefore,--as one substantive branch of the legislature, we can never, in honour or in conscience, consent to a measure of the impolicy and dangerous consequences of which we are convinced. "If, therefore, this measure is demanded by the country, let the king and the deputies form themselves into a constituent assembly; and then, assuming to act in the name of the total nation, let them decree the abolition. In that case we yield to a just, perhaps, but revolutionary, act, in which we do not participate, and against which we are, upon the supposition, quite powerless. If the deputies, however, consider themselves so completely in the character of delegates as to be at present absolutely pledged to vote without freedom of deliberation, let a concise, but perspicuous, summary of the ablest arguments that can be adduced on either side be drawn up, and printed, and circulated throughout the country; and then, after two months, let the deputies demand fresh instructions upon this point. One thing, as men of honour, we declare beforehand--that, come what will, none of us who are now peers will ever accept a peerage created _de novo_ for life." _November_ 20. 1831. CONDUCT OF MINISTERS ON THE REFORM BILL.--THE MULTITUDE. The present ministers have, in my judgment, been guilty of two things preeminently wicked, _sensu politico_, in their conduct upon this Reform Bill. First, they have endeavoured to carry a fundamental change in the material and mode of action of the government of the country by so exciting the passions, and playing upon the necessary ignorance of the numerical majority of the nation, that all freedom and utility of discussion, by competent heads, in the proper place, should be precluded. In doing this they have used, or sanctioned the use of, arguments which may he applied with equal or even greater force to the carrying of any measure whatever, no matter how atrocious in its character or destructive in its consequences. They have appealed directly to the argument of the greater number of voices, no matter whether the utterers were drunk or sober, competent or not competent; and they have done the utmost in their power to rase out the sacred principle in politics of a representation of interests, and to introduce the mad and barbarizing scheme of a delegation of individuals. And they have done all this without one word of thankfulness to God for the manifold blessings of which the constitution as settled at the Revolution, imperfect as it may be, has been the source or vehicle or condition to this great nation,--without one honest statement of the manner in which the anomalies in the practice grew up, or any manly declaration of the inevitable necessities of government which those anomalies have met. With no humility, nor fear, nor reverence, like Ham the accursed, they have beckoned, with grinning faces, to a vulgar mob, to come and insult over the nakedness of a parent; when it had become them, if one spark of filial patriotism had burnt within their breasts, to have marched with silent steps and averted faces to lay their robes upon his destitution! Secondly, they have made the _king_ the prime mover in all this political wickedness: they have made the _king_ tell his people that they were deprived of their rights, and, by direct and necessary implication, that they and their ancestors for a century past had been slaves: they have made the king vilify the memory of his own brother and father. Rights! There are no rights whatever without corresponding duties. Look at the history of the growth of our constitution, and you will see that our ancestors never upon any occasion stated, as a ground for claiming any of their privileges, an abstract right inherent in themselves; you will nowhere in our parliamentary records find the miserable sophism of the Rights of Man. No! they were too wise for that. They took good care to refer their claims to custom and prescription, and boldly--sometimes very impudently--asserted them upon traditionary and constitutional grounds. The Bill is bad enough, God knows; but the arguments of its advocates, and the manner of their advocacy, are a thousand times worse than the Bill itself; and you will live to think so. I am far, very far, from wishing to indulge in any vulgar abuse of the vulgar. I believe that the feeling of the multitude will, in most cases, be in favour of something good; but this it is which I perceive, that they are always under the domination of some one feeling or view;--whereas truth, and, above all, practical wisdom, must be the result of a wide comprehension of the more and the less, the balance and the counter- balance. _December_ 3. 1831. RELIGION. A religion, that is, a true religion, must consist of ideas and facts both; not of ideas alone without facts, for then it would be mere Philosophy;-- nor of facts alone without ideas, of which those facts are the symbols, or out of which they arise, or upon which they are grounded, for then it would be mere History. _December_ 17. 1831. UNION WITH IRELAND.--IRISH CHURCH. I am quite sure that no dangers are to be feared by England from the disannexing and independence of Ireland at all comparable with the evils which have been, and will yet be, caused to England by the Union. We have never received one particle of advantage from our association with Ireland, whilst we have in many most vital particulars violated the principles of the British constitution solely for the purpose of conciliating the Irish agitators, and of endeavouring--a vain endeavour--to find room for them under the same government. Mr. Pitt has received great credit for effecting the Union; but I believe it will sooner or later be discovered that the manner in which, and the terms upon which, he effected it, made it the most fatal blow that ever was levelled against the peace and prosperity of England. From it came the Catholic Bill. From the Catholic Bill has come this Reform Bill! And what next? * * * * * The case of the Irish Church is certainly anomalous, and full of practical difficulties. On the one hand, it is the only church which the constitution can admit; on the other, such are the circumstances, it is a church that cannot act as a church towards five sixths of the persons nominally and legally within its care. _December_ 18. 1831. A STATE.--PERSONS AND THINGS.--HISTORY. The difference between an inorganic and an organic body lies in this:--In the first--a sheaf of corn--the whole is nothing more than a collection of the individual parts or phenomena. In the second--a man--the whole is the effect of, or results from, the parts; it--the whole--is every thing, and the parts are nothing. A State is an idea intermediate between the two--the whole being a result from, and not a mere total of, the parts, and yet not so merging the constituent parts in the result, but that the individual exists integrally within it. Extremes, especially in politics, meet. In Athens each individual Athenian was of no value; but taken altogether, as Demus, they were every thing in such a sense that no individual citizen was any thing. In Turkey there is the sign of unity put for unity. The Sultan seems himself the State; but it is an illusion: there is in fact in Turkey no State at all: the whole consists of nothing but a vast collection of neighbourhoods. * * * * * When the government and the aristocracy of this country had subordinated _persons to things_, and treated the one like the other,--the poor, with some reason, and almost in self-defence, learned to set up _rights_ above _duties_. The code of a Christian society is, _Debeo, et tu debes_--of Heathens or Barbarians, _Teneo, teneto et tu, si potes_.[1] [Footnote 1: "And this, again, is evolved out of the yet higher idea of _person_ in contradistinction from _thing_, all social law and justice being grounded on the principle that a person can never, but by his own fault, become a thing, or, without grievous wrong, be treated as such; and the distinction consisting in this, that a thing may be used altogether, and merely as the _means_ to an end; but the person must always be included in the _end_; his interest must always form a part of the object,--a _mean_ to which he, by consent, that is, by his own act, makes himself. We plant a tree, and we fell it; we breed the sheep, and we shear, or we kill it,--in both cases wholly as means to _our_ ends: for trees and animals are things. The woodcutter and the hind are likewise employed as _means_; but on agreement, and that too an agreement of reciprocal advantage, which includes them as well as their employer in the _end_; for they are persons. And the government under which the contrary takes place is not worthy to be called a state, if, as in the kingdom of Dahomey, it be unprogressive; or only by anticipation, where, as in Russia, it is in advance to a better and more _manworthy_ order of things."--_Church and State_, p. 10.] * * * * * If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us! _December_ 27. 1831. BEAUTY.--GENIUS. The old definition of beauty in the Roman school of painting was, _il più nell' uno_--multitude in unity; and there is no doubt that such is the principle of beauty. And as one of the most characteristic and infallible criteria of the different ranks of men's intellects, observe the instinctive habit which all superior minds have of endeavouring to bring, and of never resting till they have brought, into unity the scattered facts which occur in conversation, or in the statements of men of business. To attempt to argue any great question upon facts only, is absurd; you cannot state any fact before a mixed audience, which an opponent as clever as yourself cannot with ease twist towards another bearing, or at least meet by a contrary fact, as it is called. I wonder why facts were ever called stubborn things: I am sure they have been found pliable enough lately in the House of Commons and elsewhere. Facts, you know, are not truths; they are not conclusions; they are not even premisses, but in the nature and parts of premisses. The truth depends on, and is only arrived at, by a legitimate deduction from _all_ the facts which are truly material. * * * * * _December_ 28. 1831. CHURCH.--STATE.--DISSENTERS. Even to a church,--the only pure democracy, because in it persons are alone considered, and one person _à priori_ is equal to another person,--even to a church, discipline is an essential condition. But a state regards classes, and classes as they represent classified property; and to introduce a system of representation which must inevitably render all discipline impossible, what is it but madness-the madness of ignorant vanity, and reckless obstinacy? * * * * * I have known, and still know, many Dissenters, who profess to have a zeal for Christianity; and I dare say they have. But I have known very few Dissenters indeed, whose hatred to the Church of England was not a much more active principle of action with them than their love for Christianity. The Wesleyans, in uncorrupted parts of the country, are nearly the only exceptions. There never was an age since the days of the apostles, in which the catholic spirit of religion was so dead, and put aside for love of sects and parties, as at present. * * * * * _January_ 1. 1832. GRACEFULNESS OF CHILDREN.--DOGS. How inimitably graceful children are in general before they learn to dance! * * * * * There seems a sort of sympathy between the more generous dogs and little children. I believe an instance of a little child being attacked by a large dog is very rare indeed. _January_ 28. 1832. IDEAL TORY AND WHIG. The ideal Tory and the ideal Whig (and some such there have really been) agreed in the necessity and benefit of an exact balance of the three estates: but the Tory was more jealous of the balance being deranged by the people; the Whig, of its being deranged by the Crown. But this was a habit, a jealousy only; they both agreed in the ultimate preservation of the balance; and accordingly they might each, under certain circumstances, without the slightest inconsistency, pass from one side to the other, as the ultimate object required it. This the Tories did at the Revolution, but remained Tories as before. I have half a mind to write a critical and philosophical essay on Whiggism, from Dryden's Achitophel (Shaftesbury), the first Whig, (for, with Dr. Johnson's leave, the devil is no such cattle,) down to ----, who, I trust, in God's mercy to the interests of peace, union, and liberty in this nation, will be the last. In it I would take the last years of Queen Anne's reign as the zenith, or palmy state, of Whiggism in its divinest _avatar_ of common sense, or of the understanding, vigorously exerted in the right direction on the right and proper objects of the understanding; and would then trace the rise, the occasion, the progress, and the necessary degeneration of the Whig spirit of compromise, even down to the profound ineptitudes of their party in these days. A clever fellow might make something of this hint. How Asgill would have done it! _February_ 22. 1832. THE CHURCH. The church is the last relic of our nationality. Would to God that the bishops and the clergy in general could once fully understand that the Christian church and the national church are as little to be confounded as divided! I think the fate of the Reform Bill, in itself, of comparatively minor importance; the fate of the national church occupies my mind with greater intensity. _February_ 24. 1832. MINISTERS AND THE REFORM BILL. I could not help smiling, in reading the report of Lord Grey's speech in the House of Lords, the other night, when he asked Lord Wicklow whether he seriously believed that he, Lord Grey, or any of the ministers, intended to subvert the institutions of the country. Had I been in Lord Wicklow's place, I should have been tempted to answer this question something in the following way:--"Waiving the charge in an offensive sense of personal consciousness against the noble earl, and all but one or two of his colleagues, upon my honour, and in the presence of Almighty God, I answer, Yes! You have destroyed the freedom of parliament; you have done your best to shut the door of the House of Commons to the property, the birth, the rank, the wisdom of the people, and have flung it open to their passions and their follies. You have disfranchised the gentry, and the real patriotism of the nation: you have agitated and exasperated the mob, and thrown the balance of political power into the hands of that class (the shopkeepers) which, in all countries and in all ages, has been, is now, and ever will be, the least patriotic and the least conservative of any. You are now preparing to destroy for ever the constitutional independence of the House of Lords; you are for ever displacing it from its supremacy as a co-ordinate estate of the realm; and whether you succeed in passing your bill by actually swamping our votes by a batch of new peers, or by frightening a sufficient number of us out of our opinions by the threat of one,--equally you will have superseded the triple assent which the constitution requires to the enactment of a valid law, and have left the king alone with the delegates of the populace!" _March_ 3. 1832. DISFRANCHISEMENT. I am afraid the Conservative party see but one half of the truth. The mere extension of the franchise is not the evil; I should be glad to see it greatly extended;--there is no harm in that _per se_; the mischief is that the franchise is nominally extended, but to such classes, and in such a manner, that a practical disfranchisement of all above, and a discontenting of all below, a favoured class are the unavoidable results. _March_ 17. 1832. GENIUS FEMININE.----PIRATES. ----'s face is almost the only exception I know to the observation, that something feminine--not _effeminate_, mind--is discoverable in the countenances of all men of genius. Look at that face of old Dampier, a rough sailor, but a man of exquisite mind. How soft is the air of his countenance, how delicate the shape of his temples! * * * * * I think it very absurd and misplaced to call Raleigh and Drake, and others of our naval heroes of Elizabeth's age, pirates. No man is a _pirate_, unless his contemporaries agree to call him so. Drake said,--"The subjects of the king of Spain have done their best to ruin my country: _ergo_, I will try to ruin the king of Spain's country." Would it not be silly to call the Argonauts pirates in our sense of the word? _March_ 18. 1832. ASTROLOGY.--ALCHEMY. It is curious to mark how instinctively the reason has always pointed out to men the ultimate end of the various sciences, and how immediately afterwards they have set to work, like children, to realize that end by inadequate means. Now they applied to their appetites, now to their passions, now to their fancy, now to the understanding, and lastly, to the intuitive reason again. There is no doubt but that astrology of some sort or other would be the last achievement of astronomy: there must he chemical relations between the planets; the difference of their magnitudes compared with that of their distances is not explicable otherwise; but this, though, as it were, blindly and unconsciously seen, led immediately to fortune- telling and other nonsense. So alchemy is the theoretic end of chemistry: there must be a common law, upon which all can become each and each all; but then the idea was turned to the coining of gold and silver. _March_ 20. 1832. REFORM BILL.--CRISIS. I have heard but two arguments of any weight adduced in favour of passing this Reform Bill, and they are in substance these:--1. We will blow your brains out if you don't pass it. 2. We will drag you through a horsepond if you don't pass it; and there is a good deal of force in both. * * * * * Talk to me of your pretended crisis! Stuff! A vigorous government would in one month change all the data for your reasoning. Would you have me believe that the events of this world are fastened to a revolving cycle with God at one end and the Devil at the other, and that the Devil is now uppermost! Are you a Christian, and talk about a crisis in that fatalistic sense! _March_ 31. 1832. JOHN, CHAP. III. VER. 4.--DICTATION AND INSPIRATION.--GNOSIS--NEW TESTAMENT CANON. I certainly understand the [Greek: ti emoi kai soi gynai] in the second chapter[1] of St. John's Gospel, as having a _liquid increpationis_ in it-- a mild reproof from Jesus to Mary for interfering in his ministerial acts by requests on her own account. I do not think that [Greek: gynai] was ever used by child to parent as a common mode of address: between husband and wife it was; but I cannot think that [Greek: m_eter] and [Greek: gynai] were equivalent terms in the mouth of a son speaking to his mother. No part of the Christopaedia is found in John or Paul; and after the baptism there is no recognition of any maternal authority in Mary. See the two passages where she endeavours to get access to him when he is preaching:--"Whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and my mother"[2] and also the recommendation of her to the care of John at the crucifixion. [Footnote 1: Verse 4.] [Footnote 2: Mark, ch. iii. ver. 35.] * * * * * There may be dictation without inspiration, and inspiration without dictation; they have been and continue to be grievously confounded. Balaam and his ass were the passive organs of dictation; but no one, I suppose, will venture to call either of those worthies inspired. It is my profound conviction that St. John and St. Paul were divinely inspired; but I totally disbelieve the dictation of any one word, sentence, or argument throughout their writings. Observe, there was revelation. All religion is revealed;-- _revealed_ religion is, in my judgment, a mere pleonasm. Revelations of facts were undoubtedly made to the prophets; revelations of doctrines were as undoubtedly made to John and Paul;--but is it not a mere matter of our very senses that John and Paul each dealt with those revelations, expounded them, insisted on them, just exactly according to his own natural strength of intellect, habit of reasoning, moral, and even physical temperament? We receive the books ascribed to John and Paul as their books on the judgment of men, for whom no miraculous discernment is pretended; nay, whom, in their admission and rejection of other books, we believe to have erred. Shall we give less credence to John and Paul themselves? Surely the heart and soul of every Christian give him sufficient assurance that, in all things that concern him as a _man_, the words that he reads are spirit and truth, and could only proceed from Him who made both heart and soul.-- Understand the matter so, and all difficulty vanishes: you read without fear, lest your faith meet with some shock from a passage here and there which you cannot reconcile with immediate dictation, by the Holy Spirit of God, without an absurd violence offered to the text. You read the Bible as the best of all books, but still as a book; and make use of all the means and appliances which learning and skill, under the blessing of God, can afford towards rightly apprehending the general sense of it--not solicitous to find out doctrine in mere epistolary familiarity, or facts in clear _ad hominem et pro tempore_ allusions to national traditions. * * * * * Tertullian, I think, says he had seen the autograph copies of some of the apostles' writings. The truth is, the ancient Church was not guided by the mere fact of the genuineness of a writing in pronouncing it canonical;-- its catholicity was the test applied to it. I have not the smallest doubt that the Epistle of Barnabas is genuine; but it is not catholic; it is full of the [Greek: gn_osis], though of the most simple and pleasing sort. I think the same of Hermas. The Church would never admit either into the canon, although the Alexandrians always read the Epistle of Barnabas in their churches for three hundred years together. It was upwards of three centuries before the Epistle to the Hebrews was admitted, and this on account of its [Greek: gn_osis]; at length, by help of the venerable prefix of St. Paul's name, its admirers, happily for us, succeeded. * * * * * So little did the early bishops and preachers think their Christian faith wrapped up in, and solely to be learned from, the New Testament,--indeed, can it be said that there was any such collection for three hundred years? --that I remember a letter from ----[1] to a friend of his, a bishop in the East, in which he most evidently speaks of the _Christian_ Scriptures as of works of which the bishop knew little or nothing. [Footnote 1: I have lost the name which Mr. Coleridge mentioned.--ED.] _April_ 4. 1832. UNITARIANISM.--MORAL PHILOSOPHY. I make the greatest difference between _ans_ and _isms_. I should deal insincerely with you, if I said that I thought Unitarianism was Christianity. No; as I believe and have faith in the doctrine, it is not the truth in Jesus Christ; but God forbid that I should doubt that you, and many other Unitarians, as you call yourselves, are, in a practical sense, very good Christians. We do not win heaven by logic. By the by, what do you mean by exclusively assuming the title of Unitarians? As if Tri-Unitarians were not necessarily Unitarians, as much (pardon the illustration) as an apple-pie must of course be a pie! The schoolmen would, perhaps, have called you Unicists; but your proper name is Psilanthropists--believers in the mere human nature of Christ. Upon my word, if I may say so without offence, I really think many forms of Pantheistic Atheism more agreeable to an imaginative mind than Unitarianism as it is professed in terms: in particular, I prefer the Spinosistic scheme infinitely. The early Socinians were, to be sure, most unaccountable logicians; but, when you had swallowed their bad reasoning, you came to a doctrine on which the _heart_, at least, might rest for some support. They adored Jesus Christ. Both Laelius and Faustus Socinus laid down the adorability of Jesus in strong terms. I have nothing, you know, to do with their logic. But Unitarianism is, in effect, the worst of one kind of Atheism, joined to the worst of one kind of Calvinism, like two asses tied tail to tail. It has no covenant with God; and looks upon prayer as a sort of self-magnetizing--a getting of the body and temper into a certain _status_, desirable _per se_, but having no covenanted reference to the Being to whom the prayer is addressed. * * * * * The sum total of moral philosophy is found in this one question, Is _Good_ a superfluous word,--or mere lazy synonyme for the pleasurable, and its causes;--at most, a mere modification to express degree, and comparative duration of pleasure?--Or the question may be more unanswerably stated thus, Is _good_ superfluous as a word exponent of a _kind_?--If it be, then moral philosophy is but a subdivision of physics. If not, then the writings of Paley and all his predecessors and disciples are false and _most_ pernicious; and there is an emphatic propriety in the superlative, and in a sense which of itself would supply and exemplify the difference between _most_ and _very_. _April_ 5. 1832. MORAL LAW OF POLARITY. It is curious to trace the operation of the moral law of polarity in the history of politics, religion, &c. When the maximum of one tendency has been attained, there is no gradual decrease, but a direct transition to its minimum, till the opposite tendency has attained its maximum; and then you see another corresponding revulsion. With the Restoration came in all at once the mechanico-corpuscular philosophy, which, with the increase of manufactures, trade, and arts, made every thing in philosophy, religion, and poetry objective; till, at length, attachment to mere external worldliness and forms got to its maximum,--when out burst the French revolution; and with it every thing became immediately subjective, without any object at all. The Rights of Man, the Sovereignty of the People, were subject and object both. We are now, I think, on the turning point again. This Reform seems the _ne plus ultra_ of that tendency of the public mind which substitutes its own undefined notions or passions for real objects and historical actualities. There is not one of the ministers--except the one or two revolutionists among them--who has ever given us a hint, throughout this long struggle, as to _what_ he really does believe will be the product of the bill; what sort of House of Commons it will make for the purpose of governing this empire soberly and safely. No; they have actualized for a moment a wish, a fear, a passion, but not an idea. _April_ 1. 1832. EPIDEMIC DISEASE.--QUARANTINE. There are two grand divisions under which all contagious diseases may be classed:--1. Those which spring from organized living beings, and from the life in them, and which enter, as it were, into the life of those in whom they reproduce themselves--such as small-pox and measles. These become so domesticated with the habit and system, that they are rarely received twice. 2. Those which spring from dead organized, or unorganized matter, and which may be comprehended under the wide term _malaria_. You may have passed a stagnant pond a hundred times without injury: you happen to pass it again, in low spirits and chilled, precisely at the moment of the explosion of the gas: the malaria strikes on the cutaneous or veno-glandular system, and drives the blood from the surface; the shivering fit comes on, till the musculo-arterial irritability re-acts, and then the hot fit succeeds; and, unless bark or arsenic--particularly bark, because it is a bitter as well as a tonic--be applied to strengthen the veno- glandular, and to moderate the musculo-arterial, system, a man may have the ague for thirty years together. But if, instead of being exposed to the solitary malaria of a pond, a man, travelling through the Pontine Marshes, permits his animal energies to flag, and surrenders himself to the drowsiness which generally attacks him, then blast upon blast strikes upon the cutaneous system, and passes through it to the musculo-arterial, and so completely overpowers the latter that it cannot re-act, and the man dies at once, instead of only catching an ague. There are three factors of the operation of an epidemic or atmospheric disease. The first and principal one is the predisposed state of the body; secondly, the specific _virus_ in the atmosphere; and, thirdly, the accidental circumstances of weather, locality, food, occupation, &c. Against the second of these we are powerless: its nature, causes, and sympathies are too subtle for our senses to find data to go upon. Against the first, medicine may act profitably. Against the third, a wise and sagacious medical police ought to be adopted; but, above all, let every man act like a Christian, in all charity, and love, and brotherly kindness, and sincere reliance on God's merciful providence. Quarantine cannot keep out an atmospheric disease; but it can, and does always, increase the predisposing causes of its reception. _April_ 10. 1832. HARMONY. All harmony is founded on a relation to rest--on relative rest. Take a metallic plate, and strew sand on it; sound an harmonic chord over the sand, and the grains will whirl about in circles, and other geometrical figures, all, as it were, depending on some point of sand relatively at rest. Sound a discord, and every grain will whisk about without any order at all, in no figures, and with no points of rest. The clerisy of a nation, that is, its learned men, whether poets, or philosophers, or scholars, are these points of relative rest. There could be no order, no harmony of the whole, without them. April 21. 1832. INTELLECTUAL REVOLUTIONS.--MODERN STYLE. There have been three silent revolutions in England:--first, when the professions fell off from the church; secondly, when literature fell off from the professions; and, thirdly, when the press fell off from literature. * * * * * Common phrases are, as it were, so stereotyped now by conventional use, that it is really much easier to write on the ordinary politics of the day in the common newspaper style, than it is to make a good pair of shoes. An apprentice has as much to learn now to be a shoemaker as ever he had; but an ignorant coxcomb, with a competent want of honesty, may very effectively wield a pen in a newspaper office, with infinitely less pains and preparation than were necessary formerly. _April_ 23. 1832. GENIUS OF THE SPANISH AND ITALIANS.--VICO.--SPINOSA. The genius of the Spanish people is exquisitely subtle, without being at all acute; hence there is so much humour and so little wit in their literature. The genius of the Italians, on the contrary, is acute, profound, and sensual, but not subtle; hence what they think to be humorous is merely witty. * * * * * To estimate a man like Vico, or any great man who has made discoveries and committed errors, you ought to say to yourself--"He did so and so in the year 1720, a Papist, at Naples. Now, what would he not have done if he had lived now, and could have availed himself of all our vast acquisitions in physical science?" * * * * * After the _Scienza Nuova_[1] read Spinosa, _De Monarchia ex rationis praescripto_[2].They differed--Vico in thinking that society tended to monarchy; Spinosa in thinking it tended to democracy. Now, Spinosa's ideal democracy was realized by a contemporary--not in a nation, for that is impossible, but in a sect--I mean by George Fox and his Quakers.[3] [Footnote 1: See Michelet's Principes de la Philosophie de l'Histoire, &c. Paris, 1827. An admirable analysis of Vico.--ED.] [Footnote 2: Tractatus Politici, c. vi.] [Footnote 3: Spinosa died in 1677; Fox in 1681.--ED.] _April_ 24. 1832. COLOURS. Colours may best be expressed by a heptad, the largest possible formula for things finite, as the pentad is the smallest possible form. Indeed, the heptad of things finite is in all cases reducible to the pentad. The adorable tetractys, or tetrad, is the formula of God; which, again, is reducible into, and is, in reality, the same with, the Trinity. Take colours thus:-- Prothesis, Red, or Colour [Greek: kat exoch_en]. ^ /1\ / \ Mesothesis, or Indifference of / \ Red and Yellow = Orange. 4/ \5 Indigo, Violet = Indifference /Synthesis\ of Red and Blue. /--6 \ Thesis = Yellow. 2 3 Blue = Antithesis. \Green indi-/ \componi- / \ble / \ / \ / To which you must add \7/ which is spurious or artificial v synthesis of Yellow and Blue. Green, decom- ponible _April_ 28. 1832. DESTRUCTION OF JERUSALEM.--EPIC POEM. The destruction of Jerusalem is the only subject now remaining for an epic poem; a subject which, like Milton's Fall of Man, should interest all Christendom, as the Homeric War of Troy interested all Greece. There would be difficulties, as there are in all subjects; and they must he mitigated and thrown into the shade, as Milton has done with the numerous difficulties in the Paradise Lost. But there would be a greater assemblage of grandeur and splendour than can now be found in any other theme. As for the old mythology, _incredulus odi;_ and yet there must be a mythology, or a _quasi_-mythology, for an epic poem. Here there would be the completion of the prophecies--the termination of the first revealed national religion under the violent assault of Paganism, itself the immediate forerunner and condition of the spread of a revealed mundane religion; and then you would have the character of the Roman and the Jew, and the awfulness, the completeness, the justice. I schemed it at twenty-five; but, alas! _venturum expectat_. _April_ 29. 1832. VOX POPULI, VOX DEI.--BLACK. I never said that the _vox populi_ was of course the _vox Dei_. It may be; but it may be, and with equal probability, _a priori_, _vox Diaboli_. That the voice of ten millions of men calling for the same thing is a spirit, I believe; but whether that be a spirit of Heaven or Hell, I can only know by trying the thing called for by the prescript of reason and God's will. * * * * * Black is the negation of colour in its greatest energy. Without lustre, it indicates or represents vacuity, as, for instance, in the dark mouth of a cavern; add lustre, and it will represent the highest degree of solidity, as in a polished ebony box. * * * * * In finite forms there is no real and absolute identity. God alone is identity. In the former, the prothesis is a bastard prothesis, a _quasi_ identity only. April 30. 1832. ASGILL AND DEFOE. I know no genuine Saxon English superior to Asgill's. I think his and Defoe's irony often finer than Swift's. May 1. 1832. HORNE TOOKE.--FOX AND PITT Horne Tooke's advice to the Friends of the People was profound:--"If you wish to be powerful, pretend to be powerful." * * * * * Fox and Pitt constantly played into each other's hands. Mr. Stuart, of the Courier, who was very knowing in the politics of the day, soon found out the gross lies and impostures of that club as to its numbers, and told Fox so. Yet, instead of disclaiming them and exposing the pretence, as he ought to have done, Fox absolutely exaggerated their numbers and sinister intentions; and Pitt, who also knew the lie, took him at his word, and argued against him triumphantly on his own premisses. Fox's Gallicism, too, was a treasury of weapons to Pitt. He could never conceive the French right without making the English wrong. Ah! I remember-- --it vex'd my soul to see So grand a cause, so proud a realm With Goose and Goody at the helm; Who long ago had fall'n asunder But for their rivals' baser blunder, The coward whine and Frenchified Slaver and slang of the other side! _May_ 2. 1832. HORNER. I cannot say that I thought Mr. Horner a man of genius. He seemed to me to be one of those men who have not very extended minds, but who know what they know very well--shallow streams, and clear because they are shallow. There was great goodness about him. _May_ 3. 1832. ADIAPHORI.--CITIZENS AND CHRISTIANS. ------ is one of those men who go far to shake my faith in a future state of existence; I mean, on account of the difficulty of knowing where to place him. I could not bear to roast him; he is not so bad as all that comes to: but then, on the other hand, to have to sit down with such a fellow in the very lowest pothouse of heaven is utterly inconsistent with the belief of that place being a place of happiness for me. * * * * * In two points of view I reverence man; first, as a citizen, a part of, or in order to, a nation; and, secondly, as a Christian. If men are neither the one nor the other, but a mere aggregation of individual bipeds, who acknowledge no national unity, nor believe with me in Christ, I have no more personal sympathy with them than with the dust beneath my feet. May 21. 1832. PROFESSOR PARK.--ENGLISH CONSTITUTION--DEMOCRACY.--MILTON AND SIDNEY. Professor Park talks[1] about its being very _doubtful_ whether the constitution described by Blackstone ever in fact existed. In the same manner, I suppose, it is doubtful whether the moon is made of green cheese, or whether the souls of Welchmen do, in point of fact, go to heaven on the backs of mites. Blackstone's was the age of shallow law. Monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, as _such_, exclude each the other: but if the elements are to interpenetrate, how absurd to call a lump of sugar hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon! nay, to take three lumps, and call the first hydrogen; the second, oxygen; and the third, carbon! Don't you see that each is in all, and all in each? The democracy of England, before the Reform Bill, was, where it ought to be, in the corporations, the vestries, the joint-stock companies, &c. The power, in a democracy, is in focal points, without a centre; and in proportion as such democratical power is strong, the strength of the central government ought to be intense--otherwise the nation will fall to pieces. We have just now incalculably increased the democratical action of the people, and, at the same time, weakened the executive power of the government. [Footnote 1: In his "Dogmas of the Constitution, four Lectures on the Theory and Practice of the Constitution, delivered at the King's College, London," 1832. Lecture I. There was a stiffness, and an occasional uncouthness in Professor Park's style; but his two works, the one just mentioned, and his "Contre-Projet to the Humphreysian Code," are full of original views and vigorous reasonings. To those who wished to see the profession of the law assume a more scientific character than for the most part it has hitherto done in England, the early death of John James Park was a very great loss.--ED.] * * * * * It was the error of Milton, Sidney, and others of that age, to think it possible to construct a purely aristocratical government, defecated of all passion, and ignorance, and sordid motive. The truth is, such a government would be weak from its utter want of sympathy with the people to be governed by it. _May_ 25. 1832. DE VI MINIMORUM.--HAHNEMANN.--LUTHER. Mercury strongly illustrates the theory _de vi minimorum_. Divide five grains into fifty doses, and they may poison you irretrievably. I don't believe in all that Hahnemann says; but he is a fine fellow, and, like most Germans, is not altogether wrong, and like them also, is never altogether right. * * * * * Six volumes of translated selections from Luther's works, two being from his Letters, would be a delightful work. The translator should be a man deeply imbued with his Bible, with the English writers from Henry the Seventh to Edward the Sixth, the Scotch divines of the 16th century, and with the old racy German.[1] Hugo de Saint Victor, Luther's favourite divine, was a wonderful man, who, in the 12th century, the jubilant age of papal dominion, nursed the lamp of Platonic mysticism in the spirit of the most refined Christianity.[2] [Footnote 1: Mr. Coleridge was fond of pressing this proposed publication:--"I can scarcely conceive," he says in the Friend, "a more delightful volume than might be made from Luther's letters, especially those that were written from the Warteburg, if they were translated in the simple, sinewy, idiomatic, _hearty_ mother tongue of the original. A difficult task I admit, and scarcely possible for any man, however great his talents in other respects, whose favourite reading has not lain among the English writers from Edward the Sixth to Charles the First." Vol. i. p. 235. n.-- ED.] [Footnote 2: This celebrated man was a Fleming, and a member of the Augustinian society of St. Victor. He died at Paris in 1142, aged forty-four. His age considered, it is sufficient praise for him that Protestants and Romanists both claim him for their own on the subject of transubstantiation.--ED.] _June_ 9. 1832. SYMPATHY OF OLD GREEK AND LATIN WITH ENGLISH.--ROMAN MIND.--WAR. If you take Sophocles, Catullus, Lucretius, the better parts of Cicero, and so on, you may, just with two or three exceptions arising out of the different idioms as to cases, translate page after page into good mother English, word by word, without altering the order; but you cannot do so with Virgil or Tibullus: if you attempt it, you will make nonsense. * * * * * There is a remarkable power of the picturesque in the fragments we have of Ennius, Actius, and other very old Roman writers. This vivid manner was lost in the Augustan age. * * * * * Much as the Romans owed to Greece in the beginning, whilst their mind was, as it were, tuning itself to an after-effort of its own music, it suffered more in proportion by the influence of Greek literature subsequently, when it was already mature and ought to have worked for itself. It then became a superfetation upon, and not an ingredient in, the national character. With the exception of the stern pragmatic historian and the moral satirist, it left nothing original to the Latin Muse.[1] A nation, to be great, ought to be compressed in its increment by nations more civilized than itself--as Greece by Persia; and Rome by Etruria, the Italian states, and Carthage. I remember Commodore Decatur saying to me at Malta, that he deplored the occupation of Louisiana by the United States, and wished that province had been possessed by England. He thought that if the United States got hold of Canada by conquest or cession, the last chance of his country becoming a great compact nation would be lost. [Footnote 1: Perhaps it left letter-writing also. Even if the Platonic epistles are taken as genuine, which Mr. Coleridge, to my surprise, was inclined to believe, they can hardly interfere, I think, with the uniqueness of the truly incomparable collections from the correspondence of Cicero and Pliny.--ED.] * * * * * War in republican Rome was the offspring of its intense aristocracy of spirit, and stood to the state in lieu of trade. As long as there was any thing _ab extra_ to conquer, the state advanced: when nothing remained but what was Roman, then, as a matter of course, civil war began. _June_ 10. 1832. CHARM FOR CRAMP. When I was a little hoy at the Blue-coat School, there was a charm for one's foot when asleep; and I believe it had been in the school since its foundation, in the time of Edward the Sixth. The march of intellect has probably now exploded it. It ran thus:-- Foot! foot! foot! is fast asleep! Thumb! thumb! thumb! in spittle we steep: Crosses three we make to ease us, Two for the thieves, and one for Christ Jesus! And the same charm served for a cramp in the leg, with the following substitution:-- The devil is tying a knot in my leg! Mark, Luke, and John, unloose it I beg!-- Crosses three, &c. And really upon getting out of bed, where the cramp most frequently occurred, pressing the sole of the foot on the cold floor, and then repeating this charm with the acts configurative thereupon prescribed, I can safely affirm that I do not remember an instance in which the cramp did not go away in a few seconds. I should not wonder if it were equally good for a stitch in the side; but I cannot say I ever tried it for _that_. July 7. 1832. GREEK.--DUAL, NEUTER PLURAL, AND VERB SINGULAR.--THETA. It is hardly possible to conceive a language more perfect than the Greek. If you compare it with the modern European tongues, in the points of the position and relative bearing of the vowels and consonants on each other, and of the variety of terminations, it is incalculably before all in the former particulars, and only equalled in the last by German. But it is in variety of termination alone that the German surpasses the other modern languages as to sound; for, as to position, Nature seems to have dropped an acid into the language, when a-forming, which curdled the vowels, and made all the consonants flow together. The Spanish is excellent for variety of termination; the Italian, in this particular, the most deficient. Italian prose is excessively monotonous. * * * * * It is very natural to have a dual, duality being a conception quite distinct from plurality. Most very primitive languages have a dual, as the Greek, Welch, and the native Chilese, as you will see in the Abbé Raynal. The neuter plural governing, as they call it, a verb singular is one of the many instances in Greek of the inward and metaphysic grammar resisting successfully the tyranny of formal grammar. In truth, there may be _Multeity_ in things; but there can only be _Plurality_ in persons. Observe also that, in fact, a neuter noun in Greek has no real nominative case, though it has a formal one, that is to say, the same word with the accusative. The reason is--a _thing_ has no subjectivity, or nominative case: it exists only as an object in the accusative or oblique case. It is extraordinary that the Germans should not have retained or assumed the two beautifully discriminated sounds of the soft and hard _theta_; as in _thy thoughts_--_the thin ether that_, &c. How particularly fine the hard _theta_ is in an English termination, as in that grand word--Death-- for which the Germans gutturize a sound that puts you in mind of nothing but a loathsome toad. _July_ 8. 1832. TALENTED. I regret to see that vile and barbarous vocable _talented_, stealing out of the newspapers into the leading reviews and most respectable publications of the day. Why not _shillinged, farthinged, tenpenced,_ &c.? The formation of a participle passive from a noun is a licence that nothing but a very peculiar felicity can excuse. If mere convenience is to justify such attempts upon the idiom, you cannot stop till the language becomes, in the proper sense of the word, corrupt. Most of these pieces of slang come from America.[1] [Footnote 1: See "_eventuate_," in Mr. Washington Irving's "Tour On the Prairies," _passim_.--ED.] * * * * * Never take an iambus as a Christian name. A trochee, or tribrach, will do very well. Edith and Rotha are my favourite names for women. _July_ 9. 1832. HOMER.--VALCKNAER. I have the firmest conviction that _Homer_ is a mere traditional synonyme with, or figure for, the Iliad. You cannot conceivefor a moment any thing about the poet, as you call him, apart from that poem. Difference in men there was in a degree, but not in kind; one man was, perhaps, a better poet than another; but he was a poet upon the same ground and with the same feelings as the rest. The want of adverbs in the Iliad is very characteristic. With more adverbs there would have been some subjectivity, or subjectivity would have made them. The Greeks were then just on the verge of the bursting forth of individuality. Valckenaer's treatise[1] on the interpolation of the Classics by the later Jews and early Christians is well worth your perusal as a scholar and critic. [Footnote 1: _Diatribe de Aristobulo Judaeo_.--ED.] July 13. 1832. PRINCIPLES AND FACTS.--SCHMIDT. I have read all the famous histories, and, I believe, some history of every country and nation that is, or ever existed; but I never did so for the story itself as a story. The only thing interesting to me was the principles to be evolved from, and illustrated by, the facts.[1] After I had gotten my principles, I pretty generally left the facts to take care of themselves. I never could remember any passages in books, or the particulars of events, except in the gross. I can refer to them. To be sure, I must be a different sort of man from Herder, who once was seriously annoyed with himself, because, in recounting the pedigree of some German royal or electoral family, he missed some one of those worthies and could not recall the name. [Footnote 1: "The true origin of human events is so little susceptible of that kind of evidence which can _compel_ our belief; so many are the disturbing forces which, in every cycle or ellipse of changes, modify the motion given by the first projection; and every age has, or imagines it has, its own circumstances, which render past experience no longer applicable to the present case; that there will never be wanting answers, and explanations, and specious flatteries of hope, to persuade and perplex its government, that the history of the past is inapplicable to _their_ case. And no wonder, if we read history for the facts, instead of reading it for the sake of the general principles, which are to the facts as the root and sap of a tree to its leaves: and no wonder if history so read should find a dangerous rival in novels; nay, if the latter should be preferred to the former, on the score even of probability. I well remember that, when the examples of former Jacobins, as Julius Caesar, Cromwell, and the like, were adduced in France and England, at the commencement of the French consulate, it was ridiculed as pedantry and pedants' ignorance, to fear a repetition of usurpation and military despotism at the close of the _enlightened eighteenth century_! Even so, in the very dawn of the late tempestuous day, when the revolutions of Corcyra, the proscriptions of the reformers Marius, Cæsar, &c., and the direful effects of the levelling tenets in the peasants' war in Germany (differenced from the tenets of the first French constitution only by the mode of wording them, the figures of speech being borrowed in the one instance from theology, and in the other from modern metaphysics), were urged on the convention and its vindicators; the magi of the day, the true citizens of the world, the _plusquam perfecti_ of patriotism, gave us set proofs that similar results were impossible, and that it was an insult to so philosophical an age, to so enlightened a nation, to dare direct the public eye towards them as to lights of warning."--_Statesman's Manual_, p. 14.] * * * * * Schmidt[1] was a Romanist; but I have generally found him candid, as indeed almost all the Austrians are. They are what is called _good Catholics_; but, like our Charles the Second, they never let their religious bigotry interfere with their political well-doing. Kaiser is a most pious son of the church, yet he always keeps his papa in good order. [Footnote 1: Michael Ignatius Schmidt, the author of the History of the Germans. He died in the latter end of the last century.--ED.] _July_ 20. 1832. PURITANS AND JACOBINS. It was God's mercy to our age that our Jacobins were infidels and a scandal to all sober Christians. Had they been like the old Puritans, they would have trodden church and king to the dust--at least for a time. * * * * * For one mercy I owe thanks beyond all utterance,--that, with all my gastric and bowel distempers, my head hath ever been like the head of a mountain in blue air and sunshine. _July_ 21. 1832. WORDSWORTH. I have often wished that the first two books of the Excursion had been published separately, under the name of "The Deserted Cottage." They would have formed, what indeed they are, one of the most beautiful poems in the language. * * * * * Can dialogues in verse be defended? I cannot but think that a great philosophical poet ought always to teach the reader himself as from himself. A poem does not admit argumentation, though it does admit development of thought. In prose there may be a difference; though I must confess that, even in Plato and Cicero, I am always vexed that the authors do not say what they have to say at once in their own persons. The introductions and little urbanities are, to be sure, very delightful in their way; I would not lose them; but I have no admiration for the practice of ventriloquizing through another man's mouth. * * * * * I cannot help regretting that Wordsworth did not first publish his thirteen books on the growth of an individual mind--superior, as I used to think, upon the whole, to the Excursion. You may judge how I felt about them by my own poem upon the occasion.[1] Then the plan laid out, and, I believe, partly suggested by me, was, that Wordsworth should assume the station of a man in mental repose, one whose principles were made up, and so prepared to deliver upon authority a system of philosophy. He was to treat man as man, --a subject of eye, ear, touch, and taste, in contact with external nature, and informing the senses from the mind, and not compounding a mind out of the senses; then he was to describe the pastoral and other states of society, assuming something of the Juvenalian spirit as he approached the high civilization of cities and towns, and opening a melancholy picture of the present state of degeneracy and vice; thence he was to infer and reveal the proof of, and necessity for, the whole state of man and society being subject to, and illustrative of, a redemptive process in operation, showing how this idea reconciled all the anomalies, and promised future glory and restoration. Something of this sort was, I think, agreed on. It is, in substance, what I have been all my life doing in my system of philosophy. [Footnote 1: Poetical Works, vol. i. p. 206. It is not too much to say of this beautiful poem, and yet it is difficult to say more, that it is at once worthy of the poet, his subject, and his object:-- "An Orphic song indeed, A song divine of high and passionate thoughts, To their own music chanted."--ED.] * * * * * I think Wordsworth possessed more of the genius of a great philosophic poet than any man I ever knew, or, as I believe, has existed in England since Milton; but it seems to me that he ought never to have abandoned the contemplative position, which is peculiarly--perhaps I might say exclusively--fitted for him. His proper title is _Spectator ab extra_. * * * * * _July_ 23. 1832. FRENCH REVOLUTION. No man was more enthusiastic than I was for France and the Revolution: it had all my wishes, none of my expectations. Before 1793, I clearly saw and often enough stated in public, the horrid delusion, the vile mockery, of the whole affair.[1] When some one said in my brother James's presence[2] that I was a Jacobin, he very well observed,--"No! Samuel is no Jacobin; he is a hot-headed Moravian!" Indeed, I was in the extreme opposite pole. [Footnote 1: "Forgive me, Freedom! O forgive those dreams! I hear thy voice, I hear thy loud lament, From bleak Helvetia's icy cavern sent-- I hear thy groans upon her blood-stain'd streams! Heroes, that for your peaceful country perish'd, And ye that, fleeing, spot your mountain snows With bleeding wounds; forgive me, that I cherish'd One thought that ever blest your cruel foes! To scatter rage and traitorous guilt, Where Peace her jealous home had built; A patriot race to disinherit Of all that made her stormy wilds so dear: And with inexpiable spirit To taint the bloodless freedom of the mountaineer-- O France, that mockest Heaven, adult'rous, blind, And patriot only in pernicious toils, Are these thy boasts, champion of human-kind? To mix with kings in the low lust of sway, Yell in the hunt and share the murderous prey-- To insult the shrine of Liberty with spoils From freemen torn--to tempt and to betray?-- 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! O Liberty! with profitless endeavour Have I pursued thee many a weary hour; But thou nor swell'st the victor's train, nor ever Didst breathe thy soul in forms of human power. Alike from all, howe'er they praise thee, (Nor prayer, nor boastful name delays thee,) Alike from priestcraft's harpy minions, And factious blasphemy's obscener slaves, _Thou speedest on thy subtle pinions, The guide of homeless winds, and playmate of the waves!_" France, an Ode. Poetical Works, vol. i. p. 130.] [Footnote 2: A soldier of the old cavalier stamp, to whom the King was the symbol of the majesty, as the Church was of the life, of the nation, and who would most assuredly have taken arms for one or the other against all the Houses of Commons or committees of public safety in the world.--ED.] _July_ 24. 1832. INFANT SCHOOLS. I have no faith in act of parliament reform. All the great--the permanently great--things that have been achieved in the world have been so achieved by individuals, working from the instinct of genius or of goodness. The rage now-a-days is all the other way: the individual is supposed capable of nothing; there must be organization, classification, machinery, &c., as if the capital of national morality could be increased by making a joint stock of it. Hence you see these infant schools so patronized by the bishops and others, who think them a grand invention. Is it found that an infant-school child, who has been bawling all day a column of the multiplication-table, or a verse from the Bible, grows up a more dutiful son or daughter to its parents? Are domestic charities on the increase amongst families under this system? In a great town, in our present state of society, perhaps such schools may be a justifiable expedient--a choice of the lesser evil; but as for driving these establishments into the country villages, and breaking up the cottage home education, I think it one of the most miserable mistakes which the well-intentioned people of the day have yet made; and they have made, and are making, a good many, God knows. _July_ 25. 1832. MR. COLERIDGE'S PHILOSOPHY.--SUBLIMITY.--SOLOMON.--MADNESS.--C. LAMB-- SFORZA's DECISION. The pith of my system is to make the senses out of the mind--not the mind out of the senses, as Locke did. * * * * * Could you ever discover any thing sublime, in our sense of the term, in the classic Greek literature? never could. Sublimity is Hebrew by birth. * * * * * I should conjecture that the Proverbs and Ecclesiastes were written, or, perhaps, rather collected, about the time of Nehemiah. The language is Hebrew with Chaldaic endings. It is totally unlike the language of Moses on the one hand, and of Isaiah on the other. * * * * * Solomon introduced the commercial spirit into his kingdom. I cannot think his idolatry could have been much more, in regard to himself, than a state protection or toleration of the foreign worship. * * * * * When a man mistakes his thoughts for persons and things, he is mad. A madman is properly so defined. * * * * * Charles Lamb translated my motto _Sermoni propriora_ by--_properer for a sermon_! * * * * * I was much amused some time ago by reading the pithy decision of one of the Sforzas of Milan, upon occasion of a dispute for precedence between the lawyers and physicians of his capital;--_Paecedant fures--sequantur carnifices_. I hardly remember a neater thing. _July_ 28. 1832. FAITH AND BELIEF. The sublime and abstruse doctrines of Christian belief belong to the church; but the faith of the individual, centered in his heart, is or may be collateral to them.[1] Faith is subjective. I throw myself in adoration before God; acknowledge myself his creature,--simple, weak, lost; and pray for help and pardon through Jesus Christ: but when I rise from my knees, I discuss the doctrine of the Trinity as I would a problem in geometry; in the same temper of mind, I mean, not by the same process of reasoning, of course. [Footnote 1: Mr. Coleridge used very frequently to insist upon the distinction between belief and faith. He once told me, with very great earnestness, that if he were that moment convinced--a conviction, the possibility of which, indeed, he could not realize to himself--that the New Testament was a forgery from beginning to end--wide as the desolation in his moral feelings would be, he should not abate one jot of his faith in God's power and mercy through some manifestation of his being towards man, either in time past or future, or in the hidden depths where time and space are not. This was, I believe, no more than a vivid expression of what he always maintained, that no man had attained to a full faith who did not _recognize_ in the Scriptures a correspondency to his own nature, or see that his own powers of reason, will, and understanding were preconfigured to the reception of the Christian doctrines and promises.--ED.] _August_ 4. 1832. DOBRIZHOFFER.[1] I hardly know any thing more amusing than the honest German Jesuitry of Dobrizhoffer. His chapter on the dialects is most valuable. He is surprised that there is no form for the infinitive, but that they say,--I wish, (go, or eat, or drink, &c.) interposing a letter by way of copula,--forgetting his own German and the English, which are, in truth, the same. The confident belief entertained by the Abipones of immortality, in connection with the utter absence in their minds of the idea of a God, is very remarkable. If Warburton were right, which he is not, the Mosaic scheme would be the exact converse. My dear daughter's translation of this book[2] is, in my judgment, unsurpassed for pure mother English by any thing I have read for a long time. [Footnote 1: "He was a man of rarest qualities, Who to this barbarous region had confined A spirit with the learned and the wise Worthy to take its place, and from mankind Receive their homage, to the immortal mind Paid in its just inheritance of fame. But he to humbler thoughts his heart inclined: From Gratz amid the Styrian hills he came, And Dobrizhofter was the good man's honour'd name. "It was his evil fortune to behold The labours of his painful life destroyed; His flock which he had brought within the fold Dispers'd; the work of ages render'd void, And all of good that Paraguay enjoy'd By blind and suicidal power o'erthrown. So he the years of his old age employ'd, A faithful chronicler, in handing down Names which he lov'd, and things well worthy to be known. "And thus when exiled from the dear-loved scene, In proud Vienna he beguiled the pain Of sad remembrance: and the empress-queen, That great Teresa, she did not disdain In gracious mood sometimes to entertain Discourse with him both pleasurable and sage; And sure a willing ear she well might deign To one whose tales may equally engage The wondering mind of youth, the thoughtful heart of age. "But of his native speech, because well-nigh Disuse in him forgetfulness had wrought, In Latin he composed his history; A garrulous, but a lively tale, and fraught With matter of delight, and food for thought. And if he could in Merlin's glass have seen By whom his tomes to speak our tongue were taught, The old man would have felt as pleased, I ween, As when he won the ear of that great empress-queen. "Little he deem'd, when with his Indian band He through the wilds set forth upon his way, A poet then unborn, and in a land Which had proscribed his order, should one day Take up from thence his moralizing lay, And, shape a song that, with no fiction drest, Should to his worth its grateful tribute pay, And sinking deep in many an English breast, Foster that faith divine that keeps the heart at rest." _Southey's Tale of Paraguay_, canto iii. st. 16.] [Footnote 2: "An Account of the Abipones, an Equestrian People of Paraguay, From the Latin of Martin Dobrizhoffer, eighteen Years a Missionary in that Country."--Vol. ii. p. 176.] _August_ 6. 1832. SCOTCH AND ENGLISH.--CRITERION OF GENIUS.--DRYDEN AND POPE. I have generally found a Scotchman with a little literature very disagreeable. He is a superficial German or a dull Frenchman. The Scotch will attribute merit to people of any nation rather than the English; the English have a morbid habit of petting and praising foreigners of any sort, to the unjust disparagement of their own worthies. * * * * * You will find this a good gage or criterion of genius,--whether it progresses and evolves, or only spins upon itself. Take Dryden's Achitophel and Zimri,--Shaftesbury and Buckingham; every line adds to or modifies the character, which is, as it were, a-building up to the very last verse; whereas, in Pope's Timon, &c. the first two or three couplets contain all the pith of the character, and the twenty or thirty lines that follow are so much evidence or proof of overt acts of jealousy, or pride, or whatever it may be that is satirized. In like manner compare Charles Lamb's exquisite criticisms on Shakspeare with Hazlitt's round and round imitations of them. _August_ 7. 1832. MILTON'S DISREGARD OF PAINTING. It is very remarkable that in no part of his writings does Milton take any notice of the great painters of Italy, nor, indeed, of painting as an art; whilst every other page breathes his love and taste for music. Yet it is curious that, in one passage in the Paradise Lost, Milton has certainly copied the _fresco_ of the Creation in the Sistine Chapel at Rome. I mean those lines,-- ----"now half appear'd The tawny lion, pawing to get free His hinder parts, then springs as broke from bonds, And rampant shakes his brinded mane;--"&c.[1] an image which the necessities of the painter justified, but which was wholly unworthy, in my judgment, of the enlarged powers of the poet. Adam bending over the sleeping Eve in the Paradise Lost[2] and Dalilah approaching Samson, in the Agonistes[3] are the only two proper pictures I remember in Milton. [Footnote 1: Par. Lost, book vii. ver. 463.] [Footnote 2: ----"so much the more His wonder was to find unwaken'd Eve With tresses discomposed, and glowing cheek, As through unquiet rest: he on his side Leaning, half raised, with looks of cordial love Hung over her enamour'd, and beheld Beauty, which, whether waking or asleep, Shot forth peculiar graces; then, with voice Mild, as when Zephyrus on Flora breathes, Her hand soft touching, whisper'd thus: Awake, My fairest," &c. Book v. ver. 8.] [Footnote 3: "But who is this, what thing of sea or land? Female of sex it seems, That so bedeck'd, ornate, and gay, Comes this way sailing Like a stately ship Of Tarsus, bound for the isles Of Javan or Gadire, With all her bravery on, and tackle trim, Sails fill'd, and streamers waving, Courted by all the winds that hold them play; An amber-scent of odorous perfume Her harbinger, a damsel train behind!"] August 9. 1832. BAPTISMAL SERVICE.--JEWS' DIVISION OF THE SCRIPTURE.--SANSKRIT. I think the baptismal service almost perfect. What seems erroneous assumption in it to me, is harmless. None of the services of the church affect me so much as this. I never could attend a christening without tears bursting forth at the sight of the helpless innocent in a pious clergyman's arms. * * * * * The Jews recognized three degrees of sanctity in their Scriptures:--first, the writings of Moses, who had the [Greek: autopsia]; secondly, the Prophets; and, thirdly, the Good Books. Philo, amusingly enough, places his works somewhere between the second and third degrees. * * * * * The claims of the Sanskrit for priority to the Hebrew as a language are ridiculous. August 11. 1832. HESIOD.--VIRGIL.--GENIUS METAPHYSICAL.--DON QUIXOTE. I like reading Hesiod, meaning the Works and Days. If every verse is not poetry, it is, at least, good sense, which is a great deal to say. * * * * * There is nothing real in the Georgies, except, to be sure, the verse.[1] Mere didactics of practice, unless seasoned with the personal interests of the time or author, are inexpressibly dull to me. Such didactic poetry as that of the Works and Days followed naturally upon legislation and the first ordering of municipalities. [Footnote 1: I used to fancy Mr. Coleridge _paulo iniquior Virgilio_, and told him so; to which he replied, that, like all Eton men, I swore _per Maronem_. This was far enough from being the case; but I acknowledge that Mr. C.'s apparent indifference to the tenderness and dignity of Virgil excited my surprise.--ED.] * * * * * All genius is metaphysical; because the ultimate end of genius is ideal, however it may be actualized by incidental and accidental circumstances. * * * * * Don Quixote is not a man out of his senses, but a man in whom the imagination and the pure reason are so powerful as to make him disregard the evidence of sense when it opposed their conclusions. Sancho is the common sense of the social man-animal, unenlightened and unsanctified by the reason. You see how he reverences his master at the very time he is cheating him. _August_ 14. 1832. STEINMETZ.--KEATS. Poor dear Steinmetz is gone,--his state of sure blessedness accelerated; or, it may be, he is buried in Christ, and there in that mysterious depth grows on to the spirit of a just man made perfect! Could I for a moment doubt this, the grass would become black beneath my feet, and this earthly frame a charnel-house. I never knew any man so illustrate the difference between the feminine and the effeminate. * * * * * A loose, slack, not well-dressed youth met Mr. ---- and myself in a lane near Highgate.---- knew him, and spoke. It was Keats. He was introduced to me, and staid a minute or so. After he had left us a little 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 ----, when Keats was gone; yet this was, I believe, before the consumption showed itself distinctly. _August_ 16. 1832. CHRIST'S HOSPITAL.--BOWYER. The discipline at Christ's Hospital in my time was ultra-Spartan;--all domestic ties were to be put aside. "Boy!" I remember Bowyer saying to me once when I was crying the first day of my return after the holidays, "Boy! the school is your father! Boy! the school is your mother! Boy! the school is your brother! the school is your sister! the school is your first cousin, and your second cousin, and all the rest of your relations! Let's have no more crying!" * * * * * No tongue can express good Mrs. Bowyer. Val. Le Grice and I were once going to be flogged for some domestic misdeed, and Bowyer was thundering away at us by way of prologue, when Mrs. B. looked in, and said, "Flog them soundly, sir, I beg!" This saved us. Bowyer was so nettled at the interruption that he growled out, "Away, woman! away!" and we were let off. _August_ 28. 1832. ST. PAUL'S MELITA. The belief that Malta is the island on which St. Paul was wrecked is so rooted in the common Maltese, and is cherished with such a superstitious nationality, that the Government would run the chance of exciting a tumult, if it, or its representatives, unwarily ridiculed it. The supposition itself is quite absurd. Not to argue the matter at length, consider these few conclusive facts:--The narrative speaks of the "barbarous people," and "barbarians,"[1] of the island. Now, our Malta was at that time fully peopled and highly civilized, as we may surely infer from Cicero and other writers.[2] A viper comes out from the sticks upon the fire being lighted: the men are not surprised at the appearance of the snake, but imagine first a murderer, and then a god from the harmless attack. Now in our Malta there are, I may say, no snakes at all; which, to be sure, the Maltese attribute to St. Paul's having cursed them away. Melita in the Adriatic was a perfectly barbarous island as to its native population, and was, and is now, infested with serpents. Besides the context shows that the scene is in the Adriatic. [Footnote 1: Acts xxviii. 2. and 4. Mr. C. seemed to think that the Greek words had reference to something more than the fact of the islanders not speaking Latin or Greek; the classical meaning of [Greek: Barbaroi].-ED.] [Footnote 2: Upwards of a century before the reign of Nero, Cicero speaks at considerable length of our Malta in one of the Verrine orations. See Act. ii. lib. iv. c. 46. "Insula est Melita, judices," &c. There was a town, and Verres had established in it a manufactory of the fine cloth or cotton stuffs, the _Melitensis vestis_, for which the island is uniformly celebrated:-- "Fertilis est Melite sterili vicina Cocyrae Insula, quam Libyci verberat unda freti." Ovid. Fast. iii. 567. And Silius Italicus has-- ----"telaque _superba_ _Lanigera_ Melite." Punic. xiv. 251. Yet it may have been cotton after all--the present product of Malta. Cicero describes an _ancient_ temple of Juno situated on a promontory near the town, so famous and revered, that, even in the time of Masinissa, at least 150 years B.C., that prince had religiously restored some relics which his admiral had taken from it. The plunder of this very temple is an article of accusation against Verres; and a deputation of Maltese (_legati Melitenses_) came to Rome to establish the charge. These are all the facts, I think, which can be gathered from Cicero; because I consider his expression of _nudatae urbes_, in the working up of this article, a piece of rhetoric. Strabo merely marks the position of Melita, and says that the lap-dogs called [Greek: kunidia Melitaia] were sent from this island, though some writers attribute them to the other Melite in the Adriatic, (lib. vi.) Diodorus, however, a Sicilian himself by birth, gives the following remarkable testimony as to the state of the island in his time, which, it will be remembered, was considerably before the date of St. Paul's shipwreck. "There are three islands to the south of Sicily, each of which has a city or town ([Greek: polin]), and harbours fitted for the safe reception of ships. The first of these is Melite, distant about 800 stadia from Syracuse, and possessing several harbours of surpassing excellence. Its inhabitants are rich and luxurious ([Greek: tous katoikountas tais ousiais eudaimonas]). There are artizans of every kind ([Greek: pantodapous tais exgasias]); the best are those who weave cloth of a singular fineness and softness. The houses are worthy of admiration for their superb adornment with eaves and brilliant white-washing ([Greek: oikias axiologous kai kateskeuasmenas philotimos geissois kai koniamasi pezittotezon])."-- Lib. v. c. 12. Mela (ii. c. 7.) and Pliny (iii. 14.) simply mark the position.--ED.] * * * * * The Maltese seem to have preserved a fondness and taste for architecture from the time of the knights--naturally enough occasioned by the incomparable materials at hand.[1] [Footnote 1: The passage which I have cited from Diodorus shows that the origin was much earlier.--ED.] _August_ 19. 1832. ENGLISH AND GERMAN.--BEST STATE OF SOCIETY. It may be doubted whether a composite language like the English is not a happier instrument of expression than a homogeneous one like the German. We possess a wonderful richness and variety of modified meanings in our Saxon and Latin quasi-synonymes, which the Germans have not. For "the pomp and _prodigality_ of Heaven," the Germans must have said "_the spendthriftness_."[1] Shakspeare is particularly happy in his use of the Latin synonymes, and in distinguishing between them and the Saxon. [Footnote 1: _Verschwendung_, I suppose.--ED.] * * * * * That is the most excellent state of society in which the patriotism of the citizen ennobles, but does not merge, the individual energy of the man. September 1. 1832. GREAT MINDS ANDROGYNOUS.--PHILOSOPHER'S ORDINARY LANGUAGE. In chemistry and nosology, by extending the degree to a certain point, the constituent proportion may be destroyed, and a new kind produced. * * * * * I have known _strong_ minds with imposing, undoubting, Cobbett-like manners, but I have never met a _great_ mind of this sort. And of the former, they are at least as often wrong as right. The truth is, a great mind must be androgynous. Great minds--Swedenborg's for instance--are never wrong but in consequence of being in the right, but imperfectly. * * * * * A philosopher's ordinary language and admissions, in general conversation or writings _ad populum_, are as his watch compared with his astronomical timepiece. He sets the former by the town-clock, not because he believes it right, but because his neighbours and his cook go by it. _January_ 2. 1833. JURIES.--BARRISTERS' AND PHYSICIANS' FEES.--QUACKS.--CAESAREAN OPERATION.-- INHERITED DISEASE. I certainly think that juries would be more conscientious, if they were allowed a larger discretion. But, after all, juries cannot be better than the mass out of which they are taken. And if juries are not honest and single-minded, they are the worst, because the least responsible, instruments of judicial or popular tyranny. I should he sorry to see the honorary character of the fees of barristers and physicians done away with. Though it seems a shadowy distinction, I believe it to be beneficial in effect. It contributes to preserve the idea of a profession, of a class which belongs to the public,--in the employment and remuneration of which no law interferes, but the citizen acts as he likes _in foro conscientiae_. * * * * * There undoubtedly ought to be a declaratory act withdrawing expressly from the St. John Longs and other quacks the protection which the law is inclined to throw around the mistakes or miscarriages of the regularly educated practitioner. * * * * * I think there are only two things wanting to justify a surgeon in performing the Caesarean operation: first, that he should possess infallible knowledge of his art: and, secondly, that he should be infallibly certain that he is infallible. * * * * * Can any thing he more dreadful than the thought that an innocent child has inherited from you a disease or a weakness, the penalty in yourself of sin or want of caution? * * * * * In the treatment of nervous cases, he is the best physician, who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope. _January_ 3. 1833. MASON'S POETRY. I cannot bring myself to think much of Mason's poetry. I may be wrong; but all those passages in the Caractacus, which we learn to admire at school, now seem to me one continued _falsetto_. _January_ 4. 1833. NORTHERN AND SOUTHERN STATES OF THE AMERICAN UNION.--ALL AND THE WHOLE. Naturally one would have thought that there would have been greater sympathy between the northern and north-western states of the American Union and England, than between England and the Southern states. There is ten times as much English blood and spirit in New England as in Virginia, the Carolinas, &c. Nevertheless, such has been the force of the interests of commerce, that now, and for some years past, the people of the North hate England with increasing bitterness, whilst, amongst those of the south, who are Jacobins, the British connection has become popular. Can there ever be any thorough national fusion of the Northern and Southern states? I think not. In fact, the Union will be shaken almost to dislocation whenever a very serious question between the states arises. The American Union has no _centre_, and it is impossible now to make one. The more they extend their borders into the Indians' land, the weaker will the national cohesion be. But I look upon the states as splendid masses to be used, by and by, in the composition of two or three great governments. * * * * * There is a great and important difference, both in politics and metaphysics, between _all_ and _the whole_. The first can never be ascertained as a standing quantity; the second, if comprehended by insight into its parts, remains for ever known. Mr. Huskisson, I thought, satisfactorily refuted the ship owners; and yet the shipping interest, who must know where the shoe pinches, complain to this day. _January_ 7, 1833. NINTH ARTICLE.--SIN AND SINS.--OLD DIVINES.--PREACHING EXTEMPORE. "Very far gone," is _quam longissime_ in the Latin of the ninth article,-- as far gone as possible, that is, as was possible for _man_ to go; as far as was compatible with his having any redeemable qualities left in him. To talk of man's being _utterly_ lost to good, is absurd; for then he would be a devil at once. * * * * * One mistake perpetually made by one of our unhappy parties in religion,-- and with a pernicious tendency to Antinomianism,--is to confound _sin_ with _sins_. To tell a modest girl, the watchful nurse of an aged parent, that she is full of _sins_ against God, is monstrous, and as shocking to reason as it is unwarrantable by Scripture. But to tell her that she, and all men and women, are of a sinful nature, and that, without Christ's redeeming love and God's grace, she cannot be emancipated from its dominion, is true and proper.[1] [Footnote 1: In a marginal scrap Mr. C. wrote:--"What are the essential doctrines of our religion, if not sin and original sin, as the necessitating occasion, and the redemption of sinners by the Incarnate Word as the substance of the Christian dispensation? And can these be intelligently believed without knowledge and steadfast meditation. By the unlearned, they may be worthily received, but not by the unthinking and self-ignorant, Christian."--ED.] * * * * * No article of faith can be truly and duly preached without necessarily and simultaneously infusing a deep sense of the indispensableness of a holy life. * * * * * How pregnant with instruction, and with knowledge of all sorts, are the sermons of our old divines! in this respect, as in so many others, how different from the major part of modern discourses! * * * * * Every attempt, in a sermon, to cause emotion, except as the consequence of an impression made on the reason, or the understanding, or the will, I hold to be fanatical and sectarian. * * * * * No doubt preaching, in the proper sense of the word, is more effective than reading; and, therefore, I would not prohibit it, but leave a liberty to the clergyman who feels himself able to accomplish it. But, as things now are, I am quite sure I prefer going to church to a pastor who reads his discourse: for I never yet heard more than one preacher without book, who did not forget his argument in three minutes' time; and fall into vague and unprofitable declamation, and, generally, very coarse declamation too. These preachers never progress; they eddy round and round. Sterility of mind follows their ministry. _January_ 20. 1833. CHURCH OF ENGLAND. When the Church at the Reformation ceased to be extra-national, it unhappily became royal instead; its proper bearing is intermediate between the crown and the people, with an inclination to the latter. * * * * * The present prospects of the Church weigh heavily on my soul. Oh! that the words of a statesman-like philosophy could win their way through the ignorant zealotry and sordid vulgarity of the leaders of the day! _February_ 5. 1833. UNION WITH IRELAND. If any modification of the Union takes place, I trust it will be a total divorce _a vinculo matrimonii_. I am sure we have lived a cat and dog life of it. Let us have no silly saving of one crown and two legislatures; that would be preserving all the mischiefs without any of the goods, if there are any, of the union. I am deliberately of opinion, that England, in all its institutions, has received injury from its union with Ireland. My only difficulty is as to the Protestants, to whom we owe protection. But I cannot forget that the Protestants themselves have greatly aided in accelerating the present horrible state of things, by using that as a remedy and a reward which should have been to them an opportunity.[1] If the Protestant Church in Ireland is removed, of course the Romish Church must be established in its place. There can be no resisting it in common reason. How miserably imbecile and objectless has the English government of Ireland been for forty years past! Oh! for a great man--but one really great man,-- who could feel the weight and the power of a principle, and unflinchingly put it into act! But truly there is no vision in the land, and the people accordingly perisheth. See how triumphant in debate and in action O'Connell is! Why? Because he asserts a broad principle, and acts up to it, rests all his body on it, and has faith in it. Our ministers--true Whigs in that-- have faith in nothing but expedients _de die in diem_. Indeed, what principles of government can _they_ have, who in the space of a month recanted a life of political opinions, and now dare to threaten this and that innovation at the huzza of a mob, or in pique at a parliamentary defeat? [Footnote 1: "Whatever may be thought of the settlement that followed the battle of the Boyne and the extinction of the war in Ireland, yet when this had been made and submitted to, it would have been the far wiser policy, I doubt not, to have provided for the safety of the constitution by improving the quality of the elective franchise, leaving the eligibility open, or like the former, limited only by considerations of property. Still, however, the scheme of exclusion and disqualification had its plausible side. The ink was scarcely dry on the parchment-rolls and proscription-lists of the Popish parliament. The crimes of the man were generalized into attributes of his faith; and the Irish catholics collectively were held accomplices in the perfidy and baseness of the king. Alas! his immediate adherents had afforded too great colour to the charge. The Irish massacre was in the mouth of every Protestant, not as an event to be remembered, but as a thing of recent expectation, fear still blending with the sense of deliverance. At no time, therefore, could the disqualifying system have been enforced with so little reclamation of the conquered party, or with so little outrage on the general feeling of the country. There was no time, when it was so capable of being indirectly useful as a _sedative_ in order to the application of the remedies directly indicated, or as a counter-power reducing to inactivity whatever disturbing forces might have interfered with their operation. And had this use been made of these exclusive laws, and had they been enforced as the precursors and negative conditions,--but, above all, as _bonâ fide_ accompaniments, of a process of _emancipation_, properly and worthily so named, the code would at this day have been remembered in Ireland only as when, recalling a dangerous fever of our boyhood, we think of the nauseous drugs and drenching-horn, and congratulate ourselves that our doctors now-a-days know how to manage these things less coarsely. But this angry code was neglected as an opportunity, and mistaken for a _substitute_: _et hinc illae* lacrymae!_"--Church and State, p. 195.] * * * * * I sometimes think it just possible that the Dissenters may once more be animated by a wiser and nobler spirit, and see their dearest interest in the church of England as the bulwark and glory of Protestantism, as they did at the Revolution. But I doubt their being able to resist the low factious malignity to the church which has characterized them as a body for so many years. _February_ 16. 1833. FAUST.----MICHAEL SCOTT, GOETHE, SCHILLER, AND WORDSWORTH. Before I had ever seen any part of Goethe's Faust[1], though, of course, when I was familiar enough with Marlowe's, I conceived and drew up the plan of a work, a drama, which was to be, to my mind, what the Faust was to Goethe's. My Faust was old Michael Scott; a much better and more likely original than Faust. He appeared in the midst of his college of devoted disciples, enthusiastic, ebullient, shedding around him bright surmises of discoveries fully perfected in after-times, and inculcating the study of nature and its secrets as the pathway to the acquisition of power. He did not love knowledge for itself--for its own exceeding great reward--but in order to be powerful. This poison-speck infected his mind from the beginning. The priests suspect him, circumvent him, accuse him; he is condemned, and thrown into solitary confinement: this constituted the _prologus_ of the drama. A pause of four or five years takes place, at the end of which Michael escapes from prison, a soured, gloomy, miserable man. He will not, cannot study; of what avail had all his study been to him? His knowledge, great as it was, had failed to preserve him from the cruel fangs of the persecutors; he could not command the lightning or the storm to wreak their furies upon the heads of those whom he hated and contemned, and yet feared. Away with learning! away with study! to the winds with all pretences to knowledge! We _know_ nothing; we are fools, wretches, mere beasts. Anon I began to tempt him. I made him dream, gave him wine, and passed the most exquisite of women before him, but out of his reach. Is there, then, no knowledge by which these pleasures can be commanded? _That way_ lay witchcraft, and accordingly to witchcraft Michael turns with all his soul. He has many failures and some successes; he learns the chemistry of exciting drugs and exploding powders, and some of the properties of transmitted and reflected light: his appetites and his curiosity are both stimulated, and his old craving for power and mental domination over others revives. At last Michael tries to raise the Devil, and the Devil comes at his call. My Devil was to be, like Goethe's, the universal humorist, who should make all things vain and nothing worth, by a perpetual collation of the great with the little in the presence of the infinite. I had many a trick for him to play, some better, I think, than any in the Faust. In the mean time, Michael is miserable; he has power, but no peace, and he every day more keenly feels the tyranny of hell surrounding him. In vain he seems to himself to assert the most absolute empire over the Devil, by imposing the most extravagant tasks; one thing is as easy as another to the Devil. "What next, Michael?" is repeated every day with more imperious servility. Michael groans in spirit; his power is a curse: he commands women and wine! but the women seem fictitious and devilish, and the wine does not make him drunk. He now begins to hate the Devil, and tries to cheat him. He studies again, and explores the darkest depths of sorcery for a receipt to cozen hell; but all in vain. Sometimes the Devil's finger turns over the page for him, and points out an experiment, and Michael hears a whisper--"Try _that_, Michael!" The horror increases; and Michael feels that he is a slave and a condemned criminal. Lost to hope, he throws himself into every sensual excess,--in the mid-career of which he sees Agatha, my Margaret, and immediately endeavours to seduce her. Agatha loves him; and the Devil facilitates their meetings; but she resists Michael's attempts to ruin her, and implores him not to act so as to forfeit her esteem. Long struggles of passion ensue, in the result of which his affections are called forth against his appetites, and, love-born, the idea of a redemption of the lost will dawns upon his mind. This is instantaneously perceived by the Devil; and for the first time the humorist becomes severe and menacing. A fearful succession of conflicts between Michael and the Devil takes place, in which Agatha helps and suffers. In the end, after subjecting him to every imaginable horror and agony, I made him triumphant, and poured peace into his soul in the conviction of a salvation for sinners through God's grace. The intended theme of the Faust is the consequences of a misology, or hatred and depreciation of knowledge caused by an originally intense thirst for knowledge baffled. But a love of knowledge for itself, and for pure ends, would never produce such a misology, but only a love of it for base and unworthy purposes. There is neither causation nor progression in the Faust; he is a ready-made conjuror from the very beginning; the _incredulus odi_ is felt from the first line. The sensuality and the thirst after knowledge are unconnected with each other. Mephistopheles and Margaret are excellent; but Faust himself is dull and meaningless. The scene in Auerbach's cellars is one of the best, perhaps the very best; that on the Brocken is also fine; and all the songs are beautiful. But there is no whole in the poem; the scenes are mere magic-lantern pictures, and a large part of the work is to me very flat. The German is very pure and fine. The young men in Germany and England who admire Lord Byron, prefer Goethe to Schiller; but you may depend upon it, Goethe does not, nor ever will, command the common mind of the people of Germany as Schiller does. Schiller had two legitimate phases in his intellectual character:--the first as author of the Robbers--a piece which must not be considered with reference to Shakspeare, but as a work of the mere material sublime, and in that line it is undoubtedly very powerful indeed. It is quite genuine, and deeply imbued with Schiller's own soul. After this he outgrew the composition of such plays as the Robbers, and at once took his true and only rightful stand in the grand historical drama--the Wallenstein;--not the intense drama of passion,--he was not master of that--but the diffused drama of history, in which alone he had ample scope for his varied powers. The Wallenstein is the greatest of his works; it is not unlike Shakspeare's historical plays--a species by itself. You may take up any scene, and it will please you by itself; just as you may in Don Quixote, which you read _through_ once or twice only, but which you read _in_ repeatedly. After this point it was, that Goethe and other writers injured by their theories the steadiness and originality of Schiller's mind; and in every one of his works after the Wallenstein you may perceive the fluctuations of his taste and principles of composition. He got a notion of re-introducing the characterlessness of the Greek tragedy with a chorus, as in the Bride of Messina, and he was for infusing more lyric verse into it. Schiller sometimes affected to despise the Robbers and the other works of his first youth; whereas he ought to have spoken of them as of works not in a right line, but full of excellence in their way. In his ballads and lighter lyrics Goethe is most excellent. It is impossible to praise him too highly in this respect. I like the Wilhelm Meister the best of his prose works. But neither Schiller's nor Goethe's prose style approaches to Lessing's, whose writings, for _manner_, are absolutely perfect. Although Wordsworth and Goethe are not much alike, to be sure, upon the whole; yet they both have this peculiarity of utter non-sympathy with the subjects of their poetry. They are always, both of them, spectators _ab extra_,--feeling _for_, but never _with_, their characters. Schiller is a thousand times more _hearty_ than Goethe. I was once pressed--many years ago--to translate the Faust; and I so far entertained the proposal as to read the work through with great attention, and to revive in my mind my own former plan of Michael Scott. But then I considered with myself whether the time taken up in executing the translation might not more worthily be devoted to the composition of a work which, even if parallel in some points to the Faust, should be truly original in motive and execution, and therefore more interesting and valuable than any version which I could make; and, secondly, I debated with myself whether it became my moral character to render into English--and so far, certainly, lend my countenance to language--much of which I thought vulgar, licentious, and blasphemous. I need not tell you that I never put pen to paper as a translator of Faust. I have read a good deal of Mr. Hayward's version, and I think it done in a very manly style; but I do not admit the argument for prose translations. I would in general rather see verse attempted in so capable a language as ours. The French cannot help themselves, of course, with such a language as theirs. [Footnote 1: "The poem was first published in 1790, and forms the commencement of the seventh volume of _Goethe's Schriften, Wien und Leipzig, bey J. Stahel and G. J. Goschen_, 1790. This edition is now before me. The poem entitled, _Faust, ein Fragment_ (not _Doktor Faust, ein Trauerspiel_, as Döring says), and contains no prologue or dedication of any sort. It commences with the scene in Faust's study, _antè_, p. 17., and is continued, as now, down to the passage ending, _antè_, p. 26. line 5. In the original, the line-- "Und froh ist, wenn er Regenwürmer findet," ends the scene. The next scene is one between Faust and Mephistopheles, and begins thus:-- "Und was der ganzen Menschheit zugetheilt ist," _i. e._ with the passage (_antè_, p. 70.) beginning, "I will enjoy, in my own heart's core, all that is parcelled out among mankind," &c. All that intervenes, in later editions, is wanting. It is thenceforth continued, as now, to the end of the cathedral scene (_antè_, p. (170)), except that the whole scene, in which Valentine is killed, is wanting. Thus Margaret's prayer to the Virgin and the cathedral scene come together, and form the conclusion of the work. According to Düring's Verzeichniss, there was no new edition of Faust until 1807. According to Dr. Sieglitz, the first part of Faust first appeared, in its present shape, in the collected edition of Goethe's works, which was published in 1808.--_Hayward's Translation of Faust_, second edition, note, p. 215.] _February_ 17. 1833. BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.--BEN JONSON.--MASSINGER. In the romantic drama Beaumont and Fletcher are almost supreme. Their plays are in general most truly delightful. I could read the Beggar's Bush from morning to night. How sylvan and sunshiny it is! The Little French Lawyer is excellent. Lawrit is conceived and executed from first to last in genuine comic humour. Monsieur Thomas is also capital. I have no doubt whatever that the first act and the first scene of the second act of the Two Noble Kinsmen are Shakspeare's. Beaumont and Fletcher's plots are, to be sure, wholly inartificial; they only care to pitch a character into a position to make him or her talk; you must swallow all their gross improbabilities, and, taking it all for granted, attend only to the dialogue. How lamentable it is that no gentleman and scholar can he found to edit these beautiful plays![1] Did the name of criticism ever descend so low as in the hands of those two fools and knaves, Seward and Simpson? There are whole scenes in their edition which I could with certainty put back into their original verse, and more that could he replaced in their native prose. Was there ever such an absolute disregard of literary fame as that displayed by Shakspeare, and Beaumont and Fletcher?[2] [Footnote 1: I believe Mr. Dyce could edit Beaumont and Fletcher as well as any man of the present or last generation; but the truth is, the limited sale of the late editions of Ben Jonson, Shirley, &c., has damped the spirit of enterprise amongst the respectable publishers. Still I marvel that some cheap reprint of B. and F. is not undertaken.--ED.] [Footnote 2: "The men of the greatest genius, as far as we can judge from their own works, or from the accounts of their contemporaries, appear to have been of calm and tranquil temper, in all that related to themselves. In the inward assurance of permanent fame, they seem to have been either indifferent or resigned, with regard to immediate reputation." * * * * * "Shakspeare's evenness and sweetness of temper were almost proverbial in his own age. That this did not arise from ignorance of his own comparative greatness, we have abundant proof in his sonnets, which could scarcely have been known to Mr. Pope, when he asserted, that our great bard 'grew immortal in his own despite.'"--_Biog. Lit._ vol. i, p. 32.] * * * * * In Ben Jonson you have an intense and burning art. Some of his plots, that of the Alchemist, for example, are perfect. Ben Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher would, if united, have made a great dramatist indeed, and yet not have come near Shakspeare; but no doubt Ben Jonson was the greatest man after Shakspeare in that age of dramatic genius. The styles of Massinger's plays and the Sampson Agonistes are the two extremes of the arc within which the diction of dramatic poetry may oscillate. Shakspeare in his great plays is the midpoint. In the Samson Agonistes, colloquial language is left at the greatest distance, yet something of it is preserved, to render the dialogue probable: in Massinger the style is differenced, but differenced in the smallest degree possible, from animated conversation by the vein of poetry. There's such a divinity doth hedge our Shakspeare round, that we cannot even imitate his style. I tried to imitate his manner in the Remorse, and, when I had done, I found I had been tracking Beaumont and Fletcher, and Massinger instead. It is really very curious. At first sight, Shakspeare and his contemporary dramatists seem to write in styles much alike: nothing so easy as to fall into that of Massinger and the others; whilst no one has ever yet produced one scene conceived and expressed in the Shakspearian idiom. I suppose it is because Shakspeare is universal, and, in fact, has no _manner_; just as you can so much more readily copy a picture than Nature herself. _February_ 20. 1833. HOUSE OF COMMONS APPOINTING THE OFFICERS OF THE ARMY AND NAVY. I was just now reading Sir John Cam Hobhouse's answer to Mr. Hume, I believe, upon the point of transferring the patronage of the army and navy from the Crown to the House of Commons. I think, if I had been in the House of Commons, I would have said, "that, ten or fifteen years ago, I should have considered Sir J. C. H.'s speech quite unanswerable,--it being clear constitutional law that the House of Commons has not, nor ought to have, any share, directly or indirectly, in the appointment of the officers of the army or navy. But now that the King had been reduced, by the means and procurement of the Honourable Baronet and his friends, to a puppet, which, so far from having any independent will of its own, could not resist a measure which it hated and condemned, it became a matter of grave consideration whether it was not necessary to vest the appointment of such officers in a body like the House of Commons, rather than in a junta of ministers, who were obliged to make common cause with the mob and democratic press for the sake of keeping their places." _March_ 9. 1833. PENAL CODE IN IRELAND.--CHURCHMEN. The penal code in Ireland, in the beginning of the last century, was justifiable, as a temporary mean of enabling government to take breath and look about them; and if right measures had been systematically pursued in a right spirit, there can be no doubt that all, or the greater part, of Ireland would have become Protestant. Protestantism under the Charter Schools was greatly on the increase in the early part of that century, and the complaints of the Romish priests to that effect are on record. But, unfortunately, the drenching-horn was itself substituted for the medicine. * * * * * There seems to me, at present, to be a curse upon the English church, and upon the governors of all institutions connected with the orderly advancement of national piety and knowledge; it is the curse of prudence, as they miscall it--in fact, of fear. Clergymen are now almost afraid to explain in their pulpits the grounds of their being Protestants. They are completely cowed by the vulgar harassings of the press and of our Hectoring sciolists in Parliament. There should be no _party_ politics in the pulpit to be sure; but every church in England ought to resound with national politics,--I mean the sacred character of the national church, and an exposure of the base robbery from the nation itself--for so indeed it is[1]--about to be committed by these ministers, in order to have a sop to throw to the Irish agitators, who will, of course, only cut the deeper, and come the oftener. You cannot buy off a barbarous invader. [Footnote 1: "That the maxims of a pure morality, and those sublime truths of the divine unity and attributes, which a Plato found it hard to learn, and more difficult to reveal; that these should have become the almost hereditary property of childhood and poverty, of the hovel and the workshop; that even to the unlettered they sound as _common-place_; this is a phenomenon which must withhold all but minds of the most vulgar cast from undervaluing the services even of the pulpit and the reading-desk. Yet he who should confine the efficiency of an established church to these, can hardly be placed in a much higher rank of intellect. That to every parish throughout the kingdom there is transplanted a germ of civilization; that in the remotest villages there is a nucleus, round which the capabilities of the place may crystallize and brighten; a model sufficiently superior to excite, yet sufficiently near to encourage and facilitate imitation; _this_ unobtrusive, continuous agency of a Protestant church establishment, _this_ it is, which the patriot and the philanthropist, who would fain unite the love of peace with the faith in the progressive amelioration of mankind, cannot estimate at too high a price. 'It cannot be valued with the gold of Ophir, with the precious onyx, or the sapphire. No mention shall be made of coral or of pearls; for the price of wisdom is above rubies.'--The clergyman is with his parishioners and among them; he is neither in the cloistered cell, nor in the wilderness, but a neighbour and family man, whose education and rank admit him to the mansion of the rich landholder, while his duties make him the frequent visitor of the farm-house and the cottage. He is, or he may become, connected with the families of his parish or its vicinity by marriage. And among the instances of the blindness, or at best of the short-sightedness, which it is the nature of cupidity to inflict, I know few more striking than the clamours of the farmers against church property. Whatever was not paid to the clergyman would inevitably at the next lease be paid to the landholder; while, as the case at present stands, the revenues of the church are in some sort the reversionary property of every family that may have a member educated for the church, or a daughter that may marry a clergyman. Instead of being _foreclosed_ and immovable, it is, in fact, the only species of landed property that is essentially moving and circulative. That there exist no inconveniences who will pretend to assert?--But I have yet to expect the proof, that the inconveniences are greater in this than in any other species; or that either the farmers or the clergy would be benefited by forcing the latter to become either _Trullibers_ or salaried _placemen_."--_Church and State_, p. 90.] _March_ 12. 1833. CORONATION OATHS. Lord Grey has, in Parliament, said two things: first, that the Coronation Oaths only bind the King in his executive capacity; and, secondly, that members of the House of Commons are bound to represent by their votes the wishes and opinions of their constituents, and not their own. Put these two together, and tell me what useful part of the constitutional monarchy of England remains. It is clear that the Coronation Oaths would be no better than Highgate oaths. For in his executive capacity the King _cannot_ do any thing, against the doing of which the oaths bind him; it is _only_ in his legislative character that he possesses a free agency capable of being bound. The nation meant to bind _that_. _March_ 14. 1833. DIVINITY.--PROFESSIONS AND TRADES. Divinity is essentially the first of the professions, because it is necessary for all at all times; law and physic are only necessary for some at some times. I speak of them, of course, not in their abstract existence, but in their applicability to man. * * * * * Every true science bears necessarily within itself the germ of a cognate profession, and the more you can elevate trades into professions the better. _March_ 17. 1833. MODERN POLITICAL ECONOMY. What solemn humbug this modern political economy is! What is there true of the little that is true in their dogmatic books, which is not a simple deduction from the moral and religious _credenda_ and _agenda_ of any good man, and with which we were not all previously acquainted, and upon which every man of common sense instinctively acted? I know none. But what they truly state, they do not truly understand in its ultimate grounds and causes; and hence they have sometimes done more mischief by their half- ignorant and half-sophistical reasonings about, and deductions from, well- founded positions, than they could have done by the promulgation of positive error. This particularly applies to their famous ratios of increase between man and the means of his subsistence. Political economy, at the highest, can never be a pure science. You may demonstrate that certain properties inhere in the arch, which yet no bridge-builder _can_ ever reduce into brick and mortar; but an abstract conclusion in a matter of political economy, the premisses of which neither exist now, nor ever will exist within the range of the wildest imagination, is not a truth, but a chimera--a practical falsehood. For there are no theorems in political economy--but problems only. Certain things being actually so and so; the question is, _how_ to _do_ so and so with them. Political _philosophy_, indeed, points to ulterior ends, but even those ends are all practical; and if you desert the conditions of reality, or of common probability, you may show forth your eloquence or your fancy, but the utmost you can produce will be a Utopia or Oceana. You talk about making this article cheaper by reducing its price in the market from 8_d_. to 6_d_. But suppose, in so doing, you have rendered your country weaker against a foreign foe; suppose you have demoralized thousands of your fellow-countrymen, and have sown discontent between one class of society and another, your article is tolerably dear, I take it, after all. Is not its real price enhanced to every Christian and patriot a hundred-fold? * * * * * _All_ is an endless fleeting abstraction; _the whole_ is a reality. _March_ 31. 1833. NATIONAL DEBT.--PROPERTY TAX.--DUTY OF LANDHOLDERS. What evil results now to this country, taken at large, from the actual existence of the National Debt? I never could get a plain and practical answer to that question. I do not advert to the past loss of capital, although it is hard to see how that capital can be said to have been unproductive, which produces, in the defence of the nation itself, the conditions of the permanence and productivity of all other capital. As to taxation to pay the interest, how can the country suffer by a process, under which the money is never one minute out of the pockets of the people? You may just as well say that a man is weakened by the circulation of his blood. There may, certainly, be particular local evils and grievances resulting from the mode of taxation or collection; but how can that debt be in any proper sense a burthen to the nation, which the nation owes to itself, and to no one but itself? It is a juggle to talk of the nation owing the capital or the interest to the stockholders; it owes to itself only. Suppose the interest to be owing to the Emperor of Russia, and then you would feel the difference of a debt in the proper sense. It is really and truly nothing more in effect than so much moneys or money's worth, raised annually by the state for the purpose of quickening industry.[1] I should like to see a well graduated property tax, accompanied by a large loan. One common objection to a property tax is, that it tends to diminish the accumulation of capital. In my judgment, one of the chief sources of the bad economy of the country now is the enormous aggregation of capitals. When shall we return to a sound conception of the right to property-- namely, as being official, implying and demanding the performance of commensurate duties! Nothing but the most horrible perversion of humanity and moral justice, under the specious name of political economy, could have blinded men to this truth as to the possession of land,--the law of God having connected indissolubly the cultivation of every rood of earth with the maintenance and watchful labour of man. But money, stock, riches by credit, transferable and convertible at will, are under no such obligations; and, unhappily, it is from the selfish autocratic possession of _such_ property, that our landholders have learnt their present theory of trading with that which was never meant to be an object of commerce. [Footnote 1: See the splendid essay in the Friend (vol. ii, p. 47.) on the vulgar errors respecting taxes and taxation. "A great statesman, lately deceased, in one of his anti-ministerial harangues against some proposed impost, said, 'The nation has been already bled in every vein, and is faint with loss of blood.' This blood, however, was circulating in the mean time through the whole body of the state, and what was received into one chamber of the heart was instantly sent out again at the other portal. Had he wanted a metaphor to convey the possible injuries of taxation, he might have found one less opposite to the fact, in the known disease of aneurism, or relaxation of the coats of particular vessels, by a disproportionate accumulation of blood in them, which sometimes occurs when the circulation has been suddenly and violently changed, and causes helplessness, or even mortal stagnation, though the total quantity of blood remains the same in the system at large. "But a fuller and fairer symbol of taxation, both in its possible good and evil effects, is to be found in the evaporation of waters from the surface of the earth. The sun may draw up the moisture from the river, the morass, and the ocean, to be given back in genial showers to the garden, to the pasture, and the corn field; but it may, likewise, force away the moisture from the fields of tillage, to drop it on the stagnant pool, the saturated swamp, or the unprofitable sand-waste. The gardens in the south of Europe supply, perhaps, a not less apt illustration of a system of finance judiciously conducted, where the tanks or reservoirs would represent the capital of a nation, and the hundred rills, hourly varying their channels and directions under the gardener's spade, give a pleasing image of the dispersion of that capital through the whole population by the joint effect of taxation and trade. For taxation itself is a part of commerce, and the government maybe fairly considered as a great manufacturing house, carrying on, in different places, by means of its partners and overseers, the trades of the shipbuilder, the clothier, the iron-founder," &c. &c.--ED.] _April_ 5. 1833. MASSINGER.--SHAKSPEARE.--HIERONIMO. To please me, a poem must be either music or sense; if it is neither, I confess I cannot interest myself in it. * * * * * The first act of the Virgin Martyr is as fine an act as I remember in any play. The Very Woman is, I think, one of the most perfect plays we have. There is some good fun in the first scene between Don John, or Antonio, and Cuculo, his master[1]; and can any thing exceed the skill and sweetness of the scene between him and his mistress, in which he relates his story?[2] The Bondman is also a delightful play. Massinger is always entertaining; his plays have the interest of novels. But, like most of his contemporaries, except Shakspeare, Massinger often deals in exaggerated passion. Malefort senior, in the Unnatural Combat, however he may have had the moral will to be so wicked, could never have actually done all that he is represented as guilty of, without losing his senses. He would have been, in fact, mad. Regan and Goneril are the only pictures of the unnatural in Shakspeare; the pure unnatural--and you will observe that Shakspeare has left their hideousness unsoftened or diversified by a single line of goodness or common human frailty. Whereas in Edmund, for whom passion, the sense of shame as a bastard, and ambition, offer some plausible excuses, Shakspeare has placed many redeeming traits. Edmund is what, under certain circumstances, any man of powerful intellect might be, if some other qualities and feelings were cut off. Hamlet is, inclusively, an Edmund, but different from him as a whole, on account of the controlling agency of other principles which Edmund had not. It is worth while to remark the use which Shakspeare always makes of his bold villains as vehicles for expressing opinions and conjectures of a nature too hazardous for a wise man to put forth directly as his own, or from any sustained character. [Footnote 1: Act iii. sc. 2.] [Footnote 2: Act iv. sc. 3.:-- "ANT. Not far from where my father lives, a lady, A neighbour by, bless'd with as great a beauty As nature durst bestow without undoing, Dwelt, and most happily, as I thought then, And bless'd the home a thousand times she dwelt in. This beauty, in the blossom of my youth, When my first fire knew no adulterate incense, Nor I no way to flatter, but my fondness; In all the bravery my friends could show me, In all the faith my innocence could give me, In the best language my true tongue could tell me, And all the broken sighs my sick heart lent me, I sued and served: long did I love this lady, Long was my travail, long my trade to win her; With all the duty of my soul, I served her. ALM. How feelingly he speaks! (_Aside_.) And she loved you too? It must be so. ANT. I would it had, dear lady; This story had been needless, and this place, I think, unknown to me. ALM. Were your bloods equal? ANT. Yes; and I thought our hearts too. ALM. Then she must love. ANT. She did--but never me; she could not love me, She would not love, she hated; more, she scorn'd me, And in so poor and base a way abused me, For all my services, for all my bounties, So bold neglects flung on me-- ALM. An ill woman! Belike you found some rival in your love, then? ANT. How perfectly she points me to my story! (_Aside_.) Madam, I did; and one whose pride and anger, Ill manners, and worse mien, she doted on, Doted to my undoing, and my ruin. And, but for honour to your sacred beauty, And reverence to the noble sex, though she fall, As she must fall that durst be so unnoble, I should say something unbeseeming me. What out of love, and worthy love, I gave her, Shame to her most unworthy mind! to fools, To girls, and fiddlers, to her boys she flung, And in disdain of me. ALM. Pray you take me with you. Of what complexion was she? ANT. But that I dare not Commit so great a sacrilege 'gainst virtue, She look'd not much unlike--though far, far short, Something, I see, appears--your pardon, madam-- Her eyes would smile so, but her eyes could cozen; And so she would look sad; but yours is pity, A noble chorus to my wretched story; Hers was disdain and cruelty. ALM. Pray heaven, Mine be no worse! he has told me a strange story, (_Aside_.)" &c.--ED.] * * * * * The parts pointed out in Hieronimo as Ben Jonson's bear no traces of his style; but they are very like Shakspeare's; and it is very remarkable that every one of them re-appears in full form and development, and tempered with mature judgment, in some one or other of Shakspeare's great pieces.[1] [Footnote 1: By Hieronimo Mr. Coleridge meant The Spanish Tragedy, and not the previous play, which is usually called The First Part of Jeronimo. The Spanish Tragedy is, upon the authority of Heywood, attributed to Kyd. It is supposed that Ben Jonson originally performed the part of Hieronimo, and hence it has been surmised that certain passages and whole scenes connected with that character, and not found in some of the editions of the play, are, in fact, Ben Jonson's own writing. Some of these supposed interpolations are amongst the best things in the Spanish Tragedy; the style is singularly unlike Jonson's, whilst there are turns and particular images which do certainly seem to have been imitated by or from Shakspeare. Mr. Lamb at one time gave them to Webster. Take this, passage, in the fourth act:-- "HIERON. What make you with your torches in the dark? PEDRO. You bid us light them, and attend you here. HIERON. No! you are deceived; not I; you are deceived. Was I so mad to bid light torches now? Light me your torches at the mid of noon, When as the sun-god rides in all his glory; Light me your torches then. PEDRO. Then we burn day-light. HIERON. _Let it be burnt; Night is a murd'rous slut, That would not have her treasons to be seen; And yonder pale-faced Hecate there, the moon, Doth give consent to that is done in darkness; And all those stars that gaze upon her face Are aglets on her sleeve, pins on her train; And those that should be powerful and divine, Do sleep in darkness when they most should shine._ PEDRO. Provoke them not, fair sir, with tempting words. The heavens are gracious, and your miseries and sorrow Make you speak you know not what HIERON. _Villain! thou liest, and thou dost nought But tell me I am mad: thou liest, I am not mad; I know thee to be Pedro, and he Jaques; I'll prove it thee; and were I mad, how could I? Where was she the same night, when my Horatio was murder'd! She should have shone then; search thou the book: Had the moon shone in my boy's face, there was a kind of grace, That I know--nay, I do know, had the murderer seen him, His weapon would have fallen, and cut the earth, Had he been framed of nought but blood and death," &c._ Again, in the fifth act:-- "HIERON. But are you sure that they are dead? CASTILE. Ay, slain, too sure. HIERON. What, and yours too? VICEROY. Ay, all are dead; not one of them survive. HIBRON. Nay, then I care not--come, we shall be friends; Let us lay our heads together. See, here's a goodly noose will hold them all. VICEROY. O damned devil! how secure he is! HIERON. Secure! why dost thou wonder at it? _I tell thee, Viceroy, this day I've seen Revenge, d in that sight am grown a prouder monarch Than ever sate under the crown of Spain. Had I as many lives at there be stars,_, _As many heavens to go to as those lives, I'd give them all, ay, and my soul to boot, But I would see thee ride in this red pool. Methinks, since I grew inward with revenge, I cannot look with scorn enough on death._ KING. What! dost thou mock us, slave? Bring tortures forth. HIERON. _Do, do, do; and meantime I'll torture you. You had a son as I take it, and your son Should have been married to your daughter: ha! was it not so? You had a son too, he was my liege's nephew. He was proud and politic--had he lived, He might have come to wear the crown of Spain: I think 't was so--'t was I that killed him; Look you--this same hand was it that stabb'd His heart--do you see this hand? For one Horatio, if you ever knew him-- A youth, one that they hang'd up in his father's garden-- One that did force your valiant son to yield_," &c.--ED. ] _April_ 7. 1833. LOVE'S LABOUR LOST.--GIFFORD'S MASSINGER.--SHAKSPEARE.--THE OLD DRAMATISTS. I think I could point out to a half line what is really Shakspeare's in Love's Labour Lost, and some other of the not entirely genuine plays. What he wrote in that play is of his earliest manner, having the all-pervading sweetness which he never lost, and that extreme condensation which makes the couplets fall into epigrams, as in the Venus and Adonis, and Rape of Lucrece. [1] In the drama alone, as Shakspeare soon found out, could the sublime poet and profound philosopher find the conditions of a compromise. In the Love's Labour Lost there are many faint sketches of some of his vigorous portraits in after-life--as for example, in particular, of Benedict and Beatrice.[2] [Footnote 1: "In Shakspeare's _Poems_ the creative power and the intellectual energy wrestle as in a war embrace. Each in its excess of strength seems to threaten the extinction of the other. At length, in the drama, they were reconciled, and fought each with its shield before the breast of the other. Or like two rapid streams, that, at their first meeting within narrow and rocky banks, mutually strive to repel each other, and intermix reluctantly, and in tumult; but soon finding a wider channel and more yielding shores, blend, and dilate, and flow on in one current, and with one voice."--_Biog. Lit._ vol. ii. p. 21.] [Footnote 2: Mr. Coleridge, of course, alluded to Biron and Rosaline; and there are other obvious prolusions, as the scene of the masque with the courtiers, compared with the play in A Midsummer Night's Dream.--ED.] * * * * * Gifford has done a great deal for the text of Massinger, but not as much as might easily be done. His comparison of Shakspeare with his contemporary dramatists is obtuse indeed.[1] [Footnote 1: See his _Introduction to Massinger, vol_.i. p. 79., in which, amongst other most extraordinary assertions, Mr. Gifford pronounces that _rhythmical modulation is not one of Shakspeare's merits!_--ED.] * * * * * In Shakspeare one sentence begets the next naturally; the meaning is all inwoven. He goes on kindling like a meteor through the dark atmosphere; yet, when the creation in its outline is once perfect, then he seems to rest from his labour, and to smile upon his work, and tell himself that it is very good. You see many scenes and parts of scenes which are simply Shakspeare's, disporting himself in joyous triumph and vigorous fun after a great achievement of his highest genius. * * * * * The old dramatists took great liberties in respect of bringing parties in scene together, and representing one as not recognizing the other under some faint disguise. Some of their finest scenes are constructed on this ground. Shakspeare avails himself of this artifice only twice, I think,--in Twelfth Night, where the two are with great skill kept apart till the end of the play; and in the Comedy of Errors, which is a pure farce, and should be so considered. The definition of a farce is, an improbability or even impossibility granted in the outset, see what odd and laughable events will fairly follow from it! _April _8. 1833. STATESMEN.--BURKE. I never was much subject to violent political humours or accesses of feelings. When I was very young, I wrote and spoke very enthusiastically, but it was always on subjects connected with some grand general principle, the violation of which I thought I could point out. As to mere details of administration, I honestly thought that ministers, and men in office, must, of course, know much better than any private person could possibly do; and it was not till I went to Malta, and had to correspond with official characters myself, that I fully understood the extreme shallowness and ignorance with which men of some note too were able, after a certain fashion, to carry on the government of important departments of the empire. I then quite assented to Oxenstiern's saying, _Nescis, mi fili, quam parva sapientia regitur mundus_. * * * * * Burke was, indeed, a great man. No one ever read history so philosophically as he seems to have done. Yet, until he could associate his general principles with some sordid interest, panic of property, jacobinism, &c., he was a mere dinner bell. Hence you will find so many half truths in his speeches and writings. Nevertheless, let us heartily acknowledge his transcendant greatness. He would have been more influential if he had less surpassed his contemporaries, as Fox and Pitt, men of much inferior minds in all respects. * * * * * As a telegraph supposes a correspondent telescope, so a scientific lecture requires a scientific audience. _April _9. 1833. PROSPECT OF MONARCHY OR DEMOCRACY.--THE REFORMED HOUSE OF COMMONS. I have a deep, though paradoxical, conviction that most of the European nations are more or less on their way, unconsciously indeed, to pure monarchy; that is, to a government in which, under circumstances of complicated and subtle control, the reason of the people shall become efficient in the apparent will of the king.[1] As it seems to me, the wise and good in every country will, in all likelihood, become every day more and more disgusted with the representative form of government, brutalized as it is, and will be, by the predominance of democracy in England, France, and Belgium. The statesmen of antiquity, we know, doubted the possibility of the effective and permanent combination of the three elementary forms of government; and, perhaps, they had more reason than we have been accustomed to think. [Footnote 1: This is backing Vico against Spinosa. It must, however, be acknowledged that at present the prophet of democracy has a good right to be considered the favourite.--ED.] * * * * * You see how this House of Commons has begun to verify all the ill prophecies that were made of it--low, vulgar, meddling with every thing, assuming universal competency, flattering every base passion, and sneering at every thing noble, refined, and truly national! The direct and personal despotism will come on by and by, after the multitude shall have been gratified with the ruin and the spoil of the old institutions of the land. As for the House of Lords, what is the use of ever so much fiery spirit, if there be no principle to guide and to sanctify it? _April _10. 1833. UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.--CAPTAIN B. HALL.--NORTHERN AND SOUTHERN STATES. --DEMOCRACY WITH SLAVERY.--QUAKERS. The possible destiny of the United States of America,--as a nation of a hundred millions of freemen,--stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, living under the laws of Alfred, and speaking the language of Shakspeare and Milton, is an august conception. Why should we not wish to see it realized? America would then be England viewed through a solar microscope; Great Britain in a state of glorious magnification! How deeply to be lamented is the spirit of hostility and sneering which some of the popular books of travels have shown in treating of the Americans! They hate us, no doubt, just as brothers hate; but they respect the opinion of an Englishman concerning themselves ten times as much as that of a native of any other country on earth. A very little humouring of their prejudices, and some courtesy of language and demeanour on the part of Englishmen, would work wonders, even as it is, with the public mind of the Americans. * * * * * Captain Basil Hall's book is certainly very entertaining and instructive; but, in my judgment, his sentiments upon many points, and more especially his mode of expression, are unwise and uncharitable. After all, are not most of the things shown up with so much bitterness by him mere national foibles, parallels to which every people has and must of necessity have? * * * * * What you say about the quarrel in the United States is sophistical. No doubt, taxation may, and perhaps in some cases must, press unequally, or apparently so, on different classes of people in a state. In such cases there is a hardship; but, in the long run, the matter is fully compensated to the over-taxed class. For example, take the householders of London, who complain so bitterly of the house and window taxes. Is it not pretty clear that, whether such householder be a tradesman, who indemnifies himself in the price of his goods,--or a letter of lodgings, who does so in his rent, --or a stockholder, who receives it back again in his dividends,--or a country gentleman, who has saved so much fresh levy on his land or his other property,--one way or other, it comes at last pretty nearly to the same thing, though the pressure for the time may be unjust and vexatious, and fit to be removed? But when New England, which may be considered a state in itself, taxes the admission of foreign manufactures in order to cherish manufactures of its own, and thereby forces the Carolinians, another state of itself, with which there is little intercommunion, which has no such desire or interest to serve, to buy worse articles at a higher price, it is altogether a different question, and is, in fact, downright tyranny of the worst, because of the most sordid, kind. What would you think of a law which should tax every person in Devonshire for the pecuniary benefit of every person in Yorkshire? And yet that is a feeble image of the actual usurpation of the New England deputies over the property of the Southern States. * * * * * There are two possible modes of unity in a State; one by absolute coordination of each to all, and of all to each; the other by subordination of classes and offices. Now, I maintain that there never was an instance of the first, nor can there be, without slavery as its condition and accompaniment, as in Athens. The poor Swiss cantons are no exception. The mistake lies in confounding a state which must be based on classes and interests and unequal property, with a church, which is founded on the person, and has no qualification but personal merit. Such a community _may_ exist, as in the case of the Quakers; but, in order to exist, it must be compressed and hedged in by another society--_mundus mundulus in mundo immundo_. * * * * * The free class in a slave state is always, in one sense, the most patriotic class of people in an empire; for their patriotism is not simply the patriotism of other people, but an aggregate of lust of power and distinction and supremacy. _April _11. 1833. LAND AND MONEY. Land was the only species of property which, in the old time, carried any respectability with it. Money alone, apart from some tenure of land, not only did not make the possessor great and respectable, but actually made him at once the object of plunder and hatred. Witness the history of the Jews in this country in the early reigns after the Conquest. * * * * * I have no objection to your aspiring to the political principles of our old Cavaliers; but embrace them all fully, and not merely this and that feeling, whilst in other points you speak the canting foppery of the Benthamite or Malthusian schools. _April _14. 1833. METHODS OF INVESTIGATION. There are three ways of treating a subject:-- In the first mode, you begin with a definition, and that definition is necessarily assumed as the truth. As the argument proceeds, the conclusion from the first proposition becomes the base of the second, and so on. Now, it is quite impossible that you can be sure that you have included all the necessary, and none but the necessary, terms in your definition; as, therefore, you proceed, the original speck of error is multiplied at every remove; the same infirmity of knowledge besetting each successive definition. Hence you may set out, like Spinosa, with all but the truth, and end with a conclusion which is altogether monstrous; and yet the mere deduction shall be irrefragable. Warburton's "Divine Legation" is also a splendid instance of this mode of discussion, and of its inability to lead to the truth: in fact, it is an attempt to adopt the mathematical series of proof, in forgetfulness that the mathematician is sure of the truth of his definition at each remove, because he _creates _it, as he can do, in pure figure and number. But you cannot _make _any thing true which results from, or is connected with, real externals; you can only _find _it out. The chief use of this first mode of discussion is to sharpen the wit, for which purpose it is the best exercitation. 2. The historical mode is a very common one: in it the author professes to find out the truth by collecting the facts of the case, and tracing them downwards; but this mode is worse than the other. Suppose the question is as to the true essence and character of the English constitution. First, where will you begin your collection of facts? where will you end it? What facts will you select, and how do you know that the class of facts which you select are necessary terms in the premisses, and that other classes of facts, which you neglect, are not necessary? And how do you distinguish phenomena which proceed from disease or accident from those which are the genuine fruits of the essence of the constitution? What can be more striking, in illustration of the utter inadequacy of this line of investigation for arriving at the real truth, than the political treatises and constitutional histories which we have in every library? A Whig proves his case convincingly to the reader who knows nothing beyond his author; then comes an old Tory (Carte, for instance), and ferrets up a hamperful of conflicting documents and notices, which proves _his _case _per contra_. A. takes this class of facts; B. takes that class: each proves something true, neither proves _the_ truth, or any thing like _the _truth; that is, the whole truth. 3. You must, therefore, commence with the philosophic idea of the thing, the true nature of which you wish to find out and manifest. You must carry your rule ready made, if you wish to measure aright. If you ask me how I can know that this idea--my own invention--is the truth, by which the phenomena of history are to be explained, I answer, in the same way exactly that you know that your eyes were made to see with; and that is, because you _do _see with them. If I propose to you an idea or self-realizing theory of the constitution, which shall manifest itself as in existence from the earliest times to the present,--which shall comprehend within it _all _the facts which history has preserved, and shall give them a meaning as interchangeably causals or effects;--if I show you that such an event or reign was an obliquity to the right hand, and how produced, and such other event or reign a deviation to the left, and whence originating,--that the growth was stopped here, accelerated there,--that such a tendency is, and always has been, corroborative, and such other tendency destructive, of the main progress of the idea towards realization;--if this idea, not only like a kaleidoscope, shall reduce all the miscellaneous fragments into order, but shall also minister strength, and knowledge, and light to the true patriot and statesmen for working out the bright thought, and bringing the glorious embryo to a perfect birth;--then, I think, I have a right to say that the idea which led to this is not only true, but the truth, the only truth. To set up for a statesman upon historical knowledge only, is as about as wise as to set up for a musician by the purchase of some score flutes, fiddles, and horns. In order to make music, you must know how to play; in order to make your facts speak truth, you must know what the truth is which _ought_ to be proved,--the ideal truth,--the truth which was consciously or unconsciously, strongly or weakly, wisely or blindly, intended at all times.[1] [Footnote 1: I have preserved this passage, conscious, the while, how liable it is to be misunderstood, or at least not understood. The readers of Mr. Coleridge's works generally, or of his "Church and State" in particular, will have no difficulty in entering into his meaning; namely, that no investigation in the non-mathematical sciences can be carried on in a way deserving to be called philosophical, unless the investigator have in himself a mental initiative, or, what comes to the same thing, unless he set out with an intuition of the ultimate aim or idea of the science or aggregation of facts to be explained or interpreted. The analysis of the Platonic and Baconian methods in "The Friend," to which I have before referred, and the "Church and State," exhibit respectively a splendid vindication and example of Mr. Coleridge's mode of reasoning on this subject.--ED.] _April _18. 1833. CHURCH OF ROME.--CELIBACY OF THE CLERGY. In my judgment, Protestants lose a great deal of time in a false attack when they labour to convict the Romanists of false doctrines. Destroy the _Papacy_, and help the priests to wives, and I am much mistaken if the doctrinal errors, such as there really are, would not very soon pass away. They might remain _in terminis_, but they would lose their sting and body, and lapse back into figures of rhetoric and warm devotion, from which they, most of them,--such as transubstantiation, and prayers for the dead and to saints,--originally sprang. But, so long as the Bishop of Rome remains Pope, and has an army of Mamelukes all over the world, we shall do very little by fulminating against mere doctrinal errors. In the Milanese, and elsewhere in the north of Italy, I am told there is a powerful feeling abroad against the Papacy. That district seems to be something in the state of England in the reign of our Henry the Eighth. How deep a wound to morals and social purity has that accursed article of the celibacy of the clergy been! Even the best and most enlightened men in Romanist countries attach a notion of impurity to the marriage of a clergyman. And can such a feeling be without its effect on the estimation of the wedded life in general? Impossible! and the morals of both sexes in Spain, Italy, France, &c. prove it abundantly. The Papal church has had three phases,--anti-Caesarean, extra-national, anti-Christian. _April _20. 1833. ROMAN CONQUEST OF ITALY. The Romans would never have subdued the Italian tribes if they had not boldly left Italy and conquered foreign nations, and so, at last, crushed their next-door neighbours by external pressure. _April _24. 1833. WEDDED LOVE IN SHAKSPEARE AND HIS CONTEMPORARY DRAMATISTS.--TENNYSON'S POEMS. Except in Shakspeare, you can find no such thing as a pure conception of wedded love in our old dramatists. In Massinger, and Beaumont and Fletcher, it really is on both sides little better than sheer animal desire. There is scarcely a suitor in all their plays, whose _abilities_ are not discussed by the lady or her waiting-woman. In this, as in all things, how transcendant over his age and his rivals was our sweet Shakspeare! * * * * * I have not read through all Mr. Tennyson's poems, which have been sent to me; but I think there are some things of a good deal of beauty in what I have seen. The misfortune is, that he has begun to write verses without very well understanding what metre is. Even if you write in a known and approved metre, the odds are, if you are not a metrist yourself, that you will not write harmonious verses; but to deal in new metres without considering what metre means and requires, is preposterous. What I would, with many wishes for success, prescribe to Tennyson,--indeed without it he can never be a poet in act,--is to write for the next two or three years in none but one or two well-known and strictly defined metres, such as the heroic couplet, the octave stanza, or the octo-syllabic measure of the Allegro and Penseroso. He would, probably, thus get imbued with a sensation, if not a sense, of metre without knowing it, just as Eton boys get to write such good Latin verses by conning Ovid and Tibullus. As it is, I can scarcely scan some of his verses. _May _1. 1833. RABELAIS AND LUTHER.--WIT AND MADNESS. I think with some interest upon the fact that Rabelais and Luther were born in the same year.[1] Glorious spirits! glorious spirits! ----"Hos utinam inter Heroas natum me!" [Footnote 1: They were both born within twelve months of each other, I believe; but Luther's birth was in November, 1484, and that of Rabelais is generally placed at the end of the year preceding.--ED.] * * * * * "Great wits are sure to madness near allied," says Dryden, and true so far as this, that genius of the highest kind implies an unusual intensity of the modifying power, which detached from the discriminative and reproductive power, might conjure a platted straw into a royal diadem: but it would be at least as true, that great genius is most alien from madness,--yea, divided from it by an impassable mountain,-- namely, the activity of thought and vivacity of the accumulative memory, which are no less essential constituents of "great wit." _May _4. 1833. COLONIZATION.--MACHINERY.--CAPITAL. Colonization is not only a manifest expedient for, but an imperative duty on, Great Britain. God seems to hold out his finger to us over the sea. But it must be a national colonization, such as was that of the Scotch to America; a colonization of hope, and not such as we have alone encouraged and effected for the last fifty years, a colonization of despair. * * * * * The wonderful powers of machinery can, by multiplied production, render the mere _arte facta _of life actually cheaper: thus money and all other things being supposed the same in value, a silk gown is five times cheaper now than in Queen Elizabeth's time; but machinery cannot cheapen, in any thing like an equal degree, the immediate growths of nature or the immediate necessaries of man. Now the _arte facta _are sought by the higher classes of society in a proportion incalculably beyond that in which they are sought by the lower classes; and therefore it is that the vast increase of mechanical powers has not cheapened life and pleasure to the poor as it has done to the rich. In some respects, no doubt, it has done so, as in giving cotton dresses to maid-servants, and penny gin to all. A pretty benefit truly! * * * * * I think this country is now suffering grievously under an excessive accumulation of capital, which, having no field for profitable operation, is in a state of fierce civil war with itself. _May _6. 1833. ROMAN CONQUEST.--CONSTANTINE.--PAPACY AND THE SCHOOLMEN. The Romans had no national clerisy; their priesthood was entirely a matter of state, and, as far back as we can trace it, an evident stronghold of the Patricians against the increasing powers of the Plebeians. All we know of the early Romans is, that, after an indefinite lapse of years, they had conquered some fifty or sixty miles round their city. Then it is that they go to war with Carthage, the great maritime power, and the result of that war was the occupation of Sicily. Thence they, in succession, conquered Spain, Macedonia, Asia Minor, &c., and so at last contrived to subjugate Italy, partly by a tremendous back blow, and partly by bribing the Italian States with a communication of their privileges, which the now enormously enriched conquerors possessed over so large a portion of the civilized world. They were ordained by Providence to conquer and amalgamate the materials of Christendom. They were not a national people; they were truly-- _Romanos rerum dominos--_ --and that's all. * * * * * Under Constantine the spiritual power became a complete reflex of the temporal. There were four patriarchs, and four prefects, and so on. The Clergy and the Lawyers, the Church and the State, were opposed. * * * * * The beneficial influence of the Papacy upon the whole has been much over- rated by some writers; and certainly no country in Europe received less benefit and more harm from it than England. In fact, the lawful kings and parliaments of England were always essentially Protestant in feeling for a national church, though they adhered to the received doctrines of the Christianity of the day; and it was only the usurpers, John, Henry IV., &c., that went against this policy. All the great English schoolmen, Scotus Erigena[1], Duns Scotus, Ockham, and others, those morning stars of the Reformation, were heart and soul opposed to Rome, and maintained the Papacy to be Antichrist. The Popes always persecuted, with rancorous hatred, the national clerisies, the married clergy, and disliked the universities which grew out of the old monasteries. The Papacy was, and is, essentially extra- national, and was always so considered in this country, although not believed to be anti-Christian. [Footnote 1: John Scotus, or Erigena, was born, according to different authors, in Wales, Scotland, or Ireland; but I do not find any account making him an Englishman of Saxon blood. His death is uncertainly placed in the beginning of the ninth century. He lived in well-known intimacy with Charles the Bald, of France, who died about A. D. 874. He resolutely resisted the doctrine of transubstantiation, and was publicly accused of heresy on that account. But the king of France protected him--ED.] _May_ 8. 1833. CIVIL WAR OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.--HAMPDEN'S SPEECH. I know no portion of history which a man might write with so much pleasure as that of the great struggle in the time of Charles I., because he may feel the profoundest respect for both parties. The side taken by any particular person was determined by the point of view which such person happened to command at the commencement of the inevitable collision, one line seeming straight to this man, another line to another. No man of that age saw _the_ truth, the whole truth; there was not light enough for that. The consequence, of course, was a violent exaggeration of each party for the time. The King became a martyr, and the Parliamentarians traitors, and _vice versâ_. The great reform brought into act by and under William the Third combined the principles truly contended for by Charles and his Parliament respectively: the great revolution of 1831 has certainly, to an almost ruinous degree, dislocated those principles of government again. As to Hampden's speech[1], no doubt it means a declaration of passive obedience to the sovereign, as the creed of an English Protestant individual: every man, Cromwell and all, would have said as much; it was the antipapistical tenet, and almost vauntingly asserted on all occasions by Protestants up to that time. But it implies nothing of Hampden's creed as to the duty of Parliament. [Footnote 1: On his impeachment with the other four members, 1642. See the "Letter to John Murray, Esq. _touching_ Lord Nugent," 1833. It is extraordinary that Lord N. should not see the plain distinction taken by Hampden, between not obeying an unlawful command, and rebelling against the King because of it. He approves the one, and condemns the other. His words are, "to _yield obedience to_ the commands of a King, if against the true religion, against the ancient and fundamental laws of the land, is another sign of an ill subject:"--"To _resist_ the lawful power of the King; to raise insurrection against the King; admit him adverse in his religion; _to conspire against his sacred person, or any ways to rebel, though commanding things against our consciences in exercising religion, or against the rights and privileges of the subject_, is an absolute sign of the disaffected and traitorous subject."--ED.] _May_ 10. 1833. REFORMED HOUSE OF COMMONS. Well, I think no honest man will deny that the prophetic denunciations of those who seriously and solemnly opposed the Reform Bill are in a fair way of exact fulfilment! For myself, I own I did not expect such rapidity of movement. I supposed that the first parliament would contain a large number of low factious men, who would vulgarize and degrade the debates of the House of Commons, and considerably impede public business, and that the majority would be gentlemen more fond of their property than their politics. But really the truth is something more than this. Think of upwards of 160 members voting away two millions and a half of tax on Friday[1], at the bidding of whom, shall I say? and then no less than 70 of those very members rescinding their votes on the Tuesday next following, nothing whatever having intervened to justify the change, except that they had found out that at least seven or eight millions more must go also upon the same principle, and that the revenue was cut in two! Of course I approve the vote of rescission, however dangerous a precedent; but what a picture of the composition of this House of Commons! [Footnote 1: On Friday, the 26th of April, 1833, Sir William Ingilby moved and carried a resolution for reducing the duty on malt from 28s. 8d. to l0s. per quarter. One hundred and sixty-two members voted with him. On Tuesday following, the 30th of April, seventy-six members only voted against the rescission of the same resolution.--ED.] _May_ 13. 1833. FOOD.--MEDICINE.--POISON.--OBSTRUCTION. 1. That which is digested wholly, and part of which is assimilated, and part rejected, is--Food. 2. That which is digested wholly, and the whole of which is partly assimilated, and partly not, is--Medicine. 3. That which is digested, but not assimilated, is--Poison. 4. That which is neither digested nor assimilated is--Mere Obstruction. As to the stories of slow poisons, I cannot say whether there was any, or what, truth in them; but I certainly believe a man may be poisoned by arsenic a year after he has taken it. In fact, I think that is known to have happened. May 14. 1833. WILSON.--SHAKSPEARE'S SONNETS.--LOVE. Professor Wilson's character of Charles Lamb in the last Blackwood, _Twaddle on Tweed-side_[1], is very sweet indeed, and gratified me much. It does honour to Wilson, to his head and his heart. [Footnote 1: "Charles Lamb ought really not to abuse Scotland in the pleasant way he so often does in the sylvan shades of Enfield; for Scotland loves Charles Lamb; but he is wayward and wilful in his wisdom, and conceits that many a Cockney is a better man even than Christopher North. But what will not Christopher forgive to genius and goodness! Even Lamb, bleating libels on his native land. Nay, he learns lessons of humanity even from the mild malice of Elia, and breathes a blessing on him and his household in their bower of rest." Some of Mr. Coleridge's poems were first published with some of C. Lamb's at Bristol in 1797. The remarkable words on the title-page have been aptly cited in the New Monthly Magazine for February, 1835, p. 198.: "Duplex nobis vinculum, et amicitiae et similium junctarumque Camcoenarum,--quod utinam neque mors solvat, neque temporis longinquitas." And even so it came to pass after thirty seven years more had passed over their heads,--ED.] * * * * * How can I wish that Wilson should cease to write what so often soothes and suspends my bodily miseries, and my mental conflicts! Yet what a waste, what a reckless spending, of talent, ay, and of genius, too, in his I know not how many years' management of Blackwood! If Wilson cares for fame, for an enduring place and prominence in literature, he should now, I think, hold his hand, and say, as he well may,-- "Militavi non sine gloria: Nunc arma defunctumque bello Barbiton hic paries habebit." Two or three volumes collected out of the magazine by himself would be very delightful. But he must not leave it for others to do; for some recasting and much condensation would be required; and literary executors make sad work in general with their testators' brains. * * * * * I believe it possible that a man may, under certain states of the moral feeling, entertain something deserving the name of love towards a male object--an affection beyond friendship, and wholly aloof from appetite. In Elizabeth's and James's time it seems to have been almost fashionable to cherish such a feeling; and perhaps we may account in some measure for it by considering how very inferior the women of that age, taken generally, were in education and accomplishment of mind to the men. Of course there were brilliant exceptions enough; but the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher-- the most popular dramatists that ever wrote for the English stage--will show us what sort of women it was generally pleasing to represent. Certainly the language of the two friends, Musidorus and Pyrocles, in the Arcadia, is such as we could not now use except to women; and in Cervantes the same tone is sometimes adopted, as in the novel of the Curious Impertinent. And I think there is a passage in the New Atlantis[1] of Lord Bacon, in which he speaks of the possibility of such a feeling, but hints the extreme danger of entertaining it, or allowing it any place in a moral theory. I mention this with reference to Shakspeare's sonnets, which have been supposed, by some, to be addressed to William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, whom Clarendon calls[2] the most beloved man of his age, though his licentiousness was equal to his virtues. I doubt this. I do not think that Shakespeare, merely because he was an actor, would have thought it necessary to veil his emotions towards Pembroke under a disguise, though he might probably have done so, if the real object had perchance been a Laura or a Leonora. It seems to me that the sonnets could only have come from a man deeply in love, and in love with a woman; and there is one sonnet which, from its incongruity, I take to be a purposed blind. These extraordinary sonnets form, in fact, a poem of so many stanzas of fourteen lines each; and, like the passion which inspired them, the sonnets are always the same, with a variety of expression,--continuous, if you regard the lover's soul,--distinct, if you listen to him, as he heaves them sigh after sigh. These sonnets, like the Venus and Adonis, and the Rape of Lucrece, are characterized by boundless fertility and laboured condensation of thought, with perfection of sweetness in rhythm and metre. These are the essentials in the budding of a great poet. Afterwards habit and consciousness of power teach more ease--_praecipitandum liberum spiritum_. [Footnote 1: I cannot fix upon any passage in this work, to which it can be supposed that Mr. Coleridge alluded, unless it be the speech of Joabin the Jew; but it contains nothing coming up to the meaning in the text. The only approach to it seems to be:--"As for masculine love, they have no touch of it; and yet there are not so faithful and inviolate friendships in the world again as are there; and to speak generally, as I said before, I have not read of any such chastity in any people as theirs."--ED.] [Footnote 2: "William Earl of Pembroke was next, a man of another mould and making, and of another fame and reputation with all men, being the most universally beloved and esteemed of any man of that age." ......."He indulged to himself the pleasures of all kinds, almost in all excesses."--_Hist. of the Rebellion_, book i. He died in 1630, aged fifty years. The dedication by T. T. (Thomas Thorpe) is to "the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets, Mr. W. H." and Malone is inclined to think that William Hughes is meant. As to Mr. W. H. being the _only_ begetter of these sonnets, it must be observed, that at least the last twenty-eight are beyond dispute addressed to a woman. I suppose the twentieth sonnet was the particular one conceived by Mr. C. to be a blind; but it seems to me that many others may be so construed, if we set out with a conviction that the real object of the poet was a woman.--ED.] * * * * * Every one who has been in love, knows that the passion is strongest, and the appetite weakest, in the absence of the beloved object, and that the reverse is the case in her presence. _May_ 15. 1833. WICLIFFE.--LUTHER.--REVERENCE FOR IDEAL TRUTHS.--JOHNSON THE WHIG.-- ASGILL.--JAMES I. Wicliffe's genius was, perhaps, not equal to Luther's; but really the more I know of him from Vaughan and Le Bas, both of whose books I like, I think him as extraordinary a man as Luther upon the whole. He was much sounder and more truly catholic in his view of the Eucharist than Luther. And I find, not without some pleasure, that my own view of it, which I was afraid was original, was maintained in the tenth century, that is to say, that the body broken had no reference to the human body of Christ, but to the Caro Noumenon, or symbolical Body, the Rock that followed the Israelites. Whitaker beautifully says of Luther;--_Felix ille, quem Dominus eo honore dignatus est, ut homines nequissimos suos haberet inimicos_. * * * * * There is now no reverence for any thing; and the reason is, that men possess conceptions only, and all their knowledge is conceptional only. Now as, to conceive, is a work of the mere understanding, and as all that can be conceived may be comprehended, it is impossible that a man should reverence that, to which he must always feel something in himself superior. If it were possible to conceive God in a strict sense, that is, as we conceive a horse or a tree, even God himself could not excite any reverence, though he might excite fear or terror, or perhaps love, as a tiger or a beautiful woman. But reverence, which is the synthesis of love and fear, is only due from man, and, indeed, only excitable in man, towards ideal truths, which are always mysteries to the understanding, for the same reason that the motion of my finger behind my back is a mystery to you now--your eyes not being made for seeing through my body. It is the reason only which has a sense by which ideas can be recognized, and from the fontal light of ideas only can a man draw intellectual power. * * * * * Samuel Johnson[1], whom, to distinguish him from the Doctor, we may call the Whig, was a very remarkable writer. He may be compared to his contemporary De Foe, whom he resembled in many points. He is another instance of King William's discrimination, which was so much superior to that of any of his ministers, Johnson was one of the most formidable advocates for the Exclusion Bill, and he suffered by whipping and imprisonment under James accordingly. Like Asgill, he argues with great apparent candour and clearness till he has his opponent within reach, and then comes a blow as from a sledge-hammer. I do not know where I could put my hand upon a book containing so much sense and sound constitutional doctrine as this thin folio of Johnson's Works; and what party in this country would read so severe a lecture in it as our modern Whigs! A close reasoner and a good writer in general may be known by his pertinent use of connectives. Read that page of Johnson; you cannot alter one conjunction without spoiling the sense. It is a linked strain throughout. In your modern books, for the most part, the sentences in a page have the same connection with each other that marbles have in a bag; they touch without adhering. Asgill evidently formed his style upon Johnson's, but he only imitates one part of it. Asgill never rises to Johnson's eloquence. The latter was a sort of Cobbett-Burke. James the First thought that, because all power in the state seemed to proceed _from_ the crown, all power therefore remained in the crown;--as if, because the tree sprang from the seed, the stem, branches, leaves, and fruit were all contained in the seed. The constitutional doctrine as to the relation which the king bears to the other components of the state is in two words this:--He is a representative of the whole of that, of which he is himself a part. [Footnote 1: Dryden's Ben Jochanan, in the second part of Absalom and Achitophel. He was born in 1649, and died in 1703. He was a clergyman. In 1686, when the army was encamped on Hounslow Heath, he published "A humble and hearty Address to all English Protestants in the present Army." For this he was tried and sentenced to be pilloried in three places, pay a fine, and be whipped from Newgate to Tyburn. An attempt was also made to degrade him from his orders, but this failed through an informality. After the Revolution he was preferred.--ED.] _May_ 17. 1833. SIR P. SIDNEY.--THINGS ARE FINDING THEIR LEVEL. When Sir Philip Sidney saw the enthusiasm which agitated every man, woman, and child in the Netherlands against Philip and D'Alva, he told Queen Elizabeth that it was the spirit of God, and that it was invincible. What is the spirit which seems to move and unsettle every other man in England and on the Continent at this time? Upon my conscience, and judging by St. John's rule, I think it is a special spirit of the devil--and a very vulgar devil too! * * * * * Your modern political economists say that it is a principle in their science--that all things _find_ their level;--which I deny; and say, on the contrary, that the true principle is, that all things are _finding_ their level like water in a storm. _May_ 18. 1833. GERMAN.--GOETHE.--GOD'S PROVIDENCE.--MAN'S FREEDOM. German is inferior to English in modifications of expression of the affections, but superior to it in modifications of expression of all objects of the senses. * * * * * Goethe's small lyrics are delightful. He showed good taste in not attempting to imitate Shakspeare's Witches, which are threefold,--Fates, Furies, and earthly Hags o' the caldron. * * * * * Man does not move in cycles, though nature does. Man's course is like that of an arrow; for the portion of the great cometary ellipse which he occupies is no more than a needle's length to a mile. In natural history, God's freedom is shown in the law of necessity. In moral history, God's necessity or providence is shown in man's freedom. _June_ 8. 1833. DOM MIGUEL AND DOM PEDRO.--WORKING TO BETTER ONE'S CONDITION.--NEGRO EMANCIPATION.--FOX AND PITT.--REVOLUTION. There can be no doubt of the gross violations of strict neutrality by this government in the Portuguese affair; but I wish the Tories had left the matter alone, and not given room to the people to associate them with that scoundrel Dom Miguel. You can never interest the common herd in the abstract question; with them it is a mere quarrel between the men; and though Pedro is a very doubtful character, he is not so bad as his brother; and, besides, we are naturally interested for the girl. * * * * * It is very strange that men who make light of the direct doctrines of the Scriptures, and turn up their noses at the recommendation of a line of conduct suggested by religious truth, will nevertheless stake the tranquillity of an empire, the lives and properties of millions of men and women, on the faith of a maxim of modern political economy! And this, too, of a maxim true only, if at all, of England or a part of England, or some other country;--namely, that the desire of bettering their condition will induce men to labour even more abundantly and profitably than servile compulsion,--to which maxim the past history and present state of all Asia and Africa give the lie. Nay, even in England at this day, every man in Manchester, Birmingham, and in other great manufacturing towns, knows that the most skilful artisans, who may earn high wages at pleasure, are constantly in the habit of working but a few days in the week, and of idling the rest. I believe St. Monday is very well kept by the workmen in London. The love of indolence is universal, or next to it. * * * * * Must not the ministerial plan for the West Indies lead necessarily to a change of property, either by force or dereliction? I can't see any way of escaping it. * * * * * You are always talking of the _rights_ of the negroes. As a rhetorical mode of stimulating the people of England _here_, I do not object; but I utterly condemn your frantic practice of declaiming about their rights to the blacks themselves. They ought to be forcibly reminded of the state in which their brethren in Africa still are, and taught to be thankful for the providence which has placed them within reach of the means of grace. I know no right except such as flows from righteousness; and as every Christian believes his righteousness to be imputed, so must his right be an imputed right too. It must flow out of a duty, and it is under that name that the process of humanization ought to begin and to be conducted throughout. * * * * * Thirty years ago, and more, Pitt availed himself, with great political dexterity, of the apprehension, which Burke and the conduct of some of the clubs in London had excited, and endeavoured to inspire into the nation a panic of property. Fox, instead of exposing the absurdity of this by showing the real numbers and contemptible weakness of the disaffected, fell into Pitt's trap, and was mad enough to exaggerate even Pitt's surmises. The consequence was, a very general apprehension throughout the country of an impending revolution, at a time when, I will venture to say, the people were more heart-whole than they had been for a hundred years previously. After I had travelled in Sicily and Italy, countries where there were real grounds for fear, I became deeply impressed with the difference. Now, after a long continuance of high national glory and influence, when a revolution of a most searching and general character is actually at work, and the old institutions of the country are all awaiting their certain destruction or violent modification--the people at large are perfectly secure, sleeping or gambolling on the very brink of a volcano. _June_ 15. 1833. VIRTUE AND LIBERTY.--EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS.--ERASMUS.----LUTHER. The necessity for external government to man is in an inverse ratio to the vigour of his self-government. Where the last is most complete, the first is least wanted. Hence, the more virtue the more liberty. * * * * * I think St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans the most profound work in existence; and I hardly believe that the writings of the old Stoics, now lost, could have been deeper. Undoubtedly it is, and must be, very obscure to ordinary readers; but some of the difficulty is accidental, arising from the form in which the Epistle appears. If we could now arrange this work in the way in which we may be sure St. Paul would himself do, were he now alive, and preparing it for the press, his reasoning would stand out clearer. His accumulated parentheses would be thrown into notes, or extruded to the margin. You will smile, after this, if I say that I think I understand St. Paul; and I think so, because, really and truly, I recognize a cogent consecutiveness in the argument--the only evidence I know that you understand any book. How different is the style of this intensely passionate argument from that of the catholic circular charge called the Epistle to the Ephesians!--and how different that of both from the style of the Epistles to Timothy and Titus, which I venture to call [Greek: epistolal panloeideiz] Erasmus's paraphrase of the New Testament is clear and explanatory; but you cannot expect any thing very deep from Erasmus. The only fit commentator on Paul was Luther--not by any means such a gentleman as the Apostle, but almost as great a genius. _June_ 17. 1833. NEGRO EMANCIPATION. Have you been able to discover any principle in this Emancipation Bill for the Slaves, except a principle of fear of the abolition party struggling with a dread of causing some monstrous calamity to the empire at large? Well! I will not prophesy; and God grant that this tremendous and unprecedented act of positive enactment may not do the harm to the cause of humanity and freedom which I cannot but fear! But yet, what can be hoped, when all human wisdom and counsel are set at nought, and religious faith-- the only miraculous agent amongst men--is not invoked or regarded! and that most unblest phrase--the Dissenting _interest_--enters into the question! _June_ 22. 1833. HACKET'S LIFE OF ARCHBISHOP WILLIAMS.--CHARLES I.--MANNERS UNDER EDWARD III., RICHARD II., AND HENRY VIII. What a delightful and instructive hook Bishop Hacket's Life of Archbishop Williams is! You learn more from it of that which is valuable towards an insight into the times preceding the Civil War than from all the ponderous histories and memoirs now composed about that period. * * * * * Charles seems to have been a very disagreeable personage during James's life. There is nothing dutiful in his demeanour. * * * * * I think the spirit of the court and nobility of Edward III. and Richard II. was less gross than that in the time of Henry VIII.; for in this latter period the chivalry had evaporated, and the whole coarseness was left by itself. Chaucer represents a very high and romantic style of society amongst the gentry. _June_ 29. 1833. HYPOTHESIS.--SUFFICTION.--THEORY.--LYELL'S GEOLOGY.--GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE. --GERARD DOUW's "SCHOOLMASTER" AND TITIAN'S "VENUS."--SIR J. SCARLETT. It seems to me a great delusion to call or suppose the imagination of a subtle fluid, or molecules penetrable with the same, a legitimate hypothesis. It is a mere _suffiction_. Newton took the fact of bodies falling to the centre, and upon that built up a legitimate hypothesis. It was a subposition of something certain. But Descartes' vortices were not an hypothesis; they rested on no fact at all; and yet they did, in a clumsy way, explain the motions of the heavenly bodies. But your subtle fluid is pure gratuitous assumption; and for what use? It explains nothing. Besides, you are endeavouring to deduce power from mass, in which you expressly say there is no power but the _vis inertiae_: whereas, the whole analogy of chemistry proves that power produces mass. * * * * * The use of a theory in the real sciences is to help the investigator to a complete view of all the hitherto discovered facts relating to the science in question; it is a collected view, [Greek: the_orhia], of all he yet knows in _one_. Of course, whilst any pertinent facts remain unknown, no theory can be exactly true, because every new fact must necessarily, to a greater or less degree, displace the relation of all the others. A theory, therefore, only helps investigation; it cannot invent or discover. The only true theories are those of geometry, because in geometry all the premisses are true and unalterable. But, to suppose that, in our present exceedingly imperfect acquaintance with the facts, any theory in chemistry or geology is altogether accurate, is absurd:--it cannot be true. Mr. Lyell's system of geology is just half the truth, and no more. He affirms a great deal that is true, and he denies a great deal which is equally true; which is the general characteristic of all systems not embracing the whole truth. So it is with the rectilinearity or undulatory motion of light;--I believe both; though philosophy has as yet but imperfectly ascertained the conditions of their alternate existence, or the laws by which they are regulated. * * * * * Those who deny light to be matter do not, therefore, deny its corporeity. * * * * * The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable. It is no doubt a sublimer effort of genius than the Greek style; but then it depends much more on execution for its effect. I was more than ever impressed with the marvellous sublimity and transcendant beauty of King's College Chapel.[1] It is quite unparalleled. I think Gerard Douw's "Schoolmaster," in the Fitzwilliam Museum, the finest thing of the sort I ever saw;--whether you look at it at the common distance, or examine it with a glass, the wonder is equal. And that glorious picture of the Venus--so perfectly beautiful and perfectly innocent--as if beauty and innocence could not be dissociated! The French thing below is a curious instance of the inherent grossness of the French taste. Titian's picture is made quite bestial. [Footnote 1: Mr. Coleridge visited Cambridge upon the occasion of the scientific meeting there in June, 1833.--"My emotions," he said, "at revisiting the university were at first, overwhelming. I could not speak for an hour; yet my feelings were upon the whole very pleasurable, and I have not passed, of late years at least, three days of such great enjoyment and healthful excitement of mind and body. The bed on which I slept--and slept soundly too--was, as near as I can describe it, a couple of sacks full of potatoes tied together. I understand the young men think it hardens them. Truly I lay down at night a man, and arose in the morning a bruise." He told me "that the men were much amused at his saying that the fine old Quaker philosopher Dalton's face was like All Souls' College." The two persons of whom he spoke with the greatest interest were Mr. Faraday and Mr. Thirlwall; saying of the former, "that he seemed to have the true temperament of genius, that carrying-on of the spring and freshness of youthful, nay, boyish feelings, into the matured strength of manhood!" For, as Mr. Coleridge had long before expressed the same thought,--"To find no contradiction in the union of old and new; to contemplate the Ancient of Days and all his works with feelings as fresh as if all had then sprung forth at the first creative fiat, this characterizes the mind that feels the riddle of the world, and may help to unravel it. To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood; to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which everyday for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar; 'With sun and moon and stars throughout the year, And man and woman;'-- this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguish genius from talent. And therefore is it the prime merit of genius, and its most unequivocal mode of manifestation, so to represent familiar objects as to awaken in the minds of others a kindred feeling concerning them, and that freshness of sensation which is the constant accompaniment of mental, no less than of bodily, convalescence. Who has not a thousand times seen snow fall on water? Who has not watched it with a new feeling, from the time that he has read Burns's comparison of sensual pleasure 'To snow that falls upon a river, A moment white--then gone for ever!'" _Biog. Lit_. vol. i, p. 85.--ED.] * * * * * I think Sir James Scarlett's speech for the defendant, in the late action of Cobbett v. The Times, for a libel, worthy of the best ages of Greece or Rome; though, to be sure, some of his remarks could not have been very palatable to his clients. * * * * * I am glad you came in to punctuate my discourse, which I fear has gone on for an hour without any stop at all. _July_ 1. 1833. MANDEVILLE'S FABLE OF THE BEES.--BESTIAL THEORY.--CHARACTER OF BERTRAM.-- BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER'S DRAMAS.--�SCHYLUS, SOPHOCLES, EURIPIDES,--MILTON. If I could ever believe that Mandeville really meant any thing more by his Fable of the Bees than a _bonne bouche_ of solemn raillery, I should like to ask those man-shaped apes who have taken up his suggestions in earnest, and seriously maintained them as bases for a rational account of man and the world--how they explain the very existence of those dexterous cheats, those superior charlatans, the legislators and philosophers, who have known how to play so well upon the peacock-like vanity and follies of their fellow mortals. By the by, I wonder some of you lawyers (_sub rosa_, of course) have not quoted the pithy lines in Mandeville upon this registration question:-- "The lawyers, of whose art the basis Was raising feuds and splitting cases, _Oppos'd all Registers_, that cheats Might make more work with dipt estates; As 'twere unlawful that one's own Without a lawsuit should be known! They put off hearings wilfully, To finger the refreshing fee; And to defend a wicked cause Examined and survey'd the laws, As burglars shops and houses do, To see where best they may break through." There is great Hudibrastic vigour in these lines; and those on the doctors are also very terse. * * * * * Look at that head of Cline, by Chantrey! Is that forehead, that nose, those temples and that chin, akin to the monkey tribe? No, no. To a man of sensibility no argument could disprove the bestial theory so convincingly as a quiet contemplation of that fine bust. * * * * * I cannot agree with the solemn abuse which the critics have poured out upon Bertram in "All's Well that ends Well." He was a young nobleman in feudal times, just bursting into manhood, with all the feelings of pride of birth and appetite for pleasure and liberty natural to such a character so circumstanced. Of course he had never regarded Helena otherwise than as a dependant in the family; and of all that which she possessed of goodness and fidelity and courage, which might atone for her inferiority in other respects, Bertram was necessarily in a great measure ignorant. And after all, her _prima facie_ merit was the having inherited a prescription from her old father the doctor, by which she cures the king,--a merit, which supposes an extravagance of personal loyalty in Bertram to make conclusive to him in such a matter as that of taking a wife. Bertram had surely good reason to look upon the king's forcing him to marry Helena as a very tyrannical act. Indeed, it must be confessed that her character is not very delicate, and it required all Shakspeare's consummate skill to interest us for her; and he does this chiefly by the operation of the other characters,--the Countess, Lafeu, &c. We get to like Helena from their praising and commending her so much. * * * * * In Beaumont and Fletcher's tragedies the comic scenes are rarely so interfused amidst the tragic as to produce a unity of the tragic on the whole, without which the intermixture is a fault. In Shakspeare, this is always managed with transcendant skill. The Fool in Lear contributes in a very sensible manner to the tragic wildness of the whole drama. Beaumont and Fletcher's serious plays or tragedies are complete hybrids,--neither fish nor flesh,--upon any rules, Greek, Roman, or Gothic: and yet they are very delightful notwithstanding. No doubt, they imitate the ease of gentlemanly conversation better than Shakspeare, who was unable _not_ to be too much associated to succeed perfectly in this. When I was a boy, I was fondest of �schylus; in youth and middle age I preferred Euripides; now in my declining years I admire Sophocles. I can now at length see that Sophocles is the most perfect. Yet he never rises to the sublime simplicity of �schylus--simplicity of design, I mean--nor diffuses himself in the passionate outpourings of Euripides. I understand why the ancients called Euripides the most tragic of their dramatists: he evidently embraces within the scope of the tragic poet many passions,-- love, conjugal affection, jealousy, and so on, which Sophocles seems to have considered as incongruous with the ideal statuesqueness of the tragic drama. Certainly Euripides was a greater poet in the abstract than Sophocles. His choruses may be faulty as choruses, but how beautiful and affecting they are as odes and songs! I think the famous [Greek: Euippoy Xene], in Oedipus Coloneus[1] cold in comparison with many of the odes of Euripides, as that song of the chorus in the Hippolytus--[Greek: "Eoos," Eoos[2]] and so on; and I remember a choric ode in the Hecuba, which always struck me as exquisitely rich and finished; I mean, where the chorus speaks of Troy and the night of the capture.[3] There is nothing very surprising in Milton's preference of Euripides, though so unlike himself. It is very common--very natural--for men to _like_ and even admire an exhibition of power very different in kind from any thing of their own. No jealousy arises. Milton preferred Ovid too, and I dare say he admired both as a man of sensibility admires a lovely woman, with a feeling into which jealousy or envy cannot enter. With Aeschylus or Sophocles he might perchance have matched himself. In Euripides you have oftentimes a very near approach to comedy, and I hardly know any writer in whom you can find such fine models of serious and dignified conversation. [Footnote 1: Greek: Euíppoy, Xége, tmsde chosas Tchoy tà chzátista gãs esaula tdn àxgaeta Kolanón'--ch. t. l. v. 668] [Footnote 2: Greek: "Exos" Exos, ó chat' ômmátton s tázeos póthon eisagog glycheïan Psuchä cháriu oûs èpithtzateúsei mae moi totè sèn chachõ phaneiaes maeô ãrruthmos ëlthois--x.t.l v.527] [Footnote 3: I take it for granted that Mr. Coleridge alluded to the chorus,-- [Greek: Su men, _o patrhis Ilias t_on aporhth_et_on polis ouketi lexei toion El- lan_on nephos amphi se krhuptei, dorhi d_e, dorhi perhsan--k. t. l.] v. 899. Thou, then, oh, natal Troy! no more The city of the unsack'd shalt be, So thick from dark Achaia's shore The cloud of war hath covered thee. Ah! not again I tread thy plain-- The spear--the spear hath rent thy pride; The flame hath scarr'd thee deep and wide; Thy coronal of towers is shorn, And thou most piteous art--most naked and forlorn! I perish'd at the noon of night! When sleep had seal'd each weary eye; When the dance was o'er, And harps no more Rang out in choral minstrelsy. In the dear bower of delight My husband slept in joy; His shield and spear Suspended near, Secure he slept: that sailor band Full sure he deem'd no more should stand Beneath the walls of Troy. And I too, by the taper's light, Which in the golden mirror's haze Flash'd its interminable rays, Bound up the tresses of my hair, That I Love's peaceful sleep might share. I slept; but, hark! that war-shout dread, Which rolling through the city spread; And this the cry,--"When, Sons of Greece, When shall the lingering leaguer cease; When will ye spoil Troy's watch-tower high, And home return?"--I heard the cry, And, starting from the genial bed, Veiled, as a Doric maid, I fled, And knelt, Diana, at thy holy fane, A trembling suppliant--all in vain.] JULY 3. 1833. STYLE.--CAVALIER SLANG.--JUNTOS.--PROSE AND VERSE.--IMITATION AND COPY. The collocation of words is so artificial in Shakspeare and Milton, that you may as well think of pushing a[1] brick out of a wall with your forefinger, as attempt to remove a word out of any of their finished passages.[2] A good lecture upon style might he composed, by taking on the one hand the slang of L'Estrange, and perhaps, even of Roger North,[3] which became so fashionable after the Restoration as a mark of loyalty; and on the other, the Johnsonian magniloquence or the balanced metre of Junius; and then showing how each extreme is faulty, upon different grounds. It is quite curious to remark the prevalence of the Cavalier slang style in the divines of Charles the Second's time. Barrow could not of course adopt such a mode of writing throughout, because he could not in it have communicated his elaborate thinkings and lofty rhetoric; but even Barrow not unfrequently lets slip a phrase here and there in the regular Roger North way--much to the delight, no doubt, of the largest part of his audience and contemporary readers. See particularly, for instances of this, his work on the Pope's supremacy. South is full of it. The style of Junius is a sort of metre, the law of which is a balance of thesis and antithesis. When he gets out of this aphorismic metre into a sentence of five or six lines long, nothing can exceed the slovenliness of the English. Horne Tooke and a long sentence seem the only two antagonists that were too much for him. Still the antithesis of Junius is a real antithesis of images or thought; but the antithesis of Johnson is rarely more than verbal. The definition of good prose is--proper words in their proper places;--of good verse--the most proper words in their proper places. The propriety is in either case relative. The words in prose ought to express the intended meaning, and no more; if they attract attention to themselves, it is, in general, a fault. In the very best styles, as Southey's, you read page after page, understanding the author perfectly, without once taking notice of the medium of communication;--it is as if he had been speaking to you all the while. But in verse you must do more;--there the words, the _media_, must be beautiful, and ought to attract your notice--yet not so much and so perpetually as to destroy the unity which ought to result from the whole poem. This is the general rule, but, of course, subject to some modifications, according to the different kinds of prose or verse. Some prose may approach towards verse, as oratory, and therefore a more studied exhibition of the _media_ may be proper; and some verse may border more on mere narrative, and there the style should be simpler. But the great thing in poetry is, _quocunque modo_, to effect a unity of impression upon the whole; and a too great fulness and profusion of point in the parts will prevent this. Who can read with pleasure more than a hundred lines or so of Hudibras at one time? Each couplet or quatrain is so whole in itself, that you can't connect them. There is no fusion,--just as it is in Seneca. [Footnote 1: They led me to the sounding shore-- Heavens! as I passed the crowded way, My bleeding lord before me lay-- I saw--I saw--and wept no more, Till, as the homeward breezes bore The bark returning o'er the sea, My gaze, oh Ilion, turn'd on thee! Then, frantic, to the midnight air, I cursed aloud the adulterous pair:-- "They plunge me deep in exile's woe; They lay my country low: Their love--no love! but some dark spell, In vengeance breath'd, by spirit fell. Rise, hoary sea, in awful tide, And whelm that vessel's guilty pride; Nor e'er, in high Mycene's hall, Let Helen boast in peace of mighty Ilion's fall." The translation was given to me by Mr. Justice Coleridge.--ED.] [Footnote 2: "The amotion or transposition will alter the thought, or the feeling, or at least the tone. They are as pieces of mosaic work, from which you cannot strike the smallest block without making a hole in the picture."-- _Quarterly Review_, No. CIII. p. 7.] [Footnote 3: But Mr. Coleridge took a great distinction between North and the other writers commonly associated with him. In speaking of the Examen and the Life of Lord North, in the Friend, Mr. C. calls them "two of the most interesting biographical works in our language, both for the weight of the matter, and the _incuriosa felicitas_ of the style. The pages are all alive with the genuine idioms of our mother tongue. A fastidious taste, it is true, will find offence in the occasional vulgarisms, or what we now call _slang_, which not a few of our writers, shortly after the Restoration of Charles the Second, seem to have affected as a mark of loyalty. These instances, however, are but a trifling drawback. They are not _sought for_, as is too often and too plainly done by L'Estrange, Collyer, Tom Brown, and their imitators. North never goes out of his way, either to seek them, or to avoid them; and, in the main, his language gives us the very nerve, pulse, and sinew of a hearty, healthy, conversational _English_."--Vol. ii. p. 307.--ED.] * * * * * Imitation is the mesothesis of likeness and difference. The difference is as essential to it as the likeness; for without the difference, it would be copy or facsimile. But to borrow a term from astronomy, it is a librating mesothesis: for it may verge more to likeness as in painting, or more to difference, as in sculpture. JULY 4. 1833. DR. JOHNSON.--BOSWELL.--BURKE.--NEWTON.--MILTON. Dr. Johnson's fame now rests principally upon Boswell. It is impossible not to be amused with such a book. But his _bow-wow_ manner must have had a good deal to do with the effect produced;--for no one, I suppose, will set Johnson before Burke,--and Burke was a great and universal talker;--yet now we hear nothing of this except by some chance remarks in Boswell. The fact is, Burke, like all men of genius who love to talk at all, was very discursive and continuous; hence he is not reported; he seldom said the sharp short things that Johnson almost always did, which produce a more decided effect at the moment, and which are so much more easy to carry off.[1] Besides, as to Burke's testimony to Johnson's powers, you must remember that Burke was a great courtier; and after all, Burke said and wrote more than once that he thought Johnson greater in talking than writing, and greater in Boswell than in real life.[2] [Footnote 1: Burke, I am persuaded, was not so continuous a talker as Coleridge. Madame de Stael told a nephew of the latter, at Coppet, that Mr. C. was a master of monologue, _mais qu'il ne savait pas le dialogue_. There was a spice of vindictiveness in this, the exact history of which is not worth explaining. And if dialogue must be cut down in its meaning to small talk, I, for one, will admit that Coleridge, amongst his numberless qualifications, possessed it not. But I am sure that he could, when it suited him, converse as well as any one else, and with women he frequently did converse in a very winning and popular style, confining them, however, as well as he could, to the detail of facts or of their spontaneous emotions. In general, it was certainly otherwise. "You must not be surprised," he said to me, "at my talking so long to you--I pass so much of my time in pain and solitude, yet everlastingly thinking, that, when you or any other persons call on me, I can hardly help easing my mind by pouring forth some of the accumulated mass of reflection and feeling, upon an apparently interested recipient." But the principal reason, no doubt, was the habit of his intellect, which was under a law of discoursing upon all subjects with reference to ideas or ultimate ends. You might interrupt him when you pleased, and he was patient of every sort of conversation except mere personality, which he absolutely hated.--ED.] [Footnote 2: This was said, I believe, to the late Sir James Mackintosh.--ED.] * * * * * Newton _was_ a great man, but you must excuse me if I think that it would take many Newtons to make one Milton. _July_ 6. 1833. PAINTING.----MUSIC.----POETRY. It is a poor compliment to pay to a painter to tell him that his figure stands out of the canvass, or that you start at the likeness of the portrait. Take almost any daub, cut it out of the canvass, and place the figure looking into or out of a window, and any one may take it for life. Or take one of Mrs. Salmon's wax queens or generals, and you will very sensibly feel the difference between a copy, as they are, and an imitation, of the human form, as a good portrait ought to be. Look at that flower vase of Van Huysum, and at these wax or stone peaches and apricots! The last are likest to their original, but what pleasure do they give? None, except to children.[1] Some music is above me; most music is beneath me. I like Beethoven and Mozart--or else some of the aërial compositions of the elder Italians, as Palestrina[2] and Carissimi.--And I love Purcell. The best sort of music is what it should be--sacred; the next best, the military, has fallen to the lot of the Devil. Good music never tires me, nor sends me to sleep. I feel physically refreshed and strengthened by it, as Milton says he did. I could write as good verses now as ever I did, if I were perfectly free from vexations, and were in the _ad libitum_ hearing of fine music, which has a sensible effect in harmonizing my thoughts, and in animating and, as it were, lubricating my inventive faculty. The reason of my not finishing Christabel is not, that I don't know how to do it--for I have, as I always had, the whole plan entire from beginning to end in my mind; but I fear I could not carry on with equal success the execution of the idea, an extremely subtle and difficult one. Besides, after this continuation of Faust, which they tell me is very poor, who can have courage to attempt[3] a reversal of the judgment of all criticism against continuations? Let us except Don Quixote, however, although the second part of that transcendant work is not exactly _uno flatu_ with the original conception. [Footnote 1: This passage, and those following, will evidence, what the readers even of this little work must have seen, that Mr. Coleridge had an eye, almost exclusively, for the ideal or universal in painting and music. He knew nothing of the details of handling in the one, or of rules of composition in the other. Yet he was, to the best of my knowledge, an unerring judge of the merits of any serious effort in the fine arts, and detected the leading thought or feeling of the artist, with a decision which used sometimes to astonish me. Every picture which I have looked at in company with him, seems now, to my mind, translated into English. He would sometimes say, after looking for a minute at a picture, generally a modern one, "There's no use in stopping at this; for I see the painter had no idea. It is mere mechanical drawing. Come on; _here_ the artist _meant_ something for the mind." It was just the same with his knowledge of music. His appetite for what he thought good was literally inexhaustible. He told me he could listen to fine music for twelve hours together, and go away _refreshed_. But he required in music either thought or feeling; mere addresses to the sensual ear he could not away with; hence his utter distaste for Rossini, and his reverence for Beethoven and Mozart--ED.] [Footnote 2: Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina was born about 1529, and died in 1594. I believe he may be considered the founder or reformer of the Italian church music. His masses, motets, and hymns are tolerably well known amongst lovers of the old composers; but Mr. Coleridge used to speak with delight of some of Palestrina's madrigals which he heard at Rome. Giacomo Carissimi composed about the years 1640--1650. His style has been charged with effeminacy; but Mr. C. thought it very graceful and chaste. Henry Purcell needs no addition in England.--ED.] [Footnote 3: "The thing attempted in Christabel is the most difficult of execution in the whole field of romance--witchery by daylight--and the success is complete."--_Quarterly Review_, No. CIII. p. 29.] _July 8. 1833._ PUBLIC SCHOOLS. I am clear for public schools as the general rule; but for particular children private education may be proper. For the purpose of moving at ease in the best English society,--mind, I don't call the London exclusive clique the best English society,--the defect of a public education upon the plan of our great schools and Oxford and Cambridge is hardly to be supplied. But the defect is visible positively in some men, and only negatively in others. The first _offend_ you by habits and modes of thinking and acting directly attributable to their private education; in the others you only regret that the freedom and facility of the established and national mode of bringing up is not _added_ to their good qualities. * * * * * I more than doubt the expediency of making even elementary mathematics a part of the routine in the system of the great schools. It is enough, I think, that encouragement and facilities should be given; and I think more will be thus effected than by compelling all. Much less would I incorporate the German or French, or any modern language, into the school labours. I think that a great mistake.[1] [Footnote 1: "One constant blunder"--I find it so pencilled by Mr. C. on a margin--"of these New-Broomers--these Penny Magazine sages and philanthropists, in reference to our public schools, is to confine their view to what schoolmasters teach the boys, with entire oversight of all that the boys are excited to learn from each other and of themselves--with more geniality even because it is not a part of their compelled school knowledge. An Eton boy's knowledge of the St. Lawrence, Mississippi, Missouri, Orellana, &c. will be, generally, found in exact proportion to his knowledge of the Ilissus, Hebrus, Orontes, &c.; inasmuch as modern travels and voyages are more entertaining and fascinating than Cellarius; or Robinson Crusoe, Dampier, and Captain Cook, than the Periegesis. Compare the _lads_ themselves from Eton and Harrow, &c. with the alumni of the New-Broom Institution, and not the lists of school-lessons; and be that comparison the criterion.--ED.] August 4, 1833. SCOTT AND COLERIDGE. Dear Sir Walter Scott and myself were exact, but harmonious, opposites in this;--that every old ruin, hill, river, or tree called up in his mind a host of historical or biographical associations,--just as a bright pan of brass, when beaten, is said to attract the swarming bees;--whereas, for myself, notwithstanding Dr. Johnson, I believe I should walk over the plain of Marathon without taking more interest in it than in any other plain of similar features. Yet I receive as much pleasure in reading the account of the battle, in Herodotus, as any one can. Charles Lamb wrote an essay [1] on a man who lived in past time:--I thought of adding another to it on one who lived not in time at all, past, present, or future,--but beside or collaterally. [Footnote 1: I know not when or where; but are not all the writings of this exquisite genius the effusions of one whose spirit lived in past time? The place which Lamb holds, and will continue to hold, in English literature, seems less liable to interruption than that of any other writer of our day.--ED.] August 10. 1833. NERVOUS WEAKNESS.----HOOKER AND BULL.-----FAITH.----A POET'S NEED OF PRAISE. A PERSON, nervously weak, has a sensation of weakness which is as bad to him as muscular weakness. The only difference lies in the better chance of removal. * * * * * The fact, that Hooker and Bull, in their two palmary works respectively, are read in the Jesuit Colleges, is a curious instance of the power of mind over the most profound of all prejudices. There are permitted moments of exultation through faith, when we cease to feel our own emptiness save as a capacity for our Redeemer's fulness. * * * * * There is a species of applause scarcely less genial to a poet, than the vernal warmth to the feathered songsters during their nest-breeding or incubation; a sympathy, an expressed hope, that is the open air in which the poet breathes, and without which the sense of power sinks back on itself, like a sigh heaved up from the tightened chest of a sick man. _August_ 14. 1833. QUAKERS.--PHILANTHROPISTS.--JEWS. A quaker is made up of ice and flame. He has no composition, no mean temperature. Hence he is rarely interested about any public measure but he becomes a fanatic, and oversteps, in his irrespective zeal, every decency and every right opposed to his course. * * * * * I have never known a trader in philanthropy who was not wrong in heart somewhere or other. Individuals so distinguished are usually unhappy in their family relations,--men not benevolent or beneficent to individuals, but almost hostile to them, yet lavishing money and labour and time on the race, the abstract notion. The cosmopolitism which does not spring out of, and blossom upon, the deep-rooted stem of nationality or patriotism, is a spurious and rotten growth. * * * * * When I read the ninth, tenth, and eleventh chapters of the Epistle to the Romans to that fine old man Mr. ----, at Ramsgate, he shed tears. Any Jew of sensibility must be deeply impressed by them. * * * * * The two images farthest removed from each other which can be comprehended under one term, are, I think, Isaiah [1]--"Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth!"--and Levi of Holywell Street--"Old clothes!"--both of them Jews, you'll observe. _Immane quantum discrepant!_ [Footnote 1: I remember Mr. Coleridge used to call Isaiah his ideal of the Hebrew prophet. He studied that part of the Scripture with unremitting attention and most reverential admiration. Although Mr. C. was remarkably deficient in the technical memory of words, he could say a great deal of Isaiah by heart, and he delighted in pointing out the hexametrical rhythm of numerous passages in the English version:-- "Hear, O heavens, and give ear, | O earth: for the Lord hath spoken. I have nourished and brought up children, | and they have rebelled against me. The ox knoweth his owner, | and the ass his master's crib: But Israel doth not know, | my people doth not consider."--ED.] _August_ 15. 1833. SALLUST.--THUCYDIDES.--HERODOTUS.--GIBBON.--KEY TO THE DECLINE OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE. I consider the two works of Sallust which have come down to us entire, as romances founded on facts; no adequate causes are stated, and there is no real continuity of action. In Thucydides, you are aware from the beginning that you are reading the reflections of a man of great genius and experience upon the character and operation of the two great political principles in conflict in the civilized world in his time; his narrative of events is of minor importance, and it is evident that he selects for the purpose of illustration. It is Thucydides himself whom you read throughout under the names of Pericles, Nicias, &c. But in Herodotus it is just the reverse. He has as little subjectivity as Homer, and, delighting in the great fancied epic of events, he narrates them without impressing any thing as of his own mind upon the narrative. It is the charm of Herodotus that he gives you the spirit of his age--that of Thucydides, that he reveals to you his own, which was above the spirit of his age. The difference between the composition of a history in modern and ancient times is very great; still there are certain principles upon which the history of a modern period may be written, neither sacrificing all truth and reality, like Gibbon, nor descending into mere biography and anecdote. Gibbon's style is detestable, but his style is not the worst thing about him. His history has proved an effectual bar to all real familiarity with the temper and habits of imperial Rome. Few persons read the original authorities, even those which are classical; and certainly no distinct knowledge of the actual state of the empire can be obtained from Gibbon's rhetorical sketches. He takes notice of nothing but what may produce an effect; he skips on from eminence to eminence, without ever taking you through the valleys between: in fact, his work is little else but a disguised collection of all the splendid anecdotes which he could find in any book concerning any persons or nations from the Antonines to the capture of Constantinople. When I read a chapter in Gibbon, I seem to be looking through a luminous haze or fog:--figures come and go, I know not how or why, all larger than life, or distorted or discoloured; nothing is real, vivid, true; all is scenical, and, as it were, exhibited by candlelight. And then to call it a History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire! Was there ever a greater misnomer? I protest I do not remember a single philosophical attempt made throughout the work to fathom the ultimate causes of the decline or fall of that empire. How miserably deficient is the narrative of the important reign of Justinian! And that poor scepticism, which Gibbon mistook for Socratic philosophy, has led him to misstate and mistake the character and influence of Christianity in a way which even an avowed infidel or atheist would not and could not have done. Gibbon was a man of immense reading; but he had no philosophy; and he never fully understood the principle upon which the best of the old historians wrote. He attempted to imitate their artificial construction of the whole work--their dramatic ordonnance of the parts--without seeing that their histories were intended more as documents illustrative of the truths of political philosophy than as mere chronicles of events. The true key to the declension of the Roman empire--which is not to be found in all Gibbon's immense work--may be stated in two words:--the _imperial_ character overlaying, and finally destroying, the _national_ character. Rome under Trajan was an empire without a nation. _August_ 16. 1833. DR. JOHNSON'S POLITICAL PAMPHLETS.--TAXATION.-DIRECT REPRESENTATION.--- UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE.---RIGHT OF WOMEN TO VOTE----HORNE TOOKE.----ETYMOLOGY OF THE FINAL IVE. I like Dr. Johnson's political pamphlets better than any other parts of his works:-particularly his "Taxation no Tyranny" is very clever and spirited, though he only sees half of his subject, and that not in a very philosophical manner. Plunder--Tribute--Taxation--are the three gradations of action by the sovereign on the property of the subject. The first is mere violence, bounded by no law or custom, and is properly an act only between conqueror and conquered, and that, too, in the moment of victory. The second supposes law; but law proceeding only from, and dictated by, one party, the conqueror; law, by which he consents to forego his right of plunder upon condition of the conquered giving up to him, of their own accord, a fixed commutation. The third implies compact, and negatives any right to plunder,--taxation being professedly for the direct benefit of the party taxed, that, by paying a part, he may through the labours and superintendence of the sovereign be able to enjoy the rest in peace. As to the right to tax being only commensurate with direct representation, it is a fable, falsely and treacherously brought forward by those who know its hollowness well enough. You may show its weakness in a moment, by observing that not even the universal suffrage of the Benthamites avoids the difficulty;--for although it may be allowed to be contrary to decorum that women should legislate; yet there can be no reason why women should not choose their representatives to legislate;--and if it be said that they are merged in their husbands, let it be allowed where the wife has no separate property; but where she has a distinct taxable estate, in which her husband has no interest, what right can her husband have to choose for her the person whose vote may affect her separate interest?--Besides, at all events, an unmarried woman of age, possessing one thousand pounds a year, has surely as good a moral right to vote, if taxation without representation is tyranny, as any ten-pounder in the kingdom. The truth, of course, is, that direct representation is a chimera, impracticable in fact, and useless or noxious if practicable. Johnson had neither eye nor ear; for nature, therefore, he cared, as he knew, nothing. His knowledge of town life was minute; but even that was imperfect, as not being contrasted with the better life of the country. Horne Tooke was once holding forth on language, when, turning to me, he asked me if I knew what the meaning of the final _ive_ was in English words. I said I thought I could tell what he, Horne Tooke himself, thought. "Why, what?" said he. "_Vis_," I replied; and he acknowledged I had guessed right. I told him, however, that I could not agree with him; but believed that the final _ive_ came from _ick_--_vicus_, [Greek: --] a'txaq; the root denoting collectivity and community, and that it was opposed to the final _ing_, which signifies separation, particularity, and individual property, from _ingle_, a hearth, or one man's place or seat: [Greek: --] oi'xo?, _vicus_, denoted an aggregation of _ingles_. The alteration of the _c_ and _k_ of the root into the _v_ was evidently the work of the digammate power, and hence we find the _icus_ and _ivus_ indifferently as finals in Latin. The precise difference of the etymologies is apparent in these phrases:--- The lamb is spor_tive;_ that is, has a nature or habit of sporting: the lamb is sport_ing;_ that is, the animal is now performing a sport. Horne Tooke upon this said nothing to my etymology; but I believe he found that he could not make a fool of me, as he did of Godwin and some other of his butts. August 17. 1833. "THE LORD" IN THE ENGLISH VERSION OF THE PSALMS, ETC.----SCOTCH KIRK AND IRVING. It is very extraordinary that, in our translation of the Psalms, which professes to be from the Hebrew, the name Jehovah--[Hebrew: --] 'O -- The Being, or God--should be omitted, and, instead of it, the [Hebrew: --] Ktlpio?, or Lord, of the Septuagint be adopted. The Alexandrian Jews had a superstitious dread of writing the name of God, and put [Greek: Kurhios] not as a translation, but as a mere mark or sign--every one readily understanding for what it really stood. We, who have no such superstition, ought surely to restore the Jehovah, and thereby bring out in the true force the overwhelming testimony of the Psalms to the divinity of Christ, the Jehovah or manifested God.[1] [Footnote 1: I find the same remark in the late most excellent Bishop Sandford's diary, under date 17th December, 1827:--"[Greek: CHairhete en t_o Kurhi_o Kurhios] idem significat quod [Hebrew: --] apud Hebraeos. Hebraei enim nomine [Hebrew: --] sanctissimo nempe Dei nomine, nunquam in colloquio utebantur, sed vice ejus [Hebrew: --] pronuntiabant, quod LXX per [Greek: Kurhios] exprimebant."--_Remains of Bishop Sandford_, vol. i. p. 207. Mr. Coleridge saw this work for the first time many months after making the observation in the text. Indeed it was the very last book he ever read. He was deeply interested in the picture drawn of the Bishop, and said that the mental struggles and bodily sufferings indicated in the Diary had been his own for years past. He conjured me to peruse the Memoir and the Diary with great care:--"I have received," said he, "much spiritual comfort and strength from the latter. O! were my faith and devotion, like my sufferings, equal to that good man's! He felt, as I do, how deep a depth is prayer in faith." In connection with the text, I may add here, that Mr. C. said, that long before he knew that the late Bishop Middleton was of the same opinion, he had deplored the misleading inadequacy of our authorized version of the expression, [Greek: pr_ototokos pas_es ktise_os] in the Epistle to the Colossians, i. 15.: [Greek: hos estin eik_on tou THeou tou aoratou, pr_ototokos pas_es ktise_os.] He rendered the verse in these words:--"Who is the manifestation of God the invisible, the begotten antecedently to all creation;" observing, that in [Greek: pr_ototokos] there was a double superlative of priority, and that the natural meaning of "_first-born of every creature_,"--the language of our version,--afforded no premiss for the causal [Greek: hoti] in the next verse. The same criticism may be found in the Stateman's Manual, p. 56. n.; and see Bishop Sandford's judgment to the same effect, vol. i. p. 165.--ED.] * * * * * I cannot understand the conduct of the Scotch Kirk with regard to poor Irving. They might with ample reason have visited him for the monstrous indecencies of those exhibitions of the spirit;--perhaps the Kirk would not have been justified in overlooking such disgraceful breaches of decorum; but to excommunicate him on account of his language about Christ's body was very foolish. Irving's expressions upon this subject are ill judged, inconvenient, in had taste, and in terms false: nevertheless his apparent meaning, such as it is, is orthodox. Christ's body--as mere body, or rather carcass (for body is an associated word), was no more capable of sin or righteousness than mine or yours;--that his humanity had a capacity of sin, follows from its own essence. He was of like passions as we, and was tempted. How could he be tempted, if he had no formal capacity of being seduced? It is Irving's error to use declamation, high and passionate rhetoric, not introduced and pioneered by calm and clear logic, which is--to borrow a simile, though with a change in the application, from the witty-wise, but not always wisely-witty, Fuller--like knocking a nail into a board, without wimbling a hole for it, and which then either does not enter, or turns crooked, or splits the wood it pierces. August 18. 1833. MILTON'S EGOTISM.--CLAUDIAN.--STERNE. In the Paradise Lost--indeed in every one of his poems--it is Milton himself whom you see; his Satan, his Adam, his Raphael, almost his Eve--are all John Milton; and it is a sense of this intense egotism that gives me the greatest pleasure in reading Milton's works. The egotism of such a man is a revelation of spirit. * * * * * Claudian deserves more attention than is generally paid to him. He is the link between the old classic and the modern way of thinking in verse. You will observe in him an oscillation between the objective poetry of the ancients and the subjective mood of the moderns. His power of pleasingly reproducing the same thought in different language is remarkable, as it is in Pope. Read particularly the Phoenix, and see how the single image of renascence is varied.[1] [Footnote 1: Mr. Coleridge referred to Claudian's first Idyll:--"Oceani summo circumfluus cequore lucus Trans Indos Eurumque viret," &c. See the lines-- "Hic neque concepto fetu, nec semine surgit; Sed pater est prolesque sibi, nulloque creante Emeritos artus foecunda morte reformat, Et petit alternam totidem per funera vitam. ... Et cumulum texens pretiosa fronde Sabaeum Componit bustumque sibi partumque futurum. ... O senium positure rogo, falsisque sepulcris Natales habiture vices, qui saepe renasci Exitio, proprioque soles pubescere leto, Accipe principium rursus. ... Parturiente rogo-- ... Victuri cineres-- ... Qm fuerat genitor, natus nunc prosilit idem, Succeditque novus--- ... O felix, haeresque tui! quo solvimur omnes, Hoc tibi suppeditat vires; praebetur origo Per cinerem; moritur te non pereunte senectus."--ED.] * * * * * I think highly of Sterne--that is, of the first part of Tristram Shandy: for as to the latter part about the widow Wadman, it is stupid and disgusting; and the Sentimental Journey is poor sickly stuff. There is a great deal of affectation in Sterne, to be sure; but still the characters of Trim and the two Shandies[1] are most individual and delightful. Sterne's morals are bad, but I don't think they can do much harm to any one whom they would not find bad enough before. Besides, the oddity and erudite grimaces under which much of his dirt is hidden take away the effect for the most part; although, to be sure, the book is scarcely readable by women. [Footnote 1: Mr. Coleridge considered the character of the father, the elder Shandy, as by much the finer delineation of the two. I fear his low opinion of the Sentimental Journey will not suit a thorough Sterneist; but I could never get him to modify his criticism. He said, "The oftener you read Sterne, the more clearly will you perceive the _great_ difference between Tristram Shandy and the Sentimental Journey. There is truth and reality in the one, and little beyond a clever affectation in the other."--ED.] August 20. 1833. HUMOUR AND GENIUS.--GREAT POETS GOOD MEN.--DICTION OF THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENT VERSION.--HEBREW.--VOWELS AND CONSONANTS. Men of humour are always in some degree men of genius; wits are rarely so, although a man of genius may amongst other gifts possess wit, as Shakspeare. * * * * * Genius must have talent as its complement and implement, just as in like manner imagination must have fancy. In short, the higher intellectual powers can only act through a corresponding energy of the lower. * * * * * Men of genius are rarely much annoyed by the company of vulgar people, because they have a power of looking _at_ such persons as objects of amusement of another race altogether. * * * * * I quite agree with Strabo, as translated by Ben Jonson in his splendid dedication of the Fox[1]--that there can be no great poet who is not a good man, though not, perhaps, a _goody_ man. His heart must be pure; he must have learned to look into his own heart, and sometimes to look _at_ it; for how can he who is ignorant of his own heart know any thing of, or be able to move, the heart of any one else? [Footnote 1: [Greek: 'H de (arhet_e) poi_etou synezeyktai t_e tou anthrh_opou kai ouch oion te agathon genesthai poi_et_en, m_e prhoterhon gen_ethenta angrha agathon.]--Lib. I. p. 33. folio. "For, if men will impartially, and not asquint, look toward the offices and function of a poet, they will easily conclude to themselves the impossibility of any man's being the good poet without first being a good man."] * * * * * I think there is a perceptible difference in the elegance and correctness of the English in our versions of the Old and New Testament. I cannot yield to the authority of many examples of usages which may be alleged from the New Testament version. St. Paul is very often most inadequately rendered, and there are slovenly phrases which would never have come from Ben Jonson or any other good prose writer of that day. * * * * * Hebrew is so simple, and its words are so few and near the roots, that it is impossible to keep up any adequate knowledge of it without constant application. The meanings of the words are chiefly traditional. The loss of Origen's Heptaglott Bible, in which he had written out the Hebrew words in Greek characters, is the heaviest which biblical literature has ever experienced. It would have fixed the sounds as known at that time. * * * * * Brute animals have the vowel sounds; man only can utter consonants. It is natural, therefore, that the consonants should be marked first, as being the framework of the word; and no doubt a very simple living language might be written quite intelligibly to the natives without any vowel sounds marked at all. The words would be traditionally and conventionally recognized as in short hand--thus--_Gd crtd th Hvn nd th Rth_. I wish I understood Arabic; and yet I doubt whether to the European philosopher or scholar it is worth while to undergo the immense labour of acquiring that or any other Oriental tongue, except Hebrew. _August_ 23. 1833. GREEK ACCENT AND QUANTITY. The distinction between accent and quantity is clear, and was, no doubt, observed by the ancients in the recitation of verse. But I believe such recitation to have been always an artificial thing, and that the common conversation was entirely regulated by accent. I do not think it possible to _talk_ any language without confounding the quantity of syllables with their high or low tones[1]; although you may _sing_ or _recitative_ the difference well enough. Why should the marks of accent have been considered exclusively necessary for teaching the pronunciation to the Asiatic or African Hellenist, if the knowledge of the acuted syllable did not also carry the stress of time with it? If _[Greek: **anthropos]_ was to be pronounced in common conversation with a perceptible distinction of the length of the penultima as well as of the elevation of the antepenultima, why was not that long quantity also marked? It was surely as important an ingredient in the pronunciation as the accent. And although the letter omega might in such a word show the quantity, yet what do you say to such words as [Greek: lelonchasi, tupsasa], and the like--the quantity of the penultima of which is not marked to the eye at all? Besides, can we altogether disregard the practice of the modern Greeks? Their confusion of accent and quantity in verse is of course a barbarism, though a very old one, as the _versus politici_ of John Tzetzes [2] in the twelfth century and the Anacreontics prefixed to Proclus will show; but these very examples prove _a fortiori_ what the common pronunciation in prose then was. [Footnote 1: This opinion, I need not say, is in direct opposition to the conclusion of Foster and Mitford, and scarcely reconcilable with the apparent meaning of the authorities from the old critics and grammarians. Foster's opponent was for rejecting the accents and attending only to the syllabic quantity;--Mr. C. would, _in prose_, attend to the accents only as indicators of the quantity, being unable to conceive any practical distinction between time and tone in common speech. Yet how can we deal with the authority of Dionysius of Halicarnassus alone, who, on the one hand, discriminates quantity so exquisitely as to make four degrees of _shortness_ in the penultimates of _[Greek: --hodos hr odos, tz opos]_ and _[Greek: --stz ophos]_, and this expressly _[Greek: --eu logois psilois]_, or plain prose, as well as in verse; and on the other hand declares, according to the evidently correct interpretation of the passage, that the difference between music and ordinary speech consists in the number only, and not in the quality, of tones:--_[Greek: **to Poso diallattousa taes su odais kahi oznauois, kahi ouchi to Poio_. (Pezhi Sun. c. 11.?]) The extreme sensibility of the Athenian ear to the accent in prose is, indeed, proved by numerous anecdotes, one of the most amusing of which, though, perhaps, not the best authenticated as a fact, is that of Demosthenes in the Speech for the Crown, asking, "Whether, O Athenians, does Aeschines appear to you to be the mercenary (_[Greek: **misthothos]_} of Alexander, or his guest or friend (_[Greek: **xenos]_)?" It is said that he pronounced _[Greek: **misthothos]_ with a false accent on the antepenultima, as _[Greek: **misthotos]_, and that upon the audience immediately crying out, by way of correction, _[Greek: **misthothos]_, with an emphasis, the orator continued coolly,--_[Greek: **achoueis a legousi]_--"You yourself hear what they say!" Demosthenes is also said, whether affectedly, or in ignorance, to have sworn in some speech by _[Greek: Asklaepios]_, throwing the accent falsely on the antepenultima, and that, upon being interrupted for it, he declared, in his justification, that the pronunciation was proper, for that the divinity was _[Greek: aepios]_, mild. The expressions in Plutarch are very striking:--"[Greek: **Thozuxon ekinaesen, omnue dhe kahi thon' Asklaepion, pzopasoxunon' Asklaepion, kai pazedeiknuen autohn ozthos legonta' einai gahz tohn thehon aepion' kahi epi outo polakis hethozuzaethae." Dec. Orat._--Ed.] [Footnote 2: See his Chiliads. The sort of verses to which Mr. Coleridge alluded are the following, which those who consider the scansion to be accentual, take for tetrameter catalectic iambics, like-- [Greek: ----] ( _Chil_. I. I 'll climb the frost | y mountains high |, and there I 'll coin | the weather; I'll tear the rain | bow from the sky |, and tie both ends | together. Some critics, however, maintain these verses to be trochaics, although very loose and faulty. See Foster, p. 113. A curious instance of the early confusion of accent and quantity may be seen in Prudentius, who shortens the penultima in _eremus_ and _idola_, from [Greek: ezaemos] and [Greek: eidola]. Cui jejuna _eremi_ saxa loquacibus Exundant scatebris, &c. _Cathemer_. V. 89. --cognatumque malum, pigmenta, Camoenas, _Idola_, conflavit fallendi trina potestas. _Cont. Symm_. 47.--ED.] _August 24. 1833._ CONSOLATION IN DISTRESS.---MOCK EVANGELICALS.--AUTUMN DAY. I am never very forward in offering spiritual consolation to any one in distress or disease. I believe that such resources, to be of any service, must be self-evolved in the first instance. I am something of the Quaker's mind in this, and am inclined to _wait_ for the spirit. * * * * * The most common effect of this mock evangelical spirit, especially with young women, is self-inflation and busy-bodyism. * * * * * How strange and awful is the synthesis of life and death in the gusty winds and falling leaves of an autumnal day! August 25. 1833. ROSETTI ON DANTE.--LAUGHTER: FARCE AND TRAGEDY. Rosetti's view of Dante's meaning is in great part just, but he has pushed it beyond all bounds of common sense. How could a poet--and such a poet as Dante--have written the details of the allegory as conjectured by Rosetti? The boundaries between his allegory and his pure picturesque are plain enough, I think, at first reading. * * * * * To resolve laughter into an expression of contempt is contrary to fact, and laughable enough. Laughter is a convulsion of the nerves; and it seems as if nature cut short the rapid thrill of pleasure on the nerves by a sudden convulsion of them, to prevent the sensation becoming painful. Aristotle's definition is as good as can be:--surprise at perceiving any thing out of its usual place, when the unusualness is not accompanied by a sense of serious danger. _Such_ surprise is always pleasurable; and it is observable that surprise accompanied with circumstances of danger becomes tragic. Hence farce may often border on tragedy; indeed, farce is nearer tragedy in its essence than comedy is. August 28. 1833. BARON VON HUMBOLDT.--MODERN DIPLOMATISTS. Baron von Humboldt, brother of the great traveller, paid me the following compliment at Rome:--"I confess, Mr. Coleridge, I had my suspicions that you were here in a political capacity of some sort or other; but upon reflection I acquit you. For in Germany and, I believe, elsewhere on the Continent, it is generally understood that the English government, in order to divert the envy and jealousy of the world at the power, wealth, and ingenuity of your nation, makes a point, as a _ruse de guerre_, of sending out none but fools of gentlemanly birth and connections as diplomatists to the courts abroad. An exception is, perhaps, sometimes made for a clever fellow, if sufficiently libertine and unprincipled." Is the case much altered now, do you know? * * * * * What dull coxcombs your diplomatists at home generally are. I remember dining at Mr. Frere's once in company with Canning and a few other interesting men. Just before dinner Lord ---- called on Frere, and asked himself to dinner. From the moment of his entry he began to talk to the whole party, and in French--all of us being genuine English--and I was told his French was execrable. He had followed the Russian army into France, and seen a good deal of the great men concerned in the war: of none of those things did he say a word, but went on, sometimes in English and sometimes in French, gabbling about cookery and dress and the like. At last he paused for a little--and I said a few words remarking how a great image may be reduced to the ridiculous and contemptible by bringing the constituent parts into prominent detail, and mentioned the grandeur of the deluge and the preservation of life in Genesis and the Paradise Lost [1], and the ludicrous effect produced by Drayton's description in his Noah's Flood:-- "And now the beasts are walking from the wood, As well of ravine, as that chew the cud. The king of beasts his fury doth suppress, And to the Ark leads down the lioness; The bull for his beloved mate doth low, And to the Ark brings on the fair-eyed cow," &c. Hereupon Lord ---- resumed, and spoke in raptures of a picture which he had lately seen of Noah's Ark, and said the animals were all marching two and two, the little ones first, and that the elephants came last in great majesty and filled up the fore-ground. "Ah! no doubt, my Lord," said Canning; "your elephants, wise fellows! staid behind to pack up their trunks!" This floored the ambassador for half an hour. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries almost all our ambassadors were distinguished men. [2] Read Lloyd's State Worthies. The third-rate men of those days possessed an infinity of knowledge, and were intimately versed not only in the history, but even in the heraldry, of the countries in which they were resident. Men were almost always, except for mere compliments, chosen for their dexterity and experience--not, as now, by parliamentary interest. [Footnote 1: Genesis, c. vi. vii. Par. Lost, book xi. v. 728, &c.] [Footnote 2: Yet Diego de Mendoza, the author of Lazarillo de Tormes, himself a veteran diplomatist, describes his brethren of the craft, and their duties, in the reigns of Charles the Emperor and Philip the Second, in the following terms:-- O embajadores, puros majaderos, Que si los reyes quieren engañar, Comienzan por nosotros los primeros. _Nuestro mayor negocio es, no dañar, Y jamas hacer cosa, ni dezilla, Que no corramos riesgo de enseñar._ What a pity it is that modern diplomatists, who, for the most part, very carefully observe the precept contained in the last two lines of this passage, should not equally bear in mind the importance of the preceding remark--_that their principal business is just to do no mischief_.--ED.] * * * * * The sure way to make a foolish ambassador is to bring him up to it. What can an English minister abroad really want but an honest and bold heart, a love for his country and the ten commandments? Your art diplomatic is stuff:--no truly greatly man now would negotiate upon any such shallow principles. August 30. 1833. MAN CANNOT BE STATIONARY.--FATALISM AND PROVIDENCE.--SYMPATHY IN JOY. If a man is not rising upwards to be an angel, depend upon it, he is sinking downwards to be a devil. He cannot stop at the beast. The most savage of men are not beasts; they are worse, a great deal worse. * * * * * The conduct of the Mohammedan and Western nations on the subject of contagious plague illustrates the two extremes of error on the nature of God's moral government of the world. The Turk changes Providence into fatalism; the Christian relies upon it--when he has nothing else to rely on. He does not practically rely upon it at all. * * * * * For compassion a human heart suffices; but for full and adequate sympathy with joy an angel's only. And ever remember, that the more exquisite and delicate a flower of joy, the tenderer must be the hand that plucks it. _September_ 2. 1833. CHARACTERISTIC TEMPERAMENT OF NATIONS.--GREEK PARTICLES.--LATIN COMPOUNDS.- -PROPERTIUS.--TIBULLUS.--LUCAN.--STATIUS.--VALERIUS FLACCUS.--CLAUDIAN.-- PERSIUS.------PRUDENTIUS.--HERMESIANAX. The English affect stimulant nourishment--beef and beer. The French, excitants, irritants--nitrous oxide, alcohol, champagne. The Austrians, sedatives--hyoscyamus. The Russians, narcotics--opium, tobacco, and beng. * * * * * It is worth particular notice how the style of Greek oratory, so full, in the times of political independence, of connective particles, some of passion, some of sensation only, and escaping the classification of mere grammatical logic, became, in the hands of the declaimers and philosophers of the Alexandrian era, and still later, entirely deprived of this peculiarity. So it was with Homer as compared with Nonnus, Tryphiodorus, and the like. In the latter there are in the same number of lines fewer words by one half than in the Iliad. All the appoggiaturas of time are lost. All the Greek writers after Demosthenes and his contemporaries, what are they but the leavings of tyranny, in which a few precious things seem sheltered by the mass of rubbish! Yet, whenever liberty began but to hope and strive, a Polybius appeared. Theocritus is almost the only instance I know of a man of true poetic genius nourishing under a tyranny. The old Latin poets attempted to compound as largely as the Greek; hence in Ennius such words as _belligerentes_, &c. In nothing did Virgil show his judgment more than in rejecting these, except just where common usage had sanctioned them, as _omnipotens_ and a few more. He saw that the Latin was too far advanced in its formation, and of too rigid a character, to admit such composition or agglutination. In this particular respect Virgil's Latin is very admirable and deserving preference. Compare it with the language of Lucan or Statius, and count the number of words used in an equal number of lines, and observe how many more short words Virgil has. * * * * * I cannot quite understand the grounds of the high admiration which the ancients expressed for Propertius, and I own that Tibullus is rather insipid to me. Lucan was a man of great powers; but what was to be made of such a shapeless fragment of party warfare, and so recent too! He had fancy rather than imagination, and passion rather than fancy. His taste was wretched, to be sure; still the Pharsalia is in my judgment a very wonderful work for such a youth as Lucan[1] was. I think Statius a truer poet than Lucan, though he is very extravagant sometimes. Valerius Flaccus is very pretty in particular passages. I am ashamed to say, I have never read Silius Italicus. Claudian I recommend to your careful perusal, in respect of his being properly the first of the moderns, or at least the transitional link between the Classic and the Gothic mode of thought. I call Persius hard--not obscure. He had a bad style; but I dare say, if he had lived[2], he would have learned to express himself in easier language. There are many passages in him of exquisite felicity, and his vein of thought is manly and pathetic. Prudentius[3] is curious for this,--that you see how Christianity forced allegory into the place of mythology. Mr. Frere [Greek: ho philokalos, ho kalokagathos] used to esteem the Latin Christian poets of Italy very highly, and no man in our times was a more competent judge than he. [Footnote 1: Lucan died by the command of Nero, A.D. 65, in his twenty-sixth year. I think this should be printed at the beginning of every book of the Pharsalia.--ED.] [Footnote 2: Aulus Persius Flaccus died in the 30th year of his age, A.D. 62.--ED.] [Footnote 3: Aurelius Prudentius Clemens was born A.D. 348, in Spain.--ED.] * * * * * How very pretty are those lines of Hermesianax in Athenaeus about the poets and poetesses of Greece![1] [Footnote 1: See the fragment from the Leontium:-- [Greek: HOi_en men philos huios an_egagen Oiagrhoio Agrhiop_en, THr_essan steilamenos kithar_en Aidothen k. t. l.] _Athen_. xiii. s. 71--ED] September 4. 1833. DESTRUCTION OF JERUSALEM.--EPIC POEM.--GERMAN AND ENGLISH.--MODERN TRAVELS.--PARADISE LOST. I have already told you that in my opinion the destruction of Jerusalem is the only subject now left for an epic poem of the highest kind. Yet, with all its great capabilities, it has this one grand defect--that, whereas a poem, to be epic, must have a personal interest,--in the destruction of Jerusalem no genius or skill could possibly preserve the interest for the hero from being merged in the interest for the event. The fact is, the event itself is too sublime and overwhelming. * * * * * In my judgment, an epic poem must either be national or mundane. As to Arthur, you could not by any means make a poem on him national to Englishmen. What have _we_ to do with him? Milton saw this, and with a judgment at least equal to his genius, took a mundane theme--one common to all mankind. His Adam and Eve are all men and women inclusively. Pope satirizes Milton for making God the Father talk like a school divine.[1] Pope was hardly the man to criticize Milton. The truth is, the judgment of Milton in the conduct of the celestial part of his story is very exquisite. Wherever God is represented as directly acting as Creator, without any exhibition of his own essence, Milton adopts the simplest and sternest language of the Scriptures. He ventures upon no poetic diction, no amplification, no pathos, no affection. It is truly the Voice or the Word of the Lord coming to, and acting on, the subject Chaos. But, as some personal interest was demanded for the purposes of poetry, Milton takes advantage of the dramatic representation of God's address to the Son, the Filial Alterity, and in _those addresses_ slips in, as it were by stealth, language of affection, or thought, or sentiment. Indeed, although Milton was undoubtedly a high Arian in his mature life, he does in the necessity of poetry give a greater objectivity to the Father and the Son, than he would have justified in argument. He was very wise in adopting the strong anthropomorphism of the Hebrew Scriptures at once. Compare the Paradise Lost with Klopstock's Messiah, and you will learn to appreciate Milton's judgment and skill quite as much as his genius. [Footnote 1: "Milton's strong pinion now not Heav'n can bound, Now, serpent-like, in prose he sweeps the ground; In quibbles angel and archangel join, And God the Father turns a school divine." 1 Epist. 2d book of Hor. v. 99.] * * * * * The conquest of India by Bacchus might afford scope for a very brilliant poem of the fancy and the understanding. * * * * * It is not that the German can express external imagery more _fully_ than English; but that it can flash more images _at once_ on the mind than the English can. As to mere power of expression, I doubt whether even the Greek surpasses the English. Pray, read a very pleasant and acute dialogue in Schlegel's Athenaeum between a German, a Greek, a Roman, Italian, and a Frenchman, on the merits of their respective languages. * * * * * I wish the naval and military officers who write accounts of their travels would just spare us their sentiment. The Magazines introduced this cant. Let these gentlemen read and imitate the old captains and admirals, as Dampier, &c. October 15. 1833. THE TRINITY.--INCARNATION.--REDEMPTION.--EDUCATION. The Trinity is the idea: the Incarnation, which implies the Fall, is the fact: the Redemption is the mesothesis of the two--that is--the religion. * * * * * If you bring up your children in a way which puts them out of sympathy with the religious feelings of the nation in which they live, the chances are, that they will ultimately turn out ruffians or fanatics--and one as likely as the other. October 23. 1833. ELEGY.--LAVACRUM PALLADOS.--GREEK AND LATIN PENTAMETER.--MILTON'S LATIN POEMS.--POETICAL FILTER.--GRAY AND COTTON. Elegy is the form of poetry natural to the reflective mind. It _may_ treat of any subject, but it must treat of no subject _for itself_; but always and exclusively with reference to the poet himself. As he will feel regret for the past or desire for the future, so sorrow and love become the principal themes of elegy. Elegy presents every thing as lost and gone, or absent and future. The elegy is the exact opposite of the Homeric epic, in which all is purely external and objective, and the poet is a mere voice. The true lyric ode is subjective too; but then it delights to present things as actually existing and visible, although associated with the past, or coloured highly by the subject of the ode itself. * * * * * I think the Lavacrum Pallados of Callimachus very beautiful indeed, especially that part about the mother of Tiresias and Minerva.[1] I have a mind to try how it would bear translation; but what metre have we to answer in feeling to the elegiac couplet of the Greeks? I greatly prefer the Greek rhythm of the short verse to Ovid's, though, observe, I don't dispute his taste with reference to the genius of his own language. Augustus Schlegel gave me a copy of Latin elegiacs on the King of Prussia's going down the Rhine, in which he had almost exclusively adopted the manner of Propertius. I thought them very elegant. [Footnote 1: Greek: Paides, Athanaia numphan mian en poka Th_ezais po_olu ti kai pezi d_e philato tan hetezan, mateza Teizesiao, kai oupoka ch_ozis egento k.t.l. v 57, &c.] * * * * * You may find a few minute faults in Milton's Latin verses; but you will not persuade me that, if these poems had come down to us _as_ written in the age of Tiberius, we should not have considered them to be very beautiful. * * * * * I once thought of making a collection,--to be called "The Poetical Filter,"--upon the principle of simply omitting from the old pieces of lyrical poetry which we have, those parts in which the whim or the bad taste of the author or the fashion of his age prevailed over his genius. You would be surprised at the number of exquisite _wholes_ which might be made by this simple operation, and, perhaps, by the insertion of a single line or half a line, out of poems which are now utterly disregarded on account of some odd or incongruous passages in them;--just as whole volumes of Wordsworth's poems were formerly neglected or laughed at, solely because of some few wilfulnesses, if I may so call them, of that great man--whilst at the same time five sixths of his poems would have been admired, and indeed popular, if they had appeared without those drawbacks, under the name of Byron or Moore or Campbell, or any other of the fashionable favourites of the day. But he has won the battle now, ay! and will wear the crown, whilst English is English. * * * * * I think there is something very majestic in Gray's Installation Ode; but as to the Bard and the rest of his lyrics, I must say I think them frigid and artificial. There is more real lyric feeling in Cotton's Ode on Winter.[1] [Footnote 1: Let me borrow Mr. Wordsworth's account of, and quotation from, this poem:-- "Finally, I will refer to Cotton's 'Ode upon Winter,' an admirable composition, though stained with some peculiarities of the age in which he lived, for a general illustration of the characteristics of Fancy. The middle part of this ode contains a most lively description of the entrance of Winter, with his retinue, as 'a palsied king,' and yet a military monarch, advancing for conquest with his army; the several bodies of which, and their arms and equipments, are described with a rapidity of detail, and a profusion of _fanciful_ comparisons, which indicate, on the part of the poet, extreme activity of intellect, and a correspondent hurry of delightful feeling. He retires from the foe into his fortress, where-- a magazine Of sovereign juice is cellared in; Liquor that will the siege maintain Should Phoebus ne'er return again." Though myself a water-drinker, I cannot resist the pleasure of transcribing what follows, as an instance still more happy of Fancy employed in the treatment of feeling than, in its preceding passages, the poem supplies of her management of forms. 'Tis that, that gives the Poet rage, And thaws the gelly'd blood of Age; Matures the Young, restores the Old, And makes the fainting coward bold. It lays the careful head to rest, Calms palpitations in the breast, Renders our lives' misfortune sweet; * * * * * Then let the _chill_ Scirocco blow, And gird us round with hills of snow; Or else go whistle to the shore, And make the hollow mountains roar: Whilst we together jovial sit Careless, and crowned with mirth and wit; Where, though bleak winds confine us home, Our fancies round the world shall roam. We'll think of all the friends we know, And drink to all worth drinking to; When, having drunk all thine and mine, We rather shall want healths than wine. But where friends fail us, we'll supply Our friendships with our charity; Men that remote in sorrows live Shall by our lusty brimmers thrive. We'll drink the wanting into wealth, And those that languish into health, Th' afflicted into joy, th' opprest Into security and rest. The worthy in disgrace shall find Favour return again more kind, And in restraint who stifled lie Shall taste the air of liberty. The brave shall triumph in success, The lovers shall have mistresses, Poor unregarded virtue, praise, And the neglected poet, bays. Thus shall our healths do others good, Whilst we ourselves do all we would; For, freed from envy and from care, What would we be but what we are? _Preface to the editions of Mr. W.'s Poems, in_ 1815 and 1820.--ED.] _November_ 1. 1833. HOMERIC HEROES IN SHAKSPEARE.--DRYDEN.--DR. JOHNSON.--SCOTT'S NOVELS.-- SCOPE OF CHRISTIANITY. Compare Nestor, Ajax, Achilles, &c. in the Troilus and Cressida of Shakspeare with their namesakes in the Iliad. The old heroes seem all to have been at school ever since. I scarcely know a more striking instance of the strength and pregnancy of the Gothic mind. Dryden's genius was of that sort which catches fire by its own motion; his chariot wheels _get_ hot by driving fast. * * * * * Dr. Johnson seems to have been really more powerful in discoursing _vivâ voce_ in conversation than with his pen in hand. It seems as if the excitement of company called something like reality and consecutiveness into his reasonings, which in his writings I cannot see. His antitheses are almost always verbal only; and sentence after sentence in the Rambler may be pointed out to which you cannot attach any definite meaning whatever. In his political pamphlets there is more truth of expression than in his other works, for the same reason that his conversation is better than his writings in general. He was more excited and in earnest. * * * * * When I am very ill indeed, I can read Scott's novels, and they are almost the only books I can then _read_. I cannot at such times read the Bible; my mind reflects on it, but I can't bear the open page. * * * * * Unless Christianity be viewed and felt in a high and comprehensive way, how large a portion of our intellectual and moral nature does it leave without object and action! * * * * * Let a young man separate I from Me as far as he possibly can, and remove Me till it is almost lost in the remote distance. "I am me," is as bad a fault in intellectuals and morals as it is in grammar, whilst none but one--God-- can say, "I am I," or "That I am." _November_ 9. 1833. TIMES OF CHARLES I. How many books are still written and published about Charles the First and his times! Such is the fresh and enduring interest of that grand crisis of morals, religion, and government! But these books are none of them works of any genius or imagination; not one of these authors seems to be able to throw himself back into that age; if they did, there would be less praise and less blame bestowed on both sides. _December_ 21. 1833. MESSENGER OF THE COVENANT--PROPHECY.--LOGIC OF IDEAS AND OF SYLLOGISMS. When I reflect upon the subject of the messenger of the covenant, and observe the distinction taken in the prophets between the teaching and suffering Christ,--the Priest, who was to precede, and the triumphant Messiah, the Judge, who was to follow,--and how Jesus always seems to speak of the Son of Man in a future sense, and yet always at the same time as identical with himself; I sometimes think that our Lord himself in his earthly career was the Messenger; and that the way is _now still preparing_ for the great and visible advent of the Messiah of Glory. I mention this doubtingly. * * * * * What a beautiful sermon or essay might be written on the growth of prophecy!--from the germ, no bigger than a man's hand, in Genesis, till the column of cloud gathers size and height and substance, and assumes the shape of a perfect man; just like the smoke in the Arabian Nights' tale, which comes up and at last takes a genie's shape.[1] [Footnote 1: The passage in Mr. Coleridge's mind was, I suppose, the following:--"He (the fisherman) set it before him, and while he looked upon it attentively, there came out a very thick smoke, which obliged him to retire two or three paces from it. The smoke ascended to the clouds, and extending itself along the sea, and upon the shore, formed a great mist, which, we may well imagine, did mightily astonish the fisherman. When the smoke was all out of the vessel, it reunited itself, and became a solid body, of which there was formed a genie twice as high as the greatest of giants." _Story of the Fisherman_. Ninth Night.--ED.] * * * * * The logic of ideas is to that of syllogisms as the infinitesimal calculus to common arithmetic; it proves, but at the same time supersedes. _January_ 1. 1834. LANDOR'S POETRY.--BEAUTY.--CHRONOLOGICAL ARRANGEMENT OF WORKS. What is it that Mr. Landor wants, to make him a poet? His powers are certainly very considerable, but he seems to be totally deficient in that modifying faculty, which compresses several units into one whole. The truth is, he does not possess imagination in its highest form,--that of stamping _il più nell' uno_. Hence his poems, taken as wholes, are unintelligible; you have eminences excessively bright, and all the ground around and between them in darkness. Besides which, he has never learned, with all his energy, how to write simple and lucid English. * * * * * The useful, the agreeable, the beautiful, and the good, are distinguishable. You are wrong in resolving beauty into expression or interest; it is quite distinct; indeed it is opposite, although not contrary. Beauty is an immediate presence, between (_inter_) which and the beholder _nihil est_. It is always one and tranquil; whereas the interesting always disturbs and is disturbed. I exceedingly regret the loss of those essays on beauty, which I wrote in a Bristol newspaper. I would give much to recover them. * * * * * After all you can say, I still think the chronological order the best for arranging a poet's works. All your divisions are in particular instances inadequate, and they destroy the interest which arises from watching the progress, maturity, and even the decay of genius. _January_ 3. 1834. TOLERATION.--NORWEGIANS. I have known books written on Tolerance, the proper title of which would be--intolerant or intolerable books on tolerance. Should not a man who writes a book expressly to inculcate tolerance learn to treat with respect, or at least with indulgence, articles of faith which tens of thousands ten times told of his fellow-subjects or his fellow-creatures believe with all their souls, and upon the truth of which they rest their tranquillity in this world, and their hopes of salvation in the next,--those articles being at least maintainable against his arguments, and most certainly innocent in themselves?--Is it fitting to run Jesus Christ in a silly parallel with Socrates--the Being whom thousand millions of intellectual creatures, of whom I am a humble unit, take to be their Redeemer, with an Athenian philosopher, of whom we should know nothing except through his glorification in Plato and Xenophon?--And then to hitch Latimer and Servetus together! To be sure there was a stake and a fire in each case, but where the rest of the resemblance is I cannot see. What ground is there for throwing the odium of Servetus's death upon Calvin alone?--Why, the mild Melancthon wrote to Calvin[1], expressly to testify his concurrence in the act, and no doubt he spoke the sense of the German reformers; the Swiss churches _advised_ the punishment in formal letters, and I rather think there are letters from the English divines, approving Calvin's conduct!-- Before a man deals out the slang of the day about the great leaders of the Reformation, he should learn to throw himself back to the age of the Reformation, when the two great parties in the church were eagerly on the watch to fasten a charge of heresy on the other. Besides, if ever a poor fanatic thrust, himself into the fire, it was Michael Servetus. He was a rabid enthusiast, and did every thing he could in the way of insult and ribaldry to provoke the feeling of the Christian church. He called the Trinity _triceps monstrum et Cerberum quendam tripartitum_, and so on. Indeed, how should the principle of religious toleration have been acknowledged at first?--It would require stronger arguments than any which I have heard as yet, to prove that men in authority have not a right, involved in an imperative duty, to deter those under their control from teaching or countenancing doctrines which they believe to be damnable, and even to punish with death those who violate such prohibition. I am sure that Bellarmine would have had small difficulty in turning Locke round his fingers' ends upon this ground. A _right_ to protection I can understand; but a _right_ to toleration seems to me a contradiction in terms. Some criterion must in any case be adopted by the state; otherwise it might be compelled to admit whatever hideous doctrine and practice any man or number of men may assert to be his or their religion, and an article of his or their faith. It was the same Pope who commanded the Romanists of England to separate from the national church, which previously their own consciences had not dictated, nor the decision of any council,--and who also commanded them to rebel against Queen Elizabeth, whom they were bound to obey by the laws of the land; and if the Pope had authority for one, he must have had it for the other. The only true argument, as it seems to me, apart from Christianity, for a discriminating toleration is, that _it is of no use_ to attempt to stop heresy or schism by persecution, unless, perhaps, it be conducted upon the plan of direct warfare and massacre. You _cannot_ preserve men in the faith by such means, though you may stifle for a while any open appearance of dissent. The experiment has now been tried, and it has failed; and that is by a great deal the best argument for the magistrate against a repetition of it. I know this,--that if a parcel of fanatic missionaries were to go to Norway, and were to attempt to disturb the fervent and undoubting Lutheranism of the fine independent inhabitants of the interior of that country, I should be right glad to hear that the busy fools had been quietly shipped off--any where. I don't include the people of the seaports in my praise of the Norwegians;--I speak of the agricultural population. If that country could be brought to maintain a million more of inhabitants, Norway might defy the world; it would be [Greek: autarhk_as] and impregnable; but it is much under-handed now. [Footnote 1: Melancthon's words are:--"Tuo judicio prorsus assentior. Affirmo etiam vestros magistratus juste fecisse quod hominem blasphemum, re ordine judicata, _interfecerunt_." 14th Oct. 1554.--ED.] _January_ 12. 1834. ARTICLES OF FAITH.--MODERN QUAKERISM.--DEVOTIONAL SPIRIT.--SECTARIANISM.--ORIGEN. I have drawn up four or perhaps five articles of faith, by subscription, or rather by assent, to which I think a large comprehension might take place. My articles would exclude Unitarians, and I am sorry to say, members of the church of Rome, but with this difference--that the exclusion of Unitarians would be necessary and perpetual; that of the members of the church of Rome depending on each individual's own conscience and intellectual light. What I mean is this:--that the Romanists hold the faith in Christ,--but unhappily they also hold certain opinions, partly ceremonial, partly devotional, partly speculative, which have so fatal a facility of being degraded into base, corrupting, and even idolatrous practices, that if the Romanist will make _them_ of the essence of his religion, he must of course be excluded. As to the Quakers, I hardly know what to say. An article on the sacraments would exclude them. My doubt is, whether Baptism and the Eucharist are properly any _parts_ of Christianity, or not rather Christianity itself;--the one, the initial conversion or light,--the other, the sustaining and invigorating life;--both together the [Greek: ph_os ahi z_oh_a], which are Christianity. A line can only begin once; hence, there can be no repetition of baptism; but a line may be endlessly prolonged by continued production; hence the sacrament of love and life lasts for ever. But really there is no knowing what the modern Quakers are, or believe, excepting this--that they are altogether degenerated from their ancestors of the seventeenth century. I should call modern Quakerism, so far as I know it as a scheme of faith, a Socinian Calvinism. Penn himself was a Sabellian, and seems to have disbelieved even the historical fact of the life and death of Jesus;--most certainly Jesus of Nazareth was not Penn's Christ, if he had any. It is amusing to see the modern Quakers appealing now to history for a confirmation of their tenets and discipline--and by so doing, in effect abandoning the strong hold of their founders. As an _imperium in imperio_, I think the original Quakerism a conception worthy of Lycurgus. Modern Quakerism is like one of those gigantic trees which are seen in the forests of North America,--apparently flourishing, and preserving all its greatest stretch and spread of branches; but when you cut through an enormously thick and gnarled bark, you find the whole inside hollow and rotten. Modern Quakerism, like such a tree, stands upright by help of its inveterate bark alone. _Bark_ a Quaker, and he is a poor creature. * * * * * How much the devotional spirit of the church has suffered by that necessary evil, the Reformation, and the sects which have sprung up subsequently to it! All our modern prayers seem tongue-tied. We appear to be thinking more of avoiding an heretical expression or thought than of opening ourselves to God. We do not pray with that entire, unsuspecting, unfearing, childlike profusion of feeling, which so beautifully shines forth in Jeremy Taylor and Andrewes and the writings of some of the older and better saints of the Romish church, particularly of that remarkable woman, St. Theresa.[1] And certainly Protestants, in their anxiety to have the historical argument on their side, have brought down the origin of the Romish errors too late. Many of them began, no doubt, in the Apostolic age itself;--I say errors-- not heresies, as that dullest of the fathers, Epiphanius, calls them. Epiphanius is very long and fierce upon the Ebionites. There may have been real heretics under that name; but I believe that, in the beginning, the name was, on account of its Hebrew meaning, given to, or adopted by, some poor mistaken men--perhaps of the Nazarene way--who sold all their goods and lands, and were then obliged to beg. I think it not improbable that Barnabas was one of these chief mendicants; and that the collection made by St. Paul was for them. You should read Rhenferd's account of the early heresies. I think he demonstrates about eight of Epiphanius's heretics to be mere nicknames given by the Jews to the Christians. Read "Hermas, or the Shepherd," of the genuineness of which and of the epistle of Barnabas I have no doubt. It is perfectly orthodox, but full of the most ludicrous tricks of gnostic fancy--the wish to find the New Testament in the Old. This gnosis is perceptible in the Epistle to the Hebrews, but kept exquisitely within the limit of propriety. In the others it is rampant, and most truly "puffeth up," as St. Paul said of it. What between the sectarians and the political economists, the English are denationalized. England I see as a country, but the English nation seems obliterated. What could redintegrate us again? Must it be another threat of foreign invasion? [Footnote 1: She was a native of Avila in Old Castile, and a Carmelite nun. Theresa established an order which she called the "Reformed," and which became very powerful. Her works are divided into ten books, of which her autobiography forms a remarkable part. She died in 1582, and was canonised by Gregory XV. in 1622--ED.] * * * * * I never can digest the loss of most of Origen's works: he seems to have been almost the only very great scholar and genius combined amongst the early Fathers. Jerome was very inferior to him. _January_ 20. 1834. SOME MEN LIKE MUSICAL GLASSES.--SUBLIME AND NONSENSE.--ATHEIST. Some men are like musical glasses;--to produce their finest tones, you must keep them wet. * * * * * Well! that passage is what I call the sublime dashed to pieces by cutting too close with the fiery four-in-hand round the corner of nonsense. * * * * * How did the Atheist get his idea of that God whom he denies? _February_ 22. 1834. PROOF OF EXISTENCE OF GOD.--KANT'S ATTEMPT.--PLURALITY OF WORLDS. Assume the existence of God,--and then the harmony and fitness of the physical creation may be shown to correspond with and support such an assumption;--but to set about _proving_ the existence of a God by such means is a mere circle, a delusion. It can be no proof to a good reasoner, unless he violates all syllogistic logic, and presumes his conclusion. Kant once set about proving the existence of God, and a masterly effort it was.* But in his later great work, the "Critique of the Pure Reason," he saw its fallacy, and said of it--that _if_ the existence could he _proved_ at all, it must be on the grounds indicated by him. * * * * * I never could feel any force in the arguments for a plurality of worlds, in the common acceptation of that term. A lady once asked me--"What then could be the intention in creating so many great bodies, so apparently useless to us?" I said--I did not know, except perhaps to make dirt cheap. The vulgar inference is _in alio genere_. What in the eye of an intellectual and omnipotent Being is the whole sidereal system to the soul of one man for whom Christ died? _March_ 1. 1834. A REASONER. I am by the law of my nature a reasoner. A person who should suppose I meant by that word, an arguer, [1] would not only not understand me, but would understand the contrary of my meaning. I can take no interest whatever in hearing or saying any thing merely as a fact--merely as having happened. It must refer to something within me before I can regard it with any curiosity or care. My mind is always energic--I don't mean energetic; I require in every thing what, for lack of another word, I may call _propriety_,--that is, a reason why the thing _is_ at all, and why it is _there_ or _then_ rather than elsewhere or at another time. [Footnote 1: In his essay, "_Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseyns Gottes_."--"The only possible argument or ground of proof for a demonstration of the existence of God." It was published in 1763; the "Critique" in 1781.--ED.] _March_ 5. 1834. SHAKSPEARE'S INTELLECTUAL ACTION.--CRABBE AND SOUTHEY.--PETER SIMPLE AND TOM CRINGLE'S LOG. Shakspeare's intellectual action is wholly unlike that of Ben Jonson or Beaumont and Fletcher. The latter see the totality of a sentence or passage, and then project it entire. Shakspeare goes on creating, and evolving B. out of A., and C. out of B., and so on, just as a serpent moves, which makes a fulcrum of its own body, and seems for ever twisting and untwisting its own strength. * * * * * I think Crabbe and Southey are something alike; but Crabbe's poems are founded on observation and real life--Southey's on fancy and books. In facility they are equal, though Crabbe's English is of course not upon a level with Southey's, which is next door to faultless. But in Crabbe there is an absolute defect of the high imagination; he gives me little or no pleasure: yet, no doubt, he has much power of a certain kind, and it is good to cultivate, even at some pains, a catholic taste in literature. I read all sorts of books with some pleasure except modern sermons and treatises on political economy. * * * * * I have received a great deal of pleasure from some of the modern novels, especially Captain Marryat's "Peter Simple." That book is nearer Smollett than any I remember. And "Tom Cringle's Log" in Blackwood is also most excellent. _March_ 15. 1834. CHAUCER.--SHAKSPEARE.--BEN JONSON.--BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.--DANIEL.--MASSINGER. I take unceasing delight in Chaucer. His manly cheerfulness is especially delicious to me in my old age.[1] How exquisitely tender he is, and yet how perfectly free from the least touch of sickly melancholy or morbid drooping! The sympathy of the poet with the subjects of his poetry is particularly remarkable in Shakspeare and Chaucer; but what the first effects by a strong act of imagination and mental metamorphosis, the last does without any effort, merely by the inborn kindly joyousness of his nature. How well we seem to know Chaucer! How absolutely nothing do we know of Shakspeare! I cannot in the least allow any necessity for Chaucer's poetry, especially the Canterbury Tales, being considered obsolete. Let a few plain rules be given for sounding the final _è_ of syllables, and for expressing the termination of such words as _ocëan_, and _natiön_, &c. as dissyllables,-- or let the syllables to be sounded in such cases be marked by a competent metrist. This simple expedient would, with a very few trifling exceptions, where the errors are inveterate, enable any reader to feel the perfect smoothness and harmony of Chaucer's verse. [Footnote 1: Eighteen years before, Mr. Coleridge entertained the same feelings towards Chaucer:--"Through all the works of Chaucer there reigns a cheerfulness, a manly hilarity, which makes it almost impossible to doubt a correspondent habit of feeling in the author himself." _Biog. Lit_., vol. i. p. 32.--ED.] * * * * * As to understanding his language, if you read twenty pages with a good glossary, you surely can find no further difficulty, even as it is; but I should have no objection to see this done:--Strike out those words which are now obsolete, and I will venture to say that I will replace every one of them by words still in use out of Chaucer himself, or Gower his disciple. I don't want this myself: I rather like to see the significant terms which Chaucer unsuccessfully offered as candidates for admission into our language; but surely so very slight a change of the text may well be pardoned, even by black--_letterati_, for the purpose of restoring so great a poet to his ancient and most deserved popularity. * * * * * Shakspeare is of no age. It is idle to endeavour to support his phrases by quotations from Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, &c. His language is entirely his own, and the younger dramatists imitated him. The construction of Shakspeare's sentences, whether in verse or prose, is the necessary and homogeneous vehicle of his peculiar manner of thinking. His is not the style of the age. More particularly, Shakspeare's blank verse is an absolutely new creation. Read Daniel[1]--the admirable Daniel--in his "Civil Wars," and "Triumphs of Hymen." The style and language are just such as any very pure and manly writer of the present day--Wordsworth, for example--would use; it seems quite modern in comparison with the style of Shakspeare. Ben Jonson's blank verse is very masterly and individual, and perhaps Massinger's is even still nobler. In Beaumont and Fletcher it is constantly slipping into lyricisms. I believe Shakspeare was not a whit more intelligible in his own day than he is now to an educated man, except for a few local allusions of no consequence. As I said, he is of no age--nor, I may add, of any religion, or party, or profession. The body and substance of his works came out of the unfathomable depths of his own oceanic mind: his observation and reading, which was considerable, supplied him with the drapery of his figures.[2] [Footnote 1: "This poet's well-merited epithet is that of the '_well-languaged Daniel_;' but, likewise, and by the consent of his contemporaries, no less than of all succeeding critics, the 'prosaic Daniel.' Yet those who thus designate this wise and amiable writer, from the frequent incorrespondency of his diction with his metre, in the majority of his compositions, not only deem them valuable and interesting on other accounts, but willingly admit that there are to be found throughout his poems, and especially in his _Epistles_ and in his _Hymen's Triumph_, many and exquisite specimens of that style, which, as the neutral ground of prose and verse, is common to both."--_Biog. Lit_., vol. ii. p. 82.] [Footnote 2: Mr. Coleridge called Shakspeare "_the myriad-minded man_," [Greek: au_az muzioyous]--" a phrase," said he, "which I have borrowed from a Greek monk, who applies it to a patriarch of Constantinople. I might have said, that I have _reclaimed_, rather than borrowed, it, for it seems to belong to Shakspeare _de jure singulari, et ex privilegio naturae." See Biog. Lit., vol. ii. p. 13.--ED.] * * * * * As for editing Beaumont and Fletcher, the task would be one _immensi laboris_. The confusion is now so great, the errors so enormous, that the editor must use a boldness quite unallowable in any other case. All I can say as to Beaumont and Fletcher is, that I can point out well enough where something has been lost, and that something so and so was probably in the original; but the law of Shakspeare's thought and verse is such, that I feel convinced that not only could I detect the spurious, but supply the genuine, word. _March_ 20. 1834. LORD BYRON AND H. WALPOLE'S "MYSTERIOUS MOTHER."--LEWIS'S "JAMAICA JOURNAL." Lord Byron, as quoted by Lord Dover[1], says, that the "Mysterious Mother" raises Horace Walpole above every author living in his, Lord Byron's, time. Upon which I venture to remark, first, that I do not believe that Lord Byron spoke sincerely; for I suspect that he made a tacit exception in favour of himself at least;--secondly, that it is a miserable mode of comparison which does not rest on difference of kind. It proceeds of envy and malice and detraction to say that A. is higher than B., unless you show that they are _in pari materia_;--thirdly, that the "Mysterious Mother" is the most disgusting, vile, detestable composition that ever came from the hand of man. No one with a spark of true manliness, of which Horace Walpole had none, could have written it. As to the blank verse, it is indeed better than Rowe's and Thomson's, which was execrably bad:--any approach, therefore, to the manner of the old dramatists was of course an improvement; but the loosest lines in Shirley are superior to Walpole's best. [Footnote 1: In the memoir prefixed to the correspondence with Sir H. Mann. Lord Byron's words are:--"He is the _ultimus Romanorum_, the author of the 'Mysterious Mother,' a tragedy of the highest order, and not a puling love play. He is the father of the first romance, and of the last tragedy, in our language; and surely worthy of a higher place than any living author, be he who he may."--_Preface to Marino Faliero_. Is not "Romeo and Juliet" a love play? --But why reason about such insincere, splenetic trash?--ED.] * * * * * Lewis's "Jamaica Journal" is delightful; it is almost the only unaffected book of travels or touring I have read of late years. You have the man himself, and not an inconsiderable man,--certainly a much finer mind than I supposed before from the perusal of his romances, &c. It is by far his best work, and will live and be popular. Those verses on the Hours are very pretty; but the Isle of Devils is, like his romances,--a fever dream-- horrible, without point or terror. _April_ 16. 1834. SICILY.--MALTA--SIR ALEXANDER BALL. I found that every thing in and about Sicily had been exaggerated by travellers, except two things--the folly of the government and the wretchedness of the people. _They_ did not admit of exaggeration. Really you may learn the fundamental principles of political economy in a very compendious way, by taking a short tour through Sicily, and simply reversing in your own mind every law, custom, and ordinance you meet with. I never was in a country in which every thing proceeding from man was so exactly wrong. You have peremptory ordinances _against_ making roads, taxes on the passage of common vegetables from one miserable village to another, and so on. By the by, do you know any parallel in modern history to the absurdity of our giving a legislative assembly to the Sicilians? It exceeds any thing I know. This precious legislature passed two bills before it was knocked on the head: the first was, to render lands inalienable; and the second, to cancel all debts due before the date of the bill. And then consider the gross ignorance and folly of our laying a tax upon the Sicilians! Taxation in its proper sense can only exist where there is a free circulation of capital, labour, and commodities throughout the community. But to tax the people in countries like Sicily and Corsica, where there is no internal communication, is mere robbery and confiscation. A crown taken from a Corsican living in the sierras would not get back to him again in ten years. * * * * * It is interesting to pass from Malta to Sicily--from the highest specimen of an inferior race, the Saracenic, to the most degraded class of a superior race, the European. * * * * * No tongue can describe the moral corruption of the Maltese when the island was surrendered to us. There was not a family in it in which a wife or a daughter was not a kept mistress. A marquis of ancient family applied to Sir Alexander Ball to be appointed his valet. "My valet!" said Ball, "what can you mean, Sir?" The marquis said, he hoped he should then have had the honour of presenting petitions to his Excellency. "Oh, that is it, is it!" said Sir Alexander: "my valet, Sir, brushes my clothes, and brings them to me. If he dared to meddle with matters of public business, I should kick him down stairs." In short, Malta was an Augean stable, and Ball had all the inclination to be a Hercules.[1] His task was most difficult, although his qualifications were most remarkable. I remember an English officer of very high rank soliciting him for the renewal of a pension to an abandoned woman who had been notoriously treacherous to us. That officer had promised the woman as a matter of course--she having sacrificed her daughter to him. Ball was determined, as far as he could, to prevent Malta from being made a nest of home patronage. He considered, as was the fact, that there was a contract between England and the Maltese. Hence the government at home, especially Dundas, disliked him, and never allowed him any other title than that of Civil Commissioner. We have, I believe, nearly succeeded in alienating the hearts of the inhabitants from us. Every officer in the island ought to be a Maltese, except those belonging to the immediate executive: 100_l_. per annum to a Maltese, to enable him to keep a gilt carriage, will satisfy him where an Englishman must have 2000_l_. [Footnote 1: I refer the reader to the five concluding essays of the third volume of the "Friend," as a specimen of what Mr. C. might have done as a biographer if an irresistible instinct had not devoted him to profounder labours. As a sketch--and it pretends to nothing more--is there any thing more perfect in our literature than the monument raised in those essays to the memory of Sir Alexander Ball?--and there are some touches added to the character of Nelson, which the reader, even of Southey's matchless Life of our hero, will find both new and interesting.--ED.] _May_ 1. 1834. CAMBRIDGE PETITION TO ADMIT DISSENTERS. There are, to my grief, the names of some men to the Cambridge petition for admission of the Dissenters to the University, whose cheeks I think must have burned with shame at the degrading patronage and befouling eulogies of the democratic press, and at seeing themselves used as the tools of the open and rancorous enemies of the church. How miserable to be held up for the purpose of inflicting insult upon men, whose worth and ability and sincerity you well know,--and this by a faction banded together like obscene dogs and cats and serpents, against a church which you profoundly revere! The _time_--the _time_--the _occasion_ and the _motive_ ought to have been argument enough, that even if the measure were right or harmless in itself, not _now_, nor with such as _these_, was it to be effected! _May_ 3. 1834. CORN LAWS. Those who argue that England may safely depend upon a supply of foreign corn, if it grow none or an insufficient quantity of its own, forget that they are subjugating the necessaries of life itself to the mere luxuries or comforts of society. Is it not certain that the price of corn abroad will be raised upon us as soon as it is once known that we _must_ buy?--and when that fact is known, in what sort of a situation shall we be? Besides this, the argument supposes that agriculture is not a positive good to the nation, taken in and by itself, as a mode of existence for the people, which supposition is false and pernicious; and if we are to become a great horde of manufacturers, shall we not, even more than at present, excite the ill will of all the manufacturers of other nations? It has been already shown, in evidence which is before all the world, that some of our manufacturers have acted upon the accursed principle of deliberately injuring foreign manufactures, if they can, even to the ultimate disgrace of the country and loss to themselves. _May_ 19. 1834. CHRISTIAN SABBATH. How grossly misunderstood the genuine character of the Christian sabbath, or Lord's day, seems to be even by the church! To confound it with the Jewish sabbath, or to rest its observance upon the fourth commandment, is, in my judgment, heretical, and would so have been considered in the primitive church. That cessation from labour on the Lord's day could not have been absolutely incumbent on Christians for two centuries after Christ, is apparent; because during that period the greater part of the Christians were either slaves or in official situations under Pagan masters or superiors, and had duties to perform for those who did not recognize the day. And we know that St. Paul sent back Onesimus to his master, and told every Christian slave, that, being a Christian, he was free in his mind indeed, but still must serve his earthly master, although he might laudably seek for his personal freedom also. If the early Christians had refused to work on the Lord's day, rebellion and civil war must have been the immediate consequences. But there is no notice of any such cessation. The Jewish sabbath was commemorative of the termination of the great act of creation; it was to record that the world had not been from eternity, nor had arisen as a dream by itself, but that God had created it by distinct acts of power, and that he had hallowed the day or season in which he rested or desisted from his work. When our Lord arose from the dead, the old creation was, as it were, superseded, and the new creation then began; and therefore the first day and not the last day, the commencement and not the end, of the work of God was solemnized. Luther, in speaking of the _good by itself_, and the good _for its expediency alone_, instances the observance of the Christian day of rest,-- a day of repose from manual labour, and of activity in spiritual labour,--a day of joy and co-operation in the work of Christ's creation. "Keep it holy"--says he--"for its use' sake,--both to body and soul! But if any where the day is made holy for the mere day's sake,--if any where any one sets up its observance upon a Jewish foundation, then I order you to work on it, to ride on it, to dance on it, to feast on it--to do any thing that shall reprove this encroachment on the Christian spirit and liberty." The early church distinguished the day of Christian rest so strongly from a fast, that it was unlawful for a man to bewail even _his own sins_, as such only, on that day. He was to bewail the sins of _all_, and to pray as one of the whole of Christ's body. And the English Reformers evidently took the same view of the day as Luther and the early church. But, unhappily, our church, in the reigns of James and Charles the First, was so identified with the undue advancement of the royal prerogative, that the puritanical Judaizing of the Presbyterians was but too well seconded by the patriots of the nation, in resisting the wise efforts of the church to prevent the incipient alteration in the character of the day of rest. After the Restoration, the bishops and clergy in general adopted the view taken and enforced by their enemies. By the by, it is curious to observe, in this semi-infidel and Malthusian Parliament, how the Sabbatarian spirit unites itself with a rancorous hostility to that one institution, which alone, according to reason and experience, can insure the continuance of any general religion at all in the nation at large. Some of these gentlemen, who are for not letting a poor labouring man have a dish of baked potatoes on a Sunday, _religionis gratia_--(God forgive that audacious blasphemy!)--are foremost among those who seem to live but in vilifying, weakening, and impoverishing the national church. I own my indignation boils over against such contemptible fellows. I sincerely wish to preserve a decent quiet on Sunday. I would prohibit compulsory labour, and put down operas, theatres, &c., for this plain reason--that if the rich be allowed to play, the poor will be forced, or, what comes to the same thing, will be induced, to work. I am not for a Paris Sunday. But to stop coaches, and let the gentleman's carriage run, is monstrous. _May_ 25. 1834. HIGH PRIZES AND REVENUES OF THE CHURCH. Your argument against the high prizes in the church might be put strongly thus:--Admit that in the beginning it might have been fairly said, that some eminent rewards ought to be set apart for the purpose of stimulating and rewarding transcendant merit; what have you to say now, after centuries of experience to the contrary?--_Have_ the high prizes been given to the highest genius, virtue, or learning? Is it not rather the truth, as Jortin said, that twelve votes in a contested election will do more to make a man a bishop than an admired commentary on the twelve minor prophets?--To all which and the like I say again, that you ought not to reason from the abuse, which may be rectified, against the inherent uses of the thing. _Appoint_ the most deserving--and the prize _will_ answer its purpose. As to the bishops' incomes,--in the first place, the net receipts--that which the bishops may spend--have been confessedly exaggerated beyond measure; but, waiving that, and allowing the highest estimate to be correct, I should like to have the disposition of the episcopal revenue in any one year by the late or the present Bishop of Durham, or the present Bishops of London or Winchester, compared with that of the most benevolent nobleman in England of any party in politics. I firmly believe that the former give away in charity of one kind or another, public, official, or private, three times as much in proportion as the latter. You may have a hunks or two now and then; but so you would much more certainly, if you were to reduce the incomes to 2000_l_. per annum. As a body, in my opinion the clergy of England do in truth act as if their property were impressed with a trust to the utmost extent that can be demanded by those who affect to believe, ignorantly or not, that lying legend of a tripartite or quadripartite division of the tithe by law. _May 31. 1834._ SIR C. WETHERELL'S SPEECH.--NATIONAL CHURCH.--DISSENTERS.--PAPACY.---- UNIVERSITIES. I think Sir Charles Wetherell's speech before the Privy Council very effective. I doubt if any other lawyer in Westminster Hall could have done the thing so well. * * * * * The National Church requires, and is required by, the Christian Church, for the perfection of each. For if there were no national Church, the mere spiritual Church would either become, like the Papacy, a dreadful tyranny over mind and body;--or else would fall abroad into a multitude of enthusiastic sects, as in England in the seventeenth century. It is my deep conviction that, in a country of any religion at all, liberty of conscience can only be permanently preserved by means and under the shadow of a national church--a political establishment connected with, but distinct from, the spiritual Church. * * * * * I sometimes hope that the undisguised despotism of temper of the Dissenters may at last awaken a jealousy in the laity of the Church of England. But the apathy and inertness are, I fear, too profound--too providential. * * * * * Whatever the Papacy may have been on the Continent, it was always an unqualified evil to this country. It destroyed what was rising of good, and introduced a thousand evils of its own. The Papacy was and still is essentially extra-national;--it affects, _temporally_, to do that which the spiritual Church of Christ can alone do--to break down the natural distinctions of nations. Now, as the Roman Papacy is in itself local and peculiar, of course this attempt is nothing but a direct attack on the political independence of other nations. The institution of Universities was the single check on the Papacy. The Pope always hated and maligned the Universities. The old coenobitic establishments of England were converted--perverted, rather--into monasteries and other monking receptacles. You see it was at Oxford that Wicliffe alone found protection and encouragement. _June_ 2. 1834. SCHILLER'S VERSIFICATION.--GERMAN BLANK VERSE. Schiller's blank verse is bad. He moves in it as a fly in a glue bottle. His thoughts have their connection and variety, it is true, but there is no sufficiently corresponding movement in the verse. How different from Shakspeare's endless rhythms! There is a nimiety--a too-muchness--in all Germans. It is the national fault. Leasing had the best notion of blank verse. The trochaic termination of German words renders blank verse in that language almost impracticable. We have it in our dramatic hendecasyllable; but then we have a power of interweaving the iambic close _ad libitum._ _June_ 14. 1834. ROMAN CATHOLIC EMANCIPATION.--DUKE OF WELLINGTON.--CORONATION OATH. The Roman Catholic Emancipation Act--carried in the violent, and, in fact, unprincipled manner it was--was in effect a Surinam toad;--and the Reform Bill, the Dissenters' admission to the Universities, and the attack on the Church, are so many toadlets, one after another detaching themselves from their parent brute. * * * * * If you say there is nothing in the Romish religion, sincerely felt, inconsistent with the duties of citizenship and allegiance to a territorial Protestant sovereign, _cadit quæstio_. For if _that_ is once admitted, there can be no answer to the argument from numbers. Certainly, if the religion of the majority of the _people_ be innocuous to the interests of the _nation_, the majority have a natural right to be trustees of the nationalty--that property which is set apart for the nation's use, and rescued from the gripe of private hands. But when I say--_for the nation's use_.--I mean the very reverse of what the Radicals mean. They would convert it to relieve taxation, which I call a private, personal, and perishable use. A nation's uses are immortal. * * * * * How lamentable it is to hear the Duke of Wellington expressing himself doubtingly on the abominable sophism that the Coronation Oath only binds the King as the executive power--thereby making a Highgate oath of it. But the Duke is conscious of the ready retort which his language and conduct on the Emancipation Bill afford to his opponents. He is hampered by that affair. _June_ 20. 1834. CORN LAWS.--MODERN POLITICAL ECONOMY. In the argument on the Corn Laws there is a [Greek: metazasis eis allo gevos]. It may be admitted that the great principles of commerce require the interchange of commodities to be free; but commerce, which is barter, has no proper range beyond luxuries or conveniences;--it is properly the complement to the full existence and development of a state. But how can it be shown that the principles applicable to an interchange of conveniences or luxuries apply also to an interchange of necessaries? No state can be such properly, which is not self-subsistent at least; for no state that is not so, is essentially independent. The nation that cannot even exist without the commodity of another nation, is in effect the slave of that other nation. In common times, indeed, pecuniary interest will prevail, and prevent a ruinous exercise of the power which the nation supplying the necessary must have over the nation which has only the convenience or luxury to return; but such interest, both in individuals and nations, will yield to many stronger passions. Is Holland any authority to the contrary? If so, Tyre and Sidon and Carthage were so! Would you put England on a footing with a country, which can be overrun in a campaign, and starved in a year? * * * * * The entire tendency of the modern or Malthusian political economy is to denationalize. It would dig up the charcoal foundations of the temple of Ephesus to burn as fuel for a steam-engine! _June_ 21. 1834. Mr. ----, in his poem, makes trees coeval with Chaos;--which is next door to Hans Sachse[1] who, in describing Chaos, said it was so pitchy dark, that even the very _cats_ ran against each other! [Footnote 1: Hans Sachse was born 1494, and died 1576.--ED], _June_ 23. 1834. SOCINIANISM.--UNITARIANISM.--FANCY AND IMAGINATION. Faustus Socinus worshipped Jesus Christ, and said that God had given him the power of being omnipresent. Davidi, with a little more acuteness, urged that mere audition or creaturely presence could not possibly justify worship from men;--that a man, how glorified soever, was no nearer God in essence than the vulgarest of the race. Prayer, therefore, was inapplicable. And how could a _man_ be a mediator between God and man? How could a _man_ with sins himself offer any compensation for, or expiation of, sin, unless the most arbitrary caprice were admitted into the counsels of God?--And so, at last, you see, it was discovered by the better logicians amongst the Socinians, that there was no such thing as sin at all. It is wonderful how any Socinian can read the works of Philo Judæus without some pause of doubt in the truth of his views as to the person of Christ. Whether Philo wrote on his own ground as a Jew, or borrowed from the Christians, the testimony as to the then Jewish expectation and belief, is equally strong. You know Philo calls the Logos [Greek: yios Theoy], the _Son of God_, and [Greek: agap_athon te non], _beloved Son_. He calls him [Greek: arhchierheus], _high priest_, [Greek: deuterhos Thehos], _second divinity_, [Greek: ei an Theoy], _image of God_, and describes him as [Greek: eggutat_o m_adenhos ovtos methorhioy diast_amatos], the _nearest possible to God without any intervening separation_. And there are numerous other remarkable expressions of the same sort. My faith is this:--God is the Absolute Will: it is his Name and the meaning of it. It is the Hypostasis. As begetting his own Alterity, the Jehovah, the Manifested--He is the Father; but the Love and the Life--the Spirit-- proceeds from both. I think Priestley must be considered the author of the modern Unitarianism. I owe, under God, my return to the faith, to my having gone much further than the Unitarians, and so having come round to the other side. I can truly say, I never falsified the Scripture. I always told them that their interpretations of the Scripture were intolerable upon any principles of sound criticism; and that, if they were to offer to construe the will of a neighbour as they did that of their Maker, they would be scouted out of society. I said then plainly and openly, that it was clear enough that John and Paul were not Unitarians. But at that time I had a strong sense of the repugnancy of the doctrine of vicarious atonement to the moral being, and I thought nothing could counterbalance that. "What care I," I said, "for the Platonisms of John, or the Rabbinisms of Paul?-- My conscience revolts!" That was the ground of my Unitarianism. Always believing in the government of God, I was a fervent Optimist. But as I could not but see that the present state of things was not the best, I was necessarily led to look forward to some future state. * * * * * You may conceive the difference in kind between the Fancy and the Imagination in this way,--that if the check of the senses and the reason were withdrawn, the first would become delirium, and the last mania. The Fancy brings together images which have no connection natural or moral, but are yoked together by the poet by means of some accidental coincidence; as in the well-known passage in Hudibras: "The sun had long since in the lap Of Thetis taken out his nap, And like a lobster boyl'd, the morn From black to red began to turn."[1] The Imagination modifies images, and gives unity to variety; it sees all things in one, _il più nell' uno_. There is the epic imagination, the perfection of which is in Milton; and the dramatic, of which Shakspeare is the absolute master. The first gives unity by throwing back into the distance; as after the magnificent approach of the Messiah to battle[2], the poet, by one touch from himself-- --"far off their coming shone!"-- makes the whole one image. And so at the conclusion of the description of the appearance of the entranced angels, in which every sort of image from all the regions of earth and air is introduced to diversify and illustrate,--the reader is brought back to the single image by-- "He call'd so loud, that all the hollow deep Of Hell resounded."[3] The dramatic imagination does not throw back, but brings close; it stamps all nature with one, and that its own, meaning, as in Lear throughout. [Footnote 1: Part II. c. 2. v.29.] [Footnote 2: ----"Forth rush'd with whirlwind sound The chariot of Paternal Deity, Flashing thick flames, wheel within wheel undrawn, Itself instinct with spirit, but convoy'd By four cherubic shapes; four faces each Had wonderous; as with stars their bodies all And wings were set with eyes; with eyes the wheels Of beryl, and careering fires between; Over their heads a crystal firmament, Whereon a sapphire throne, inlaid with pure Amber, and colours of the showery arch. He, in celestial panoply all arm'd Of radiant Urim, work divinely wrought, Ascended; at his right hand Victory Sat eagle-wing'd; beside him hung his bow And quiver, with three-bolted thunder stored; And from about him fierce effusion roll'd Of smoke, and bickering flame, and sparkles dire; Attended with ten thousand thousand saints, He onward came; _far off their coming shone;_ And twenty thousand (I their number heard) Chariots of God, half on each hand, were seen: He on the wings of cherub rode sublime On the crystalline sky, in sapphire throned, Illustrious far and wide; but by his own First seen."--P. L. b. vi. v. 749, &c.] [Footnote 3: ----"and call'd His legions, angel forms, who lay intranced Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks In Vallombrosa, where th' Etrurian shades, High over arch'd, embower; or scatter'd sedge Afloat, when with fierce winds Orion arm'd Hath vex'd the Red Sea coast, whose waves o'erthrew Busiris, and his Memphian chivalry, While with perfidious hatred they pursued The sojourners of Goshen, who beheld From the safe shore their floating carcasses And broken chariot wheels; so thick bestrewn, Abject and lost lay these, covering the flood, Under amazement of their hideous change. _He call'd so loud, that all the hollow deep Of Hell resounded_."--P. L. b. i. v. 300, &c.] * * * * * At the very outset, what are we to think of the soundness of this modern system of political economy, the direct tendency of every rule of which is to denationalize, and to make the love of our country a foolish superstition? _June_ 28. 1834. MR. COLERIDGE'S SYSTEM.--BIOGRAPHIA LITERAHIA.--DISSENTERS. You may not understand my system, or any given part of it,--or by a determined act of wilfulness, you may, even though perceiving a ray of light, reject it in anger and disgust:--but this I will say,--that if you once master it, or any part of it, you cannot hesitate to acknowledge it as the truth. You cannot be sceptical about it. The metaphysical disquisition at the end of the first volume of the "Biographia Literaria" is unformed and immature;--it contains the fragments of the truth, but it is not fully thought out. It is wonderful to myself to think how infinitely more profound my views now are, and yet how much clearer they are withal. The circle is completing; the idea is coming round to, and to be, the common sense. * * * * * The generation of the modern worldly Dissenter was thus: Presbyterian, Arian, Socinian, and last, Unitarian. * * * * * Is it not most extraordinary to see the Dissenters calling themselves the descendants of the old Nonconformists, and yet clamouring for a divorce of Church and State? Why--Baxter, and the other great leaders, would have thought a man an atheist who had proposed such a thing. _They_ were rather for merging the State _in_ the Church. But these our modern gentlemen, who are blinded by political passion, give the kiss of alliance to the harlot of Rome, and walk arm in arm with those who deny the God that redeemed them, if so they may but wreak their insane antipathies on the National Church! Well! I suppose they have counted the cost, and know what it is they would have, and can keep. _July_ 5. 1834. LORD BROOKE.--BARROW AND DRYDEN.--PETER WILKINS AND STOTHARD.--FIELDING AND RICHARDSON.--BISHOP SANDFORD.--ROMAN CATHOLIC RELIGION. I do not remember a more beautiful piece of prose in English than the consolation addressed by Lord Brooke (Fulke Greville) to a lady of quality on certain conjugal infelicities. The diction is such that it might have been written now, if we could find any one combining so thoughtful a head with so tender a heart and so exquisite a taste. * * * * * Barrow often debased his language merely to evidence his loyalty. It was, indeed, no easy task for a man of so much genius, and such a precise mathematical mode of thinking, to adopt even for a moment the slang of L'Estrange and Tom Brown; but he succeeded in doing so sometimes. With the exception of such parts, Barrow must be considered as closing the first great period of the English language. Dryden began the second. Of course there are numerous subdivisions. * * * * * Peter Wilkins is to my mind a work of uncommon beauty; and yet Stothard's illustrations have _added_ beauties to it. If it were not for a certain tendency to affectation, scarcely any praise could be too high for Stothard's designs. They give me great pleasure. I believe that Robinson Crusoe and Peter Wilkins could only have been written by islanders. No continentalist could have conceived either tale. Davis's story is an imitation of Peter Wilkins; but there are many beautiful things in it; especially his finding his wife crouching by the fireside--she having, in his absence, plucked out all her feathers--to be like him! It would require a very peculiar genius to add another tale, _ejusdem generis_, to Robinson Crusoe and Peter Wilkins. I once projected such a thing; but the difficulty of a pre-occupied ground stopped me. Perhaps La Motte Fouqué might effect something; but I should fear that neither he, nor any other German, could entirely understand what may be called the "_desert island_" feeling. I would try the marvellous line of Peter Wilkins, if I attempted it, rather than the _real_ fiction of Robinson Crusoe. * * * * * What a master of composition Fielding was! Upon my word, I think the Oedipus Tyrannus, the Alchemist, and Tom Jones the three most perfect plots ever planned. And how charming, how wholesome, Fielding always is! To take him up after Richardson, is like emerging from a sick room heated by stoves, into an open lawn, on a breezy day in May. * * * * * I have been very deeply interested in the account of Bishop Sandford's life, published by his son. He seems to have been a thorough gentleman upon the model of St. Paul, whose manners were the finest of any man's upon record. * * * * * I think I could have conformed to the then dominant Church before the Reformation. The errors existed, but they had not been riveted into peremptory articles of faith before the Council of Trent. If a Romanist were to ask me the question put to Sir Henry Wotton, [1]I should content myself by answering, that I could not exactly say when my religion, as he was pleased to call it, began--but that it was certainly some sixty or seventy years before _his_, at all events--which began at the Council of Trent. [Footnote 1: "Having, at his being in Rome, made acquaintance with a pleasant priest, who invited him, one evening, to hear their vesper music at church; the priest, seeing Sir Henry stand obscurely in a corner, sends to him by a boy of the choir this question, writ in a small piece of paper;--'Where was your religion to be found before Luther?' To which question Sir Henry presently underwrit;--'My religion was to be found then, where yours is not to be found now--in the written word of God.'"--_Isaak Walton's Life of Sir Henry Wotton_.] _July_ 10. 1834. _EUTHANASIA._ I am, dying, but without expectation of a speedy release. Is it not strange that very recently by-gone images, and scenes of early life, have stolen into my mind, like breezes blown from the spice-islands of Youth and Hope-- those twin realities of this phantom world! I do not add Love,--for what is Love but Youth and Hope embracing, and so seen as _one?_ I say _realities_; for reality is a thing of degrees, from the Iliad to a dream; [Greek: *ai g_or t onar e Di s esti]. Yet, in a strict sense, reality is not predicable at all of aught below Heaven. "Es enim _in coelis_, Pater noster, qui tu vere _es!_" Hooker wished to live to finish his Ecclesiastical Polity;--so I own I wish life and strength had been spared to me to complete my Philosophy. For, as God hears me, the originating, continuing, and sustaining wish and design in my heart were to exalt the glory of his name; and, which is the same thing in other words, to promote the improvement of mankind. But _visum aliter Deo_, and his will be done. * * * * * ** This note may well finish the present specimens. What followed was for the memory of private friends only. Mr. Coleridge was then extremely ill; but certainly did not believe his end to be quite so near at hand as it was.--ED. The following Recollections of Mr. Coleridge, written in May, 1811, have been also communicated to me by my brother, Mr. Justice Coleridge:-- "20_th April_, 1811, _at Richmond_. "We got on politics, and he related some curious facts of the Prince and Perceval. Then, adverting to the present state of affairs in Portugal, he said that he rejoiced not so much in the mere favourable turn, as in the end that must now be put to the base reign of opinion respecting the superiority and invincible skill of the French generals. Brave as Sir John Moore was, he thought him deficient in that greater and more essential manliness of soul which should have made him not hold his enemy in such fearful respect, and which should have taught him to care less for the opinion of the world at home. "We then got, I know not how, to German topics. He said that the language of their literature was entirely factitious, and had been formed by Luther from the two dialects, High and Low German; that he had made it, grammatically, most correct, more so, perhaps, than any other language; it was equal to the Greek, except in harmony and sweetness. And yet the Germans themselves thought it sweet;--Klopstock had repeated to him an ode of his own to prove it, and really had deceived himself, by the force of association, into a belief that the harsh sounds, conveying, indeed, or being significant of, sweet images or thoughts, were themselves sweet. Mr. C. was asked what he thought of Klopstock. He answered, that his fame was rapidly declining in Germany; that an Englishman might form a correct notion of him by uniting the moral epigram of Young, the bombast of Hervey, and the minute description of Richardson. As to sublimity, he had, with all Germans, one rule for producing it;--it was, to take something very great, and make it very small in comparison with that which you wish to elevate. Thus, for example, Klopstock says,--'As the gardener goes forth, and scatters from his basket seed into the garden; so does the Creator scatter worlds with his right hand.' Here _worlds_, a large object, are made small in the hands of the Creator; consequently, the Creator is very great. In short, the Germans were not a poetical nation in the very highest sense. Wieland was their best poet: his subject was bad, and his thoughts often impure; but his language was rich and harmonious, and his fancy luxuriant. Sotheby's translation had not at all caught the manner of the original. But the Germans were good metaphysicians and critics: they criticised on principles previously laid down; thus, though they might be wrong, they were in no danger of being self-contradictory, which was too often the case with English critics. "Young, he said, was not a poet to be read through at once. His love of point and wit had often put an end to his pathos and sublimity; but there were parts in him which must be immortal. He (Mr. C.) loved to read a page of Young, and walk out to think of him. "Returning to the Germans, he said that the state of their religion, when he was in Germany, was really shocking. He had never met one clergyman a Christian; and he found professors in the universities lecturing against the most material points in the Gospel. He instanced, I think, Paulus, whose lectures he had attended. The object was to resolve the miracles into natural operations; and such a disposition evinced was the best road to preferment. He severely censured Mr. Taylor's book, in which the principles of Paulus were explained and insisted on with much gratuitous indelicacy. He then entered into the question of Socinianism, and noticed, as I recollect, the passage in the Old Testament; 'The people bowed their faces, and _worshipped_ God and the king.' He said, that all worship implied the presence of the object worshipped: the people worshipped, bowing to the sensuous presence of the one, and the conceived omnipresence of the other. He talked of his having constantly to defend the Church against the Socinian Bishop of Llandaff, Watson. The subject then varied to Roman Catholicism, and he gave us an account of a controversy he had had with a very sensible priest in Sicily on the worship of saints. He had driven the priest from one post to another, till the latter took up the ground, that though the saints were not omnipresent, yet God, who was so, imparted to them the prayers offered up, and then they used their interference with Him to grant them. 'That is, father, (said C. in reply)--excuse my seeming levity, for I mean no impiety--that is; I have a deaf and dumb wife, who yet understands me, and I her, by signs. You have a favour to ask of me, and want my wife's interference; so you communicate your request to me, who impart it to her, and she, by signs back again, begs me to grant it.' The good priest laughed, and said, '_Populus milt decipi, et decipiatur!_' "We then got upon the Oxford controversy, and he was decidedly of opinion that there could be no doubt of Copleston's complete victory. He thought the Review had chosen its points of attack ill, as there must doubtless be in every institution so old much to reprehend and carp at. On the other hand, he thought that Copleston had not been so severe or hard upon them as he might have been; but he admired the critical part of his work, which he thought very highly valuable, independently of the controversy. He wished some portion of mathematics was more essential to a degree at Oxford, as he thought a gentleman's education incomplete without it, and had himself found the necessity of getting up a little, when he could ill spare the time. He every day more and more lamented his neglect of them when at Cambridge, "Then glancing off to Aristotle, he gave a very high character of him. He said that Bacon objected to Aristotle the grossness of his examples, and Davy now did precisely the same to Bacon: both were wrong; for each of those philosophers wished to confine the attention of the mind in their works to the _form_ of reasoning only, by which other truths might be established or elicited, and therefore the most trite and common-place examples were in fact the best. He said that during a long confinement to his room, he had taken up the Schoolmen, and was astonished at the immense learning and acute knowledge displayed by them; that there was scarcely any thing which modern philosophers had proudly brought forward as their own, which might not be found clearly and systematically laid down by them in some or other of their writings. Locke had sneered at the Schoolmen unfairly, and had raised a foolish laugh against them by citations from their _Quid libet_ questions, which were discussed on the eyes of holydays, and in which the greatest latitude was allowed, being considered mere exercises of ingenuity. We had ridiculed their _quiddities_, and why? Had we not borrowed their _quantity_ and their _quality_, and why then reject their _quiddity_, when every schoolboy in logic must know, that of every thing may be asked, _Quantum est? Quale est?_ and _Quid est?_ the last bringing you to the most material of all points, its individual being. He afterwards stated, that in a History of Speculative Philosophy which he was endeavouring to prepare for publication, he had proved, and to the satisfaction of Sir James Mackintosh, that there was nothing in Locke which his best admirers most admired, that might not be found more clearly and better laid down in Descartes or the old Schoolmen; not that he was himself an implicit disciple of Descartes, though he thought that Descartes had been much misinterpreted. "When we got on the subject of poetry and Southey, he gave us a critique of the Curse of Kehama, the fault of which he thought consisted in the association of a plot and a machinery so very wild with feelings so sober and tender: but he gave the poem high commendation, admired the art displayed in the employment of the Hindu monstrosities, and begged us to observe the noble feeling excited of the superiority of virtue over vice; that Kehama went on, from the beginning to the end of the poem, increasing in power, whilst Kailyal gradually lost her hopes and her protectors; and yet by the time we got to the end, we had arrived at an utter contempt and even carelessness of the power of evil, as exemplified in the almighty Rajah, and felt a complete confidence in the safety of the unprotected virtue of the maiden. This he thought the very great merit of the poem. "When we walked home with him to the inn, he got on the subject of the English Essay for the year at Oxford, and thought some consideration of the corruption of language should he introduced into it. [Footnote: On Etymology.] It originated, he thought, in a desire to abbreviate all expression as much as possible; and no doubt, if in one word, without violating idiom, I can express what others have done in more, and yet be as fully and easily understood, I have manifestly made an improvement; but if, on the other hand, it becomes harder, and takes more time to comprehend a thought or image put in one word by Apuleius than when expressed in a whole sentence by Cicero, the saving is merely of pen and ink, and the alteration is evidently a corruption." _"April_ 21.--Richmond._ "Before breakfast we went into Mr. May's delightful book-room, where he was again silent in admiration of the prospect. After breakfast, we walked to church. He seemed full of calm piety, and said he always felt the most delightful sensations in a Sunday church-yard,--that it struck him as if God had given to man fifty-two springs in every year. After the service, he was vehement against the sermon, as common-place, and invidious in its tone towards the poor. Then he gave many texts from the lessons and gospel of the day, as affording fit subjects for discourses. He ridiculed the absurdity of refusing to believe every thing that you could not understand; and mentioned a rebuke of Dr. Parr's to a man of the name of Frith, and that of another clergyman to a young man, who said he would believe nothing which he could not understand:--'Then, young man, your creed will be the shortest of any man's I know.' "As we walked up Mr. Cambridge's meadows towards Twickenham, he criticised Johnson and Gray as poets, and did not seem to allow them high merit. The excellence of verse, he said, was to be untranslatable into any other words without detriment to the beauty of the passage;--the position of a single word could not be altered in Milton without injury. Gray's personifications, he said, were mere printer's devils' personifications-- persons with a capital letter, abstract qualities with a small one. He thought Collins had more genius than Gray, who was a singular instance of a man of taste, poetic feeling, and fancy, without imagination. He contrasted Dryden's opening of the 10th satire of Juvenal with Johnson's:-- "'Let observation, with extensive view, Survey mankind from Ganges to Peru.' which was as much as to say,-- "'Let observation with extensive observation observe mankind.' "After dinner he told us a humorous story of his enthusiastic fondness for Quakerism, when he was at Cambridge, and his attending one of their meetings, which had entirely cured him. When the little children came in, he was in raptures with them, and descanted upon the delightful mode of treating them now, in comparison with what he had experienced in childhood. He lamented the haughtiness with which Englishmen treated all foreigners abroad, and the facility with which our government had always given up any people which had allied itself to us, at the end of a war; and he particularly remarked upon our abandonment of Minorca. These two things, he said, made us universally disliked on the Continent; though, as a people, most highly respected. He thought a war with America inevitable; and expressed his opinion, that the United States were unfortunate in the prematureness of their separation from this country, before they had in themselves the materials of moral society--before they had a gentry and a learned class,--the former looking backwards, and giving the sense of stability--the latter looking forwards, and regulating the feelings of the people. "Afterwards, in the drawing-room, he sat down by Professor Rigaud, with whom he entered into a discussion of Kant's System of Metaphysics. The little knots of the company were speedily silent: Mr. C.'s voice grew louder; and abstruse as the subject was, yet his language was so ready, so energetic, and so eloquent, and his illustrations so very neat and apposite, that the ladies even paid him the most solicitous and respectful attention. They were really entertained with Kant's Metaphysics! At last I took one of them, a very sweet singer, to the piano-forte; and, when there was a pause, she began an Italian air. She was anxious to please him, and he was enraptured. His frame quivered with emotion, and there was a titter of uncommon delight on his countenance. When it was over, he praised the singer warmly, and prayed she might finish those strains in heaven! "This is nearly all, except some anecdotes, which I recollect of our meeting with this most interesting, most wonderful man. Some of his topics and arguments I have enumerated; but the connection and the words are lost. And nothing that I can say can give any notion of his eloquence and manner,--of the hold which he soon got on his audience--of the variety of his stores of information--or, finally, of the artlessness of his habits, or the modesty and temper with which he listened to, and answered arguments, contradictory to his own."--J. T. C. The following address has been printed before; but it cannot be too widely circulated, and it will form an appropriate conclusion to this volume. _To Adam Steinmetz K----._ MY DEAR GODCHILD, I offer up the same fervent prayer for you now, as I did kneeling before the altar, when you were baptized into Christ, and solemnly received as a living member of his spiritual body, the Church. Years must pass before you will be able to read, with an understanding heart, what I now write. But I trust that the all-gracious God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of Mercies, who, by his only-begotten Son, (all mercies in one sovereign mercy!) has redeemed you from the evil ground, and willed you to be born out of darkness, but into light--out of death, but into life--out of sin, but into righteousness, even into the Lord our Righteousness; I trust that He will graciously hear the prayers of your dear parents, and be with you as the spirit of health and growth in body and mind! My dear Godchild!--You received from Christ's minister at the baptismal font, as your Christian name, the name of a most dear friend of your father's, and who was to me even as a son, the late Adam Steinmetz, whose fervent aspiration, and ever-paramount aim, even from early youth, was to be a Christian in thought, word, and deed--in will, mind, and affections. I too, your Godfather, have known what the enjoyments and advantages of this life are, and what the more refined pleasures which learning and intellectual power can bestow; and with all the experience that more than threescore years can give, I now, on the eve of my departure, declare to you, (and earnestly pray that you may hereafter live and act on the conviction,) that health is a great blessing,--competence obtained by honourable industry a great blessing,--and a great blessing it is to have kind, faithful, and loving friends and relatives; but that the greatest of all blessings, as it is the most ennobling of all privileges, is to be indeed a Christian. But I have been likewise, through a large portion of my later life, a sufferer, sorely afflicted with bodily pains, languors, and manifold infirmities; and, for the last three or four years, have, with few and brief intervals, been confined to a sick-room, and, at this moment, in great weakness and heaviness, write from a sick-bed, hopeless of a recovery, yet without prospect of a speedy removal; and I, thus on the very brink of the grave, solemnly bear witness to you, that the Almighty Redeemer, most gracious in his promises to them that truly seek him, is faithful to perform what he hath promised, and has preserved, under all my pains and infirmities, the inward peace that passeth all understanding, with the supporting assurance of a reconciled God, who will not withdraw his spirit from me in the conflict, and in his own time will deliver me from the Evil One! O, my dear Godchild! eminently blessed are those who begin early to seek, fear, and love their God, trusting wholly in the righteousness and mediation of their Lord, Redeemer, Saviour, and everlasting High Priest, Jesus Christ! O preserve this as a legacy and bequest from your unseen Godfather and friend, S. T. COLERIDGE. _Grove, Highgate, July_ 13. 1834. He died on the 25th day of the same month. INDEX. * * * * * A. Abraham. Abuse, Eloquence of. Acoustics. Acts, Origin of. Adiaphori. Advocate, Duties and Needs of an. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Alchemy. All and the Whole. America, United States of. American Union, Northern and Southern States of the. Americans, the. Anarchy, Mental. Ancient Mariner. Animal Being, Scale of. Ant and Bee. Architecture, Gothic. Ariosto and Tasso. Aristotle. Army and Navy, House of Commons appointing the Officers of the. Article, Ninth. Asgill. -----and Defoe. Astrology. Atheist. Autumn Day. B. Bacon. Ball, Sir Alexander. Baptismal Service. Barrow and Dryden. _Bartram's Travels_. Baxter. Beaumont and Fletcher. ----'s Dramas. Beauty. Behmen, Jacob. Bentley. Berkeley. Bertram, Character of. Bestial Theory. Bible, Study of the. ----, Version of the. Biblical Commentators. Biographia Literaria. Bitters and Tonics. Black. Black, Colonel. Blumenbach and Kant's Races. Books of Moses, Genuineness of. Boswell. Bourrienne. Bowyer. British Schoolmen. Brooke, Lord. Brown and Darwin. Bull and Waterland. Burke. Burnet. Buonaparte. Byron, Lord. ----and H. Walpole's "Mysterious Mother." ----, his Versification, and Don Juan. C. Caesarean Operation. Cambridge Petition to admit Dissenters. Canning. Capital. Catholicity. Cavalier Slang. Character, Differences of. Charles I. Chaucer. Children, Gracefulness of, Chillingworth, Christ, Divinity of, Christ's Hospital, Christian Sabbath, Christianity, ----, Scope of, Church, ----, High Prizes and Revenues of the, ----, National, ----of England, ----of Rome, Churchmen, Church Singing, Citizens and Christians, Claudian, Clergy, Celibacy of the, Coleridge's (Mr.) System, Colonization, Colours, ----, Non-perception of, Commons, House of, ----, the Reformed House of, Compounds, Latin, Consolation in Distress, Constantine, Constitution, English, Corn Laws, Coronation Oaths, Crabbe and Southey, Cramp, Charm for, Craniology, Crisis, D. Dancing, English and Greek, Daniel, Davy, Sir H., Democracy, ----, with Slavery, Devotional Spirit, De vi Minimorum, Dictation and Inspiration, Diction of the Old and New Testament Version, Diplomatists, modern, Disfranchisement, Dissenters, Diversions of Purley, Divines, old, Divinity, Dobrizhoffer, Dog, Don Quixote, Douw's (Gerard) "Schoolmaster," and Titian's "Venus," Dramatists, the Old, Drayton and Daniel, Dreams, ----and Ghosts, Difference between Stories of, Dryden, ----and Pope, Dual, Neuter plural, and Verb singular, E. Education, Egyptian Antiquaries, Eldon's (Lord) Doctrine as to Grammar Schools, Electricity, Elegy, Energy of Man and other Animals, England, ----and Holland, English and German, Envy, Epidemic Disease, Epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians, ----to the Hebrews, ----to the Romans, Erasmus, Etymology of the final _Ive_, Eucharist, the, Euripides, Euthanasia, Evangelicals, Mock, F. Faith, ----, Articles of, ----and Belief Fantasy and Imagination, Fatalism and Providence, Fathers, the, Faust, Fees, Barristers' and Physicians', Fielding and Richardson, Fine Arts, Patronage of the, Flaccus, Valerius, Flogging, Food, Fox and Pitt, French, the, ----Gendarmerie, ----Hereditary Peerage, Abolition of the, G. Galileo, Newton, Kepler, Bacon, Galvanism, Gas, Hydro-carbonic, Gender of the Sun in German, Genius, Genius, Criterion of. ----, Feminine. ----, Metaphysical. ----of the Spanish and Italians. German. ----Blank Verse. ----and English. Ghosts, Gibbon, Gifford's Massier, Giotto, Gnosis, God, Proof of Existence of, ----'s Providence, Goethe, Good and the True, the, Government, Grammar, Gray and Cotton Great Minds androgynous, ----Poets, good Men, Greek, ----, Italian, and English, pure Ages of, ----Accent and Quantity, ----Drama, ----Particles, Grey, Earl, H. Hacket's Life of Archbishop Williams, Hahnemann, Hall, Captain B., ----and the Americans, Hamlet, Hampden's Speech, Harmony, Heat, Hebrew, Hermesianax, Herodotus, Hesiod, Hieronimo, History, ----, Jewish, Hobbism, Holland and Belgium, ----and the Dutch, Homer, Homeric Heroes in Shakspeare, Hooker, Hooker and Bull, Horner, Humour and Genius, Hypothesis, Hysteria, I. Iapetic and Semitic, Ideal Tory and Whig, Ideal Truths, Reverence for, Ideas, Imitation and Copy, Incarnation, Inherited Disease, Insects, Interest, Monied, Investigation, Methods of, Ireland, Union with, Irish Church, Iron, Irving, Isaac, Italy, Roman Conquest of, J. Jacob, Jacobins, James I, Jerusalem, Destruction of, Jews, ----, Conversion of the, ----, Division of the Scripture, ----, in Poland, Job, Book of, Johnson, Dr., ----, his Political Pamphlets, ----, the Whig, Jonson, Ben, Junius, Juries, K. Kant's Attempt, Kant's Races of Mankind, Kean, Keats, Keenness and Subtlety, Kemble, John, Kepler, Knowledge, Kotzebue, L. Lakes, Scotch and English, Lamb, C., Land and Money, Landholders, Duty of, Landor's (W. S.) Poetry, Laud, Laughter, Farce and Tragedy, Lavacrum Pallados, Legislation, Iniquitous, Leo X., Lewis's Jamaica Journal, Life, Constitutional and Functional, Liturgy, English, Logic, ----, Character of the Age for, Logic of Ideas and of Syllogisms. Logos, the. "Lord, the," in the English Version of the Psalms. Love. ----and Friendship opposed. Love's Labour Lost. Lucan. Luther. Lyell's Geology. M. Machinery. Mackintosh, Sir James. Madness. Magnetism. Malta. Man cannot be stationary. ----Fall of. ----'s Freedom. Mandeville's Fable of the Bees. Manners under Edward III., Richard II., and Henry VIII. Marriage. ----Parental Control in. ----of Cousins. Martin. Mason's Poetry. Massier. Materialism. Mathews. Measure for Measure. Medicine. Medicines, Specific. Men. Messenger of the Covenant. Messiah. Metre, Modern. Miguel, Dom, and Dom Pedro. Milesian Tales. Milton. ----and Sydney. ----'s disregard of Painting. ----'s Egotism. ----'s Latin Poems. Ministers and the Reform Bill. Monarchy or Democracy, Prospect of. Monro, Sir T. Mosaic Miracles. ----Prophecies. Motives and Impulses. Music. ----, Ear and Taste for, different. Musical Glasses, some Men like. N. Napier. National Colonial Character and Naval Discipline. ----Debt. Nations, Characteristic Temperament of. Negro Emancipation. Nervous Weakness. New Testament Canon. Newton. Nitrous Oxide. Nominalists and Realists. Northern and Southern States. Norwegians. O. Oath, Coronation. Oaths. Obstruction. Origen. Othello, Character of. P. Painting. Pantheism. ----and Idolatry. Papacy. ----, the, and the Reformation. ----and the Schoolmen. Paradise Lost. Park, Professor. Parliamentary Privilege. Party Spirit. Penal Code in Ireland. Penn, Granville, and the Deluge. Pentameter, Greek and Latin. Permanency and Progression of Nations. Persius. Persons and Things. Peter Simple, and Tom Cringle's Log. Phantom Portrait. Philanthropists. Philosopher's ordinary Language. Philosophy, Greek. ----, Moral. ----, Mr. Coleridge's System of. ----of young Men of the present Day. Pictures. Pilgrim's Progress. Pirates. Plants. Plato. ----and Xenophon. Plotinus. Poem, Epic. Poetic Promise. Poetical Filter. Poetry. ----, Persian and Arabic. Poison. Polarity, Moral Law of. Political Action, the two Modes of. Political Economy, Modern. Polonius. Poor Laws. Popedom. Prayer. Preaching extempore. Presbyterians, Independents, and Bishops. Principle, Greatest Happiness. Principles and Facts. ----and Maxims. Professions and Trades. Propertius. Property Tax. Prophecies of the Old Testament. Prophecy. Prose and Poetry. ----and Verse. Prudentius. Psalms, Translation of the. Puritans and Cavaliers. ----and Jacobins. Q. Quacks. Quakerism, Modern. Quakers. Quarantine. R. Rabelais. ----and Luther. Raffles, Sir S. Rainbow. Reason and Understanding. Reasoner, a. Redemption. Reform of the House of Commons. ----Bill. ----, Conduct of Ministers on the. Reformation. ----, English. Religion. Religion gentilizes. ----of the Greeks. -----, Roman Catholic. -----, Romish Representation, Popular. ----, Direct. Restoration. Review, Principles of a. Revolution. ----, Belgian. ----, French. ----, Intellectual. Rhenferd. Roman Conquest. ----Empire. Key to the Decline of the. ----Mind. ----Catholics. ----Catholic Emancipation. Rosetti on Dante. S. Sallust. Sandford, Bishop. Sanskrit. Sarpi, Paul. Scanderbeg. Scarlett, Sir J. Schemes, Spinozistic and Hebrew. Schiller. ----'s Robbers. ----'s Versification. Schmidt. Schools, Infant. ----, Public. Scotch and English. ----Kirk and Irving. ----Novels. Scott, Michael. ----and Coleridge. ----'s Novels. Sectarianism. Seneca. Shakspeare. ----, _in Minimis_. ----'s Intellectual Action. ----'s Sonnets. Sicily. Sidney, Sir P. Sin and Sins. Smith, Robert. Society, best State of. Socinianism. Socrates. Solomon. Sophocles. Southey. ----'s Life of Bunyan. Speech, Parts of. Spenser. Spinosa. Spurzheim. Spurzheim and Craniology. St. John. ----'s Gospel. ----, Chap. xix. Ver. 11. ----, Chap. iii. Ver. 4. St. Paul's Melita. State. ----, a. ----, Idea of a. Statesmen. Statius. Steinmetz. Stella. Sterne. Style. ----, Algernon Sydney's. ----, Modern. Sublime and Nonsense. Sublimity. Suffiction. Superstition of Maltese, Sicilians, and Italians. Swift. Sympathy of old Greek and Latin with English, 168. T. Talent and Genius. Talented. Taxation. Taylor, Jeremy. Tennyson's Poems. Tertullian. Thelwall. Theory. Theta. Things are finding their Level. Thomas à Becket. Thucydides. ----and Tacitus. Tibullus. Times of Charles I. Toleration. Tooke, Horne. Travels, Modern. Trinity, the. Truths and Maxims. U. Understanding, the. Undine. Unitarianism. Universal Suffrage. Universities. V. Valcknaer. Varro. Vico. Virgil. Virtue and Liberty. Von Humboldt, Baron. Vote, Right of Women to. Vowels and Consonants. Vox Populi, Vox Dei. W. Walkerite Creed. War. ----, Civil, of the Seventeenth Century. Wedded Love in Shakspeare and his contemporary Dramatists. Wellington, Duke of. Wetherell's (Sir Charles) Speech. Whigs, Conduct of the. Wicliffe. Wilkins, Peter, and Stothard. William III. Wilson. Wit and Madness. Witch of Endor. Women, Characterlessness of. ----, Old. ----and Men. Words and Names of Things. Wordsworth. Works, Chronological Arrangement of. Working to better one's condition. Worlds, Plurality of. Z. Zendavesta. THE END. 
8580	----	[Illustration: Portrait.] * * * * * REMINISCENCES OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE AND ROBERT SOUTHEY by JOSEPH COTTLE * * * * * INTRODUCTION. It is with a solemnized feeling that I enter on these Reminiscences. Except one, I have survived all the associates of my earlier days. The young, with a long life in perspective, (if any life can be called long, in so brief an existence) are unable to realize the impressions of a man, nearer eighty than seventy, when the shadows of evening are gathering around, and, in a retrospective glance, the whole field of past vision appears, in all its complexities, like the indistinct tumults of a dream. The acute reasoner--the fiery politician--the eager polemic--the emulous aspirant after fame; and many such have I known, where are they? and how mournful, if any one of them should be found, at last, to have directed his solicitudes, alone, to material objects;--should have neglected to cultivate his own little plot of earth, more valuable than mines! and have sown no seeds for eternity. It is not a light motive which could have prompted me, when this world of "Eye and Ear" is fast receding, while grander scenes are opening, and so near! to call up almost long-forgotten associations, and to dwell on the stirring, by-gone occurrences that tend, in some measure, to interfere with that calm which is most desirable, and best accords with the feelings of one who holds life by such slender ties. Yet through the goodness of the Almighty, being at the present moment exempt from many of the common infirmities of age, I am willing, as a last act, to make some sacrifice to obtain the good which I hope this recurrence to the past is calculated to produce. With respect to Mr. Coleridge, it would be easy and pleasant to sail with the stream; to admire his eloquence; to extol his genius; and to forget his failings; but where is the utility, arising out of this homage paid to naked talent? If the attention of posterity rested here, where were the lessons of wisdom to be learnt from his example? His path through the world was marked by strong outlines, and instruction is to be derived from every feature of his mind, and every portion of his eventful and chequered life. In all the aspects of his character, he was probably the most singular man that has appeared in this country during the preceding century, and the leading incidents of whose life ought to stand fairly on record. The facts which I have stated are undeniable, the most important being substantiated by his own letters; but higher objects were intended by this narrative than merely to elucidate a character, (however remarkable), in all its vicissitudes and eccentricities. Rising above idle curiosity, or the desire of furnishing aliment for the sentimental;--excitement the object, and the moral tendency disregarded, these pages take a wider range, and are designed for the good of many, where if there be much to pain the reader, he should moderate his regrets, by looking through the intermediate to the end. There is scarcely an individual, whose life, if justly delineated, would not present much whence others might derive instruction. If this be applicable to the multitude, how much more essentially true is it, in reference to the ethereal spirits, endowed by the Supreme with a lavish portion of intellectual strength, as well as with proportionate capacities for doing good? How serious therefore is the obligation to fidelity, when the portraiture of a man is to be presented, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in whom such diversified and contrary qualities alternately predominated! Yet all the advantages to be derived from him, and similar instructors of mankind, must result from a faithful exhibition of the broad features of their earthly conduct and character, so that they might stand out as landmarks, and pharos-towers, to guide, or warn, or encourage, all succeeding voyagers on the Ocean of Life. In preparing the following work, I should gladly have withheld that one letter of Mr. Coleridge to Mr. Wade, had not the obligation to make it public been imperative. But concealment would have been injustice to the living, and treachery to the dead. This letter is the solemnizing voice of conscience. Can any reflecting mind, deliberately desire the suppression of this document, in which Mr. Coleridge, for the good of others, generously forgets its bearing on himself, and makes a full and voluntary confession of the sins he had committed against "himself, his friends, his children, and his God?" In the agony of remorse, at the retrospection, he thus required that this his confession should hereafter be given to the public. "AFTER MY DEATH, I EARNESTLY ENTREAT, THAT A FULL AND UNQUALIFIED NARRATIVE OF MY WRETCHEDNESS, AND ITS GUILTY CAUSE, MAY BE MADE PUBLIC, THAT AT LEAST SOME LITTLE GOOD MAY BE EFFECTED BY THE DIREFUL EXAMPLE." This is the most redeeming letter Samuel Taylor Coleridge ever penned. A callous heart could not have written it. A Christian, awaking from his temporary lethargy, might. While it powerfully propitiates the reader, it almost converts condemnation into compassion. No considerate friend, it might be thought, would have desired the suppression of this letter, but rather its most extended circulation; and that, among other cogent reasons, from the immense moral lesson, enforced by it, in perpetuity, on all consumers of opium; in which they will behold, as well as in some of the other letters, the "tremendous consequences," (to use Mr. Coleridge's own expressions) of such practices, exemplified in his own person; and to which terrible effects, he himself so often, and so impressively refers. It was doubtless a deep conviction of the beneficial tendencies involved in the publication, that prompted Mr. C. to direct publicity to be given to this remarkable letter, after his decease. The incidents connected with the lives of Mr. Coleridge and Mr. Southey, are so intimately blended, from relationship, association, and kindred pursuits, that the biography of one, to a considerable extent, involves that of the other. The following narrative, however, professes to be annals of, rather than a circumstantial account of these two remarkable men. Some persons may be predisposed to misconstrue the motive for giving publicity to the following letter, but others, it is hoped, will admit that the sole object has been, not to draw the reader's attention to the writer, but to confer _credit on Southey_. Many are the individuals who would have assisted, to a greater extent than myself, two young men of decided genius, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey, who required, at the commencement of their literary career, encouragement, and a little assistance. Few however, would have exhibited the magnanimity which Southey displayed, in seasons of improved circumstances, by referring to slender acts of kindness, long past, and scarcely remembered but by himself. Few are the men, who, after having surmounted their difficulties by honourable exertion, would have referred to past seasons of perplexity, and have desired--that occurrences "might be seen hereafter," which little minds would sedulously have concealed, as discredit, rather than as conferring conspicuous honour. Ten years after the incidents had occurred to which the following letter refers, in writing to Mr. Southey, among other subjects, I casually expressed a regret, that when I quitted the business of a bookseller, I had not returned him the copy-rights of his "Joan of Arc;" of his two volumes of Poems; and of his letters from Spain and Portugal. The following was his reply. "Wednesday evening, Greta Hall, April 28, 1808. My dear Cottle, ... What you say of my copy-rights affects me very much. Dear Cottle, set your heart at rest on that subject. It ought to be at rest. They were yours; fairly bought, and fairly sold. You bought them on the chance of their success, what no London bookseller would have done; and had they not been bought, they could not have been published at all. Nay, if you had not published 'Joan of Arc,' the poem never would have existed, nor should I, in all probability, ever have obtained that reputation which is the capital on which I subsist, nor that power which enables me to support it. But this is not all. Do you suppose, Cottle, that I have forgotten those true and most essential acts of friendship which you showed me when I stood most in need of them? Your house was my house when I had no other. The very money with which I bought my wedding ring, and paid my marriage fees, was supplied by you. It was with your sisters that I left my Edith, during my six months' absence; and for the six months after my return, it was from you that I received, week by week, the little on which we lived, till I was enabled to live by other means. It is not the settling of our cash account that can cancel obligations like these. You are in the habit of preserving your letters, and if you were not, _I would entreat you to preserve this, that it might be seen hereafter_. Sure I am, that there never was a more generous, nor a kinder heart than yours, and you will believe me when I add, that there does not live that man upon earth, whom I remember with more gratitude, and more affection. My heart throbs, and my eyes burn with these recollections. Good night my dear old friend and benefactor. Robert Southey." Gratitude is a plant indigenous to Heaven. Specimens are rarely found on Earth. This is one. Mr. Southey, on previous occasions had advised me to write my "Recollections of Persons and Things," and it having been understood that I was about to prepare a memoir of Mr. Coleridge, (1836) Mr. S. renewed his solicitation, as will appear by the following extracts. "Keswick, April 14, 1836. My dear Cottle, There is I hope, time enough for you to make a very interesting book of your own 'Recollections,' a book which will be of no little value to the history of our native city, and the literature of our times. Your prose has a natural ease which no study could acquire. I am very confident you could make as delightful a book on this subject as Isaac Walton has in his way. If you are drawing up your 'Recollections of Coleridge,' you are most welcome to insert anything of mine which you may think proper. To be employed in such a work, with the principles and frame of mind wherewith you would engage in it, is to be instructing and admonishing your fellow-creatures; it is employing your talents, and keeping up that habitual preparation for the enduring inheritance in which the greater part of your life has been spent. Men like us, who write in sincerity, and with the desire of teaching others so to think, and to feel, as may be best for themselves and the community, are labouring as much in their vocation as if they were composing sermons, or delivering them from the pulpit.... God bless you, my dear old friend. Always yours most affectionately, Robert Southey." On another occasion Mr. S. thus wrote. "My dear Cottle, I both wish and advise you to draw up your '_Reminiscences_', I advise you for your own sake, as a valuable memorial, and wish it for my own, that that part of my life might be faithfully reported by the person who knows it best...." "You have enough to tell which is harmless, as well as interesting, and not harmless only, but instructive, and that ought to be told, _and which only you can tell._" It may be proper to notice that the title here adopted, of "REMINISCENCES" is to be understood as a general, rather than as a strictly applicable phrase, since the present miscellaneous work is founded on letters, and various memoranda, that for the most part, have lain in a dormant state for many years, and which were preserved as mementos of past scenes, personally interesting, but without, in the first instance, the least reference to ultimate publication. I cannot withhold a final remark, with which my own mind is greatly affected; from revolving on a most unexpected, as it is a singular fact,--that these brief memorials of Mr. Coleridge, and Mr. Southey, should be written by the _same individual_ who, more than _half a century_ before, contributed his humble efforts to assist, and encourage them, in their first entrance on a literary life. The whole of the events thus recorded, appear through the dim vista of memory, already with the scenes before the flood! while all the busy, the aspiring, and the intellectual spirits here noticed, and once so well known, have been hurried off our mortal stage!--Robert Lovell!--George Burnet!--Charles Lloyd!--George Catcott!--Dr. Beddoes!--Charles Danvers!--Amos Cottle!--William Gilbert!--John Morgan!--Ann Yearsley!--Sir H. Davy!--Hannah More!--Robert Hall!--Samuel Taylor Coleridge!--Charles Lamb!--Thomas Poole!--Josiah Wade!--Robert Southey!--and John Foster!--confirming, with fresh emphasis, "What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!" Bristol, April 20, 1847. J. C. * * * * * CONTENTS. Pantisocracy and Robert Lovell Mr. Southey and Mr. Burnet arrive in Bristol Mr. Coleridge arrives in Bristol Fears for the Pantisocritans dissipated A London bookseller offers Mr. Coleridge six guineas for the copyright of his Poems Mr. Coleridge and Mr. Southey each sells his 1st volume of Poems, for thirty guineas Mr. Southey sells his Joan of Arc for fifty guineas Mr. Coleridge begins his lectures in Bristol Specimen of Mr. C.'s lecture Liberty's letter to Famine Mr. C.'s political lectures, &c. Death of Robert Lovell Mr. Southey's course of historical lectures Mr. Coleridge disappoints his audience Excursion to Tintern Abbey Dissension between Mr. Coleridge and Mr. Southey Incidents connected with Mr. Coleridge's volume of Poems Mr. Coleridge married to Miss Sarah Fricker Household articles required Notices of Wm. Gilbert, Ann Yearsley, H. More, and Robert Hall Mr. Coleridge removes, first to Bristol and then to Stowey --- --------- again to Bristol --- --------- woeful letter Mr. Coleridge's Poems now published --- --------- projects his "Watchman" --- --------- seven letters, while on his journey to collect subscribers to the "Watchman" --- --------- inaugural sermon at Bath Mr. Lloyd domesticates with Mr. Coleridge Mr. Coleridge's melancholy letter Mr. Coleridge's views of Epic Poetry Quarrel between Mr. Coleridge and Mr. Southey. Reconciled Mr. Coleridge's letter to Miss Cruikshanks --- -------- diagram of the second bottle --- -------- Theological letter Mr. Coleridge prepares for a second edition of his Poems Mr. Coleridge's letter to George Catcott --- -------- on hexameters, &c. --- -------- Foster-mother's tale (extract) --- -------- ludicrous interview with a country woman --- -------- Poem relating to Burns --- -------- character of Mr. Wordsworth Herbert Croft and Chatterton (Note) Coleridge's character of Thelwall Letters from Charles Lamb Mr. Coleridge's lines to Joseph Cottle Sara's lines to the same Three Sonnets, by Nehemiah Higginbotham Coleridge, Lloyd, and Lamb, quarrel Lamb's sarcastic Theses to Mr. Coleridge Coleridge goes to Shrewsbury on probation Mr. Coleridge receives an annuity of £150 from the Messrs. Thomas and Josiah Wedgewood Letters from Mr. Wordsworth,--Lyrical Ballads Mr. Wordsworth caballed against Disasters attending a dinner with Mr. Wordsworth Mr. Coleridge and Mr. Wordsworth depart for Germany Mr. Coleridge's character of Mr. Southey Mr. Southey marries Miss Edith Fricker Three letters of Mr. Southey, from Falmouth and Portugal Sundry letters from Mr. Southey to Joseph Cottle George Dyer, and a ludicrous incident Mr. Southey's rhyming letter from Lisbon Mr. Churchey, and incidents concerning him Mr. Southey in danger from an enraged author Mr. Southey and Wat Tyler Mr. Foster explains how Wat Tyler came to be published J. Morgan's ruined circumstances. Mr. S.'s proposal for a subscription List of Mr. Southey's contributions to the Quarterly Discovery of first edition of Pilgrim's Progress Mr. Coleridge's letter on travelling in Germany Slow sale at first of Mr. Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads Mr. Humphrey Davy arrives in Bristol Dr. Beddoe and the Pneumatic Institution Mr. Davy's dangerous experiments with the gases Mr. Coleridge's and Mr. Davy's anecdotes Mr. Coleridge relates his military adventures Mr. Coleridge's Epigrams from the German Character of Coleridge, by Professor Wilson, Mr. Sergeant Talfourd, Dr. Dibdin, Mr. Justice Coleridge, Rev. Archdeacon Hare, Quarterly Review, Rev. C. V. Le Grice Mr. Coleridge's letter to Mr. Cottle on his return from Malta, 1807 Rev. J. Foster's letter concerning Coleridge Mr. Coleridge's singular escape from Italy --- ----------- letter on the Trinity --- ----------- views of Unitarianism --- ----------- character of Sir H. Davy Sir H. Davy's rebuke of an Infidel Mr. Coleridge's character of Holcroft, the Atheist Rev. J. Foster's letter respecting his Essay on Doddridge Mr. Coleridge's letter to Mr. G. Fricker Mr. De Quincey presents Mr. Coleridge with £300 Mr. Coleridge's letter on Narrative Poems Reasons why Mr. Coleridge's opium habits should not be concealed Mr. Coleridge ill in Bath Mr. Coleridge engages to Lecture in Bristol, 1814. Disappoints his Audience, by an excursion into North Wales Mr. Coleridge's lines for a transparency at the capture of Buonaparte Mr. Coleridge's approval of Infant Schools Mr. Cottle's letter of remonstrance respecting opium Mr. Coleridge's distressing letters in reply Mr. Coleridge wishes to be placed in an Asylum Mr. Southey's letters respecting Mr. Coleridge Mr. Coleridge's contrivance to cheat the doctor Mr. Coleridge leaves Bristol for Calne Letters of Mr. Southey respecting Mr. Coleridge Letter of Mr. Coleridge from Calne Mr. Coleridge's letter, requiring the truth to be told of his opium habits, after his death Mr. Coleridge's letter to his god-son, Kinnaird Letters from Mr. Southey concerning Mr. Allsop, and the scheme of Pantisocracy, and Mr. Coleridge Letters from Mr. Southey concerning "Early Recollections" Letter from Mr. Southey: his Western journey Letter from Mr. Southey. Melancholy foreboding Mr. Southey's mental malady Letter from Mr. Foster, relating to Mr. Southey Mr. Cottle's letter to Mr. Foster, respecting Mr. Southey Sixteen letters from Mr. Coleridge to Thomas and Josiah Wedgewood, Esqs. List of works promised by Mr. Coleridge, but not written Mr. Coleridge sound in health, in 1800 --- --------- his health undermined by opium soon after Dr. Carlyon, relating to Mr. Coleridge (Note) Extracts from Mr. Poole's letters, respecting Mr. Coleridge Dr. Adam's letter to Mr. Gillman, respecting Mr. Coleridge Mr. Coleridge domesticates with Mr. Gillman Letter of Mr. Foster, respecting Mr. Coleridge Prayer of Mr. Coleridge, 1831 Mr. Coleridge's Epitaph on himself Mr. Coleridge's monument APPENDIX. Character of John Henderson Controversy of Rowley and Chatterton The Weary Pilgrim, a Poem * * * * * REMINISCENCES. * * * * * Ten years ago I published "Recollections of S. T. Coleridge." This work I have revised, and embodied in the present "Reminiscences of S. T. Coleridge, and Robert Southey." My views and motives have been explained in the Introduction. If some Readers should consider that there are occasional documents introduced into the following work, too unimportant and derogatory to legitimate biography, I would observe, that it was designed that nothing should be admitted which was not characteristic of the individual; and that which illustrates _character_ in a man of genius, cannot well be esteemed trifling and deserving of rejection.--In preparing those Reminiscences, some effort has been required. I have endeavoured to forget the intervening space of forty or fifty years, and, as far as it was practicable, to enter on the scenes and circumstances described with all the feelings coincident with that distant period. My primary design has been to elucidate the incidents referring to the early lives of the late Mr. Coleridge and Mr. Southey: yet I purposed, in addition, to introduce brief notices of some other remarkable characters, known in Bristol at this time. To account for my introduction to all the persons subsequently noticed, it is necessary to apprise the Reader that I was a bookseller in Bristol from the year 1791 to 1798; from the age of 21 to 28: and having imbibed from my tutor and friend, the late John Henderson, (one of the most extraordinary of men) some little taste for literature, I found myself, during that period, generally surrounded by men of cultivated minds.[1] With these preliminary remarks I shall commence the narrative. At the close of the year 1794, a clever young man, of the Society of Friends, of the name of Robert Lovell, who had married a Miss Fricker, informed me that a few friends of his from Oxford and Cambridge, with himself, were about to sail to America, and, on the banks of the Susquehannah, to form a Social Colony, in which there was to be a community of property, and where all that was selfish was to be proscribed. None, he said, were to be admitted into their number, but tried and incorruptible characters; and he felt quite assured that he and his friends would be able to realize a state of society free from the evils and turmoils that then agitated the world, and to present an example of the eminence to which men might arrive under the unrestrained influence of sound principles. He now paid me the compliment of saying that he would be happy to include _me_ in this select assemblage who, under a state which he called PANTISOCRACY, were, he hoped, to regenerate the whole complexion of society; and that, not by establishing formal laws, but by excluding all the little deteriorating passions; injustice, "wrath, anger, clamour, and evil speaking," and thereby setting an example of "Human Perfectibility." Young as I was, I suspected there was an old and intractable leaven in human nature that would effectually frustrate these airy schemes of happiness, which had been projected in every age, and always with the same result. At first the disclosure so confounded my understanding, that I almost fancied myself transported to some new state of things, while images of patriarchal and pristine felicity stood thick around, decked in the rain-bow's colours. A moment's reflection, however, dissolved the unsubstantial vision, when I asked him a few plain questions. "How do you go?" said I. My young and ardent friend instantly replied, "We freight a ship, carrying out with us ploughs, and other implements of husbandry." The thought occurred to me, that it might be more economical to purchase such articles in America; but not too much to discourage the enthusiastic aspirant after happiness, I forebore all reference to the accumulation of difficulties to be surmounted, and merely inquired who were to compose his company? He said that only four had as yet absolutely engaged in the enterprise; Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from Cambridge; (in whom I understood the plan to have originated;) Robert Southey and George Burnet, from Oxford, and himself. "Well," I replied, "when do you set sail?" He answered, "Very shortly. I soon expect my friends from the Universities, when all the preliminaries will be adjusted, and we shall joyfully cross the blue waves of the Atlantic." "But," said I "to freight a ship, and sail out in the high style of gentlemen agriculturists, will require funds. How do you manage this?" "We all contribute what we can," said he, "and I shall introduce all my dear friends to you, immediately on their arrival in Bristol." Robert Lovell (though inexperienced, and constitutionally sanguine) was a good specimen of the open frankness which characterizes the well-informed members of the Society of Friends; and he excited in me an additional interest, from a warmth of feeling, and an extent of reading, above even the ordinary standard of the estimable class to which he belonged. He now read me some of the MS. poems of his two unknown friends, which at once established their genius in my estimation.[2] My leisure having been devoted for many years to reading and composition, and having a small volume of Poems at that time in the press, I anticipated great pleasure from an introduction to two poets, who superadded to talents of a high order, all the advantages arising from learning, and a consequent familiarity with the best models of antiquity. Independently of which, they excited an interest, and awakened a peculiar solicitude, from their being about so soon to leave their father land, and to depart permanently for a foreign shore. * * * * * [Illustration: Portrait.] * * * * * One morning shortly after, Robert Lovell called on me, and introduced Robert Southey. Never will the impression be effaced, produced on me by this young man. Tall, dignified, possessing great suavity of manners; an eye piercing, with a countenance full of genius, kindliness, and intelligence, I gave him at once the right hand of fellowship, and to the moment of his decease, that cordiality was never withdrawn. I had read so much of poetry, and sympathized so much with poets in all their eccentricities and vicissitudes, that, to see before me the realization of a character, which in the abstract most absorbed my regards, gave me a degree of satisfaction which it would be difficult to express. I must now make a brief reference to George Burnet, who, in this epidemic delusion, had given his sanction to, and embarked all his prospects in life on this Pantisocratical scheme. He was a young man, about the age of twenty; the son of a respectable Somersetshire farmer, who had bestowed on him his portion, by giving him an University education as an introduction to the Church, into which he would probably have entered but for this his transatlantic pursuit of happiness. His talents were not conspicuous, but his manners were unpresuming, and honesty was depicted on his countenance. He possessed also that habitual good temper, and those accommodating manners, which would prove a desirable accession in any society; and it soon appeared, without indicating any disrespect, that his was a subordinate part to act in the new drama, and not the less valuable for its wanting splendour. After some considerable delay, it was at length announced, that on the coming morning Samuel Taylor Coleridge would arrive in Bristol, as the nearest and most convenient port; and where he was to reside but a short time before the favouring gales were to waft him and his friends across the Atlantic. Robert Lovell at length introduced Mr. C. I instantly descried his intellectual character; exhibiting as he did, an eye, a brow, and a forehead, indicative of commanding genius. Interviews succeeded, and these increased the impression of respect. Each of my new friends read me his productions. Each accepted my invitations, and gave me those repeated proofs of good opinion, ripening fast into esteem, that I could not be insensible to the kindness of their manners, which, it may truly be affirmed, infused into my heart a brotherly feeling, that more than identified their interests with my own. I introduced them to several intelligent friends, and their own merits soon augmented the number, so that their acquaintance became progressively extended, and their society coveted. Bristol was now found a very pleasant residence; and though the ship was not engaged, nor the least preparation made for so long a voyage, still the delights and wide-spreading advantages of Pantisocracy formed one of their everlasting themes of conversation; and, considering the barrenness of the subject, it was in no common degree amusing, to hear these young enthusiasts repel every objection to the practicability of their scheme, and magnify the condition to which it was to introduce them; where thorns and briars were, no doubt, to be expelled, and their couch to be strewed with down and roses. It will excite merely an innocent smile in the reader at the extravagance of a youthful and ardent mind, when he learns that Robert Lovell stated with great seriousness, that, after the minutest calculation and inquiry among practical men, the demand on their labour would not exceed two hours a day; that is, for the production of absolute necessaries. The leisure still remaining, might be devoted, in convenient fractions, to the extension of their domain, by prostrating the sturdy trees of the forest, where "lop and top," without cost, would supply their cheerful winter fire; and the trunks, when cut into planks, without any other expense than their own pleasant labour, would form the sties for their pigs, and the linnies for their cattle, and the barns for their produce; reserving their choicest timbers for their own comfortable log-dwellings. But after every claim that might be made on their manual labour had been discharged, a large portion of time, would still remain for their own individual pursuits, so that they might read, converse, and even write books. Cowper, in an unpublished letter now before me, says, "I know well that publication is necessary to give an edge to the poetic turn, and that what we produce in the closet, is never a vigorous birth, if we intend that it should die there. For my own part I could no more amuse myself with writing verse, if I did not print it when written, than with the study of tactics, for which I can never have any real occasion." But our young and ardent friends seemed to entertain a strong impression that the mere pleasure of writing, that is, like virtue, writing for its own sake, was all the mental and rational gratification wise men could desire. Views and times alter, and these richly-endowed young men, in after life, were prompt, and amongst the first to confess the fallacious schemes of their youth; but at this time the pleasurable alone occupied their field of vision, and confidence never stood more unencumbered with doubt. If any difficulties were now started, and many such there were, a profusion of words demonstrated the reasonableness of the whole design; impressing all who heard, with the conviction that the citadel was too strong for assault. The Mercury at these times was generally Mr. Coleridge, who, as has been stated, ingeniously parried every adverse argument, and after silencing his hardy disputants, announced to them that he was about to write and publish a quarto volume in defence of Pantisocracy, in which a variety of arguments would be advanced in defence of his system, too subtle and recondite to comport with conversation. It would then, he said, become manifest that he was not a projector raw from his cloister, but a cool calculating reasoner, whose efforts and example would secure to him and his friends the permanent gratitude of mankind. From the sentiments thus entertained, I shall represent Mr. Coleridge, in the section of his days which devolves on me to exhibit, just as he was, and that with a firm belief that by so doing, without injuring his legitimate reputation, I shall confer an essential benefit on those to come, who will behold in Mr. C. much to admire and imitate; and certainly some things to regret. For it should be remembered, Mr. Coleridge, from universal admission, possessed some of the highest mental endowments, and many pertaining to the heart; but if a man's life be valuable, not for the incense it consumes, but for the instruction it affords, to state even defects, (in one like Mr. C. who can so well afford deduction without serious loss) becomes in his biographer, not optional, but a serious obligation. It is proper additionally to remark, that some apology or propitiation may be necessary toward those who regard every approximation to poverty, not as a misfortune, but a crime. Pecuniary difficulties, especially such as occur in early life, and not ascribable to bad conduct, reflect no discredit on men of genius. Many of them, subsequently, surmounted their first embarrassments by meritorious exertion; and some of our first men (like travellers, after having successfully passed through regions of privation and peril) delight even to recall their former discouragements, and, without the shame that luxuriates alone in little minds, undisguisedly to tell of seasons, indelible in their memories, when, in the prostration of hope, the wide world appeared one desolate waste! but they ultimately found, that these seasons of darkness, (however tenaciously retained by memory) in better times often administer a new and refreshing zest to present enjoyment. Despair, therefore ill becomes one who has follies to bewail, and a God to trust in. Johnson and Goldsmith, with numerous others, at some seasons were plunged deep in the waters of adversity, but halcyon days awaited them: and even those sons of merit and misfortune whose pecuniary troubles were more permanent, in the dimness of retrospection, only stand out invested in softer hues. Cervantes is not the less read, because the acclamations of praise were heard by him in his abode of penury. Butler, Otway, Collins, Chatterton, and Burns, and men like them, instead of suffering in public estimation from the difficulties they encountered, absolutely challenge in every generous mind an excess of interest from the very circumstances that darkened the complexion of their earthly prospects. In corroboration of this remark, in our own day, the son of Crabbe, who must have cherished the deepest solicitude for his father's reputation, has laid bare to general inspection his parent's early perplexities, by which impartial disclosures we behold the individual in his deepest depressions; worth enriched by trial, and greatness, by a refining process, struggling successfully with adversity. Does the example of such a man nobly bearing up against the pressures that surrounded him inflict obduracy on our hearts? On the contrary, while we feelingly sympathize with the poet, and deplore the tardy hand of deliverance, we pause only to transfer a reflex portion of praise to him whose magnanimous conduct has furnished so ample a scope for the tenderest emotions of our nature. This reflection will induce me not to withhold from false delicacy, occurrences, the disclosure of which none but the inconsiderate will condemn; and by which all the features of Mr. Coleridge's character will be exhibited to the inspection of the inquisitive and philosophical mind. I proceed, therefore, to state that the solicitude I felt lest these young and ardent geniuses should in a disastrous hour, and in their mistaken apprehensions, commit themselves in this their desperate undertaking, was happily dissipated by Mr. Coleridge applying for the loan of a little cash,--to pay the voyager's freight? or passage? No,--LODGINGS. They all lodged, at this time, at No. 48, College-Street. Never did I lend money with such unmingled pleasure, for now I ceased to be haunted day and night with the spectre of the ship! the ship! which was to effect such incalculable mischief! The form of the request was the following: My dear Sir, Can you conveniently lend me five pounds, as we want a little more than four pounds to make up our lodging bill, which is indeed much higher than we expected; seven weeks, and Burnet's lodging for twelve weeks, amounting to eleven pounds. Yours, affectionately, S. T. COLERIDGE. Till this time, not knowing what the resources of my young friends were, I could not wholly divest myself of fear; but now an effectual barrier manifestly interposed to save them from destruction. And though their romantic plan might linger in their minds, it was impossible not to be assured that their strong good sense would eventually dissipate their delusions. Finding now that there was a deficiency in that material, deemed of the first consequence in all civilized states, and remembering Burgh's feeling lamentation over the improvidence, or rather the indifference with which many men of genius regard the low thoughts that are merely of a pecuniary nature, I began to revolve on the means by which the two poets might advantageously apply their talents. Soon after, finding Mr. Coleridge in rather a desponding mood, I urged him to keep up his spirits, and recommended him to publish a volume of his poems. "Oh," he replied, "that is a useless expedient." He continued: "I offered a volume of my poems to different booksellers in London, who would not even look at them! The reply being, 'Sir, the article will not do.' At length, one, more accommodating than the rest, condescended to receive my MS. poems, and, after a deliberate inspection, offered me for the copy-right, six guineas, which sum, poor as I was, I refused to accept." "Well," said I, "to encourage you, I will give you twenty guineas." It was very pleasant to observe the joy that instantly diffused itself over his countenance. "Nay," I continued, "others publish for themselves, I will chiefly remember you. Instead of giving you twenty guineas, I will extend it to thirty, and without waiting for the completion of the work, to make you easy you may have the money as your occasions require." The silence and the grasped hand, showed that at that moment one person was happy. Every incident connected with the lives of literary men, especially at the commencement of their career, always excites interest. I have been, therefore, the more particular in detailing this circumstance, (except for its connexion, of no consequence) and proceed further to state, that now, meeting Mr. Southey, I said to him, "I have engaged to give Mr. Coleridge thirty guineas for a volume of his poems; you have poems equal to a volume, and if you approve of it, I will give you the same." He cordially thanked me, and instantly acceded to my proposal. I then said to him, "you have read me several books of your 'Joan of Arc' which Poem I perceive has great merit. If it meet with your concurrence, I will give you fifty guineas for this work, and publish it in quarto, when I will give you, in addition, fifty copies to dispose of amongst your friends." Without a moment's hesitation, to this proposal also he acceded. I could say much of Mr. Southey at this time; of his constitutional cheerfulness; of the polish of his manners; of his dignified, and at the same time, of his unassuming deportment; as well as of the general respect which his talents, conduct, and conversation excited.[3] But before reference be made to more serious publications, some notice will be taken of other objects of pursuit. Mr. Coleridge and Mr. Southey, now determined by their best efforts, in other ways than those detailed, to raise money for their projected expedition. They resolved therefore, to give the citizens of Bristol individual lectures, or series of lectures, on different subjects. Mr. Coleridge chose Political and Moral subjects;[4] Mr. Southey chose History. On examining my old papers, I find most of the notices or prospectuses relating to these subjects. Mr. Coleridge's first two lectures were delivered in the Corn Market in Wine-Street. Mr. Coleridge's next two lectures were delivered the latter end of February, 1795, and afterwards were thrown into a small pamphlet, printed under the title of _"Conciones ad Populum_, or Addresses to the people." After this he consolidated two other of his lectures, and published them under the title of "The Plot Discovered." Two detached lectures were given at the Corn Market, and one at a room in Castle Green. All these lectures were anti-Pitt-ite. The next lecture given by Mr. Coleridge was in reprobation of the Slave Trade. The following was the prospectus:-- "To-morrow evening, June 16th, 1795, S. T. Coleridge, of Jesus College, Cambridge, will deliver, (by particular desire) a lecture on the Slave Trade, and the duties that result from its continuance. To begin at eight o'clock in the evening, at the Assembly Coffee House, on the Quay. Admission, One shilling." His next lecture was (it is believed) on the Hair Powder Tax, in which his audience were kept in good feeling, by the happy union of wit, humour, and argument. Mr. C.'s lectures were numerously attended, and enthusiastically applauded. It may amuse and gratify the reader, to receive a specimen of a lecture,[5] descriptive of Mr. C.'s composition and reasoning, delivered at this time, and by which it will appear that his politics were not of that inflammable description which would set a world in flames. "... But of the propriety and utility of holding up the distant mark of attainable perfection, we shall enter more fully toward the close of this address. We turn with pleasure to the contemplation of that small but glorious band, whom we may truly distinguish by the name of thinking and disinterested patriots.[6] These are the men who have encouraged the sympathetic passions till they have become irresistible habits, and made their duty a necessary part of their self-interest, by the long-continued cultivation of that moral taste, which derives our most exquisite pleasures from the contemplation of possible perfection. Accustomed to regard all the affairs of man as a process, they never hurry, and they never pause. Theirs is not the twilight of political knowledge, which gives us just light enough to place one foot before the other: as they advance, the scene still opens upon them, and they press right onward, with a vast and varied landscape of existence around them. Calmness and energy mark all their actions. Benevolence is the silken thread that runs through the pearl-chain of all their virtues. The unhappy children of vice and folly, whose tempers are adverse to their own happiness, as well as to the happiness of others, will at times awaken a natural pang, but he looks forward with gladdened heart to that glorious period when justice shall have established the universal fraternity of love. These soul-ennobling views bestow the virtues which they anticipate. He whose mind is habitually impressed with them, soars above the present state of humanity, and may be justly said to dwell in the presence of the Most High. Regarding every event, as he that ordains it, evil vanishes from before him, and he views the eternal form of universal beauty." At one of his lectures, Mr. Coleridge amused his audience by reciting the following letter from Liberty to his dear friend Famine; the effect of which was greatly heightened by Mr. C.'s arch manner of recitation. It should be understood that there was at this time a great scarcity in the land. Dear Famine, You will doubtless be surprised at receiving a petitionary letter from a perfect stranger, but, _Fas est vel ab hoste_. All whom I once supposed my unalterable friends, I have found unable, or unwilling to assist me. I first applied to GRATITUDE, entreating her to whisper into the ear of Majesty, that it was I who had placed his forefathers on the throne of Great Britain. She told me that she had frequently made the attempt, but had as frequently been baffled by FLATTERY: and, that I might not doubt the truth of her apology, she led me (as the Spirit did the prophet Ezekiel) "to the door of the COURT, and I went in and saw--and behold! every form of creeping things." I was however somewhat consoled, when I heard that RELIGION was high in favour there, and possessed great influence. I myself had been her faithful servant, and always found her my best protectress: her service being indeed perfect freedom. Accordingly, in full confidence of success, I entered her mansion, but, alas! instead of my kind mistress, horror-struck, I beheld a painted, patched-up old ----. She was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, and on her forehead was written "MYSTERY." I shrieked, for I knew her to be the dry-nurse of that detested Imp, DESPOTISM. I next addressed myself to PRUDENCE, and earnestly besought her to plead my cause to the Ministers; to urge the distresses of the lower orders, and my fears lest, so distressed, they should forget their obedience. For the prophet Isaiah had informed me "that it shall come to pass, that when the people shall be hungry, they shall fret themselves and curse the King." The grave matron heard me, and, shaking her head, learnedly replied, "_Quos Deus vult perdere dementat._" Again I besought her to speak to the rich men of the nation, concerning Ministers, of whom it might soon become illegal even to complain--of long and ruinous wars, and whether _they_ must not bear the damage. All this quoth PRUDENCE, I have repeatedly urged, but a sly imposter named EXPEDIENCE has usurped my name, and struck such a panick of property, as hath steeled the hearts of the wealthy, and palsied their intellects. Lastly I applied to CONSCIENCE. She informed me that she was indeed a perfect ventriloquist, and could throw her voice into any place she liked, but that she was seldom attended to unless when she spoke out of the _pocket_. Thus baffled and friendless, I was about to depart, and stood a fearful lingerer on the isle which I had so dearly loved--when tidings were brought me of your approach. I found myself impelled by a power superior to me to build my last hopes on you. Liberty, the MOTHER of PLENTY, calls Famine to her aid. O FAMINE, most eloquent Goddess! plead thou my cause. I in the mean time, will pray fervently that heaven may unstop the ears of her Vicegerent, so that they may listen to your _first_ pleadings, while yet your voice is faint and distant, and your counsels peaceable. "I remain your distressed suppliant, LIBERTY. The following is the prospectus of Mr. Coleridge's series of Political lectures. S. T. Coleridge proposes to give, in Six Lectures, a comparative view of the English Rebellion under Charles the First, and the French Revolution. The subjects of the proposed Lectures are, FIRST. The distinguishing marks of the French and English character, with their probable causes. The national circumstances precursive to--1st, the English Rebellion.--2nd, the French Revolution. SECOND. The Liberty of the Press. Literature; its Revolutionary powers. Comparison of the English, with the French Political Writers, at the time of the several Revolutions. Milton. Sydney. Harrington.--Brissot. Sieyes. Mirabeau. Thomas Paine. THIRD. The Fanaticism of the first English and French Revolutionists. English Sectaries. French Parties. Feuillans. Girondists. Faction of Hebert. Jacobins. Moderants. Royalists. FOURTH. 1st, Characters of Charles the First, and Louis the Sixteenth. 2nd, of Louis the Fourteenth and the present Empress of Russia. 3rd, Life and Character of Essex and Fayette. FIFTH. Oliver Cromwell, and Robespierre.--Cardinal Mazarine, and William Pitt.--Dundas, and Barrere. SIXTH. On Revolution in general. Its moral causes, and probable effects on the Revolutionary People, and surrounding nations. It is intended that the Lectures should be given once a week; on Tuesday Evenings, at eight o'clock, at the Assembly Coffee House, on the Quay. The First Lecture, on Tuesday, June 23d, 1795. As the author wishes to ensure an audience adequate to the expenses of the room, he has prepared subscription tickets for the whole course, price Six Shillings, which may be had at the Lecture Room, or of Mr. Cottle, or Mr. Reed, Booksellers. Mr. Coleridge's Theological lectures succeeded, of which the following is the prospectus. Six Lectures will be given by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, on Revealed Religion, its Corruptions, and its Political Views. These Lectures are intended for two classes of men, Christians and Infidels; to the former, that they be able to give a reason for the hope that is in them; to the latter, that they may not determine against Christianity, from arguments applicable to its corruptions only. The subjects of the FIRST LECTURE, are--The Origin of Evil. The Necessity of Revelation deduced from the Nature of man. An Examination and Defence of the Mosaic Dispensation. SECOND.--The Sects of Philosophy, and the Popular Superstitions of the Gentile World, from the earliest times to the Birth of Christ. THIRD.--Concerning the Time of the Appearance of Christ. The Internal Evidences of Christianity. The External Evidences of Christianity. FOURTH.--The External Evidences of Christianity continued. Answers to Popular and Philosophical objections. FIFTH.--The Corruptions of Christianity, in Doctrines. Political Application. SIXTH.--The grand Political Views of Christianity--far beyond other Religions, and even Sects of Philosophy. The Friend of Civil Freedom. The probable state of Society and Governments, if all men were Christians. Tickets to be had of Mr. Cottle, Bookseller. Sometimes a single Lecture was given. The following is an Advertisement of one of them. To-morrow Evening, Tuesday, June 16th, 1795, S. T. Coleridge will deliver (by particular desire) a Lecture on the Slave Trade, and the duties that result from its continuance. To begin at 8 o'clock, at the Assembly Coffee House, on the Quay. Admittance, One Shilling. It may be proper to state that all three of my young friends, in that day of excitement, felt a detestation of the French war then raging, and a hearty sympathy with the efforts made in France to obtain political ameliorations. Almost every young and unprejudiced mind participated in this feeling; and Muir, and Palmer, and Margarot, were regarded as martyrs in the holy cause of freedom. The successive enormities, however, perpetrated in France and Switzerland by the French, tended to moderate their enthusiastic politics, and progressively to produce that effect on them which extended also to so many of the soberest friends of rational freedom. Mr. Coleridge's zeal on these questions was by far the most conspicuous, as will appear by some of his Sonnets, and particularly by his Poem of "Fire, Famine, and Slaughter;" though written some considerable time after. When he read this Poem to me, it was with so much jocularity as to convince me that, without bitterness, it was designed as a mere joke. In conformity with my determination to state occurrences, plainly, as they arose, I must here mention that strange as it may appear in Pantisocritans, I observed at this time a marked coolness between Mr. Coleridge and Robert Lovell, so inauspicious in those about to establish a "Fraternal Colony;" and, in the result, to renovate the whole face of society! They met without speaking, and consequently appeared as strangers. I asked Mr. C. what it meant. He replied, "Lovell, who at first, did all in his power to promote my connexion with Miss Fricker, now opposes our union." He continued, "I said to him, 'Lovell! you are a villain!'" "Oh," I replied, "you are quite mistaken. Lovell is an honest fellow, and is proud in the hope of having you for a brother-in-law. Rely on it he only wishes you from prudential motives to delay your union." In a few days I had the happiness of seeing them as sociable as ever. This is the last time poor Robert Lovell's name will be mentioned in this work, as living. He went to Salisbury, caught a fever, and, in eagerness to reach his family, travelled when he ought to have lain by; reached his home, and died! We attended his funeral, and dropt a tear over his grave! Mr. Coleridge, though at this time embracing every topic of conversation, testified a partiality for a few, which might be called stock subjects. Without noticing his favorite Pantisocracy, (which was an everlasting theme of the laudatory) he generally contrived, either by direct amalgamation or digression, to notice in the warmest encomiastic language, Bishop Berkeley, David Hartley, or Mr. Bowles; whose sonnets he delighted in reciting. He once told me, that he believed, by his constant recommendation, he had sold a whole edition of some works; particularly amongst the fresh-men of Cambridge, to whom, whenever he found access, he urged the purchase of three works, indispensable to all who wished to excel in sound reasoning, or a correct taste;--Simpson's Euclid; Hartley on Man; and Bowles's Poems. In process of time, however, when reflection had rendered his mind more mature, he appeared to renounce the fanciful and brain-bewildering system of Berkeley; whilst he sparingly extolled Hartley; and was almost silent respecting Mr. Bowles. I noticed a marked change in his commendation of Mr. B. from the time he paid that man of genius a visit. Whether their canons of criticisms were different, or that the personal enthusiasm was not mutual; or whether there was a diversity in political views; whatever the cause was, an altered feeling toward that gentleman was manifested after his visit, not so much expressed by words, as by his subdued tone of applause. The reflux of the tide had not yet commenced, and Pantisocracy was still Mr. Coleridge's favourite theme of discourse, and the banks of the Susquehannah the only refuge for permanent repose. It will excite great surprise in the reader to understand that Mr. C.'s cooler friends could not ascertain that he had received any specific information respecting this notable river. "It was a grand river;" but there were many other grand and noble rivers in America; (the Land of Rivers!) and the preference given to the Susquehannah, seemed almost to arise solely from its imposing name, which, if not classical, was at least poetical; and it probably by mere accident became the centre of all his pleasurable associations. Had this same river been called the Miramichi or the Irrawaddy, it would have been despoiled of half its charms, and have sunk down into a vulgar stream, the atmosphere of which might have suited well enough Russian boors, but which would have been pestiferous to men of letters. The strong hold which the Susquehannah had taken on Mr. Coleridge's imagination may be estimated by the following lines, in his Monody on Chatterton. "O, Chatterton! that thou wert yet alive; Sure thou would'st spread the canvass to the gale, And love with us the tinkling team to drive O'er peaceful freedom's UNDIVIDED dale; And we at sober eve would round thee throng, Hanging enraptured on thy stately song! And greet with smiles the young-eyed POSEY All deftly masked, as hoar ANTIQUITY. Alas, vain phantasies! the fleeting brood Of woe self-solaced in her dreamy mood! Yet I will love to follow the sweet dream, Where Susquehannah pours his untamed stream, And on some hill, whose forest-frowning side Waves o'er the murmurs of his calmer tide; And I will build a cenotaph to thee, Sweet harper of time-shrouded minstrelsy! And there soothed sadly by the dirgeful wind, Muse on the sore ills I had left behind." In another poem which appeared only in the first edition, a reference is again made to the American "undivided dell," as follows: TO W. J. H. While playing on his flute. Hush! ye clamorous cares! be mute. Again, dear Harmonist! again, Through the hollow of thy flute, Breathe that passion-warbled strain: Till memory each form shall bring The loveliest of her shadowy throng; And hope that soars on sky-lark whig, Carol wild her gladdest song! O skill'd with magic spell to roll The thrilling tones, that concentrate the soul! Breathe through thy flute those tender notes again, While near thee sits the chaste-eyed maiden mild; And bid her raise the poet's kindred strain In soft empassioned voice, correctly wild. "In freedom's UNDIVIDED DELL Where toil and health, with mellowed love shall dwell, Far from folly, far from men, In the rude romantic glen, Up the cliff, and through the glade, Wand'ring with the dear-loved maid, I shall listen to the lay, And ponder on thee far away." Mr. Coleridge had written a note to his Monody on Chatterton, in which he caustically referred to Dean Milles. On this note being shown to me, I remarked that Captain Blake, whom he occasionally met, was the son-in-law of Dean Milles. "What," said Mr. Coleridge, "the man with the great sword?" "The same," I answered. "Then," said Mr. C. with an assumed gravity, "I will suppress this note to Chatterton; the fellow might have my head off before I am aware!" To be sure there was something rather formidable in his huge dragoon's sword, constantly rattling by his side! This Captain Blake was a member of the Bristol Corporation, and a pleasant man, but his sword, worn by a short man, appeared prodigious!--Mr. C. said, "The sight of it was enough to set half a dozen poets scampering up Parnassus, as though hunted by a wild mastodon." In examining my old papers I found this identical note in Mr. Coleridge's hand writing, and which is here given to the reader; suggesting that this note, like the Sonnet to Lord Stanhope, was written in that portion of C.'s life, when it must be confessed, he really was hot with the French Revolution. Thus he begins: By far the best poem on the subject of Chatterton, is, "Neglected Genius, or Tributary Stanzas to the memory of the unfortunate Chatterton." Written by Rushton, a blind sailor. Walpole writes thus. "All the House of Forgery are relations, although it be but just to Chatterton's memory to say, that his poverty never made him claim kindred with the more enriching branches; yet he who could so ingeniously counterfeit styles, and the writer believes, hands, might easily have been led to the more facile imitation of Prose Promissory Notes!" O, ye who honor the name of man, rejoice that this Walpole is called a Lord! Milles, too, the editor of Rowley's Poem's, a priest; who (though only a Dean, in dulness and malignity was most episcopally eminent) foully calumniated him.--An Owl mangling a poor dead nightingale! Most injured Bard! "To him alone in this benighted age Was that diviner inspiration given Which glows in Milton's, and in Shakspeare's page, The pomp and prodigality of heaven!" Mr. Southey's course of Historical Lectures, comprised the following subjects, as expressed in his prospectus. Robert Southey, of Baliol College, Oxford, proposes to read a course of Historical Lectures in the following order. 1st. Introductory: on the origin and Progress of Society. 2nd. Legislation of Solon and Lycurgus. 3rd. State of Greece, from the Persian War to the Dissolution of the Achaian League. 4th. Rise, Progress, and Decline of the Roman Empire. 5th. Progress of Christianity. 6th. Manners and Irruptions of the Northern Nations. Growth of the European States. Feudal System. 7th. State of the Eastern Empire, to the Capture of Constantinople by the Turks; including the Rise and Progress of the Mahommedan Religion, and the Crusades. 8th. History of Europe, to the Abdication of the Empire by Charles the Fifth. 9th. History of Europe, to the Establishment of the Independence of Holland. 10th. State of Europe, and more particularly of England, from the Accession of Charles the First, to the Revolution, in 1688. 11th. Progress of the Northern States. History of Europe to the American War. 12th. The American War. Tickets for the whole course, 10s. 6d. to be had of Mr. Cottle, bookseller, High-Street. These Lectures of Mr. Southey were numerously attended, and their composition was greatly admired; exhibiting as they did a succinct view of the various subjects commented upon, so as to chain the hearers' attention. They at the same time evinced great self-possession in the lecturer; a peculiar grace in the delivery; with reasoning so judicious and acute, as to excite astonishment in the auditory that so young a man should concentrate so rich a fund of valuable matter in lectures, comparatively so brief, and which clearly authorized the anticipation of his future eminence. From this statement it will justly be inferred, that no public lecturer could have received stronger proofs of approbation than Mr. S. from a polite and discriminating audience. Mr. Coleridge had solicited permission of Mr. Southey, to deliver his fourth lecture, "On the Rise, Progress, and Decline of the Roman Empire," as a subject to which he had devoted much attention. The request was immediately granted, and at the end of the third lecture it was formally announced to the audience, that the next lecture would be delivered by Mr. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, of Jesus College, Cambridge. At the usual hour the room was thronged. The moment of commencement arrived. No lecturer appeared! Patience was preserved for a quarter, extending to half an hour!--but still no lecturer! At length it was communicated to the impatient assemblage, that a circumstance, exceedingly to be regretted! would prevent Mr. Coleridge from giving his lecture that evening, as intended. Some few present learned the truth, but the major part of the company retired not very well pleased, and under the impression that Mr. C. had either broken his leg, or that some severe family affliction had occurred. Mr. C's rather habitual absence of mind, with the little importance he generally attached to engagements,[7] renders it likely that at this very time he might have been found at No. 48, College-Street; composedly smoking his pipe, and lost in profound musings on his divine Susquehannah! Incidents of the most trifling nature must sometimes be narrated; when they form connecting links with events of more consequence. Wishing to gratify my two young friends and their ladies elect with a pleasant excursion, I invited them to accompany me in a visit to the Wye, including Piercefield and Tintern Abbey; objects new to us all. It so happened the day we were to set off was that immediately following the woeful disappointment! but here all was punctuality. It was calculated that the proposed objects might be accomplished in two days, so as not to interfere with the Friday evening's lecture, which Mr. Southey had now wisely determined to deliver himself. The morning was fine. The party of five all met in high spirits, anticipating unmingled delight in surveying objects and scenery, scarcely to be surpassed in the three kingdoms. We proceeded to the Old Passage; crossed the Severn, and arrived at the Beaufort Arms, Chepstow, time enough to partake of a good dinner, which one of the company noticed Homer himself had pronounced to be no bad thing: a sentiment in which we all concurred, admiring his profound knowledge of human nature! But prior to our repast, we visited the fine old Castle, so intimately connected with by-gone days; and as soon as possible we purposed to set off toward the Abbey, distant about six or seven miles; taking Piercefield in our way. Proceeding on my principle of impartial narration, I must here state, that, after dinner, an unpleasant altercation occurred between--no other than the two Pantisocritans! When feelings are accumulated in the heart, the tongue will give them utterance. Mr. Southey, whose regular habits scarcely rendered it a virtue in him, never to fail in an engagement, expressed to Mr. Coleridge his deep feelings of regret, that _his_ audience should have been disappointed on the preceding evening; reminding him that unless he had determined punctually to fulfil his voluntary engagement he ought not to have entered upon it. Mr. C. thought the delay of the lecture of little or no consequence. This excited a remonstrance, which produced a reply. At first I interfered with a few conciliatory words, which were unavailing; and these two friends, about to exhibit to the world a glorious example of the effects of concord and sound principles, with an exemption from all the selfish and unsocial passions, fell, alas! into the common lot of humanity, and in so doing must have demonstrated, even to themselves, the rope of sand to which they had confided their destinies! In unspeakable concern and surprise I retired to a distant part of the room, and heard with dismay the contention continued, if not extending; for now the two young ladies entered into the dispute, (on adverse sides, as might be supposed) each confirming or repelling the arguments of the belligerents. A little cessation in the storm afforded me the opportunity of stepping forward and remarking that, however much the disappointment was to be regretted, it was an evil not likely again to occur, (Mr. S. shook his head) and that the wisest way, was to forget the past and to remember only the pleasant objects before us. In this opinion the ladies concurred, when placing a hand of one of the dissentients in that of the other, the hearty salutation went round, and with our accustomed spirits, we prepared once more for Piercefield and the Abbey. Being an indifferent walker (from a former dislocation of my ancle, arising out of a gig accident) I had engaged a horse, while the four pedestrians set forward, two on each side of my Rosinante. After quitting the extensive walks of Piercefield, we proceeded toward that part of the road, where we were to turn off to the right, leading down to Tintern Abbey. We had been delayed so long at Chepstow, and afterward, by various enchanting scenes, particularly that from the Wind-cliff, that we were almost benighted, before we were aware. We recalled all our minute directions. Every object corresponded. A doubt expressed, at a most unlucky moment, whether we were to turn to the right, or to the left, threw ice into some hearts; but at length we all concurred, that it was to the right, and that this must be the road. These complicated deliberations, allowed the night rapidly to advance, but the grand preliminaries being settled, we approached the "road" and strove to penetrate with our keenest vision into its dark recesses. A road! this it could not be. It was a gross misnomer! It appeared to our excited imaginations, a lane, in the tenth scale of consanguinity to a road; a mere chasm between lofty trees, where the young moon strove in vain to dart a ray! To go or not to go, that was the question! A new consultation was determined upon, what proceeding should be adopted in so painful a dilemma. At length, with an accession of courage springing up as true courage always does in the moment of extremity, we resolutely determined to brave all dangers and boldly to enter on the road, lane, or what it was, where perchance, Cadwallader, or Taliesen, might have trodden before! On immerging into the wood, for such it was, extending the whole downward way to Tintern, we all suddenly found ourselves deprived of sight; obscurity aggravated almost into pitchy darkness! We could see nothing distinctly whilst we floundered over stones, embedded as they appeared in their everlasting sockets, from the days of Noah. The gurgling of the unseen stream, down in the adjacent gully, (which we perchance might soon be found, reluctantly to visit!) never sounded so discordant before. Having some respect for my limbs (with no bone-setter near) I dismounted, resolving to lead my steed who trembled as though conscious of the perilous expedition on which he had entered. Mr. Coleridge who had been more accustomed to rough riding than myself, upon understanding that I through cowardice had forsaken the saddle, without speaking a word put his foot in the stirrup and mounting, determined to brave at all hazards, the dangers of the campaign. Our General on his charger floundered on before us over channels that the storms had made, and the upstarting fragments of rocks that seemed confederated to present an insurmountable barrier to every rash and roving wight. We were in a forlorn condition! and never before did we so feelingly sympathize with the poor babes in the wood; trusting, in the last extremity, (should it occur) a few kind robins with their sylvan pall, would honour also our obsequies. This kind of calming ulterior hope might do very well for poets, but it was not quite so consolatory to the ladies, who with all their admiration of disinterested pity, wished to keep off the dear tender-hearted robins a little longer. These desponding thoughts were of short continuance, for whether the moon had emerged from clouds, or that our sight had become strengthened by exercise, we rejoiced now in being able to see a little, although it might be to reveal only sights of woe. Mr. Southey marched on like a pillar of strength, with a lady pressing on each arm, while the relator lagged in the rear, without even a pilgrim's staff to sustain his tottering steps. Our condition might have been more forlorn, had not Mr. Coleridge from before cheered on his associates in misfortune; and intrepidity produces intrepidity. The deepest sorrow often admits of some alleviation, and at present our source of beguilement was to invent some appropriate name, in designation of this most[*] horrible channel of communication between man and man. Various acrimonious epithets were propounded, but they all wanted an adequate measure of causticity; when Mr. Southey censuring in us our want of charity, and the rash spirit that loaded with abuse objects which if beheld in noon-day might be allied even to the picturesque, proposed that our path-way, whatever it was, should simply be called--"Bowling-green-lane." [* Transcriber's note: Corrected from original 'mot'.] We should have smiled assent, but we had just arrived at a spot that overshadowed every countenance with ten-fold seriousness! This was no moment for gratuitous triflings. We had arrived at a spot, where there was just light enough to descry three roads, in this bosom of the wood, diverging off in different directions! two of them must be collaterals; and to fix on the one which was honest, where all had equal claims to bad pre-eminence, exceeded our divining power. Each awhile ruminated in silence; reflecting that we were far from the habitations of man, with darkness only not intense around us! We now shouted aloud, in the faint hope that some solitary woodman might hear, and come to our relief. The shrill voices of the ladies, in the stillness of night, formed the essence of harmony. All was silence! No murmur! No response! The three lanes lay before us. If we pursued one, it might by the next morning, conduct us safe back to Chepstow; and if we confided in the other, it might lead us in due time, half-way toward Ragland Castle! What was to be done? One in the company now remarked, "Of what service is it to boast a pioneer, if we do not avail ourselves of his services?" Mr. Coleridge received the hint, and set off up one of the lanes at his swiftest speed, namely, a cautious creep; whilst we four stood musing on the wide extent of human vicissitudes! A few hours before, surrounded by a plethora of enjoyments, and now desponding and starving in the depth of what appeared an interminable forest. To augment our trouble, fresh anxieties arose! From Mr. Coleridge's long absence, we now almost feared whether hard necessity might not force us to go in search of our way-bewildered or quagmired companion! To our great joy, we now faintly heard, in the stillness of night, the horse's hoofs sliding over the loose stones! The sound drew nearer. Mr. Coleridge approached and pensively said, that could not be the way, for it led to an old quarry which the quick sight of his steed discovered just in time to save both their necks! Mr. C. was next ordered instantly to explore one of the other two ominous lanes; when like a well-disciplined orderly man, he set off gallantly on his new commission. After waiting a time, which in our state of suspense might almost be called a period, he leisurely returned, significantly saying, that neither man nor beast could pass that way! rubbing his thorn-smitten cheek. Now came the use of the syllogism, in its simplest form. "If the right road must be A, B, or C, and A and B were wrong, then C must be right." Under this conviction, we marched boldly on, without further solicitude or exploration,' and at length joyfully reached--Tintern Abbey! On arriving at this celebrated place, to which so many travellers resort, (thanks now to his Grace of Beaufort for a better road than ours) the first inquiry that hunger taught us to make of a countryman, was for the hotel. "Hotel! Hotel! Sir? Oh, the sign of the Tobacco Pipe! There it is over the way." Rusticity and comfort often go together. We entered the inn, homely as it was, quite certain that any transition must be paradisaical, compared with our late hopeless condition. After supper, I proposed to avail ourselves of the darkness, and to inspect the Abbey by torch-light. This being acceded to, we all set off to view the beautiful but mouldering edifice, where, by an artificial light, the ruins might present a new aspect, and, in dim grandeur, assist the labouring imagination. At the instant the huge doors unfolded, the horned moon appeared between the opening clouds, and shining through the grand window in the distance. It was a delectable moment; not a little augmented by the unexpected green sward that covered the whole of the floor, and the long-forgotten tombs beneath; whilst the gigantic ivies, in their rivalry, almost concealed the projecting and dark turrets and eminences, reflecting back the lustre of the torch below. In this season, which ought to have been consecrated to reflection and silence, the daws, nestling in their abodes of desolation, aroused from their repose by the unusual glare, sailed over our heads in sable multitudes that added depth to the darkness of the sky, while, in their hoarsest maledictions, they seemed to warn off the intruders on "their ancient solitary reign." On returning late to the Inn, I informed my companions, that there was at no great distance a large iron foundry, never seen to perfection but at night, and proposed our visiting it. Mr. Coleridge felt downright horror at the thought of being again moved; considering that he had had quite enough exercise for one day, and infinitely preferring the fire of his host to the forge of the Cyclops. The ladies also rather shrunk from encountering a second night expedition; but Mr. Southey cordially approved the suggestion, and we ushered forth, in the dreariness of midnight, to behold this real spectacle of sublimity! Our ardour indeed, was a little cooled when, by the glimmering of the stars, we perceived a dark expanse stretched by our path,--an ugly mill-pond, by the side of which we groped, preserving, as well as we could, a respectful distance, and entering into a mutual compact that if (after all) one should fall in, the other should do all that in him lay to pull him out. But I leave further extraneous impositions on the reader's attention,--the Wye, and other etceteras, briefly to remark, that we safely returned the next day, after an excursion where the reality exceeded the promise: and it may be added, quite in time to enable Mr. Southey to prepare for, and deliver his Lecture, "on the Rise, Fall, and Decline of the Roman Empire." Mr. Coleridge was not present. The publication of Mr. C.'s volume of Poems having been attended with some rather peculiar circumstances, to detail them a little may amuse the reader. On my expressing to him a wish to begin the printing as early as he found it convenient, he sent me the following note. "My dear friend, The printer may depend on copy on Monday morning, and if he can work a sheet a day, he shall have it. S. T. C." A day or two after, and before the receipt of the copy, I received from Mr. C. the following cheerful note. "Dear Cottle, By the thick smoke that precedes the volcanic eruptions of Etna, Vesuvius, and Hecla, I feel an impulse to fumigate, at [now] 25, College-Street, one pair of stairs room; yea, with our Oronoko, and if thou wilt send me by the bearer, four pipes, I will write a panegyrical epic poem upon thee, with as many books as there are letters in thy name. Moreover, if thou wilt send me "the copy book" I hereby bind myself, by to-morrow morning, to write out enough copy for a sheet and a half. God bless you! July 31st, 1795. S. T. C." This promising commencement was soon interrupted by successive and long-continued delays. The permission I had given to anticipate payment was remembered and complied with, before the work went to the press. These delays I little heeded, but they were not quite so acceptable to the printer, who grievously complained that his types, and his leads, and his forms, were locked up, week after week, to his great detriment. Being importuned by the printer, I stated these circumstances to Mr. Coleridge in a note, expressed in what I thought the mildest possible way, but which excited, it appeared, uncomfortable feelings in his mind, never in the least noticed to or by myself, but evidenced to my surprise, by the following passage in a note to Mr. Wade. "My very dear Friend, ... Mr. Cottle has ever conducted himself towards me with unbounded kindness, and one unkind act, no, nor twenty, can obliterate the grateful remembrance of it. By indolence, and frequent breach of promise, I had deserved a severe reproof from him, although my present brain-crazing circumstances, rendered this an improper time for it.... S. T. C." I continued to see Mr. Coleridge every day, and occasionally said to him, smiling, "Well, how much copy;" "None, to day," was the general reply, "but to-morrow you shall have some." To-morrow produced, if any, perhaps a dozen lines; and, in a favourable state of mind, so much, it might be, as half a dozen pages: and here I think I can correctly state, that Mr. C. had repeated to me at different times nearly all the poems contained in his volume, except the "Religious Musings," which I understood to be wholly a new poem. It may amuse the reader to receive one or two more of Mr. C.'s little apologies. "My dear Friend, The Printer may depend on copy by to-morrow. S. T. C." "My dear Cottle, The Religious Musings are finished, and you shall have them on Thursday. S. T. C." Sometimes sickness interfered. "Dear Cottle, A devil, a very devil, has got possession of my left temple, eye, cheek, jaw, throat, and shoulder. I cannot see you this evening. I write in agony. Your affectionate Friend and Brother, S. T. C." Sometimes his other engagements were of a pressing nature. "Dear Cottle, Shall I trouble you (I being over the mouth and nose, in doing something of importance, at Lovell's) to send your servant into the market, and buy a pound of bacon, and two quarts of broad beans; and when he carries it down to College St. to desire the maid to dress it for dinner, and tell her I shall be home by three o'clock. Will you come and drink tea with me, and I will endeavour to get the etc. ready for you. Yours affectionately, S. T. C." Whatever disappointments arose, plausible reasons were always assigned for them, but when ingenuity was fairly taxed with excuses, worn out, Mr. C. would candidly admit, that he had very little "finger industry," but then, he said, his mind was always on "full stretch."--The Herculean labour now appeared drawing to a close; as will be clear from the following letter. "My dear, very dear Cottle, I will be with you at half past six; if you will give me a dish of tea, between that time and eleven o'clock at night, I will write out the whole of the notes, and the preface, as I give you leave to turn the lock and key upon me. I am engaged to dine with Michael Castle, but I will not be one minute past my time. If I am, I permit you to send a note to Michael Castle, requesting him to send me home to fulfil engagements, like an honest man. S. T. C." Well knowing that it was Mr. Coleridge's intention to do all that was right, but aware at the same time that, however prompt he might be in resolving, he had to contend, in the fulfilment, with great constitutional indecision, I had long resolved to leave the completion of his work wholly to himself, and not to urge him to a speed which would render that a toil, which was designed to be a pleasure. But we must instantly leave, alike excuses, and printer, and copy, to notice a subject of infinitely more importance! It was now understood that Mr. Coleridge was about to be married. Aware of his narrow circumstances, and not doubting the anxieties he must necessarily feel, in the prospect of his altered condition, and to render his mind as easy in pecuniary affairs, as the extreme case would admit; I thought it would afford a small relief to tell him that I would give him one guinea and a-half, (after his volume was completed,) for every hundred lines he might present to me, whether rhyme or blank verse. This offer appeared of more consequence in the estimation of Mr. C., than it did in his who made it; for when a common friend familiarly asked him "how he was to keep the pot boiling, when married?" he very promptly answered, that Mr. Cottle had made him such an offer, that he felt no solicitude on that subject. Mr. Coleridge, in prospect of his marriage, had taken a cottage at Clevedon, a village, happily on the banks not of the Susquehannah, but the Severn. He was married to Miss Sarah Fricker, October the 4th, 1795, and immediately after set off for his country abode. The following is a copy of the certificate:-- "ST. MARY REDCLIFFE CHURCH, BRISTOL. Married, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, to Sarah Fricker, Oct. 4th, 1795. Benj. Spry, Vicar. Witnesses,--Martha Fricker, Josiah Wade." It happened in this case, as it often does where a duty devolves equally on two; both neglect it. The cottage at Clevedon, it appeared, had walls, and doors, and windows; but only such furniture as became a philosopher who was too well disciplined to covet inordinately, non-essentials. Beside which there might have been more of system in this deliberate renunciation of luxury. For would it have been consistent in those who anticipated a speedy location on the marge of one of the great American rivers, to intrench themselves in comforts that must so soon be exchanged for little more than primeval supplies and the rugged privations of the desert? (For even at this time Mr. C. still fondly dwelt on the joys of the Susquehannah.) Two days after his marriage, I received a letter from Mr. Coleridge (which now lies before me) requesting the kindness of me to send him down, with all dispatch, the following little articles. "A riddle slice; a candle box; two ventilators; two glasses for the wash-hand stand; one tin dust pan; one small tin tea kettle; one pair of candlesticks; one carpet brush; one flower dredge; three tin extinguishers; two mats; a pair of slippers; a cheese toaster; two large tin spoons; a bible; a keg of porter; coffee; raisins; currants; catsup; nutmegs; allspice; cinnamon; rice; ginger; and mace." With the aid of the grocer, and the shoemaker, and the brewer, and the tinman, and the glassman, and the brazier, &c., I immediately sent him all that he had required, and more; and the next day rode down to pay my respects to the new-married couple; being greeted, not with the common, and therefore vulgar, materials of cake and wine, but with that which moved the spirit, hearty gratulations! I was rejoiced to find that the cottage possessed every thing that heart could desire. The situation also was peculiarly eligible. It was in the western extremity, not in the centre of the village. It had the benefit of being but one story high, and as the rent was only five pounds per ann., and no taxes, Mr. Coleridge had the satisfaction of knowing, that by fairly "mounting his Pegasus," he could write as many verses in a week as would pay his rent for a year. There was also a small garden, with several pretty flowers; and the "tallest rose tree," was not failed to be pointed out, which "peeped at the chamber window," (and which has been honoured with some beautiful lines). I observed, however, that the parlour, from my perverted taste, looked rather awkward in being only whitewashed, and the same effected in rather the "olden time;" to remedy which fanciful inconvenience, on my return to Bristol, I sent an upholsterer[8] down to this retired and happy abode with a few pieces of sprightly paper, to tarnish the half immaculate sitting-room walls. Mr. Coleridge being now comfortably settled at Clevedon, I shall there for the present leave him to write verses on his beloved Sarah, while in the mean time, I introduce the reader to an ingenious young barrister whom I had known some years previously under the following peculiar circumstances. William Gilbert, author of the "Hurricane," was the son of the eminent philanthropist, Nathaniel Gilbert, of Antigua, who is usually noticed as "The excellent Gilbert who first set an example to the planters, of giving religious instruction to the slaves." In the year 1787, a want of self-control having become painfully evident, he was placed by his friends in the Asylum of Mr. Richard Henderson at Hanham, near Bristol, when I first knew him. He occasionally accompanied John Henderson into Bristol, on one of which occasions he introduced him to my brother and myself, as the "Young Counsellor!" I spent an afternoon with them, not readily to be forgotten. Many and great talkers have I known, but William Gilbert, at this time, exceeded them all. His brain seemed to be in a state of boiling effervescence, and his tongue, with inconceivable rapidity, passed from subject to subject, but with an incoherence that was to me, at least, marvellous. For two hours he poured forth a verbal torrent, which was only suspended by sheer physical exhaustion. John Henderson must have perceived a thousand fallacies in his impassioned harangue; but he allowed them all to pass uncommented upon, for he knew there was no fighting with a vapour. He continued in the Asylum about a year, when his mind being partially restored, his friends removed him, and he wholly absented himself from Bristol, till the year 1796, when he re-appeared in that city. Being so interesting a character, I felt pleasure in introducing him to Mr. Coleridge and Mr. Southey, with whom he readily coalesced, and they, I believe, truly respected him, soon however perceiving there was "something unsound in Denmark;" but still there was so much general and obvious talent about him, and his manners were so conciliating, that they liked his company, and tolerated some few peculiarities for the sake of the much that was good. The deference he paid Mr. C. and Mr. S. was some evidence that reason had partly reassumed her seat in his mind, for when before them, he withheld many of his most extravagant notions, and maintained such a comparative restraint on his tongue, as evidently arose from the respect with which he was impressed. At one time he very gravely told me, that to his certain knowledge there was in the centre of Africa, bordering on Abyssinia, a little to the south-east, an extensive nation of the Gibberti, or Gilberti, and that one day or other he intended to visit them, and claim kindred.[9] One morning, information was brought to us that W. Gilbert, at an early hour, had departed precipitately from Bristol, without speaking to any one of his friends. We felt great concern at this unexpected movement, and by comparing recent conversations, we thought it highly probable that, in obedience to some astrological monition he had determined, forthwith, to set off on a visit to his relatives in Africa. So convinced was Mr. Southey that this long-cherished design had influenced poor Gilbert in his sudden withdrawment, that he wrote to Mr. Roscoe, at Liverpool, begging him to interfere, to prevent any African captain from taking such a person as Mr. S. described. Mr. Roscoe appeared to have taken much trouble; but after a vigilant inquiry, he replied, by saying that no such person had sailed from, or appeared in Liverpool. So that we remained in total uncertainty as to what was become of him; many years afterwards it appeared he had gone to Charleston, United States, where he died. Mr. Southey thus refers to W. Gilbert in his "Life of Wesley." "In the year 1796, Mr. G. published the 'Hurricane, a Theosophical and Western Eclogue,' and shortly afterwards placarded the walls of London with the largest bills that had at that time been seen, announcing 'the Law of Fire.' I knew him well and look back with a melancholy pleasure to the hours which I have passed in his society, when his mind was in ruins. His madness was of the most incomprehensible kind, as may be seen in the notes to his 'Hurricane;' but the Poem possesses passages of exquisite beauty. I have among my papers some memorials of this interesting man. They who remember him (as some of my readers will,) will not be displeased at seeing him thus mentioned, with the respect and regret which are due to a noble mind." Mr. Wordsworth, also at the end of his "Excursion," has quoted the following note to the "Hurricane," with the remark that it "is one of the finest passages of modern English prose." "A man is supposed to improve by going out into the world, by visiting London. Artificial man does, he extends with his sphere; but, alas! that sphere is microscopic; it is formed of minutiae, and he surrenders his genuine vision to the artist, in order to embrace it in his ken. His bodily senses grow acute, even to barren and inhuman pruriency; while his mental become proportionally obtuse. The reverse is the man of mind. He who is placed in the sphere of nature and of God, might be a mock at Tattersall's and Brookes's, and a sneer at St. James's: he would certainly be swallowed alive by the first Pizarro that crossed him; but when he walks along the river of Amazons; when he rests his eye on the unrivalled Andes: when he measures the long and watered savannah, or contemplates from a sudden promontory, the distant, vast Pacific, and feels himself in this vast theatre, and commanding each ready produced fruit of this wilderness, and each progeny of this stream--his exaltation is not less than imperial. He is as gentle too as he is great: his emotions of tenderness keep pace with his elevation of sentiment; for he says, 'These were made by a good Being, who, unsought by me, placed me here to enjoy them.' He becomes at once a child and a king. His mind is in himself; from hence he argues and from hence he acts, and he argues unerringly, and acts magisterially. His mind in himself is also in his God; and therefore he loves, and therefore he soars.'" As these pages are designed, by brief incidental notices, to furnish a view of the Literature of Bristol during a particular portion of time; and having introduced the name of Ann Yearsley, I here, in reference to her, subjoin a few additional remarks. * * * * * I was well acquainted with Ann Yearsley, and my friendship for Hannah More did not blind my eyes to the merits of her opponent. Candour exacts the acknowledgment that the Bristol Milkwoman was a very extraordinary individual. Her natural abilities were eminent, united with which, she possessed an unusually sound masculine understanding; and altogether evinced, even in her countenance, the unequivocal marks of genius. If her education and early advantages had been favourable, there is no limiting the distinction to which she might have attained; and the respect she did acquire, proves what formidable barriers may be surmounted by native talent when perseveringly exerted, even in the absence of those preliminary assistances which are often merely the fret-work, the entablature, of the Corinthian column. Ann Yearsley's genius was discoverable in her Poems, but perhaps the extent of her capacity chiefly appeared in her Novel, "The Man in the Iron Mask;" in itself a bad subject, from the confined limit it gives to the imagination; but there is a vigour in her style which scarcely appeared compatible with a wholly uneducated woman. The late Mr. G. Robinson, the bookseller, told me that he had given Ann Yearsley two hundred pounds for the above work, and that he would give her one hundred pounds for every volume she might produce. This sum, with the profits of her Poems, enabled her to set up a circulating library, at the Hot Wells. I remember, in the year 1793, an imposition was attempted to be practised upon her, and she became also involved in temporary pecuniary difficulties, when by timely interference and a little assistance I had the happiness of placing her once more in a state of comfort. From a grateful feeling she afterwards sent me a handsome copy of verses. It has been too customary to charge her with ingratitude, (at which all are ready to take fire,) but without sufficient cause, as the slight services I rendered her were repaid with a superabundant expression of thankfulness; what then must have been the feelings of her heart toward Mrs. Hannah More, to whom her obligations were so surpassing? The merits of the question involved in the dissension between Ann Yearsley and Mrs. H. More, lay in a small compass, and they deserve to be faithfully stated; the public are interested in the refutation of charges of ingratitude, which, if substantiated, would tend to repress assistance toward the humbler children of genius. The baneful effects arising from a charge of ingratitude in Ann Yearsley towards her benefactress, might be the proximate means of dooming to penury and death some unborn Chatterton, or of eclipsing the sun of a future Burns. Hannah More discovered that the woman who supplied her family daily with milk, was a really respectable poetess. She collected her productions, and published them for her benefit, with a recommendatory address. The Poems, as they deserved, became popular; doubtless, in a great degree, through the generous and influential support of Mrs. H. More, and the profits of the sale amounted to some hundreds of pounds. The money, thus obtained, the milkwoman wished, to receive herself: for the promotion of herself in life, and the assistance of her two promising sons, who inherited much of their mother's talent. Hannah More on the contrary, in conjunction with Mrs. Montague, thought it most advisable to place the money in the Funds, in the joint names of herself and Mrs. M. as trustees for Ann Yearsley, so that she might receive a small permanent support through life. In this, Hannah More acted with the purest intention. If any judicious friend had stated to her that Ann Yearsley, whom she had so greatly served, was a discreet woman and would not be likely to squander her little all: that she wanted to educate her two sons, and to open for herself a circulating library, neither of which objects could be accomplished without trenching on her capital, no doubt could have been entertained of her instantly acceding to it. The great error on the part of the milkwoman, was in not prevailing on some friend thus to interfere, and calmly to state her case; instead of which, in a disastrous moment, she undertook to plead her own cause; and, without the slightest intention of giving offence, called on her patroness. Both parties meant well, but from the constitution of the human mind, it was hardly possible for one who had greatly obliged another in a subordinate station to experience the least opposition without at least an uncomfortable feeling. There must have existed a predisposition to misconstrue motives, as well as a susceptibility, in the closest alliance with offence. And now the experiment commenced. Here was a strong-minded illiterate woman on one side, impressed with a conviction of the justice of her cause; and further stimulated by a deep consciousness of the importance of success to herself and family; and on the other side, a refined mind, delicately alive to the least approximation to indecorum, and, not unreasonably, requiring deference and conciliation. Could such incongruous materials coalesce? Ann Yearsley's suit, no doubt was urged with a zeal approaching to impetuosity, and not expressed in that measured language which propriety might have dictated; and any deficiency in which could not fail to offend her polished and powerful patroness. Ann Yearsley obtained her object, but she lost her friend. Her name, from that moment, was branded with ingratitude; and severe indeed was the penalty entailed on her by this act of indiscretion! Her good name, with the rapidity of the eagle's pinion, was forfeited! Her talents, in a large circle at once became questionable, or vanished away. Her assumed criminality also was magnified into audacity, in daring to question the honour, or oppose the wishes of two such women as Mrs. H. More, and Mrs. Montague! and thus, through this disastrous turn of affairs, a dark veil was suddenly thrown over prospects, so late the most unsullied and exhilarating; and the favorite of fortune sunk to rise no more! Gloom and perplexities in quick succession oppressed the Bristol milkwoman, and her fall became more rapid than her ascent! The eldest of her sons, William Cromartie Yearsley, who had bidden fair to be the prop of her age; and whom she had apprenticed to an eminent engraver, with a premium of one hundred guineas, prematurely died; and his surviving brother soon followed him to the grave! Ann Yearsley, now a childless and desolate widow, retired, heart-broken from the world, on the produce of her library; and died many years after, in a state of almost total seclusion, at Melksham. An inhabitant of the town lately informed me that she was never seen, except when she took her solitary walk in the dusk of the evening! She lies buried in Clifton church-yard. In this passing notice of the Bristol milkwoman, my design has been to rescue her name from unmerited obloquy, and not in the remotest degree to criminate Hannah More, whose views and impressions in this affair may have been somewhat erroneous, but whose intentions it would be impossible for one moment to question.[10] The reader will not be displeased with some further remarks on Mrs. Hannah More, whose long residence near Bristol identified her so much with that city. Mrs. H. More lived with her four sisters, Mary, Elizabeth, Sarah, and Martha, after they quitted their school in Park-Street, Bristol, at a small neat cottage in Somersetshire, called Cowslip Green. The Misses M. some years afterward built a better house, and called it Barley Wood, on the side of a hill, about a mile from Wrington. Here they all lived, in the highest degree respected and beloved: their house the seat of piety, cheerfulness, literature, and hospitality; and they themselves receiving the honour of more visits from bishops, nobles, and persons of distinction, than, perhaps, any private family in the kingdom. My sisters having been educated by them, and myself having two intimate friends, who were also the friends of the Misses More; the Rev. James Newton,[11] and my old tutor, John Henderson, they introduced me to the family in Park Street, and the acquaintance then commenced was progressively ripened into respect that continued to the termination of all their lives. Hannah More gave me unrestricted permission to bring down to Barley-Wood, any literary or other friend of mine, at any time; and of which privilege, on various occasions I availed myself. Many years before, I had taken down, then by express, invitation, Mr. Southey, to see these excellent ladies; and in the year 1814, I conducted Mr. Coleridge to Barley Wood, and had the pleasure of introducing him to Hannah More and her sisters. For two hours after our arrival, Mr. C. displayed a good deal of his brilliant conversation, when he was listened to with surprise and delight by the whole circle; but at this time, unluckily, Lady--was announced, when Mrs. Hannah, from politeness, devoted herself to her titled visitant, while the little folks retired to a snug window with one or two of the Misses More, and there had their own agreeable converse. Hannah More's eminently useful life manifested itself in nothing more than the effort she made to instruct the ignorant through the medium of moral and religious _tracts_, and by the establishment of schools. These were made blessings on a wide scale, whilst their good effects are continued to this time, and are likely to be perpetuated. It is here proper to mention that after superintending these various schools, either personally or by proxy, for more than a quarter of a century, and after the decease of her four benevolent and excellent sisters, Hannah More found it necessary to leave Barley Wood, and to remove to Clifton. Here her expenses were reduced one half, and her comforts greatly increased. The house she occupied, No. 4, Windsor Terrace, Clifton, was even more pleasant than the one she had left, and the prospects from it much more enlivening. I remember to have called on her with the late Robert Hall, when she discovered a cheerfulness which showed that Barley Wood was no longer regretted. She brought us to the windows of her spacious drawing room, and there, in the expanse beneath, invited us to behold the new docks, and the merchants' numerous ships, while the hill of Dundry appeared (at the distance of four miles) far loftier than her own Mendip, and equally verdant. From the window of her back room also, directly under her eye, a far more exquisite prospect presented itself than any Barley Wood could boast; Leigh Woods, St. Vincent's Rocks, Clifton Down, and, to crown the whole, the winding Avon, with the continually shifting commerce of Bristol; and we left her with the impression that the change in her abode was a great accession to her happiness. In a letter to Mr. Wilberforce, Hannah More thus rather pleasantly writes:-- "4, Windsor Terrace, Oct. 29, 1828. My Very Dear Friend, ... I am diminishing my worldly cares. I have sold Barley Wood. I have exchanged the eight "pampered minions," for four sober servants. As I have sold my carriage and horses, I want no coachman: as I have no garden, I want no gardener. I have greatly lessened my house expenses, which enables me to maintain my schools, and enlarge my charities. My schools alone, with clothing, rents, &c., cost me £150 a year." Mrs. H. More was sometimes liberally assisted in the support of these schools (as I learned from Miss Martha More,) by three philanthropic individuals, the late Mr. Henry Thornton, the late Mr. Wilberforce, and the late Sir W. W. Pepys, Bart. Mrs. H. More, in a letter to Sir W. W. Pepys, acknowledging the receipt of one hundred pounds, says, "My most affectionate respects to Lady Pepys. The young race, of course, have all forgotten me; but I have not forgotten the energy with which your eldest son, at seven years old, ran into the drawing room, and said to me, "After all, Ferdinand would never have sent Columbus to find out America if it had not been for Isabella: it was entirely her doing." How gratifying it would have been to H. More, had she lived two or three years longer, to have found in the round of human things, that this energetic boy of seven years, had become (1837) the Lord High Chancellor of England! and now again in 1846. All the paintings, drawings, and prints which covered the walls of the parlour, on Hannah More's quitting Barley Wood, she gave to her friend, Sir T. D. Ackland, Bart, with the exception of the portrait, by Palmer, of John Henderson, which she kindly presented to myself. * * * * * As I purposed, in projecting the present work, to allow myself a certain latitude in commenting on persons of talent connected recently with Bristol, and with whom Mr. C. and Mr. S. were acquainted, and especially when those persons are dead, I shall here in addition briefly refer to the late Robert Hall. Mr. Hall is universally admitted to have possessed a mind of the first order. He united qualities, rarely combined, each of which would have constituted greatness; being a writer of pre-eminent excellence, and a sacred orator that exceeded all competition. Posterity will judge of Robert Hall's capacity by his writings alone, but all who knew him as a preacher, unhesitatingly admit that in his pulpit exercises (when the absorption of his mind in his subject rendered him but half sensible to the agony of internal maladies which scarcely knew cessation, and which would have prostrated a spirit less firm) that in these exercises, the superiority of his intellect became more undeniably manifest than even in his deliberate compositions. Here some might approach, who could not surpass; but, as a preacher, he stood, collected, in solitary grandeur. Let the reader who was never privileged to see or hear this extraordinary man, present to his imagination a dignified figure[12] that secured the deference which was never exacted; a capacious forehead; an eye, in the absence of excitement, dark, yet placid, but when warmed with argument, flashing almost coruscations of light, as the harmonious accompaniments of his powerful language. But the pulpit presented a wider field for the display of this constitutional ardour. Here, the eye, that always awed, progressively advanced in expression; till warmed with his immortal subject it kindled into absolute radiance, that with its piercing beams penetrated the very heart, and so absorbed the spirit that the preacher himself was forgotten in the magnificent and almost overpowering array of impassioned thoughts and images. With this exterior, let the reader associate a voice, though not strong, eminently flexible and harmonious; a mind that felt, and therefore never erred in its emphasis; alternately touching the chord of pathos, or advancing with equal ease into the region of argument or passion; and then let him remember that every sentiment he uttered was clothed in expressions as mellifluous as perhaps ever fell from the tongue of man. Few would dispute the testimony of Dugald Stewart on subjects of composition; and still fewer would question his authority in ascribing, as he does, to Robert Hall, the excellencies of Addison, Johnson, and Burke, without their defects: and to the works of Mr. H. reference will hereafter doubtless be made, as exhibiting some of the finest specimens that can be adduced, of the harmony, the elegance, the energy, and compass of the English tongue. After noticing the excellencies of Mr. Hall as a Christian advocate, it appears almost bordering on the anti-climax, to name, that a great accession to this his distinction as a writer arose from his exquisite taste in composition, sedulously cultivated through life; and which (as the reward of so chastened a judgment, attained with such labour) at length superseded toil in the arrangement of his words,'since every thought, as it arose in his mind, when expression was given to it, appeared spontaneously, clothed in the most appropriate language. Often has Mr. H. expatiated to me on the subject of style, so as to manifest the depth and acuteness of his criticisms; as well as to leave a firm conviction that the superiority he had acquired arose from no lax endeavour and happy casualty, but from severe and permanent effort, founded on the best models; at least, in that period of his life when the structure of his mind was formed, or forming. He said that _Cicero_ had been his chief model. This habit of minute and general analysis, combined as it was with his fine luminous intellect, enabled him with almost intuitive discernment, to perceive promptly whatever was valuable or defective in the productions of others; and this faculty being conjoined with solid learning, extensive reading, a retentive memory, a vast |tore of diversified knowledge, together with a creative fancy and a logical mind, gave him at all times, an unobtrusive reliance on himself; with an inexhaustible mental treasury that qualified him alike to shine in the friendly circle, or to charm, and astonish, and edify, in the crowded assembly. That the same individual should so far excel both as a preacher and a writer, and at the same time be equally distinguished for his brilliant conversational talent, is scarcely conceivable, and would be too much reputation for any man, unless tempered, as it was in Mr. Hall, by no ordinary measure of Christian humility, and a preference ever expressed, for the moral over the intellectual character. It is not meant to imply that Mr. Hall was perfect, (a condition reserved for another state) but he made gigantic strides towards that point, at which all should aim. That such rare talents should have been devoted, through a long and consistent life, to the cause of his Redeemer, must excite thankfulness in the breast of every Christian, and at the same time deepen the hue with which he contemplates some others, whose talents and influences, were, and are, all banefully exercised, from what might appear a design to corrupt man, and madly to oppose and defy the Supreme himself! Some of Mr. Hall's later admirers may resist the idea that there ever was a period when his ministerial exercises were more eloquent than at the last; but without hesitation, I adopt a different opinion. The estimate formed of him in this place is chiefly founded on the earlier part of life, when, without any opposing influences, a more unbridled range was given to his imagination; when there was an energy in his manner, and a felicity and copiousness in his language, which vibrated on the very verge of human capability. It is incredible to suppose that intense and almost unceasing pain, should not partially have unnerved his mind; that he should not have directed a more undiverted concentration of thought, and revelled with more freedom and luxuriance of expression, before, rather than during the ravages of that insidious and fatal disease, under which he laboured for so many years, and which never allowed him, except when in the pulpit, to deviate from a recumbent posture. However combated by mental firmness, such perpetual suffering must have tended in some degree to repress the vehemence of his intellectual fire; and the astonishment prevails, that he possessed fortitude enough to contend so long with antagonists so potent. Except for the power of religion, and the sustaining influence of faith, nothing could have restrained him from falling back on despondency or despair. Yet even to his final sermon, he maintained his preeminence; and in no one discourse of his last years, did he decline into mediocrity, or fail to remind the elder part of his audience of a period when his eloquence was almost superhuman.[13] After allowing, that many humble but sincere preachers of the gospel of Christ may be as accepted of God, and be made as useful to their fellow-men as the most prodigally endowed, yet the possession of great and well-directed talents must not be underrated. Different soils require different culture, and that which is inoperative on one man may be beneficial to another, and it is hardly possible for any one to form a due estimate of the elevation of which pulpit oratory is susceptible who never heard Robert Hall. This character of his preaching refers more particularly to the period when his talents were in their most vigorous exercise; a little before the time when he published his celebrated sermon on "Infidelity." This sermon I was so happy as to hear delivered, and have no hesitation in expressing an opinion that the oral was not only very different from the printed discourse, but greatly its superior. In the one case he expressed the sentiments of a mind fully charged with matter the most invigorating, and solemnly important; but, discarding notes, (which he once told me always "hampered him") it was not in his power to display the same language, or to record the same evanescent trains of thought; so that in preparing a sermon for the press, no other than a general resemblance could be preserved. In trusting alone to his recollection, when the stimulus was withdrawn of a crowded and most attentive auditory, the ardent feeling; the thought that "burned," was liable, in some measure, to become deteriorated by the substitution of cool philosophical arrangement and accuracy for the spontaneous effusions of his overflowing heart; so that what was gained by one course was more than lost by the other. During Mr. Hall's last visit to Bristol, (prior to his final settlement there) I conducted him to view the beautiful scenery in the neighbourhood, and no one could be more alive to the picturesque than Mr. H. On former occasions, when beholding the expanse of water before him, he has said, with a pensive ejaculation, "We have no water in Cambridgeshire;" and subsequently, in noticing the spreading foliage of Lord de Clifford's park, he has observed with the same mournful accent; "Ah, sir, we have no such trees as these in Leicestershire." And when at this time he arrived at a point which presented the grandest assemblage of beauty, he paused in silence to gaze on the rocks of St. Vincent, and the Avon, and the dense woods, and the distant Severn, and the dim blue mountains of Wales, when with that devotional spirit which accorded with the general current of his feelings, in an ecstacy he exclaimed; "Oh, if these outskirts of the Almighty's dominion can, with one glance, so oppress the heart with gladness, what will be the disclosures of eternity, when the full revelation shall be made of the things not seen, and the river of the city of God!" But "Recollections" of Mr. Hall are not intended, although it may be named, he stated, in one of these rides, that he had arisen from his bed two or three times in the course of the night, when projecting his "Sermon on the Death of the Princess Charlotte" to record thoughts, or to write down passages that he feared might otherwise escape his memory. This, at least, showed the intensity of the interest he felt, though a superabundance of the choicest matter was ever at his command; and if one idea happened accidentally to be lost, one that was better immediately supplied its place. Perhaps this notice may be deemed, by some, too extended, if not misplaced; but if the present occasion of referring to Mr. Hall, had been neglected, no other might have occurred. The man whose name is recorded on high stands in no need of human praise; yet survivors have a debt to pay, and whilst I disclaim every undue bias on my mind in estimating the character of one who so ennobled human nature, none can feel surprise that I should take a favorable retrospect of Mr. H. after an intercourse and friendship of more than forty years. Inadequate as is the present offering, some satisfaction is felt at the opportunity presented of bestowing this small tribute to the memory of one whom I ever venerated, and, in so doing, of adding another attestation to the merits of so good and great a man. * * * * * The reader after this long digression, will have his attention directed once more, to Mr. Coleridge, who was left at Clevedon in the possession of domestic comfort, and with the hope, if not the prospect, of uninterrupted happiness. It could hardly be supposed, that in the element of so much excitement, the spirit of inspiration should remain slumbering. On my next seeing Mr. C. he read me, with more than his accustomed enthusiasm, those tenderly affectionate lines to his "Sara," beginning "My pensive Sara, thy soft cheek reclined." &c, Mr. Coleridge now began to console himself with the suspicion, not only that felicity might be found on this side the Atlantic, but that Clevedon concentrated the sum of all that Earth had to bestow. He was now even satisfied that the Susquehannah itself retired into shade before the superior attractions of his own native Severn. He had, in good truth, discovered the grand secret; the abode of happiness, after which all are so sedulously inquiring; and this accompanied with the cheering assurance, that, by a merely pleasurable intellectual exertion, he would be able to provide for his moderate expenses, and experience the tranquillizing joys of seclusion, while the whole country and Europe were convulsed with war and changes. Alas, repose was not made for man, nor man for repose! Mr. Coleridge at this time little thought of the joys and sorrows, the vicissitudes of life, and revolutions of feeling, with which he was ordained ere long to contend! Inconveniences connected with his residence at Clevedon, not at first taken into the calculation, now gradually unfolded themselves. The place was too far from Bristol. It was difficult of access to friends; and the neighbours were a little too tattling and inquisitive. And then again, Mr. Coleridge could not well dispense with his literary associates, and particularly with his access to that fine institution, the Bristol City Library; and, in addition, as he was necessitated to submit to frugal restraints, a walk to Bristol was rather a serious undertaking; and a return the same day hardly to be accomplished, in the failure of which, his "Sara," was lonely and uneasy; so that his friends urged him to return once more to the place he had left; which he did, forsaking, with reluctance, his rose-bound cottage, and taking up his abode on Redcliff-hill. There was now some prospect that the printer's types would be again set in motion, although it was quite proper that they should remain in abeyance while so many grand events were transpiring in the region of the domestic hearth. This was late in the year 1795. After Mr. Coleridge had been some little time settled in Bristol, he experienced another removal. To exchange the country, and all the beauties of nature, for pent-up rooms on Redcliff-hill, demanded from a poet, sacrifices for which a few advantages would but ill compensate. In this uneasy state of mind, Mr. C. received an invitation from his friend, Mr. T. Poole, of Stowey, Somersetshire, to come and visit him in that retired town, and to which place Mr. and Mrs. Coleridge repaired. The volume of poems, that, in the presence of so many more important affairs, had retired into shade, was now about to reappear, as will be found by the following letter. "Stowey, My dear Cottle, I feel it much, and very uncomfortable, that, loving you as a brother, and feeling pleasure in pouring out my heart to you, I should so seldom be able to write a letter to you, unconnected with business, and uncontaminated with excuses and apologies. I give every moment I can spare from my garden and the Reviews (i. e.) from my potatoes and meat to the poem, (Religious Musings) but I go on slowly, for I torture the poem and myself with corrections; and what I write in an hour, I sometimes take two or three days in correcting. You may depend on it, the poem and prefaces will take up exactly the number of pages I mentioned, and I am extremely anxious to have the work as perfect as possible, and which I cannot do, if it be finished immediately. The "Religious Musings" I have altered monstrously, since I read them to you and received your criticisms. I shall send them to you in my next. The Sonnets I will send you with the Musings. God love you! From your affectionate friend, S. T. Coleridge." Mr. Coleridge at this time meditated the printing of two volumes of his poems. He thus expresses his intention. "I mean to have none but large poems in the second volume; none under three hundred lines; therefore I have crowded all my little pieces into this." He speaks in the same letter, of two poems which I never saw. Perhaps they were composed in his own mind, but never recorded on paper; a practice which Mr. C. sometimes adopted. He thus writes. "The 'Nativity' is not quite three hundred lines. It has cost me much labour in polishing; more than any poem I ever wrote, and I believe deserves it more. The epistle to Tom. Poole, which will come with the 'Nativity,' is I think one of my most pleasing compositions." In a letter of Mr. C. dated from Stowey, Mr. Coleridge also says, "I have written a Ballad of three hundred lines, and also a plan of general study." It appeared right to make these statements, and it is hoped the productions named may still be in existence. Mr. Coleridge now finding it difficult to superintend the press at so great a distance as Stowey, and that it interfered also with his other literary engagements, he resolved once more to remove to Bristol, the residence of so many friends; and to that city he repaired, the beginning of 1796. A conviction now also rested on his mind, as there was the prospect of an increase in his family, that he must bestir himself, and effectually call his resolutions into exercise. Soon after he was fairly settled, he sent me the following letter. "My dear Cottle, I have this night and to-morrow for you, being alone, and my spirits calm. I shall consult my poetic honour, and of course your interest, more by staying at home, than by drinking tea with you. I should be happy to see my poems out even by next week, and I shall continue in stirrups, that is, shall not dismount my Pegasus, till Monday morning, at which time you will have to thank God for having done with Your affectionate friend always, but author evanescent. S. T. C." Except for the serious effect, unintentionally produced, a rather ludicrous circumstance some time after this occurred, that is, after Mr. C. had "mounted his Pegasus" for the last time, and, permitted, so long ago, "the lock and key to be turned upon him." The promised notes, preface, and some of the text, not having been furnished, I had determined to make no further application, but to allow Mr. C. to consult his own inclination and convenience. Having a friend who wanted an introduction to Mr. Coleridge, I invited him to dinner, and sent Mr. C. a note, to name the time, and to solicit his company. The bearer of the note was simply requested to give it to Mr. C. and not finding him at home, inconsiderately brought it back. Mr. Coleridge returning home soon after, and learning that I had sent a letter, which was taken back, in the supposition that it could relate but to _one subject_, addressed to me the following astounding letter. "Redcliff-hill, Feb. 22, 1796. My dear Sir, It is my duty and business to thank God for all his dispensations, and to believe them the best possible; but, indeed, I think I should have been more thankful, if he had made me a journeyman shoemaker, instead of an author by trade. I have left my friends: I have left plenty; I have left that ease which would have secured a literary immortality, and have enabled me to give the public, works conceived in moments of inspiration, and polished with leisurely solicitude, and alas! for what have I left them? for--who deserted me in the hour of distress, and for a scheme of virtue impracticable and romantic! So I am forced to write for bread! write the flights of poetic enthusiasm, when every minute I am hearing a groan from my wife. Groans, and complaints, and sickness! The present hour I am in a quick-set hedge of embarrassment, and whichever way I turn, a thorn runs into me! The future is cloud, and thick darkness! Poverty, perhaps, and the thin faces of them that want bread, looking up to me! Nor is this all. My happiest moments for composition are broken in upon by the reflection that I must make haste. I am too late! I am already months behind! I have received my pay beforehand! Oh, wayward and desultory spirit of genius! Ill canst thou brook a taskmaster! The tenderest touch from the hand of obligation, wounds thee like a scourge of scorpions. I have been composing in the fields this morning, and came home to write down the first rude sheet of my preface, when I heard that your man had brought a note from you. I have not seen it, but I guess its contents. I am writing as fast as I can. Depend on it you shall not be out of pocket for me! I feel what I owe you, and independently of this, I love you as a friend; indeed, so much, that I regret, seriously regret, that you have been my copyholder. If I have written petulantly, forgive me. God knows I am sore all over. God bless you, and believe me that, setting gratitude aside, I love and esteem you, and have your interest at heart full as much as my own. S. T. Coleridge." At the receipt of this painful letter, which made me smile and sigh at the same moment, my first care was to send the young and desponding Bard some of the precious metal, to cheer his drooping spirits; to inform him of his mistake; and to renew my invitation; which was accepted, and at this interview he was as cheerful as ever. He saw no difference in my countenance, and I perceived none in his. The "thick cloud" and the "thorn" had completely passed away, whilst his brilliant conversation charmed and edified the friend for whose sake he had been invited. At length, Mr. Coleridge's volume of poems was completed. On the blank leaf of one of the copies, he asked for a pen, and wrote the following: "Dear Cottle, On the blank leaf of my poems, I can most appropriately write my acknowledgments to you, for your too disinterested conduct in the purchase of them. Indeed, if ever they should acquire a name and character, it might be truly said, the world owed them to you. Had it not been for you, none perhaps of them would have been published, and some not written. Your, obliged and affectionate friend, S. T. Coleridge. Bristol, April 15, 1796." The particulars respecting the publication of Mr. Coleridge's volume of Poems have been continued unbroken, to the exclusion of some antecedent circumstances, which will now be noticed. If it were my object to give a fictitious, and not a real character; to remove, scrupulously, all protuberances that interfered with the polish, I might withhold the following letter, which merely shows the solicitude with which Mr. C. at this time, regarded small profits. His purse, soon after his return to Bristol, being rather low, with the demands on it increasing, he devised an ingenious, and very innocent plan for replenishing it, in a small way, as will thus appear. "My ever dear Cottle, Since I last conversed with you on the subject, I have been thinking over again the plan I suggested to you, concerning the application of Count Rumford's plan to the city of Bristol. I have arranged in my mind the manner, and matter of the Pamphlet, which would be three sheets, and might be priced at one shilling. 'Considerations Addressed to the Inhabitants of Bristol, on a subject of importance, (unconnected with Politics.) BY S. T. C.' Now I have by me the history of Birmingham, and the history of Manchester. By observing the names, revenues, and expenditures of their different charities, I could easily alter the calculations of the "Bristol Address," and, at a trifling expense, and a few variations, the same work might be sent to Manchester and Birmingham. "Considerations addressed to the inhabitants of Birmingham." &c. I could so order it, that by writing to a particular friend, at both places, the pamphlet should be thought to have been written _at_ each place, as it certainly would be _for_ each place. I think therefore 750 might be printed in all. Now will you undertake this? either to print it and divide the profits, or (which indeed I should prefer) would you give me three guineas, for the copy-right? I would give you the first sheet on Thursday, the second on the Monday following, the third on the Thursday following. To each pamphlet I would annex the alterations to be made, when the press was stopped at 250.[14] God love you! S. T. C." Mr. Coleridge used occasionally to regret, with even pungency of feeling, that he had no relation in the world, to whom, in a time of extremity, he could apply "for a little assistance." He appeared like a being dropped from the clouds, without tie or connection on earth; and during the years in which I knew him, he never once visited any one of his relations, nor exchanged a letter with them. It used to fill myself and others with concern and astonishment, that such a man should, apparently, be abandoned. On some occasions I urged him to break through all impediments, and go and visit his friends at Ottery; this his high spirit could not brook. I then pressed him to dedicate his Poems to one of his relatives, his brother George, of whom he occasionally spoke with peculiar kindness. He was silent; but some time after, he said in a letter, "You, I am sure will be glad to learn, that I shall follow your advice." In the poem which thus arose, what can be more touching than these lines in his dedication to his brother? (Second edition.) "To me the Eternal Wisdom hath dispensed A different fortune, and more different mind-- Me from the spot where first I sprang to light Too soon transplanted, ere my soul had fixed Its first domestic loves; and hence through life Chasing chance--started friendships. A brief while, Some have preserved me from life's pelting ills." In certain features of their character, there was a strong resemblance between Chatterton and S. T. Coleridge, with a reverse in some points, for Chatterton was loved and cherished by his family, but neglected by the world. In the agony of mind which Mr. C. sometimes manifested on this subject, I have wished to forget those four tender lines in his Monody on Chatterton. "Poor Chatterton! farewell! Of darkest hues, This chaplet cast I on thy unshaped tomb: But dare no longer on the sad theme muse, Lest kindred woes persuade a kindred doom!" Mr. C. would not have felt so much, if his own natural and unshaken affections had been less ardent. Before I enter on an important incident in Mr. Coleridge's Bristol life, I must previously observe, that his mind was in a singular degree distinguished for the habit of projecting. New projects and plans, at this time, followed each other in rapid succession, and while the vividness of the impression lasted, the very completion could scarcely have afforded more satisfaction than the vague design. To project, with him, was commonly sufficient. The execution, of so much consequence in the estimation of others, with him was a secondary point. I remember him once to have read to me, from his pocket book; a list of eighteen different works which he had resolved to write, and several of them in quarto, not one of which he ever effected. At the top of the list appeared the word "Pantisocracy! 4to." Each of these works, he could have talked, (for he often poured forth as much as half an 8vo. volume in a single evening, and that in language sufficiently pure and connected to admit of publication) but talking merely benefits the few, to the exclusion of the many. The work that apparently advanced the nearest to completion, was "Translations of the modern Latin Poets;" two vols. 8vo. This work, which no man could better have accomplished than himself, he so far proceeded in, as to allow of the Proposals being issued. It was to be published by subscription, and he brought with him from Cambridge a very respectable list of university subscribers. His excuses for not showing any part of the work, justified the suspicion that he had not advanced in it further than these said "Proposals." Another prominent feature in Mr. Coleridge's mind, was procrastination. It is not to be supposed that he ever made a promise or entered on an engagement without intending to fulfil it, but none who knew him could deny that he wanted much of that steady, persevering determination which is the precursor of success, and the parent of all great actions. His strongest intentions were feebly supported after the first paroxysms of resolve, so that any judicious friend would strenuously have dissuaded him from an undertaking that involved a race with time. Mr. Coleridge, however, differently regarded his mental constitution, and projected at this time a periodical miscellany, called "The Watchman." When the thought of this magazine first suggested itself to his mind, he convened his chief friends one evening at the Rummer Tavern, to determine on the size, price, and time of publishing, with all other preliminaries, essential to the launching this first-rate vessel on the mighty deep. Having heard of the circumstance the next day, I rather wondered at not having also been requested to attend, and while ruminating on the subject, I received from Mr. C. the following communication. "My dear friend, I am fearful that you felt hurt at my not mentioning to you the proposed 'Watchman,' and from my not requesting you to attend the meeting. My dear friend, my reasons were these. All who met were expected to become subscribers to a fund; I knew there would be enough without you, and I knew, and felt, how much money had been drawn from you lately. God Almighty love you! S. T. C." In a few days the following prospectus of the new work was circulated far and near. "To supply at once the places of a Review, Newspaper, and Annual Register. On Tuesday, the 1st of March, 1796, will be published, No. 1, price fourpence, of a Miscellany, to be continued every eighth day, under the name of THE WATCHMAN, BY SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, This Miscellany will be comprised in two sheets, or thirty-two pages, closely printed in 8vo. the type, long primer. ITS CONTENTS. 1st. A History of the Domestic and Foreign Policy of the preceding days. 2nd. The Speeches in both Houses of Parliament, and during the recess. Select Parliamentary Speeches, from the commencement of the reign of Charles the First, to the present Aera, with Notes, Historical and Biographical. 3rd. Original Essays and Poetry. 4th. Review of interesting and important Publications. ITS ADVANTAGES. FIRST. There being no Advertisements, a greater quantity of Original matter will be given, and the Speeches in Parliament will be less abridged. SECOND. From its form, it may be bound up at the end of the year, and become an Annual Register. THIRD. This last circumstance may induce men of letters to prefer this miscellany to more perishable publications as the vehicle of their effusions. FOURTH. Whenever the Ministerial and Opposition Prints differ in their accounts of occurrences, &c. such difference will always be faithfully stated." Of all men, Mr. Coleridge was the least qualified to display periodical industry. Many of his cooler friends entertained from the beginning no sanguine expectations of success, but now that the experiment was fairly to be tried, they united with him in making every exertion to secure it. As a magazine it was worth nothing without purchasers. Bristol was the strong-hold, where about two hundred and fifty subscribers were obtained by myself, and one hundred and twenty by Mr. Reed. These were insufficient. What was to be done? A bold measure was determined upon. Mr. Coleridge, conceiving that his means of subsistence depended upon the success of this undertaking, armed himself with unwonted resolution, and expressed his determination to travel over half England and take the posse comitatus by storm. In conformity with such resolution, he obtained letters of introduction to influential men in the respective towns he meant to visit, and, like a shrewd calculator, determined to add the parson's avocation to that of the political pamphleteer. The beginning of Jan. 1796, Mr. Coleridge, laden with recommendatory epistles, and rich in hope, set out on his eventful journey, and visited in succession, Worcester, Birmingham, Nottingham, Lichfield, Derby, Manchester, Sheffield, Liverpool, &c. and as a crowning achievement, at the last, paid his respects to the great metropolis; in all which places, by bills, prospectuses, advertisements, and other expedients, the reading public were duly apprised of the "NEW REVIEW, NEWSPAPER, and ANNUAL REGISTER," about to be published. The good people, in all the towns through which Mr. Coleridge passed, were electrified by his extraordinary eloquence. At this time, and during the whole of his residence in Bristol, there was, in the strict sense, little of the true, interchangeable conversation in Mr. C. On almost every subject on which he essayed to speak, he made an impassioned harangue of a quarter, or half an hour; so that inveterate talkers, while Mr. Coleridge was on the wing, generally suspended their own flight, and felt it almost a profanation to interrupt so impressive and mellifluous a speaker. This singular, if not happy peculiarity, occasioned even Madame de Stael to remark of Mr. C. that "He was rich in a Monologue, but poor in a Dialogue." From the brilliant volubility before noticed, admiration and astonishment followed Mr. C. like a shadow, through the whole course of his peregrinations. This new "Review, Newspaper, and Annual Register," was largely patronized; for who would not give fourpence every eighth day, to be furnished, by so competent a man as Mr. Coleridge, with this quintessence, this concentration of all that was valuable, in Politics, Criticism, and Literature; enriched in addition, with Poetry of the first waters, luminous Essays, and other effusions of men of letters? So choice a morçeau was the very thing that every body wanted; and, in the course of his journey, subscriptions poured in to the extent of one thousand; and Mr. C. on his return, after what might be called a triumph, discovered the elasticity of his spirit; smiling at past depressions, and now, on solid ground, anticipating ease, wealth, and fame. The first of March arrived. The "Watchman" was published. Although deprived of the pleasure of contributing to Mr. Coleridge's fund, I determined to assist him in other ways, and that far more effectually. On the publication of the first Number, besides my trouble in sending round to so many subscribers,--with all the intense earnestness attending the transaction of the most weighty concerns, it occupied Mr. Coleridge and myself four full hours to arrange, reckon, (each pile being counted by Mr. C. after myself, to be quite satisfied that there was no extra 3-1/2 d. one slipped in unawares,) pack up, and write invoices and letters for the London and country customers, all expressed thus, in the true mercantile style: Bristol, March 1st, 1796. Mr. Pritchard, (Derby) Dr. to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. To 73 No. 1 of the Watchman ... 3-1/2 d. ... £1 1 3-1/2 This routine was repeated with every fresh number. My part was zealously and cheerfully discharged, with the encouraging hope that it would essentially serve my anxious and valued friend. But all would not do! A feeling of disappointment prevailed early and pretty generally, amongst the subscribers. The Prospectus promised too much. In the Review department, no one article appeared embodying any high order of talent. The Newspaper section pleased no one, from the confined limits to which the editor was restricted, independently of which, nearly all the subscribers had seen the Debates in their length, through other mediums; and yet this profitless part of the work gave most trouble to the compiler. Its dulness, I know, fretted Mr. Coleridge exceedingly.[15] The theory of publishing was delightful; but the exemplification--the practice, proved, alas! teasing, if not tormenting. One pitiful subscriber of fourpence, every eighth day, thought his boys did not improve much under it. Another expected more from his "Annual Register!" Another wanted more Reviews! Another, more Politics! and those a little sharper. As the work proceeded, joys decreased, and perplexities multiplied! added to which, subscribers rapidly fell off, debts were accumulated and unpaid, till, at the Tenth Number, the Watchman at the helm cried "Breakers" and the vessel stranded!--It being formally announced, that "The work did not pay its expenses!" The "Address to the readers of the Watchman," in the last page, was the following: "This is the last Number of the Watchman.--Henceforward I shall cease to cry the state of the Political atmosphere. While I express my gratitude to those friends who exerted themselves so liberally in the establishment of this Miscellany, I may reasonably be expected to assign some reason for relinquishing it thus abruptly. The reason is short and satisfactory.--The work does not pay its expences. Part of my subscribers have relinquished it, because it did not contain sufficient original composition; and a still larger number, because it contained too much. Those who took it in as a mere journal of weekly events, must have been unacquainted with 'FLOWER'S CAMBRIDGE INTELLIGENCER;' a Newspaper, the style and composition of which would claim distinguished praise, even among the productions of literary leisure; while it breathes everywhere the severest morality; fighting fearlessly the good fight against tyranny, yet never unfaithful to that religion, whose service is perfect freedom. Those, on the other hand, who expected from it much and varied original composition, have naturally relinquished it in favour of the 'NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE;' a work which has almost monopolized the talent of the country, and with which I should have continued a course of literary rivalship, with as much success as might be expected to attend a young recruit, who should oppose himself to a phalanx of disciplined warriors. Long may it continue to deserve the support of the patriot and the philanthropist; and while it teaches its readers NATIONAL LIBERTY, prepare them for the enjoyment of it; strengthening the intellect by SCIENCE, and softening our affections by the GRACES! To return to myself. I have endeavoured to do well: and it must be attributed to defect of ability, not of inclination or effort, if the words of the Prophet be altogether applicable to me. "O, Watchman! thou hast watched in vain." Many readers will feel a concern in the arrangements and perplexities of Mr. Coleridge at the time of publishing his "Watchman;" for he had a more vital interest involved in the success of that work than he had, individually, in the rise and fall of empires. When he returned from his northern journey laden with subscribers, and with hope ripened into confidence, all that had yet been done was the mere scaffolding; the building was now to be erected. Soon after this time I received from Mr. Coleridge the following letter. "1796. My ever dear Cottle, I will wait on you this evening at 9 o'clock, till which hour I am on "Watch." Your Wednesday's invitation I of course accept, but I am rather sorry that you should add this expense to former liberalities. Two editions of my Poems would barely repay you. Is it not possible to get twenty-five, or thirty of the Poems ready by to-morrow, as Parsons, of Paternoster Row, has written to me pressingly about them. 'People are perpetually asking after them.' All admire the Poetry in the 'Watchman;' he says, I can send them with one hundred "of the First Number," which he has written for. I think if you were to send half a dozen 'Joans of Arc,' [4to. £1. 1. 0] on sale or return, it would not be amiss. To all the places in the North, we will send my 'Poems,' my 'Conciones,' and the 'Joans of Arc,' together, per waggon. You shall pay the carriage for the London and the Birmingham parcels; I for the Sheffield, Derby, Nottingham, Manchester, and Liverpool. With regard to the Poems I mean to give away, I wish to make it a common interest; that is, I will give away a sheet full of Sonnets. One to Mrs. Barbauld; one to Wakefield; one to Dr. Beddoes: one to Wrangham, (a College acquaintance of mine, an admirer of me, and a pitier of my principles!) one to George Augustus Pollen, Esq. one to C. Lamb; one to Wordsworth; one to my brother G. and one to Dr. Parr. These Sonnets I mean to write on the blank leaf, respectively, of each copy.[16] Concerning the paper for the 'Watchman,' I was vexed to hear your proposal of trusting it to Biggs, who, if he undertook it at all, would have a profit, which heaven knows, I cannot afford. My plan was, either that you should write to your paper-maker, saying that you had recommended him to me, and ordering for me twenty or forty reams, at a half year's credit; or else, in your own name; in which case I would transfer to you, Reed's[17] weekly account, amounting to 120 3-1/2 d's, (or 35 shillings) and the Birmingham monthly account, amounting to £14. a month. God bless you, and S. T. Coleridge." This letter requires a few explanations. In recommending that Biggs, the printer, should choose the paper, it was not designed for him to provide it, which, had he been so requested, he would not have done, but merely to select one, out of different samples to be submitted to him, as that which he, as a printer, thought the best. This was explained to Mr. C. It will be perceived, that Mr. Coleridge's two proposals were virtually one: as, if I ordered the paper for myself or for another, the responsibility would rest with me. The plain fact is, I purchased the whole of the paper for the "Watchman," allowing Mr. C. to have it at prime cost, and receiving small sums from him occasionally, in liquidation. I became responsible, also, to Mr. B. for printing the work, by which means I reduced the price per sheet, as a bookseller, (1000) from fifty shillings to thirty five shillings. Mr. C. paid me for the paper in fractions, as he found it convenient, but from the falling off of his own receipts, I never received the whole. It was a losing concern altogether, and I was willing to bear, uncomplaining, my proportion of the loss. There is some difference between this statement, and that of Mr. Coleridge in his "Biographia Literaria."[18] A defect of memory must have existed, arising out of the lapse of twenty two years; but my notices, made at that time, did not admit of mistake. My loss was also augmented from another cause. Mr. C. states in the above work, that his London publisher never paid him "one farthing," but "set him at defiance." I also was more than his equal companion in this misfortune. The thirty copies of Mr. C.'s poems, and the six "Joans of Arc" (referred to in the preceding letter) found a ready sale, by this said "indefatigable London publisher," and large and fresh orders were received, so that Mr. Coleridge and myself participated in two very opposite feelings, the one of exultation that our publications had found _so good a sale_; and the other of _depression_, that the time of _payment_ never arrived! All the copies also, of Mr. C.'s Poems, and the "Joan's of Arc," which were sent to the North, so far as I am concerned, shared the same fate. I do not know that they were ever paid for. If they were, in combination with other things, it was my wish that the entanglement should never be unravelled, for who could take from Mr. C. any portion of his slender remittances. The most amusing appendage to this unfortunate "Miscellany," will now be presented to the reader, in the seven following letters of Mr. Coleridge, addressed to his friend Mr. Josiah Wade, and written in the progress of his journey to collect subscribers for the "Watchman." "Worcester, Jan. 1796. My dear Wade, We were five in number, and twenty-five, in quantity. The moment I entered the coach, I stumbled on a huge projection, which might be called a belly, with the same propriety that you might name Mount Atlas a mole-hill. Heavens! that a man should be unconscionable enough to enter a stage coach, who would want elbow room if he were walking on Salisbury Plain! This said citizen was a most violent aristocrat, but a pleasant humourous fellow in other respects, and remarkably well-informed in agricultural science; so that the time passed pleasantly enough. We arrived at Worcester at half-past two: I of course dined at the inn, where I met Mr. Stevens. After dinner I christianized myself; that is, washed and changed, and marched in finery and cleanliness to High-Street. With regard to business, there is no chance of doing any thing at Worcester. The aristocrats are so numerous, and the influence of the clergy so extensive, that Mr. Barr thinks no bookseller will venture to publish the 'Watchman.' P.S. I hope and trust that the young citizeness is well, and also Mrs. Wade. Give my love to the latter, and a kiss for me to little Miss Bratinella. S. T. Coleridge." "Birmingham, Jan. 1796. My dear friend, ... My exertions have been incessant, for in whatever company I go, I am obliged to be the figurante of the circle. Yesterday I preached twice, and, indeed, performed the whole service, morning and afternoon. There were about fourteen hundred persons present, and my sermons (great part extempore) were _preciously peppered with Politics_. I have here, at least, double the number of subscribers, I had expected...." "Nottingham, Jan. 7, 1796. My dear friend, You will perceive by this letter I have changed my route. From Birmingham, on Friday last, (four o'clock in the morning) I proceeded to Derby, stayed there till Monday morning, and am now at Nottingham. From Nottingham I go to Sheffield; from Sheffield to Manchester; from Manchester to Liverpool? from Liverpool to London, from London to Bristol. Ah, what a weary way! My poor crazy ark has been tossed to and fro on an ocean of business, and I long for the Mount Ararat on which it is to rest. At Birmingham I was extremely unwell; a violent cold in my head and limbs confined me for two days. Business succeeded very well; about a hundred subscribers, I think. At Derby, also, I succeeded tolerably well. Mr. Strutt, the successor of Sir Richard Arkwright, tells me, I may count on forty or fifty in Derby. Derby is full of curiosities; the cotton and silk mills; Wright, the painter, and Dr. Darwin, the every thing but Christian! Dr. Darwin possesses, perhaps, a greater range of knowledge than any other man in Europe, and is the most inventive of philosophical men. He thinks in a new train on all subjects but religion. He bantered me on the subject of religion. I heard all his arguments, and told him, it was infinitely consoling to me--to find that the arguments of so great a man, adduced against the existence of a God and the evidences of revealed religion, were such as had startled me at fifteen, but had become the objects of my smile at twenty. Not one new objection; not even an ingenious one! He boasted 'that he had never read one book in favour of such stuff! but that he had read all the works of infidels.' What would you think, Mr. Wade, of a man, who having abused and ridiculed you, should openly declare, that he had heard all that your enemies had to say against you, but had scorned to inquire the truth from any one of your friends? Would you think him an honest man? I am sure you would not. Yet such are all the infidels whom I have known. They talk of a subject, yet are proud to confess themselves profoundly ignorant of it. Dr. Darwin would have been ashamed to reject 'Hutton's Theory of the Earth,' without having minutely examined it: yet what is it to us, how the earth was made, a thing impossible to be known. This system the Dr. did not reject without having severely studied it; but all at once he makes up his mind on such important subjects, as, whether we be the outcasts of a blind idiot, called Nature, or, the children of an All-wise and Infinitely Good God! Whether we spend a few miserable years on this earth, and then sink into a clod of the valley; or, endure the anxieties of mortal life, only to fit us for the enjoyment of immortal happiness. These subjects are unworthy a philosopher's investigation! He deems that there is a certain self-evidence in Infidelity, and becomes an Atheist by intuition! Well did St. Paul say, 'Ye have an evil heart of unbelief.' ... What lovely children Mr. Barr, of Worcester has! After church, in the evening, they sat round and sung hymns, so sweetly that they overpowered me. It was with great difficulty that I abstained from weeping aloud! and the infant, in Mrs. B.'s. arms, leant forward, and stretched his little arms, and stared, and smiled! It seemed a picture of heaven, where the different orders of the blessed, join different voices in one melodious hallelulia! and the babe like a young spirit just that moment arrived in heaven, startled at the seraphic songs, and seized at once with wonder and rapture!... From your affectionate friend, S. T. Coleridge." "Sheffield, Jan. 1796. My very dear friend, I arrived at this place, late last night, by the mail from Nottingham, where I have been treated with kindness and friendship, of which I can give you but a faint idea. I preached a charity sermon there last sunday; I preached in colored clothes. With regard to the gown at Birmingham (of which you inquire) I suffered myself to be over-persuaded:--first of all, my sermon being of so political a tendency, had I worn my blue coat, it would have impugned Edwards. They would have said, he had stuck a political lecturer in his pulpit. Secondly,--the society is of all sorts. Unitarians, Arians, Trinitarians, &c.! and I must have shocked a multitude of prejudices. And thirdly,--there is a difference between an Inn, and a place of residence. In the first, your example, is of little consequence; in a single instance only, it ceases to operate as example; and my refusal would have been imputed to affectation, or an unaccommodating spirit. Assuredly I would not do it in a place where I intended to preach often. And even in the vestry at Birmingham, when they at last persuaded me, I told them, I was acting against my better knowledge, and should possibly feel uneasy after. So these accounts of the matter you must consider as reasons and palliations, concluding, 'I plead guilty my Lord!' Indeed I want firmness. I perceive I do. I have that within me which makes it difficult to say, No! (repeatedly) to a number of persons who seem uneasy and anxious.... My kind remembrances to Mrs. Wade. God bless her, and you, and (like a bad shilling slipped in between two guineas.) Your faithful and affectionate friend, S. T. Coleridge." Mr. Coleridge, in the course of his extensive journey, having had to act the tradesman on rather an extended scale; conferring and settling with all the booksellers in the respective towns, as to the means of conveyance, allowance, remittances, &c. he thus wrote in a dejected mood, to his friend Mr. Wade,--an unpropitious state of mind for a new enterprise, and very different from those sanguine hopes which he had expressed on other occasions. "My dear friend, ... I succeeded very well here at Litchfield. Belcher, bookseller, Birmingham; Sutton, Nottingham; Pritchard, Derby; and Thomson, Manchester, are the publishers. In every number of the 'Watchman,' there be printed these words, 'Published in Bristol, by the Author, S. T. Coleridge, and sold, &c. &c.' I verily believe no poor fellow's idea-pot ever bubbled up so vehemently with fears, doubts and difficulties, as mine does at present. Heaven grant it may not boil over, and put out the fire! I am almost heartless! My past life seems to me like a dream, a feverish dream! all one gloomy huddle of strange actions, and dim-discovered motives! Friendships lost by indolence, and happiness murdered by mismanaged sensibility! The present hour I seem in a quickset hedge of embarrassments! For shame! I ought not to mistrust God! but indeed, to hope is far more difficult than to fear. Bulls have horns, Lions have talons. The Fox, and Statesman subtle wiles ensure, The Cit, and Polecat stink and are secure: Toads with their venom, Doctors with their drug, The Priest, and Hedgehog, in their robes are snug! Oh, Nature! cruel step-mother, and hard, To thy poor, naked, fenceless child the Bard! No Horns but those by luckless Hymen worn, And those, (alas! alas!) not Plenty's Horn! With naked feelings, and with aching pride, He bears th' unbroken blast on every side! Vampire booksellers drain him to the heart, And Scorpion critics cureless venom dart![19] S. T. C." "Manchester, Jan. 7, 1796. My dear friend, I arrived at Manchester, last night, from Sheffield, to which place I shall only send about thirty numbers. I might have succeeded there, at least, equally well with the former towns, but I should injure the sale of the 'Iris.' the editor of which Paper (a very amiable and ingenious young man, of the name of 'James Montgomery') is now in prison, for a libel on a bloody-minded magistrate there. Of course, I declined publicly advertising or disposing of the 'Watchman' in that town. This morning I called on Mr. ---- with H's letter. Mr. ---- received me as a rider, and treated me with insolence that was really amusing from its novelty. 'Overstocked with these Articles.' 'People always setting up some new thing or other.' 'I read the Star and another paper; what can I want with this paper, which is nothing more.' 'Well, well, I'll consider of it.' To these entertaining bon mots, I returned the following repartee,--'Good morning, sir.' ... God bless you, S. T. C." "Mosely, near Birmingham, 1796. My very dear Wade, Will it be any excuse to you for my silence, to say that I have written to no one else, and that these are the very first lines I have written? I stayed a day or two at Derby, and then went on in Mrs. ---- carriage to see the beauties of Matlock. Here I stayed from Tuesday to Saturday, which time was completely filled up with seeing the country, eating, concerts, &c. I was the first fiddle, not in the concerts, but everywhere else, and the company would not spare me twenty minutes together. Sunday I dedicated to the drawing up my sketch of education, which I meant to publish, to try to get a school. Monday I accompanied Mrs. E. to Oakover, with Miss W.--, to the thrice lovely valley of Ham; a vale hung by beautiful woods all round, except just at its entrance, where, as you stand at the other end of the valley, you see a bare, bleak mountain, standing as it were to guard the entrance. It is without exception, the most beautiful place I ever visited, and from thence we proceeded to Dove-Dale, without question tremendously sublime. Here we dined in a cavern, by the side of a divine little spring. We returned to Derby, quite exhausted with the rapid succession of delightful emotions. I was to have left Derby on Wednesday; but on the Wednesday, Dr. Crompton, who had been at Liverpool, came home. He called on me, and made the following offer. That if I would take a house in Derby, and open a day-school, confining my number to twelve, he would send his three children. That, till I had completed my number, he would allow me one hundred a year; and and when I had completed it, twenty guineas a year for each son. He thinks there is no doubt but that I might have more than twelve in a very short time, if I liked it. If so, twelve times twenty guineas is two hundred and forty guineas per annum; and my mornings and evenings would be my own: the children coming to me from nine to twelve, and from two to five: the two last hours employed with the writing and drawing masters, in my presence: so that only four hours would be thoroughly occupied by them. The plan to commence in November. I agreed with the Doctor, he telling me, that if, in the mean time, anything more advantageous offered itself, I was to consider myself perfectly at liberty to accept it. On Thursday I left Derby for Burton. Prom Burton I took chaise, slept at Litchfield, and in the morning arrived at my worthy friend's, Mr. Thomas Hawkes, at Mosely, three miles from Birmingham, in whose shrubbery I am now writing. I shall stay at Birmingham a week longer. I have seen a letter from Mr. William Roscoe, (Author of the life of Lorenzo the magnificent; a work in two quarto volumes, of which the whole first edition sold in a month) it was addressed to Mr. Edwards, the minister here, and entirely related to me. Of me, and my composition, he writes in terms of high admiration, and concludes by desiring Mr. Edwards to let him know my situation and prospects, and saying, if I would come and settle at Liverpool, he thought a comfortable situation might be procured for me. This day Edwards will write to him. God love you, and your grateful and affectionate friend, S. T. Coleridge. N. B. I preached yesterday." Mr. Coleridge, in the preceding letters, states his having preached occasionally. There must have been a first sermon. It so happened that I heard Mr. C. preach his first and also his second sermon, with some account of which I shall now furnish the reader; and that without concealment or embellishment. But it will be necessary, as an illustration of the whole, to convey some previous information, which, as it regards most men, would be too unimportant to relate. When Mr. Coleridge first came to Bristol, he had evidently adopted, at least to some considerable extent, the sentiments of Socinus. By persons of that persuasion, therefore, he was hailed as a powerful accession to their cause. From Mr. C.'s voluble utterance, it was even believed that he might become a valuable Unitarian minister, (of which class of divines, a great scarcity then existed, with a still more gloomy anticipation, from most of the young academicians at their chief academy having recently turned infidels.) But though this presumption in Mr. Coleridge's favour was confidently entertained, no certainty could exist without a trial, and how was this difficulty to be overcome? The Unitarians in Bristol might have wished to see Mr. C. in their pulpit, expounding and enforcing their faith; but, as they said, "the thing, in Bristol, was altogether impracticable," from the conspicuous stand which he had taken in free politics, through the medium of his numerous lectures.[20] It was then recollected by some of his anxious and importunate friends, that Bath was near, and that a good judge of requisite qualifications was to be found therein in the person of the Rev. David Jardine, with whom some of Mr. C.'s friends were on terms of intimacy; so that it was determined that Mr. Coleridge, as the commencement of his brilliant career, should be respectfully requested to preach his inaugural discourse in the Unitarian chapel at Bath. The invitation having been given and accepted, I felt some curiosity to witness the firmness with which he would face a large and enlightened audience, and, in the intellectual sense, grace his canonical robes. No conveyance having been provided, and wishing the young ecclesiastic to proceed to the place of his exhibition with some decent respectability, I agreed with a common friend, the late Mr. Charles Danvers, to take Mr. C. over to Bath in a chaise. The morning of the important day unfolded, and in due time we arrived at the place of our destination. When on the way to the chapel, a man stopped Charles Danvers, and asked him if he could tell where the Rev. Mr. Coleridge preached. "Follow the crowd," said Danvers, and walked on. Mr. C. wore his blue coat and white waistcoat; but what was Mr. Jardine's surprise, when he found that his young probationer peremptorily refused to wear the hide-all sable gown! Expostulation was unavailing, and the minister ascended to the pulpit in his coloured clothes! Considering that it had been announced on the preceding Sunday, that "the Rev. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from Cambridge University" would preach there on this day, we naturally calculated on an overflowing audience, but it proved to be the most meagre congregation I had ever seen. The reader will but imperfectly appreciate Mr. C.'s discourse, without the previous information that this year (1796) was a year of great scarcity, and consequent privation, amongst the poor; on which subject the sermon was designed impressively to bear. And now the long-expected service commenced. The prayer, without being intended, was formal, unimpressive, and undevotional; the singing was languid; but we expected that the sermon would arouse the inattentive, and invigorate the dull. The moment for announcing the text arrived. Our curiosity was excited. With little less than famine in the land, our hearts were appalled at hearing the words, "When they shall be hungry, they shall fret themselves, and curse their king, and their God, and look upward." (Isaiah viii. 21.) Mr. Winterbotham, a little before, had been thrown into prison for the freedom of his political remarks in a sermon at Plymouth, and we were half fearful whether in his impetuous current of feeling, some stray expressions might not subject our friend to a like visitation. Our fears were groundless. Strange as it may appear in Mr. Coleridge's vigorous mind, the whole discourse consisted of little more than a Lecture on the Corn Laws! which some time before he had delivered in Bristol, at the Assembly Boom. Returning from our edifying discourse to a tavern dinner, we were privileged with more luminous remarks on this inexhaustible subject: but something better (or worse, as the reader's taste may be) is still in reserve. After dinner, Mr. Coleridge remarked that he should have no objection to preach another sermon that afternoon. In the hope that something redeeming might still appear, and the best be retained for the last, we encouraged his proposal, when he rang the bell, and on the waiter appearing, he was sent, with Mr. Coleridge's compliments, to the Rev. Mr. Jardine, to say "If agreeable, Mr. C. would give his congregation another sermon, this afternoon, on the Hair Powder Tax!"[21] On the departure of the waiter, I was fully assured that Mr. Jardine would smile, and send a civil excuse, satisfied that he had had quite enough of political economy, with blue coat and white waistcoat, in the morning; but to my great surprise, the waiter returned with Mr. Jardine's compliments, saying, "he should be happy to hear Mr. Coleridge!" Now all was hurry lest the concourse should be kept waiting. What surprise will the reader feel, on understanding that, independently of ourselves and Mr. Jardine, there were but seventeen persons present, including men, women, and children! We had, as we expected, a recapitulation of the old lecture, with the exception of its humorous appendages, in reprobation of the Hair Powder Tax; and the twice-told tale, even to the ear of friendship, in truth sounded rather dull! Two or three times Mr. C. looked significantly toward our seat, when fearful of being thrown off my guard into a smile, I held down my head, from which position I was aroused, when the sermon was about half over, by some gentleman throwing back the door of his pew, and walking out of the chapel. In a few minutes after, a second individual did the same; and soon after a third door flew open, and the listener escaped! At this moment affairs looked so very ominous, that we were almost afraid Mr. Jardine himself would fly, and that none but ourselves would fairly sit it out. A little before, I had been in company with the late Robert Hall, and S. T. Coleridge, when the collision of equal minds elicited light and heat; both of them ranking in the first class of conversationalists, but great indeed was the contrast between them in the pulpit. The parlour was the element for Mr. Coleridge, and the politician's lecture, rather than the minister's harangue. We all returned to Bristol with the feeling of disappointment;--Mr. C. from the little personal attention paid to him by Mr. Jardine; and we, from a dissatisfying sense of a Sunday desecrated. Although no doubt can be entertained of Mr. Coleridge having, in the journey before noticed, surpassed his first essay, yet, with every reasonable allowance, the conviction was so strong on my mind that Mr. C. had mistaken his talent, that my regard for him was too genuine to entertain the wish of ever again seeing him in a pulpit. It is unknown when the following letter was received, (although quite certain that it was not the evening in which Mr. Coleridge wrote his "Ode to the Departing Year,") and it is printed in this place at something of an uncertainty.[22] "January 1st. My dear Cottle, I have been forced to disappoint not only you, but Dr. Beddoes, on an affair of some importance. Last night I was induced by strong and joint solicitation, to go to a card-club, to which Mr. Morgan belongs, and, after the playing was over, to sup, and spend the remainder of the night: having made a previous compact, that I should not drink; however just on the verge of twelve, I was desired to drink only one wine glass of punch, in honour of the departing year; and, after twelve, one other in honour of the new year. Though the glasses were very small, yet such was the effect produced during my sleep, that I awoke unwell, and in about twenty minutes after had a relapse of my bilious complaint. I am just now recovered, and with care, I doubt not, shall be as well as ever to-morrow. If I do not see you then, it will be from some relapse, which I have no reason, thank heaven, to anticipate. Yours affectionately, S. T. Coleridge." In consequence of Mr. Coleridge's journey to the north, to collect subscribers for the "Watchman," an incident occurred, which produced a considerable effect on his after life. During Mr. C.'s visit to Birmingham, an accident had introduced him to the eldest son of Mr. Lloyd, the eminent banker of that town. Mr. Lloyd had intended his son Charles to unite with him in the bank, but the monotonous business of the establishment, ill accorded with the young man's taste, which had taken a decidedly literary turn. If the object of Charles Lloyd had been to accumulate wealth, his disposition might have been gratified to the utmost, but the tedious and unintellectual occupation of adjusting pounds, shillings, and pence, suited, he thought, those alone who had never, eagle-like, gazed at the sun, or bathed their temples in the dews of Parnassus. The feelings of this young man were ardent; his reading and information extensive; and his genius, though of a peculiar cast, considerable. His mind appeared, however, subject to something of that morbid sensibility which distinguished Cowper. The admiration excited in Mr. L. by Mr. Coleridge's pre-eminent talents, induced him to relinquish his connexion with the bank; and he had now arrived in Bristol to seek Mr. C. out, and to improve his acquaintance with him. To enjoy the enviable privilege of Mr. Coleridge's conversation, Mr. Lloyd proposed even to domesticate with him; and made him such a pecuniary offer, that Mr. C. immediately acceded to the proposal; and to effect this, as an essential preliminary, removed from Redcliff-hill, to a house on Kingsdown. In this his new abode, Mr. Coleridge appeared settled and comfortable. Friends were kind and numerous. Books, of all kinds, were at his command. Of the literary society now found in Bristol, he expressed himself in terms of warm approval, and thought, in this feature, that it was surpassed by no city in the kingdom. His son Hartley, also, was now born; and no small accession to his comfort arose from his young and intelligent domestic associate, Charles Lloyd. This looked something like permanence; but the promise was fallacious, for Mr. Coleridge now experienced another removal. His friend, Mr. Thomas Poole, of Nether Stowey, near Bridgwater, was desirous of obtaining Mr. C. again, as a permanent neighbour, and recommended him to take a small house at Stowey, then to be let, at seven pounds a year, which he thought would well suit him. Mr. Poole's personal worth; his friendly and social manners; his information, and taste for literature; all this, combined with the prospect of a diminished expense in his establishment, unitedly, formed such powerful inducements, that Mr. C. at once decided, and the more so, as Mr. Lloyd had consented to accompany him. To this place, consequently, the whole party repaired. On Mr. Coleridge reaching his new abode, I was gratified by receiving from him the following letter. "Stowey, 1796. My dear Cottle, We arrived safe. Our house is set to rights. We are all--wife, bratling, and self, remarkably well. Mrs. Coleridge likes Stowey, and loves Thomas Poole and his mother, who love her. A communication has been made from our orchard into T. Poole's garden, and from thence to Cruikshank's, a friend of mine, and a young married man, whose wife is very amiable, and she and Sara are already on the most cordial terms; from all this you will conclude we are happy. By-the-bye, what a delightful poem, is Southey's 'Musings on a Landscape of Gaspar Poussin.' I love it almost better than his 'Hymn to the Penates.' In his volume of poems. The following, namely, 'The Six Sonnets on the Slave Trade.--The Ode to the Genius of Africa.--To my own Miniature Picture.--The Eight Inscriptions.--Elinor, Botany-bay Eclogue.--Frederick, ditto.--The Ten Sonnets, (pp. 107-116.) On the death of an Old Spaniel.--The Soldier's Wife, Dactylics.--The Widow, Sapphics.--The Chapel Bell.--The Race of Banco. Rudiger.' All these Poems are worthy the Author of 'Joan of Arc.' And 'The Musings on a Landscape,' &c. and 'The Hymn to the Penates,' deserve to have been published after 'Joan of Arc,' as proofs of progressive genius. God bless you, S. T. C." The account of Mr. Coleridge's residence at Stowey, lies in the department of another; although he occasionally visited Bristol, with Mrs. C., as engagements or inclination prompted; some notice of which visits will here be taken. Mr. Charles Lloyd was subject to fits, to one of which the second following letter refers. In the above letter Mr. C. pronounces himself happy, but as no condition, in this changeable world, is either perfect happiness or misery, so the succeeding letter presents Mr. C. over-powered, almost, with a feeling of despondency! The calculation of the course which genius, combined with eccentricity, would be likely to pursue, must be attended with uncertainty, but the probability is, that had Mr. C's mind been easy at this time, surrounded by domestic quiet and comparative seclusion, he might have been equal to any intellectual achievement; but soon after he settled at Stowey, he was reduced to the most prostrate state of depression, arising purely from the darkness of his pecuniary horizon. Happily for the reader, a brief mental respite succeeded, in which, if trouble existed, the letter which expressed that trouble, soon exhibits him (half forgetful) expatiating in those comprehensive surveys of possible excellence which formed the habit of his mind. "Stowey, 1796. My dearest Cottle, I love and respect you as a brother, and my memory deceives me woefully, if I have not evidenced, by the animated tone of my conversation when we have been tete a tete, how much your conversation interested me. But when last in Bristol, the day I meant to devote to you, was such a day of sadness, I could do nothing. On the Saturday, the Sunday, and ten days after my arrival at Stowey, I felt a depression too dreadful to be described. So much I felt my genial spirits droop, My hopes all flat; Nature within me seemed In all her functions, weary of herself, Wordsworth's[23] conversation aroused me somewhat, but even now I am not the man I have been, and I think I never shall. A sort of calm hopelessness diffuses itself over my heart. Indeed every mode of life which has promised me bread and cheese, has been, one after another, torn away from me, but God remains. I have no immediate pecuniary distress, having received ten pounds from Lloyd. I employ myself now on a book of morals in answer to Godwin, and on my tragedy. * * * * * There are some poets who write too much at their ease, from the facility with which they please themselves. They do not often enough 'Feel their burdened breast Heaving beneath incumbent Deity.' So that to posterity their wreaths will look unseemly. Here, perhaps, an everlasting Amaranth, and, close by its side, some weed of an hour, sere, yellow, and shapeless. Their very beauties will lose half their effect, from the bad company they keep. They rely too much on story and event, to the neglect of those lofty imaginings that are peculiar to, and definite of the Poet. The story of Milton might be told in two pages. It is this which distinguishes an epic poem from a romance in metre. Observe the march of Milton; his severe application; his laborious polish; his deep metaphysical researches; his prayer to God before he began his great work; all that could lift and swell his intellect, became his daily food. I should not think of devoting less than twenty years to an epic poem. Ten years to collect materials and warm my mind with universal science. I would be a tolerable Mathematician. I would thoroughly understand Mechanics; Hydrostatics; Optics, and Astronomy; Botany; Metallurgy; Fossilism; Chemistry; Geology; Anatomy; Medicine; then the mind of man; then the minds of men, in all Travels, Voyages, and Histories. So I would spend ten years; the next five in the composition of the poem, and the five last in the correction of it. So would I write, haply not unhearing of that divine and nightly-whispering voice, which speaks to mighty minds, of predestinated garlands, starry and unwithering.[24] God love you. S. T. Coleridge. P. S. David Hartley is well and grows. Sara is well, and desires a sister's love to you." In the spirit of impartiality, it now devolves on me to state a temporary misunderstanding between even the two Pantisocratans; Mr. Coleridge and Mr. Southey! The affair occurred in the autumn of 1795, but it could not be noticed at that time, without interrupting the narrative. It is difficult to assign any other reason for the wild scheme of Pantisocracy, than the inexperience of youth, acting on sanguine imaginations. At its first announcement, every reflecting mind saw that the plan, in its nature, and in the agents who were to carry it into effect, was liable to insurmountable objections; but the individuals with whom the design originated, were young, ardent, and enthusiastic, and at that time entertained views of society erroneous in themselves, and which experience alone could correct. The fullest conviction was entertained by their friends, that as reason established itself in their minds, the delusion would vanish; and they themselves soon smile at extravagances which none but their own ingenious order of minds could have devised; but when the dissension occurred, before noticed, at Chepstow, Mr. Southey must have had conviction flashed on his mind, that the habits of himself and his friend were so essentially opposed, as to render harmony and success impossible. Mr. Southey now informed Mr. Coleridge, that circumstances, and his own views had so altered, as to render it necessary for him candidly to state that he must abandon Pantisocracy, and the whole scheme of colonizing in America; and that he should accept an invitation from his uncle, to accompany him through Spain to Lisbon. The reader has had cause to believe that Mr. C. himself had relinquished this wild plan, but it was by implication, rather than by direct avowal. Perhaps, in the frustration of so many of his present designs, a latent thought might linger in his mind, that America, after all, was to be the fostering asylum, where, alone, unmingled felicity was to be found. The belief is hardly admissible, and yet the admission, extravagant as it is, derives some support from the unexpected effect produced on him by the disclosure of his friend. On this announcement, or soon after, a tumult of fearful intensity arose in Mr. Coleridge's mind, which filled the whole circle of their friends with grief and dismay. This unexpected effect, perhaps, may be ascribed to the consciousness now first seriously awakened, of the erroneous principles on which all his calculations had been founded. He perceived at length, (it may be) that he had been pursuing a phantom; and the conviction must have been associated with self-upbraidings. It is commonly found, that the man who is dissatisfied with himself, is seldom satisfied long with those around him; and these compound and accumulated feelings must necessarily be directed against some object. At this brain-crazing moment, the safety-valve of feeling was Mr. Southey. Being familiar with the whole affair, I completely justified Mr. S. as having acted with the strictest honour and propriety, and in such a way as any wise man, under such circumstances, would have acted. The great surprise with their friends was, that the crisis should not have occurred earlier, as a result certain to take place, and delayed alone by the vivid succession of objects that gave, it must be said, a temporary suspension to the full exercise of their understandings. Justice to Mr. S. requires it to be stated, that he acted purely on the defensive; adopting no epithets, and repelling offensive accusations and expressions, with sober argument and remonstrance alone. I spoke to each in succession, and laboured to procure a reconciliation; but oil and water would sooner have united than the accuser and the accused. This difference occurred only two or three days before Mr. S. set off on his Spanish and Portuguese expedition. During his absence, the fire lay smouldering, and on his return to England, in May, 1796, the conflagration was renewed. Charges of "desertion," flew thick around; of "dishonourable retraction, in a compact the most binding"--I again spoke to Mr. Coleridge, and endeavoured to soften his asperity. I also wrote to Mr. Southey, and expressed a hope, that if he found it impossible at the present moment to return to cordiality, he would at least consent when he met Mr. Coleridge, to restrain the indignant look, which was painfully manifest on both countenances. The most pleasant part of the narrative will now be unfolded. Mr. Coleridge and Mr. Southey met at the house of a relation when, without explanation, the relentings of nature threw them silently into each other's arms! I knew nothing of this happy reconciliation, the first intimation of which was their calling on me, arm in arm, after having taken a pleasant walk together into the country. Each seemed to relish the surprise and the delight which it was impossible for me to conceal; and I had reason afterwards to think, that this sprightly scene was a preconcerted arrangement to heighten the stage-effect. I shall now withdraw the reader's attention from Mr. Southey, and proceed with the narrative of Mr. Coleridge. When Mr. Southey departed for the continent, Mr. Coleridge repaired to his own calm retreat at Stowey, from which place he sent me the following letter. "Stowey, 1796. Dear Cottle, I write under great agony of mind, Charles Lloyd being very ill. He has been seized with his fits three times in the space of seven days: and just as I was in bed last night, I was called up again; and from twelve o'clock at night, to five this morning, he remained in one continued state of agonized delirium. What with bodily toil, exerted in repressing his frantic struggles, and what with the feelings of agony for his sufferings, you may suppose that I have forced myself from bed, with aching temples, and a feeble frame.... We offer petitions, not as supposing we influence the Immutable; but because to petition the Supreme Being, is the way most suited to our nature, to stir up the benevolent affections in our hearts. Christ positively commands it, and in St. Paul you will find unnumbered instances of prayer for individual blessings; for kings, rulers, &c. &c. We indeed should all join to our petitions: 'But thy will be done, Omniscient, All-loving Immortal God!' Believe me to have towards you, the inward and spiritual gratitude and affection, though I am not always an adept in the outward and visible signs. God bless you, S. T. C." A letter written by Mr. Coleridge to Miss Cruikshanks, living near Stowey during Mr. C.'s residence at that place, exhibits the law of association in a new light; and shows the facility with which ingenious men can furnish excuses, at all times, for doing that which they desire. "Dear Mary, I wandered on so thought-bewildered, that it is no wonder I became way-bewildered; however, seeing a road-post, in two places, with the name, 'Stowey;' one by some water and a stone-bridge, and another on a tree, at the top of the ascent, I concluded I was only gone a new way, when coming to a place where four roads met, I turned to my left, merely because I saw some houses, and found myself at Plansfield. Accordingly, I turned upward, and as I knew I must pay a farewell visit to Ashhalt, I dined with the B--s', and arrived at Stowey, just before dark. I did not lose my way then, though I confess that Mr. B. and myself, disobedient to the voice of the ladies, had contrived to finish two bottles of Port between us, to which I added two glasses of mead. All this was in consequence of conversing about John Cruikshanks' coming down. Now John Cruikshanks' idea being regularly associated in Mr. B.'s mind, with a second bottle, and S. T. C. being associated with John Cruikshanks, the second bottle became associated with the idea, and afterwards with the body of S. T. C. by necessity of metaphysical law, as you may see in the annexed figure, or diagram. [Illustration: Second Bottle. B [Image of bottle.] /\ / \ / \ / \ / \ J. C./__________\ S. T. C.] God bless you, S. T. C." Miss Cruikshanks has favored me with a letter of Mr. Coleridge to herself, explanatory of his political principles, when he had receded in a good measure from the sentiments pervading his "Conciones ad Populum." This letter was written at a later period, but is made to follow the preceding, to preserve a continuity of subject. Miss C. it appears, had lent the first edition of Mr. Coleridge's poems to Lady Elizabeth Perceval,[25] in some parts of which volume the sentiments of an earlier day were rather too prominently displayed. To counteract the effect such parts were calculated to produce, Mr. Coleridge wrote the following letter, in the hope that by being shown to her ladyship, it might efface from her mind any unfavorable impression she might have received. In this letter he also rather tenderly refers to his American scheme. (No date, supposed to be 1803.) "My dear Miss Cruikshanks, With the kindest intentions, I fear you have done me some little disservice, in borowing the first edition of my poems from Miss B--. I never held any principles indeed, of which, considering my age, I have reason to be ashamed. The whole of my public life may be comprised in eight or nine months of my 22nd year; and the whole of my political sins during that time, consisted in forming a plan of taking a large farm in common, in America, with other young men of my age. A wild notion indeed, but very harmless. As to my principles, they were, at all times, decidedly anti-jacobin and anti-revolutionary, and my American scheme is a proof of this. Indeed at that time, I seriously held the doctrine of passive obedience, though a violent enemy of the first war. Afterwards, and for the last ten years of my life, I have been fighting incessantly in the good cause, against French ambition, and Trench principles; and I had Mr. Addington's suffrage, as to the good produced by my Essays, written in the Morning Post, in the interval of the peace of Amiens, and the second war, together with my two letters to Mr. Fox.[26] Of my former errors, I should be no more ashamed, than of my change of body, natural to increase of age; but in that first edition, there was inserted (without my consent!) a Sonnet to Lord Stanhope, in direct contradiction, equally, to my _then_, as to my present principles. A Sonnet written by me in ridicule and mockery of the bloated style of French Jacobinical declamation, and inserted by Biggs, (the fool of a printer,) in order forsooth, that he might send the book, and a letter to Earl Stanhope; who, to prove that he was not mad in all things, treated both book and letter with silent contempt.[27] I have therefore sent Mr. Poole's second edition, and if it be in your power, I could wish you to read the 'dedication to my brother,' at the beginning, to Lady E. Perceval, to obtain whose esteem, so far at least as not to be confounded with the herd of vulgar mob flatterers, I am not ashamed to confess myself solicitous. I would I could be with you, and your visitors. Penelope, you know, is very high in my esteem. With true warmth of heart, she joins more strength of understanding; and, to steady principle, more variety of accomplishments, than it has often been my lot to meet with among the fairer sex. When I praise one woman to another I always mean a compliment to both. My tenderest regards to your dear mother, whom I really long to spend a few hours with, and believe me with sincere good wishes, Yours, &c. S. T. Coleridge." Fragment of a Theological letter of Mr. Coleridge, date unknown. ... The declaration that the Deity is "the sole Operant" (Religious Musings) is indeed far too bold: may easily be misconstrued into Spinosism; and, therefore, though it is susceptible of a pious and justifiable interpretation, I should by no means now use such a phrase. I was very young when I wrote that poem, and my religious feelings were more settled than my theological notions. As to eternal punishments, I can only say, that there are many passages in Scripture, and these not metaphorical, which declare that all flesh shall be finally saved; that the word _aionios_ is indeed used sometimes when eternity must be meant, but so is the word 'Ancient of Days,' yet it would be strange reasoning to affirm, that therefore, the word ancient must always mean eternal. The literal meaning of '_aionios_' is, 'through ages;' that is indefinite; beyond the power of imagination to bound. But as to the effects of such a doctrine, I say, First,--that it would be more pious to assert nothing concerning it, one way or the other. Ezra says well, 'My Son, meditate on the rewards of the righteous, and examine not over-curiously into the fate of the wicked. (This apocryphal Ezra is supposed to have been written by some Christian in the first age of Christianity.) Second,--that however the doctrine is now broached, and publicly preached by a large and increasing sect, it is no longer possible to conceal it from such persons as would be likely to read and understand the 'Religious Musings.' Third.--That if the offers of eternal blessedness; if the love of God; if gratitude; if the fear of punishment, unknown indeed as to its kind and duration, but declared to be unimaginably great; if the possibility, nay, the probability, that this punishment may be followed by annihilation, not final happiness, cannot divert men from wickedness to virtue; I fear there will be no charm in the word Eternal. Fourth, that it is a certain fact, that scarcely any believe eternal punishment practically with relation to themselves. They all hope in God's mercy, till they make it a presumptuous watch-word for religious indifference. And this, because there is no medium in their faith, between blessedness and misery,--infinite in degree and duration; which latter they do not practically, and with their whole hearts, believe. It is opposite to their clearest views of the divine attributes; for God cannot be vindictive, neither therefore can his punishments be founded on a vindictive principle. They must be, either for amendment, or warning for others; but eternal punishment precludes the idea of amendment, and its infliction, after the day of judgment, when all not so punished shall be divinely secured from the possibility of falling, renders the notion of warning to others inapplicable. The Catholics are far more afraid of, and incomparably more influenced in their conduct by, the doctrine of purgatory, than Protestants by that of hell! That the Catholics practise more superstitions than morals, is the effect of other doctrines. Supererogation; invocation of saints; power of relics, &c. &c. and not of Purgatory, which can only act as a general motive, to what must depend on other causes. Fifth, and lastly.--It is a perilous state in which a christian stands, if he has gotten no further, than to avoid evil from the fear of hell! This is no part of the Christian religion, but a preparatory awakening of the soul: a means of dispersing those gross films which render the eye of the spirit incapable of any religion, much less of such a faith as that of the love of Christ. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, but perfect love shutteth out fear. It is sufficient for the utmost fervour of gratitude that we are saved from punishments, too great to be conceived; but our salvation is surely not complete, till by the illumination from above, we are made to know 'the exceeding sinfulness of sin,' and that horribleness in its nature, which, while it involves all these frightful consequences, is yet, of itself more affrightful to a regenerated soul than those consequences. To him who but for a moment felt the influence of God's presence, the thought of eternal exclusion from the sense of that presence, would be the worst hell his imagination could conceive. N.B. I admit of no right, no claim of a creature on its Creator. I speak only of hopes and of faith deduced from inevitable reason, the gift of the Creator; from his acknowledged attributes. Above all, immortality is a free gift, which we neither do, nor can deserve.... S. T. C." To descend now to humbler things. There are persons who will be interested in learning how the bard and his bookseller managed their great pecuniary affairs. A second edition of Mr. Coleridge's poems being demanded, I was under no obligation, the copy-right being mine, in publishing a second edition, to make Mr. Coleridge any payment, alterations or additions being optional with him: but in his circumstances, and to show that my desire was to consider Mr. C. even more than myself, I promised him, on the sale of the second edition of 500, twenty guineas. The following was his reply: (not viewing the subject quite in the right light; but this was of little consequence.) "Stowey, Oct. 18th, 1796. My dear Cottle, I have no mercenary feelings, I verily believe; but I hate bartering at any time, and with any person; with you it is absolutely intolerable. I clearly perceive that by giving me twenty guineas, on the sale of the second edition, you will get little or nothing by the additional poems, unless they should be sufficiently popular to reach a third edition, which soars above our wildest expectations. The only advantage you can derive therefore from the purchase of them on such terms, is, simply, that my poetry is more likely to sell when the whole may be had in one volume, price 5s., than when it is scattered in two volumes; the one 4s., the other possibly 3s. In short, you will get nothing directly, but only indirectly, from the probable circumstance, that these additional poems added to the former, will give a more rapid sale to the second edition than could otherwise be expected, and cause it possibly to be reviewed at large. Add to this, that by omitting every thing political, I widen the sphere of my readers. So much for you. Now for myself. You must see, Cottle, that whatever money I should receive from you, would result from the circumstances that would give me the same, or more--if I published them on my own account. I mean the sale of the poems. I can therefore have no motive to make such conditions with you, except the wish to omit poems unworthy of me, and the circumstance that our separate properties would aid each other by the union; and whatever advantage this might be to me, it would, of course, be equally so to you. The only difference between my publishing the poems on my own account, and yielding them up to you; the only difference I say, independent of the above stated differences, is, that, in one case, I retain the property for ever, in the other case, I lose it after two editions. However, I am not solicitous to have any thing omitted, except the sonnet to Lord Stanhope and the ludicrous poem; I should like to publish the best pieces together, and those of secondary splendour, at the end of the volume, and think this is the best quietus of the whole affair. Yours affectionately, S. T. Coleridge." In consequence of a note received from Mr. Coleridge, I called at the Bristol Library, where I found Mr. George Catcott, the Sub-Librarian, much excited. "See," said he, immediately I entered the room, "here is a letter I have just received from Mr. Coleridge. Pray look at it." I read it. "Do you mean to give the letter to me, with its ponderous contents?" I said. "O yes, take it," he replied. This gift enables me to lay the letter in question before the reader. Mr. George Catcott though of singular manners, was a person of worth. He was the patron of Chatterton, and chiefly through his efforts, the Poems of "Rowley" were preserved. "Stowey, May, 1797. My dear Cottle, I have sent a curious letter to George Catcott. He has altogether made me pay five shillings! for postage, by his letters sent all the way to Stowey, requiring me to return books to the Bristol Library.... "Mr. Catcott, I beg your acceptance of all the enclosed letters. You must not think lightly of the present, as they cost me, who am a very poor man, five shillings. With respect to the 'Bruck. Hist. Crit,' although by accident they were registered on the 23d of March, yet they were not removed from the Library for a fortnight after; and when I received your first letter, I had had the books just three weeks. Our learned and ingenious Committee may read through two quartos, that is, one thousand and four hundred pages of close printed Latin and Greek, in three weeks, for aught I know to the contrary. I pretend to no such intenseness of application, or rapidity of genius. I must beg you to inform me, by Mr. Cottle, what length of time is allowed by the rules and customs of our institution for each book. Whether their contents, as well as their size, are consulted, in apportioning the time; or whether, customarily, any time at all is apportioned, except when the Committee, in individual cases, choose to deem it proper. I subscribe to your library, Mr. Catcott, not to read novels, or books of quick reading and easy digestion, but to get books which I cannot get elsewhere,--books of massy knowledge; and as I have few books of my own, I read with a common-place book, so that if I be not allowed a longer period of time for the perusal of such books, I must contrive to get rid of my subscription, which would be a thing perfectly useless, except so far as it gives me an opportunity of reading your little expensive notes and letters. Yours in Christian fellowship, S. T. Coleridge." Mr. C. was now preparing for a second edition of his Poems, and had sent the order in which they were to be printed, with the following letter, accompanying two new Poems. "Stowey, Friday Morning. My dear Cottle. ... If you do not like the following verses, or if you do not think them worthy of an edition in which I profess to give nothing but my choicest fish, picked, gutted, and cleaned, please to get some one to write them out and send them, with my compliments, to the editor of the New Monthly Magazine. But if you think of them as I do (most probably from parental dotage for my last born) let them immediately follow 'The Kiss.' God love you, S. T. C." TO AN UNFORTUNATE YOUNG WOMAN. WHOM I HAD KNOWN IN THE DAYS OF HER INNOCENCE. Maiden! that with sullen brow, Sitt'st behind those virgins gay; Like a scorched, and mildew'd bough, Leafless mid the blooms of May. Inly gnawing, thy distresses Mock those starts of wanton glee; And thy inmost soul confesses Chaste Affection's majesty. Loathing thy polluted lot, Hie thee, Maiden! hie thee hence! Seek thy weeping mother's cot, With a wiser innocence! Mute the Lavrac[28] and forlorn While she moults those firstling plumes That had skimm'd the tender corn, Or the bean-field's od'rous blooms; Soon with renovating wing, Shall she dare a loftier flight, Upwards to the day-star sing, And embathe in heavenly light. ALLEGORICAL LINES ON THE SAME SUBJECT. Myrtle Leaf, that, ill besped, Pinest in the gladsome ray, Soiled beneath the common tread, Far from thy protecting spray; When the scythes-man o'er his sheaf, Caroll'd in the yellow vale, Sad, I saw thee, heedless leaf, Love the dalliance of the gale. Lightly didst thou, poor fond thing! Heave and flutter to his sighs While the flatterer on his wing, Woo'd, and whisper'd thee to rise. Gaily from thy mother stalk Wert thou danced and wafted high; Soon on this unsheltered walk, Hung to fade, and rot, and die! The two poems as printed in Mr. Coleridge's edition of 1835, here follow, which by being compared with the same poems, in their preceding original form, will exhibit a study, particularly to the Poet.[29] ON AN UNFORTUNATE WOMAN AT THE THEATRE. _With Mr. Coleridge's last corrections_. Maiden, that with sullen brow Sitt'st behind those virgins gay, Like a scorched and mildew'd bough, Leafless mid the blooms of May. Him who lured thee and forsook, Oft I watch'd with angry gaze, Fearful saw his pleading look, Anxious heard his fervid phrase. Soft the glances of the youth, Soft his speech, and soft his sigh; But no sound like simple truth, But no true love in his eye. Loathing thy polluted lot, Hie thee, maiden, hie thee hence! Seek thy weeping mother's cot, With a wiser innocence. Thou hast known deceit and folly, Thou hast felt that vice is woe; With a musing melancholy, Inly armed, go, maiden! go. Mother, sage of self dominion, Firm thy steps, O melancholy! The strongest plume in wisdom's pinion Is the memory of past folly. Mute the sky-lark and forlorn While she moults the firstling plumes, That had skimm'd the tender corn, Or the bean-field's odorous blooms. Soon with renovated wing, Shall she dare a loftier flight, Upward to the day-star spring, And embathe in heavenly light. ON AN UNFORTUNATE WOMAN, Whom The Author Had Known In The Days Of Her Innocence. (_With Mr. Coleridge's last corrections_.) Myrtle-leaf that ill-besped, Pinest in the gladsome ray; Soiled beneath the common tread, Far from thy protecting spray! When the partridge o'er the sheaf Whirred along the yellow vale, Sad I saw thee, heedless leaf! Love the dalliance of the gale. Lightly didst thou, foolish thing! Heave and flutter to his sighs, While the flatterer on his wing, Woo'd and whispered thee to rise. Gaily from thy mother stalk Wert thou danced and wafted high-- Soon upon this sheltered walk, Flung to fade, to rot, and die. Mr. Coleridge having requested me to decide concerning the introduction into his volume of the two preceding Poems, I approved of the second, with certain alterations, (which was accordingly printed,) and rejected the first, for the reasons assigned in the following letter. This letter is introduced for the sake of Mr. C.'s reply, and to exhibit the candid and untenacious quality of his mind. As a mark of Mr. Coleridge's solicitude to obtain the observations of another, without surrendering his own ultimate judgment, he always encouraged my remarks on his compositions. When about to send the second edition of his Poems to the press, he thus wrote to me. "My dear Cottle, ... On Thursday morning, by Milton, the Stowey carrier, I shall send you a parcel, containing the book of my Poems interleaved, with the alterations, and likewise the prefaces, which I shall send to you, for your criticisms...." This is mentioned as an apology for the freedom of the remarks I then took, for it was always my principle not to spare a friend through mistaken kindness;--however much I might spare myself. "Dear Coleridge, You have referred your two last Poems to my judgment. I do not think your first, 'Maiden! that with sullen brow,' admissible, without a little more of your nice picking. The first verse is happy, but two objections apply to the second. To my ear, (perhaps too fastidious) 'inly,' and 'inmost,' are too closely allied for the same stanza; but the first line presents a more serious objection, in containing a transition verb, (or rather a participle, with the same government) without an objective: 'Inly gnawing, thy distresses Mock those starts of sudden glee.' Gnawing what? surely not distresses; though the bar of a comma can hardly keep them apart. In order to give it any decent meaning, a tortuous ellipsis is necessary; to pursue which, gives the reader too much toil. Rejecting the first horse in the team, the three last are beautiful animals. To the last line in the third stanza, I rather object; 'With a wiser innocence.' The meaning, it appears to me, would be more definite and in character, if you were to say, as you do not represent her utterly debased, 'With thy wreck of innocence.' The apostrophe to the 'Weeping mother's cot,' is then impressive. In the fourth stanza, why do you introduce the old word 'Lavrac' a word requiring an explanatory note? Why not say at once, sky-lark? A short poem, _you_ know better than _I_, should be smooth as oil, and lucid as glass. The two last stanzas, with their associates, will require a few of your delicate touches, before you mount them on the nautilus which is to bear them buoyant round the world. These two last stanzas, about the 'Lavrac' though good in themselves, (with the exception of one line, which I will not point out, its roughness absolutely reminds one of 'Bowling-green Lane!') appear to me to be awkward appendages. The illustration is too much extended. It is laboured; far-fetched. It is an infelicitous attempt to blend sportive fancy with fact that has touched the heart, and which, in this its sobered mood, shrinks from all idle play of imagination. The transition is too abrupt from truth to fancy. This simile of two stanzas, also, out of five, is a tail disproportioned to the size of so small a body:--A thought elongated, ramified, attenuated, till its tendril convolutions have almost escaped from their parent stem. I would recommend you to let this Lavrac fly clean away, and to conclude the Poem with the third affecting stanza, unless you can continue the same train of feeling. This you might readily effect, by urging the 'unfortunate' in seeking her 'weeping mother's cot' to cheer that mother by moral renovation. I now come to the second Poem, 'Allegorical lines.' This poem has sound materials, but it wants some of your hard tinkering. Pardon my unceremonious language. I do not like that affected old word, 'ill-besped' in the first line. To ascribe human feelings to a leaf, as you have done through the whole Poem, notwithstanding your authority, as I conceive, offensively violates reason. There is no analogy; no conceivable bond of union between thought and inanimate things, and it is about as rational as though, in sober reasoning, you were to make the polished shoe remonstrate with its wearer, in being soiled so soon after it had received its lustre. It is the utmost stretch of human concession, to grant thought and language to living things;--birds, beasts, and fishes; rights which the old fablers have rendered inalienable, as vehicles of instruction; but here, as I should think, the liberty ends. It is always a pity when sense and poetry cannot go together. They are excellent arm-in-arm companions, but quarrelsome neighbours, when a stile separates them. The first line in the second stanza I do not like. 'When the scythesman o'er his sheaf.' Two objections apply to this line. The word scythesman, for a short poem, is insufferably rough; and furthermore requires the inhalation of a good breath, before it can be pronounced; besides which, as the second objection, by connecting sheaves with scythesman, it shows that the scythe is cutting wheat, whereas, wheat is cut with a hook or sickle. If my agricultural knowledge be correct, barley and oats are cut with a scythe, but these grains are not put into sheaves. Had you not better substitute rustic, for scythesman? The first line in the third stanza is not happy. The spondee, in a compound word, sometimes gives a favourable emphasis; but to my taste, rarely, when it is formed of a double epithet. It has the appearance of labour, like tugging against a hill. Would not 'foolish' be simpler and better than 'poor fond?' I have one other objection, and that, unfortunately, is in the last line. 'Flung to fade, and rot, and die!' Surely, if it rots, it must die, or have died. Query. 'Flung to wither and to die.' I am astonished at my own temerity. This is reversing the order of things; the pupil correcting his master. But, candidly speaking, I do think these two poems the most defective of any I ever saw of yours, which, usually, have been remarkably free from all angles on which the race of snarlers can lay hold. From, &c. &c., Joseph Cottle." Mr. Coleridge's reply to the preceding letter. "Wednesday morning, 10 o'clock. My dearest Cottle, ... 'Ill besped' is indeed a sad blotch; but after having tried at least a hundred ways, before I sent the Poem to you, and often since, I find it incurable. This first Poem is but a so so composition. I wonder I could have been so blinded by the ardour of recent composition, as to see anything in it. Your remarks are _perfectly just_ on the 'Allegorical lines,' except that, in this district, corn is as often cut with a scythe, as with a hook. However, for '_Scythesman_' read _Rustic_. For '_poor fond thing_' read _foolish thing_, and for '_flung to fade, and rot, and die_,' read _flung to wither and to die_.[30] * * * * * Milton (the carrier) waits impatiently. S. T. C." Having once inquired of Mr. Coleridge something respecting a nicety in hexameters, he asked for a sheet of paper, and wrote the following. These hexameters appear in the last edition of Mr. C.'s Poems, though in a less correct form, and without the condensed and well-expressed preliminary remarks. Two new lines are here also added. "The Hexameter consists of six feet, or twelve times. These feet, in the Latin and Greek languages, were always either dactyls, or spondees; the time of a dactyl, being only that of a spondee. In modern languages, however, metre being regulated by the emphasis, or intonation of the syllables, and not by the position of the letters, spondees can scarcely exist, except in compound words, as dark-red. Our dissyllables are for the most part, either iambics, as desire; or trochees, as languid. These therefore, but chiefly the latter, we must admit, instead of spondees. The four first feet of each line may be dissyllable feet, or dactyls, or both commingled, as best suits the melody, and requisite variety; but the two last feet must, with rare exceptions, be uniformly, the former a dactyl, the latter a dissyllable. The amphimacer may, in English, be substituted for the dactyl, occasionally. EXAMPLES. Oh, what a life is the eye! What a fine and inscrutable essence! He that is utterly blind, nor glimpses the fire that warms him; He that never beheld the swelling breast of his mother, He that smiled at the bosom, the babe that smiles in its slumber, Even to him it exists. It moves, and stirs in its prison; Lives with a separate life, and "Is it a spirit?" he murmurs, Sure it has thoughts of its own, and to see is only a language. ANOTHER SPECIMEN, DESCRIBING HEXAMETERS IN HEXAMETERS. Strongly it tilts us along, o'er leaping and limitless billows, Nothing before, and nothing behind, but the sky and the ocean. ANOTHER SPECIMEN. In the Hexameter rises the fountain's silvery column In the Pentameter still, falling melodious down. * * * * * THE ENGLISH DUODECASYLLABLE. This consists of two dactyls, and three trochees; the two dactyls first; and the trochees following. Hear, my beloved! an old Milesian story; High and embosomed in congregated laurels, Glimmered a temple, upon a breezy headland In the dim distance, amid the skyey billows, Rose a fair island; the God of flocks had blest it: From the dim shores of this bleak resounding island, Oft in the moon-light a little boat came floating, Came to the sea-cave beneath the breezy headland, Where between myrtles a path-way stole in mazes, Up to the groves of the high embosomed temple. There in a thicket of consecrated roses, Oft did a Priestess, as lovely as a vision, Pouring her soul to the son of Cytherea, Pray him to hover around the light canoe boat, And with invisible pilotage to guide it Over the dusky waves, till the nightly sailor Shiv'ring with ecstacy sank upon her bosom. Now, by the immortals! he was a beauteous stripling, Worthy to dream the sweet dream of young Endymion." In the last edition of Mr. Coleridge's poems, (3 vols., 1835) there is a poem, called "The Destiny of Nations, a Vision;"--a sounding title, with which the contents but ill accord. No note conveys information to the reader, what was the origin of this poem; nor does any argument show its object, or train of thought. Who the maid is, no one can tell, and if there be a vision respecting the destiny of nations, it is nearly as confused and incoherent as a true vision of the night; exciting in the mind some such undefined wonderment, as must have accompanied the descent of one of Peter Wilkins' winged Aerials. The reader may here be informed, that the Second book of Mr. Southey's "Joan of Arc," to line 452, as acknowledged, was written by Mr. Coleridge, with the intermixture of 97 lines, written by Mr. Southey, in which there are noble sentiments, expressed in the loftiest poetical diction; and in which also there is a tutelary spirit introduced to instruct and counsel the Maid of Orleans. In the second edition of "Joan of Arc," Mr. Southey omitted the whole of these lines, and intimated to Mr. C. his intention so to do, as early as the autumn of 1795. I advised Mr. Coleridge, from the intrinsic merit of the lines, to print them in the second edition of his poems. To this he assented, but observed, that he must greatly extend them. Some considerable time after, he read me the poem in its enlarged state, calling it "The Progress of Liberty, or the Visions of the Maid of Orleans." After hearing it read, I at once told him, it was all very fine, but what it was all about, I could not tell: that it wanted, I thought, an obvious design, a definite purpose, a cohesion of parts, so as to make it more of a whole, instead of its being, as it then was, profuse, but detached splendour, and exhibiting in the management, nothing like construction. Thus improved, I told him the poem would be worthy of him. Mr. C. was evidently partial to the lines, and said, "I shall consider of what you say, and speak again about them." Amongst my papers I find two or three notes from Mr. C. on this subject, subsequently received. "Stowey. My dear Cottle, If you delay the press it will give me the opportunity I so much wish, of sending my "Visions of the Maid of Arc" to Wordsworth, who lives[31] not above twenty miles from this place; and to Charles Lamb, whose taste and judgment, I see reason to think more correct and philosophical than my own, which yet I place pretty high...." In a succeeding letter Mr. Coleridge says, "My dear Cottle, The lines which I added to my lines in the 'Joan of Arc' have been so little approved by Charles Lamb, to whom I sent them, that although I differ from him in opinion, I have not heart to finish the poem." Mr. Coleridge in the same letter, thus refers to his "Ode to the Departing Year." "... So much for an 'Ode,' which some people think superior to the 'Bard' of Gray, and which others think a rant of turgid obscurity; and the latter are the more numerous class. It is not obscure. My 'Religious Musings' I know are, but not this 'Ode.'" Mr. C. still retained a peculiar regard for these lines of the "Visions" and once meant to remodel the whole, as will appear from the following letter. "Stowey, 1797. My dear Cottle, I deeply regret, that my anxieties and my slothfulness, acting in a combined ratio, prevented me from finishing my 'Progress of Liberty, or Visions of the Maid of Orleans' with that Poem at the head of the volume, with the 'Ode' in the middle, and the 'Religious Musings' at the end. ... In the 'Lines on the Man of Ross' immediately after these lines, 'He heard the widow's heaven-breathed prayer of praise, He mark'd the shelter'd orphan's tearful gaze.' Please to add these two lines. 'And o'er the portioned maiden's snowy cheek, Bade bridal love suffuse its blushes meek.' And for the line, 'Beneath this roof, if thy cheer'd moments pass.' I should be glad to substitute this, 'If near this roof thy wine-cheer'd moments pass.' These emendations came too late for admission in the second edition; nor have they appeared in the last edition. They will remain therefore for insertion in any future edition of Mr. Coleridge's Poems.[32] "Stowey, 1797. My dear Cottle, ... Public affairs are in strange confusion. I am afraid that I shall prove, at least, as good a Prophet as Bard. Oh, doom'd to fall, my country! enslaved and vile! But may God make me a foreboder of evils never to come! I have heard from Sheridan, desiring me to write a tragedy. I have no genius that way; Robert Southey has. I think highly of his 'Joan of Arc' and cannot help prophesying, that he will be known to posterity, as Shakspeare's great grandson. I think he will write a tragedy or tragedies. Charles Lloyd has given me his Poems, which I give to you, on condition that you print them in this Volume, after Charles Lamb's Poems; the title page, 'Poems, by S. T. Coleridge. Second Edition; to which are added Poems, by C. Lamb, and C. Lloyd.' C. Lamb's poems will occupy about forty pages; C. Lloyd's at least one hundred, although only his choice fish. P. S. I like your 'Lines on Savage.'[33] God bless you, S. T. Coleridge." In a letter received from Mr. Coleridge soon after, he says, "I shall now stick close to my tragedy (called Osorio,) and when I have finished it, shall walk to Shaftesbury to spend a few days with Bowles. From thence I go to Salisbury, and thence to Christchurch, to see Southey." This letter, as was usual, has no date, but a letter from Mr. Wordsworth determines about the time when Mr. C. had nearly finished his Tragedy. "September 13, 1797. ... Coleridge is gone over to Bowles with his Tragedy, which he has finished to the middle of the 5th Act. He set off a week ago." Mr. Coleridge, in the summer of 1797 presented me with an extract from his "Osorio," which is here given to the reader, from Mr. C.'s own writing. FOSTER-MOTHER'S TALE. _Scene, Spain._ FOSTER-MOTHER. Now blessings on the man, whoe'er he be, That joined your names with mine! O my sweet lady As often as I think of those dear times, When you two little ones would stand, at eve, On each side of my chair, and make me learn All you had learnt in the day, and how to talk In gentle phrase, then bid me sing to you-- 'Tis more like heaven to come than what _has_ been. MARIA. O my dear mother! this strange man has left us, Troubled with wilder fancies than the moon Breeds in the love-sick maid who gazes at it, Till lost in inward vision, with wet eye She gazes idly!--But that _entrance_, Mother! FOSTER-MOTHER. Can no one hear? It is a perilous tale! MARIA. No one. FOSTER-MOTHER. My husband's father told it me, Poor Old Leoni--Angels rest his soul! He was a woodman, and could fell and saw With lusty arm. You know that huge round beam Which props the hanging wall of the old Chapel. Beneath that tree, while yet it was a tree He found a baby wrapt in mosses, lined With thistle beards, and such small locks of wool As hang on brambles. Well, he brought him home, And reared him at the then Lord Velez' cost. And so the babe grew up a pretty boy, A pretty boy but most unteachable-- And never learnt a prayer nor told a bead, But knew the names of birds, and mocked their notes, And whistled, as he were a bird himself. And all the autumn 'twas his only play To get the seeds of wild flowers and to plant them With earth and water on the stumps of trees. A Friar who gathered simples in the wood, A grey-haired man--he loved this little boy, The boy loved him--and, when the Friar taught him, He soon could write with the pen; and from that time Lived chiefly at the Convent or the Castle. So he became a very learned man. But O! poor youth!--he read, and read, and read, 'Till his brain turned--and ere his twentieth year, He had unlawful thoughts of many things: And though he prayed, he never loved to pray With holy men, nor in a holy place-- But yet his speech, it was so soft and sweet, The late Lord Velez ne'er was wearied with him. And once as by the north side of the Chapel They stood together, chained in deep discourse, The earth heaved under them with such a groan, That the wall tottered, and had well-nigh fallen Right on their heads. My Lord was sorely frightened: A fever seized the youth; and he made confession Of all the heretical and lawless talk Which brought this judgment: so the youth was seized, And cast into that hole. My husband's father Sobbed like a child--it almost broke his heart: And once, as he was working in the cellar, He heard a voice distinctly; 'twas the youth's, Who sung a doleful song about green fields, How sweet it were on lake or wild savannah To hunt for food, and be a naked man, And wander up and down at liberty. He always doated on the youth, and now His love grew desperate; and defying death, He made that cunning _entrance_ I described: And the young man escaped. MARIA. 'Tis a sweet tale: Such as would lull a listening child to sleep, His rosy face besoiled with unwiped tears. And what became of him? FOSTER-MOTHER. He went on ship-board With those bold voyagers, who made discovery Of golden lands: Leoni's younger brother Went likewise, and when he returned to Spain, He told Leoni, that the poor mad youth, Soon after they arrived in that new world, In spite of his dissuasion, seized a boat, And all alone set sail by silent moonlight, Up a great river, great as any sea, And ne'er was heard of more: but 'tis supposed, He lived and died among the savage men. The following letter of Mr. C. was in answer to a request for some long-promised copy, and for which the printer importuned. "Stowey, 1797. My dear, dear Cottle, Have patience, and everything shall be done. I think now entirely of your brother:[34] in two days I will think entirely for you. By Wednesday next you shall have Lloyd's other Poems, with all Lamb's, &c. &c.... S. T. C." A little before this time, a singular occurrence happened to Mr. C. during a pedestrian excursion into Somersetshire, as detailed in the following letter to Mr. Wade. "My dear friend, I am here after a most tiresome journey; in the course of which, a woman asked me if I knew one Coleridge, of Bristol, I answered, I had heard of him. 'Do you know, (quoth she) that that vile jacobin villain drew away a young man of our parish, one Burnet' &c. and in this strain did the woman continue for near an hour; heaping on me every name of abuse that the parish of Billingsgate could supply. I listened very particularly; appeared to approve all she said, exclaiming, 'dear me!' two or three times, and, in fine, so completely won the woman's heart by my civilities, that I had not courage enough to undeceive her.... S. T. Coleridge. P. S. You are a good prophet. Oh, into what a state have the scoundrels brought this devoted kingdom. If the House of Commons would but melt down their faces, it would greatly assist the copper currency--we should have brass enough." To refer now to another subject. Robert Burns had died in 1796. Finding that his family had little more than their father's fame to support them, I consulted with Mr. Coleridge, whether it would not be possible to add to the fund then being raised, by promoting a subscription in Bristol, in furtherance of such design. It being deemed feasible, while Mr. C. undertook to write a Poem on the subject for a Bristol paper, I sent the following advertisement to the same vehicle. TO THE CITIZENS OF BRISTOL. It will doubtless afford much pleasure to the liberal portion of the inhabitants of this city, to understand that a subscription has been set on foot in different parts of the kingdom, for the wife and five small children of poor Burns, the Scotch poet. There has already been subscribed-- At Dumfries (where the Bard lived) £104 12 0 At Edinburgh ... ... ... 64 16 0 At Liverpool ... ... ... 67 10 0 Whoever, in Bristol, from their admiration of departed genius, may wish to contribute, in rescuing from distress the family of Robert Burns, will be pleased to leave their donations with Mr. Cottle, High-Street. Mr. Nichol, of Pall-Mall, London, will publicly acknowledge the receipt of all monies subscribed in this city. The sum we transmitted to the general fund, did credit to the liberality of Bristol. Mr. Coleridge had often, in the keenest terms, expressed his contemptuous indignation at the Scotch patrons of the poet, in making him an exciseman! so that something biting was expected. The Poem was entitled, "To a Friend, who had declared his intention of writing no more Poetry." In reading the Poem immediately after it was written, the rasping force which Mr. C. gave to the following concluding lines was inimitable. "Is thy Burns dead? And shall he die unwept, and sink to earth, Without the meed of one melodious tear? Thy Burns, and nature's own beloved Bard, Who to 'the illustrious of his native land,'[35] So properly did look for patronage. Ghost of Maecenas! hide thy blushing face! They took him from the sickle and the plough-- To guage ale firkins! O, for shame return! On a bleak rock, midway the Aonian Mount, There stands a lone and melancholy tree, Whose aged branches to the midnight blast Make solemn music, pluck its darkest bough, Ere yet th' unwholesome night dew be exhaled, And weeping, wreath it round thy Poet's tomb: Then in the outskirts, where pollutions grow, Pick stinking henbane, and the dusky flowers Of night-shade, or its red and tempting fruit; These, with stopped nostril, and glove-guarded hand, Knit in nice intertexture, so to twine Th' illustrious brow of Scotch Nobility!" If Mr. C.'s nature had been less benevolent, and he had given full vent to the irascible and satirical, the restrained elements of which abounded in his spirit, he would have obtained the least enviable of all kinds of pre-eminence, and have become the undisputed modern Juvenal. Mr. George Burnet resided sometimes with his relations, sometimes with Mr. Coleridge, at Stowey. Mr. and Mrs. C. happened to be now in Bristol, when the former was summoned home on account of Burnet's sudden and serious illness. On reaching Stowey, Mr. C. sent me the following letter. "Stowey. My dear friend, I found George Burnet ill enough, heaven knows, Yellow Jaundice,---the introductory symptoms very violent. I return to Bristol on Thursday, and shall not leave till _all be done._ Remind Mrs. Coleridge of the kittens, and tell her that George's brandy is just what smuggled spirits might be expected to be, execrable! The smack of it remains in my mouth, and I believe will keep me most horribly temperate for half a century. He (Burnet) was bit, but I caught the Brandiphobia.[36] [obliterations ...]--scratched out, well knowing that you never allow such things to pass, uncensured. A good joke, and it slipped out most impromptu--ishly. The mice play the very devil with us. It irks me to set a trap. By all the whiskers of all the pussies that have mewed plaintively, or amorously, since the days of Whittington, it is not fair. 'Tis telling a lie. 'Tis as if you said, 'Here is a bit of toasted cheese; come little mice! I invite you!' when, oh, foul breach of the rites of hospitality! I mean to assassinate my too credulous guests! No, I cannot set a trap, but I should vastly like to make a Pitt--fall. (Smoke the Pun!). But concerning the mice, advise thou, lest there be famine in the land. Such a year of scarcity! Inconsiderate mice! Well, well, so the world wags. Farewell, S. T. C. P. S. A mad dog ran through our village, and bit several dogs. I have desired the farmers to be attentive, and to-morrow shall give them, in writing, the first symptoms of madness in a dog. I wish my pockets were as yellow as George's phiz!"[37] The preceding letter is about a fair example of that playful and ebullient imagination for which Mr. Coleridge, at this time, was distinguished. Subjects high and low received the same embellishment. Figure crowded on figure, and image on image, in new and perpetual variety. He was once reprobating the introduction of all bull and bear similes into poetry. "Well," I replied, "whatever your antipathies may be to bulls and bears, you have no objection to wolves." "Yes," he answered, "I equally abominate the whole tribe of lion, bull, bear, boar, and wolf similes. They are more thread-bare than a beggar's cast-off coat. From their rapid transition from hand to hand, they are now more hot and sweaty than halfpence on a market day. I would as soon meet a wolf in the open field, as in a friend's poem." I then rejoined, "Your objection, once at least, to wolf similes, was not quite so strong, seeing you prevailed on Mr. Southey to throw into the first book of "Joan of Arc," a five-line flaming wolf simile of yours. One could almost see the wolf leap, he was so fierce!" "Ah" said Mr. C. "but the discredit rests on him, not on me." The simile, in question, if not a new subject, is at least, perhaps, as energetically expressed as any five lines in Mr. Coleridge's writings. As who, through many a summer night serene Had hover'd round the fold with coward wish; Horrid with brumal ice, the fiercer wolf, From his bleak mountain and his den of snows Leaps terrible and mocks the shepherd's spear. Book 1. L. 47. "June, 1796. My dear Cottle, I am sojourning for a few days at Racedown, Dorset, the mansion of our friend Wordsworth; who presents his kindest respects to you.... Wordsworth admires my tragedy, which gives me great hopes. Wordsworth has written a tragedy himself. I speak with heartfelt sincerity, and I think, unblinded judgment, when I tell you that I feel myself a little man by his side, and yet I do not think myself a less man than I formerly thought myself. His drama is absolutely wonderful. You know I do not commonly speak in such abrupt and unmingled phrases, and therefore will the more readily believe me. There are, in the piece, those profound touches of the human heart, which I find three or four times in the "Robbers" of Schiller, and often in Shakspeare, but in Wordsworth there are no inequalities.... God bless you, and eke, S. T. Coleridge." Respecting this tragedy of Mr. W.'s, parts of which I afterwards heard with the highest admiration, Mr. Coleridge in a succeeding letter gave me the following information. "I have procured for Wordsworth's tragedy, an introduction to Harris, the manager of Covent Garden, who has promised to read it attentively, and give his answer immediately; and if he accepts it, to put it in preparation without an hour's delay. This tragedy may or may not have been deemed suitable for the stage. Should the latter prove the case, and the closet be its element, the public after these intimations, will importunately urge Mr. W. to a publication of this dramatic piece, so calculated still to augment his high reputation. There is a peculiar pleasure in recording the favorable sentiments which one poet and man of genius entertains of another, I therefore state that Mr. Coleridge says, in a letter received from him March 8th, 1798, "The Giant Wordsworth-God love him! When I speak in the terms of admiration due to his intellect, I fear lest these terms should keep out of sight the amiableness of his manners. He has written near twelve hundred lines of blank verse, superior, I hesitate not to aver, to any thing in our language which any way resembles it." And in a letter received from Mr. Coleridge, 1807, he says--speaking of his friend Mr. W. "He is one, whom God knows, I love and honour as far beyond myself, as both morally and intellectually he is above me." "Stowey, 1797. My dear Cottle, Wordsworth and his exquisite sister are with me. She is a woman indeed! in mind I mean, and heart; for her person is such, that if you expected to see a pretty woman, you would think her rather ordinary; if you expected to see an ordinary woman, you would think her pretty! but her manners are simple, ardent, impressive. In every motion, her most innocent soul outbeams so brightly, that who saw would say, "Guilt was a thing impossible in her." Her information various. Her eye watchful in minutest observation of nature; and her taste, a perfect electrometer. It bends, protrudes, and draws in, at subtlest beauties, and most recondite faults. She and W. desire their kindest respects to you. Your ever affectionate friend. S. T. C." "Stowey, Sept. 1797. My very dear Cottle, Your illness afflicts me, and unless I receive a full account of you by Milton, I shall be very uneasy, so do not fail to write. Herbert Croft is in Exeter gaol! This is unlucky. Poor devil! He must now be unpeppered.[39] We are all well. Wordsworth is well. Hartley sends a grin to you? He has another tooth! In the wagon, there was brought from Bath, a trunk, in order to be forwarded to Stowey, directed, 'S. T. Coleridge, Stowey, near Bridgwater.' This, we suppose, arrived in Bristol on Tuesday or Wednesday, last week. It belonged to Thelwall. If it be not forwarded to Stowey, let it be stopped, and not sent. Give my kind love to your brother Robert, and _ax_ him to put on his hat, and run, without delay to the inn, or place, by whatever bird, beast, fish, or man distinguished, where Parsons's Bath wagon sets up. From your truly affectionate friend, S. T. Coleridge." A letter, written, at this time, by Mr. Coleridge to Mr. Wade, more particularly refers to Mr. Thelwall's visit at Stowey. "Stowey, 1797. My very dear friend, ... John Thelwall is a very warm-hearted, honest man; and disagreeing as we do, on almost every point of religion, of morals, of politics, and philosophy, we like each other uncommonly well. He is a great favorite with Sara. Energetic activity of mind and of heart, is his master feature. He is prompt to conceive, and still prompter to execute; but I think he is deficient in that patience of mind which can look intensely and frequently at the same subject. He believes and disbelieves with impassioned confidence. I wish to see him doubting, and doubting. He is intrepid, eloquent, and honest. Perhaps, the only acting democrat that is honest, for the patriots are ragged cattle; a most execrable herd. Arrogant because they are ignorant, and boastful of the strength of reason, because they have never tried it enough to know its weakness. Oh! my poor country! The clouds cover thee. There is not one spot of clear blue in the whole heaven! My love to all whom you love, and believe me, with brotherly affection, with esteem and gratitude, and every warm emotion of the heart, Your faithful S. T. Coleridge." "London, 1797. Dear Cottle, If Mrs. Coleridge be in Bristol, pray desire her to write to me immediately, and I beg you, the moment you receive this letter, to send to No. 17, Newfoundland Street to know whether she be there. I have written to Stowey, but if she be in Bristol, beg her to write to me of it by return of post, that I may immediately send down some cash for her travelling expenses, &c. We shall reside in London for the next four months. God bless you, Cottle, I love you, S. T. Coleridge." P. S. The volume (second edition, Coleridge, Lloyd, and Lamb) is a most beautiful one. You have determined that the three Bards shall walk up Parnassus, in their best bib and tucker. "Stowey, June 29th, 1797. My very dear Cottle, ... Charles Lamb will probably be here in about a fortnight. Could you not contrive to put yourself in a Bridgwater coach, and T. Poole would fetch you in a one-horse chaise to Stowey. What delight would it not give us.... It was not convenient at this time to accept Mr. C.'s invitation, but going to Stowey two or three weeks afterwards, I learnt how pleasantly the interview had been between Charles Lamb and himself. It is delightful, even at the present moment, to recal the images connected with my then visit to Stowey, (which those can best understand, who, like myself, have escaped from severe duties to a brief season of happy recreation). Mr. Coleridge welcomed me with the warmest cordiality. He talked with affection of his old school-fellow, Lamb, who had so recently left him; regretted he had not an opportunity of introducing me to one whom he so highly valued. Mr. C. took peculiar delight in assuring me (at least, at that time) how happy he was; exhibiting successively, his house, his garden, his orchard, laden with fruit; and also the contrivances he had made to unite his two neighbours' domains with his own. After the grand circuit had been accomplished, by hospitable contrivance, we approached the "Jasmine harbour," when to our gratifying surprise, we found the tripod table laden with delicious bread and cheese, surmounted by a brown mug of true Taunton ale. We instinctively took our seats; and there must have been some downright witchery in the provisions which surpassed all of its kind; nothing like it on the wide terrene, and one glass of the Taunton, settled it to an axiom. While the dappled sun-beams played on our table, through the umbrageous canopy, the very birds seemed to participate in our felicities, and poured forth their selectest anthems. As we sat in our sylvan hall of splendour, a company of the happiest mortals, (T. Poole, C. Lloyd, S. T. Coleridge, and J. C.) the bright-blue heavens; the sporting insects; the balmy zephyrs; the feathered choristers; the sympathy of friends, all augmented the pleasurable to the highest point this side the celestial! Every interstice of our hearts being filled with happiness, as a consequence, there was no room for sorrow, exorcised as it now was, and hovering around at unapproachable distance. With our spirits thus entranced, though we might weep at other moments, yet joyance so filled all within and without, that, if, at this juncture, tidings had been brought us, that an irruption of the ocean had swallowed up all our brethren of Pekin; from the pre-occupation of our minds, "poor things," would have been our only reply, with anguish put off till the morrow. While thus elevated in the universal current of our feelings, Mrs. Coleridge approached, with her fine Hartley; we all smiled, but the father's eye beamed transcendental joy! "But, all things have an end." Yet, pleasant it is for memory to treasure up in her choicest depository, a few such scenes, (these sunny spots in existence!) on which the spirit may repose, when the rough, adverse winds shake and disfigure all besides. Although so familiar with the name and character of Charles Lamb, through the medium of S. T. Coleridge, yet my intercourse (with the exception of one casual visit) commenced with him in the year 1802, during a residence of many months in London, when we often met. After this period, from my residing permanently in Bristol, our acquaintance was intermitted, till 1819, when he requested the loan of a portrait, for the purpose expressed in the following letter. "Dear Sir, It is so long since I have seen or heard from you, that I fear that you will consider a request I have to make, as impertinent. About three years since, when I was in Bristol, I made an effort to see you, by calling at Brunswick Square, but you were from home. The request I have to make, is, that you would very much oblige me, if you have any small portrait of yourself, by allowing me to have it copied, to accompany a selection, of the likenesses of 'Living Bards,' which a most particular friend of mine is making. If you have no objection, and would oblige me by transmitting such portrait, I will answer for taking the greatest care of it, and for its safe return. I hope you will pardon the liberty, From an old friend and well wisher, Charles Lamb." In consequence of this application, I sent Charles Lamb a portrait, by Branwhite, and enclosed for his acceptance, the second part of my "Messiah." When the portrait was returned, it was accompanied with the following letter, containing a few judicious remarks, such as might have been expected from one whose judgment Mr. Coleridge so highly estimated. "Dear Sir, My friend, whom you have obliged by the loan of your picture, has had it very nicely copied (and a very spirited drawing it is; so every one thinks who has seen it.) The copy is not much inferior to yours, done by a daughter of Joseph's, R. A. I accompany the picture with my warm thanks, both for that, and your better favour the 'Messiah' which I assure you I have read through with great pleasure. The verses have great sweetness, and a New Testament plainness about them which affected me very much. I could just wish that in page 63, you had omitted the lines 71 and 72, and had ended the period with, The willowy brook was there, but that sweet sound-- When to be heard again on earthly ground!" Two very sweet lines, and the sense perfect. And in page 154, line 68, He spake, 'I come, ordain'd a world to save, To be baptis'd by thee in Jordan's wave." These words are hardly borne out by the story, and seem scarce accordant with the modesty with which our Lord came to take his common portion among the baptismal candidates. They also anticipate the beauty of John's recognition of the Messiah, and the subsequent confirmation by the Voice and Dove. You will excuse the remarks of an old brother bard, whose career, though long since pretty well stopped, was coeval in its beginning with your own, and who is sorry his lot has been always to be so distant from you. It is not likely that C. L. will see Bristol again, but if J. C. should ever visit London, he will be a most welcome visitor to C. L. My sister joins in cordial remembrances. Dear sir, Yours truly, Charles Lamb." Having always entertained for Charles Lamb a very kind feeling, independently of my admiration of his wit and genius, I requested his acceptance of my poem of the "Fall of Cambria," to which he sent the following characteristic reply. "London, India House, May 26, 1829. My dear Sir, I am quite ashamed of not having acknowledged your kind present earlier, but that unknown something which was never yet discovered, though so often speculated upon, which stands in the way of lazy folks' answering letters, has presented its usual obstacle. It is not forgetfulness, nor disrespect, nor incivility, but terribly like all these bad things. I have been in my time a great Epistolatory scribbler, but the passion, and with it the facility, at length wears out, and it must be pumped up again by the heavy machinery of duty or gratitude, when it should run free. I have read your 'Fall of Cambria' with as much pleasure as I did your 'Messiah.' Your Cambrian Poem I shall be tempted to repeat oftenest, as human poems take me in a mood more frequently congenial than divine. The character of Llewellyn pleases me more than anything else perhaps; and then some of the Lyrical pieces are fine varieties. It was quite a mistake that I could dislike anything you should write against Lord Byron, for I have a thorough aversion to his character, and a very moderate admiration of his genius; he is great in so little a way. To be a poet is to be the man; not a petty portion of occasional low passion worked up into a permanent form of humanity. Shakspeare has thrust such rubbishly feelings into a corner--the dark dusky heart of Don John, in the 'Much Ado about Nothing.' The fact is, I have not seen your 'Expostulatory Epistle' to him. I was not aware, till your question, that it was out. I shall inquire and get it forthwith. Southey is in town, whom I have seen slightly. Wordsworth expected, whom I hope to see much of. I write with accelerated motion, for I have two or three bothering clerks and brokers about me, who always press in proportion as you seem to be doing something that is not business. I could exclaim a little profanely, but I think you do not like swearing. I conclude, begging you to consider that I feel myself much obliged by your kindness, and shall be most happy at any and at all times to hear from you. Dear Sir, yours truly, Charles Lamb." Mr. Coleridge, in the second edition of his poems, transferred some of the poems which appeared in the first, to a supplement, and, amongst others, some verses addressed to myself, with the following notice. "The first in order of these verses which I have thus endeavoured to reprieve from immediate oblivion, was originally addressed "To the Author of Poems published anonymously at Bristol." A second edition of these poems has lately appeared with the author's name prefixed: (Joseph Cottle) and I could not refuse myself the gratification of seeing the name of that man amongst my poems, without whose kindness, they would probably have remained unpublished; and to whom I know myself greatly, and variously obliged, as a poet, a man, and a Christian. LINES ADDRESSED TO JOSEPH COTTLE. My honor'd friend! whose verse concise, yet clear, Tunes to smooth melody unconquer'd sense, May your fame fadeless live, "as never seer" The ivy wreathes yon oak, whose broad defence Embow'rs me from noon's sultry influence! For like that nameless riv'let stealing by, Your modest verse to musing quiet dear Is rich with tints heaven-borrow'd, the charm'd eye Shall gaze undazzled there, and love the soften'd sky. Circling the base of the poetic mount A stream there is, which rolls in lazy flow; Its cold-black waters from oblivion's fount; The vapour poison'd birds that fly too low, Fall with dead swoop, and to the bottom go. Escaped that heavy stream on pinion fleet, Beneath the mountain's lofty frowning brow, Ere aught of perilous ascent you meet, A mead of mildest charm delays the unlab'ring feet. Not there the cloud-climb rock, sublime and vast, That like some giant king, o'er-glooms the hill; Nor there the pine-grove to the midnight blast Makes solemn music! But the unceasing rill To the soft wren or lark's descending trill Murmurs sweet under-song 'mid jasmine bowers. In this same pleasant meadow at your will, I ween, you wander'd--there collecting flow'rs Of sober tint, and herbs of medicinal powers! There for the monarch-murder'd soldier's tomb You wove the unfinish'd[40] wreath of saddest hues, And to that holier[41] chaplet added bloom Besprinkling it with Jordan's cleansing dews. But lo! your[42] Henderson awakes the Muse-- His spirit beckon'd from the mountain's height! You left the plain and soar'd mid richer views! So nature mourn'd, when sank the first day's light, With stars, unseen before, spangling her robe of night! Still soar my friend those richer views among, Strong, rapid, fervent, flashing fancy's beam! Virtue and truth shall love your gentler song: But Poesy demands th' impassion'd theme: Wak'd by heaven's silent dews at Eve's mild gleam What balmy sweets Pomona breathes around? But if the vex'd air rush a stormy stream, Or autumn's shrill gust moan in plaintive sound With fruits and flowers she loads the tempest honor'd ground." While the first edition of Mr. Coleridge's poems was in the press, I received from him the following letter. "My dear Sir, ... There is a beautiful little poetic epistle of Sara's, which I mean to print here. What if her epistle to you were likewise printed, so as to have two of her poems? It is remarkably elegant, and would do honour to any volume of poems." The first epistle I never received. The second was printed in the first edition of Mr. C.'s poems, and in no other. On account of its merit it is here inserted. "THE PRODUCTION OF A YOUNG LADY,[43] ADDRESSED TO HER FRIEND, J. COTTLE. * * * * * She had lost her thimble, and her complaint being accidentally overheard by her friend, he immediately sent her four others to take her choice from. * * * * * As oft mine eye, with careless glance, Has gallop'd o'er some old romance, Of speaking birds, and steeds with wings, Giants and dwarfs, and fiends, and kings: Beyond the rest, with more attentive care, I've loved to read of elfin-favor'd fair-- How if she longed for aught beneath the sky, And suffered to escape one votive sigh, Wafted along on viewless pinions airy, It kid itself obsequious at her feet: Such things I thought we might not hope to meet, Save in the dear delicious land of fairy! But now (by proof I know it well) There's still some peril in free wishing-- Politeness is a licensed spell, And you, dear sir, the arch-magician. You much perplexed me by the various set: They were indeed an elegant quartette! My mind went to and fro, and wavered long; At length I've chosen (Samuel thinks me wrong) That around whose azure brim, Silver figures seem to swim, Like fleece-white clouds, that on the skyey blue, Waked by no breeze, the self-same shapes retain; Or ocean nymphs, with limbs of snowy hue, Slow floating o'er the calm cerulean plain. Just such a one, mon cher ami (The finger-shield of industry,) The inventive gods, I deem, to Pallas gave, What time the vain Arachne, madly brave, Challenged the blue-eyed virgin of the sky A duel in embroidered work to try. And hence the thimbled finger of grave Pallas, To th' erring needle's point was more than callous. But, ah, the poor Arachne! she, unarmed, Blund'ring, through hasty eagerness, alarmed With all a rival's hopes, a mortal's fears, Still miss'd the stitch, and stained the web with tears. Unnumbered punctures, small, yet sore, Full fretfully the maiden bore, Till she her lily finger found Crimson'd with many a tiny wound, And to her eyes, suffused with watery woe, Her flower-embroidered web danced dim, I wist, Like blossom'd shrubs, in a quick-moving mist; Till vanquish'd, the despairing maid sank low. O, Bard! whom sure no common muse inspires, I heard your verse that glows with vestal fires; And I from unwatch'd needle's erring point Had surely suffered on each finger joint, Those wounds, which erst did poor Arachne meet; While he, the much-loved object of my choice, (My bosom thrilling with enthusiast heat) Pour'd on my ear, with deep impressive voice, How the great Prophet of the desert stood, And preach'd of penitence by Jordan's flood: On war; or else the legendary lays, In simplest measures hymn'd to Alla's praise; Or what the Bard from his heart's inmost stores, O'er his friend's grave in loftier numbers pours: Yes, Bard polite! you but obey'd the laws Of justice, when the thimble you had sent; What wounds your thought-bewildering muse might cause, 'Tis well, your finger-shielding gifts prevent. SARA." "Dear Cottle, I have heard nothing of my Tragedy, except some silly remarks of Kemble's, to whom a friend showed it; it does not appear to me that there is a shadow of probability that it will be accepted. It gave me no pain, and great pleasure, in finding that it gave me no pain. I had rather hoped than believed that I was possessed of so much philosophical capability. Sheridan most certainly has not used me with common justice. The proposal came from himself, and although this circumstance did not bind him to accept the tragedy, it certainly bound him to every, and that the earliest, attention to it. I suppose it is snugly in his green bag, if it have not emigrated to the kitchen. I sent to the Monthly Magazine, (1797) three mock Sonnets, in ridicule of my own Poems, and Charles Lloyd's, and Lamb's, &c. &c. exposing that affectation of unaffectedness, of jumping and misplaced accent, in common-place epithets, flat lines forced into poetry by italics, (signifying how well and mouthishly the author would read them) puny pathos, &c. &c. the instances were almost all taken from myself, and Lloyd, and Lamb. I signed them 'Nehemiah Higginbotham.' I think they may do good to our young Bards. God love you, S. T. C." P. S. I am translating the 'Oberon' of Wieland; it is a difficult language, and I can translate at least as fast as I can construe. I have made also a very considerable proficiency in the French language, and study it daily, and daily study the German; so that I am not, and have not been idle.... SONNETS. ATTEMPTED IN THE MANNER OP CONTEMPORARY WRITERS. * * * * * SONNET I. Pensive, at eve, on the hard world I mus'd, And my poor heart was sad: so at the moon I gazed, and sigh'd, and sigh'd! for ah! how soon Eve darkens into night! Mine eye perus'd With tearful vacancy the dampy grass, Which wept and glitter'd in the paly ray: And I did pause me on my lonely way, And muse me on those wretched ones, who pass O'er the black heath of sorrow. But alas! Most of MYSELF I thought: when it befel That the sooth SPIRIT of the breezy wood Breath'd in mine ear--"All this is very well; But much of _one_ thing is for _no-thing_ good." Ah! my poor heart's inexplicable swell! NEHEMIAH HIGGINBOTHAM. SONNET II. TO SIMPLICITY. O! I do love thee, meek simplicity! For of thy lays, the lulling simpleness Goes to my heart, and soothes each small distress, Distress, though small, yet haply great to me! 'Tis true, on lady fortune's gentlest pad, I amble on; yet, though I know not why, So sad I am!--but should a friend and I Grow cool and miff, oh, I am very sad! And then with sonnets, and with sympathy. My dreamy bosom's mystic woes I pall; Now of my false friend 'plaining plaintively, Now raving at mankind in gener-al But whether sad or fierce, 'tis simple all, All very simple, meek SIMPLICITY! NEHEMIAH HIGGINBOTHAM. SONNET III. ON A RUINED HOUSE WHICH JACK BUILT. And this reft house is that, the which he built, Lamented Jack! and here his malt he piled, Cautious in vain! These rats that squeak'd so wild, Squeak, not unconscious of their fathers' guilt. Did ye not see her gleaming through the glade? Belike 'twas she, the Maiden all forlorn. What though she milk no cow with crumpled horn, Yet, aye she haunts the dale where erst she stray'd: And, aye beside her stalks her amorous knight! Still on his thighs his wonted brogues are worn, And through those brogues, still tatter'd and betorn, His hindward charms gleam an unearthly white; As when through broken clouds, at night's high moon. Peeps in fair fragments forth--the full-orb'd harvest moon! NEHEMIAH HIGGINBOTHAM.[44] The moralist rightly says, "There is nothing permanent in this uncertain world;" and even most friendships do not partake of the "Munition of Rocks." Alas! the spirit of impartiality now compels me to record, that the inseparable Trio; even the three "Groscolliases" themselves, had, somehow or other, been touched with the negative magnet, and their particles, in opposition, flew off "as far as from hence to the utmost pole." I never rightly understood the cause of this dissension, but shrewdly suspected that that unwelcome and insidious intruder, Mr. Nehemiah Higginbotham, had no inconsiderable share in it. Mr. C. even determined in his third projected edition, (1798) that the production of his two late friends should be excluded. The three next letters refer to this unpleasant affair. It is hardly necessary to add, that the difference was of short continuance. The Latin motto, prefixed to the second edition of Mr. C.'s poems, puzzled everybody to know from what author it was derived. One and another inquired of me, to no purpose, and expressed a wish that Mr. C. had been clearer in his citation, as "no one could understand it." On my naming this to Mr. Coleridge, he laughed heartily, and said, "It was all a hoax." "Not meeting" said he, "with a suitable motto, I invented one, and with references purposely obscure," as will be explained in the next letter.[45] "March 8th, 1798. My dear Cottle, I have been confined to my bed for some days, through a fever occasioned by the stump of a tooth, which baffled chirurgical efforts to eject, and which, by affecting my eye, affected my stomach, and through that my whole frame. I am better, but still weak, in consequence of such long sleeplessness and wearying pains; weak, very weak. I thank you, my dear friend, for your late kindness, and in a few weeks will either repay you in money, or by verses, as you like. "With regard to Lloyd's verses, it is curious that I should be applied to, 'to be persuaded to resign' and in hopes that I might 'consent to give up' (unknown by whom) a number of poems which were published at the earnest request of the author, who assured me, that the circumstance was of 'no trivial import to his happiness'! Times change and people change; but let us keep our souls in quietness! I have no objection to any disposal of Lloyd's poems except that of their being republished with mine. The motto which I had prefixed--"Duplex, &c." from Groscollias, has placed me in a ridiculous situation, but it was a foolish and presumptuous start of affectionateness, and I am not unwilling to incur the punishment due to my folly. By past experiences we build up our moral being. God bless you, S. T. Coleridge." A reference to this "stump of a tooth." was more particularly made, in the following letter to Mr. Wade. "March 21st, 1798. My very dear friend, I have even now returned from a little excursion that I have taken for the confirmation of my health, which had suffered a rude assault from the anguish of the stump of a tooth which had baffled the attempts of our surgeon here, and which confined me to my bed. I suffered much from the disease, and more from the doctor; rather than again put my mouth into his hands, I would put my hands into a lion's mouth. I am happy to hear of, and should be most happy to see, the plumpness and progression of your dear boy; but-yes, my dear Wade, it must be a but, much as I hate the word but. Well,--but I cannot attend the chemical lectures. I have many reasons, but the greatest, or at least the most ostensible reason, is, that I cannot leave Mrs. C. at that time; our house is an uncomfortable one; our surgeon may be, for aught I know, a lineal descendant of Esculapius himself, but if so, in the repeated transfusion of life from father to son, through so many generations, the wit and knowledge, being subtle spirits, have evaporated.... Ever your grateful and affectionate friend, S. T. Coleridge." "1798. My dear Cottle, I regret that aught should have disturbed our tranquillity; respecting Lloyd, I am willing to believe myself in part mistaken, and so let all things be as before. I have no wish respecting these poems, either for or against re-publication with mine. As to the third edition, if there be occasion for it immediately, it must be published with some alterations, but no additions or omissions. The Pixies, Chatterton, and some dozen others, shall be printed at the end of the volume, under the title of Juvenile Poems, and in this case I will send you the volume immediately. But if there be no occasion for the volume to go to press for ten weeks, at the expiration of that time, I would make it a volume worthy of me, and omit utterly near one-half of the present volume--a sacrifice to pitch black oblivion.[46] Whichever be the case, I will repay you the money you have paid for me, in money, and in a few weeks; or if you should prefer the latter proposal, i. e. the not sending me to the press for ten weeks, I should insist on considering the additions, however large, as my payment to you for the omissions, which, indeed, would be but strict justice. I am requested by Wordsworth, to put to you the following questions. What could you, conveniently and prudently, and what would you give for--first, our two Tragedies, with small prefaces, containing an analysis of our principal characters? Exclusive of the prefaces, the tragedies are, together, five thousand lines; which, in printing, from the dialogue form, and directions respecting actors and scenery, are at least equal to six thousand. To be delivered to you within a week of the date of your answer to this letter; and the money which you offer, to be paid to us at the end of four months from the same date; none to be paid before, all to be paid then. Second.--Wordsworth's 'Salisbury Plain,' and 'Tale of a Woman'; which two poems, with a few others which he will add, and the notes, will make a volume. This to be delivered to you within three weeks of the date of your answer, and the money to be paid as before, at the end of four months from the present date. Do not, my dearest Cottle, harass yourself about the imagined great merit of the compositions, or be reluctant to offer what you can prudently offer, from an idea that the poems are worth more. But calculate what you can do, with reference simply to yourself, and answer as speedily as you can; and believe me your sincere, grateful, and affectionate friend and brother, S. T. Coleridge." I offered Mr. Coleridge and Mr. Wordsworth, thirty guineas each, as proposed, for their two tragedies; but which, after some hesitation, was declined, from the hope of introducing one, or both, on the stage. The volume of Poems was left for some future arrangement. "My dear Cottle, I never involved you in the bickering, and never suspected you, in any one action of your life, of practising guile against any human being, except yourself. Your letter supplied only one in a link of circumstances, that informed me of some things, and perhaps deceived me in others. I shall write to-day to Lloyd. I do not think I shall come to Bristol for these lectures of which you speak.[47] I ardently wish for the knowledge, but Mrs. Coleridge is within a month of her confinement, and I cannot, I ought not to leave her; especially as her surgeon is not a John Hunter, nor my house likely to perish from a plethora of comforts. Besides, there are other things that might disturb that evenness of benevolent feeling, which I wish to cultivate. I am much better, and at present at Allfoxden, and my new and tender health is all over me like a voluptuous feeling. God bless you, S. T. Coleridge." When the before noticed dissension occurred, Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd, between whom a strong friendship had latterly sprung up, became alienated from Mr. Coleridge, and cherished something of an indignant feeling. Strange as it may appear, C. Lamb determined to desert the inglorious ground of neutrality, and to commence active operations against his late friend; but the arrows were taken from his own peculiar armoury; tipped, not with iron, but wit. He sent Mr. Coleridge the following letter. Mr. Coleridge gave me this letter, saying, "These young visionaries will do each other no good." The following is Charles Lamb's letter to Mr. C. "THESES QUAEDAM THEOLOGICAE. 1st. Whether God loves a lying angel better than a true man? 2nd. Whether the archangel Uriel could affirm an untruth, and if he could, whether he would? 3rd. Whether honesty be an angelic virtue, or not rather to be reckoned among those qualities which the school-men term 'Virtutes minus splendidae'? 4th. Whether the higher order of Seraphim illuminati ever sneer? 5th. Whether pure intelligences can love? 6th. Whether the Seraphim ardentes do not manifest their virtues, by the way of vision and theory; and whether practice be not a sub-celestial and merely human virtue? 7th. Whether the vision beatific be anything more or less than a perpetual representment, to each individual angel, of his own present attainments, and future capabilities, somehow in the manner of mortal looking-glasses, reflecting a perpetual complacency and self satisfaction? 8th. and last. Whether an immortal and amenable soul may not come to be condemned at last, and the man never suspect it beforehand? Learned Sir, my friend, Presuming on our long habits of friendship, and emboldened further by your late liberal permission to avail myself of your correspondence, in case I want any knowledge, (which I intend to do, when I have no Encyclopedia, or Ladies Magazine at hand to refer to, in any matter of science,) I now submit to your enquiries the above theological propositions, to be by you defended or oppugned, or both, in the schools of Germany, whither, I am told, you are departing, to the utter dissatisfaction of your native Devonshire, and regret of universal England; but to my own individual consolation, if, through the channel of your wished return, learned sir, my friend, may be transmitted to this our island, from those famous theological wits of Leipsic and Gottingen, any rays of illumination, in vain to be derived from the home growth of our English halls and colleges. Finally wishing, learned sir, that you may see Schiller, and swing in a wood, (vide poems) and sit upon a tun, and eat fat hams of Westphalia, I remain, Your friend and docile pupil, to instruct, Charles Lamb." Mr. Coleridge, at first, appeared greatly hurt at this letter; an impression which I endeavoured to counteract, by considering it as a slight ebullition of feeling that would soon subside; and which happily proved to be the case. I also felt concern, not only that there should be a dissension between old friends, but lest Mr. Coleridge should be inconvenienced in a pecuniary way by the withdrawal of C. Lloyd from his domestic roof. To restore and heal, therefore, I wrote a conciliatory letter to Charles Lloyd, to which he thus replied. "Birmingham, 7th June, 1798. My dear Cottle, I thank you many times for your pleasing intelligence respecting Coleridge. I cannot think that I have acted with, or from, passion towards him. Even my solitary night thoughts have been easy and calm when they have dwelt on him.... I love Coleridge, and can forget all that has happened. At present, I could not well go to Stowey. I could scarcely excuse so sudden a removal from my parents. Lamb quitted me yesterday, after a fortnight's visit. I have been much interested in his society. I never knew him so happy in my life. I shall write to Coleridge today. God bless you, my dear friend, C. Lloyd, Jun." Mr. C. up to this day, Feb. 18th, 1798, held, though laxly, the doctrines of Socinus. On the Rev. Mr. Rowe, of Shrewsbury, the Unitarian minister, coming to settle in Bristol, Mr. Coleridge was strongly recommended by his friends of that persuasion, to offer himself as Mr. R.'s successor; and he accordingly went on probation to Shrewsbury. It is proper here to mention, in order that this subject may be the better understood, that Mr. Poole, two or three years before, had introduced Mr. Coleridge to Mr. Thomas Wedgewood. This gentleman formed a high opinion of Mr. C.'s talents, and felt an interest in his welfare. At the time Mr. Coleridge was hesitating whether or not he should persist in offering himself to the Shrewsbury congregation, and so finally settle down into an Unitarian minister, Mr. T. Wedgewood having heard of the circumstance, and fearing that a pastoral engagement might operate unfavourably on his literary pursuits, interfered, as will appear by the following letter of Mr. Coleridge to Mr. Wade. "Stowey, My very dear friend, This last fortnight has been very eventful. I received one hundred pounds from Josiah Wedgewood, in order to prevent the necessity of my going into the ministry. I have received an invitation from Shrewsbury, to be minister there; and after fluctuations of mind, which have for nights together robbed me of sleep, and I am afraid of health, I have at length returned the order to Mr. Wedgwood, with a long letter, explanatory of my conduct, and accepted the Shrewsbury invitation...." Mr. T. Wedgewood still adhering to his first opinion that Mr. Coleridge's acceptance of the proposed engagement, would seriously obstruct his literary efforts; sent Mr. C. a letter, in which himself and his brother, Mr. Josiah Wedgwood, promised, conjointly, to allow him for his life, one hundred and fifty pounds a year. This decided Mr. Coleridge to reject the Shrewsbury invitation. He was oppressed with grateful emotions to these his liberal benefactors, and always spoke, in particular, of the late Mr. Thomas Wedgewood as being one of the best talkers, and as possessing one of the acutest minds, of any man he had known. The following is Mr. Coleridge's hasty reply to Mr. Wedgewood. "Shrewsbury, Friday night, 1798. My dear sir, I have this moment received your letter, and have scarcely more than a moment to answer it by return of post. If kindly feeling can be repaid by kindly feeling, I am not your debtor. I would wish to express the, same thing which is big at my heart, but I know not how to do it without indelicacy. As much abstracted from personal feeling as possible, I honor and esteem you for that which you have done. I must of necessity stay here till the close of Sunday next. On Monday morning I shall leave it, and on Tuesday will be with you at Cote-House. Very affectionately yours, S. T. Coleridge. T. Wedgewood, Esq." While the affair was in suspense, a report was current in Bristol, that Mr. Coleridge had rejected the Messrs. Wedgewoods' offer, which the Unitarians in both towns ardently desired. Entertaining a contrary wish, I addressed a letter to Mr. C. stating the report, and expressing a hope that it had no foundation. The following satisfactory answer was immediately returned. "My very dear Cottle, The moment I received Mr. T. Wedgewood's letter, I accepted his offer. How a contrary report could arise, I cannot guess.... I hope to see you at the close of next week. I have been respectfully and kindly treated at Shrewsbury. I am well, and now, and ever, Your grateful and affectionate friend, S. T. Coleridge." In the year 1798, Mr. Coleridge and Mr. Wordsworth determined upon visiting Germany. A knowledge of this fact will elucidate some of the succeeding letters. "Feb. 18, 1798. My dear Cottle, I have finished my Ballad, it is 340 lines; I am going on with my 'Visions': altogether (for I shall print two scenes of my Tragedy, as fragments) I can add 1500 lines; now what do you advise? Shall I add my Tragedy, and so make a second volume? or shall I pursue my first intention of inserting 1500 in the third edition? If you should advise a second volume, should you wish, i. e. find it convenient, to be the purchaser? I ask this question, because I wish you to know the true state of my present circumstances. I have received nothing yet from the Wedgewoods, and my money is utterly expended. A friend of mine wanted five guineas for a little while, which I borrowed of Poole, as for myself, I do not like therefore to apply to him. Mr. Estlin has some little money I believe in his hands, but I received from him before I went to Shrewsbury, fifteen pounds, and I believe that this was an anticipation of the five guinea presents, which my friends would have made in March. But (this affair of the Messrs. Wedgewoods turning out) the money in Mr. Estlin's hand must go towards repaying him that sum which he suffered me to anticipate. Meantime I owe Biggs £5. which is heavy on my thoughts, and Mrs. I has not been paid her last quarter which is still heavier. As to myself, I can continue to go on here, but this £10 I must pay somehow, that is £5 to Biggs, and £5 to Mrs. F.... God bless you, S. T. Coleridge." P.S. This week I purpose offering myself to the Bridgwater Socinian congregation, as assistant minister, without any salary, directly, or indirectly; but of this say not a word to any one, unless you see Mr. Estlin. A visit to Mr. Coleridge at Stowey, had been the means of my introduction to Mr. Wordsworth, who read me many of his Lyrical Pieces, when I immediately perceived in them extraordinary merit, and advised him to publish them, expressing a belief that they would be well received. I further said he should be at no risk; that I would give him the same sum which I had given to Mr. Coleridge and to Mr. Southey, and that it would be a gratifying circumstance to me, to have been the publisher of the first volumes of three such poets, as Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth; such a distinction might never again occur to a Provincial bookseller. To the idea of publishing he expressed a strong objection, and after several interviews, I left him, with an earnest wish that he would reconsider his determination. Soon after Mr. Wordsworth sent me the following letter. "Allfoxden, 12th April, 1798. My dear Cottle, ... You will be pleased to hear that I have gone on very rapidly adding to my stock of poetry. Do come and let me read it to you, under the old trees in the park. We have a little more than two months to stay in this place. Within these four days the season has advanced with greater rapidity than I ever remember, and the country becomes almost every hour more lovely. God bless you, Your affectionate friend, W. Wordsworth." A little time after, I received an invitation from Mr. Coleridge to pay himself and Mr. Wordsworth another visit. At about the same time, I received the following corroborative invitation from Mr. Wordsworth. "Dear Cottle, We look for you with great impatience. We will never forgive you if you do not come. I say nothing of the 'Salisbury Plain' till I see you. I am determined to finish it, and equally so that you shall publish. I have lately been busy about another plan, which I do not wish to mention till I see you; let this be very, very soon, and stay a week if possible; as much longer as you can. God bless you, dear Cottle, Yours sincerely, W. Wordsworth. Allfoxden, 9th May, 1798." The following letter also on this subject, was received from Mr. Coleridge. "My dear Cottle, Neither Wordsworth nor myself could have been otherwise than uncomfortable, if any but yourself had received from us the first offer of our Tragedies, and of the volume of Wordsworth's Poems. At the same time, we did not expect that you could with prudence and propriety, advance such a sum as we should want at the time we specified. In short, we both regard the publication of our Tragedies as an evil. It is not impossible but that in happier times, they may be brought on the stage: and to throw away this chance for a mere trifle, would be to make the present moment act fraudulently and usuriously towards the future time. My Tragedy employed and strained all my thoughts and faculties for six or seven months; Wordsworth consumed far more time, and far more thought, and far more genius. We consider the publication of them an evil on any terms; but our thoughts were bent on a plan for the accomplishment of which, a certain sum of money was necessary, (the whole) at that particular time, and in order to this we resolved, although reluctantly, to part with our Tragedies: that is, if we could obtain thirty guineas for each, and at less than thirty guineas Wordsworth will not part with the copy-right of his volume of Poems. We shall offer the Tragedies to no one, for we have determined to procure the money some other way. If you choose the volume of Poems, at the price mentioned, to be paid at the time specified, i. e. thirty guineas, to be paid sometime in the last fortnight of July, you may have them; but remember, my dear fellow! I write to you now merely as a bookseller, and intreat you, in your answer, to consider yourself only; as to us, although money is necessary to our plan, [that of visiting Germany] yet the plan is not necessary to our happiness; and if it were, W. could sell his Poems for that sum to some one else, or we could procure the money without selling the Poems. So I entreat you, again and again, in your answer, which must be immediate, consider yourself only. Wordsworth has been caballed against _so long and so loudly_, that he has found it impossible to prevail on the tenant of the Allfoxden estate, to let him the house, after their first agreement is expired, so he must quit it at Midsummer; whether we shall be able to procure him a house and furniture near Stowey, we know not, and yet we must: for the hills, and the woods, and the streams, and the sea, and the shores, would break forth into reproaches against us, if we did not strain every nerve, to keep their poet among them. Without joking, and in serious sadness, Poole and I cannot endure to think of losing him. At all events, come down, Cottle, as soon as you can, but before Midsummer, and we will procure a horse easy as thy own soul, and we will go on a roam to Linton and Limouth, which, if thou comest in May, will be in all their pride of woods and waterfalls, not to speak of its august cliffs, and the green ocean, and the vast Valley of Stones, all which live disdainful of the seasons, or accept new honours only from the winter's snow. At all events come down, and cease not to believe me much and affectionately your friend, S. T. Coleridge." In consequence of these conjoint invitations, I spent a week with Mr. C. and Mr. W. at Allfoxden house, and during this time, (beside the reading of MS. poems) they took me to Limouth, and Linton, and the Valley of Stones. This beautiful and august scenery, might suggest many remarks, as well as on our incidents upon the way, but I check the disposition to amplify, from recollecting the extent to which an unconstrained indulgence in narrative had formerly led me, in the affair of Tintern Abbey. At this interview it was determined, that the volume should be published under the title of "Lyrical ballads," on the terms stipulated in a former letter: that this volume should not contain the poem of "Salisbury Plain," but only an extract from it; that it should not contain the poem of "Peter Bell," but consist rather of sundry shorter poems, and, for the most part, of pieces more recently written. I had recommended two volumes, but one was fixed on, and that to be published anonymously. It was to be begun immediately, and with the "Ancient Mariner;" which poem I brought with me to Bristol. A day or two after I received the following. "My dear Cottle, You know what I think of a letter, how impossible it is to argue in it. You must therefore take simple statements, and in a week or two, I shall see you, and endeavour to reason with you. Wordsworth and I have duly weighed your proposal, and this is an answer. He would not object to the publishing of 'Peter Bell,' or the 'Salisbury Plain' singly; but to the publishing of his poems in two volumes, he is decisively repugnant and oppugnant. He deems that they would want variety, &c. &c. If this apply in his case, it applies with ten-fold more force to mine. We deem that the volumes offered to you, are, to a certain degree, one work in kind, though not in degree, as an ode is one work; and that our different poems are, as stanzas, good, relatively rather than absolutely: mark you, I say in kind, though not in degree. As to the Tragedy, when I consider it in reference to Shakspeare's, and to one other Tragedy, it seems a poor thing, and I care little what becomes of it. When I consider it in comparison with modern dramatists, it rises: and I think it too bad to be published, too good to be squandered. I think of breaking it up; the planks are sound, and I will build a new ship of the old materials. The dedication to the Wedgewoods, which you recommend, would be indelicate and unmeaning. If, after four or five years, I shall have finished some work of importance, which could not have been written, but in an unanxious seclusion, to them I will dedicate it; for the public will have owed the work to them who gave me the power of that unanxious seclusion. As to anonymous publications, depend on it, you are deceived. Wordsworth's name is nothing to a large number of persons; mine stinks. The 'Essay on Man,' the 'Botanic Garden,' the 'Pleasures of Memory,' and many other most popular works, were published anonymously. However, I waive all reasoning, and simply state it as an unaltered opinion, that you should proceed as before, with the 'Ancient Mariner.' The picture shall be sent.[48] For your love gifts and book-loans accept our hearty love. The 'Joan of Arc' is a divine book; it opens lovelily. I hope that you will take off some half dozen of our Poems on great paper, even as the 'Joan of Arc.' Cottle, my dear Cottle, I meant to have written you an Essay on the Metaphysics of Typography, but I have not time. Take a few hints, without the abstruse reasons for them, with which I mean to favour you. 18 lines in a page, the line closely printed, certainly more closely printed than those of the 'Joan;'[49] ('Oh, by all means, closer, _W. Wordsworth_') equal ink, and large margins; that is beauty; it may even, under your immediate care, mingle the sublime! And now, my dear Cottle, may God love you and me, who am, with most unauthorish feelings, Your true friend, S. T. Coleridge. P. S. I walked to Linton the day after you left us, and returned on Saturday. I walked in one day, and returned in one." A reference is made by Mr. Coleridge, in a letter (p. 177 [Letter starting with "Neither Wordsworth nor myself...." Transcriber.]) to the "caballing, long and loud" against Mr. Wordsworth, and which occasioned him to remove from Somersetshire. To learn the nature of this annoyance, may furnish some little amusement to the reader, while Mr. W. himself will only smile at trifling incidents, that are now, perhaps, scarcely remembered. Mr. W. had taken the Allfoxden House, near Stowey, for one year, (during the minority of the heir) and the reason why he was refused a continuance, by the ignorant man who had the letting of it, arose, as Mr. Coleridge informed me, from a whimsical cause, or rather a series of causes. The wiseacres of the village had, it seemed, made Mr. W. the subject of their serious conversation. One said that "He had seen him wander about by night, and look rather strangely at the moon! and then, he roamed over the hills, like a partridge." Another said, "He had heard him mutter, as he walked, in some outlandish brogue, that nobody could understand!" Another said, "It's useless to talk, Thomas, I think he is what people call a 'wise man.'" (a conjuror!) Another said, "You are every one of you wrong. I know what he is. We have all met him, tramping away toward the sea. Would any man in his senses, take all that trouble to look at a parcel of water! I think he carries on a snug business in the smuggling line, and, in these journies, is on the look out for some wet cargo!" Another very significantly said, "I know that he has got a private still in his cellar, for I once passed his house, at a little better than a hundred yards distance, and I could smell the spirits, as plain as an ashen fagot at Christmas!" Another said, "However that was, he is sure_ly_ a desperd French jacobin, for he is so silent and dark, that nobody ever heard him say one word about politics!" And thus these ignoramuses drove from their village, a greater ornament than will ever again be found amongst them. In order to continue the smile on the reader's countenance, I may be allowed to state a trifling circumstance, which at this moment forces itself on my recollection. A visit to Mr. Coleridge, at Stowey, in the year 1797, had been the means of my introduction to Mr. Wordsworth. Soon after our acquaintance had commenced, Mr. W. happened to be in Bristol, and asked me to spend a day or two with him at Allfoxden. I consented, and drove him down in a gig. We called for Mr. Coleridge, Miss Wordsworth, and the servant, at Stowey, and they walked, while we rode on to Mr. W.'s house at Allfoxden, distant two or three miles, where we purposed to dine. A London alderman would smile at our prepation, or bill of fare. It consisted, of philosophers' viands; namely, a bottle of brandy, a noble loaf, and a stout piece of cheese; and as there were plenty of lettuces in the garden, with all these comforts we calculated on doing very well. Our fond hopes, however, were somewhat damped, by finding, that our "stout piece of cheese" had vanished! A sturdy _rat_ of a beggar, whom we had relieved on the road, with his olfactories all alive, no doubt, _smelt_ our cheese, and while we were gazing at the magnificent clouds, contrived to abstract our treasure! Cruel tramp! An ill return for our pence! We both wished the rind might not choke him! The mournful fact was ascertained a little before we drove into the courtyard of the house. Mr. Coleridge bore the loss with great fortitude, observing, that we should never starve with a loaf of bread, and a bottle of brandy. He now, with the dexterity of an adept, admired by his friends around, unbuckled the horse, and, putting down the shafts with a jerk, as a triumphant conclusion of his work, lo! the bottle of brandy that had been placed most carefully behind us on the seat, from the force of gravity, suddenly rolled down, and before we could arrest this spirituous avalanche, pitching right on the stones, was dashed to pieces. We all beheld the spectacle, silent and petrified! We might have collected the broken fragments of glass, but the brandy! that was gone! clean gone![50] One little untoward thing often follows another, and while the rest stood musing, chained to the place, regaling themselves with the Cogniac effluvium, and all miserably chagrined, I led the horse to the stable, when a fresh perplexity arose. I removed the harness without difficulty, but after many strenuous attempts, I could not get off the collar. In despair, I called for assistance, when aid soon drew near. Mr. Wordsworth first brought his ingenuity into exercise, but after several unsuccessful efforts, he relinquished the achievement, as a thing altogether impracticable. Mr. Coleridge now tried his hand, but showed no more grooming skill than his predecessors; for after twisting the poor horse's neck almost to strangulation, and to the great danger of his eyes, he gave up the useless task, pronouncing that the horse's head must have grown, (gout or dropsy!) since the collar was put on! for, he said, it was a downright impossibility for such a huge Os Frontis to pass through so narrow a collar! Just at this instant the servant girl came near, and understanding the cause of our consternation, "La, Master," said she, "you do not go about the work in the right way. You should do like as this," when turning the collar completely upside down, she slipped it off in a moment, to our great humiliation and wonderment; each satisfied, afresh, that there were heights of knowledge in the world, to which we had not yet attained. We were now summoned to dinner, and a dinner it was, such as every _blind_ and starving man in the three kingdoms would have rejoiced to _behold_. At the top of the table stood a superb brown loaf. The centre dish presented a pile of the true coss lettuces, and at the bottom appeared an empty plate, where the "stout piece of cheese" _ought_ to have stood! (cruel mendicant!) and though the brandy was "clean gone," yet its place was well, if not _better_ supplied by an abundance of fine sparkling Castalian champagne! A happy thought at this time started into one of our minds, that some condiment would render the lettuces a little more palatable, when an individual in the company, recollected a question, once propounded by the most patient of men, "How can that which is unsavoury be eaten without _salt?_" and asked for a little of that valuable culinary article. "Indeed, sir," Betty replied, "I quite forgot to buy salt." A general laugh followed the announcement, in which our host heartily joined. This was nothing. We had plenty of other good things, and while crunching our succulents, and munching our crusts, we pitied the far worse condition of those, perchance as hungry as ourselves, who were forced to dine, off aether alone. For our next meal, the mile-off village furnished all that could be desired, and these trifling incidents present the sum and the result of half the little passing disasters of life. The "Lyrical Ballads" were published about Midsummer, 1798. In September of the same year, Mr. Coleridge and Mr. Wordsworth left England for Germany, and I quitted the business of a bookseller. Had I not once been such, this book would never have appeared. * * * * * The narrative of Mr. Coleridge being concluded to the time when he left Bristol, with Mr. Wordsworth, to visit Germany, I shall now, for the present, leave him; and direct the reader's attention to Mr. Southey, by introducing a portion of his long-continued correspondence with myself; but it may not be inappropriate to offer a few preliminary remarks:-- The following letters will exhibit the genuine character of Mr. Southey through the whole of his literary life. In the earlier periods, a playful hilarity will be found; but this buoyancy of spirit, when prevailing to excess, (in the constitutionally cheerful, such as was Mr. S.) is generally modified, if not subdued, by the sobering occurrences of after life. Letters, like the present, possess some peculiar advantages. Whenever, as in this instance, epistles are written through a series of years, to one person, the writer's mind is presented, under different aspects, while the identity is preserved. This benefit is greatly diminished, when, in a promiscuous correspondence, letters are addressed to a diversity of persons; often of different habits, and pursuits, where the writer must be compelled, occasionally, to moderate his expressions; to submit in some measure to mental restraint, by the necessity he is under to curb the flow of his spontaneous feeling. Besides this freedom from comparative bondage, one other advantage is derived from these continuous, and unconstrained letters to a single friend. A writer, in all his letters, from addressing one, for the most part, of congenial sympathies, expresses himself with less reserve; with more of the interior poured out; and consequently he maintains a freedom from that formality of essay-like sentences, which often resemble beautiful statues, fair, but cold and wanting life. When, during the Revolutionary war, disgusted with the excesses of the Trench, Mr. Southey saw it right, from a Foxite, to become a Pittite, some who did not know him, ascribed his change of sentiment to unworthy motives; of this number was my esteemed friend the late Rev. John Foster, who whilst freely admitting Mr. Southey's great attainments and distinguished genius, regarded his mind as injuriously biassed. He thought Mm a betrayer of his political friends. No countervailing effect was produced by affirming his uprightness, and the temperance with which he still spake of those from whom he was compelled to differ. He was told that Mr. Southey was no blind political partisan, but an honest vindicator of what, in his conscience, he believed to be right--that no earthly consideration could have tempted him to swerve from the plain paths of truth and justice. An appeal was made to his writings, which manifested great moderation: and as it respected the Church, the London, and the Baptist Missionary Societies, it might be said, that he courageously stood forth to vindicate them in the Quarterly, at a critical time, when those Societies had been assailed by Sydney Smith, in the Edinburgh Review. All proved unavailing. At length I submitted to Mr. Foster's inspection, Mr. Southey's correspondence for more than forty years, where, in the disclosure of the heart's deepest recesses, the undisguised character distinctly appears. He read, he admired, he recanted. In a letter to myself on returning the MS. he thus wrote: "The letters exhibit Southey as a man of sterling worth,--of sound principles;--faithfulness to old friendship, generosity, and, I trust I may say, genuine religion." And Mr. F. ever after expressed the same sentiments to his friends. It is confidently hoped that similar instances of unfavourable prepossession, may be corrected by the same means. In his "Friend" Mr. Coleridge thus refers to his early schemes of Pantisocracy. "Truth I pursued, as fancy led the way And wiser men than I went worse astray." "From my earliest manhood I perceived that if the people at large were neither ignorant nor immoral, there could be no motive for a sudden and violent change of Government; and if they were, there could be no hope but a change for the worse. My feelings and imagination did not remain unkindled in this general conflagration (the French Revolution) and I confess I should be more inclined to be ashamed than proud of myself if they had. I was a sharer in the general vortex, though my little world described the path of its revolution in an orbit of its own. What I dared not expect from constitutions of Government and whole nations, I hoped from religion, and a small company of chosen individuals, formed a plan, as harmless as it was extravagant, of trying the experiment of human perfectibility on the banks of the Susquehannah; where our little society, in its second generation, was to have combined the innocence of the patriarchal age with the knowledge and genuine refinements of European culture; and where I dreamt that in the sober evening of my life, I should behold the cottages of Independence in the undivided dale of liberty, 'And oft, soothed sadly by the dirgeful wind Muse on the sore ills I had left behind.' Strange fancies! and as vain as strange! Yet to the intense interest and impassioned zeal, which called forth and strained every faculty of my intellect for the organization and defence of this scheme, I owe much of whatever I at present possess,--my clearest insight into the nature of individual man, and my most comprehensive views of his social relations, of the true uses of trade and commerce, and how far the wealth and relative power of nations promote or impede their inherent strength." The following is Mr. Coleridge's estimate of Mr. Southey. "Southey stands second to no man, either as an historian or as a bibliographer; and when I regard him as a popular essayist, I look in vain for any writer who has conveyed so much information, from so many and such recondite sources, with so many just and original reflections, in a style so lively and poignant, yet so uniformly classical and perspicuous; no one, in short, who has combined so much wisdom, with so much wit; so much truth and knowledge, with so much life and fancy. His prose is always intelligible, and always entertaining. It is Southey's almost unexampled felicity, to possess the best gifts of talent and genius, free from all their characteristic defects. As son, brother, husband, father, master, friend, he moves with firm, yet light steps, alike unostentatious, and alike exemplary. As a writer he has uniformly made his talents subservient to the best interests of humanity, of public virtue, and domestic piety; his cause has ever been the cause of pure religion, and of liberty, of national independence, and of national illumination."--_Bio. Lit._ The reader has several times heard of Pantisocracy; a scheme perfectly harmless in itself, though obnoxious to insuperable objections. The ingenious devisers of this state of society, gradually withdrew from it their confidence; not in the first instance without a struggle; but cool reflection presented so many obstacles, that the plan, of itself, as the understanding expanded, gradually dissolved into "thin air." A friend had suggested the expediency of first trying the plan in Wales, but even this less exceptionable theatre of experiment was soon abandoned, and sound sense obtained its rightful empire. It was mentioned in a former part, that Mr. Southey was the first to abandon the scheme of American colonization; and that, in confirmation, towards the conclusion of 1795, he accompanied his uncle, the Rev. Herbert Hill, Chaplain to the English factory at Lisbon, through some parts of Spain and Portugal; of which occurrence, Mr. S.'s entertaining "Letters" from those countries are the result; bearing testimony to his rapid accumulation of facts, and the accuracy of his observations on persons and things. The very morning on which Mr. Southey was married to Miss Edith Fricker,[51] he left his wife in the family of kind friends, and set off with his Uncle, to pass through Spain to Lisbon. But this procedure marks the delicacy and the noble character of his mind; as will appear from the following letter, received from him, just before he embarked. "Falmouth, 1795. My dear friend, I have learnt from Lovell the news from Bristol, public and private, and both of an interesting nature. My marriage is become public. You know that its publicity can give me no concern. I have done my duty. Perhaps you may think my motives for marrying (at that time) not sufficiently strong. One, and that to me of great weight, I believe was not mentioned to you. There might have arisen feelings of an unpleasant nature, at the idea of receiving support from one not legally a husband; and (do not show this to Edith) should I perish by shipwreck, or any other casualty, I have relations whose prejudices would then yield to the anguish of affection, and who would then love and cherish, and yield all possible consolation to my widow. Of such an evil there is but a possibility, but against possibility it was my duty to guard.[52] Farewell, Yours sincerely, Robert Southey." Mr. Southey having sent me two letters from the Peninsula, they are here presented to the reader. "Corunna, Dec. 15th, 1795. Indeed my dear friend, it is strange that you are reading a letter from me now, and not an account of our shipwreck. We left Falmouth on Tuesday mid-day; the wind was fair till the next night, so fair that we were within twelve hours' sail of Corunna; it then turned round, blew a tempest, and continued so till the middle of Saturday. Our dead lights were up fifty hours, and I was in momentary expectation of death. You know what a situation this is. I forgot my sickness, and though I thought much of the next world, thought more of those at Bristol, who would daily expect letters; daily be disappointed, and at last learn from the newspapers, that the Lauzarotte had never been heard of. Of all things it is most difficult to understand the optimism of this difference of language; the very beasts of the country do not understand English. Say "poor fellow" to a dog, and he will probably bite you; the cat will come if you call her "Meeth-tha," but "puss" is an outlandish phrase she has not been accustomed to; last night I went to supper to the fleas, and an excellent supper they made; and the cats serenaded me with their execrable Spanish: to lie all night in _Bowling-Green Lane_,[53] would be to enjoy the luxury of soft and smooth lying. At sight of land a general shaving took place; no subject could be better for Bunbury than a Packet cabin taken at such a moment. For me, I am as yet whiskered, for I would not venture to shave on board, and have had no razor on shore till this evening. Custom-house officers are more troublesome here than in England, I have however got everything at last; you may form some idea of the weather we endured; thirty fowls over our head were drowned; the ducks got loose, and ran with a party of half naked Dutchmen into our cabin: 'twas a precious place, eight men lying on a shelf much like a coffin. Mr. Wahrendoff, a Swede, was the whole time with the bason close under his nose. The bookseller's shop was a great comfort; the Consul here has paid me particular attentions, and I am to pass to-morrow morning with him, when he will give me some directions concerning Spanish literature. He knows the chief literary men in England, and did know Brissot and Petion. Of the dramatic poet whom Coates's friend Zimbernatt mentioned as rivalling Shakspeare, I hear nothing; that young Spaniard seems to exaggerate or rather to represent things like a warm-hearted young man, who believes what he wishes. The father-in-law of Tallien is a banker, what you call a clever fellow; another word, says the most sensible man here, for a cheat; the court and the clergy mutually support each other, and their combined despotism is indeed dreadful, yet much is doing; Jardine is very active; he has forwarded the establishment of schools in the Asturias with his Spanish friends. Good night, they are going to supper. Oh, their foul oils and wines! Tuesday morning. I have heard of hearts as hard as rocks, and stones, and adamants, but if ever I write upon a hard heart, my simile shall be, as inflexible as a bed in a Spanish Posada; we had beef steaks for supper last night, and a sad libel upon beef steaks they were. I wish you could see our room; a bed in an open recess, one just moved from the other corner. Raynsford packing his trunk; Maber shaving himself; tables and chairs; looking-glass hung too high even for a Patagonian, the four evangelists, &c. &c. the floor beyond all filth, most filthy. I have been detained two hours since I began to write, at the custom house. Mr. Cottle, if there be a custom house to pass through, to the infernal regions, all beyond must be, comparatively, tolerable.... Adieu, Robert Southey." "Lisbon, February 1st, 1796. 'Certainly, I shall hear from Mr. Cottle, by the first packet' said I. Now I say, 'probably I may hear by the next,' so does experience abate the sanguine expectations of man. What, could you not write one letter? and here am I writing not only to all my friends in Bristol, but to all in England. Indeed I should have been vexed, but that the packet brought a letter from Edith, and the pleasure that gave me, allowed no feeling of vexation. What of 'Joan?' Mr. Coates tells me it gains upon the public, but authors seldom hear the plain truth. I am anxious that it should reach a second edition, that I may write a new preface, and enlarge the last book. I shall omit all in the second book which Coleridge wrote. Bristol deserves panegyric instead of satire. I know of no mercantile place so literary. Here I am among the Philistines, spending my mornings so pleasantly, as books, only books, can make them, and sitting at evening the silent spectator of card playing and dancing. The English here unite the spirit of commerce, with the frivolous amusements of high life. One of them who plays every night (Sundays are not excepted here) will tell you how closely he attends to profit. 'I never pay a porter for bringing a burthen till the next day,' says he, 'for while the fellow feels his back ache with the weight, he charges high; but when he comes the next day the feeling is gone, and he asks only half the money.' And the author of this philosophical scheme is worth £200,000! This is a comfortless place, and the only pleasure I find in it, is in looking on to my departure. Three years ago I might have found a friend, Count Leopold Berchtold. This man (foster brother of the Emperor Joseph) is one of those rare characters, who spend their lives in doing good. It is his custom in every country he visits, to publish books in its language, on some subject of practical utility; these he gave away. I have now lying before me the two which he printed in Lisbon; the one is an Essay on the means of preserving life, in the various dangers to which men are daily exposed. The other an Essay on extending the limits of benevolence, not only towards men, but towards animals. His age was about twenty-five; his person and his manners the most polished. My uncle saw more of him than any one, for he used his library; and this was the only house he called at; he was only seen at dinner, the rest of the day was constantly given to study. They who lived in the same house with him, believed him to be the wandering Jew. He spoke all the European languages, had written in all, and was master of the Arabic. From thence he went to Cadiz, and thence to Barbary; no more is known of him. We felt a smart earthquake the morning after our arrival here. These shocks alarm the Portuguese dreadfully; and indeed it is the most terrifying sensation you can conceive. One man jumped out of bed and ran down to the stable, to ride off almost naked as he was. Another, more considerately put out his candle, 'because I know,' said he 'the fire does more harm than the earthquake.' The ruins of the great earthquake are not yet removed entirely. The city is a curious place; a straggling plan; built on the most uneven ground, with heaps of ruins in the middle, and large open places. The streets filthy beyond all English ideas of filth, for they throw everything into the streets, and nothing is removed. Dead animals annoy you at every corner; and such is the indolence and nastiness of the Portuguese, that I verily believe they would let each other rot, in the same manner, if the priests did not get something by burying them. Some of the friars are vowed to wear their clothes without changing for a year; and this is a comfort to them: you will not wonder, therefore, that I always keep to the windward of these reverend perfumers. The streets are very disagreeable in wet weather. If you walk under the houses you are drenched by the waterspouts; if you attempt the middle, there is a river; if you would go between both, there is the dunghill. The rains here are very violent, and the streams in the streets, on a declivity, so rapid as to throw down men; and sometimes to overset carriages. A woman was drowned some years ago, in one of the most frequented streets of Lisbon. But to walk home at night is the most dangerous adventure, for then the chambermaids shower out the filth into the streets with such profusion, that a Scotchman might fancy himself at Edinburgh. You cannot conceive what a cold perspiration it puts me in, to hear one dashed down just before me; as Thomson says, with a little alteration: "Hear nightly dashed, amid the perilous street, The fragrant stink pot." This furnishes food for innumerable dogs, that belong to nobody, and annoy everybody. If they did not devour it, the quantities would breed a pestilence. In a moonlight night, we see dogs and rats feeding at the same dunghill. Lisbon is plagued with a very small species of red ant, that swarm over everything in the house. Their remedy for this is, to send for the priest, and exorcise them. The drain from the new convent opens into the middle of the street. An English pigsty is cleaner than the metropolis of Portugal. To-night I shall see the procession of 'Our Lord of the Passion.' This image is a very celebrated one, and with great reason, for one night he knocked at the door of St Roque's church, and there they would not admit him. After this he walked to the other end of the town, to the church of St. Grace, and there they took him in: but a dispute now arose between the two churches, to which the image belonged; whether to the church which he first chose, or the church that first chose him. The matter was compromised. One church has him, and the other fetches him for their processions, and he sleeps with the latter the night preceding. The better mode for deciding it, had been to place the gentleman between both, and let him walk to which he liked best. What think you of this story being believed in 1796!!! The power of the Inquisition still exists, though they never exercise it, and thus the Jews save their bacon. Fifty years ago it was the greatest delight of the Portuguese to see a Jew burnt. Geddes, the then chaplain, was present at one of these detestable Auto da Fe's. He says, 'the transports expressed by all ages, and all sexes, whilst the miserable sufferers were shrieking and begging mercy for God's sake, formed a scene more horrible than any out of hell!' He adds, that 'this barbarity is not their national character, for no people sympathize so much at the execution of a criminal; but it is the damnable nature of their religion, and the most diabolical spirit of their priests; their celibacy deprives them of the affections of men, and their creed gives them the ferocity of devils.' Geddes saw one man gagged, because, immediately he came out of the Inquisition gates, he looked up at the sun, whose light for many years had never visited him, and exclaimed, 'How is it possible for men who behold that glorious orb, to worship any being but him who created it!' My blood runs cold when I pass that accursed building; and though they do not exercise their power, it is a reproach to human nature that the building should exist. It is as warm here as in May with you; of course we broil in that month at Lisbon; but I shall escape the hot weather here, as I did the cold weather of England, and quit this place the latter end of April. You will of course see me the third day after my landing at Falmouth, or, if I can get companions in a post-chaise, sooner. This my resolution is like the law of the Medes and Persians, that altereth not. Be so good as to procure for me a set of Coleridge's 'Watchman,' with his Lectures and Poems. I want to write a tragedy here, but can find no leisure to begin it. Portugal is much plagued with robbers, and they generally strip a man, and leave him to walk home in his birth-day suit. An Englishman was served thus at Almeyda, and the Lisbon magistrates, on his complaint, took up the whole village, and imprisoned them all. Contemplate this people in what light you will, you can never see them in a good one. They suffered their best epic poet to perish for want: and they burned to death their best dramatic writer, because he was a Jew. Pombal, whose heart was bad, though he made a good minister, reduced the church during his administration. He suffered no persons to enter the convents, and, as the old monks and nuns died, threw two convents into one, and sold the other estates. By this means, he would have annihilated the whole generation of vermin; but the king died, and the queen, whose religion has driven her mad, undid, through the influence of the priests, all that Pombal had done. He escaped with his life, but lived to see his bust destroyed, and all his plans for the improvement of Portugal reversed. He had the interest of his country at heart, and the punishment, added to the regret of having committed so many crimes to secure his power, must almost have been enough for this execrable marquis. The climate here is delightful, and the air so clear, that when the moon is young, I can often distinguish the whole circle, thus; O. You and Robert may look for this some fine night, but I do not remember ever to have observed it in England. The stars appear more brilliant here, but I often look up at the Pleiades, and remember how much happier I was when I saw them in Bristol. Fare you well. Let me know that my friends remember me.... Robert Southey." After the complete reconciliation had taken place with Mr. Coleridge, Mr. Southey in the autumn of 1796, settled in London, and purposed to study the law. From London he sent me the following letter. "London, Nov. 1796. My dear friend, I am now entering on a new way of life which will lead me to independence. You know that I neither lightly undertake any scheme, nor lightly abandon what I have undertaken. I am happy because I have no want, and because the independence I labour to attain, and of attaining which, my expectations can hardly be disappointed, will leave me nothing to wish. I am indebted to you, Cottle, for the comforts of my later time. In my present situation I feel a pleasure in saying thus much. Thank God! Edith comes on Monday next. I say Thank God, for I have never since my return from Portugal, been absent from her so long before, and sincerely hope and intend never to be so again. On Tuesday we shall be settled, and on Wednesday my legal studies begin in the morning, and I shall begin with 'Madoc' in the evening. Of this it is needless to caution you to say nothing; as I must have the character of a lawyer; and though I can and will unite the two pursuits, no one would credit the possibility of the union. In two years the Poem shall be finished, and the many years it must lie by will afford ample time for correction. I have declined being a member of a Literary Club, which meet at the Chapter Coffee House, and of which I had been elected a member. Surely a man does not do his duty who leaves his wife to evenings of solitude; and I feel duty and happiness to be inseparable. I am happier at home than any other society can possibly make me. With Edith I am alike secure from the wearisomeness of solitude, and the disgust which I cannot help feeling at the contemplation of mankind, and which I do not wish to suppress. Here is a great deal about myself, and nothing about those whom I have seen in London, and of whom we have all heard in the country. I will make a report upon them in my next letter. God bless you. Yours sincerely, Robert Southey." Letter from Robert Southey, to Amos Cottle, Magdalen College, Cambridge. "London, Feb. 28, 1797. 20, Prospect Place, Newington Butts. ... Here I am travelling on in the labyrinth of the law; and though I had rather make books myself than read the best lawyer's composition, I am getting on cheerfully, and steadily, and well. While you are amusing yourself with mathematics, and I lounging over the law, the political and commercial world are all in alarm and confusion. I cannot call myself a calm witness of all this, for I sit by the fireside, hear little about it, think less, and see nothing; 'all hoping, and expecting all in patient faith.' Tranquillity of mind is a blessing too valuable to sacrifice for all the systems man has ever established. My day of political enthusiasm is over. I know what is right, and as I see that everything is wrong, care more about the changing of the wind, lest it should make the chimney smoke, than for all the empires of Europe...." "London, 1797. My dear friend, ... I physiognomise everything, even the very oysters may be accurately judged by their shells. I discovered this at Lisbon, where they are all deformed, hump-backed, and good for nothing. Is it not possible by the appearance of a river to tell what fish are in it? In the slow sluggish stream you will find the heavy chub. In the livelier current, the trout and the pike. If a man loves prints you have an excellent clue to his character; take for instance, the inventory of mine at College:--Four views of the ruins at Rome; Charles Fox; Belisarius; Niobe; and four Landscapes of Poussin; and Claude Lorraine. These last are of constant source of pleasure. I become acquainted with the inhabitants in every house, and know every inch of ground in the prospect. They have formed for me many a pleasant day-dream. I can methodise these into a little poem. I am now settled; my books are organised; and this evening I set off on my race. We have a story of a ghost here, who appears to the watchman,--the spirit of a poor girl, whose life was abandoned, and her death most horrible. I am in hopes it may prove _true!_ as I have a great love for apparitions. They make part of the poetical creed. Fare you well. Sincerely yours, To Joseph Cottle. Robert Southey." "London, March 6, 1797. ... I am inclined to complain heavily of you, Cottle. Here am I committing grand larceny on my time, in writing to you; and you, who might sit at your fire, and write me huge letters, have not found time to fill even half a sheet. As you may suppose, I have enough of employment. I work like a negro at law, and therefore neglect nothing else, for he who never wastes time has always time enough. I have to see many of the London lions, or literati, George Dyer is to take me to Mary Hayes, Miss Christal, and Taylor, the Pagan, my near neighbour. You shall have my physiognomical remarks upon them. I hate this city more and more, although I see little of it. You do not know with what delight I anticipate a summer in Wales, and I hope to spend the summer of the next year there, and to talk Welsh most gutturally. I shall see Meirion this week, whose real name is William Owen. He is the author of the new Welsh dictionary, a man of uncommon erudition, and who ought to esteem me for Madoc's sake. Fare you well. Remember me to all friends. God bless you. Yours sincerely, Robert Southey." "... Perhaps you will be surprised to hear, that of all the lions of literati that I have seen here, there is not one whose countenance has not some unpleasant trait. Mary Imlay is the best, infinitely the best. The only fault in it, is an expression somewhat similar to what the prints of Horne Tooke display; an expression indicating superiority, not haughtiness, not conceit, not sarcasm, in Mary Imlay, but still it is unpleasant. Her eyes are light brown, and though the lid of one of them is affected by a slight paralysis, they are the most meaning I ever saw. Her complexion is dark, sun-burnt, and her skin a little cracked, for she is near forty, and affliction has borne harder on her than years; but her manners are the most pleasing I ever witnessed, they display warm feeling, and strong understanding; and the knowledge she has acquired of men and manners, ornaments, not disguises, her own character. I have given an unreserved opinion of Mrs. Barbauld to Charles Danvers. While I was with George Dyer one morning last week, Mary Hayes and Miss Christal entered, and the ceremony of introduction followed. Mary Hayes writes in the New Monthly Magazine, under the signature of M. H., and sometimes writes nonsense there about Helvetius. She has lately published a novel, 'Emma Courtney,' a book much praised and much abused. I have not seen it myself, but the severe censure passed on it by persons of narrow mind, have made me curious, and convinced me that it is at least an uncommon book. Mary Hayes is an agreeable woman and a Godwinite. Now if you will read Godwin's book with attention, we will determine between us, in what light to consider that sectarian title. As for Godwin himself, he has large noble eyes, and a nose,--oh, most abominable nose! Language is not vituperative enough to express the effect of its downward elongation. He loves London, literary society, and talks nonsense about the collision of mind, and Mary Hayes echoes him. But Miss Christal, have you seen her Poems? A fine, artless, sensible girl. Now, Cottle, that word sensible must not be construed here in its dictionary acceptation. Ask a Frenchman what it means, and he will understand it, though, perhaps, he can by no circumlocution explain its French meaning. Her heart is alive. She loves poetry. She loves retirement. She loves the country. Her verses are very incorrect, and the literary circle say, she has no genius, but she has genius, Joseph Cottle, or there is no truth in physiognomy. Gilbert Wakefield came in while I was disputing with Mary Hayes upon the moral effects of towns. He has a most critic-like voice, as if he had snarled himself hoarse. You see I like the women better than the men. Indeed they are better animals in general, perhaps because more is left to nature in their education. Nature is very good, but God knows there is very little of it left. I wish you were within a morning's walk, but I am always persecuted by time and space. Robert Southey, and law, and poetry, make up an odd kind of tri-union. We jog on easily together, and I advance with sufficient rapidity in Blackstone, and 'Madoc.' I hope to finish my poem, and to begin my practice in about two years. God bless you. Yours affectionately, Robert Southey." "... I am running a race with the printers again: translating a work from the French: 'Necker on the French Revolution,' vol. II. Dr. Aikin and his son translate the 1st volume. My time is wholly engrossed by the race, for I run at the rate of sixteen pages a day; as hard going as sixteen miles for a hack horse. About sixteen days more will complete it. There is no necessity for my residing in London till the close of the autumn. Therefore after keeping the next term, which may be kept the first week in May, I intend to go into the country for five months; probably near the sea, at the distance of one day's journey from London, for the convenience of coming up to keep the Trinity Term. This will not increase my expenses, though it will give me all the pleasure of existence which London annihilates. God bless you, Yours affectionately, Robert Southey." "My dear Cottle, ... George Dyer gave me what he calls his 'Crotchet,' and what I call an indifferent poem. Said he to me, 'I could not bring in Wordsworth, and Lloyd, and Lamb, but I put them in a note.' That man is all benevolence. If, which is probable, we go to Hampshire, I shall expect to see you there. It is an easy day's ride from Bristol to Southampton; but I shall lay before you a correct map of the road when all is settled. I have seen your Dr. Baynton's book. It is vilely written; but the theory, seems good, (that of bandaging wounded legs) My friend Carlisle means to try it at the Westminster Hospital. I was somewhat amused at seeing a treatise on sore legs, printed on wove paper, and hot pressed. I met Townsend, the Spanish traveller, a few days since at Carlisle's. He flattered me most unpleasantly on 'Joan of Arc.' Townsend is much taller than I am, and almost as thin. He invited me to Pewsey, and I shall breakfast with him soon. He is engaged in a work of immense labour; the origin of languages. I do not like him; he is too polite to be sincere. Yours affectionately, Robert Southey." The late George Dyer, referred to by Mr. Southey, was an University man who exercised his talents chiefly in writing for the Periodicals. His chief work was "The History of the Halls and Colleges of Cambridge." He published also several small works. The Poem, referred to above, was complimentary, in which he noticed most of his literary friends. The way in which he "brought in" the author of the "Pleasures of Memory" was, very properly putting wit before wealth, "Was born a banker, and then rose a bard," George Dyer was sincere, and had great simplicity of manners, so that he was a favourite with all his friends. No man in London encouraged so much as he did, Bloomfield, the author of the "Farmer's Boy;" and he was equally prepared with kind offices for every body. He had some odd fancies, one of which was, that men ought to live more sparingly and drink plenty of water-gruel. By carrying this wholesome precept on one occasion, rather too far, he unhappily reduced himself to death's door. Charles Lamb told me, that having once called on him, at his room in Clifford's Inn, he found a little girl with him, (one of his nieces) whom he was teaching to sing hymns. Mr. Coleridge related to me a rather ludicrous circumstance concerning George Dyer, which Charles Lamb had told him, the last time he passed through London. Charles Lamb had heard that George Dyer was very ill, and hastened to see him. He found him in an emaciated state, shivering over a few embers. "Ah!" said George, as Lamb entered, "I am glad to see you. You wont have me here long. I have just written this letter to my young nephews and nieces, to come immediately and take a final leave of their uncle." Lamb found, on inquiry, that he had latterly been living on water-gruel, and a low starving diet, and readily divined the cause of his maladies. "Come," said Lamb, "I shall take you home immediately to my house, and I and my sister will nurse you." "Ah!" said George Dyer, "it wont do." The hackney coach was soon at the door, and as the sick man entered it, he said to Lamb, "Alter the address, and then send the letter with all speed to the poor children." "I will," said Lamb, "and at the same time call the doctor." George Dyer was now seated by Charles Lamb's comfortable fire, while Lamb hastened to his medical friend, and told him that a worthy man was at his house who had almost starved himself on water-gruel. "You must come," said he, "directly, and prescribe some kitchen stuff, or the poor man will be dead. He wont take any thing from me; he says, 'tis all useless." Away both the philanthropists hastened, and Charles Lamb, anticipating what would be required, furnished himself, on the road, with a pound of beef steaks. The doctor now entered the room, and advancing towards his patient, felt his pulse, and asked him a few questions; when, looking grave, he said, "Sir, you are in a very dangerous way," "I know it Sir, I know it Sir," said George Dyer. The Dr. replied, "Sir, yours is a very peculiar case, and if you do not implicitly follow my directions, you will die of atrophy before to-morrow morning. It is the only possible chance of saving your life. You must directly make a good meal off beef-steaks, and drink the best part of a pot of porter." "Tis too late," said George, but "I'll eat, I'll eat." The doctor now withdrew, and so nicely had Lamb calculated on results, that the steaks were all this time broiling on the fire! and, as though by magic, the doctor had scarcely left the room, when the steaks and the porter were both on the table. Just as George Dyer had begun voraciously to feast on the steaks, his young nephews and nieces entered the room crying. "Good bye, my dears," said George, taking a deep draught of the porter. "You wont see me much longer." After a few mouthfuls of the savoury steak, he further said, "be good children, when I am gone." Taking another draught of the porter, he continued, "mind your books, and don't forget your hymns." "We wont," answered a little shrill silvery voice, from among the group, "we wont, dear Uncle." He now gave them all a parting kiss; when the children retired in a state of wonderment, that "sick Uncle" should be able to eat and drink so heartily. "And so," said Lamb, in his own peculiar phraseology "at night, I packed up his little nipped carcass snug in bed, and, after stuffing him for a week, sent him home as plump as a partridge." "April, 26, 1797. "... I have finished Necker this morning, and return again to my regular train of occupation. Would that digging potatoes were amongst them! and if I live a dozen years, you shall eat potatoes of my digging: but I must think now of the present. Some Mr. ---- sent me a volume of his poems, last week. I read his book: it was not above mediocrity. He seems very fond of poetry and even to a superstitious reverence of Thompson's 'old table,' and even of Miss Seward, whose MS. he rescued from the printer. I called on him to thank him, and was not sorry to find him not at home. But the next day a note arrived with more praise. He wished my personal acquaintance, and 'trusts I shall excuse the frankness which avows, that it would gratify his feelings to receive a copy of 'Joan of Arc, from the author.' I thought this, to speak tenderly, not a very modest request, but there is a something in my nature which prevents me from silently displaying my sentiments, if that display can give pain, and so I answered his note, and sent him the book. He writes sonnets to Miss Seward, and Mr. Hayley; enough to stamp him 'blockhead.' Carlisle and I, instead of our neighbours' 'Revolutionary Tribunal,' mean to erect a physiognomical one, and as transportation is to be the punishment, instead of guillotining, we shall put the whole navy in requisition to carry off all ill-looking fellows, and then we may walk London streets without being jostled. You are to be one of the Jury, and we must get some good limner to take down the evidence. Witnesses will be needless. The features of a man's face will rise up in judgment against him; and the very voice that pleads 'Not Guilty,' will be enough to convict the raven-toned criminal. I sapped last night with Ben. Flower, of Cambridge, at Mr. P.'s, and never saw so much coarse strength in a countenance. He repeated to me an epigram on the dollars which perhaps you may not have seen. To make Spanish dollars with Englishmen pass, Stamp the head of a fool, on the tail of an ass.[54] This has a coarse strength rather than a point. Danvers tells me that you have written to Herbert Croft. Give me some account of your letter. Let me hear from you, and tell me how you all are, and what is going on in the little world of Bristol. God bless you. Yours affectionately, Robert Southey. "... We dine with Mary Wolstoncroft (now Godwin) to-morrow. Oh! he has a foul nose! I never see it without longing to cut it off. By the by, Dr. Hunter (the murderer of St. Pierre) [55] told me that I had exactly Lavater's nose, to my no small satisfaction, for I did not know what to make of that protuberance, or promontory of mine. I could not compliment him. He has a very red drinking face: little good humoured eyes, with the skin drawn up under them, like cunning and short-sightedness united. I saw Dr. Hunter again yesterday. I neither like him, nor his wife, nor his son, nor his daughter, nor any thing that is his. To night I am to meet Opie. God bless you. Edith's love. Yours affectionately, Robert Southey." "May, 1797. My dear Cottle, ... Opie indeed is a very extraordinary man. I have now twice seen him. Without any thing of politeness, his manners are pleasing, though their freedom is out of the common; and his conversation, though in a half-uttered, half-Cornish, half-croak, is interesting. There is a strange contrast between his genius, which is not confined to painting, and the vulgarity of his appearance, --his manners, and sometimes of his language. You will however easily conceive that a man who can paint like Opie, must display the same taste on other subjects. He is very fond of Spenser. No author furnishes so many pictures, he says. You may have seen his 'Britomart delivering Amoret.' He has begun a picture from Spenser,--which he himself thinks his best design, but it has remained untouched for three years. The outline is wonderfully fine. It is the delivery of Serena from the Salvages, by Calepine. You will find the story in the 6th book of the 'Fairy Queen.' The subject has often struck me as being fit for the painter. I saw Dr. Gregory (Biographer of Chatterton) to-day; a very brown-looking man, of most pinquescent, and full-moon cheeks. There is much tallow in him. I like his wife, and perhaps him too, but his Christianity is of an intolerant order, and he affects a solemnity when talking of it, which savours of the high priest. When he comes before the physiognomical tribunal, we must melt him down. He is too portly. God bless you.... Yours truly, Robert Southey." May, 1797. "... I fancy you see no hand-writing so often as mine. I have been much pleased with your letter to Herbert Croft. I was at Dr. Gregory's last night. He has a nasal twang, right priestly in its note. He said he would gladly abridge his life of Chatterton, if I required it. But it is a bad work, and Coleridge should write a new one, or if he declines it, let it devolve on me.[56] They knew Miss Wesley, daughter of Charles Wesley, with whom I once dined at your house. She told them, had he not prematurely died, that she was going to be married to John Henderson. Is this true?[57] I have a treasure for you. A 'Treatise on Miracles,' written by John Henderson, your old tutor, for Coleridge's brother George, and given to me by a pupil of his, John May, a Lisbon acquaintance, and a very valuable one. John May is anxious for a full life of John Henderson. You should get Agutter's papers. You ought also to commit to paper all you know concerning him, and all you can collect, that the documents may remain, if you decline it. If the opportunity pass, he will die without his fame. I have lost myself in the bottomless profundity of Gilbert's papers. Fire, and water, and cubes, and sybils, and Mother Church, &c. &c. Poor fellow. I have been introduced to a man, not unlike him in his ideas,--Taylor the Pagan, a most devout Heathen! who seems to have some hopes of me. He is equally unintelligible, but his eye has not that inexpressible wildness, which sometimes half-terrified us in Gilbert." "Christ Church, June 14, 1797. "... I am in a place I like: the awkwardness of introduction over, and the acquaintance I have made here pleasant.... Your letter to Herbert Croft has made him some enemies here. I wish much to see you on that business. Bad as these times are for literature, a subscription might be opened now with great success, for Mrs. Newton (Chatterton's sister) and the whole statement of facts ought to be published in the prospectus. Time gallops with me. I am at work now for the Monthly Magazine, upon Spanish poetry. If we are unsuccessful here (in suiting ourselves with a house) I purpose writing to Wordsworth, and asking him if we can get a place in his neighbourhood. If not, down we go to Dorsetshire. Oh, for a snug island in the farthest of all seas, surrounded by the highest of all rocks, where I and some ten or twelve more might lead the happiest of all possible lives, totally secluded from the worst of all possible monsters, man...." "Christ Church, June 18, 1797. "... The main purport of my writing is to tell you that we have found a house for the next half year. If I had a mind to affect the pastoral style, I might call it a cottage; but, in plain English, it is exactly what it expresses. We have got a sitting-room, and two bed-rooms, in a house which you may call a cottage if you like it, and that one of these bed-rooms is ready for you, and the sooner you take possession of it the better. You must let me know when you come that I may meet you. So you have had Kosciusco with you, (in Bristol) and bitterly do I regret not having seen him. If he had remained one week longer in London, I should have seen him; and to have seen Kosciusco would have been something to talk of all the rest of one's life. We have a congregation of rivers here, the clearest you ever saw: plenty of private boats too. We went down to the harbour on Friday, in Mr. Rickman's;[58] a sensible young man, of rough, but mild manners, and very seditious. He and I rowed, and Edith was pilot. God bless you. Yours affectionately. Robert Southey." Mr. Rickman afterwards acquired some celebrity. He became private secretary to the prime minister, Mr. Perceval, and afterwards for many years, was one of the clerks of the House of Commons. He published also, in 4to, a creditable Life of Telford, the great engineer, and officially conducted the first census, (1800) a most laborious undertaking. The second census, (1810) was conducted in a very efficient way, by Mr. Thomas Poole, whose name often appears in this work, appointed through the influence of Mr. Rickman. "London, Dec. 14, 1797. My dear Cottle, I found your parcel on my return from a library belonging to the Dissenters, (Dr. Williams's Library) in Redcross-street, from which, by permission of Dr. Towers, I brought back books of great importance for my 'Maid of Orleans.' A hackney coach horse turned into a field of grass, falls not more eagerly to a breakfast which lasts the whole day, than I attacked the old folios, so respectably covered with dust. I begin to like dirty rotten binding, and whenever I get among books, pass by the gilt coxcombs, and disturb the spiders. But you shall hear what I have got. A latin poem in four long books; on 'Joan of Arc;' very bad, but it gives me a quaint note or two, and Valerandus Valerius is a fine name for a quotation. A small 4to, of the 'Life of the Maid', chiefly extracts from forgotten authors, printed at Paris, 1712, with a print of her on horseback. A sketch of her life by Jacobus Philippus Bergomensis,--bless the length of his erudite name. John May, and Carlisle, (surgeon) were with me last night, and we struck out a plan, which, if we can effect it, will be of great use. It is to be called the 'Convalescent Asylum'; and intended to receive persons who are sent from the hospitals; as the immediate return to unwholesome air, bad diet, and all the loathsomeness of poverty, destroys a very great number. The plan is to employ them in a large garden, and it is supposed in about three years, the institution would pay itself, on a small scale for forty persons. The success of one, would give birth to many others. C. W. W. Wynn enters heartily into it. We meet on Saturday again, and as soon as the plan is at all digested, Carlisle means to send it to Dr. Beddoes, for his inspection. We were led to this by the circumstance of finding a poor woman, almost dying for want, who is now rapidly recovering in the hospital, under Carlisle. Yours affectionately, Robert Southey." "1798. My dear Cottle, In the list of the killed and wounded of the 'Mars,' you saw the name of Bligh, a midshipman. I remember rejoicing at the time, that it was not a name I knew. Will you be surprised that the object of this letter is to require your assistance in raising some little sum for the widow of this man. I cannot express to you how deep and painful an interest I take in the history of this man. My brother Tom, an officer in the same ship, loved him; and well he might, for poor Bligh was a man, who, out of his midshipman's pay, allowed his wife and children thirteen pounds a year. He wished to be made master's mate, that he might make the sum twenty pounds, and then he said they would be happy. He was a man about thirty-five years of age; an unlettered man, of strong natural powers, and of a heart, of which a purer, and a better, never lived. I could tell you anecdotes of him that would make your eyes overflow, like mine. Surely, Cottle, there will be no difficulty in sending his poor wife some little sum. Five guineas would be much to her. We will give one, and I will lay friends in London under contribution. God bless you. Yours truly, Robert Southey." "Hereford, 1798. My dear Cottle, My time here has been completely occupied in riding about the country. I have contrived to manufacture one eclogue, and that is all; but the exercise of riding has jostled a good many ideas into my brain, and I have plans enough for long leisure. You know my tale of the 'Adite' in the garden of Irem. I have tacked it on to an old plan of mine upon the destruction of the Domdanyel, and made the beginning, middle, and end. There is a tolerable skeleton formed. It will extend to ten or twelve books, and they appear to me to possess much strong conception in the Arabian manner. It will at least prove that I did not reject machinery in my Epics, because I could not wield it. This only forms part of a magnificent project, which I do not despair of one day completing, in the destruction of the 'Domdanyel.' My intention is, to show off all the splendor of the Mohammedan belief. I intend to do the same to the Runic, and Oriental systems; to preserve the costume of place as well as of religion. I have been thinking that though we have been disappointed of our Welsh journey, a very delightful pilgrimage is still within our reach. Suppose you were to meet me at Boss. We go thence down the Wye to Monmouth. On the way are Goodrich castle, the place where Henry V. was nursed; and Arthur's cavern. Then there is Ragland Castle somewhere thereabout, and we might look again at Tintern. I should like this much. The Welsh mail from Bristol, comes every day through Boss; we can meet there. Let me hear from you, and then I will fix the day, and we will see the rocks and woods in all their beauty. God bless you. Yours affectionately, Robert Southey." "Exeter, Sept. 22, 1799. My dear Cottle, ... You will, I hope, soon have a cargo to send me of your own, for the second volume of the 'Anthology' and some from Davy. If poor Mrs. Yearsley were living I should like much to have her name there. As yet I have only Coleridge's pieces, and my own, amounting to eighty or one hundred pages. 'Thalaba, the Destroyer' is progressing. There is a poem called 'Geber' of which I know not whether my review of it, in the Critical' be yet printed, but in that review you will find some of the most exquisite poetry in the language. The poem is such as Gilbert, if he were only half as mad as he is, could have written. I would go a hundred miles to see the (anonymous) author.[59] There are some worthies in Exeter, with whom I have passed some pleasant days, but the place is miserably bigoted. Would you believe that there are persons here who still call the Americans 'the Rebels' Exeter is the filthiest town in England; a gutter running down the middle of every street and lane. We leave on Monday week. I shall rejoice to breathe fresh air. Exeter, however, has the best collection of old books for sale, of any town out of London.[60] I have lately made up my mind to undertake one great historical work, the 'History of Portugal,' but for this, and for many other noble plans, I want uninterrupted leisure; time wholly my own, and not frittered away by little periodical employments. My working at such work is Columbus serving before the mast. God bless you. Yours affectionately, Robert Southey." "Falmouth, 1800. My dear Cottle, Our journey here was safe, but not without accidents. We found the packet, by which we were to sail, detained by the wind, and we are watching it with daily anxiety.[61] A voyage is a serious thing, and particularly an outward-bound voyage. The hope of departure is never an exhilarating hope. Inns are always comfortless, and the wet weather that detains us at Falmouth, imprisons us. Dirt, noise, restlessness, expectation, impatience,--fine cordials for the spirits! Devonshire is an ugly county. I have no patience with the cant of travellers, who so bepraise it. They have surely slept all the way through Somersetshire. Its rivers are beautiful, very beautiful, but nothing else. High hills, all angled over with hedges, and no trees. Wide views, and no object. I have heard a good story of our friend, Charles Fox. When his house, at this place, was on fire, he found all effort to save it useless, and being a good draughtsman, he went up the next hill to make a drawing of the fire! the best instance of philosophy I ever heard. I have received letters from Rickman and Coleridge. Coleridge talks of flaying Sir Herbert Croft. This may not be amiss. God bless you. I shake you mentally by the hand, and when we shake hands bodily, trust that you will find me a repaired animal, with a head fuller of knowledge, and a trunk full of manuscripts. Tell Davy this Cornwall is such a vile county, that nothing but its merit, as his birth-place, redeems it from utter execration. I have found in it nothing but rogues, restive horses, and wet weather; and neither Pilchards, White-ale, or Squab-pie, were to be obtained! Last night I dreamt that Davy had killed himself by an explosion. Once more, God bless you. Yours affectionately, Robert Southey. Mr. Southey, in this second visit to Lisbon, sent me the following poetical letter, which, for ease, vivacity, and vigorous description, stands at the head of that class of compositions. A friendly vessel, mistaken for a French privateer, adds to the interest. In one part, the poet conspicuously bursts forth. "Lisbon, May 9th, 1800. Dear Cottle, d'ye see, In writing to thee, I do it in rhyme, That I may save time, Determin'd to say, Without any delay, Whatever comes first, Whether best or worst. Alack for me! When I was at sea, For I lay like a log, As sick as a dog, And whoever this readeth, Will pity poor Edith: Indeed it was shocking, The vessel fast rocking, The timbers all creaking, And when we were speaking, It was to deplore That we were not on shore, And to vow we would never go voyaging more. The fear of our fighting, Did put her a fright in, And I had alarms For my legs and my arms. When the matches were smoking, I thought 'twas no joking, And though honour and glory And fame were before me, 'Twas a great satisfaction, That we had not an action, And I felt somewhat bolder, When I knew that my head might remain on my shoulder. But O! 'twas a pleasure, Exceeding all measure, On the deck to stand, And look at the land; And when I got there, I vow and declare, The pleasure was even Like getting to heaven! I could eat and drink, As you may think; I could sleep at ease, Except for the fleas, But still the sea-feeling,-- The drunken reeling, Did not go away For more than a day: Like a cradle, the bed Seemed to rock my head, And the room and the town, Went up and down. My Edith here, Thinks all things queer, And some things she likes well; But then the street She thinks not neat, And does not like the smell. Nor do the fleas Her fancy please Although the fleas like her; They at first vie w Fell merrily too, For they made no demur. But, O, the sight! The great delight! From this my window, west! This view so fine, This scene divine! The joy that I love best! The Tagus here, So broad and clear, Blue, in the clear blue noon-- And it lies light, All silver white, Under the silver moon! Adieu, adieu, Farewell to you, Farewell, my friend so dear, Write when you may, I need not say, How gladly we shall hear. I leave off rhyme, And so next time, Prose writing you shall see; But in rhyme or prose, Dear Joseph knows The same old friend in me, Robert Southey." * * * * * [Illustration: Portrait of Robert Southey, Esq. Poet Laurate.] * * * * * "Portugal, Cintra, July, 1800. My dear Cottle, I write at a five minutes' notice. The unforeseen and unlucky departure of my only friend gives me occasion for this letter, and opportunity to send it. It is Miss Barker Congreve. She is a woman of uncommon talents, with whom we have been wandering over these magnificent mountains, till she made the greatest enjoyment of the place. I feel a heavier depression of spirits at losing her than I have known since Tom left me at Liskard. We are at Cintra: I am well and active, in better health than I have long known, and till to-day, in uninterrupted gaiety at heart. I am finishing the eleventh book of 'Thalaba' and shall certainly have written the last before this reaches you. My Bristol friends have neglected me. Danvers has not written, and Edith is without a line from either of her sisters. My desk is full of materials for the literary history which will require only the labour of arrangement and translation, on my return. I shall have the knowledge for the great work; and my miscellaneous notes will certainly swell into a volume of much odd and curious matter. Pray write to me. You know not how I hunger and thirst for Bristol news. I long to be among you. If I could bring this climate to Bristol, it would make me a new being: but I am in utter solitude of all rational society; in a state of mental famine, save that I feed on rocks and woods, and the richest banquet nature can possibly offer to her worshippers. God bless you. Abuse Danvers for me. Remember me to Davy, and all friendly inquirers. Yours affectionately, Robert Southey. P. S.--.... The zeal of the Methodists and their itinerant preachers, has reprieved for half a century the system; but you must be aware, that sooner or later, the Church of England will absorb all those sects that differ only in discipline. The comfortable latitude that takes in the Calvinist and the Arminian, must triumph. The Catholic system will perhaps, last the longest; and bids fair to continue as a political establishment, when all its professors shall laugh at its absurdity. Destroy its monastic orders, and marry the priests, and the rest is a pretty puppet-show, with the idols, and the incense, and the polytheism, and the pomp of paganism. God bless you. R. S." "Bristol, Aug. 1802. Dear Cottle, Well done good and faithful editor. I suspect that it is fortunate for the edition of Chatterton, that its care has devolved upon you. The note with which you preface 'Burgum's Pedigree' need not come to me, as the M.S. is yours, whatever inferences may be drawn from it, will be by you. Add your name at the end to give it the proper authority. I shall know how to say enough, in the preface, about all other aiders and abetters, but it will not be easy to mention such a ringleader as yourself in words of adequate acknowledgment. What you have detected in the 'Tournament' I have also observed in Barrett, in the omission of a passage of bombast connected with one of the accounts of the Bristol churches. Your copy of the 'Tournament' being in Chatterton's own hand-writing is surely the best authority. We are now of one opinion, that Chatterton and Rowley are one. I am glad to hear that you have discovered anything worth printing in the British Museum. Doubtless, if you think it worth printing, others will do the same, and it is not our fault, if it be dull or an imperfect work. I transcribed page after page of what would have been worth little if genuine, and not being genuine, is worth nothing. This refers only to the local antiquities, and false deeds of gift, &c. I made a catalogue, and left it with you. Why say, 'I hope you will not take it amiss.' I am as ready to thank you for supplying any negligence of mine, as any one else can be. I should have wished for more engravings, but we have gone to the bounds of expense and trouble, in this gratuitous, but pleasant effort to benefit the family of Bristol's most illustrious bard. Why did you not sign your notes? I can now only say, that much, indeed most of the trouble has devolved on yon. J. C. at the end of each note, would have showed how much. I have seen Cattcott.[62] Chatterton had written to Clayfield that he meant to destroy himself. Clayfield called on Barrett to communicate his uneasiness about the young lad. 'Stay,' said Barrett, 'and hear what he will say to me.' Chatterton was sent for. Barrett talked to him on the guilt and folly of suicide. Chatterton denied any intention of the kind, or any conversation to that import. Clayfield came from the closet with the letter in his hand, and asked, 'Is not this your hand-writing?' Chatterton then, in a state of confusion, fell upon his knees, and heard in sullen silence, the suitable remarks on his conduct. God bless you. Yours affectionately, Robert Southey." "Bristol, Sept. 1802. Dear Cottle, I was from home, looking out for a habitation[63] in Wales, when your letter arrived. My journey was so far successful, that I am in treaty for a house, eight miles from Neath, in the mountains, a lovely spot, exactly such as will suit my wishes...." In a letter received from Mr. Southey, Aug. 25, 1805, he says, "I have neither seen, nor heard, of 'Foster's Essays'; nor do I remember to have heard you mention him. Certainly, on your recommendation, I shall either buy or borrow the work. But no new book ever reaches these mountains, except such as come to me to be killed off." Mr. Southey mentioned to me the last time I saw him, the jeopardy in which he had recently been placed, through his 'killing off'; and from which danger he was alone saved by his anonymous garb. He said he had found it necessary in reviewing a book, written by a native of the emerald isle, to treat it with rather unwonted severity, such as it richly deserved. A few days after the critique had appeared, he happened to call on a literary friend, in one of the inns of court. They were conversing on this work, and the incompetence of the writer, when the author, a gigantic Irishman entered the room, in a great rage, and vowing vengeance against the remorseless critic. Standing very near Mr. Southey, he raised his huge fist, and exclaimed, "And, if I knew who it was, I'd hate him!" Mr. S. observed a very profound silence, and not liking the vicinity of a volcano, quietly retired, reserving his laugh for a less hazardous occasion. Mr. Southey in a letter, June 18, 1807, thus expresses himself. "... Beyond the fascinations of poetry, there is a calmer and steadier pleasure in acquiring and communicating the knowledge of what has been, and of what is. I am passionately fond of history, even when I have been delighted with the act of poetical composition. The recollection that all was fable in the story with which I have exerted myself, frequently mingled with the delight. I am better pleased in rendering justice to the mighty dead; with the holding up to the world, of kings, conquerors, heroes, and saints, not as they have been usually held up, but as they really are, good or evil, according to the opinion formed of them, by one who has neither passion, prejudice, nor interest, of any kind to mislead his mind. There is a delight in recording great actions, and, though of a different kind, in execrating bad ones, beyond anything which Poetry can give, when it departs from historical truth. There is also a sense of power, even beyond what the poet, creator as he is, can exercise. It is before _my_ earthly tribunal, that these mighty ones are brought for judgment. Centuries of applause, trophies, and altars, or canonizations, or excommunications, avail nothing with me. No former sentences are cognizable in my court. The merits of the case are all I look to, and I believe I have never failed to judge of the actions by themselves, and of the actor by his motives; and to allow manners, opinions, circumstances, &c., their full weight in extenuation. What other merit my historical works may have, others must find out for themselves, but this will I vouch for, that never was the heart of any historian fuller of purer opinions; and that never any one went about his work with more thorough industry, or more thorough good-will. Your account of Churchey is very amusing, I should like to see the pamphlet of which you speak.[64] God bless you. Yours affectionately, Robert Southey." "Keswick, March 16, 1810. My dear Cottle, I cannot express to you how much it has affected me to hear of your affliction, [a long continued inflammation of the eyes, subdued ultimately, after bleeding, blistering, and cupping, by Singleton's eye ointment,] for though I am sure there is no one who would bear any sufferings with which it should please God to visit him, more patiently and serenely, than yourself, this nevertheless, is an affliction of the heaviest kind. It is very far from being the habit of my mind to indulge in visionary hopes, but from what I recollect of the nature of your complaint, it is an inveterate inflammation, and this I believe to be completely within the reach of art...." In the year 1814, after an hemorrhage from the lungs, and consequent debility, I relieved my mind by writing a kind, serious, and faithful letter to my friend Southey, under an apprehension that it might be my last; to which Mr. Southey returned the following reply. "Keswick, May 13, 1814. My dear Cottle, I have seen so dreadful a case of hemorrhage from the lungs terminate favorably, that your letter alarms me less than otherwise it would have done. Basil Montague the younger, continued to bleed at intervals for six weeks, in January and February last, and he has this day left Keswick without any dangerous symptoms remaining upon him. Two other instances have occurred within my knowledge, I will therefore hope for a favorable termination. Your letter comes upon me when I am like a broken reed, so deeply has the loss of Danvers wounded me. Were I to lose you also, I should never have heart to visit Bristol again. What answer shall I make to your exhortations? We differ, if indeed there be a difference, more in appearance than reality; more in the form than in the substance of our belief. I have already so many friends on the other side of the grave, that a large portion of my thoughts and affections are in another world, and it is only the certainty of another life, which could make the changes and insecurity of this life endurable. May God bless you, and restore you, my dear old friend, is the sincere prayer of Your affectionate Robert Southey." In the year 1816, Mr. Southey sustained a great loss in the death of his youngest son, a boy of promising talent, and endued with every quality which could attach a father's heart. Mr. S. thus announced the melancholy tidings. "Keswick, May 23, 1816. My dear Cottle, I know not whether the papers may have informed you of the severe affliction with which we have been visited,--the death of my son; a boy who was in all things after my own heart. You will be gratified to hear, however, that this sorrow produces in both our cases, that beneficial purpose for which such visitations were appointed: and in subtracting so large a portion of our earthly happiness, fixes our hearts and hopes with more earnestness on the life to come. Nothing else I am well assured, could have supported me, though I have no ordinary share of fortitude. But I know where to look for consolation, and am finding it where only it can be found. My dear Cottle, the instability of human prospects and enjoyments! You have read my proem to the 'Pilgrimage,' and before the book was published, the child of whom I had thus spoken, with such heartfelt delight, was in his grave! But of this enough. We have many blessings left, abundant all, and of this, which was indeed the flower of all our blessings, we are deprived for a time, and that time must needs be short...." In the year 1817, Mr. Southey's juvenile drama of "Wat Tyler," was surreptitiously published; written during the few months of his political excitement, when the specious pretensions of the French, carried away, for a brief period, so many young and ardent minds. He thus noticed the circumstance. "My dear Cottle, You will have seen by the papers, that some villain, after an interval of three and twenty years, has published my old uncle, 'Wat Tyler.' I have failed in attempting to obtain an injunction, because a false oath has been taken, for the purpose of defeating me.... I am glad to see, and you will be very glad to hear, that this business has called forth Coleridge, and with the recollections of old times, brought back something like old feelings. He wrote a very excellent paper on the subject in the 'Courier,' and I hope it will be the means of his rejoining us ere long; so good will come out of evil, and the devil can do nothing but what he is permitted.[65] I am well in health, and as little annoyed by this rascality as it becomes me to be. The only tiling that has vexed me, is the manner in which my counsel is represented in talking about my being ashamed of the work as a wicked performance! "Wicked! My poor 'old uncle' has nothing wicked about him. It was the work of a right-honest enthusiast, as you can bear witness; of one who was as upright in his youth as he has been in his manhood, and is now in the decline of his life; who, blessed be God, has little to be ashamed before man, of any of his thoughts, words, or actions, whatever cause he may have for saying to his Maker, 'God be merciful to me a sinner.' God bless you, my old and affectionate friend, Robert Southey. I am writing a pamphlet, in the form of a letter, to Wm. Smith. Fear not, but that I shall make my own cause good, and set my foot on my enemies. This has been a wicked transaction. It can do me no other harm than the expense to which it has put me." "Keswick, Sept. 2, 1817. My dear Cottle, ... I have made a long journey on the continent, accompanied with a friend of my own age, and with Mr. Nash, the architect, who gave me the drawings of Waterloo. We went by way of Paris to Besançon, into Switzerland: visited the Grand Chartreuse, crossed Mont Cenis; proceeded to Turin, and Milan, and then turned back by the lakes Como, Lugano, and Maggiore, and over the Simplon. Our next business was to see the mountainous parts of Switzerland. From Bern we sent our carriage to Zurich, and struck off what is called the Oberland (upper-land.) After ten days spent thus, in the finest part of the country, we rejoined our carriage, and returned through the Black Forest. The most interesting parts of our homeward road were Danaustrugen, where the Danube rises. Friburg, Strasburg, Baden, Carlsruhe, Heidelburg, Manheim, Frankfort, Mentz, Cologne, and by Brussels and Lisle, to Calais. I kept a full journal, which might easily be made into an amusing and useful volume, but I have no leisure for it. You may well suppose what an accumulation of business is on my hands after so long an absence of four months. I have derived great advantage both in knowledge and health. God bless you, my dear Cottle. Yours most affectionately, Robert Southey. P.S.--Hartley Coleridge has done himself great credit at Oxford. He has taken what is called a second class, which, considering the disadvantages of his school education, is as honourable for him as a first class for any body else. In all the higher points of his examination, he was excellent, and inferior only in those minuter points, wherein he had not been instructed. He is on the point of taking his degree." "Keswick, Nov. 26,1819. My dear Cottle, Last night I received a letter from Charles Lamb, telling me to what a miserable condition poor John Morgan is reduced: not by any extravagance of his own, but by a thoughtless generosity, in lending to men who have never repaid him, and by ----, who has involved him in his own ruin; and lastly by the visitation of providence. Every thing is gone! In such a case, what is to be done? 'but to raise some poor annuity amongst his friends.' It is not likely to be wanted long. He has an hereditary disposition to a liver complaint, a disease of all others, induced by distress of mind, and he feels the whole bitterness of his situation. The palsy generally comes back to finish what it has begun. Lamb will give ten pounds a year. I will do the same, and we both do according to our means, rather tham our will. I have written to Michael Castle to exert himself; and if you know where his friend Porter is, I pray you communicate this information to him. We will try what can be done in other quarters...."[66] "Keswick, June 25, 1823. My dear Cottle, ... I must finish my 'Book of the Church.' Under this title a sketch of our ecclesiastical history is designed. One small volume was intended, and behold it will form two 8vos. The object of the book is, to give those who come after us a proper bias, by making them feel and understand, how much they owe to the religious institutions of their country. Besides this, I have other works in hand, and few things would give me more pleasure than to show you their state of progress, and the preparations I have made for them. If you would bring your sister to pass a summer with us, how joyfully and heartily you would be welcomed, I trust you both well know. Our friendship is now of nine and twenty years' standing, and I will venture to say, for you, or for us, life cannot have many gratifications in store greater than this would prove. Here are ponies accustomed to climb these mountains which will carry you to the summit of Skiddaw, without the slightest difficulty, or danger. And here is my boat, the 'Royal Noah,' in the lake, in which you may exercise your arms when you like. Within and without I have much to show you. You would like to see my children; from Edith May, who is taller than her mother, down to Cuthbert, who was four years old in February last. Then there are my books, of which I am as proud as you are of your bones.[67] They are not indeed quite so old, but then they are more numerous, and I am sure Miss C. will agree with me that they are much better furniture, and much pleasanter companions. Not that I mean to depreciate your fossil remains. Forbid it all that is venerable. I should very much like to see your account of them. You gave me credit for more than is my due, when you surmised that the paper in the Quarterly (on the presumed alteration in the plane of the ecliptic) might have been mine. I write on no subject on which I have not bestowed considerable time and thought; and on all points of science, I confess myself to be either very superficially informed, or altogether ignorant. Some day I will send you a list of all my papers in that Journal, that you may not impute to me any thing which is not mine; and that, if you have at any time such a desire, you may see what the opinions are that I have there advanced. Very few I believe in which you would not entirely accord with me. God bless you. Yours affectionately, Robert Southey." "Keswick, April 7, 1825. My dear Cottle, You have indeed had a severe loss,[68] I know not how the heart could bear, if it were not for the prospect of eternity, and the full sense of the comparative nothingness of time, which that prospect produces. If I look on the last thirty years, things seem as but yesterday; and when I look forward, the end of this mortal journey must be near, though the precise point where it will terminate is not in sight. Yet were you under my roof, as I live in hope that one day you will be, you would recognize just as much of the original Robert Southey as you would wish to see remaining;--though the body is somewhat the worse for wear. I thought I had written to thank you for your 'Strictures on the Plymouth Antinomians;' which were well deserved, and given in a very proper spirit. Ultra-Calvinism is as little to my liking as it is to yours. It may be, and no doubt is held by many good men, upon whom it produces no worse effects than that of narrowing charity. But Dr. Hawker, and such as the Hawkers, only push it to its legitimate consequences. At present I am engaged in a war with the Roman Catholics, a war in which there will be much ink shed, though not on my part, for when my 'Vindiciae' are finished, I shall leave the field. When you see that book, you will be surprised at the exposure of sophistries, disingenuousness, and downright falsehoods, which it will lay before the world; and you will see the charge of systematic imposture proved upon the papal church. I must leave my home by the middle of next month, and travel for some weeks, in the hope of escaping an annual visitation of Catarrh, which now always leaves cough behind it, and a rather threatening hold of the chest. I am going therefore to Holland, to see that country, and to look for certain ecclesiastical books, which I shall be likely to obtain at Brussels, or Antwerp, or on the way thither. A young friend, in the Colonial office, is to be one of my companions, and I expect that Neville White will be the other. It is a great effort to go from home at any time, and a great inconvenience, considering the interruption which my pursuits must suffer; still it is a master of duty and of economy to use every means for averting illness. If I can send home one or two chests of books, the pleasure of receiving them on my return is worth some cost. How you would like to see my library, and to recognize among them some volumes as having been the gift of Joseph Cottle, seven or eight and twenty years ago. I have a great many thousand volumes, of all sorts, sizes, languages, and kinds, upon all subjects, and in all sorts of trims; from those which are displayed in 'Peacock Place,' to the ragged inhabitants of 'Duck Row.' The room in which I am now writing contains two thousand four hundred volumes, all in good apparel; many of them of singular rarity and value. I have another room full, and a passage full; book-cases in both landing places, and from six to seven hundred volumes in my bed-room. You have never seen a more cheerful room than my study; this workshop, from which so many works have proceeded, and in which among other things, I have written all those papers of mine, in the Quarterly Review, whereof you have a list below.[69] The next month will have a paper of mine on the 'Chuch Missionary Society,' and the one after, upon the 'Memoir of the Chevalier Bayard,' which Sarah Coleridge, daughter of S. T. Coleridge, has translated. Write to me oftener, as your letters will always have a reply, let whose may go unanswered. God bless you, my dear old friend. Yours most affectionately, Robert Southey." "Keswick, Feb. 26, 1826. My dear Cottle, I have sent you my Vindication of the 'Book of the Church,' in which though scarcely half of what was intended to be comprised, enough is done to prove the charge of superstition, impostures, and wickedness, upon the Romish Church. Whether I shall pursue the subject, in that form, depends on circumstances. I have employment enough in other ways, and would rather present my historical recollections in any form than that of controversy.... The revelations of sister Nativity are mentioned in my 'Vindiciae.' You will see an account of this impious Romish imposture in the next Quarterly. Such an exposure ought to open the eyes of those who are duped with the belief that the Roman Catholic religion is become innocent and harmless. Have I written to you since I was bug-bitten in France, and laid up in consequence, under a surgeon's hands in Holland? This mishap brought with it much more immediate good than evil. Bilderdyk, whose wife translated 'Don Roderic' into Dutch, and who is himself confessedly the best poet, and the most learned man in that country, received me into his house, where I was nursed for three weeks by two of the very best people in the world. But the effects of the accident remain. On my way home, owing perhaps to the intense heat of the weather, erysipelas showed itself on the wounded part. The foot also has been in a slight degree swollen, and there is just enough sense of uneasiness to show that something is amiss. My last year's journey succeeded in cutting short the annual catarrh, which had for so many years laid me up during the summer months. I shall try the same course as soon as the next summer commences. Will you never come and visit me, and see how that hair looks, which I doubt not keeps its colour so well in Vandyke's portrait? now it is three parts grey, but curling still as strong as in youth. I look at your portrait every day and see you to the life, as you were thirty years ago! What a change should we see in each other now, and yet how soon should we find that the better part remains unchanged. The day before yesterday I received your two volumes of 'Malvern Hills, Poems, and Essays,' fourth edition, forwarded to me from Sheffield, by James Montgomery. You ask my opinion on your ninth essay (on the supposed alteration in the planes of the equator and the ecliptic suggested by an hypothesis in the Quarterly). I am too ignorant to form one. The reasoning seems conclusive, taking the scientific part for granted, but of that science, or any other, I know nothing. This I can truly say, that the essays in general please me very much. That I am very glad to see those concerning Chatterton introduced there;--and very much admire, the manner, and the feeling, with which you have treated Psalmanazar's story. You tell me things respecting Chatterton which were new to me, and of course interested me much. It may be worth while, when you prepare a copy for republication, to corroborate the proof of his insanity, by stating that there was a constitutional tendency to such a disease, which places the fact beyond all doubt.... Thank you, for the pains you have taken about 'Bunyan.' The first edition we cannot find, nor even ascertain its date. The first edition of the Second part we have found. An impudent assertion, I learn from 'Montgomery's Essay,' was published, that the 'Pilgrim's Progress' was a mere translation from the Dutch. I have had the Dutch book, and have read it, which he who made this assertion could not do. The charge of plagiarism is utterly false, not having the slightest foundation. When you and I meet in the next world, we will go and see John Bunyan, and tell him how I have tinkered the fellow, for tinker him I will, who has endeavoured to pick a hole in his reputation. God bless you, my dear old friend, Robert Southey. P. S. There are two dreams that may be said to haunt me, they recur so often. The one is, that of being at Westminster school again, and not having my books. The other is, that I am at Bristol, and have been there some indefinite time; and unaccountably, have never been to look for you in Brunswick Square, for which I am troubled in conscience. Come to us, and I will pledge myself to visit you in return when next I travel to the south." In a letter to Mr. Southey, I mentioned that a relation of Wm. Gilbert had informed me that he was hurt with Mr. S. for having named him, in his 'Life of Wesley,' as being tinctured with insanity; a fact notorious. Mr. G. had often affirmed that there was a nation of the Gilbertians in the centre of Africa, and expressed a determination of one day visiting them. In the year 1796, he suddenly left Bristol, without speaking to any one of his friends; and the inference drawn, was that he was about to commence his African expedition. I had also mentioned that Sir James Mackintosh had expressed an opinion that Mr. Southey had formed his style on the model of Horace Walpole. These preliminary remarks are necessary to the understanding of the following letter. "Keswick, Feb. 26. My dear Cottle, What you say about poor Gilbert has surprised me. You know we lost sight of him after he left Bristol, with, according to our apprehension, the design of going to Liverpool, and from thence to procure a passage to Africa. On that occasion, after consulting with Danvers, and I think with you, I wrote to Roscoe, apologizing, as a stranger, for the liberty, requesting him to caution any captain of a ship, bound to the African coast, from taking a person in his state of mind on board. Roscoe replied very courteously, and took the desired precaution, but Gilbert never appeared at Liverpool. Some time afterward it was told me that he was dead, and believing him so to be, I mentioned him in the life of Wesley, (Vol. 2. p. 467.) speaking of him as I had ever felt, with respect and kindness, but in a way which I should not have done if I had not been fully persuaded of his death. Mackintosh's notice, as you inform me, that my style is founded on Horace Walpole, is ridiculous. It is founded on nobody's. I say what I have to say as plainly as I can, without thinking of the style, and this is the whole secret. I could tell by what poets my poetry has successively been leavened, but not what prose writers have ever in the same manner influenced me. In fact, I write as you may always have remarked, such as I always converse, without effort, and without aiming at display. ... Poor Morgan, you know, was latterly supported by a subscription, which Charles Lamb set on foot, and which was to have been annual, but he died within the year. Just now I am pressed for time to finish the 'Life of Cowper.' This Life will interest you, not merely because you (I know) would read with partial interest anything of mine, but because many circumstances are there stated which have never before been made public. You may have heard that a new edition of my 'Life of Wesley' is promised. Such an accumulation of materials has been poured upon me by a Mr. Marriott, well known among the Methodists, that I shall have to add a fourth, or perhaps, a third part of new matter, besides making many corrections and alterations. I have also got possession of the remaining papers of Mr. Powley, who married Miss Unwin. His widow died last year; and thus they became accessible. There were in the collection a good many letters of Mr. Newton, whose letters to Mr. Thornton, I have had before, and made great use of them in the 1st vol. of Cowper. From these papers I shall learn much concerning the first proceedings of the evangelical clergy, and expect to collect some materials for the 'Biographical Notes,' which must accompany 'Cowper's Letters'; and still more for the religious history of 'Wesley's Times,' as connected with the progress of Methodism. God bless you, my dear old friend, Robert Southey." "Keswick, Nov. 4, 1828. My dear Cottle, Shame on me that your last friendly letter should have remained so long unanswered, and that the direct motive for writing now should be a selfish one; one however, in which I know you will take some interest, on more accounts than one. Major, in Fleet Street, is about to publish an edition of the Pilgrim's Progress, for which I have undertaken to write an introductory life of the author. You need not be told how dearly I love John Bunyan. Now he has made inquiries among public and private libraries for the first edition, and can nowhere discover a copy. It has occurred to me that it may be in the Bristol Baptist Library, and if you will make this inquiry for me, and in case it be there, ascertain whether it differs from the folio edition of Bunyan's works, you will do me a great kindness[70].... That I should be somewhat the worse for the wear was to be expected, but I am not more so than you would look to see me; still active, cheerful, with a good appetite for books, and not an ill one for work. Some things I shall have to send you both in prose and verse, before the winter passes away.... Remember me in the kindest manner to ----, and to ----, and to ----. When I think of you all, old times return with the freshness of a dream. In less time than has elapsed since we were all young together, we shall be together again, and have dropped the weight of years and mortality on the way. If my old acquaintance, Isaac James be living, remember me to him with cordial good will. God bless you, my dear old friend. Robert Southey." "Keswick, March 22, 1831. My dear Cottle, Your package arrived safely yesterday afternoon. I shall get the books with which you presented me furbished up, and write in each that it was your gift;--a pleasant memorandum which is found in others on these shelves. I like to give books this incidental value, and write therefore, the date, and place, in every fresh acquisition. Many recollections do they call up, which otherwise would have passed away. You who have known me from the beginning of my authorial life, ought to see this library of mine. As I think no man ever made more use of his books, so I am sure that no man ever took more delight in them. They are the pride of my eyes, and the joy of my heart; an innocent pride, I trust, and a wholesome joy." * * * * * The reader's attention will now be directed to Mr. Coleridge, by introducing a letter from Mr. C. to Mr. Wade, who had written to him for advice respecting a meditated excursion to Germany. "March 6, 1801. My very dear friend, I have even now received your letter. My habits of thinking and feeling, have not hitherto inclined me to personify commerce in any such shape, so as to tempt me to tarn pagan, and offer vows to the goddess of our isle. But when I read that sentence in your letter, 'The time will come I trust, when I shall be able to pitch my tent in your neighbourhood,' I was most potently commanded to a breach of the second commandment, and on my knees, to entreat the said goddess, to touch your bank notes and guineas with her magical multiplying wand. I could offer such a prayer for you, with a better conscience than for most men, because I know that you have never lost that healthy common sense, which regards money only as the means of independence, and that you would sooner than most men cry out, enough! enough! To see one's children secured against want, is doubtless a delightful thing; but to wish to see them begin the world as rich men, is unwise to ourselves, for it permits no close of our labours, and is pernicious to them; for it leaves no motive to their exertions, none of those sympathies with the industrious and the poor, which form at once the true relish and proper antidote of wealth. ... Is not March rather a perilous month for the voyage from Yarmouth to Hamburg? danger there is very little, in the packets, but I know what inconvenience rough weather brings with it; not from my own feelings, for I am never sea-sick, but always in exceeding high spirits on board ship, but from what I see in others. But you are an old sailor. At Hamburgh I have not a shadow of acquaintance. My letters of introduction produced for me, with one exception, viz., Klopstock, the brother of the poet, no real service, but merely distant and ostentatious civility. And Klopstock will by this time have forgotten my name, which indeed he never properly knew, for I could speak only English and Latin, and he only French and German. At Ratzeburgh, 35 English miles N. E. from Hamburgh, on the road to Lubec, I resided four months; and I should hope, was not unbeloved by more than one family, but this is out of your route. At Gottingen I stayed near five months, but here I knew only students, who will have left the place by this time, and the high learned professors, only one of whom could speak English; and they are so wholly engaged in their academical occupations, that they would be of no service to you. Other acquaintance in Germany I have none, and connexion I never had any. For though I was much entreated by some of the Literati to correspond with them, yet my natural laziness, with the little value I attach to literary men, as literary men, and with my aversion from those letters which are to be made up of studied sense, and unfelt compliments, combined to prevent me from availing myself of the offer. Herein, and in similar instances, with English authors of repute, I have ill consulted the growth of my reputation and fame. But I have cheerful and confident hopes of myself. If I can hereafter do good to my fellow-creatures as a poet, and as a metaphysician, they will know it; and any other fame than this, I consider as a serious evil, that would only take me from out the number and sympathy of ordinary men, to make a coxcomb of me. As to the inns or hotels at Hamburgh, I should recommend you to some German inn. Wordsworth and I were at the 'Der Wilde Man,' and dirty as it was, I could not find any inn in Germany very much cleaner, except at Lubec. But if you go to an English inn, for heaven's sake, avoid the 'Shakspeare,' at Altona, and the 'King of England,' at Hamburgh. They are houses of plunder rather than entertainment. 'The Duke of York' hotel, kept by Seaman, has a better reputation, and thither I would advise you to repair; and I advise you to pay your bill every morning at breakfast time: it is the only way to escape imposition. What the Hamburgh merchants may be I know not, but the tradesmen are knaves. Scoundrels, with yellow-white phizzes, that bring disgrace on the complexion of a bad tallow candle. Now as to carriage, I know scarcely what to advise; only make up your mind to the very worst vehicles, with the very worst horses, drawn by the very worst postillions, over the very worst roads, and halting two hours at each time they change horses, at the very worst inns; and you have a fair, unexaggerated picture of travelling in North Germany. The cheapest way is the best; go by the common post wagons, or stage coaches. What are called extraordinaries, or post-chaises, are little wicker carts, uncovered, with moveable benches or forms in them, execrable in every respect. And if you buy a vehicle at Hamburgh, you can get none decent under thirty or forty guineas, and very, probably it will break to pieces on the infernal roads. The canal boats are delightful, but the porters everywhere in the United Provinces, are an impudent, abominable, and dishonest race. You must carry as little luggage as you well can with you, in the canal boats, and when you land, get recommended to an inn beforehand, and bargain with the porters first of all, and never lose sight of them, or you may never see your portmanteau or baggage again. My Sarah desires her love to you and yours. God bless your dear little ones! Make haste and get rich, dear friend! and bring up the little creatures to be playfellows and school-fellows with my little ones! Again and again, sea serve you, wind speed you, all things turn out good to you! God bless you, S. T. Coleridge." As a curious literary fact, I might mention that the sale of the first edition of the "Lyrical Ballads," was so slow, and the severity of most of the reviews so great, that their progress to oblivion, notwithstanding the merit which I was quite sure they possessed, seemed ordained to be as rapid as it was certain. I had given thirty guineas for the copyright, as detailed in the preceding letters; but the heavy sale induced me at length, to part with, at a loss, the largest proportion of the impression of five hundred, to Mr. Arch, a London bookseller. After this transaction had occurred, I received a letter from Mr. Wordsworth, written the day before he set sail for the continent, requesting me to make over my interest in the "Lyrical Ballads" to Mr. Johnson, of St Paul's Churchyard. This I could not have done, had I been so disposed, as the engagement had been made with Mr. Arch. On Mr. W.'s return to England, I addressed a letter to him, explaining the reasons why I could not comply with his request, to which he thus replied: "My dear Cottle, I perceive that it would have been impossible for you to comply with my request, respecting the 'Lyrical Ballads,' as you had entered into a treaty with Arch. How is the copyright to be disposed of when you quit the bookselling business? We were much amused with the 'Anthology,' Your poem of the 'Killcrop' we liked better than any; only we regretted that you did not save the poor little innocent's life, by some benevolent art or other. You might have managed a little pathetic incident, in which nature, appearing forcibly in the child, might have worked in some way or other, upon its superstitious destroyer. We have spent our time pleasantly enough in Germany, but we are right glad to find ourselves in England, for we have learnt to know its value. We left Coleridge well at Gottingen, a month ago.... God bless you, my dear Cottle, Your affectionate friend, W. Wordsworth." Soon after the receipt of the above, I received another letter from Mr. W. kindly urging me to pay him a visit in the north, in which, as an inducement, he says, "... Write to me beforehand, and I will accompany you on a tour. You will come by Greta-bridge, which is about twenty miles from this place, (Stockburn); and after we have seen all the curiosities of that neighbourhood, I will accompany you into Cumberland and Westmoreland.... God bless you, dear Cottle, W. W." A short time after the receipt of this invitation, Mr. Coleridge arrived in Bristol from Germany, and as he was about to pay Mr. Wordsworth a visit, he pressed me to accompany him. I had intended a journey to London, and now determined on proceeding with so agreeable a companion, and on so pleasant a journey and tour; taking the metropolis on my return. To notice the complicated incidents which occurred on this tour, would occupy a large space. I therefore pass it all over, with the remark, that in this interview with Mr. Wordsworth, the subject of the "Lyrical Ballads" was mentioned but once, and that casually, and only to account for its failure! which Mr. W. ascribed to two causes; first the "Ancient Mariner," which, he said, no one seemed to understand; and secondly, the unfavorable notice of most of the reviews. On my reaching London, having an account to settle with Messrs. Longman and Rees, the booksellers of Paternoster Row, I sold them all my copyrights, which were valued as one lot, by a third party. On my next seeing Mr. Longman, he told me, that in estimating the value of the copyrights, Fox's "Achmed," and Wordsworth's "Lyrical Ballads," were "reckoned _as nothing_." "That being the case," I replied, "as both these authors are my personal friends, I should be obliged, if you would return me again these two copyrights, that I may have the pleasure of presenting them to the respective writers." Mr. Longman answered, with his accustomed liberality, "You are welcome to them." On my reaching Bristol, I gave Mr. Fox his receipt for twenty guineas; and on Mr. Coleridge's return from the north, I gave him Mr. Wordsworth's receipt for his thirty guineas; so that whatever advantage has arisen, subsequently, from the sale of this volume of the "Lyrical Ballads," I am happy to say, has pertained exclusively to Mr. W. I have been the more particular in these statements, as it furnishes, perhaps, the most remarkable instance on record, of a volume of Poems remaining for so long a time, almost totally neglected, and afterwards acquiring, and that in a rapid degree, so much deserved popularity.[71] A month or two after Mr. Coleridge had left Bristol for Germany, Dr. Beddoes told me of a letter he had just received from his friend, Davies Giddy, (afterward with the altered name of Gilbert, President of the Royal Society) recommending a very ingenious young chemist, of Penzance, in Cornwall, to assist him in his Pneumatic Institution, at the Hotwells. "The character is so favourable," said the Dr. "I think I shall engage him;" handing me the letter. I read it, and replied, "You cannot err in receiving a young man thus recommended." Two or three weeks after, Dr. B. introduced me to no other than Mr. afterwards Sir. Humphrey Davy. (Mr. Giddy little thought that this "young chemist of Penzance," was destined to precede himself, in occupying the chair of Newton.) This Pneumatic Institution, for ascertaining how far the different gases, received into the lungs, were favourable, or not, to certain diseases, has often been referred to; but its origin, that I am aware of, has never been stated. It has erroneously been supposed, to have depended for its establishment and support, exclusively on Dr. Beddoes. But being acquainted with the circumstances of the case, it is right to mention, that this Gaseous Institution resulted from the liberality of the late Mr. Lambton, (father of the late Earl of Durham). When Mr. L. heard from Dr. Beddoes an opinion expressed, that Medical science might be greatly assisted by a fair and full examination of the effects of factitious airs on the human constitution, particularly in reference to consumption; to obtain this "fair and full examination," Mr. Lambton immediately presented Dr. B. with the munificent sum of fifteen hundred pounds. One other individual also, contributed handsomely toward the same object,--the late Mr. Thomas Wedgewood, who presented Dr. B. with one thousand pounds, for the furtherance of this design.[72] It might be here mentioned, that a few months after this, two intelligent-looking boys were often seen with Dr. B. with whom they were domesticated. The Dr. was liberally remunerated for superintending their education, (with suitable masters;) and this he did at the dying request of their father, who had recently deceased in Italy. Dr. Beddoes took great pains with these boys, so that when they entered at Eton, they were found quite equal to other boys of their own age in classical attainments, and greatly their superiors in general knowledge. The father was the above Mr. Lambton, and one of the two boys, was the late Earl of Durham. One of the precepts strongly inculcated on these youths, was, "Never be idle, boys. Let energy be apparent in all you do. If you play, play heartily, and at your book, be determined to excel. Languor is the bane of intellect." I remember to have seen Mr. Lambton at Dr. B.'s. He had a fine countenance, but it betrayed the hue of consumption. After having been for some time under the care of Dr. Beddoes, the Dr. recommended his patient to try a warmer climate, when Mr. L. departed for Italy. Mr. Lambton's health still declining, and considering that his only chance for life depended on the skill of his own experienced physician, he wrote to Dr. Beddoes, urging him, without delay to set off, I think, for Naples. This I received from Dr. B. himself, who said, at the same time, "On Monday morning I shall set off for Italy." But before Monday, the tidings arrived that Mr. Lambton was dead! The two young Lambtons had the additional privilege of living under the same roof with Mr. Davy, and on various occasions through life, the Earl of Durham and his brother have testified a deep sense of respect and friendship for the illustrious chemist who so enlivened and edified their younger days. When Dr. Beddoes introduced to me young Mr. Davy, (being under twenty) I was much struck with the intellectual character of his face. His eye was piercing, and when not engaged in converse, was remarkably introverted, amounting to absence, as though his mind had been pursuing some severe trains of thought, scarcely to be interrupted by external objects; and from the first interview also, his ingenuousness impressed me as much as his mental superiority. Mr. D. having no acquaintance in Bristol, I encouraged and often received his visits, and he conferred an obligation on me, by often passing his afternoons in my company. During these agreeable interviews, he occasionally amused me by relating anecdotes of himself; or detailing his numerous chemical experiments: or otherwise by repeating his poems, several of which he gave me (still retained); and it was impossible to doubt, that if he had not shone as a philosopher, he would have become conspicuous as a poet.[73] I must now refer again to the Pneumatic Institution, to which the medical world looked with some anxiety, and which excited much conversation in the circle where I happened to be placed. Dr. Beddoes early in the year 1798, had given an admirable course of Lectures in Bristol, on the principles and practice of Chemistry, and which were rendered popular by a great diversity of experiments; so that, with other branches of the science, the gases, had become generally familiar. The establishment of the Pneumatic Institution immediately following, the public mind was prepared, in some measure, to judge of its results; and a very considerable increase of confidence was entertained, from the acknowledged talents of the young superintendant; so that all which could be accomplished was fully calculated upon. The funds also which supported the Institution being ample, the apparatus corresponded, and a more persevering and enthusiastic experimentalist than Mr. Davy, the whole kingdom could not have produced; an admission which was made by all who knew him, before the profounder parts of his character had been developed. No personal danger restrained him from determining facts, as the data of his reasoning; and if Fluxions, or some other means, had not conveyed the information, such was his enthusiasm, he would almost have sprung from the perpendicular brow of St. Vincent to determine his precise time, in descending from the top to the bottom. I soon learnt from Mr. D. himself the course of his experiments; many of which were in the highest degree hazardous, when, with friendly earnestness, I warned him against his imminent perils. He seemed to act, as if in case of sacrificing one life, he had two or three others in reserve on which he could fall back in case of necessity. He occasionally so excited my fears that I half despaired of seeing him alive the next morning. He has been known sometimes to breathe a deadly gas, with his finger on his pulse, to determine how much could be borne, before a serious declension occurred in the vital action. The great hazards to which he exposed himself may be estimated by the following slight detail. Dr. Mitchell, as well as Dr. Priestley, had stated the fatal effects on animal life, of the gazeous oxide of azote; Mr. Davy, on the contrary, for reasons which satisfied himself, thought it respirable in its pure state; at least, that a single inspiration of this gas might neither destroy, nor materially injure the powers of life. He tried one inspiration. No particularly injurious effects followed. He now breathed, out of his _green bag_, three quarts of this nitrous oxide (gazeous oxide of azote,) when it was attended with a degree of giddiness, great fulness in the head, and with loss of distinct sensation and voluntary power, analogous to intoxication. Not being able fully to determine whether the gas was "stimulant" or "depressing," he now breathed four quarts of it from his _green bag_, when an irresistible propensity to action followed, with motions, various and violent. Still, not being satisfied, he proceeded in his experiments, and at length found that he could breathe nine quarts for three minutes, and twelve quarts for rather more than four, but never for five minutes, without the danger of fatal consequences, as before five minutes had expired, the mouth-piece generally dropped from his unclosed lips. By breathing from six to seven quarts only, muscular motions were produced, and he manifested the pleasure it excited, by stamping, laughing, dancing, shouting, &c. At another time, having ascertained that his pure nitrous oxide, was eminently stimulant, he wanted to determine whether the system, in a high state of stimulation, would then be susceptible of a proportionate accession of stimulus from his new gas; like that which would be experienced by the man, who after taking one bottle of wine, drank a second; and to acquire demonstration on this nice subject, (although he was a confirmed water-drinker) to form the basis of his experiment, he drank off with all despatch a whole bottle of wine, the consequence of which was, that he first reeled, and then fell down insensibly drunk. After lying in this state for two or three hours, he awoke with a sense of nausea, head-ache, and the usual effects of intoxication. At the first return of recollection, however, undaunted by the past, the young enthusiastic philosopher called out for the _green bag_, when he breathed twelve quarts of nitrous oxide, for three or four minutes. The consequence of this was, he became a second time intoxicated, though in a less degree, when he strode across the room, and by stamping, laughing, dancing, and vociferation, found that the same effects followed, which attended his former experiment, without any increase of stimulus from the wine. All the gases that had hitherto been the subject of investigation, sunk in importance before this nitrous oxide, which the perseverance of Mr. Davy had now obtained in its pure state, in any quantity and consequently divested of that foreign admixture which rendered it usually so destructive. He had also ascertained the quantity which might safely be admitted into the lungs. Dr. Beddoes was sanguine as to its medical qualities, and conceived that, if not a specific, it might prove highly advantageous in paralysis, and pulmonary affections; and, in conjunction with these benefits he well knew it would confer importance on his own Pneumatic Institution. As Dr. B. meditated a publication expressly on this subject, he was desirous of collecting the testimony of others, for which purpose, he persuaded several of his friends to breathe this innocent, but exhilarating nitrous oxide, while they described, and he recorded their sensations. Mr. Southey, Mr. Clayfield, Mr. Tobin, and others inhaled the new air. One, it made dance, another laugh, while a third, in his state of excitement, being pugnaciously inclined, very uncourteously, struck Mr. Davy rather violently with his fist. It became now an object with Dr. B. to witness the effect this potent gas might produce on one of the softer sex, and he prevailed on a courageous young lady, (Miss ----) to breathe out of his pretty _green bag_, this delightful nitrous oxide. After a few inspirations, to the astonishment of every body, the young lady dashed out of the room and house, when, racing down Hope-square, she leaped over a great dog in her way, but being hotly pursued by the fleetest of her friends, the fair fugitive, or rather the temporary maniac, was at length overtaken and secured, without further damage. Dr. Beddoes now expressed a wish to record my testimony also, and presented me his _green bag_; but being satisfied with the effects produced on others, I begged to decline the honour. The Pneumatic Institution, at this time, from the laughable and diversified effects produced by this new gas on different individuals, quite exorcised philosophical gravity, and converted the laboratory into the region of hilarity and relaxation. The young lady's feats, in particular, produced great merriment, and so intimidated the ladies, that not one, after this time, could be prevailed upon to look at the _green bag_, or hear of nitrous oxide, without horror! But more perilous experiments must now be noticed. Mr. Davy having succeeded so well with the Nitrous Oxide, determined even to hazard a trial with the deadly Nitrous Gas. For this purpose he placed in a bag, "one hundred and fourteen cubic inches of nitrous gas," and knowing that unless he exhausted his lungs of the atmospheric air, its oxygen would unite with the nitrous gas, and produce in his lungs _aqua-fortis_, he wisely resolved to expel if possible, the whole of the atmospheric air from his lungs, by some contrivance of his own. For this purpose, in a second bag, he placed seven quarts of nitrous oxide, and made from it three inspirations, and three expirations, and then instantly transferred his mouth to the nitrous gas bag, and turning the stop-cock, took one inspiration. This gas, in passing through his mouth and fauces, burnt his throat, and produced such a spasm in the epiglottis, as to cause him instantly to desist, when, in breathing the common air, aqua-fortis was really formed in his mouth, which burnt his tongue, palate, and injured his teeth. Mr. D. says, "I never design again to repeat so rash an experiment." But though this experiment might not be repeated, there was one other nearly as dangerous, to which Mr. Davy's love of science prompted him to resort; not by trying it on another but, generously, on himself. Mr. Davy wished to determine whether the carburetted hydrogen gas, was so destructive to animal life as had been represented. In its pure state, one inspiration of this gas was understood to destroy life, but Mr. D. mixed three quarts of the gas, with two quarts of the atmospheric air, and then breathed the whole for nearly a minute. This produced only slight effects, (nothing to an experimental chemist;) merely "giddiness, pain in the head, loss of voluntary power," &c. The spirit of inquiry not being to be repressed by these trifling inconveniences, Mr. Davy was now emboldened to introduce into his green bag, four quarts of carburetted hydrogen gas, nearly pure. After exhausting his lungs in the usual way, he made two inspirations of this gas. The first inspiration produced numbness and loss of feeling in the chest. After the second, he lost all power of perceiving external things, except a terrible oppression on his chest, and he seemed sinking fast to death! He had just consciousness enough to remove the mouth-piece from his unclosed lips, when he became wholly insensible. After breathing the common air for some time, consciousness was restored, and Mr. Davy faintly uttered, as a consolation to his then attendant, Mr. John Tobin, "I do not think I shall die." Such are some of the appalling hazards encountered by M. Davy, in his intrepid investigation of the gases. These destructive experiments, during his residence at Bristol, probably, produced those affections of the chest, to which he was subject through life, and which, beyond all question, shortened his days. Nothing at this moment so excites my surprise, as that Mr. D.'s life should have been protracted, with all his unparalleled indifference concerning it, to the vast age, for him, of fifty years. I cannot here withhold an ungracious piece of information. In the prospect of this establishment, great expectations had been raised, and the afflicted of all descriptions, were taught to expect a speedy cure; so that when the doors were opened, no less than seventy or eighty patients, progressively applied for the gratuitous alleviation of their maladies. But it is too great a tax on human patience, when cures are always promised, but never come. No one recovery, in an obstinate case, had occurred: in consequence of which, many patients became dissatisfied, and remitted their attendance. Independently of which, an idea had become prevalent amongst the crowd of afflicted, that they were merely made the subjects of experiment, which thinned the ranks of the old applicants, and intimidated new. It might be said, that patients after a certain period had so ominously declined, that the very fire was likely to become extinguished for want of fuel. In order that the trials might be deliberately proceeded in, a fortunate thought occurred to Dr. Beddoes; namely, not to _bribe_, but to _reward_ all persevering patients; for Mr. Davy informed me, that, before the Pneumatic Institution was broken up, they allowed every patient sixpence per diem; so that when all hopes of cure had subsided, it became a mere pecuniary calculation with the sufferers, whether, for a parish allowance of three shillings a week, they should submit or not, to be drenched with these nauseous gases. This Pneumatic Institution, though long in a declining state, protracted its existence for more than two years, till the departure from Bristol of Mr. D., and then by its failure, it established the useful negative fact, however mortifying, that medical science was not to be improved through the medium of factitious airs. I happened to be present when Mr. W. Coates casually named to Mr. Davy, then just turned of twenty, that his boy the preceding evening, had accidentally struck one piece of cane against another, in the dark, and which produced light. It was quite impressive to notice the intense earnestness with which Mr. D. heard this fact which, by others, might have been immediately forgotten. Mr. D. on the contrary, without speaking, appeared lost in meditation. He subsequently commenced his experiments on these canes, and thus communicated the results to his friend Mr. Giddy, (now Gilbert). "My dear friend, ... I have now just room to give you an account of the experiments I have lately been engaged in. _First_. One of Mr. Coates's children accidentally discovered that two bonnet-canes rubbed together produced a faint light. The novelty of this experiment induced me to examine it, and I found that the canes, on collision, produced sparks of light, as brilliant as those from flint and steel. _Secondly_. On examining the epidermis, I found, when it was taken off, that the canes no longer gave light on collision. _Thirdly_. The epidermis, subjected to chemical analysis, had all the properties of silex. _Fourthly_, The similar appearance of the epidermis of reeds, corn, and grasses, induced me to suppose that they also contained silex. By burning them carefully and analyzing their ashes, I found that they contained it in rather larger proportions than the canes. _Fifthly_. The corn and grasses contain sufficient potash to form glass with their flint. A very pretty experiment may be made on these plants with the blowpipe. If you take a straw of wheat, barley, or hay, and burn it, beginning at the top, and heating the ashes with a blue flame, you will obtain a perfect globule of hard glass, fit for microscopic discovery." The circumstance, that all canes, as well as straws and hollow grasses, have an epidermis of silex, is one of the most singular facts in nature. Mr. Davy, in another place, has stated the advantages arising to this class of vegetables, from their stony external concretion: namely, "the defence it offers from humidity; the shield which it presents to the assaults of insects; and the strength and stability that it administers to plants, which, from being hollow, without this support, would be less perfectly enabled to resist the effect of storms. Those canes which are not hollow, are long and slender, and from wanting the power to sustain themselves, come usually in contact with the ground, when they would speedily decay, from moisture, but from the impenetrable coat of mail with which nature has furnished them. But questions still arise for future investigators. How came the matter of flint to invest those plants which most need it, and not others? Whence does this silex come? Is it derived from the air, or from water, or from the earth? That it emanates from the atmosphere is wholly inadmissible. If the silex proceed from water, where is the proof? and how is the superficial deposit effected? Also, as silex is not a constituent part of water, if incorporated at all, it can be held only in solution. By what law is this solution produced, so that the law of gravity should be suspended? If the silex be derived from the earth, by what vessels is it conveyed to the surface of the plants? and, in addition, if earth be its source, how is it that earth-seeking, and hollow plants, with their epidermis of silex, should arise in soils that are not silicious? being equally predominant, whether the soil be calcareous, argillaceous, or loamy. The decomposition of decayed animal and vegetable substances, doubtless composes the richegt superficial mould; but this soil, so favorable for vegetation, gives the reed as much silex, but no more, in proportion to the size of the stalk, than the same plants growing in mountainous districts, and primitive soils. It is to be regretted, that the solution of these questions, with others that might be enumerated, had not occupied the profoundly investigating spirit of Mr. Davy; but which subjects now offer an ample scope for other philosophical speculators. It is a demonstrative confirmation of the accuracy of Mr. Davy's reasoning, that a few years ago, after the burning of a large mow, in the neighbourhood of Bristol, a stratum of pure, compact, vitrified silex appeared at the bottom, forming one continuous sheet, nearly an inch in thickness. I secured a portion, which, with a steel, produced an abundance of bright sparks. Upon Mr. Coleridge's return from the north, to Bristol, where he meant to make some little stay, I felt peculiar pleasure in introducing him to young Mr. Davy. The interview was mutually agreeable, and that which does not often occur, notwithstanding their raised expectations, each, afterward, in referring to the other, expressed to me the opinion, that his anticipations had been surpassed. They frequently met each other under my roof, and their conversations were often brilliant; intermixed, occasionally, with references to the scenes of their past lives. Mr. Davy told of a Cornish young man, of philosophical habits, who had adopted the opinion that a firm mind might endure in silence, any degree of pain: showing the supremacy of "mind over matter." His theory once met with an unexpected confutation. He had gone one morning to bathe in Mount's Bay, and as he bathed, a crab griped his toe, when the young philosopher roared loud enough to be heard at Penzance.[74] Mr. Coleridge related the following occurrence, which he received from his American friend, Mr. Alston, illustrating the effect produced on a young man, at Cambridge University, near Boston, from a fancied apparition. "A certain youth," he said, "took it into his head to convert a Tom-Painish companion of his, by appearing as a ghost before him. He accordingly dressed himself in the usual way, having previously extracted the ball from the pistol which always lay near the head of his friend's bed. Upon first awaking and seeing the apparition, A. the youth who was to be frightened, suspecting a trick, very coolly looked his companion, the ghost, in the face, and said, 'I know you. This is a good joke, but you see I am not frightened. Now you may vanish.' The ghost stood still. 'Come,' said A. 'that is enough. I shall get angry. Away!' Still the ghost moved not. Exclaimed A. 'If you do not in one minute go away, I will shoot you.' He waited the time, deliberately levelled his pistol, fired, and with a scream at the motionless immobility of the figure, was convinced it was a real ghost--became convulsed, and from the fright, afterwards died." Mr. Coleridge told also of his reception at an Hessian village, after his visit to the Hartz mountains, and the Brocken. Their party consisted of himself, Mr. Carlyon, and the two Mr. Parrys. (sons of Dr. Parry, of Bath--one of them the Arctic explorer). The four pedestrians entered the village late of an evening, and repaired to the chief ale-house, wearied with a hard day's journey, in order to be refreshed and to rest for the night. The large room contained many of the neighbouring peasants. "What can we have to eat?" said Mr. Coleridge. "Nothing," was the reply. "Can we have beds?" "No," answered the master of the house. "Can we have some straw on which to lie?" "None, none," was the reply. On which Mr. Coleridge cried out, "Are the Hessians Christians?" To have their Christianity doubted, was an insufferable insult, and to prove their religion, one man in a rage, hurled a log of wood at Mr. C., which, if it had struck him, would have laid him prostrate! But more effectually to prove that they were Christians, "good and true," the men, in fierce array, now marched up, and roughly drove the saucy Englanders out of the house, to get lodgings where they could. From the extreme wrath of the insulted peasants, the travellers were apprehensive of some worse assault; and hurrying out of the village, weary, and hunger-smitten, bivouacked under a tree, determined never again to question a Hessian's Christianity, even under the gallows. On one occasion, Mr. Coleridge entered into some of his college scenes, to one of which I may here refer. He said that, perhaps, it was culpable in him not to have paid more attention to his dress than he did when at the University, but the great excluded the little. He said that he was once walking through a street in Cambridge, leaning on the arms of two _silk gowns_, when his own habiliments formed rather a ludicrous contrast. His cap had the merit of having once been new; and some untoward rents in his gown, which he had a month before intended to get mended, left a strong tendency, in some of its posterior parts, to trail along the ground in the form, commonly called "tatters." The three friends were settling the exact site of Troy, or some other equally momentous subject, when they were passed by two spruce gownsmen, one of whom said to the other, which just caught the ear of Mr. C., "That sloven thinks he can hide his ribbons by the gowns of his companions." Mr. C. darted an appalling glance at him, and passed on. He now learned the name, and acquired some particulars respecting the young man who had offended him, and hastened home to exercise his Juvenallian talent. The next day he gave his satire to a friend, to show it to the young man, who became quite alarmed at the mistake he had made, and also at the ominous words, "He who wrote this can write more." The cauldron might boil over with fresh "bubble, bubble, toil and trouble." There was no time to lose. He therefore immediately proceeded to Mr. C.'s chambers; apologized for his inconsiderate expressions; thought him to have been some "rough colt," from the country, again begged his pardon, and received the hand of reconciliation. This young, miscalculating Cantabrigian, now became one of Mr. C.'s warmest friends, and rose to eminence.[75] The satire was singularly cutting. I can recall but two unconnected lines: "With eye that looks around with asking gaze, And tongue that traffics in the trade of praise."[76] Mr. Coleridge now told us of the most remarkable of his Cambridge eccentricities, that of his having enlisted as a soldier. He had previously stated to me many of the following particulars, yet not the whole; but (having taken a deep interest in this singular adventure,) in addition to that which I heard from Mr. C., who never told all the incidents of his military life to any one person, but on the contrary, detailed some few to one, and some few to another, I made a point of collecting from different friends, every scattered fact I could obtain, and shall now throw the whole into one narrative. But before I proceed, I must take some notice of a statement on this subject, communicated to the public, by Mr. Bowles, wherein his account appears to clash with mine. Of this gentleman (with whose name and writings I have connected so many pleasant remembrances, from early life,) I wish to speak with the utmost respect; but the truth Mr. B. himself will be glad to learn. Mr. Bowles states a circumstance relating to what he calls, "The most correct, sublime, chaste, and beautiful of Mr. Coleridge's poems; the 'Religious Musings;'" namely, that "it was written, non inter sylvas academi, but in the tap-room at Reading." This information could not have been received from Mr. C. but perhaps was derived from the imperfect recollection of Captain O.; but whoever the informant may have been, the assertion has not the merit of being founded on a shadow of accuracy. The poem of the "Religious Musings" was not written "in the tap-room at Reading," nor till long after Mr. C. had quitted his military life. It was written partly at Stowey; partly on Redcliff Hill; and partly in my parlour, where both Mr. Coleridge and Mr. Southey occasionally wrote their verses. This will have sufficiently appeared by Mr. C.'s own letters; to which I could add other decisive evidence, if the subject were of more consequence. I now proceed with the narrative of Mr. Coleridge's military adventures, chiefly collected from himself, but not inconsiderably from the information of other of his more intimate friends; particularly R. Lovell; although I must apprise the reader that after a lapse of forty years, I cannot pledge myself for every individual word: a severity of construction which neither my memoranda nor memory would authorize. In order not to interrupt the reader, by stating that this was derived from one source, and that from another, (at this time hardly to be separated in my own mind) I shall narrate it as though Mr. Coleridge had related the whole at once, to Mr. Davy and myself. * * * * * Mr. Coleridge now told us of one of his Cambridge eccentricities which highly amused us. He said that he had paid his addresses to a Mary Evans, who, rejecting his offer, he took it so much in dudgeon, that he withdrew from the University to London, when, in a reckless state of mind, he enlisted in the 15th, Elliot's Light Dragoons. No objection having been taken to his height or age, he was asked his name. He had previously determined to give one that was thoroughly Kamschatkian, but having noticed that morning over a door in Lincoln's Inn Fields, (or the Temple) the name of "Cumberbatch," (not Comberback) he thought this word sufficiently outlandish, and replied "Silas Tomken Cumberbatch,"[77] and such was the entry in the regimental book. Here, in his new capacity, laborious duties devolved on Mr. C. He endeavoured to think on Caesar, and Epaminondas, and Leonidas, with other ancient heroes, and composed himself to his fate; remembering, in every series, there must be a commencement: but still he found confronting him no imaginary inconveniences. Perhaps he who had most cause for dissatisfaction, was the drill sergeant, who thought his professional character endangered; for after using his utmost efforts to bring his raw recruit into something like training, he expressed the most serious fears, from his unconquerable awkwardness, that he never should be able to make _a soldier of him!_ Mr. C. it seemed, could not even rub down his own horse, which, however, it should be known, was rather a restive one, who, like Cowper's hare, "would bite if he could," and in addition, kick not a little. We could not suppose that these predispositions in the martial steed were at all aggravated by the unskilful jockeyship to which he was subjected, but the sensitive quadruped did rebel a little in the stable, and wince a little in the field! Perhaps the poor animal was something in the state of the horse that carried Mr. Wordsworth's "Idiot Boy," who, in his sage contemplations, "wondered"--"What he had got upon his back!" This rubbing down his horse was a constant source of annoyance to Mr. C., who thought that the most rational way was,--to let the horse rub himself down, shaking himself clean, and so to shine in all his native beauty; but on this subject there were two opinions, and his that was to decide carried most weight. If it had not been for the foolish and fastidious taste of the ultra precise sergeant, this whole mass of trouble might be avoided, but seeing the thing must be done, or punishment! he set about the herculean task with the firmness of a Wallenstein; but lo! the paroxysm was brief, in the necessity that called it forth. Mr. C. overcame this immense difficulty, by bribing a young man of the regiment to perform the achievement for him; and that on very easy terms; namely, by writing for him some "Love Stanzas," to send to his sweetheart! Mr. Coleridge, in the midst of all his deficiencies, it appeared, was liked by the men, although he was the butt of the whole company; being esteemed by them as next of kin to a natural, though of a peculiar kind--a talking natural. This fancy of theirs was stoutly resisted by the love-sick swain, but the regimental logic prevailed; for, whatever they could do, with masterly dexterity, he could not do at all, ergo, must he not be a natural? There was no man in the regiment who met with so many falls from his horse, as Silas Tomken Cumberbatch! He often calculated with so little precision his due equilibrium, that, in mounting on one side, (perhaps the wrong stirrup) the probability was, especially if his horse moved a little, that he lost his balance, and, if he did not roll back on this side, came down ponderously on the other! when the laugh spread amongst the men, "Silas is off again!" Mr. C. had often heard of campaigns, but he never before had so correct an idea of hard service. Some mitigation was now in store for Mr. C. arising out of a whimsical circumstance. He had been placed as a sentinel, at the door of a ball-room, or some public place of resort, when two of his officers, passing in, stopped for a moment, near Mr. C., talking about Euripides, two lines from whom, one of them repeated. At the sound of Greek, the sentinel instinctively turned his ear, when he said, with all deference, touching his lofty cap, "I hope your honour will excuse me, but the lines you have repeated are not quite accurately cited. These are the lines," when he gave them in their more correct form. "Besides," said Mr. C., "instead of being in Euripides, the lines will be found in the second antistrophe of the 'Aedipus of Sophocles.'" "Why, man, who are you?" said the officer, "old Faustus ground young again?" "I am your honour's humble sentinel," said Mr. C., again touching his cap. The officers hastened into the room, and inquired of one and another, about that "odd fish," at the door; when one of the mess, (it is believed, the surgeon) told them, that he had his eye upon him, but he would neither tell where he came from, nor anything about his family of the Cumberbatches; "but," continued he, "instead of his being an 'odd fish,' I suspect he must be a 'stray bird' from the Oxford or Cambridge aviary." They learned also, the laughable fact, that he was bruised all over, by frequent falls from his horse. "Ah," said one of the officers, "we have had, at different times, two or three of these 'University birds' in our regiment." This suspicion was confirmed by one of the officers, Mr. Nathaniel Ogle, who observed that he had noticed a line of Latin, chalked under one of the men's saddles, and was told, on inquiring whose saddle it was, that it was "Cumberbatch's." The officers now kindly took pity on the 'poor scholar' and had Mr. C. removed to the medical department, where he was appointed assistant in the regimental hospital. This change was a vast improvement in Mr. C.'s condition; and happy was the day, also, on which it took place, for the sake of the sick patients; for Silas Tomken Cumberbatch's amusing stories, they said, did them more good than all the doctor's physic! Many ludicrous dialogues sometimes occurred between Mr. C. and his new disciples; particularly with one who was "the geographer." The following are some of these dialogues. If he began talking to one or two of his comrades; for they were all on a perfect equality, except that those who went through their exercise the best, stretched their necks a little above the "awkward squad;" in which ignoble class Mr. C. was placed, as the preeminent member, almost by acclamation; if he began to speak, notwithstanding, to one or two, others drew near, increasing momently, till by-and-bye the sick-beds were deserted, and Mr. C. formed the centre of a large circle. On one occasion, he told them of the Peloponnesian war, which lasted twenty-seven years, "There must have been famous promotion there," said one poor fellow, haggard as a death's head. Another, tottering with disease, ejaculated, "Can you tell, Silas, how many rose from the ranks?" He now still more excited their wonderment, by recapitulating the feats of Archimedes. As the narrative proceeded, one restrained his scepticism, till he was almost ready to burst, and then vociferated, "Silas, that's a lie!" "D'ye think so?" said Mr. C. smiling, and went on with his story. The idea, however, got amongst them, that Silas's fancy was on the stretch, when Mr. C. finding that this tact would not do, changed his subject, and told them of a famous general, called Alexander the Great. As by a magic spell, the flagging attention was revived, and several, at the same moment, to testify their eagerness, called out, "The general! The general!" "I'll tell you all about him," said Mr. C. when impatience marked every countenance. He then told them whose son this Alexander the Great was; no less than Philip of Macedon. "I never heard of him," said one. "I think I have," said the "geographer," ashamed of being thought ignorant, "Silas, was'nt he a Cornish man? I knew one of the Alexanders at Truro!" Mr. C. now went on describing to them, in glowing colours, the valour, and the wars, and the conquests of this famous general. "Ah," said one man, whose open mouth had complimented the speaker, for the preceding half hour; "Ah," said he, "Silas, this Alexander must have been as great a man as our Colonel!" Mr. C. now told them of the "Retreat of the Ten Thousand." "I don't like to hear of retreat," said one. "Nor I," said a second: "I'm for marching on." Mr. C. now told of the incessant conflicts of these brave warriors, and of the virtues of the "square." "They were a parcel of crack men," said one. "Yes," said another, "their bayonets fixed, and sleeping on their arms day and night." "I should like to know," said a fourth, "what rations were given with all that hard fighting;" on which an Irishman replied, "to be sure, every time the sun rose, two pounds of good ox beef, and plenty of whiskey." At another time he told them of the invasion of Xerxes, and his crossing the _wide_ Hellespont. "Ah," said a young recruit, a native of an obscure village in Kent, who had acquired a decent smattering of geography,--knowing well that the world was round, and that the earth was divided into land and water, and, furthermore, that there were more countries on the globe than England, and who now wished to raise his pretensions a little before his comrades; said this young man of Kent; "Silas, I know where that 'Helspont' is. I think it must be the mouth of the Thames, for _'tis_ very wide." Mr. C. now told them of the herces of Thermopylae, when the geographer interrupted him, by saying, "Silas, I think I know, too, where that 'Thermopple' is; isn't it somewhere up in the north?" "You are quite right, Jack," said Mr. C. "it is to the north of the Line." A conscious elevation marked his countenance, and he rose at once, five degrees in the estimation of his friends. In one of these interesting conversaziones, when Mr. C. was sitting at the foot of a bed, surrounded by his gaping comrades, who were always solicitous of, and never wearied with, his stories, the door suddenly burst open, and in came two or three gentlemen, (his friends) looking for some time, in vain, amid the uniform dresses, for their man. At length, they pitched on Mr. C. and taking him by the arm, led him, in silence, out of the room, (a picture indeed, for a Wilkie!) As the supposed _deserter_ passed the threshold, one of the astonished auditors uttered, with a sigh, "poor Silas! I wish they may let him off with a cool five hundred!" Mr. C.'s ransom was soon joyfully adjusted by his friends, and now the wide world once more lay before him.[78] A very old friend of Mr. Coleridge has recently furnished me with the two following anecdotes of Mr. C. which were also new to me. The inspecting officer of his regiment, on one occasion, was examining the guns of the men, and coming to one piece which was rusty, he called out in an authoritative tone, "Whose rusty gun[79] is this?" when Mr. Coleridge said, "is it _very_ rusty, Sir?" "Yes Cumberbatch, it _is_" said the officer, sternly. "Then, Sir," replied Mr. C. "it must be mine!" The oddity of the reply disarmed the officer, and the poor scholar escaped without punishment. Mr. Coleridge was a remarkably awkward horseman, so much so, as generally to attract notice. Some years after this, he was riding along the turnpike road, in the county of Durham, when a wag, approaching him, noticed his peculiarity, and (quite mistaking his man) thought the rider a fine subject for a little sport; when, as he drew near, he thus accosted Mr. C. "I say, young man, did you meet a _tailor_ on the road?" "Yes," replied Mr. C. (who was never at a loss for a rejoinder) "I did; and he told me, if I went a little further I should meet a _goose!_" The assailant was struck dumb, while the traveller jogged on. Mr. C. gave me these, his translations from the German. ON A BAD READER OF HIS OWN VERSES. Hoarse Maevius reads his hobbling verse To all, and at all times, And deems them both divinely smooth, His voice, as well as rhymes. But folks say Maevius is no ass! But Maevius makes it clear, That he's a monster of an ass, An ass without an ear. * * * * * If the guilt of all lying consists in deceit, Lie on--'tis your duty, sweet youth! For believe me, then only we find you a cheat, When you cunningly tell us the truth. "As Dick and I at Charing Cross were walking, Whom should we see on t'other side pass by, But INFORMATOR with a stranger talking, So I exclaimed--"O, what a lie!" Quoth Dick, "What, can you hear him?" Stuff! I saw him open his mouth--an't that enough?" * * * * * ON OBSERVING A LADY LICKING HER LAP-DOG, Thy Lap-dog Rufa, is a dainty beast; It don't surprise me in the least, To see thee lick so dainty clean a beast, But that so dainty clean a beast licks thee-- Yes--that surprises me. * * * * * Jack writes his verses with more speed Than the printer's boy can set 'em; Quite as fast as we can read, But only--not so fast as we forget 'em. Mr. Coleridge accompanied these epigrams with the translation of one of LESSING'S pieces, where the felicity of the expression, in its English form, will excite in most readers a suspicion, that no German original, could equal the poem in its new dress. MY LOVE. I ask'd my love, one happy day, What I should call her in my lay! By what sweet name from Rome or Greece; Iphigenia, Clelia, Chloris, Laura, Lesbia, or Doris, Dorimene, or Lucrece? Ah! replied my gentle fair, Beloved! what are names but air! Take whatever suits the line: Call me Clelia, call me Chloris, Laura, Lesbia, or Doris, Only, only, call me thine. Mr. C. told me that he intended to translate the whole of Lessing. I smiled. Mr. C. understood the symbol, and smiled in return. The above poem is thus printed in the last edition of 1835, by which the two may be compared, and the reader will perhaps think that the alterations are not improvements. NAMES. I asked my fair one happy day, What I should call her in my lay? By what sweet name from Rome or Greece: Lalage, Nesera, Chloris, Sappho, Lesbia, or Doris, Arethusa, or Lucrece. Ah, replied my gentle fair, Beloved, what are names but air? Choose thou whatever suits the line; Call me Sappho, call me Chloris, Call me Lalage, or Doris, Only, only, call me thine. Some time after this, Mr. Coleridge being in an ill state of health, recollected that a friend of his, Sir John Stoddart, was the Judge at Malta,[80] and he determined to repair to that island. Here he was introduced to Sir Alexander Ball, the Governor, who happened at that time to be in want of a Secretary, and being greatly pleased with Mr. Coleridge, he immediately engaged him in that capacity.[81] * * * * * I shall here for the present leave the narrative of Mr. C. in other and better hands, and proceed to remark, that Mr. Davy and Mr. Coleridge continued their friendly feeling toward each other, through life. Mr. Davy, in a letter to Mr. Poole, (1804.) thus expresses himself: "I have received a letter from Coleridge within the last three weeks. He writes from Malta, in good spirits, and as usual, from the depth of his being. God bless him! He was intended for a great man. I hope and trust he will, at some period, appear such." Mr. Davy, after a continuance in Bristol of more than two years, sent me the following letter, with a copy of "Burns's Life and Works," by Dr. Currie. "Dear Cottle, I have been for the last six weeks so much hurried by business, and the prospect of a change of situation, that I have not had time to call on you. I am now on the point of leaving the Hotwells, and had designed to see you this morning, but engagements have unluckily prevented me. I am going to the Royal Institution, where, if you come to London, it will give me much pleasure to see you. Will you be pleased to accept the copy of 'Burns's Life and Poems,' sent with this, and when you are reading with delight the effusions of your brother bard, occasionally think of one who is, with sincere regard and affection, your friend, H. Davy. March 9th, 1801." In a letter of Sir H. Davy, addressed to his friend Mr. Poole, 1803, he thus writes of S. T. C. "Coleridge has left London for Keswick. During his stay in town, I saw him seldomer than usual; when I did see him, it was generally in the midst of large companies, where he is the image of power and activity. His eloquence is unimpaired; perhaps it is softer and stronger. His will is less than ever commensurate with his ability. Brilliant images of greatness float upon his mind, like images of the morning clouds on the waters. Their forms are changed by the motion of the waves, they are agitated by every breeze, and modified by every sun-beam. He talked in the course of an hour, of beginning three works; and he recited the poem of Christabel unfinished, and as I had before heard it. What talent does he not waste in forming visions, sublime, but unconnected with the real world! I have looked to his efforts, as to the efforts of a creating being; but as yet he has not laid the foundation for the new world of intellectual forms." In the following letter received by me from Sir H. Davy, so late as June, 1823, he refers to Mr. Coleridge. "My dear Sir, ... I have often thought on the subject of the early history of our planet, and have some peculiar views, but I have some reserve in talking here about it, as all our knowledge on such matter is little more than ignorance. What I stated to the Royal Society, in awarding the medal to Professor Buckland, has not been correctly given in the Journals. I merely said that the facts lately brought forward, proved the occurrence of that great catastrophe which had been recorded in sacred and profane history, and of which traditions were current, even amongst the most barbarous nations. I did not say they proved the truth of the Mosaic account of the deluge, that is to say, of the history of the Ark of Noah, and the preservation of animal life. This is revelation; and no facts, that I know of, have been discovered in science that bear upon this question, and the sacred history of the race of Shem. My idea was to give to Caesar what belonged to Caesar, &c. &c., and not to blend divine truths with the fancies of men. I met Coleridge this morning, looking very well. I had not seen him for years. He has promised to dine with me on Monday.... Very sincerely yours, H. Davy. June 11th, 1823." Sir H. Davy was the chief agent in prevailing on Mr. Coleridge to give a course of lectures on Shakspeare, at the Royal Institution, which he did, eighteen in number, in the year 1808. Sir H. D. in writing to Mr. Poole, this year, thus refers to him. "Coleridge, after disappointing his audience twice from illness, is announced to lecture again this week. He has suffered greatly from excessive sensibility, the disease of genius. His mind is a wilderness, in which the cedar and the oak, which might aspire to the skies, are stunted in their growth by underwood, thorns, briars, and parasitical plants. With the most exalted genius, enlarged views, sensitive heart, and enlightened mind, he will be the victim of want of order, precision, and regularity. I cannot think of him without experiencing the mingled feelings of admiration, regard, and pity." To this testimony in confirmation of Mr. Coleridge's intellectual eminence, some high and additional authorities will be added; such as to entitle him to the name of the Great Conversationalist. Professor Wilson thus writes: "If there be any man of great and original genius alive at this moment, in Europe, it is S. T. Coleridge. Nothing can surpass the melodious richness of words, which he heaps around his images; images that are not glaring in themselves, but which are always affecting to the very verge of tears, because they have all been formed and nourished in the recesses of one of the most deeply musing spirits, that ever breathed forth its inspirations, in the majestic language of England." "Not less marvellously gifted, though in a far different manner, is Coleridge, who by a strange error has usually been regarded of the same (lake) school. Instead, like Wordsworth, of seeking the sources of sublimity and beauty in the simplest elements of humanity, he ranges through all history and science, investigating all that has really existed, and all that has had foundation only in the wildest, and strangest minds, combining, condensing, developing and multiplying the rich products of his research with marvellous facility and skill; now pondering fondly over some piece of exquisite loveliness, brought from an unknown recess, now tracing out the hidden germ of the eldest, and most barbaric theories, and now calling fantastic spirits from the vasty deep, where they have slept since the dawn of reason. The term 'myriad-minded' which he has happily applied to Shakspeare, is truly descriptive of himself. He is not one, but legion, 'rich with the spoils of time,' richer in his own glorious imagination and sportive fantasy. There is nothing more wonderful than the facile majesty of his images, or rather of his world of imagery, which, whether in his poetry or his prose, start up before us, self-raised, and all perfect, like the palace of Aladdin. He ascends to the sublimest truths by a winding track of sparkling glory, which can only be described in his own language. 'The spirit's ladder That from this gross and visible world of dust, Even to the starry world, with thousand rounds Builds itself up; on which the unseen powers Move up and down on heavenly ministries-- The circles in the circles, that approach The central sun from ever narrowing orbit.' In various beauty of versification he has never been exceeded. Shakspeare doubtless in liquid sweetness and exquisite continuity, and Milton in pure majesty and classic grace--but this, in one species of verse only; and taking all his trials of various metres, the swelling harmony of his blank verse, the sweet breathing of his gentle odes, and the sybil-like flutter, with the murmuring of his wizard spells, we doubt if even these great masters have so fully developed the sources of the English tongue. He has yet completed no adequate memorial of his Genius, yet it is most unjust to say he has done little or nothing. To refute this assertion, there are his 'Wallenstein;' his love poems of intensest beauty; his 'Ancient Mariner,' with his touches of profoundest tenderness amidst the wildest and most bewildering terrors; his holy and sweet tale of 'Christabel,' with its enchantments, and richer humanities; the depths, the sublimities, and the pensive sweetness of his 'Tragedy;' the heart-dilating sentiments scattered through his 'Friend;' and the stately imagery which breaks upon us at every turn of the golden paths of his metaphysical labyrinth. And if he has a power within him mightier than that which even these glorious creations indicate, shall he be censured because he has deviated from the ordinary course of the age in its development, and instead of committing his imaginative wisdom to the press, has delivered it from his living lips? He has gone about in the true spirit of an old Greek bard, with a noble carelessness of self, giving fit utterance to the divine spirit within, him. Who that has ever heard can forget him? His mild benignity, the unbounded variety of his knowledge, the fast succeeding products of his imagination, the child-like simplicity with which he rises from the dryest and commonest theme into the wildest magnificence of thought, pouring on the soul a stream of beauty and wisdom to mellow and enrich it for ever? The seeds of poetry, the materials for thinking, which he has thus scattered will not perish. The records of his fame are not in books only, but on the fleshly tablets of young hearts, who will not suffer it to die even in the general ear, however base and unfeeling criticism may deride their gratitude."--_Mr. Sergeant Talfourd._ Dr. Dibdin has given an animated description of Coleridge's lecturing and conversation, which concurs with the universal opinion. "I once came from Kensington in a snow-storm to hear Mr. Coleridge lecture on Shakspeare, I might have sat as wisely, and more comfortably by my own fire-side--for no Coleridge appeared.----I shall never forget the effect his conversation made upon me at the first meeting, at a dinner party. It struck me as something not only quite out of the ordinary course of things, but an intellectual exhibition altogether matchless. The viands were unusually costly, and the banquet was at once rich and varied; but there seemed to be no dish like Coleridge's conversation to feed upon--and no information so instructive as his own. The orator rolled himself up as it were in his chair, and gave the most unrestrained indulgence to his speech; and how fraught with acuteness and originality was that speech, and in what copious and eloquent periods did it flow. The auditors seemed to be wrapt in wonder and delight, as one conversation, more profound or clothed in more forcible language than another, fell from his tongue. He spoke nearly for two hours with unhesitating and uninterrupted fluency. As I returned homewards, to Kensington, I thought a second Johnson had visited the earth, to make wise the sons of men; and regretted that I could not exercise the powers of a second Boswell to record the wisdom and the eloquence that fell from the orator's lips. The manner of Coleridge was emphatic rather than dogmatic, and thus he was generally and satisfactorily listened to. It might be said of Coleridge, as Cowper has so happily said of Sir Philip Sidney, that he was 'the warbler of poetic prose.' There was always this characteristic feature in his multifarious conversation,--it was always delicate, reverend, and courteous. The chastest ear could drink in no startling sound; the most serious believer never had his bosom ruffled by one sceptical or reckless assertion. Coleridge was eminently simple in his manner. Thinking and speaking were his delight; and he would sometimes seem, during the more fervid movements of discourse, to be abstracted from all, and everything around and about him, and to be basking in the sunny warmth of his own radiant imagination."--_Dr. Dibdin_. "Last Thursday, my Uncle, S. T. C. dined with us; and ---- and ---- came to meet him. I have heard him more brilliant, but he was very fine, and delighted both, ---- and ---- very much. It is impossible to carry off, or commit to paper, his long trains of argument; indeed it is not possible to understand them, he lays the foundation so deep, and views every question in so original a manner. Nothing can be finer than the principles which he lays down in morals and religion. His deep study of scripture is very astonishing; ---- and ---- were but as children in his hands, not merely in general views of theology, but in minute criticism.... Afterwards in the drawing-room, he sat down by Professor Rigaud, with whom he entered into a discussion of 'Kant's system of Metaphysics.' The little knots of the company were speedily silent. Mr. Coleridge's voice grew louder; and, abstruse as the subject was, yet his language was so ready, so energetic, and eloquent, and his illustrations so very apt and apposite, that the ladies even paid him the most solicitous, and respectful attention.... This is nearly all I recollect of our meeting with this most interesting, most wonderful man. Some of his topics and arguments I have enumerated, but the connexion and the words are lost. And nothing that I can say can give any notion of his eloquence and manner."--_Mr. Justice Coleridge.--Table Talk_. "To the honoured memory of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Christian Philosopher, who through dark and winding paths of speculation was led to the light, in order that others by his guidance might reach that light, without passing through the darkness, these sermons on the work of the spirit are dedicated with deep thankfulness and reverence by one of the many pupils whom his writings have helped to discern the sacred concord and unity of human and Divine truth. "Of recent English writers, the one with whose sanction I have chiefly desired whenever I could, to strengthen my opinions, is the great religious philosopher to whom the mind of our generation in England owes more than to any other man. My gratitude to him I have endeavoured to express by dedicating the following sermons to his memory; and the offering is so far at least appropriate, in that the main work of his life was to spiritualize, not only our philosophy, but our theology; to raise them both above the empiricism into which they had long been dwindling, and to set them free from the technical trammels of logical systems. Whether he is as much studied by the genial young men of the present day, as he was twenty or thirty years ago, I have no adequate means of judging: but our theological literature teems with errors, such as could hardly have been committed by persons whose minds had been disciplined by his philosophical method, and had rightly appropriated his principles. So far too as my observation has extended, the third and fourth volumes of his 'Remains,' though they were hailed with delight by Arnold on their first appearance, have not yet produced their proper effect on the intellect of the age. It may be that the rich store of profound and beautiful thought contained in them has been weighed down, from being mixed with a few opinions on points of Biblical criticism, likely to be very offensive to persons who know nothing about the history of the Canon. Some of these opinions, to which Coleridge himself ascribed a good deal of importance, seem to me of little worth; some to be decidedly erroneous. Philological criticism, indeed all matters requiring a laborious and accurate investigation of details were alien from the bent and habits of his mind; and his exegetical studies, such as they were, took place at a period when he had little better than the meagre Rationalism of Eichhorn and Bertholdt to help him. Of the opinions which he imbibed from them, some abode with him through life. These however, along with everything else that can justly be objected to in the 'Remains,' do not form a twentieth part of the whole, and may easily be separated from the remainder. Nor do they detract in any way from the sterling sense, the clear and far-sighted discernment, the power of tracing principles in their remotest operations, and of referring all things to their first principles, which are manifested in almost every page, and from which we might learn so much. There may be some indeed, who fancy that Coleridge's day is gone by, and that we have advanced beyond him. I have seen him numbered, along with other persons who would have been no less surprised at their position and company, among the pioneers who prepared the way for our new theological school. This fathering of Tractarianism, as it is termed, upon Coleridge, well deserves to rank beside the folly which would father Rationalism upon Luther. Coleridge's far-reaching vision did indeed discern the best part of the speculative truths which our new school has laid hold on, and exaggerated and perverted. But in Coleridge's field of view they were comprised along with the complimental truths which limit them, and in their conjunction and co-ordination with which alone they retain the beneficent power of truth. He saw what our modern theologians see, though it was latent from the vulgar eyes in his days; but he also saw what they do not see, what they have closed their eyes on; and he saw far beyond them, because he saw things in their universal principles and laws."--_Rev. Archdeacon Charles Hare's "Mission of the Comforter."--Preface, pp. 13, 15. Two Vols. 8vo_. These various testimonies to the conversational eminence of Mr. Coleridge, and from men the best qualified to decide, must satisfy every mind, that in this one quality he scarcely ever had a superior, or perhaps an equal. In the 103rd No. of the "Quarterly Review," there is a description of his conversation, evidently written by one competent to judge, and who well knew the subject of his praise; but though the writer's language is highly encomiastic, corresponding with his eloquence, yet to all who knew Coleridge, it will not be considered as exceeding the soberest truth. When and where are such descriptions as the preceding and the following to be found? "Perhaps our readers may have heard repeated a saying of Mr. Wordsworth, 'that many men of his age had done wonderful _things_, as Davy, Scott, Cuvier, &c.; but that Coleridge was the only wonderful _man_ he ever knew.' Something of course must be allowed in this, as in all other such cases, for the antithesis; but we believe the fact really to be, that the greater part of those who have occasionally visited Mr. Coleridge, have left him with the feeling akin to the judgment indicated in the above remark. They admire the man more than his works, or they forget the works in the absorbing impression made by the living author; and no wonder. Those who remember him in his more vigorous days, can bear witness to the peculiarity and transcendant power of his conversational eloquence. It was unlike anything that could be heard elsewhere; the kind was different, the degree was different, the manner was different. The boundless range of scientific knowledge, the brilliancy and exquisite nicety of illustration, the deep and ready reasoning, the strangeness and immensity of bookish lore, were not all; the dramatic story, the joke, the pun, the festivity, must be added; and with these, the clerical looking dress, the thick waving silver hair, the youthful coloured cheek, the indefinable mouth and lips, the quick yet steady and penetrating greenish grey eye, the slow and continuous enunciation, and the everlasting music of his tones,--all went to make up the image, and to constitute the living presence of the man. Even now his conversation is characterized by all the essentials of its former excellence; there is the same individuality, the same unexpectedness, the same universal grasp; nothing is too high, nothing too low for it--it glances from earth to heaven, from heaven to earth, with a speed and a splendour, an ease and a power, which almost seemed inspired." * * * * * As a conclusion to these honourable testimonies, it may be added, the wish has often been expressed, that more were known respecting Mr. Coleridge's school and college life, so briefly detailed in his "Biographia." There was one friend of whom he often used to talk, and always with a kind feeling, who sat next to him at Christ Church School, and who afterwards accompanied him to Cambridge, where their friendship was renewed, and their intercourse uninterrupted. This gentleman was the Rev. C. V. Le Grice, the respected and erudite incumbent of a living near Penzance. Mr. Le G. might contribute largely toward the elucidation of Mr. Coleridge's school and college life; but as the much has been denied, we must be thankful for the little. The following are Mr. Le Grice's brief, but interesting notices of his friend: "Mr. Urban, In the various and numerous memoirs, which have been published of the late Mr. Coleridge, I have been surprised at the accuracy in many respects, and at the same time their omission of a very remarkable, and a very honourable anecdote in his history. In the memoir of him in your last number, you do not merely omit, but you give an erroneous account of this very circumstance, to which I mean to allude. You assert that he did not obtain, and indeed did riot aim to obtain, the honours of the University. So far is this from the fact, that in his Freshman's year he won the gold medal for the Greek Ode; and in his second year he became a candidate for the Craven scholarship, a University scholarship, for which undergraduates of any standing are entitled to become candidates. This was in the winter of 1792. Out of sixteen or eighteen competitors a selection of four was made to contend for the prize, and these four were Dr. Butler, now the Head Master of Shrewsbury; Dr. Keate, the late Head Master of Eton; Mr. Bethell, the late Member for Yorkshire; and S. T. Coleridge. Dr. Butler was the successful candidate. Pause a moment in Coleridge's history, and think of him at this period! Butler! Keate! Bethell! and Coleridge!! How different the career of each in future life! O Coleridge; through what strange paths did the meteor of genius lead thee! Pause a moment, ye distinguished men! and deem it not the least bright spot in your happier career, that you and Coleridge were once rivals, and for a moment running abreast in the pursuit of honour. I believe that his disappointment at this crisis damped his ardour. Unfortunately, at that period there was no classical Tripos; so that if a person did not obtain the classical medal, he was thrown back among the totally undistinguished; and it was not allowable to become a candidate for the classical medal, unless you had taken a respectable degree in mathematics. Coleridge had not the least taste for these, and here his case was hopeless; so that he despaired of a Fellowship, and gave up, what in his heart he coveted, college honours, and a college life. He had seen his schoolfellow and dearest friend, Middleton, (late Bishop of Calcutta) quit Pembroke under similar circumstances. Not _quite_ similar, because Middleton studied mathematics so as to take a respectable degree, and to enable him to try for the medal; but he failed, and therefore all hopes failed of a Fellowship--most fortunately, as it proved in after life, for Middleton, though he mourned at the time most deeply, and exclaimed, 'I am Middleton, which is another name for Misfortune!' 'There is a Providence which shapes our ends, Rough hew them how you will.' That, which Middleton deemed a misfortune, drew him from the cobwebs of a college library to the active energies of a useful and honoured life. But to return to Coleridge. When he quitted College, which he did before he had taken a degree, in a moment of mad caprice--it was indeed an inauspicious hour! 'In an inauspicious hour I left the friendly cloisters, and the happy grove of quiet, ever honoured Jesus College, Cambridge.' Short, but deep and heart-felt reminiscence! In a literary Life of himself this short memorial is all that Coleridge gives of his happy days at college. Say not, that he did not obtain, and did not wish to obtain classical honours! He did obtain them, and was eagerly ambitious of them; but he did not bend to that discipline which was to qualify him for the whole course. He was very studious, but his reading was desultory and capricious. He took little exercise merely for the sake of exercise; but he was ready at any time to unbend his mind in conversation, and for the sake of this, his room (the ground-floor room on the right hand of the staircase facing the great gate) was a constant rendezvous of conversation loving friends, I will not call them loungers, for they did not call to kill time, but to enjoy it. What evenings have I spent in those rooms! What little suppers, or _sizing_, as they were called, have I enjoyed; when Aeschylus, and Plato, and Thucydides, were pushed aside, with a pile of lexicons, &c., to discuss the pamphlets of the day. Ever and anon, a pamphlet issued from the pen of Burke. There was no need of having the book before us. Coleridge had read it in the morning; and in the evening he would repeat whole pages verbatim. Freud's trial was then in progress. Pamphlets swarmed from the press. Coleridge had read them all; and in the evening, with our negus, we had them _viva voce_ gloriously. O Coleridge! it was indeed an inauspicious hour, when you quitted the friendly cloisters of Jesus. The epithet 'friendly' implied what you were thinking of, when you thought of college. To you, Coleridge, your contemporaries were indeed friendly, and I believe, that in your literary life you have passed over your college life so briefly, because you wished to banish from your view the 'visions of long-departed joys.' To enter into a description of your college days would have called up too sadly to your memory 'the hopes which once shone bright,' and would have made your heart sink. Yours, &c., C. V. Le Grice. P. S.--I was a witness to the breathless delight with which he hastened to give his friends intelligence of his success. The following lines, in his "Verses written in Early Youth," are a memorial of the pleasure, which he felt in the sympathy of one who was then most dear to him:-- "With faery wand, O bid the maid arise, Chaste joyance dancing in her bright blue eyes, As erst, when, from the Muse's calm abode, I came with learning's meed not unbestowed." See Poems, Edit. 1805, p. 34. He wrote, to my certain knowledge, for the prize in the ensuing year; but it was most deservedly given to Keate's beautiful Ode. The subject Laus Astronomiae. No one was more convinced of the propriety of the decision than Coleridge himself. He used to repeat Ramsden's Greek Ode on Gibraltar, and Smith's Latin one on Mare Liberum, with incessant rapture. It would have been his glory to have caught their spirit,--he was absorbed in these things. A Classical Tripos would have changed Coleridge's destiny."--_Gentleman's Magazine_, Dec. 1834. * * * * * The reader's attention will now be directed to Mr. Coleridge, after he left Malta, when he visited Bristol, in the year 1807. I accidentally learned that Mr. C. had returned to England, not in good health, and that he was at Mr. Poole's, when I addressed a letter to him, expressing a hope that his health would soon allow him to pay me a visit, in Bristol. To this letter he thus replied: "Dear Cottle, On my return to Bristol, whenever that may be, I will certainly give you the right hand of old fellowship; but, alas! you will find me the wretched wreck of what you knew me, rolling, rudderless. My health is extremely bad. Pain I have enough of, but that is indeed to me, a mere trifle, but the almost unceasing, overpowering sensations of wretchedness: achings in my limbs, with an indescribable restlessness, that makes action to any available purpose, almost impossible: and worst of all, the sense of blighted utility, regrets, not remorseless. But enough; yea, more than enough; if these things produce, or deepen the conviction of the utter powerlessness of ourselves, and that we either perish, or find aid from something that passes understanding. Affectionately, S. T. C." The preceding letter of Mr. Coleridge led me to anticipate a worse state of health, on his arrival in Bristol, than appearances authorized. I knew nothing of opium, and was pleased to notice the clearness of his understanding, as well as much struck with the interesting narratives he gave of Malta, Italy, and his voyage to England. I knew that Mr. C. was somewhat in the habit of accommodating his discourse to the sentiments of the persons with whom he was conversing; but his language was now so pious and orthodox, that the contrast between his past and present sentiments was most noticeable. He appeared quite an improved character, and was about, I thought, to realise the best hopes of his friends. I found him full of future activity, projecting new works, and particularly a 'New Review,' of which he himself was to be the Editor! At this time not one word was said about opium, Colerton, Ottery, or Mrs. Coleridge, and I thought the prospect never appeared so cheering. In my state of exultation, I invited Mr. Foster to come to Bristol, from Frome, to renew his acquaintance with the improved and travelled Mr. Coleridge. Mr. Tester's reply is here given. "Frome, June, 1807. My dear sir, I am very unfortunate in having made an engagement, two or three weeks back, to go just at this time on a very particular occasion, to a distant place in this county, and therefore being deprived of the very high luxury to which you so kindly invite me. I shall be unavoidably detained, for a very considerable time, and my imagination will strongly represent to me the pleasure and advantage of which an inevitable necessity deprives me. But I will indulge the hope, that I shall sometime be known to Mr. Coleridge, under more favourable circumstances, in a literary respect, than I can at present, after a regular application to the severer order of studies shall in some measure have retrieved the consequences of a very loose and indolent intellectual discipline, and shall have lessened a certain feeling of imbecility which always makes me shrink from attempting to gain the notice of men whose talents I admire. No man can feel a more animated admiration of Mr. Coleridge than I have retained ever since the two or three times that I was a little while in his company; and during his absence in the south and the east, I have very often thought with delight of the immense acquisitions which he would at length bring back to enrich the works, which I trust the public will in due time receive from him, and to which it has an imperious claim. And still I trust he will feel the solemn duty of making his very best and continued efforts to mend as well as delight mankind, now that he has attained the complete mastery and expansion of his admirable powers. You do not fail, I hope, to urge him to devote himself strenuously to literary labour. He is able to take a station amongst the most elevated ranks, either of the philosophers or the poets. Pray tell me what are his immediate intentions, and whether he has any important specific undertaking in hand. For the sake of elegant literature, one is very glad, that he has had the opportunity of visiting those most interesting scenes and objects which you mention. Will you express to him in the strongest terms, my respect and my animated wishes for his health, his happiness, and his utility. You can inform me what is the nature of that literary project to which you allude. Tell me also, what is the state and progress of your own literary projects, and, I hope I may say, labours. I behaved shabbily about some slight remarks which I was to have ventured on Mr. Southey's 'Madoc,' in the 'Eclectic Review.' On reading the critiques in the 'Edinburgh Review,' on 'Thalaba' and 'Madoc,' I found what were substantially my own impressions, so much better developed than I could have done, that I instantly threw my remarks away. Let me hear from you when you have half an hour of leisure, and believe me to be, with every kind remembrance to your most excellent, family, my dear sir, Most cordially yours, John Foster. To Joseph Cottle." Some weeks after, Mr. Coleridge called on me; when, in the course of conversation, he entered into some observations on his own character, that made him appear unusually amiable. He said that he was naturally very arrogant; that it was his easily besetting sin; a state of mind which he ascribed to the severe subjection to which he had been exposed, till he was fourteen years of age, and from which, his own consciousness of superiority made him revolt. He then stated that he had renounced all his Unitarian sentiments; that he considered Unitarianism as a heresy of the worst description; attempting in vain, to reconcile sin and holiness; the world and heaven; opposing the whole spirit of the Bible; and subversive of all that truly constituted christianity. At this interview he professed his deepest conviction of the truth of Revelation; of the Fall of Man; of the Divinity of Christ, and redemption alone through his blood. To hear these sentiments so explicitly avowed, gave me unspeakable pleasure, and formed a new, and unexpected, and stronger bond of union. A long and highly interesting theological conversation; followed, in which Mr. C. proved, that, however weak his body, the intellectual vigour of his mind was unimpaired. He exhibited, also, more sobriety of manner than I had before noticed in him, with an improved and impressive maturity in his reflections, expressed in his happiest language; and which, could it have been accurately recorded, would have adorned the most splendid of his pages;--so rare and pre-eminent was the powerful and spontaneous utterance with which this gifted son of genius was endowed. Mr. Coleridge, at his next visit, related to me some of his Italian adventures; one or two of which I here introduce. After quitting Malta, he had landed in Sicily, and visited Etna; his ascent up whose side, to the crater, he graphically described, with some striking features; but as this is a subject proverbially enlarged upon by all travellers, I waive further notice, and proceed to state, that Mr. C. after leaving Sicily passed over to the south of Italy, and journeyed on to Rome. Shortly after Mr. Coleridge had arrived in this city, he attracted some notice amongst the literati, as an English "Man of Letters." Cardinal Fesch, in particular, was civil, and sought his company; but that which was more remarkable, Jerome Buonaparte was then a resident at Rome, and Mr. C.'s reputation becoming known to him, he sent for him, and after showing him his palace, pictures, &c. thus generously addressed him: "Sir, I have sent for you to give you a little candid advice. I do not know that you have said, or written anything against my brother Napoleon, but as an Englishman, the supposition is not unreasonable. If you have, my advice is, that you leave Italy as soon as you possibly can!" This hint was gratefully received, and Mr. Coleridge soon after quitted Rome, in the suite of Cardinal Fesch. From his anxiety to reach England, he proceeded to Leghorn, where a circumstance occurred which will excite every reader's sympathy. Mr. Coleridge had journeyed to this port, where he rather hoped, than expected to find some conveyance, through the medium of a neutral, that should waft him to the land, "more prised than ever." The hope proved delusive. The war was now raging between England and France, and Buonaparte being lord of the ascendant in Italy, Mr. Coleridge's situation became insecure, and even perilous. To obtain a passport was impossible; and as Mr. C. had formerly rendered himself obnoxious to the great Captain by some political papers, he was in daily and hourly expectation of being incarcerated in an Italian prison, which would have been the infallible road to death! In half despair of ever again seeing his family and friends, and under the constant dread of apprehension by the emissaries of the Tuscan government, or French spies; he went out one morning to look at some ruins in the neighbourhood of Leghorn, in a state of despondency, where, certainty, however terrible, would have been almost preferable to suspense. While musing on the ravages of time, he turned his eye, and observed at a little distance, a seafaring looking man, musing in silence, like himself, on the waste around. Mr. Coleridge advanced towards him, supposing, or at least deeming it possible, that he also might be mourning his captivity, and commenced a discourse with him; when he found that the stranger was an American captain, whose ship was then in the harbour, and on the point of sailing for England. This information sent joy into his heart; but he testified no emotion, determined to obtain the captain's good will, by showing him all the civilities in his power, as a preliminary to any future service the captain might be disposed to render him, whether the power were united with the disposition or not. This showed adroitness, with great knowledge of human nature; and more winning and captivating manners than those of Mr. C. when called forth, were never possessed by mortal! In conformity with this almost forlorn hope, Mr. Coleridge explained to the American captain the history of the ruin; read to him some of the half defaced Latin and Italian inscriptions, and concluded with extolling General Washington, and predicting the stability of the Union. The right keys, treble and tenor, were touched at the same moment. "Pray young man," said the captain, "who are you?" Mr. C. replied, "I am a poor unfortunate Englishman, with a wife and family at home; but I am afraid I shall never see them more! I have no _passport_, nor means of escape; and, to increase my sorrow, I am in daily dread of being thrown into jail, when those I love will not have the last pleasure of _knowing_ that I am dead!" The captain's heart was touched. He had a wife and family at a distance. "My young man," said he, "what is your name?" The reply was, "Samuel Taylor Coleridge." "Poor young man," answered the captain. "You meet me at this place to-morrow morning, exactly at ten o'clock." So saying, the captain withdrew, Mr. C. stood musing on the singular occurrence, in which there was something _inexplicable_. His discernment of the stranger's character convinced him there existed no _under plot_, but still there was a wide space between _probability_ and _certainty_. On a balance of circumstances, he still thought _all fair_, and, at the appointed hour, repaired to the interior of the ruins. No captain was there; but in a few minutes he appeared, and, hastening up to Mr. Coleridge, exclaimed exultingly, "I have got your passport!" "How! What!" said Mr. C. almost overpowered by his feelings. "Ask me no questions," replied the captain; "you are my _steward_, and you shall sail away with me to-morrow morning!" He continued, giving him his address, "You come to my house to-morrow early, when I will provide you with a _jacket_ and _trowsers_, and you shall follow me to the ship with a _basket of vegetables_" In short, thus accoutred, he _did_ follow the captain to the ship the next morning; and in three hours fairly sailed out of Leghorn harbour, triumphantly on his course to England! As soon as the ship had cleared the port, Mr. Coleridge hastened down to the cabin, and cried, "my dear captain, tell me how you obtained my passport?" Said the captain, very gravely, "Why, I went to the authorities, and _swore_ that you were an _American_, and my steward! I _swore_ also, that I knew your father and mother; that they lived in a red-brick house, about half a mile out of New York, on the road to Boston!" It is gratifying to add, that this benevolent little-scrupulous captain refused to accept any thing from Mr. C. for his passage to England; and, behaved in many other respects, with the same uniform kindness. During the voyage, Mr. Coleridge told me, he was attacked with a dangerous illness, when he thought he should have _died_, but for the "_good captain_," who attended him with the solicitude of a father. Mr. C. also said, had he known what the captain was going to _swear_, whatever the consequences might have been, he would have prevented him.[82] The following long letter will be read with interest. "Bristol, 1807. Dear Cottle, To pursue our last conversation. Christians expect no outward or sensible miracles from prayer. Its effects, and its fruitions are spiritual, and accompanied says that _true Divine_, Archbishop Leighton, 'not by reasons and arguments, but by an inexpressible kind of evidence, which they only know who have it.' To this I would add, that even those who, like me I fear, have not attained it, yet may presume it. First, because reason itself, or rather mere human nature, in any dispassionate moment, feels the necessity of religion, but if this be not true there is no religion, no religation, or binding over again; nothing added to reason, and therefore _Socinianism_, misnamed _Unitarianism_, is not only not _Christianity_, it is not even _religion_, it does not _religate_; does not bind anew. The first outward and sensible result of prayer is, a penitent resolution, joined with a consciousness of weakness in effecting it, yea even a dread, too well grounded, lest by breaking and falsifying it, the soul should add guilt to guilt; by the very means it has taken to escape from guilt; so pitiable is the state of unregenerate man. Are you familiar with Leighton's Works? He resigned his archbishoprick, and retired to voluntary poverty on account of the persecutions of the Presbyterians, saying, 'I should not dare to introduce christianity itself with such cruelties, how much less for a surplice, and the name of a bishop.' If there could be an intermediate space between inspired, and uninspired writings, that space would be occupied by Leighton. No show of learning, no appearance, or ostentatious display of eloquence, and yet both may be shown in him, conspicuously and holily. There is in him something that must be felt, even as the scriptures must be felt. You ask me my views of the _Trinity_. I accept the doctrine, not as deduced from human reason, in its grovelling capacity for comprehending spiritual things, but as the clear revelation of Scripture. But perhaps it may be said, the Socinians do not admit this doctrine as being taught in the bible. I know enough of their shifts and quibbles, with their dexterity at explaining away all they dislike, and that is not a little, but though beguiled once by them, I happily for my own peace of mind, escaped from their sophistries, and now hesitate not to affirm, that Socinians would lose all character for honesty, if they were to explain their neighbour's will with the same latitude of interpretation, which they do the Scriptures. I have in my head some floating ideas on the _Logos_, which I hope, hereafter, to mould into a consistent form; but it is a gross perversion of the truth, in Socinians, to declare that we believe in _three gods_; and they know it to be false. They might, with equal justice affirm that we believe in _three suns_. The meanest peasant, who has acquired the first rudiments of christianity, would shrink back from a thing so monstrous. Still the Trinity has its difficulties. It would be strange if otherwise. A _Revelation_ that revealed nothing, not within the grasp of human reason!--no religation, no binding over again, as before said; but these difficulties are shadows, contrasted with the substantive and insurmountable obstacles, with which _they_ contend who admit the _Divine authority of Scripture_, with the _superlative excellence of Christ_, and yet undertake to prove that these Scriptures teach, and that Christ taught his own _pure humanity_. If Jesus Christ was merely a man, if he was not God as well as man, be it considered, he could not have been even a _good man_. There is no medium. The SAVIOUR _in that case_ was absolutely _a deceiver!_ one, transcendantly _unrighteous!_ in advancing pretensions to miracles, by the 'Finger of God,' which he never performed; and by asserting claims, (as a man) in the most aggravated sense, blasphemous. These consequences, Socinians, to be consistent, must allow, and which impious arrogation of Divinity in Christ, according to their faith, as well as his false assumption of a community of 'glory' with the Father, 'before the world was,' even they will be necessitated completely to admit the exoneration of the Jews, according to their law, in crucifying one, who 'being a man,' 'made himself God!' But in the Christian, rather than in the _Socinian_, or _Pharisaic_ view, all these objections vanish, and harmony succeeds to inexplicable confusion. If Socinians hesitate in ascribing _unrighteousness_ to Christ, the inevitable result of their principles, they tremble, as well they might, at their avowed creed, and virtually renounce what they profess to uphold. The Trinity, as Bishop Leighton has well remarked, is 'a doctrine of faith, not of demonstration,' except in a _moral_ sense. If the New Testament declare it, not in an insulated passage, but through the whole breadth of its pages, rendering, with any other admission, the book which is the christian's anchor-hold of hope, dark and contradictory, then it is not to be rejected, but on a penalty that reduces to an atom, all the sufferings this earth can inflict. Let the grand question be determined.--Is, or is not the bible _inspired_? No one book has ever been subjected to so rigid an investigation as the Bible, by minds the most capacious, and in the result, which has so triumphantly repelled all the assaults of infidels. In the extensive intercourse which I have had with this class of men, I have seen their prejudices surpassed only by their ignorance. This I found particularly the case in Dr. Darwin, (p. 1-85.) the prince of their fraternity. Without therefore, stopping to contend on what all dispassionate men must deem undebatable ground, I may assume inspiration as admitted; and equally so, that it would be an insult to man's understanding, to suppose any other revelation from God than the christian scriptures. If these Scriptures, impregnable in their strength, sustained in their pretensions, by undeniable prophecies and miracles, and by the experience of the _inner man_, in all ages, as well as by a concatenation of arguments, all bearing upon one point, and extending with miraculous consistency, through a series of fifteen hundred years; if all this combined proof does not establish their validity, nothing can be proved under the sun; but the world and man must be abandoned, with all its consequences, to one universal scepticism! Under such sanctions, therefore, if these scriptures, as a fundamental truth, _do_ inculcate the doctrine of the _Trinity_; however surpassing human comprehension; then I say, we are bound to admit it on the strength of _moral demonstration_. The supreme Governor of the world and the Father of our spirits, has seen fit to disclose to us much of his will, and the whole of his natural and moral perfections. In some instances he has given his _word_ only, and demanded our _faith_; while on other momentous subjects, instead of bestowing full revelation, like the _Via Lactea_, he has furnished a glimpse only, through either the medium of inspiration, or by the exercise of those rational faculties with which he has endowed us. I consider the Trinity as substantially resting on the first proposition, yet deriving support from the last. I recollect when I stood on the summit of Etna, and darted my gaze down the crater; the immediate vicinity was discernible, till, lower down, obscurity gradually terminated in total darkness. Such figures exemplify many truths revealed in the Bible. We pursue them, until, from the imperfection of our faculties, we are lost in impenetrable night. All truths, however, that are essential to faith, _honestly_ interpreted; all that are important to human conduct, under every diversity of circumstance, are manifest as a blazing star. The promises also of felicity to the righteous in the future world, though the precise nature of that felicity may not be defined, are illustrated by every image that can swell the imagination; while the misery of the _lost_, in its unutterable intensity, though the language that describes it is all necessarily figurative, is there exhibited as resulting chiefly, if not wholly, from the withdrawment of the _light of God's countenance_, and a banishment from his _presence!_ best comprehended in this world by reflecting on the desolations, which would instantly follow the loss of the sun's vivifying and universally diffused _warmth_. You, or rather _all_, should remember that some truths from their nature, surpass the scope of man's limited powers, and stand as the criteria of _faith_, determining by their rejection, or admission, who among the sons of men can confide in the veracity of heaven. Those more ethereal truths, of which the Trinity is conspicuously the chief, without being circumstantially explained, may be faintly illustrated by material objects. The eye of man cannot discern the satellites of Jupiter, nor become sensible of the multitudinous stars, whose rays have never reached our planet, and consequently garnish not the canopy of night; yet are they the less real, because their existence lies beyond man's unassisted gaze? The tube of the philosopher, and the _celestial telescope_,--the unclouded visions of heaven will confirm the one class of truths, and irradiate the other. The _Trinity_ is a subject on which analogical reasoning may advantageously be admitted, as furnishing, at least a glimpse of light, and with this, for the present, we must be satisfied. Infinite Wisdom deemed clearer manifestations inexpedient; and is man to dictate to his Maker? I may further remark, that where we cannot behold a desirable object distinctly, we must take the best view we can; and I think you, and every candid enquiring mind, may derive assistance from such reflections as the following. Notwithstanding the arguments of Spinosa, and Des Cartes, and other advocates of the _Material system_, or, in more appropriate language, the _Atheistical system!_ it is admitted by all men, not prejudiced, not biased by sceptical prepossessions, that _mind_ is distinct from _matter_. The mind of man, however, is involved in inscrutable darkness, (as the profoundest metaphysicians well know) and is to be estimated, if at all, alone by an inductive process; that is, by its _effects_. Without entering on the question, whether an extremely circumscribed portion of the mental process, surpassing instinct, may or may not be extended to quadrupeds, it is universally acknowledged, that the mind of man alone, regulates all the actions of his corporeal frame. Mind, therefore, may be regarded as a distinct genus, in the scale ascending above brutes, and including the whole of intellectual existences; advancing from _thought_, that mysterious thing! in its lowest form, through all the gradations of sentient and rational beings, till it arrives at a Bacon, a Newton; and then, when unincumbered by matter, extending its illimitable sway through Seraph and Archangel, till we are lost in the GREAT INFINITE! Is it not deserving of notice, as an especial subject of meditation, that our _limbs_, in all they do or can accomplish, implicitly obey the dictation of the _mind_? that this operating power, whatever its name, under certain limitations, exercises a sovereign dominion not only over our limbs, but over our intellectual pursuits? The mind of every man is evidently the fulcrum, the moving force,--which alike regulates all his limbs and actions: and in which example, we find a strong illustration of the subordinate nature of mere _matter_. That alone which gives direction to the organic parts of our nature, is wholly _mind_; and one mind if placed over a thousand limbs, could, with undiminished ease, control and regulate the whole. This idea is advanced on the supposition that _one mind_ could command an unlimited direction over any given number of _limbs_, provided they were all connected by _joint_ and _sinew_. But suppose, through some occult and inconceivable means, these limbs were dis-associated, as to all material connexion; suppose, for instance, one mind with unlimited authority, governed the operations of _two_ separate persons, would not this substantially, be only _one person_, seeing the directing principle was one? If the truth here contended for, be admitted, that _two persons_, governed by _one mind_, is incontestably _one person_; the same conclusion would be arrived at, and the proposition equally be justified, which affirmed that, _three_, or otherwise _four_ persons, owning also necessary and essential subjection to _one mind_, would only be so many diversities or modifications of that _one mind_, and therefore, the component parts virtually collapsing into _one whole_, the person would be _one_. Let any man ask himself, whose understanding can both reason and become the depository of truth, whether, if _one mind_ thus regulated with absolute authority, _three_, or otherwise _four_ persons, with all their congeries of material parts, would not these parts inert in themselves, when subjected to one predominant mind, be in the most logical sense, _one person_? Are ligament and exterior combination indispensable pre-requisites to the sovereign influence of mind over mind? or mind over matter? But perhaps it may be said, we have no instance of one mind governing more than one body. This may be, but the argument remains the same. With a proud spirit, that forgets its own contracted range of thought, and circumscribed knowledge, who is to limit the sway of Omnipotence? or presumptuously to deny the possibility of _that_ Being, who called light out of darkness, so to exalt the dominion of _one mind_, as to give it absolute sway over other dependant minds, or (indifferently) over detached, or combined portions of organized matter? But if this superinduced quality be conferable on any order of created beings, it is blasphemy to limit the power of God, and to deny _his_ capacity to transfuse _his own_ Spirit, when and to whom he will. This reasoning may now be applied in illustration of the Trinity. We are too much in the habit of viewing our Saviour Jesus Christ, through the medium of his body. 'A body was prepared for him,' but this body was mere matter; as insensible in itself as every human frame when deserted by the soul. If therefore the Spirit that was in Christ, was the Spirit of the Father; if no thought, no vibration, no spiritual communication, or miraculous display, existed in, or proceeded from Christ, not immediately and consubstantially identified with Jehovah, the Great First cause; if all these operating principles were thus derived, in consistency alone with the conjoint divine attributes; if this Spirit of the Father ruled and reigned in Christ as his own manifestation, then in the strictest sense, Christ exhibited 'the Godhead bodily,' and was undeniably '_one_ with the Father;' confirmatory of the Saviour's words: 'Of myself, (my body) I can do nothing, the Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works.' But though I speak of the body as inert in itself, and necessarily allied to matter, yet this declaration must not be understood as militating against the christian doctrine of the _resurrection of the body_. In its grosser form, the thought is not to be admitted, for 'flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God,' but that the body, without losing its consciousness and individuality, may be subjected by the illimitable power of omnipotence, to a sublimating process, so as to be rendered compatible with spiritual association, is not opposed to reason, in its severe abstract exercises, while in attestation of this _exhilarating belief_, there are many remote analogies in nature exemplifying the same truth, while it is in the strictest accordance with that final dispensation, which must, as christians, regulate all our speculations. I proceed now to say, that If the postulate be thus admitted, that one mind influencing two bodies, would only involve a diversity of operations, but in reality be one in essence; or otherwise as an hypothetical argument, illustrative of truth, if one preeminent mind, or spiritual subsistence, unconnected with matter, possessed an undivided and sovereign dominion over two or more disembodied minds, so as to become the exclusive source of all their subtlest volitions and exercises, the _unity_, however complex the modus of its manifestation, would be fully established; and this principle extends to Deity itself, and shows the true sense, as I conceive, in which Christ and the Father are one. In continuation of this reasoning, if God who is light, the Sun of the moral world, should in his union of infinite wisdom, power, and goodness, and from all eternity, have ordained that an emanation from himself,--for aught we know, an essential emanation, as light is inseparable from the luminary of day--should not only have existed in his Son, in the fulness of time to be united to a mortal body, but that a like emanation from himself, also perhaps essential, should have constituted the Holy Spirit, who, without losing his ubiquity, was more especially sent to this lower earth, _by_ the Son, _at_ the impulse of the Father, then in the most comprehensive sense, God, and his Son Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost, are ONE. 'Three persons in one God,' and thus form the true Trinity in Unity. To suppose that more than one independent power, or governing mind, exists in the whole universe, is absolute Polytheism, against which the denunciations of all the Jewish and Christian canonical books were directed. And if there be but ONE directing MIND, that mind is God! operating however, in three persons, according to the direct and uniform declarations of that inspiration which 'brought life and immortality to light.' Yet this divine doctrine of the Trinity is to be received, not because it is or can be clear to finite apprehension, but, in reiteration of the argument, because the Scriptures, in their unsophisticated interpretation expressly state it. The Trinity, therefore, from its important aspects, and biblical prominence, is the grand article of faith, and the foundation of the whole christian system. Who can say, as Christ and the Holy Ghost proceeded from, and are still one with the Father, and as all the disciples of Christ derive their fulness from him, and, in spirit, are inviolately united to him as a branch is to the vine, who can say, but that in one view, what was once mysteriously separated, may as mysteriously, be re-combined, and, without interfering with the everlasting Trinity, and the individuality of the spiritual and seraphic orders, the Son at the consummation of all things, deliver up his mediatorial kingdom to the Father, and God, in some peculiar and infinitely sublime sense, become all in all! God love you, S. T. Coleridge."[83] In a former page, Mr. Coleridge has been represented as entertaining sentiments in early life, approaching to, though not identified with, those of Unitarians; on his return to Bristol, in the year 1807, a complete reverse had taken place in his theological tenets. Reflection and reading, particularly the bible, had taught him, as he said, the unstable foundation on which Unitarians grounded their faith; and in proportion as orthodox sentiments acquired an ascendancy in his mind, a love of truth compelled him to oppose his former errors, and stimulated him, by an explicit declaration of his religious views, to counteract those former impressions, which his cruder opinions had led him once so strenuously to enforce on all around. The editor of Mr. Coleridge's "Table Tails," has conferred an important benefit on the public, by preserving so many of his familiar conversations, particularly those on the important subject of Unitarianism. Few men ever poured forth torrents of more happily-expressed language, the result of more matured reflection, in his social intercourse, than Mr. Coleridge; and at this time, the recollection is accompanied with serious regret, that I allowed to pass unnoticed so many of his splendid colloquies, which, could they be recalled, would exhibit his talents in a light equally favourable with his most deliberately-written productions. I did indeed take notes of one of his conversations, on his departure from a supper party, and which I shall subjoin, because the confirmed general views, and individual opinions of so enlarged a mind must command attention; especially when exercised on subjects intrinsically important. I however observe, that my sketch of the conversation must be understood as being exceedingly far from doing _justice_ to the original. At this time I was invited to meet Mr. Coleridge with a zealous Unitarian minister. It was natural to conclude, that such uncongenial, and, at the same time, such inflammable materials would soon ignite. The subject of Unitarianism having been introduced soon after dinner, the minister avowed his sentiments, in language that was construed into a challenge, when Mr. Coleridge advanced at once to the charge, by saying "Sir, you give up so much, that the little you retain of Christianity is not worth keeping." We looked in vain for a reply. After a manifest internal conflict, the Unitarian minister very prudently allowed the gauntlet to remain undisturbed. Wine he thought more pleasant than controversy. Shortly after this occurrence, Mr. Coleridge supped with the writer, when his well known conversational talents were eminently displayed; so that what Pope affirmed of Bolingbroke, that "his usual conversation, taken down verbatim, from its coherence and accuracy, would have borne printing, without correction," was fully, and perhaps, more justly applicable to Mr. C. Some of his theological observations are here detailed. He said, he had recently had a long conversation with an Unitarian minister, who declared, that, he could discover nothing in the New Testament which in the _least_ favoured the Divinity of Christ, to which Mr. C. replied that it appeared to him impossible for any man to read the New Testament, with the common exercise of an unbiassed understanding, without being convinced of the Divinity of Christ, from the testimony almost of every page. He said it was evident that different persons might look at the same object with very opposite feelings. For instance, if Sir Isaac Newton looked at the planet Jupiter, he would view him with his revolving moons, and would be led to the contemplation of his being inhabited, which thought would open a boundless field to his imagination: whilst another person, standing perhaps at the side of the great philosopher, would look at Jupiter with the same set of feelings that he would at a silver sixpence. So some persons were wilfully blind, and did not seek for that change, that preparation of the heart and understanding, which would enable them to see clearly the gospel truth. He said that Socinians believed no more than St. Paul did before his conversion: for the Pharisees believed in a Supreme Being, and a future state of rewards and punishments. St. Paul thought he ought to do many things contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth. The saints he shut up in prison, having received authority from the High Priest, and when they were put to death, he gave his voice against them. But after his conversion, writing to the Romans, he says, 'I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation unto every man that believeth: to the Jew first, and also to the Gentiles.' He then referred to the dreadful state of the literati in London, as it respects religion, and of their having laughed at him, and believed him to be in jest, when he professed his belief in the Bible. Having introduced Mr. Davy to Mr. C. some years before, I inquired for him with some anxiety, and expressed a hope that he was not tinctured with the prevailing scepticism since his removal from Bristol to London. Mr. C. assured me that he was not: that _his_ heart and understanding were not the _soil_ for _infidelity_.[84] I then remarked, "During your stay in London, you doubtless saw a great many of what are called 'the cleverest men,' how do you estimate Davy, in comparison with these?" Mr. Coleridge's reply was strong, but expressive. "Why, Davy could eat them all! There is an energy, an elasticity in his mind, which enables him to seize on, and analyze, all questions, pushing them to their legitimate consequences. Every subject in Davy's mind has the principle of vitality. Living thoughts spring up like the turf under his feet." With equal justice, Mr. Davy entertained the same exalted opinion of Mr. Coleridge. Mr. C. now changed the subject, and spoke of Holcroft; who he said was a man of but small powers, with superficial, rather than solid talents, and possessing principles of the most horrible description; a man who at the very moment he denied the existence of a Deity, in his heart believed and trembled. He said that Holcroft, and other Atheists, reasoned with so much fierceness and vehemence against a God, that it plainly showed they were inwardly conscious there _was_ a GOD to reason against; for, a nonentity would never excite passion. He said that in one of his visits to London, he accidentally met Holcroft in a public office without knowing his name, when he began, stranger as he was, the enforcement of some of his diabolical sentiments! which, it appears, he was in the habit of doing, at all seasons, and in all companies; by which he often corrupted the principles of those simple persons who listened to his shallow, and worn-out impieties. Mr. C. declared himself to have felt indignant at conduct so infamous, and at once closed with the "prating atheist," when they had a sharp encounter. Holcroft then abruptly addressed him, "I perceive you have _mind_, and know what you are talking about. It will be worth while to make a convert of _you_. I am engaged at present, but if you vrill call on me to-morrow morning, giving him his card, I will engage, in half an hour, to convince you there is no God!" Mr. Coleridge called on him the next morning, when the discussion was renewed, but none being present except the disputants, no account is preserved of this important conversation; but Mr. C. affirmed that he beat all his arguments to atoms; a result that none who knew him could doubt. He also stated that instead of _his_ being converted to atheism, the atheist himself, after his manner, was converted; for the same day he sent Mr. C. a letter, saying his reasoning was so clear and satisfactory, that he had changed his views and was now "_a theist_." The next sun probably beheld him an atheist again; but whether he _called_ himself this or that, his character was the same. Soon after the foregoing incident, Mr. Coleridge said, he found himself in a large party, at the house of a man of letters, amongst whom to his surprise, he saw Mr. and Mrs. Holcroft, when, to incite to a renewal of their late dispute, and before witnesses, (in the full consciousness of strength) Mr. C. enforced the propriety of teaching children, as soon as they could articulate, to lisp the praises of their Maker; "for," said he, "though they can, form no correct idea of God, yet they entertain a high opinion of their _father_, and it is an easy introduction to the truth, to tell them that their Heavenly Father is stronger, and wiser, and better, than their _earthly_ father." The whole company looked at Mr. Holcroft, implying that _now_ was the time for him to meet a competent opponent, and justify sentiments which he had so often triumphantly advanced. They looked in vain. He maintained, to their surprise, a total silence, well remembering the severe castigation he had so recently received. But a very different effect was produced on Mrs. Holcroft. She indignantly heard, and giving vent to her passion and her _tears_, said, she was quite surprised at Mr. Coleridge talking in that way before her, when he knew that both herself and Mr. Holcroft were atheists! Mr. C. spoke of the unutterable horror he felt, when Holcroft's son, a boy eight years of age, came up to him and said, "There is no God!" So that these wretched parents, alike father and mother, were as earnest in inculcating atheism on their children, as christian parents are in inspiring their offspring with respect for religious truth. Actions are often the best illustration of principles. Mr. Coleridge also stated the following circumstance, notorious at the time, as an evidence of the disastrous effects of atheism. Holcroft's tyrannical conduct toward his children was proverbial. An elder son, with a mind embued with his father's sentiments, from extreme severity of treatment, had run away from his paternal roof, and entered on board a ship. Holcroft pursued his son, and when the fugitive youth saw his father in a boat, rowing toward the vessel, rather than endure his frown and his chastisement, he seized a pistol, and blew his brains out![85] An easy transition having been made to the Bible, Mr. C. spoke of our Saviour with an utterance so sublime and reverential, that none could have heard him without experiencing an accession of love, gratitude, and adorations to the Great Author of our salvation. He referred to the Divinity of Christ, as a truth, incontestable to all who admitted the inspiration, and consequent authority of Scripture. He particularly alluded to the 6th of John, v. 15. "When Jesus perceived that they would come and take him by force to make him a king, he departed again into a mountain '_alone_.'" He said it characterized the low views, and worldly-mindedness of the Jews, that, after they had seen the miracles of Jesus Christ, and heard his heavenly doctrine, and had been told that his kingdom was not of this world, they should think of conferring additional honour on him, by making him their King! He departed from these little views and scenes, _by night_, to a neighbouring mountain, and there, in the spirit of _prescience_, meditated on his approaching crucifixion; on that attendant guilt, which would bring on the Jews, wrath to the uttermost, and terminate their impieties, by one million of their race being swept from the face of the earth. Mr. C. noticed Doddridge's works with great respect, particularly his "Rise and Progress of Religion."[86] He thought favourably of Lord Rochester's conversion as narrated by Burnet; spoke of Jeremy Taylor in exalted terms, and thought the compass of his mind discovered itself in none of his works more than in his "Life of Christ," extremely miscellaneous as it was. He also expressed the strongest commendation of Archbishop Leighton, whose talents were of the loftiest description, and which were, at the same time, eminently combined with humility. He thought Bishop Burnet's high character of Leighton justly deserved, and that his whole conduct and spirit were more conformed to his Divine Master, than almost any man on record. I now proceed to say, it was with extreme reluctance that the Unitarians in Bristol resigned their champion, especially as other defections had recently occurred in their community, and that among the more intellectual portion of their friends. Although the expectation might be extravagant, they still cherished the hope, however languid, that Mr. C. after some oscillations, would once more bestow on them his suffrage; but an occurrence took place, which dissipated the last vestige of this hope, and formed between them a permanent wall of separation. Mr. Coleridge was lecturing in Bristol, surrounded by a numerous audience, when, in referring to the "Paradise Regained," he said that Milton had clearly represented Satan, as a "sceptical Socinian." This was regarded as a direct and undisguised declaration of war. It so happened that indisposition prevented me from attending that lecture, but I received from Mr. C. directly after, a letter, in which he thus writes: "... Mr. ---- I find is raising the city against me, as far as he and his friends can, for having stated a mere matter of fact; viz. that Milton had represented Satan as a sceptical Socinian; which is the case; and I could not have explained the excellence of the sublimest single passage in all his writings, had I not previously informed the audience, that Milton had represented Satan, as knowing the Prophetic and Messianic character of Christ, but was sceptical as to any higher claims. And what other definition could Mr. ---- himself give of a sceptical Socinian? (with this difference indeed, that Satan's faith somewhat exceeded that of Socinians.) Now that Satan has done so, will you consult 'Paradise Regained,' Book IV. from line 196, and the same Book, from line 500." It is of consequence that Mr. Coleridge's _later_ sentiments on the subject of Socinianism should be given; but as I had no opportunity of ascertaining what those sentiments were, it was satisfactory to learn from the testimony of Mr. C.'s "Table Talk,"[87] that his last and maturest opinions were, to the fullest, confirmatory of those expressed by him in these pages. The following letter was written by Mr. Coleridge, to Mr. George Fricker, his brother-in-law; it is believed in 1807. Mr. F. died 1828; pious and respected. "Saturday afternoon. My dear young friend, I am sorry that you should have felt any delicacy in disclosing to me your religious feelings, as rendering it inconsistent with your tranquillity of mind to spend the Sunday evening with me. Though I do not find in that book, which we both equally revere, any command, either express, or which I can infer, which leads me to attach any criminality to cheerful and innocent social intercourse on the Lord's day; though I do not find that it was in the least degree forbidden to the Jews on their Sabbath; and though I have been taught by Luther, and the great founders of the Church of England, that the Sabbath was a part of the ceremonial and transitory parts of the law given by heaven to Moses; and that our Sunday is binding on our consciences, chiefly from its manifest and most awful usefulness, and indeed moral necessity; yet I highly commend your firmness in what you think right, and assure you solemnly, that I esteem you greatly for it. I would much rather that you should have too much, than an atom too little. I am far from surprised that, having seen what you have seen, and suffered what you have suffered, you should have opened your soul to a sense of our fallen nature; and the incapability of man to heal himself. My opinions may not be in all points the same as yours; but I have experienced a similar alteration. I was for many years a Socinian; and at times almost a Naturalist, but sorrow, and ill health, and disappointment in the only deep wish I had ever cherished, forced me to look into myself; I read the New Testament again, and I became fully convinced, that Socinianism was not only not the doctrine of the New Testament, but that it scarcely deserved the name of a religion in any sense. An extract from a letter which I wrote a few months ago to a sceptical friend, who had been a Socinian, and of course rested all the evidences of christianity on miracles, to the exclusion of grace and inward faith, will perhaps, surprise you, as showing you how much nearer our opinions are than what you must have supposed. 'I fear that the mode of defending christianity, adopted by Grotius first; and latterly, among many others, by Dr. Paley, has increased the number of infidels;--never could it have been so great, if thinking men had been habitually led to look into their own souls, instead of always looking out, both of themselves, and of their nature. If to curb attack, such as yours on miracles, it had been answered:--"Well, brother! but granting these miracles to have been in part the growth of delusion at the time, and of exaggeration afterward, yet still all the doctrines will remain untouched by this circumstance, and binding on thee. Still mast thou repent and be regenerated, and be crucified to the flesh; and this not by thy own mere power; but by a mysterious action of the moral Governor on thee; of the Ordo-ordinians, the Logos, or Word. Still will the eternal filiation, or Sonship of the Word from the Father; still will the Trinity of the Deity, the redemption, and the thereto necessary assumption of humanity by the Word, 'who is with God, and is God,' remain truths: and still will the vital head-and-heart FAITH in these truths, be the living and only fountain of all true virtue. Believe all these, and with the grace of the spirit consult your own heart, in quietness and humility, they will furnish you with proofs, that surpass all understanding, because they are felt and known; believe all these I say, so as that thy faith shall be not merely real in the acquiescence of the intellect; but actual, in the thereto assimilated affections; then shalt thou KNOW from God, whether or not Christ be of God. But take notice, I only say, the miracles are extra essential; I by no means deny their importance, much less hold them useless, or superfluous. Even as Christ did, so would I teach; that is, build the miracle on the faith, not the faith on the miracle." May heaven bless you, my dear George, and Your affectionate friend, S. T. C." In the intervening time, between the receipt of Mr. C.'s last letter, and his calling on me, I received a note from a lady, an old friend, begging permission to introduce to me, a clever young man of her acquaintance, whom she even so honoured as to call "A little John Henderson;" concerning whom, this young man wished to make inquiries. An invitation immediately followed, and the lady introduced to me, young Mr. De Quincey. Several interviews followed, each exhibiting his talents in a more favourable view, till I was satisfied he would either shine in literature, or, with steady perseverance, acquire eminence in either of the professions. He made many inquiries respecting John Henderson, of whose learning, and surprising attainments, he had heard much. After conversing long on this subject, Mr. De Q. asked me if I knew any thing of Mr. Coleridge's pecuniary affairs. I replied, "I am afraid he is a legitimate son of genius." He asked if I thought he would accept a hundred or two pounds. I answered, I could not tell, but that I expected shortly to see him, when, if he seriously desired to learn, I would ascertain what the state of his finances was, and let him know. This he said, was his particular wish. When Mr. Coleridge called on me, and the extended conversation had occurred, before stated, I asked him concerning his circumstances. He confessed that he had some present difficulties, which oppressed his mind. He said that all the money he had received from his office in Malta, as secretary to Sir Alexander Ball, had been expended in Italy, and on his way home. I then told him, that a young man of fortune, who admired his talents, had inquired of me, if I thought he would accept the present of a hundred or two pounds, "and I now ask you," said I, "that question, that I may return an answer." Mr. Coleridge rose from his seat. He appeared much oppressed, and agitated, and, after a short silence, he turned to me, and said. "Cottle I will write to you. We will change the subject." The next day I received from Mr. C. the following letter. "My dear Cottle, Independent of letter-writing, and a dinner engagement with C. Danvers, I was the whole of yesterday till evening, in a most wretched restlessness of body and limbs, having imprudently discontinued some medicines, which are now my anchor of hope. This morning I dedicate to certain distant calls on Dr. Beddoes and Colston, at Clifton, not so much for the calls themselves, as for the necessity of taking brisk exercise. But no unforeseen accident intervening, I shall spend the evening with you from seven o'clock. I will now express my sentiments on the important subject communicated to you. I need not say it has been the cause of serious meditation. Undoubtedly, calamities have so thickened on me for the last two years, that the pecuniary pressures of the moment, are the only serious obstacles at present to my completion of those works, which, if completed, would make me easy. Besides these, I have reason for belief that a Tragedy of mine will be brought on the stage this season, the result of which is of course only one of the possibilities of life, on which I am not fool enough to calculate. Finally therefore, if you know that any unknown benefactor is in such circumstances, that, in doing what he offers to do, he transgresses no duty of morals, or of moral prudence, and does not do that from feeling, which after reflection might perhaps discountenance, I shall gratefully accept it, as an unconditional loan, which I trust I shall be able to restore at the close of two years. This however, I shall be able to know at the expiration of one year, and shall then beg to know the name of my benefactor, which I should then only feel delight in knowing, when I could present to him some substantial proof, that I have employed the tranquillity of mind, which his kindness has enabled me to enjoy, in sincere desires to benefit my fellow men. May God bless you. S. T. C." Soon after the receipt of this letter, (on my invitation) Mr. De Quincey called on me. I said, I understood from Mr. Coleridge himself, that he laboured under embarrassments. "Then" said he, "I will give him five hundred pounds." "Are you serious?" I said. He replied, "I am." I then inquired, "Are you of age?" He said "I am." I then asked, "Can you afford it?" He answered, "I can," and continued, "I shall not feel it." I paused. "Well" I said, "I can know nothing of your circumstances but from your own statement, and not doubting its accuracy, I am willing to become an agent, in any way you prescribe." Mr. De Quincey then said, "I authorise you, to ask Mr. Coleridge, if he will accept from a gentleman, who admires his genius, the sum of five hundred pounds, but remember, he continued, I absolutely prohibit you from naming to him, the source whence it was derived." I remarked; "To the latter part of your injunction, if you require it, I will accede, but although I am deeply interested in Mr. Coleridge's welfare, yet a spirit of equity compels me to recommend you, in the first instance, to present Mr. C. with a smaller sum, and which, if you see it right, you can at any time, augment." Mr. De Quincey then replied, "Three hundred pounds, I _will_ give him, and you will oblige me by making this offer of mine to Mr. Coleridge." I replied, "I will." I then gave him Mr. Coleridge's letter, requesting him to put it in his pocket, and read it at his leisure. Soon after, I received the following communication from Mr. De Quincey. "My dear Sir, I will write for the three hundred pounds to-morrow. I am not able to say anything farther at present, but will endeavour to call on you in a day or two. I am very sincerely, and with many thanks for your trouble in this affair, Yours, Thomas De Quincey." In a day or two, Mr. De Quincey enclosed me the three hundred pounds, when I received from Mr. Coleridge, the following receipt, which I still retain. "November 12, 1807. Received from Mr. Joseph Cottle, the sum of three hundred pounds, presented to me, through him, by an unknown friend. Bristol. S. T. Coleridge." I have been thus particular in detailing the whole of this affair, so honourable to Mr. De Quincey; and, as I was the communicating agent, I thought it right, on this occasion, to give publicity to the transaction, on the principle of doing justice to all. Notwithstanding the prohibition, some indirect notices from myself, could have left no doubt with Mr. C. of the source of this handsome gift. It is singular, that a little before this time, (1807) Mr. Coleridge had written to his friend Mr. Wade a melancholy letter, detailing his embarrassed circumstances; so that Mr. De Quincey's £300 must have been received at an acceptable time! * * * * * No date determines when the following letter was written: supposed, 1807. "My dear Cottle, ... The common end of all narrative, nay, of all poems is, to convert a series into a whole, to make those events, which, in real or imagined history, move on in a straight line, assume to our understandings a circular motion--the snake with its tail in its mouth. Hence, indeed, the almost flattering and yet appropriate term, Poesy, i. e. Poieses--_making_. Doubtless, to His eye, which alone comprehends all past and all future, in one eternal, what to our short sight appears straight, is but a part of the great cycle, just as the calm sea to us appears level, though it be indeed only a part of the globe. Now what the globe is in geography, miniaturing in order to manifest the truth, such is a poem to that image of God, which we were created into, and which still seeking that unity, or revelation of the one, in and by the many, which reminds it, that though in order to be an individual being, it must go farther from God; yet as the receding from him, is to proceed toward nothingness and privation, it must still at every step turn back toward him, in order to be at all. A straight line continually retracted, forms of necessity a circular orbit. Now God's will and word CANNOT be frustrated. His fiat was, with ineffable awfulness, applied to man, when all things, and all living things, and man himself, (as a mere animal) included, were called forth by the Universal, 'Let there be,' and then the breath of the Eternal superadded, to make an immortal spirit--immortality being, as the author of the 'Wisdom of Soloman' profoundly expresses it, 'the only possible reflex, or image of eternity.' The immortal finite is the contracted shadow of the eternal Infinite. Therefore nothingness, or death, to which we move, as we recede from God and from the Word, cannot be nothing; but that tremendous medium between nothing and true being, which Scripture and inmost reason present as most, most horrible! Affectionately, S. T. C." The following letter to Mr. Wade has no date. "Tuesday night, i. e. Wednesday morning. My best and dearest friend, I have barely time to scribble a few lines, so as not to miss the post, for here as every where, there are charitable people, who, taking for granted that you have no business of your own, would save from the pain of vacancy, by employing you in theirs. As to the letter you propose to write to a man who is unworthy even of a rebuke from you, I might most unfeignedly object to some parts of it, from a pang of conscience forbidding me to allow, even from a dear friend, words of admiration, which are inapplicable in exact proportion to the power given to me of having deserved them, if I had done my duty. It is not of comparative utility I speak: for as to what has been actually done, and in relation to useful effects produced, whether on the minds of individuals, or of the public, I dare boldly stand forward, and (let every man have his own, and that be counted mine which, but for, and through me, would not have existed) will challenge the proudest of my literary contemporaries to compare proofs with me, of usefulness in the excitement of reflection, and the diffusion of original or forgotten, yet necessary and important truths and knowledge; and this is not the less true, because I have suffered others to reap all the advantages. But, O dear friend, this consciousness, raised by insult of enemies, and alienated friends, stands me in little stead to my own soul, in how little then, before the all-righteous Judge! who, requiring back the talents he had entrusted, will, if the mercies of Christ do not intervene, not demand of me what I have done, but why I did not do more; why, with powers above so many, I had sunk in many things below most! But this is too painful, and in remorse we often waste the energy which should be better employed in reformation--that essential part, and only possible proof, of sincere repentance.... May God bless you, and your affectionate friend, S. T. Coleridge." Toward the end of 1807, Mr. Coleridge left Bristol, and I saw nothing more of him for another seven years, that is, till 1814. All the leading features in Mr. Coleridge's life, during these two septennial periods, will no doubt, be detailed by others. My undertaking recommences in 1814. Some preliminary remarks must precede the narrative, which has now arrived at an important part.[88] Neither to clothe the subject of biography with undeserved applause, nor unmerited censure, but to present an exact portraiture, is the object which ought scrupulously to be aimed at by every impartial writer. Is it expedient; is it lawful; to give publicity to Mr. Coleridge's practice of inordinately taking opium? which, to a certain extent, at one part of his life, inflicted on a heart naturally cheerful, the stings of conscience, and sometimes almost the horrors of despair? Is it right, in reference to one who has passed his ordeal, to exhibit sound principles, habitually warring with inveterate and injurious habits; producing for many years, an accumulation of bodily suffering, that wasted the frame; poisoned the sources of enjoyment; entailed, in the long retinue of ills, dependence and poverty, and with all these, associated that which was far less bearable, an intolerable mental load, that scarcely knew cessation? In the year 1814, all this, I am afflicted to say, applied to Mr. Coleridge. The question to be determined is, whether it be best or not, to obey the first impulse of benevolence, and to throw a mantle over these dark and appalling occurrences, and, since the sufferer has left this stage of existence, to mourn in secret, and consign to oblivion the aberrations of a frail mortal? This was my first design, but other thoughts arose. If the individual were alone concerned, the question would be decided; but it might almost be said, that the world is interested in the disclosures connected with this part of Mr. Coleridge's life. His example forms one of the most impressive memorials the pen ever recorded; so that thousands hereafter, may derive instruction from viewing in Mr. C. much to approve, and in other features of his character, much also to regret and deplore. Once Mr. Coleridge expressed to me, with indescribable emotion, the joy he should feel, if he could collect around him all who were "beginning to tamper with the lulling, but fatal draught;" so that he might proclaim as with a trumpet, "the worse than death that opium entailed." I must add, if he could now speak from his grave, retaining his earthly, benevolent solicitude for the good of others, with an emphasis that penetrated the heart, he would doubtless utter, "Let my example be a warning!" This being my settled conviction, it becomes in me a duty, with all practicable mildness, to give publicity to the following facts; in which censure will often be suspended by compassion, and every feeling be absorbed in that of pity; in which, if the veil be removed, it will only be, to present a clear and practical exemplification of the consequences that progressively follow indulgences in, what Mr. Coleridge latterly denominated, "the accursed drug!" To soften the repugnance which might, pardonably, arise in the minds of some of Mr. G.'s friends, it is asked, whether it be not enough to move a breast of adamant, to behold a man of Mr. Coleridge's genius, spell-bound by his narcotic draughts? deploring, as he has done, in his letters to myself, the destructive consequences of opium; writhing under its effects,--so injurious to mind, body, and estate; submitting to the depths of humiliation and poverty, and all this for a season at least, accompanied with no effectual effort to burst his fetters, and assume the station in society which became his talents; but on the contrary, submitting patiently to dependence, and grovelling where he ought to soar! Another powerful reason, which should reconcile the friends of Mr. Coleridge to this detail of his destructive habits, arises from the recollection that the pain given to their minds, is present and temporary. They should wisely consider that, though they regret, their regrets, like themselves, as time rolls on, are passing away! but the example,--this clear, full, incontestable example, _remains!_ And who can estimate the beneficial consequences of this undisguised statement to numerous succeeding individuals? It is consolatory to believe, that had I written nothing else, this humble but unflinching narrative would be an evidence that I had not lived in vain. When it is considered also, how many men of high mental endowments, have shrouded their lustre, by a passion for this stimulus, and thereby, prematurely, become fallen spirits: would it not be a criminal concession to unauthorized feelings, to allow so impressive an exhibition of this subtle species of intemperance to escape from public notice; and, that no discredit might attach to the memory of the individual we love, to conceal an example, fraught with so much instruction, brought out into full display? In the exhibition here made, the inexperienced, in future, may learn a memorable lesson, and be taught to shrink from opium, as they would from a scorpion; which, before it destroys, invariably expels peace from the mind, and excites the worst species of conflict, that of setting a man at war with himself. The most expressive and pungent of all Mr. Coleridge's self-upbraidings, is that, in which he thrills the inmost heart, by saying, with a sepulchral solemnity, "I have learned what a sin is against an infinite, imperishable being, such as is the soul of man!" And yet, is this, and such as this, to be devoted to forgetfulness, and all be sacrificed, lest some friend, disdaining utility, should prefer flattery to truth? A concession to such advice would be treachery and pusillanimity combined, at which none would so exult as the spirits of darkness. If some of the preceding language should be deemed too strong, by those who take but a contracted view of the subject, and who would wish to screen the dead, rather than to improve the living, let them judge what their impressions would be, in receiving, like myself, at this time, the communications from Mr. C. which will subsequently appear, and then dispassionately ask themselves, whether such impressive lessons of instruction ought to be doomed to oblivion. * * * * * The following letter to Mr. Wade, has no date, but the post-mark determines it to have been Dec. 8, 1813. "... Since my arrival at the Greyhound, Bath, I have been confined to my bed-room, almost to my bed. Pray for my recovery, and request Mr. Roberts's[89] prayers, for my infirm, wicked heart; that Christ may mediate to the Father, to lead me to Christ, and give me a _living_ instead of a _reasoning_ faith! and for my health, so far only as it may be the condition of my improvement, and final redemption. My dear affectionate friend, I am your obliged, and grateful, and affectionate, friend, S. T. Coleridge." I now proceed further to notice Mr. Coleridge's reappearance in Bristol. Mr. C. had written from London in the year 1814, to a friend in Bristol, to announce that he was coming down to give a course of Lectures on Shakspeare, such as he had delivered at the Royal Institution, London, and expressing a hope that his friends would obtain for him as many subscribers as they could. Great efforts were made to obtain these subscribers, and the lectures were accordingly advertised, to commence at the time appointed by the lecturer, and the place specified with the day and hour; of the whole of which arrangement Mr. C. had received due notice, and expressed his approval. On the morning on which the lectures were to begin, a brother of Mr. George Cumberland, (a gentleman well known in the literary world, residing in Bristol,) arrived in this city from London, on a visit to his brother, and casually said to him, "I came as far as Bath with one of the most amusing men I ever met with. At the White Horse, Piccadilly, he entered the coach, when a jew boy came up with pencils to sell. This amusing gentleman asked the boy a few questions, when his answers being what he thought unusually acute, the gentleman said, 'that boy is not where he ought to be. He has talent, and if I had not an important engagement at Bristol to-morrow, I would not mind the loss of my fare, but would stay a day or two in London to provide some better condition for him.' He then called the waiter; wrote to a gentleman in the neighbourhood, with a pencil, urging him to patronize the bearer; gave the boy five shillings, and sent him, with the waiter, according to the address of the note." This same gentleman, he said, talked incessantly for thirty miles out of London, in the most entertaining way, and afterwards, with little intermission, till they arrived about Marlborough, when he discovered that the lady who was in the coach with them, was the sister of a particular friend of his. "On our arrival at Bath," said the brother, "this entertaining gentleman observed to me, 'I must here quit you, as I am determined not to leave this lady, who is going into North Wales, till I have seen her safe at her brother's door;' so here the amusing gentleman left us." "Why" said Mr. Cumberland, "I should not be surprised if that were Coleridge, and yet that cannot be, for he has an appointment this day in Bristol." "That is the very name," said his brother. Mr. G. C. remarked, "This Mr. Coleridge is coming to Bristol, to give us a course of lectures on Shakspeare, and this evening he has appointed for his first lecture, at the Great Boom, White Lion." "Whatever the engagement may be," replied the brother, "rely upon it you will have no lecture this evening. Mr. C. at the present moment is posting hard towards North Wales!" The great business now was for those who had interested themselves in the sale of tickets for the course, to hasten round to the purchasers, to announce that Mr. C. would be prevented from giving the lectures till further notice. In two or three days, Mr. Coleridge presented himself in Bristol, after a right true journey into North Wales; and then, another day was appointed to begin the course. The day arrived. His friends met in the afternoon, full of anxiety, lest a second disappointment should take place. Not one of them had seen Mr. C. in the course of that day, and they could not tell where he had dined. They then set off, to find out this intricate point, and having discovered him, after some difficulty, hurried him from the bottle, and the argument, to fulfil his less important, or at least, his less pleasing engagement. He arrived at the lecture-room, just one hour after all the company had impatiently awaited him. Apologizing for an unavoidable interruption! Mr. C. commenced his lecture on Hamlet. The intention is not entertained of pursuing this subject, except to remark, that no other important delay arose, and that the lectures gave great satisfaction. I forbear to make further remarks, because these lectures will form part of the London narrative. After this course had been terminated, and one or more friends had given him five pounds for his ticket, so rich a mine was not to be abandoned. Another printed proposal was sent round for a course of six lectures, which was well attended. After this, a proposal came for four lectures, which were but indifferently attended. Not discouraged, Mr. C. now issued proposals on a new subject, which he hoped would attract the many; but alas, although the subject of the lectures was on no less a theme than that of Homer, only a few of his old staunch friends attended; the public were wearied out, and the plan of lecturing now ceased, for these latter lectures scarcely paid the expenses. I should here mention, that Mr. Coleridge's lectures bore but a small resemblance to the polished compositions of Sir James Mackintosh. They were all of a conversational character, and were little other than the earnest harangues, with which on all possible occasions, he indulged his friends, so that there was little of the toil of preparation with him, and if the demand had been equal to the supply, he might have lectured continuously. But if there was little of formal and finished composition in Mr. C.'s lectures, there were always racy and felicitous passages, indicating deep thought, and indicative of the man of genius; so that if polish was not always attained, as one mark of excellence, the attention of his hearers never flagged, and his large dark eyes, and his countenance, in an excited state, glowing with intellect, predisposed his audience in his favor. It may here be mentioned, that in the year 1814, when Buonaparte was captured and sent to Elba, the public, expression of joy burst forth in a general illumination; when Mr. Josiah Wade, wishing to display a large transparency, applied to his friend Mr. Coleridge, then residing with him, for a subject, as a guide to his ingenious painter, of which the following is a copy, from Mr. C.'s original. The four lines were chosen, of which the two last have something of a prophetic aspect. "On the right side of the transparency, a rock with the word Elba on it: chained to this by one leg, put a vulture with the head of Napoleon Buonaparte; then a female genius, representing BRITANNIA, in a bending posture, with one hand holding out one wing of the vulture, and with the other clipping it with a large pair of shears; on the one half of which appears either the word 'WELLINGTON,' or the word 'ARMY,' and on the other, either 'NELSON,' or else 'NAVY;' I should prefer WELLINGTON and NELSON, but that I fear Wellington may be a word of too many letters. Behind Britannia, and occupying the right side of the transparency, a slender gilded column, with 'TRADE' on its base, and the cap of liberty on its top; and on one side, leaning against it, a trident laurelled, and on the other a laurelled sword. At the top of the transparency, and quite central, a dove, with an olive branch, may be hovering over the bending figure of Britannia. N. B.--The trident to be placed with the points upwards, the sword with its hilt upwards. We've conquer'd us a PEACE, like lads true metall'd: And bankrupt NAP.'S accompts seem all now settled. OR THUS. We've fought for peace, and conquer'd it at last, The rav'ning vulture's leg seems fetter'd fast! Britons, rejoice! and yet be wary too; The chain may break, the clipt wing sprout anew." Returning now to the lectures. During their delivery it was remarked by many of Mr. C.'s friends, with great pain, that there was something unusual and strange in his look and deportment. The true cause was known to few, and least of all to myself. At one of the lectures, meeting Mr. Coleridge at the inn door, he said, grasping my hand with great solemnity, "Cottle, this day week I shall not be alive!" I was alarmed, and speaking to another friend, he replied, "Do not be afraid. It is only one of Mr. C.'s odd fancies." After another of the lectures, he called me on one side, and said, "My dear friend, a dirty fellow has threatened to arrest me for ten pounds." Shocked at the idea, I said, "Coleridge, you shall not go to gaol while I can help it," and immediately gave him the ten pounds. The following two letters were sent me, I believe, at or about this time. They have no date. "My dear Cottle, An erysipelatous complaint, of all alarming nature, has rendered me barely able to attend and go through with my lectures, the receipts of which, have almost paid the expenses of the room, advertisements, &c.[90] Whether this be to my discredit, or that of the good citizens of Bristol, it is not for me to judge. I have been persuaded to make another trial, by advertising three lectures, on the rise, and progress, and conclusion of the French Revolution, with a critique on the proposed constitution, but unless fifty names are procured, not a lecture give I. Even so the two far, far more important lectures, for which I have long been preparing myself, and have given more thought to, than to any other subject, viz.: those on female education, from infancy to womanhood practically systematized, I shall be (God permitting) ready to give the latter end of the week after next, but upon condition that I am assured of sixty names. Why as these are lectures that I must write down, I could sell them as a _recipe_ for twice the sum at least. If I can walk out, I will be with you on Sunday. Has Mr. Wade called on you? Mr. Le Breton, a near neighbour of your's, in Portland Square, would, if you sent a note to him, converse with you on any subject relative to my interest, with congenial sympathy; but indeed I think your idea one of those Chimeras, which kindness begets upon an unacquaintance with mankind.[91] 'Harry! thy wish was father to that thought.' God bless you, S. T. C." "My dear Cottle, I have been engaged three days past, to dine with the sheriff, at Merchant's Hall to-morrow. As they will not wield knife and fork till near six, I cannot of course attend the meeting, [for the establishment of an Infant School] but should it be put off, and you will give me a little longer notice, I will do my best to make my humble talents serviceable in their proportion to a cause in which I take no common interest, which has always my best wishes, and not seldom my prayers. God bless you, and your affectionate friend, S. T. Coleridge. P. S. To you who know I prefer a roast potatoe and salt to the most splendid public dinner, the very sight of which always offends my infant appetite, I need not say that I am actuated solely by my pre-engagement, and by the impropriety of disappointing the friend whom I am to accompany, and to whom probably I owe the unexpected compliment of the sheriff's invitation. I have read two-thirds of Dr. Pole's[92] pamphlet on Infant Schools, with great interest. Thoughts on thoughts, feelings on feelings, crowded upon my mind and heart during the perusal, and which I would fain, God willing, give vent to! I truly honor and love the orthodox dissenters, and appreciate with heart-esteem their works of love. I have read, with much pleasure, the second preface to the second edition of your 'Alfred.' It is well written." Mr. Coleridge's health appeared, at this time, increasingly precarious; one complaint rapidly succeeding another; as will appear by the three following notes. "1814. My dear Cottle, On my return home yesterday, I continued unwell, so as to be obliged to lie down for the greater part of the evening, and my indisposition keeping me awake during the whole night, I found it necessary to take some magnesia and calomel, and I am at present very sick. I have little chance of being able to stir out this morning, but if I am better I will see you in the evening. God bless you, Mr. Wade's, Queen Square. S. T. Coleridge." Written on a card. "1814. My dear Cottle, The first time I have been out of the house, save once at meeting; and the very first call I have made. I will be with you to-morrow by noon, if I have no relapse. This is the third morning, that, thank heaven, I have been free from vomiting...." Mr. Coleridge having designed to attend Broadmead meeting, I sent him a note to inquire if he would allow me to call and take him up; he sent me the following reply. "1814. My dear Cottle, It was near ten before the maid got up, or waked a soul in the house. We are all in a hurry, for we had all meant to go to Broadmead. As to dining, I have not five minutes to spare to the family below, at meals. Do not call, for, if possible, I shall meet you at the Meeting. S. T. Coleridge. Mr. Wade's, Queen Square." I must now enter on a subject of profound interest. I had often spoken to Hannah More of S. T. Coleridge, and proceeded with him, one morning to Barley Wood, her residence, eleven miles from Bristol. The interview was mutually agreeable, nor was there any lack of conversation; but I was struck with something singular in Mr. Coleridge's eye. I expressed to a friend, the next day, my concern at having beheld him, during his visit to Hannah More, so extremely paralytic, his hands shaking to an alarming degree, so that he could not take a glass of wine without spilling it, though one hand supported the other! "That," said he, "arises from the immoderate quantity of OPIUM he takes." It is remarkable, that this was the first time the melancholy fact of Mr. Coleridge's excessive indulgence in opium had come to my knowledge. It astonished and afflicted me. Now the cause of his ailments became manifest. On this subject, Mr. C. may have been communicative to others, but to me he was silent. I now saw it was mistaken kindness to give him money, as I had learned that he indulged in his potions according to the extent of his means, so that to be temperate, it was expedient that he should be poor. I ruminated long upon this subject, with indescribable sorrow; and having ascertained from others, not only the existence of the evil, but its extent, so as to render doubt impossible, such was the impression of duty on my mind, I determined, however hazardous, to write to Mr. Coleridge, and that faithfully, otherwise, I considered myself not a friend, but an enemy. At the end of his course, therefore, I addressed to him the following letter, under the full impression that it was a case of "life and death," and that if some strong effort were not made to arouse him from his insensibility, speedy destruction must inevitably follow.. Nothing but so extreme a case, could have prompted, or could justify, such a letter as the following. "Bristol, April 25, 1814. Dear Coleridge, I am conscious of being influenced by the purest motives in addressing to you the following letter. Permit me to remind you that I am the oldest friend you have in Bristol, that I was such when my friendship was of more consequence to you than it is at present, and that at that time, you were neither insensible of my kindnesses, nor backward to acknowledge them. I bring these things to your remembrance, to impress on your mind, that it is still a _friend_ who is writing to you; one who ever has been such, and who is now going to give you the most decisive evidence of his sincerity. When I think of Coleridge, I wish to recall the image, of him, such as he appeared in past years; now, how has the baneful use of opium thrown a dark cloud over you and your prospects. I would not say anything needlessly harsh or unkind, but I must be _faithful_. It is the irresistible voice of conscience. Others may still flatter you, and hang upon your words, but I have another, though a less gracious duty to perform. I see a brother sinning a sin unto death, and shall I not warn him? I see him perhaps on the borders of eternity, in effect, despising his Maker's law, and yet indifferent to his perilous state! In recalling what the expectations concerning you once were, and the excellency with which, seven years ago, you wrote and spoke on religious truth, my heart bleeds to see how you are now fallen; and thus to notice, how many exhilarating hopes are almost blasted by your present habits. This is said, not to wound, but to arouse you to reflection. I know full well the evidences of the pernicious drug! You cannot be unconscious of the effects, though you may wish to forget the cause. All around you behold the wild eye! the sallow countenance! the tottering step! the trembling hand! the disordered frame! and yet will you not be awakened to a sense of your danger, and I must add, your guilt? Is it a small thing, that one of the finest of human understandings should be lost! That your talents should be buried! That most of the influences to be derived from your present example, should be in direct opposition to right and virtue! It is true you still talk of religion, and profess the warmest admiration of the church and her doctrines, in which it would not be lawful to doubt your sincerity; but can you be unaware, that by your unguarded and inconsistent conduct, you are furnishing arguments to the infidel; giving occasion for the enemy to blaspheme; and (amongst those who imperfectly know you) throwing suspicion over your religious profession! Is not the great test in some measure against you, 'By their fruits ye shall know them?' Are there never any calm moments, when you impartially judge of your own actions by their consequences? Not to reflect on you; not to give you a moment's _needless_ pain, but, in the spirit of friendship, suffer me to bring to your recollection, some of the sad effects of your undeniable intemperance. I know you have a correct love of honest independence, without which, there can be no true nobility of mind; and yet for opium, you will sell this treasure, and expose yourself to the liability of arrest, by some 'dirty fellow,' to whom you choose to be indebted for 'ten pounds!' You had, and still have, an acute sense of moral right and wrong, but is not the feeling sometimes overpowered by self-indulgence? Permit me to remind you, that you are not more suffering in your mind than you are in your body, while you are squandering largely your money in the purchase of opium, which, in the strictest equity, should receive _a different direction._ I will not again refer to the mournful effects produced on your own health from this indulgence in opium, by which you have undermined your strong constitution; but I must notice the injurious consequences which this passion for the narcotic drug has on your literary efforts. What you have already done, excellent as it is, is considered by your friends and the world, as the bloom, the mere promise of the harvest. Will you suffer the fatal draught, which is ever accompanied by sloth, to rob you of your fame, and, what to you is a higher motive, of your power of doing good; of giving fragrance to your memory, amongst the worthies of future years, when you are numbered with the dead? [And now I would wish in the most delicate manner, to remind you of the injurious effects which these habits of yours produce on your family. From the estimation in which, you are held by the public, I am clear in stating, that a small daily exertion on your part, would be sufficient to obtain for you and them, honour, happiness, and independence. You are still comparatively, a young man, and in such a cause, labour is sweet. Can you withhold so small a sacrifice? Let me sincerely advise you to return home, and live in the circle once more, of your wife and family. There may have been faults on one, possibly on both sides; but calumny itself has never charged criminality. Let all be forgotten, a small effort for the Christian. If I can become a mediator, command me. If you could be prevailed on to adopt this plan, I will gladly defray your expenses to Keswick, and I am sure, with better habits, you would be hailed by your family, I was almost going to say, as an angel from heaven. It will also look better in the eyes of the world, who are always prompt with their own constructions, and these constructions are rarely the most charitable. It would also powerfully promote your own peace of mind. There is this additional view, which ought to influence you, as it would every generous mind. Your wife and children are domesticated with Southey. He has a family of his own, which by his literary labour, he supports, to his great honour; and to the extra provision required of him on your account, he cheerfully submits; still, will you not divide with him the honour? You have not extinguished in your heart the Father's feelings. Your daughter is a sweet girl. Your two boys are promising; and Hartley, concerning whom you once so affectionately wrote, is eminently clever. These want only a father's assistance to give them credit and honourable stations in life. Will you withhold so equitable and small a boon. Your eldest son will soon be qualified for the university, where your name would inevitably secure him patronage, but without your aid, how is he to arrive there; and afterward, how is he to be supported? Revolve on these things, I entreat you, calmly, on your pillow.][93] And now let me conjure you, alike by the voice of friendship, and the duty you owe yourself and family: above all, by the reverence you feel for the cause of Christianity; by the fear of God, and the awfulness of eternity, to renounce from this moment opium and spirits, as your bane! Frustrate not the great end of your existence. Exert the ample abilities which God has given you, as a faithful steward; so will you secure your rightful pre-eminence amongst the sons of genius; recover your cheerfulness; your health; I trust it is not too late! become reconciled to yourself; and through the merits of that Saviour, in whom you profess to trust, obtain, at last, the approbation of your Maker! My dear Coleridge, be wise before it be too late! I do hope to see you a renovated man! and that you will still burst your inglorious fetters, and justify the best hopes of your friends. Excuse the freedom with which I write. If at the first moment it should offend, on reflection, you will approve at least of the motive, and, perhaps, in a better state of mind, thank and bless me. If all the good which I have prayed for, should not be effected by this letter, I have at least discharged an imperious sense of duty. I wish my manner were less exceptionable, as I do that the advice through the blessing of the Almighty, might prove effectual. The tear which bedims my eye, is an evidence of the sincerity with which I subscribe myself Your affectionate friend, Joseph Cottle." The following is Mr. Coleridge's reply. "April 26th, 1814. You have poured oil in the raw and festering wound of an old friend's conscience, Cottle! but it is _oil of vitriol!_ I but barely glanced at the middle of the first page of your letter, and have seen no more of it--not from resentment, God forbid! but from the state of my bodily and mental sufferings, that scarcely permitted human fortitude to let in a new visitor of affliction. The object of my present reply, is, to state the case just as it is--first, that for ten years the anguish of my spirit has been indescribable, the sense of my danger staring, but the consciousness of my GUILT worse--far worse than all! I have prayed, with drops of agony on my brow; trembling, not only before the justice of my Maker, but even before the mercy of my Redeemer. 'I gave thee so many talents, what hast thou done with them?' Secondly overwhelmed as I am with a sense of my direful infirmity, I have never attempted to disguise or conceal the cause. On the contrary, not only to friends, have I stated the whole case with tears, and the very bitterness of shame; but in two instances, I have warned young men, mere acquaintances, who had spoken of having taken laudanum, of the direful consequences, by an awful exposition of its tremendous effects on myself. Thirdly, though before God I cannot lift up my eyelids, and only do not despair of his mercy, because to despair would be adding crime to crime, yet to my fellow-men, I may say, that I was seduced into the ACCURSED habit ignorantly. I had been almost bed-ridden for many months, with swellings in my knees. In a medical Journal, I unhappily met with an account of a cure performed in a similar case, or what appeared to me so, by rubbing in of Laudanum, at the same time taking a given dose internally. It acted like a charm, like a miracle! I recovered the use of my limbs, of my appetite, of my spirits, and this continued for near a fortnight. At length the unusual stimulus subsided, the complaint returned,--the supposed remedy was recurred to--but I cannot go through the dreary history. Suffice it to say, that effects were produced which acted on me by terror and cowardice, of pain and sudden death, not (so help me God!) by any temptation of pleasure, or expectation, or desire of exciting pleasurable sensations. On the very contrary, Mrs. Morgan and her sister will bear witness so far, as to say, that the longer I abstained, the higher my spirits were, the keener my enjoyments--till the moment, the direful moment arrived, when my pulse began to fluctuate, my heart to palpitate, and such falling abroad, as it were, of my whole frame, such intolerable restlessness, and incipient bewilderment, that in the last of my several attempts to abandon the dire poison, I exclaimed in agony, which I now repeat in seriousness and solemnity, 'I am too poor to hazard this.' Had I but a few hundred pounds, but £200,--half to send to Mrs. Coleridge, and half to place myself in a private mad house, where I could procure nothing but what a physician thought proper, and where a medical attendant could be constantly with me for two or three months, (in less than that time, life or death would be determined) then there might be hope. Now there is none!! O God! how willingly would I place myself under Dr. Fox, in his establishment; for my case is a species of madness, only that it is a derangement, an utter impotence of the volition, and not of the intellectual faculties. You bid me rouse myself: go bid a man paralytic in both arms, to rub them briskly together, and that will cure him. 'Alas!' he would reply, 'that I cannot move my arms, is my complaint and my misery.' May God bless you, and Your affectionate, but most afflicted, S. T. Coleridge." On receiving this full and mournful disclosure, I felt the deepest compassion for Mr. C.'s state, and sent him the following letter. (Necessary to be given, to understand Mr. Coleridge's reply.) "Dear Coleridge, I am afflicted to perceive that Satan is so busy with you, but God is greater than Satan. Did you ever hear of Jesus Christ? That he came into the world to save sinners? He does not demand, as a condition, any merit of your own, he only says, 'Come and be healed!' Leave your idle speculations: forget your vain philosophy. Come as you are. Come and be healed. He only requires you to be sensible of your need of him, to give him your heart, to abandon with penitence, every evil practice, and he has promised that whosoever thus comes, he will in no wise cast out. To such as you Christ ought to be precious, for you see the hopelessness of every other refuge. He will add strength to your own ineffectual efforts. For your encouragement, I express the conviction, that such exercises as yours, are a conflict that must ultimately prove successful. You do not cloak your sins. You confess and deplore them. I believe that you will still be as 'a brand plucked from the burning,' and that you (with all your wanderings) will be restored, and raised up, as a chosen instrument, to spread a Saviour's name. Many a 'chief of sinners,' has been brought, since the days of 'Saul of Tarsus,' to sit as a little child, at the Redeemer's feet. To this state you, I am assured, will come. Pray! Pray earnestly, and you will be heard by your Father, which is in Heaven. I could say many things of duty and virtue, but I wish to direct your views at once to Christ, in whom is the alone balm for afflicted souls. May God ever bless you, Joseph Cottle. P. S. If my former letter appeared unkind, pardon me! It was not intended. Shall I breathe in your ear?--I know one, who is a stranger to these throes and conflicts, and who finds 'Wisdom's ways to be ways of pleasantness, and her paths, paths of peace." To this letter I received the following reply. "O dear friend! I have too much to be forgiven, to feel any difficulty in forgiving the cruellest enemy that ever trampled on me: and you I have only to _thank!_ You have no conception of the dreadful hell of my mind, and conscience, and body. You bid me pray. O, I do pray inwardly to be able to pray; but indeed to pray, to pray with a faith to which a blessing is promised, this is the reward of faith, this is the gift of God to the elect. Oh! if to feel how infinitely worthless I am, how poor a wretch, with just free-will enough to be deserving of wrath, and of my own contempt, and of none to merit a moment's peace, can make a part of a Christian's creed; so far I am a Christian. April 26, 1814." S. T. C. At this time Mr. Coleridge was indeed in a pitiable condition. His passion for opium had so completely subdued his _will_, that he seemed carried away, without resistance, by an overwhelming flood. The impression was fixed on his mind, that he should inevitably die, unless he were placed under _constraint_, and that constraint he thought could be alone effected in an _asylum!_ Dr. Fox, who presided over an establishment of this description in the neighbourhood of Bristol, appeared to Mr. C. the individual, to whose subjection he would most like to submit. This idea still impressing his imagination, he addressed to me the following letter. "Dear Cottle, I have resolved to place myself in any situation, in which I can remain for a month or two, as a child, wholly in the power of others. But, alas! I have no money! Will you invite Mr. Hood, a most dear and affectionate friend to worthless me; and Mr. Le Breton, my old school-fellow, and, likewise, a most affectionate friend: and Mr. Wade, who will return in a few days: desire them to call on you, any evening after seven o'clock, that they can make convenient, and consult with them whether any thing of this kind can be done. Do you know Dr. Fox? Affectionately, S. T. C. I have to prepare my lecture. Oh! with how blank a spirit!"[94] I _did_ know the late Dr. Fox, who was an opulent and liberal-minded man; and if I had applied to him, or any friend had so done, I cannot doubt but that he would instantly have received Mr. Coleridge gratuitously; but nothing could have induced me to make the application, but that extreme case, which did not then appear fully to exist. My sympathy for Mr. C. at this time, was so excited, that I should have withheld no effort, within my power, to reclaim, or to cheer him; but this recurrence to an asylum, I strenuously opposed. Mr. Coleridge knew Dr. Fox himself, eighteen years before, and to the honour of Dr. E. I think it right to name, that, to my knowledge, in the year 1796, Dr. Fox, in admiration of Mr. C.'s talents, presented him with FIFTY POUNDS! It must here be, noticed, that, fearing I might have exceeded the point of discretion, in my letter to Mr. C. and becoming alarmed, lest I had raised a spirit that I could not lay, as well as to avoid an unnecessary weight of responsibility, I thought it best to consult Mr. Southey, and ask him, in these harassing circumstances, what I was to do; especially as he knew more of Mr. C.'s latter habits than myself, and had proved his friendship by evidences the most substantial. The years 1814 and 1815, were the darkest periods in Mr. Coleridge's life. However painful the detail, it is presumed that the reader would desire a knowledge of the undisguised truth. This cannot be obtained without introducing the following letters of Mr. Southey, received from him, after having sent him copies of the letters which passed between Mr. Coleridge and myself. "Keswick, April, 1814. My dear Cottle, You may imagine with what feelings I have read your correspondence with Coleridge. Shocking as his letters are, perhaps the most mournful thing they discover is, that while acknowledging the guilt of the habit, he imputes it still to morbid bodily causes, whereas after every possible allowance is made for these, every person who has witnessed his habits, knows that for the greater, infinitely the greater part, inclination and indulgence are its motives. It seems dreadful to say this, with his expressions before me, but it is so, and I know it to be so, from my own observation, and that of all with whom he has lived. The Morgans, with great difficulty and perseverance, _did_ break him of the habit, at a time when his ordinary consumption of laudanum was, from _two quarts a week_, to _a pint a day!_ He suffered dreadfully during the first abstinence, so much so, as to say it was better for him to die than to endure his present feelings. Mrs. Morgan resolutely replied, it was indeed better that he should die, than that he should continue to live as he had been living. It angered him at the time, but the effort was persevered in. To what then was the relapse owing? I believe to this cause--that no use was made of renewed health and spirits; that time passed on in idleness, till the lapse of time brought with it a sense of neglected duties, and then relief was again sought for _a self-accusing mind_;--in bodily feelings, which when the stimulus ceased to act, added only to the load of self-accusation. This Cottle, is an insanity which none but the soul's physician can cure. Unquestionably, restraint would do as much for him as it did when the Morgans tried it, but I do not see the slightest reason for believing it would be more permanent. This too I ought to say, that all the medical men to whom Coleridge has made his confession, have uniformly ascribed the evil, not to bodily disease, but indulgence. The restraint which alone could effectually cure, is that which no person can impose upon him. Could he be compelled to a certain quantity of labour every day, _for his family_, the pleasure of having done it would make his heart glad, and the sane mind would make the body whole. I see nothing so advisable for him, as that he should come here to Greta Hall. My advice is, that he should visit T. Poole for two or three weeks, to freshen himself and recover spirits, which new scenes never fail to give him. When there, he may consult his friends at Birmingham and Liverpool, on the fitness of lecturing at those two places, at each of which he has friends, and would, I should think beyond all doubt be successful. He must be very unfortunate if he did not raise from fifty to one hundred pounds at the two places. But whether he can do this or not, here it is that he ought to be. He knows in what manner he would be received;--by his children with joy; by his wife, not with tears, if she can control them--certainly not with reproaches;--by myself only with encouragement. He has sources of direct emolument open to him in the '_Courier_,' and in the '_Eclectic Review_.'--These for his immediate wants, and for everything else, his pen is more rapid than mine, and would be paid as well. If you agree with me, you had better write to Poole, that he may press him to make a visit, which I know he has promised. His great object should be, to get out a play, and appropriate the whole produce to the support of his son Hartley, at College. Three months' pleasurable exertion would effect this. Of some such fit of industry I by no means despair; of any thing more than fits, I am afraid I do. But this of course I shall never say to him. From me he shall never hear ought but cheerful encouragement, and the language of hope. You ask me if you did wrong in writing to him. A man with your feelings and principles never does wrong. There are parts which would have been expunged had I been at your elbow, but in all, and in every part it is strictly applicable. I hope your next will tell me that he is going to T. Poole's--I have communicated none of your letters to Mrs. Coleridge, who you know resides with us. Her spirits and health are beginning to sink under it. God bless you. Yours affectionately, Robert Southey." After anxious consideration, I thought the only effectual way of benefitting Mr. Coleridge, would be, to renew the object of an annuity, by raising for him, amongst his friends, one hundred, or, if possible, one hundred and fifty pounds a year; purposing through a committee of three, to pay for his comfortable board, and all necessaries, but not of giving him the disposition of any part, till it was hoped, the correction of his bad habits, and the establishment of his better principles, might qualify him for receiving it for his own distribution. It was difficult to believe that his subjection to opium could much longer resist the stings of his own conscience, and the solicitations of his friends, as well as the pecuniary destitution to which his _opium habits_ had reduced him. The proposed object was named to Mr. C. who reluctantly gave his consent. I now drew up a letter, intending to send a copy to all Mr. Coleridge's old and steady friends, (several of whom approved of the design) but before any commencement was made, I transmitted a copy of my proposed letter to Mr. Southey, to obtain his sanction. The following is his reply. "April 17, 1814. Dear Cottle, I have seldom in the course of my life felt it so difficult to answer a letter, as on the present occasion. There is however no alternative. I must sincerely express what I think, and be thankful that I am writing to one who knows me thoroughly. Of sorrow and humiliation I will say nothing. Let me come at once to the point. On what grounds can such a subscription as you propose raising for Coleridge be solicited? The annuity to which your intended letter refers, (£150) _was_ given him by the Wedgewoods. Thomas, by his will, settled his portion on Coleridge, for his life. Josiah withdrew his about three years ago. The half still remaining amounts, when the Income Tax is deducted, to £67 10s. That sum Mrs. C. receives at present, and it is all which she receives for supporting herself, her daughter, and the two boys at school:--the boys' expenses amounting to the whole. No part of Coleridge's embarrassment arises from his wife and children,--except that he has insured his life for a thousand pounds, and pays the annual premium. He never writes to them, and never opens a letter from them![95] In truth, Cottle, his embarrassments, and his miseries, of body and mind, all arise from one accursed cause--excess in _opium_, of which he habitually takes more than was ever known to be taken by any person before him. The Morgans, with great effort, succeeded in making him leave it off for a time, and he recovered in consequence _health_ and _spirits_. He has now taken to it again. Of this indeed I was too sure before I heard from you--that his looks bore testimony to it. Perhaps you are not aware of the costliness of this drug. In the quantity which C. takes, it would consume _more_ than the whole which you propose to raise. A frightful consumption of _spirits_ is added. In this way bodily ailments are produced; and the wonder is that he is still alive. There are but two grounds on which a subscription of this nature can proceed: either when the, object is disabled from exerting himself; or when his exertions are unproductive. Coleridge is in neither of these predicaments. Proposals after proposals have been made to him by the booksellers, and he repeatedly closed with them. He is at this moment as capable of exertion as I am, and would be paid as well for whatever he might be pleased to do. There are two Reviews,--the 'Quarterly,' and the 'Eclectic,' in both of which he might have employment at ten guineas a sheet. As to the former I could obtain it for him; in the latter, they are urgently desirous of his assistance. _He promises, and does nothing._ I need not pursue this subject. What more can I say? He may have new friends who would subscribe to this plan, but they cannot be many; but among all those who know him, his habits are known also. Do you as you think best. My own opinion is, that Coleridge ought to come here, and employ himself, collecting money by the way by lecturing at Birmingham and Liverpool. Should you proceed in your intention, my name must not be mentioned. _I subscribe enough._ Here he may employ himself without any disquietude about immediate subsistence. Nothing is wanting to make him easy in circumstances, and happy in himself, but to leave off opium, and to direct a certain portion of his time to the discharge of _his duties_. Four hours a day would suffice. Believe me, my dear Cottle, very affectionately Your old friend, Robert Southey." The succeeding post brought me the following letter. "Keswick, April 18, 1814. My dear Cottle, I ought to have slept upon your letter before I answered it. In thinking over the subject (for you may be assured it was not in my power to get rid of the thought) the exceeding probability occurred to me.... When you talked, in the proposed letter you sent me, of Coleridge producing valuable works if his mind were relieved by the certainty of a present income, you suffered your feelings to overpower your memory. Coleridge _had_ that income for many years. It was given him expressly that he might have leisure for literary productions; and to hold out the expectation that he would perform the same conditions, if a like contract were renewed, is what experience will not warrant. You will probably write to Poole on this subject. In that case, state to him distinctly what my opinion is: that Coleridge should return home to Keswick, raising a supply for his present exigencies, by lecturing at Birmingham, and Liverpool, and then, if there be a necessity, as I fear there _will be_ (arising solely and wholly from his own most culpable habits of sloth and self-indulgence) of calling on his friends to do that which _he can_ and _ought to do_,--for _that_ time the humiliating solicitation should be reserved.... God bless you, Robert Southey." No advantage would arise from recording dialogues with Mr. Coleridge, it is sufficient to state that Mr. C.'s repugnance to visit Greta Hall, and to apply his talents in the way suggested by Mr. Southey, was invincible; neither would he visit T. Poole, nor lecture at Birmingham nor Liverpool. Just at this time I was afflicted with the bursting of a blood vessel, occasioned, probably, by present agitations of mind, which reduced me to the point of death; when the intercourse of friends, and even speaking, were wholly prohibited. During my illness, Mr. Coleridge sent my sister the following letter; and the succeeding one to myself. "13th May, 1814. Dear Madam, I am uneasy to know how my friend, J. Cottle, goes on. The walk I took last Monday to enquire, in person, proved too much for my strength, and shortly after my return, I was in such a swooning way, that I was directed to go to bed, and orders were given that no one should interrupt me. Indeed I cannot be sufficiently grateful for the skill with which _the surgeon treats me._ But it must be a slow, and occasionally, an interrupted progress, after a sad retrogress of nearly twelve years. To God all things are possible. I intreat your prayers, your brother has a share in mine. What an astonishing privilege, that a sinner should be permitted to cry, 'Our Father!' Oh, still more stupendous mercy, that this poor ungrateful sinner should be exhorted, invited, nay, commanded, to pray--to pray importunately. That which great men most detest, namely, importunacy; to _this_ the GIVER and the FORGIVER ENCOURAGES _his_ sick petitioners! I will not trouble you except for one verbal answer to this note. How is your brother? With affectionate respects to yourself and your sister, S. T. Coleridge. To Miss Cottle, Brunswick Square." "Friday, 27th May, 1814. My dear Cottle, Gladness be with you, for your convalescence, and equally so, at the hope which has sustained and tranquillized you through your imminent peril. Far otherwise is, and hath been, my state; yet I too am grateful; yet I cannot rejoice. I feel, with an intensity, unfathomable by words, my utter nothingness, impotence, and worthlessness, in and for myself. I have learned what a sin is, against an infinite imperishable being, such as is the soul of man. I have had more than a glimpse of what is meant by death and outer darkness, and the worm that dieth not--and that all the _hell_ of the reprobate, is no more inconsistent with the love of God, than the blindness of one who has occasioned loathsome and guilty diseases to eat out his eyes, is inconsistent with the light of the sun. But the consolations, at least, the sensible sweetness of hope, I do not possess. On the contrary, the temptation which I have constantly to fight up against, is a fear, that if _annihilation_ and the _possibility_ of _heaven_, were offered to my choice, I should choose the former. This is, perhaps, in part, a constitutional idiosyncracy, for when a mere boy, I wrote these lines: Oh, what a wonder seems the fear of death, Seeing how gladly we all sink to sleep; Babes, children, youths and men, Night following night, for three-score years and ten.[96] And in my early manhood, in lines descriptive of a gloomy solitude, I disguised my own sensations in the following words: Here wisdom might abide, and here remorse! Here too, the woe-worn man, who weak in soul, And of this busy human heart aweary, Worships the spirit of _unconscious life_, In tree, or wild-flower. Gentle lunatic! If so he might not wholly cease to BE, He would far rather not be that he is; But would be something that he knows not of, In woods, or waters, or among the rocks.' My main comfort, therefore, consists in what the divines call the faith of adherence, and no spiritual effort appears to benefit me so much as the one earnest, importunate, and often, for hours, momently repeated prayer: 'I believe, Lord help my unbelief! Give me faith, but as a mustard seed, and I shall remove this mountain! Faith, faith, faith! I believe, O give me faith! O, for my Redeemer's sake, give me faith in my Redeemer.' In all this I justify God, for I was accustomed to oppose the preaching of the terrors of the gospel, and to represent it as debasing virtue, by the admixture of slaving selfishness. I now see that what is spiritual, can only be spiritually apprehended. Comprehended it cannot. Mr. Eden gave you a too flattering account of me. It is true, I am restored, as much beyond my expectations almost, as my deserts; but I am exceedingly weak. I need for myself, solace and refocillation of animal spirits, instead of being in a condition of offering it to others. Yet, as soon as I may see you, I will call on you. S. T. Coleridge. P. S. It is no small gratification to me, that I have seen and conversed with Mrs. Hannah More. She is, indisputably, the first literary female I ever met with. In part, no doubt, because she is a Christian. Make my best respects when you write." The serious expenditure of money, resulting from Mr. C.'s consumption of opium, was the least evil, though very great, and which must have absorbed all the produce of Mr. C.'s lectures, and all the liberalities of his friends. It is painful to record such circumstances as the following, but the picture would be incomplete without it. Mr. Coleridge, in a late letter, with something it is feared, if not of duplicity, of self-deception, extols the skill of his surgeon, in having gradually lessened his consumption of laudanum, it was understood, to twenty drops a day. With this diminution, the habit was considered as subdued, and at which result, no one appeared to rejoice more than Mr. Coleridge himself. The reader will be surprised to learn, that, notwithstanding this flattering exterior, Mr. C. while apparently submitting to the directions of his medical adviser, was secretly indulging in his usual overwhelming quantities of opium! Heedless of his health, and every honourable consideration, he contrived to obtain surreptitiously, the fatal drug, and, thus to baffle the hopes of his warmest friends. Mr. Coleridge had resided, at this time, for several months, with his kind friend, Mr. Josiah Wade, of Bristol, who, in his solicitude for his benefit, had procured for him, so long as it was deemed necessary, the professional assistance, stated above. The surgeon on taking leave, after the cure had been _effected_, well knowing the expedients to which opium patients would often recur, to obtain their proscribed draughts; at least, till the habit of temperance was fully established, cautioned Mr. W. to prevent Mr. Coleridge, by all possible means, from obtaining that by stealth, from which he was openly debarred. It reflects great credit on Mr. Wade's humanity, that to prevent all access to opium, and thus, if possible, to rescue his friend from destruction, he engaged a respectable old decayed tradesman, constantly to attend Mr. C. and, to make that which was sure, doubly certain, placed him even in his bed-room; and this man always accompanied him whenever he went out. To such surveillance Mr. Coleridge cheerfully acceded, in order to show the promptitude with which he seconded the efforts of his friends. It has been stated that every precaution was unavailing. By some unknown means and dexterous contrivances, Mr. C. afterward confessed that he still obtained his usual lulling potions. As an example, amongst others of a similar nature, one ingenious expedient, to which he resorted, to cheat the doctor, he thus disclosed to Mr. Wade, from whom I received it. He said, in passing along the quay, where the ships were moored, he noticed, by a side glance, a druggist's shop, probably an old resort, and standing near the door, he looked toward the ships, and pointing to one at some distance, he said to his attendant, "I think that's an American." "Oh, no, that I am sure it is not," said the man. "I think it is," replied Mr. C. "I wish you would step over and ask, and bring me the particulars." The man accordingly went; when as soon as his back was turned, Mr. C. stepped into the shop, had his portly bottle filled with laudanum, which he always carried in his pocket, and then expeditiously placed himself in the spot where he was left. The man now returned with the particulars, beginning, "I told you, sir, it was not an American, but I have learned all about her." "As I am mistaken, never mind the rest," said Mr. C. and walked on.[97] Every bad course of conduct (happily for the good of social order) leads to perplexing, and generally, to disastrous results. The reader will soon have a practical illustration, that Mr. Coleridge was not exempt from the general law. A common impression prevailed on the minds of his friends, that it was a desperate case, that paralyzed all their efforts: that to assist Mr. C. with money, which, under favourable circumstances, would have been most promptly advanced, would now only enlarge his capacity to obtain the opium which was consuming him. We at length learnt that Mr. Coleridge was gone to reside with his friend Mr. John Morgan, in a small house, at Calne, in Wiltshire. So gloomy were our apprehensions, that even the death of Mr. C. was mournfully expected at no distant period! for his actions at this time, were, we feared, all indirectly of a suicidal description. In a letter from Mr. Southey, dated Oct. 27, 1814, he thus writes:-- "My dear Cottle, It is not long since I heard of you from Mr. De Quincey: but I wish you would sometimes let me hear from you. There was a time when scarcely a day passed without my seeing you, and in all that time, I do not remember that there was a passing cloud of coolness between us. The feeling I am sure continues: do not then let us be so entirely separated by distance, which in cases of correspondence may almost be considered as a mere abstraction.... Can you tell me anything of Coleridge? We know that he is with the Morgans at Calne. What is to become of him? He may find men who will give him board and lodging for the sake of his conversation, but who will pay his other expenses? He leaves his family to chance, and charity. With good feelings, good principles, as far as the understanding is concerned, and an intellect as clear, and as powerful, as was ever vouchsafed to man, he is the slave of degrading sensuality, and sacrifices everything to it. The case is equally deplorable and monstrous.... Believe me, my dear Cottle, Ever your affectionate old friend, Robert Southey." Of Mr. Coleridge, I now heard nothing, but, in common with all his friends, felt deep solicitude concerning his future course; when, in March, 1815, I received from him the following letter:-- "Calne, March 7, 1815. Dear Cottle, You will wish to know something of myself. In health, I am not worse than when at Bristol I was best; yet fluctuating, yet unhappy! in circumstances 'poor indeed!' I have collected my scattered, and my manuscript poems, sufficient to make one volume. Enough I have to make another. But till the latter is finished, I cannot without great loss of character, publish the former on account of the arrangement, besides the necessity of correction. For instance, I earnestly wish to begin 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's Prayer, and more than all this, to finish my greater work on 'Christianity, considered as Philosophy, and as the only Philosophy.' All the materials I have in no small part, reduced to form, and written, but, oh me! what can I do, when I am so poor, that in having to turn off every week, from these to some mean subject for the newspapers, I distress myself, and at last neglect the greater, wholly to do little of the less. If it were in your power to receive my manuscripts, (for instance what I have ready for the press of my poems) and by setting me forward with _thirty_ or _forty_ pounds, taking care that what I send, and would make over to you, would more than secure you from loss, I am sure you would do it. And I would die (after my recent experience of the cruel and insolent spirit of calumny,) rather than subject myself, as a slave, to a club of subscribers to my poverty. If I were to say I am easy in my conscience, I should add to its pains by a lie; but this I can truly say, that my embarrassments have not been occasioned by the bad parts, or selfish indulgences of my nature. I am at present five and twenty pounds in arrear, my expenses being at £2 10s. per week. You will say I ought to live for less, and doubtless I might, if I were to alienate myself from all social affections, and from all conversation with persons of the same education. Those who severely blame me, never ask, whether at any time in my life, I had for myself and my family's wants, £50 beforehand. Heaven knows of the £300 received, through you, what went to myself.[98] No! bowed down under manifold infirmities, I yet dare to appeal to God for the truth of what I say; I have remained poor by always having been poor, and incapable of pursuing any one great work, for want of a competence beforehand. S. T. Coleridge." This was precisely the termination I was prepared to expect. I had never before, through my whole life refused Mr. C. an application for money; yet I now hesitated: assured that the sum required, was not meant for the discharge of board, (for which he paid nothing) but for the purchase of opium, the expense of which, for years, had amounted nearly to the two pounds ten shillings per week. Under this conviction, and after a painful conflict, I sent Mr. C. on the next day, a friendly letter, declining his request in the kindest manner I could, but enclosing a five pound note. It happened that my letter to Mr. Coleridge passed on the road, another letter from him to myself, far more harrowing than the first. This was the _last_ letter ever received from Mr. C. The following is Mr. Coleridge's second letter. "Calne, Wiltshire, March 10, 1815. My dear Cottle, I have been waiting with the greatest uneasiness for a letter from you. My distresses are impatient rather than myself: inasmuch as for the last five weeks, I know myself to be a burden on those to whom I am under great obligations: who would gladly do all for me; _but who have done all they can!_ Incapable of any exertion in this state of mind, I have now written to Mr. Hood, and have at length bowed my heart down, to beg that four or five of those, who I had reason to believe, were interested in my welfare, would raise the sum I mentioned, between them, should you not find it convenient to do it. Manuscript poems, equal to one volume of 230 to 300 pages, being sent to them immediately. If not, I must instantly dispose of all my poems, fragments and all, for whatever I can get from the first rapacious bookseller, that will give anything--and then try to get my livelihood where I am, by receiving, or waiting on day-pupils, children, or adults, but even this I am unable to wait for without some assistance: for I cannot but with consummate baseness, throw the expenses of my lodging and boarding for the last five or six weeks on those, who must injure and embarrass themselves in order to pay them. The 'Friend' has been long out of print, and its re-publication has been called for by numbers. Indeed from the manner in which it was first circulated, it is little less than a new work. To make it a complete and circular work, it needs but about eight or ten papers. This I could, and would make over to you at once in full copy-right, and finish it outright, with no other delay than that of finishing a short and temperate Treatise on the Corn Laws, and their national and moral effects; which had I even twenty pounds only to procure myself a week's ease of mind, I could have printed before the bill had passed the Lords. At all events let me hear by return of post. I am confident that whether you take the property of my Poems, or of my Prose Essays, in pledge, you cannot eventually lose the money. As soon as I can, I shall leave Calne for Bristol, and if I can procure any day pupils, shall immediately take cheap lodgings near you. My plan is to have twenty pupils, ten youths or adults, and ten boys. To give the latter three hours daily, from eleven o'clock to two, with exception of the usual school vacations, in the Elements of English, Greek, and Latin, presenting them exercises for their employment during the rest of the day, and two hours every evening to the adults (that is from sixteen and older) on a systematic plan of general knowledge; and I should hope that £15 a year, would not be too much to ask from each, which excluding Sundays and two vacations, would be little more than a shilling a day, or six shillings a week, for forty-two weeks. To this I am certain I could attend with strictest regularity, or indeed to any thing mechanical. But composition is no voluntary business. The very necessity of doing it robs me of the power of doing it. Had I been possessed of a tolerable competency, I should have been a voluminous writer. But I cannot, as is feigned of the Nightingale, sing with my breast against a thorn. God bless you, Saturday, Midnight. S. T. Coleridge." The receipt of this letter filled me with the most poignant grief; much for the difficulties to which Mr. C. was reduced, but still more for the cause. In one letter, indignantly spurning the contributions of his "club of subscribers to his poverty;" and in his next, (three days afterwards) earnestly soliciting this assistance! The victorious bearer away of University prizes, now bent down to the humiliating desire of keeping a day school, for a morsel of bread! The man, whose genius has scarcely been surpassed, proposing to "attend" scholars, "children or adults," and to bolster up his head, at night, in "cheap lodgings!" Oppressed with debt, contracted by expending that money on opium, which should have been paid to his impoverished friend; and this, at a moment, when, for the preceding dozen years, if he had called his mighty intellect into exercise, the "world" would have been "all before him, where to choose his place of rest." But at this time he preferred, to all things else, the Circean chalice! These remarks have reluctantly been forced from me; and never would they have passed the sanctuary of my own breast, but to call on every consumer of the narcotic poison, who fancies, perchance, that in the taking of opium there is pleasure only and no pain, to behold in this memorable example, the inevitable consequences, which follow that "accursed practice!" Property consumed! health destroyed! independence bartered; respectability undermined; family concord subverted! that peace sacrificed, which forms so primary an ingredient in man's cup of happiness!--a deadly war with conscience! and the very mind of the unhappy votary, (whilst the ethereal spirit of natural affection _generally escapes!_ despoiled of its best energies). I venture the more readily on these reflections, from the hope of impressing some young delinquents, who are beginning to sip the "deadly poison;" little aware that no habit is so progressive, and that he who begins with the little, will rapidly pass on to the much! I am also additionally urged to these mournful disclosures, from their forming one portion only, of Mr. Coleridge's life. It has been my unenviable lot, to exhibit my friend in his lowest points of depression; conflicting with unhallowed practices, and, as the certain consequence, with an accusing conscience. Most rejoiced should I have been, had my opportunities and acquaintance with Mr. Coleridge continued, to have traced the gradual development into action, of those better principles which were inherent in his mind. This privilege is reserved for a more favoured biographer; and it now remains only for me, in a closing remark, to state, that, had I been satisfied that the money Mr. C. required, would have been expended in lawful purposes, I would have supplied him, (without being an affluent man) to the utmost of his requirements, and not by dividing the honour with others, or receiving his writings in pledge! But, knowing that whatever monies he received would, assuredly, be expended in opium, COMPASSION STAYED MY HAND. In my reply to his second letter, by "return of post," I enclosed Mr. C. another five pounds: urged him in a kind letter, to come immediately to Bristol, where myself and others, would do all that could be done, to advise and assist him. I told him at the same time, that, when I declined the business of a bookseller, I for ever quitted publishing, so that I could not receive his MSS. valuable as they doubtless were; but I reminded him, that as his merits were _now_ appreciated by the public, the London booksellers would readily enter into a treaty, and remunerate him liberally. Mr. Coleridge returned no answer to my letter; came not to Bristol, but went in the next spring to London, as I learned indirectly: and I now await a narrative of the latter periods of Mr. C.'s life, and particularly the perusal of his "posthumous works," with a solicitude surpassed by none. I mentioned before that from my intimate knowledge of Mr. Coleridge's sentiments and character, no doubt could be entertained by me, of its being Mr. C.'s earnest wish, in order to exhibit to his successors the pernicious consequences of opium, that, when called from this world, the fullest publicity should be given to its disastrous effects on himself. But whatever confidence existed in my own mind, it might be, I well knew, no easy task, to inspire, with the same assurance, some of his surviving friends; so that I have been compelled to argue the point, and to show, to those who shrunk from such disclosures, that Mr. Coleridge's example was intimately combined with general utility, and that none ought to regret a faithful narration of, (unquestionably) _the great bane of his life_, since it presented a conspicuous example, which might arrest the attention, and operate as a warning to many others. From a conviction of the tender ground on which I stood, and entertaining a latent suspicion that some, whom I could wish to have pleased, would still censure, as unjustifiable exposure, what with me was the result of conscience; I repeat, with all these searching apprehensions, the reader will judge what my complicated feelings must have been, of joy and sorrow; a momentary satisfaction, succeeded by the deepest pungency of affliction, when, (after all the preceding was written) Mr. Josiah Wade, presented to me the following mournful and touching letter, addressed to him by Mr. Coleridge, in the year 1814, which, whilst it relieved my mind from so onerous a burden, fully corroborated all that I had presumed, and all that I had affirmed. Mr. W. handed this letter to me, that it might be made public, in conformity with his departed friend's injunction. "Bristol, June 26th, 1814. Dear sir, For I am unworthy to call any good man friend--much less you, whose hospitality and love I have abused; accept, however, my intreaties for your forgiveness, and for your prayers. Conceive a poor miserable wretch, who for many years has been attempting to beat off pain, by a constant recurrence to the vice that reproduces it. Conceive a spirit in bell, employed in tracing out for others the road to that heaven, from which his crimes exclude him! In short, conceive whatever is most wretched, helpless, and hopeless, and you will form as tolerable a notion of my state, as it is possible for a good man to have. I used to think the text in St. James that 'he who offended in one point, offends in all,' very harsh: but I now feel the awful, the tremendous truth of it. In the one crime of OPIUM, what crime have I not made myself guilty of!--Ingratitude to my Maker! and to my benefactors--injustice! _and unnatural cruelty to my poor children!_--self-contempt for my repeated promise--breach, nay, too often, actual falsehood! After my death, I earnestly entreat, that a full and unqualified narration of my wretchedness, and of its guilty cause, may be made public, that at least, some little good may be effected by the direful example. May God Almighty bless you, and have mercy on your still affectionate, and in his heart, grateful-- S. T. Coleridge." This is indeed a redeeming letter. We here behold Mr. Coleridge in the lowest state of human depression, but his condition is not hopeless. It is not the insensibility of final impenitence; it is not the slumber of the grave. A gleam of sunshine bursts through the almost impenetrable gloom; and the virtue of that prayer "May God Almighty have mercy!" in a penitent heart, like his, combined as we know it was, with the recognition of Him, who is "the Way, the Truth, and the Life," authorizes the belief, that a spirit thus exercised, had joys in reserve, and was to become the recipient of the best influences that can illumine regenerate man. No individual ever effected great good in the moral world, who had not been subjected to a long preliminary discipline; and he who knows what is in man; who often educes good from evil, can best apportion the exact kind and degree, indispensable to each separate heart. Mr. Coleridge, after this time, lived twenty years. A merciful providence, though with many mementos of decay, preserved his body, and in all its vigor sustained his mind. Power was given him, it is presumed, and fervently hoped, to subdue his former pernicious practices. The season of solemn reflection it is hoped arrived, that his ten talents were no longer partially buried, but that the lengthened space extended to him, was consecrated by deep reflection, and consequent qualification, to elucidate and establish the everlasting principles of Christian truth. Under such advantages, we are authorized in forming the highest expectations from his Great Posthumous Work. Nothing which I have narrated of Mr. Coleridge, will in the least subtract from the merit, or the impression of that production, effected in his mature manhood, when his renovated faculties sent forth new corruscations, and concentrated the results of all his profound meditations. The very process to which he had been exposed, so unpropitious as it appeared, may have been the most favourable for giving consistency to his intellectual researches. He may have thought in channels the more refined, varied, and luminous, from the ample experience he had acquired, that the only real evil in this world, was the frown of the Almighty, and His favor the only real good; so that the grand work, about to appear, may add strength to the strong, and give endurance to the finished pediment of his usefulness and his fame. But although all these cheering anticipations should be fully realized, regrets will still exist. It will ever be deplored, that Mr. Coleridge's system of Christian Ethics, had not yet been deliberately recorded by himself. This feeling, however natural, is still considerably moderated, by reflecting on the ample competence of the individual on whom the distinction of preparing this system has devolved; a security that it will be both well and faithfully executed, and which, in the same proportion that it reflects credit on the editor, will embalm with additional honours, the memory of SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE; a genius, who in the opulence of his imagination, and his rich and inexhaustible capabilities, as a poet, a logician, and a metaphysician, has not perhaps been surpassed since the days of Milton. The following letter of Mr. Coleridge, was written a short time before his death, to a young friend. This deliberate exposition of his faith, and at such a season, cancels every random word or sentence, Mr. C. may ever have expressed or written, of an opposing tendency. In thoughtless moments Mr. C. may sometimes have expressed himself unguardedly, attended, on reflection, no doubt with self-accusation, but here in the full prospect of dissolution, he pours forth the genuine and ulterior feelings of his soul. "To Adam Steinmetz Kinnaird, My dear godchild,--I offer up the same fervent prayer for you now, as I did kneeling before the altar, when you were baptized into Christ, and solemnly received as a living member of his spiritual body, the church. Years must, pass before you will be able to read with an understanding heart what I now write. But I trust that the all-gracious God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, who, by his only-begotten Son, (all mercies in one sovereign mercy!) has redeemed you from evil ground, and willed you to be born out of darkness, but into light; out of death, but into life; out of sin, but into righteousness; even into 'the Lord our righteousness;' I trust that he will graciously hear the prayers of your dear parents, and be with you as the spirit of health and growth, in body and in mind. My dear godchild, you received from Christ's minister, at the baptismal font, as your Christian name, the name of a most dear friend of your father's, and who was to me even as a son, the late Adam Steinmetz, whose fervent aspirations, and paramount aim, even from early youth, was to be a Christian in thought, word, and deed; in will, mind, and affections. I too, your godfather, have known what the enjoyment and advantages of this life are, and what the more refined pleasures which learning and intellectual power can give; I now, on the eve of my departure, declare to you, and earnestly pray that you may hereafter live and act on the conviction, that health is a great blessing; competence, obtained by honourable industry, a great blessing; and a great blessing it is, to have kind, faithful, and loving friends and relatives; but that the greatest of all blessings, as it is the most ennobling of all privileges, is to be indeed a Christian. But I have been likewise, through a large portion of my later life, a sufferer, sorely affected with bodily pains, languor, and manifold infirmities, and for the last three or four years have, with few and brief intervals, been confined to a sick room, and at this moment, in great weakness and heaviness, write from a sick bed, hopeless of recovery, yet without prospect of a speedy removal. And I thus, on the brink of the grave, solemnly bear witness to you, that the Almighty Redeemer, most gracious in his promises to them that truly seek him, is faithful to perform what he has promised; and has reserved, under all pains and infirmities, the peace that passeth all understanding, with the supporting assurance of a reconciled God, who will not withdraw his spirit from me in the conflict, and in his own time will deliver me from the evil one. O my dear godchild! eminently blessed are they who begin _early_ to seek, fear, and love, their God, trusting wholly in the righteousness and mediation of their Lord, Redeemer, Saviour, and everlasting High Priest, Jesus Christ. Oh, preserve this as a legacy and bequest from your unseen godfather and friend, S. T. Coleridge. July 13th, 1834, Grove, Highgate." Is the writer of this epistle the man, who twenty years before, even coveted annihilation! Is this the man, who so long preferred, to all things else, the "Circean chalice!" Is this he, who at one time, learned to his unutterable dismay, what a sin was, "against an imperishable being, such as is the soul of man." Is this he, whose will was once extinguished by an unhallowed passion, and he himself borne along toward perdition by a flood of intemperance! Is this the man who resisted the light, till darkness entered his mind, and with it a "glimpse of outer darkness!" Is this he, who feared that his own inveterate and aggravated crimes would exclude him, from that heaven, the road to which he was tracing out for others! Is this he, that through successive years, contended with the severest mental and bodily afflictions; who knew the cause, but rejected the remedy?--who, in 1807, declared himself "rolling rudderless," "the wreck of what he once was," "with an unceasing overwhelming sensation of wretchedness?" and in 1814, who still pronounced himself the endurer of all that was "wretched, helpless, and hopeless?" Samuel Taylor Coleridge is the man on whom all these charges and fearful anticipations once rested: but he it is fervently hoped, was changed; that he was renovated; that, when refuge failed, an unseen power subdued the rebellious, and softened the hard; and that he approached the verge of life in the serenity of faith and hope. Before the effect of this letter, the eccentricities of S. T. Coleridge--his indiscretions, his frailties, vanish away. There is in it a mellowed character, accordant with a proximity to the eternal state, when alone the objects of time assume their true dimensions; when, earth receding; eternity opening; the spirit, called to launch its untried bark on the dark and stormy waters that separate both worlds, descries _light_ afar, and leans, as its only solace, on the hope of the christian. Checkered indeed was the life of this great but imperfect man. His dawn was not without promise. Hopes and blessings attended him in his course, but mists obscured his noon, and tempests long followed him; yet he set, it is hoped, serene and in splendor, looking on, through faith in his Redeemer, to that cloudless morning, where his sun shall no more go down. * * * * * The attention of the reader will now be directed to letters of Mr. Southey, briefly relating to Mr. Coleridge, and to circumstances connected with the publication of the "Early Recollections of S. T. Coleridge," 1837;--with a reference to the distressing malady with which Mrs. Southey was afflicted. "Keswick, Feb. 26, 1836. My dear Cottle, ... I never go out but for regular exercise. Constant occupation; a daily walk whatever the weather may be; constitutional buoyancy of spirits; the comfort I have in my daughters and son; the satisfaction of knowing that nothing is neglected for my dear Edith, which can be done by human care and dutiful attention; above all, a constant trust in God's mercy, and the certainty that whatever he appoints for us is best; these are my supports, and I have as much cause to be thankful for present consolation, as for past happiness. ... If this domestic affliction had not fallen upon us, it was my intention to have seen you in October 1834, and have brought my son Cuthbert with me; and if it please God that I should ever be able to leave home for a distant journey, this I still hope to do, and if you are not then in a better place than Bedminster, I am selfish enough to wish you may stay there till we meet; and indeed for the sake of others, that it may be to the utmost limits which may be assigned us. I would give a great deal to pass a week with you in this world. When I called on your brother Robert, in London, four years ago, he did not recollect me, and yet I was the least changed of the two. I should very much like to show you the correspondence which once passed between Shelley and myself. Perhaps you are not acquainted with half of his execrable history. I know the whole, and as he gave me a fit opportunity, I read him such a lecture upon it as he deserved. God bless you, my dear old friend, Robert Southey." I shall now refer to some incidental subjects relating to Mr. Southey, which could not be well introduced in an earlier stage. In drawing up my "Early Recollections of S. T. Coleridge," so many references had been made to Mr. Southey, that, notwithstanding his general permission, I deemed it proper to transmit him the MS., with a request that he would, without hesitation, draw his pen across any portions to which he either objected, or thought it might be better to omit. A further benefit also was anticipated by such inspection, as any error which might inadvertently have crept in, as to facts and dates, would infallibly be detected by Mr. Southey's more retentive memory. Mr. S. thus replied: "Keswick, March 6, 1836. My dear Cottle, You will see that I have drawn my pen across several passages in your MS. of "Early Recollections."[99] The easiest way of showing you those small inaccuracies, will be by giving you a slight summary of the facts, most of them antecedent to my introduction to you. Since your manuscript has arrived, I have received from London, two volumes of 'Letters and Conversations of S. T. Coleridge,' published anonymously by one of his later friends, Mr. Alsop, by name, a person of whom I never heard before. Mr. Moxon, the publisher, writes to me thus concerning it: 'In many respects I regret that I undertook the publication of the work, for though at my earnest solicitation, many objectionable passages respecting both yourself and Mr. Wordsworth were left out, yet much I fear still remains that ought not to have been published; and yet if I had refused the work, it would most likely have been published by some other bookseller, with more in it to offend than there is at present.' Now there is nothing in this work relating to myself of the slightest consequence, but the worst enemy of S. T. C. could not have done so much injury to his character as this injudicious friend has done; who, be it observed, was also a friend of Cobbet's. He calls on Mr. Green, his presumed editor, not to conceal Coleridge's real opinions from the public, and certainly represents those opinions as being upon most, if not all subjects, as lax as his own. Coleridge's nephews,--the Bishop and Judge--are wantonly insulted by this person, and contemptuous speeches of his are reported concerning dead and living individuals, for whom he professed friendship, and from whom he had received substantial proofs of kindness. Heaven preserve me from such a friend as Mr. Alsop! But I never could have admitted such a person to my friendship, nor, if I had, would he have any such traits of character to record.... Now then to your narrative, or rather to mine; referring to incidents which took place before Coleridge's and my own acquaintance with yourself; by which you will perceive on what small points you were misinformed, and in what your memory has deceived you. In the summer of 1794, S. T. Coleridge and Hucks came to Oxford, on their way into Wales on a pedestrian tour. Allen introduced them to me, and the scheme of _Pantisocracy_ was introduced _by them_; talked of, by no means determined on. It was subsequently talked into shape by Burnet and myself, at the commencement of the long vacation. We separated from Coleridge and Hucks: they making for Gloucester; Burnet and I proceeding on foot to Bath. After some weeks, Coleridge returning from his tour, came to Bristol on his way, and stopped there. (I being there.) Then it was that we resolved on going to America, and S. T. C., and I walked into Somersetshire to see Burnet, and on that journey it was that we first saw Poole. Coleridge made his engagement with Miss Fricker, on our return from this journey, at my mother's house in Bath;--not a little to my astonishment, for he had talked of being deeply in love with a certain _Mary Evans_. I had been previously engaged to her sister, my poor Edith!--_whom it would make your heart ache to see at this time!_ We remained at Bristol till the close of the vacation; several weeks. During that time we again talked of America. The funds were to be what each could raise. Coleridge, by his _projected work_, 'Specimens of Modern Latin Poems,' for which he had printed proposals, and obtained a respectable list of Cambridge subscribers, before I knew him: I by 'Joan of Arc,' and what else I might publish. I had no rich relations, except one, my uncle, John Southey, of Taunton, who took no notice of his brother's family; nor any other expectation. He hoped to find companions with money. Coleridge returned to Cambridge, and then published 'The Fall of Robespierre;' while Lovell (who had married one of the Miss Frickers) and I, published a thin volume of poems at Bath. My first transaction with you was for 'Joan of Arc,' and this was before Coleridge's arrival at Bristol, and soon after Lovell had introduced me to you. Coleridge did not come back again to Bristol till January 1795, nor would he I believe _have come back at all_, if I had not gone to London to look for him, for having got there from Cambridge at the beginning of winter, there he remained without writing either to Miss Fricker or myself. At last I wrote to Favell (a Christ's Hospital boy, whose name I knew as one of his friends, and whom he had set down as one of our companions) to inquire concerning him, and learnt in reply, that S. T. Coleridge was at 'The Cat and Salutation,' in Newgate Street. [100] Thither I wrote. He answered my letter, and said, that _on such a day_ he should set off for Bath by the _waggon_. Lovell and I walked from Bath to meet him. Near Marlborough we met with the appointed waggon; but _no S. T. Coleridge was therein!_ A little while afterward, I went to London, and not finding him at 'The Cat and Salutation,' called at Christ's Hospital, and was conducted by Favell to 'The Angel Inn, Butcher Hall street,' whither Coleridge had shifted his quarters. I brought him then to Bath, and in a few days to Bristol. In the intermediate time between his leaving Bristol, and returning to it, the difficulties of getting to America became more and more apparent. Wynne wrote to press upon me the expedience of trying our scheme of Pantisocracy in Wales, knowing how impracticable it would be _any where_; knowing also, that there was no hope of convincing me of its impracticability, _at that time_. In our former plan we were all agreed, and expected that what the earth failed to produce for us, the pen would supply. Such were our views in January 1795; when S. T. Coleridge gave his first and second lectures in the Corn Market, and his third in a vacant house in Castle Green. These were followed by my lectures, and you know the course of our lives till the October following, when we parted. By that time I had seen that _no dependence_ could be placed on Coleridge. No difference took place between us when I communicated to him my intention of going with my uncle to Lisbon, nor even a remonstrance on his part; nor had I the slightest suspicion that he intended to quarrel with me, till ----'s insolence made it apparent; and I then learnt from Mrs. Morgan (poor John Morgan's mother) in what manner he was speaking of me. This was in October. From that time to my departure for Lisbon you know my history. Lovell did not die till six months afterward. The 'Watchman' was not projected till I was on my way to Lisbon. Poor Burnet's history would require a letter of itself. He became deranged on one point, which was that of _hatred to me_, whom he accused of having jealously endeavoured to suppress his talents! This lasted about six months, in the year 1802, and it returned again in the last year of his life. The scheme of Pantisocracy proved his ruin; but he was twice placed in situations where he was well provided for. I had the greatest regard for him, and would have done, and indeed, as far as was in my power, did my utmost to serve him God bless you, my dear old friend, Yours most affectionately, Robert Southey." "Keswick, 14 April, 1836. My dear Cottle, If you are drawing up your 'Recollections of Coleridge,' for separate publication, you are most welcome to insert anything of mine which you might think proper; but it is my wish that nothing of mine may go into the hands of any person concerned in bringing forward Coleridge's MSS. I know that Coleridge at different times of his life never let pass an opportunity of speaking ill of me. Both Wordsworth and myself have often lamented the exposure of duplicity which must result from the publication of his letters, and by what he has delivered by word of mouth to the worshippers by whom he was always surrounded. To Wordsworth and to me, it matters little. Coleridge received from us such substantial services as few men have received from those whose friendship they had forfeited. This indeed was not the case with Wordsworth, as it was with me, for he knew not in what manner Coleridge had latterly spoken of him. But I continued all possible offices of kindness to his children, long after I regarded his own conduct with that _utter disapprobation_ which alone it can call forth from all who had any sense of duty and moral obligation. Poole[101] from whom I had a letter by the same post with yours, thinks, from what you have said concerning Coleridge's habit of taking opium, that it would operate less to deter others from the practice, than it would lead them to flatter themselves in indulging in it, by the example of so great a man. That there is some probability in this I happen to know from the effect of Mr. De Quincey's book; one who had never taken a drop of opium before, but took so large a dose, for the sake of experiencing the sensations which had been described, that a very little addition to the dose might have proved fatal. There, however, the mischief ended, for he never repeated the experiment. But I apprehend if you send what you have written, about Coleridge and opium, it will not be made use of, and that Coleridge's biographer will seek to find excuses for his abuse of that drug. Indeed in Mr. Alsop's book, it is affirmed that the state of his heart, and other appearances in his chest, showed the habit to have been brought on by the pressure of disease in those parts:--the more likely inference is, that the excess brought on the disease. I am much pleased with your "_Predictions_." Those who will not be convinced by such scriptural proofs, if they pretend to admit any authority in the Scriptures, would not, though one rose from the dead. God bless you, my dear old friend. Whenever I can take a journey, I will, if you are living, come to Bedminster. There is no other place in the world which I remember with such feelings as that village.[102] Believe me always yours most affectionately, Robert Southey." In answer to an invitation, Mr. Southey thus replied. "Keswick, August 16, 1836. My dear Cottle, ... Be assured, whenever it may seem fitting for me to take so long a journey, I shall come to you with as cordial a feeling of unchanged and unabated friendship as that with which you I know will receive me. It is very much my wish to do so, to show Cuthbert my son (who will accompany me) the scenes of my boyhood and youth, and the few friends who are left to me in the West of England. There is an urgent reason why I should go to London before the last volume of Cowper is brought forth, if domestic circumstances can be so arranged as to admit of this, and I would fain hope it may be; I shall then certainly proceed to the West. Longman has determined to print my poetical works in ten monthly parts, and I have to prepare accordingly for the press. No one will take more interest than yourself in this arrangement. I have much to correct, much to alter, and not a little to add: among other things, a general preface, tracing the circumstances which contributed to determine my course as a poet. I can say nothing which would give you pleasure to hear on a subject[103] which concerns me so nearly. We have continued variations of better and worse, with no tendency to amendment; and according to all human foresight, no hope of recovery. We entertain no guests, and admit no company whom it is possible to exclude. God bless you, my dear old friend, and believe me always Yours most affectionately, Robert Southey." I now refer to an occurrence that gave me some uneasiness. It appears, from the following letter that the family of Mr. Coleridge felt uneasy at learning that I intended to disclose to the public, the full extent of Mr. C.'s subjection to opium. "September 30, 1836. My dear Cottle, ... Coleridge's relations are uneasy at what they hear of your intention to publish an account of him. Yesterday I learnt personally, from an influential member of the family, what their objections particularly were. He specified as points on which they were uncomfortable, Coleridge's own letter, or letters, respecting _opium_, and the circumstances of a gift of three hundred pounds from Mr. De Quincey. The truth is, that Coleridge's relations are placed in a most uncomfortable position. They cannot say that any one of themselves will bring out a full and authentic account of C. because they know how much there is, which all who have any regard for Coleridge's memory, would wish to be buried with him. But we will talk over the subject when we meet. Meantime I have assured ---- that your feelings toward Coleridge are, what they have ever been, friendly in the highest degree. How like a dream does the past appear! through the last years of my life more than any other part. All hope of recovery, or even of amendment, is over! In all reason I am convinced of this; and yet at times when Edith speaks and looks like herself, I am almost ready to look for what, if it occurred, would be a miracle. _It is quite necessary that I should be weaned from this constant object of solicitude_; so far at least as to refresh myself, and recruit for another period of confinement. Like all other duties, it brings with it its reward: and when I consider with how many mercies this affliction has been tempered, I have cause indeed to be thankful. Believe me always, my dear Cottle, Yours most affectionately, Robert Southey." A few days after I received the following letter from Mr. Southey:-- "Keswick, Oct. 10, 1836. My dear Cottle, I have long foreseen that poor S. T. Coleridge would leave a large inheritance of uneasiness to his surviving friends, and those who were the most nearly connected with him. The _Head of the Family_ being in these parts, I have heard more concerning the affair of _your Memoir_, as it respects the feelings of that family than I should otherwise. He is a thoroughly good man; mild, unassuming, amiable, and judicious beyond most men. This matter interests him greatly, on account of his brother having married Mr. S. T. Coleridge's daughter. Indeed it is in consequence of a letter from the ---- that I am now writing. He cared nothing when a gross and wanton insult was offered to him in that ... book, but on this occasion he is much concerned. A few omissions (one letter in particular, respecting the habit of taking opium,) would spare them great pain, and leave your book little the poorer, rich as your materials are. Wilfully I am sure you never gave pain to any human being, nor any living creature.... You are not like a witness who is required to tell all which he knows. In those cases the moral law requires us to tell nothing but the truth, but does not demand the whole truth, unless the suppression of any part of it should be tantamount to falsehood. Of this indeed you are fully aware. You have enough to tell that is harmless as well as interesting, and not only harmless, but valuable and instructive, and that _ought_ to be told, and which _no one but yourself can tell_. Strike out only.... I will read over the Memoir when we meet. You have abundance of materials; and many things may come to mind which may supply the place of what should be withdrawn. _You will understand my motive in pressing this upon you._ God bless you, my dear old friend. Your's most affectionately, Robert Southey." As I determined to publish nothing relating to Mr. Coleridge, without Mr. Southey's sanction, my first impression, on the receipt of this letter, was, wholly to _withdraw the work_;--but as I expected soon to see Mr. S., I resolved to suspend my determination till he had an opportunity of inspecting the MS. once more, when his specific objections might be better understood. Two or three weeks after receiving the former letter, Mr. S. addressed to me the following hasty line:-- "Friday, Nov. 1, 1836, Pipe Hayes. My dear Cottle, Here we are, six miles from Birmingham. Our places are taken for Thursday morning, in the coach which starts from the Hen and Chickens, Birmingham. To what Inn it comes in Bristol, I forgot to ask. So, if on our arrival, we do not find your vehicle, we shall pack ourselves, and our luggage, in a hackney-coach, without delay, and drive to Carlton Villa. So on Thursday evening I hope to see you. God bless you, my dear old friend, Robert Southey." P.S. "I saw Wordsworth on my way, and mentioned your wish about engraving his portrait. He referred it entirely to my opinion of its likeness."[104] On his arrival, Mr. Southey deliberately re-read the whole of my MS., and objected alone to a few trifles, which were expunged. He read the series of _opium letters_ with a mind evidently affected, but no part did he interdict. He now arrived at, and read the solemn _Testamentary Letter_,(p. 394 [Letter dating "Bristol, June 26th, 1814. Transcriber.]). I said to him, "Southey shall I, or shall I not, omit this letter." He paused for a few moments, and then distinctly said. "You must print it. It is your authority for what you have done." He then continued, "You must print it also, for the sake of faithful biography, and for the beneficial effect this, and the other opium letters must inevitably produce." This unqualified approval determined me to publish the whole of the opium letters. I here give the next letter I received from Mr. Southey, when he had returned home, after his long excursion to Bristol, and the West of England, by which it will be perceived that no after inclination existed in Mr. S.'s mind to alter the opinion he had given. "Keswick, May 9, 1837. My dear Cottle, It is scarcely possible that a day should pass, in which some circumstance, some object, or train of recollection, does not bring you to my mind. You may suppose then how much I thought of you during the employment I recently got through of correcting "_Joan of Arc_" for the last time.... Our journey, after we left your comfortable house, was as prosperous as it could be at that time of the year. We have reason, indeed, to be thankful, that travelling so many hundred miles, in all sorts of ways, and over all kinds of roads, we met with no mischief of any kind; nor any difficulties greater than what served for matter of amusement. During the great hurricane, we were at Dawlish, in a house on the beach, from which we saw the full effect of its force on the sea. The great snow-storm caught us at Tavistock, and rendered it impossible for us to make our intended excursion on Dartmoor. Cuthbert and I parted company at my friend, Miss Caroline Bowles's, near Lymington, he going to his brother-in-law, (at Terring, where he is preparing for the University,) I, the next day, to London. I joined him again at Terring, three weeks afterward; and, after a week, made the best of my way home. The objects of my journey were fully accomplished. Cuthbert has seen most of the spots which I desired to show him, and has been introduced to the few old friends whom I have left in the West of England. I had much pleasure, but not unmingled with pain, in visiting many places which brought back vividly the remembrance of former days; but to Cuthbert, all was pure pleasure. God bless you, my dear old friend, Yours affectionately, Robert Southey." In a previous letter Mr. Southey had said in a contemplative mood, "... Little progress is made in my 'Life of George Fox' but considerable preparation. This, and some sketches of Monastic history, will probably complete the ecclesiastical portion of my labours. Alas! I have undertaken more than there is any reasonable likelihood of completing. My head will soon be white, and I feel a disposition to take more thought for the morrow than I was wont to do; not as if distrusting providence, which has hitherto supported me, _but my own powers of exertion!_" I pass over the intervening period between this, and my old friend's mental affliction, as more properly belonging to Mr. Southey's regular biographer, but this much I may observe. Having heard, with the deepest concern, that Mr. Southey's mind was affected, I addressed a kind letter to him, to inquire after his health, and requested only one line from him, to relieve my anxiety, if only the signing of his name. I received a letter in reply, from his kindest friend, of which the following is an extract. "... With deep and affectionate interest he read and re-read your letter, and many times in the course of the evening he received it I observed tears in his eyes. 'I will write to Cottle,' he has often repeated since, but alas! the purpose remains unfulfilled, and from me, dear sir, you must receive the explanation of his silence...." On communicating this melancholy intelligence to my old and valued friend, Mr. Foster, he thus replied. "My dear sir, I am obliged for your kind note, and the letter, which I here return. I can well believe that you must feel it a mournful communication. A friend in early life: a friend ever since; a man highly, and in considerable part, meritoriously conspicuous in the literature of the age; and now at length prostrated, and on the borders of the grave; for there can be no doubt the bodily catastrophe will soon follow the mental one. It is a most wonderful career that he has run in literary achievement, and it is striking to see such a man disabled at last, even to write a letter to an old friend! It is interesting to myself, as it must be to every one accustomed to contemplate the labours and productions of mind, to see such a spirit finally resigning its favourite occupations, and retiring from its fame!..." Mr. Foster, referring to the death of his friends, thus afterwards wrote. "Stapleton, June 22, 1842. My dear sir, ... How our old circle is narrowing around us. Going back just three years and a-half, I was recounting yesterday eleven persons departed within that space of time; three-fourths of those who had formed, till then, the list of my old friends and acquaintance, leaving just a few, how few, of those who are my coevals, or approaching to that standard. You are within one, and he at a great distance, whom I may never see again, the oldest in both senses, of the almost solitary remainder. Our day is not far off. Oh, may we be prepared to welcome its arrival...." The following is an extract from another letter of Mr. Foster's containing the same train of thought. "My dear sir, ... My thoughts are often pensively turning on the enumeration of those I may call my coevals; and many of them of long acquaintance who have been called away within these few years. An old, and much valued friend at Worcester, Mr. Stokes, from whose funeral I returned little more than in time to attend that of our estimable friend, your brother-in-law, Mr. Hare; since then, your excellent sister Mary. Mr. Coles, of Bourton, known and esteemed almost forty years. Mr. Addington. Lately in Scotland, the worthy Mr. Dove; and now last of all, so unexpectedly, Mr. Roberts. I dined with him at Mr. Wade's, perhaps not more than ten days before his death.... With friendly regards, I remain, my dear sir, Most truly yours, John Foster." A letter of mine to Mr. Foster, referring chiefly to Mr. Southey, may not inappropriately be here introduced. "July 6, 1842. To the Rev. John Foster, My dear Sir,--I sympathize with you on the comparatively recent loss of so large a proportion of your early friends and acquaintance. I can, to a great extent, participate in similar feelings. Yourself and Mr. Wordsworth are the only two survivors, of all with whom in early life I joined in familiar intercourse, for poor dear Southey since I last wrote to you concerning him, is worse than dead. Mr. W., who dined with me last summer, told me that he does not now know his own children. He said, he had a short time previously called upon him, and he fancied that a slight glimpse of remembrance crossed his mind, when, in a moment, he silently passed to his library, and taking down a book, (from mechanical habit) turned over the pages, without reading, or the power of reading. Pardon prolixity, where the heart is so full. Surely the world does not present a more melancholy, or a more humiliating sight, than the prostration of so noble a mind as that of my old and highly-prized friend, Robert Southey. When I first knew him, he had all that Westminster and Oxford could give him. He was, as the Mores said, to whom I had introduced him, 'brimfull of literature:' decisive and enthusiastic in all his sentiments, and impetuous in all his feelings, whether of approval or dislike. I never knew one more uncompromising in what he believed either to be right, or wrong; thereby marking the integrity of his mind, which ever shrunk from the most distant approximation to duplicity or meanness. This disposition manifested itself almost in infancy, for his mother, an acute and very worthy woman, told me, in the year 1798, that whenever any mischief or accident occurred amongst the children, which some might wish to conceal, she always applied to Robert, who never hesitated, or deviated from the truth, though he himself might have been implicated. And in after life, whatever sentiments he avowed, none who knew the confirmed fidelity of his mind, could possibly doubt that they were the genuine dictates of his heart. There was in Southey, alas! his sun is set!--I must, write in the third person!--one other quality which commands admiration; an habitual delicacy in his conversation, evidencing that cheerfulness and wit might exist without ribaldry, grossness, or profanation. He neither violated decorum himself, nor tolerated it in others. I have been present when a trespasser of the looser class, has received, a rebuke, I might say a castigation, well deserved, and not readily forgotten. His abhorrence also of injustice, or unworthy conduct, in its diversified shapes, had all the decision of a Roman censor; while this apparent austerity was associated, when in the society he liked, with so bland and playful a spirit, that it abolished all constraint, and rendered him one of the most agreeable, as well as the most intelligent of companions. It must occasionally have been exemplified in your experience, that some writers who have acquired a transient popularity, perchance, more from adventitious causes, than sterling merit, appear at once to occupy an increased space, and fancy that he who fills his own field of vision, occupies the same space in the view of others. This disposition will almost invariably be found in those who most readily depreciate those whom they cannot excel; as if every concession to the merits of another subtracted from their own claims. Southey was eminently exempt from this little feeling. He heartily encouraged genius, wherever it was discoverable; whether, 'with all appliances,' the jewel shone forth from academic bowers, or whether the gem was incrusted with extraneous matter, and required the toil of polishing; indifferent to him, it met with the encouraging smile, and the fostering care. It may be truly said, Mr. Southey exacted nothing, and consequently his excellencies were the more readily allowed; and this merit was the greater, since, as Mr. Coleridge remarked, "he had written on so many subjects, and so well on all." Although his company was sought by men of the first rank and talent, from whom he always received that acknowledgment, if not deference, which is due to great attainments and indisputable genius, yet such honours excited no plebeian pride. It produced none of that morbid inflation, which, wherever found, instinctively excites a repulsive feeling. It was this unassuming air, this suavity of deportment, which so attached Southey to his friends, and gave such permanence to their regard. It seems almost invidious to single out one distinguishing quality in his mind, when so many deserve notice, but I have often been struck with the quickness of his perception; the promptitude with which he discovered whatever was good or bad in composition, either in prose or verse. When reading the production of another, the tones of his voice became a _merit-thermometer_, a sort of _Aeolian-harp-test_; in the flat parts his voice was unimpassioned, but if the gust of genius swept over the wires, his tones rose in intensity, till his own energy of feeling and expression kindled in others a sympathetic impulse, which the dull were forced to feel, whilst his animated recitations threw fresh meaning into the minds of the more discerning. What an emblem of human instability! The idea of Robert Southey's altered state can hardly force itself on my imagination. The image of one lately in full vigour, who appeared, but as yesterday, all thought and animation, whose mind exhibited a sort of rocky firmness, and seemed made almost for perpetuity; I say it is hard to conceive of faculties so strong and richly matured, reduced now even to imbecility! The image of death I could withstand, for it is the lot of mortals, but the spectacle of such a mind associated with living extinction, appears incongruous, and to exceed the power of possible combination. Those who witnessed the progressive advances of this mournful condition were prepared for the event by successive changes, but with my anterior impressions, if in his present state I were to be abruptly presented to Robert Southey, and met the vacant and cold glance of indifference, the concussion to my feelings would so overwhelm, that--merciful indeed would be the power which shielded me from a like calamity. Southey spent a week with me, four or five years ago, when he manifested the same kind and cordial behaviour, which he had uniformly displayed for nearly half a century, and which had never during that long period been interrupted for a moment. Nor was steadfastness in friendship one of his least excellencies. From the kindliness of his spirit, he excited an affectionate esteem in his friends, which they well knew no capriciousness on his part would interrupt: to which, it might be added, his mind was well balanced, presenting no unfavourable eccentricities, and but few demands for the exercise of charity. Justly also, may it be affirmed, that he was distinguished for the exemplary discharge of all the social and relative virtues; disinterestedly generous, and scrupulously conscientious, presenting in his general deportment, courteousness without servility, and dignity without pride. There was in him so much kindliness and sincerity, so much of upright purpose, and generous feeling, that the belief is forced on the mind, that, through the whole range of biographical annals, few men, endowed with the higher order of intellect, have possessed more qualities commanding esteem than Robert Southey; who so happily blended the great with the amiable, or whose memory will become more permanently fragrant to the lovers of genius, or the friends of virtue. Nor would Southey receive a fair measure of justice by any display of personal worth, without noticing the application of his talents. His multifarious writings, whilst they embody such varied excellence, display wherever the exhibition was demanded, or admissible, a moral grandeur, and reverence of religion, which indirectly reflects on some, less prodigally endowed, who do, and have, corrupted by their prose, or disseminated their pollutions through the sacred, but desecrated medium of song. It was always a luxury with Southey to talk of old times, places, and persons; and Bristol, with its vicinities, he thought the most beautiful city he had ever seen. When a boy he was almost a resident among St. Vincent's rocks, and Leigh Woods. The view, from the Coronation Road, of the Hotwells, with Clifton, and its triple crescents, he thought surpassed any view of the kind in Europe. He loved also to extol his own mountain scenery, and, at his last visit, upbraided me for not paying him a visit at Greta Hall, where, he said, he would have shown me the glories of the district, and also have given me a sail on the lake, in his own boat, 'The Royal Noah.' After dwelling on his entrancing water-scenes, and misty eminences, he wanted much, he said to show me his library, which at that time consisted of fourteen thousand volumes, which he had been accumulating all his life, from the rare catalogues of all nations: but still, he remarked, he had a list of five hundred other volumes to obtain, and after possessing these, he said, he should be satisfied. Alas! he little knew, how soon the whole would appear to him--less than the herbage of the desert! At this time, Mr. S. mentioned a trifling occurrence, arising out of what happened to be the nature of our conversation, although it is hardly worth naming to you, who so lightly esteem human honours. He said, some years before, when he chanced to be in London, he accepted an invitation to dine with the Archbishop of Canterbury but, subsequently, he received an invitation for the same day, from the Duchess of Kent, to dine at Kensington Palace; and as invitations from Royalty supersede all others, he sent an apology to the Archbishop, and dined with more Lords and Ladies than he could remember. At the conclusion of the repast, before the Ladies retired, _she_ who was destined to receive _homage_, on proper occasions, had learnt to pay _respect_, for the young Princess (our present gracious Queen Victoria) came up to him, and curtseying, very prettily said, 'Mr. Southey, I thank you for the pleasure I have received in reading your Life of Lord Nelson.' I must mention one other trait in Southey, which did him peculiar honour, I allude to the readiness with which he alluded to any little acts of kindness which he might have received from any of his friends, in past years. To the discredit of human nature, there is in general a laborious endeavour to bury all such remembrances in the waters of Lethe: Southey's mind was formed on a different model. The tear which dims my eye, attests the affection which I still bear to poor dear Southey. Few knew him better than myself, or more highly estimated the fine qualities of his head and heart; and still fewer can be oppressed with deeper commiseration for his present forlorn and hopeless condition.... My dear sir, Most truly yours, Joseph Cottle. Rev. John Foster." I have now to present the Reader with a series of letters from Mr. Coleridge to the late Josiah and Thomas Wedgewood, Esqrs.; obligingly communicated to me by Francis Wedgewood, Esq., of Etruria, son of Mr. Josiah Wedgewood. "May 21st, 1799. Gottingen. My dear sir, I have lying by my side six huge letters, with your name on each of them, and all, excepting one, have been written for these three months. About this time Mr. Hamilton, by whom I send this and the little parcel for my wife, was, as it were, setting off for England; and I seized the opportunity of sending them by him, as without any mock-modesty I really thought that the expense of the postage to me and to you would be more than their worth. Day after day, and week after week, was Hamilton going, and still delayed. And now that it is absolutely settled that he goes to-morrow, it is likewise absolutely settled that I shall go this day three weeks, and I have therefore sent only this and the picture by him, but the letters I will now take myself, for I should not like them to be lost, as they comprize the only subject on which I have had an opportunity of making myself thoroughly informed, and if I carry them myself, I can carry them without danger of their being seized at Yarmouth, as all my letters were, yours to ---- excepted, which were, luckily, not sealed. Before I left England, I had read the book of which you speak. I must confess that it appeared to me exceedingly illogical. Godwin's and Condorcet's extravagancies were not worth confuting; and yet I thought that the Essay on 'Population' had not confuted them. Professor Wallace, Derham, and a number of German statistic, and physico-theological writers had taken the same ground, namely, that population increases in a geometrical, but the accessional nutriment only in arithmetical ratio--and that vice and misery, the natural consequences of this order of things, were intended by providence as the counterpoise. I have here no means of procuring so obscure a book, as Rudgard's; but to the best of my recollection, at the time that the Fifth Monarchy enthusiasts created so great a sensation in England, under the Protectorate, and the beginning of Charles the Second's reign, Rudgard, or Rutgard (I am not positive even of the name) wrote an Essay to the same purpose, in which he asserted, that if war, pestilence, vice, and poverty, were wholly removed, the world could not exist two hundred years, &c. Seiffmilts, in his great work concerning the divine order and regularity in the destiny of the human race, has a chapter entitled a confutation of this idea; I read it with great eagerness, and found therein that this idea militated against the glory and goodness of God, and must therefore be false,--but further confutation found I none!--This book of Seiffmilts has a prodigious character throughout Germany; and never methinks did a work less deserve it. It is in three huge octavos, and wholly on the general laws that regulate the population of the human species--but is throughout most unphilosophical, and the tables, which he has collected with great industry, prove nothing. My objections to the Essay on Population you will find in my sixth letter at large--but do not, my dear sir, suppose that because unconvinced by this essay, I am therefore convinced of the contrary. No, God knows, I am sufficiently sceptical, and in truth more than sceptical, concerning the possibility of universal plenty and wisdom; but my doubts rest on other grounds. I had some conversation with you before I left England, on this subject; and from that time I had purposed to myself to examine as thoroughly as it was possible for me, the important question. Is the march of the human race progressive, or in cycles? But more of this when we meet. What have I done in Germany? I have learned the language, both high and low German, I can read both, and speak the former so fluently, that it must be a fortune for a German to be in my company, that is, I have words enough and phrases enough, and I arrange them tolerably; but my pronunciation is hideous. 2ndly, I can read the oldest German, the Frankish, and the Swabian. 3rdly, I have attended the lectures on Physiology, Anatomy, and Natural History, with regularity, and have endeavoured to understand these subjects. 4thly, I have read and made collections for a history of the. 'Belles Lettres,' in Germany, before the time of Lessing: and 5thly, very large collections for a 'Life of Lessing;' to which I was led by the miserably bad and unsatisfactory biographies that have been hitherto given, and by my personal acquaintance with two of Lessing's friends. Soon after I came into Germany, I made up my mind fully not to publish anything concerning my travels, as people call them; yet I soon perceived that with all possible economy, my expenses would be greater than I could justify, unless I did something that would to a moral certainty repay them. I chose the 'Life of Lessing' for the reasons above assigned, and because it would give me an opportunity of conveying under a better name than my own ever will be, opinions which I deem of the highest importance. Accordingly, my main business at Gottingen, has been to read all the numerous controversies in which Lessing was engaged, and the works of all those German poets before the time of Lessing, which I could not afford to buy. For these last four months, with the exception of last week, in which I visited the Hartz, I have worked harder than I trust in God Almighty, I shall ever have occasion to work again: this endless transcription is such a body-and-soul-wearying purgatory. I shall have bought thirty pounds' worth of books, chiefly metaphysics, and with a view to the one work, to which I hope to dedicate in silence, the prime of my life; but I believe and indeed doubt not, that before Christmas I shall have repaid myself. I never, to the best of my recollection, felt the fear of death but once; that was yesterday when I delivered the picture to Hamilton. I felt, and shivered as I felt it, that I should not like to die by land or water before I see my wife and the little one; that I hope yet remains to me. But it was an idle sort of feeling, and I should not like to have it again. Poole half mentioned, in a hasty way, a circumstance that depressed my spirits for many days:--that you and Thomas were on the point of settling near Stowey, but had abandoned it. "God Almighty! what a dream of happiness it held out to me!" writes Poole. I felt disappointment without having had hope. In about a month I hope to see you. Till then may heaven bless and preserve us! Believe me, my dear sir, with every feeling of love, esteem, and gratitude, Your affectionate friend, S. T. Coleridge. Josiah Wedgewood, Esq." "21, Buckingham Street, Strand, January, 1800. My dear sir, I am sitting by a fire in a rug great coat. Your room is doubtless to a greater degree air tight than mine, or your notions of Tartarus would veer round to the Greenlander's creed. It is most barbarously cold, and you, I fear, can shield yourself from it, only by perpetual imprisonment. If any place in the southern climates were in a state of real quiet, and likely to continue so, should you feel no inclination to migrate? Poor Southey, from over great industry, as I suspect, the industry too of solitary composition, has reduced himself to a terrible state of weakness, and is determined to leave this country as soon as he has finished the poem on which he is now employed. 'Tis a melancholy thing that so young a man, and one whose life has ever been so simple and self-denying.... O, for a peace, and the south of France! I could almost wish for a Bourbon king, if it were only that Sieyes and Buonaparte might finish their career in the old orthodox way of hanging. Thank God, _I have my health perfectly_, and I am working hard; yet the present state of human affairs presses on me for days together, so as to deprive me of all my cheerfulness. It is probable that a man's private and personal connexions and interests ought to be uppermost in his daily and hourly thoughts, and that the dedication of much hope and fear to subjects which are perhaps disproportionate to our faculties and powers, is a disease. But I have had this disease so long, and my early education was so undomestic, that I know not how to get rid of it; or even to wish to get rid of it. Life were so flat a thing without enthusiasm, that if for a moment it leaves me, I have a sort of stomach sensation attached to all my thoughts, _like those which succeed to the pleasurable operations of a dose of opium._ Now I make up my mind to a sort of heroism in believing the progressiveness of all nature, during the present melancholy state of humanity, and on this subject _I am now writing_; and no work on which I ever employed myself makes me so happy while I am writing. I shall remain in London till April. The expenses of my last year made it necessary for me to exert my industry, and many other good ends are answered at the same time. Where I next settle I shall, continue, and that must be in a state of retirement and rustication. It is therefore good for me to have a run of society, and that, various, and consisting of marked characters. Likewise, by being obliged to write without much elaboration, I shall greatly improve myself in naturalness and facility of style, and the particular subjects on which I write for money are nearly connected with my future schemes. My mornings I give to compilations which I am sure cannot be wholly useless, and for which, by the beginning of April I shall have earned nearly £150. My evenings to the _Theatres_, as I am to conduct a sort of Dramaterye or series of Essays on the Drama, both its general principles, and likewise in reference to the present state of the English Theatres. This I shall publish in the 'Morning Post.' My attendance on the theatres costs me nothing, and Stuart, the Editor, covers my expenses in London. Two mornings, and one whole day, I dedicate to these Essays on the possible progressiveness of man, and on the principles of population. In April I retire to my greater works,--'The Life of Lessing.' My German chests are arrived, but I have them not yet, but expect them from Stowey daily; when they come I shall send a letter. I have seen a good deal of Godwin, who has just published a Novel. I like him for thinking so well of Davy. He talks of him every where as the most extraordinary of human beings he had ever met with. I cannot say that, for I know _one_ whom I feel to be the superior, but I never met with so extraordinary a _young man_. I have likewise dined with Horne Tooke. He is a clear-headed old man, as every man must needs be who attends to the real import of words, but there is a sort of charlatanry in his manner that did not please me. He makes such a mystery out of plain and palpable things, and never tells you any thing without first exciting, and detaining your curiosity. But it were a bad heart that could not pardon worse faults than these in the author of 'The Diversions of Purley.' Believe me, my dear sir, with much affection Yours, S. T. Coleridge. Thomas Wedgewood, Esq." "21, Buckingham Street, Feb. 1800. My dear sir, Your brother's health [Mr. Thomas Wedgewood] outweighs all other considerations. Beyond a doubt he has made himself acquainted with the degree of heat which he is to experience there [the West Indies]. The only objections that I see are so obvious, that it is idle in me to mention them: the total want of men with whose pursuits your brother can have a fellow feeling: the length and difficulty of the return, in case of a disappointment; and the necessity of sea-voyages to almost every change of scenery. I will not think of the yellow fever; that I hope is quite out of all probability. Believe me, my dear friend, I have some difficulty in suppressing all that is within me of affection and grief. God knows my heart, wherever your brother is, I shall follow him in spirit; follow him with my thoughts and most affectionate wishes. I read your letter, and did as you desired me. ---- is very cool to me. Whether I have still any of the leaven of the _Citizen_, and visionary about me--too much for his present zeal, or whether he is incapable of attending.... As to his views, he is now gone to Cambridge to canvass for a Fellowship in Trinity Hall. Mackintosh has kindly written to Dr. Lawrence, who is very intimate with the Master, and he has other interest. He is also trying hard, and in expectation of a Commissionership of Bankruptcy, and means to pursue the law with all ardour and steadiness. As to the state of his mind, it is that which it was and will be. God love him! He has a most incurable forehead. ---- called on him and looking on his table, saw by accident a letter directed to himself. Said he, 'Why ---- what letter is this for me? and from ----,' 'Yes I have had it some time.' 'Why did you not give it me?' 'Oh, it wants some explanation first. You must not read it now, for I can't give you the explanation now.' And ----, who you know is a right easy-natured man, has not been able to get his own letter from him to this hour! Of his success at Cambridge, Caldwell, is doubtful, or more than doubtful.... So much of ----. All that I know, and all I suspect that is to be known. A kind, gentlemanly, affectionate hearted man, possessed of an absolute talent for industry. Would to God, he had never heard of Philosophy! I have been three times to the House of Commons; each time earlier than the former; and each time hideously crowded. The two first days the debate was put off. Yesterday I went at a quarter before eight, and remained till three this morning, and then sat writing and correcting other men's writing till eight--a good twenty four hours of unpleasant activity! I have not felt myself sleepy yet. Pitt and Fox completely answered my pre-formed ideas of them. The elegance and high finish of Pitt's periods, even in the most sudden replies, is _curious_, but that is all. He argues but so so, and does not reason at all. Nothing is rememberable of what he says. Fox possesses all the full and overflowing eloquence of a man of clear head, clear heart, and impetuous feelings. He is to my mind a great orator; all the rest that spoke were mere creatures. I could make a better speech myself than any that I heard, except Pitt and Fox. I reported that part of Pitt's which I have enclosed in brackets, not that I report ex-officio, but my curiosity having led me there, I did Stuart a service by taking a few notes. I work from morning to night, but in a few weeks I shall have completed my purpose, and then adieu to London for ever. We newspaper scribes are true galley-slaves. When the high winds of events blow loud and frequent then the sails are hoisted, or the ship drives on of itself. When all is calm and sunshine then to our oars. Yet it is not unflattering to a man's vanity to reflect that what he writes at twelve at night, will before twelve hours are over, have perhaps, five or six thousand readers! To trace a happy phrase, good image, or new argument, running through the town and sliding into all the papers. Few wine merchants can boast of creating more sensation. Then to hear a favorite and often-urged argument, repeated almost in your own particular phrases, in the House of Commons; and, quietly in the silent self-complacence of your own heart, chuckle over the plagiarism, as if you were monopolist of all good reasons. But seriously, considering that I have newspapered it merely as means of subsistence, while I was doing other things, I have been very lucky. 'The New Constitution'; 'The Proposal for Peace'; 'The Irish Union'; &c. &c.; they are important in themselves, and excellent vehicles for general truths. I am not ashamed of what I have written. I desired Poole to send you all the papers antecedent to your own; I think you will like the different analyses of the French constitution. I have attended Mackintosh's lectures regularly; he was so kind as to send me a ticket, and I have not failed to profit by it. I remain, with grateful and most affectionate esteem, Your faithful friend S. T. Coleridge. Josiah Wedgewood, Esq." "July 24, 1800. My dear sir, I find your letter on my arrival at Grasmere, namely, dated on the 29th of June, since which time to the present, with the exception of the last few days, I have been more unwell than I have ever been since I left school. For many days I was forced to keep my bed, and when released from that incarceration, I suffered most grievously from a brace of swollen eyelids, and a head into which, on the least agitation, the blood was felt as rushing in and flowing back again, like the raking of the tide on a coast of loose stones. However, thank God, I am now coming about again. That Tom receives such pleasure from natural scenery strikes me as it does you. The total incapability which I have found in myself to associate any but the most languid feelings, with the God-like objects which have surrounded me, and the nauseous efforts to impress my admiration into the service of nature, has given me a sympathy with his former state of health, which I never before could have had. I wish, from the bottom of my soul, that he may be enjoying similar pleasures with those which I am now enjoying with all that newness of sensation; that voluptuous correspondence of the blood and flesh about me with breeze and sun-heat, which makes convalescence more than repay one for disease. I parted from Poole with pain and dejection, for him, and for myself in him. I should have given Stowey a decided preference for a residence. It was likewise so conveniently situated, that I was in the way of almost all whom I love and esteem. But there was no suitable house, and no prospect of a suitable house. ... These things would have weighed as nothing, could I have remained at Stowey, but now they come upon me to diminish my regret. Add to this, Poole's determination to spend a year or two on the continent, in case of a peace and his mother's death. God in heaven bless her! I am sure she will not live long. This is the first day of my arrival at Keswick. My house is roomy, situated on an eminence, a furlong from the town; before it an enormous garden, more than two-thirds of which is rented is a garden for sale articles; but the walks are ours. Completely behind the house are shrubberies, and a declivity planted with flourishing trees of ten or fifteen years' growth, at the bottom of which is a most delightful shaded walk, by the river Greta, a quarter of a mile in length. The room in which I sit commands from one window the Bassenthwaite lake, woods, and mountains. From the opposite, the Derwentwater and fantastic mountains of Borrowdale. Straight before is a wilderness of mountains, catching and streaming lights and shadows at all times. Behind the house, and entering into all our views, is Skiddaw. My acquaintances here are pleasant, and at some distance is Sir Guilfred Lawson's seat, with a very large and expensive library, to which I have every reason to hope that I shall have free access. But when I have been settled here a few days longer, I will write you a minute account of my situation. Wordsworth lives twelve miles distant. In about a year's time he will probably settle at Keswick likewise. It is no small advantage here, that for two-thirds of the year we are in complete retirement. The other third is alive and swarms with tourists of all shapes, and sizes, and characters. It is the very place I would recommend to a novelist or farce writer. Besides, at that time of the year there is always hope that a friend may be among the number and miscellaneous crowd, whom this place attracts. So much for Keswick. Have you seen my translation of Wallenstein. It is a dull heavy play, but I entertain hopes that you will think the language for the greater part, natural, and good common sense English; to which excellence, if I can lay fair claim in any work of poetry or prose, I shall be a very singular writer, at least. I am now working at my 'Introduction of the Life of Lessing,' which I trust will be in the press before Christmas, that is, the 'Introduction,' which will be published first. God bless you, S. T. Coleridge. Josiah Wedgewood, Esq." "Keswick, Nov. 1, 1800. My dear Sir, I would fain believe that the experiment which your brother has made in the West Indies is not wholly a discouraging one. If a warm climate did nothing but only prevented him from getting worse, it surely evidenced some power; and perhaps a climate equally favorable in a country of more various interest, Italy, or the South of France, may tempt your brother to make a longer trial. If (disciplining myself into silent cheerfulness) I could be of any comfort to him by being his companion and attendant, for two or three months, on the supposition that he should wish to travel, and was at a loss for a companion more fit, I would go with him with a willing affection. You will easily see, my dear friend, that I say this only to increase the range of your brother's choice--for even in choosing there is some pleasure. There happen frequently little odd coincidences in time, that recall momentary faith in the notion of sympathies acting in absence. I heard of your brother's return, for the first time, on Monday last, the day on which your letter is dated, from Stoddart. Had it rained on my naked skin I could not have felt more strangely. The 300 or 400 miles that are between us seemed converted into a moral distance; and I knew that the whole of this silence I was myself accountable for; for I ended my last letter by promising to follow it with a second and longer one, before you could answer the first. But immediately on my arrival in this country I undertook to finish a poem which I had begun, entitled 'Christabel,' for a second volume of the 'Lyrical Ballads.' I tried to perform my promise, but the deep unutterable disgust which I had suffered in the translation of the accursed Wallenstein, seemed to have stricken me with barrenness; for I tried and tried, and nothing would come of it. I desisted with a deeper dejection than I am willing to remember. The wind from the Skiddaw and Borrowdale was often as loud as wind need be, and many a walk in the clouds in the mountains did I take; but all would not do, till one day I dined out at the house of a neighbouring clergyman, and some how or other drank so much wine, that I found some effort and dexterity requisite to balance myself on the hither edge of sobriety. The next day my verse-making faculties returned to me, and I proceeded successfully, till my poem grew so long, and in Wordsworth's opinion so impressive, that he rejected it from his volume, as disproportionate both in size and merit, and as discordant in its character. In the mean time I had gotten myself entangled in the old sorites of the old sophist,--procrastination. I had suffered my necessary businesses to accumulate so terribly, that I neglected to write to any one, till the pain I suffered from not writing made me waste as many hours in dreaming about it as would have sufficed for the letter writing of half a life. But there is something beside time requisite for the writing of a letter--at least with me. My situation here is indeed a delightful situation; but I feel what I have lost--feel it deeply--it recurs more often and more painfully than I had anticipated, indeed so much so, that I scarcely ever feel myself impelled, that is to say, pleasurably impelled to write to Poole. I used to feel myself more at home in his great windy parlour than in my own cottage. We were well suited to each other--my animal spirits corrected his inclination to melancholy; and there was something both in his understanding and in his affections, so healthy and manly, that my mind freshened in his company, and my ideas and habits of thinking acquired day after day more of substance and reality. Indeed, indeed, my dear sir, with tears in my eyes, and with all my heart and soul, I wish it were as easy for us all to meet as it was when you lived at Upcott. Yet when I revise the step I have taken, I know not how I could have acted otherwise than I did act. Everything I promised myself in this country has answered far beyond my expectation. The room in which I write commands six distinct landscapes--the two lakes, the vale, the river and mountains, and mists, and clouds and sunshine, make endless combinations, as if heaven and earth were for ever talking to each other. Often when in a deep study, I have walked to the window and remained there looking without seeing; all at once the lake of Keswick and the fantastic mountains of Borrowdale, at the head of it, have entered into my mind, with a suddenness as if I had been snatched out of Cheapside and placed for the first time, in the spot where I stood--and that is a delightful feeling--these fits and trances of novelty received from a long known object. The river Greta flows behind our house, roaring like an untamed son of the hills, then winds round and glides away in the front, so that we live in a peninsula. But besides this etherial eye-feeding we have very substantial conveniences. We are close to the town, where we have respectable and neighbourly acquaintance, and a most sensible and truly excellent medical man. Our garden is part of a large nursery garden, which is the same to us and as private as if the whole had been our own, and thus too we have delightful walks without passing our garden gates. My landlord who lives in the sister house, for the two houses are built so as to look like one great one, is a modest and kind man, of a singular character. By the severest economy he raised himself from a carrier into the possession of a comfortable independence. He was always very fond of reading, and has collected nearly 500 volumes, of our most esteemed modern writers, such as Gibbon, Hume, Johnson, &c. &c. His habits of economy and simplicity, remain with him, and yet so very disinterested a man I scarcely ever knew. Lately, when I wished to settle with him about the rent of our house, he appeared much affected, told me that my living near him, and the having so much of Hartley's company were great comforts to him and his housekeeper, that he had no children to provide for, and did not mean to marry; and in short, that he did not want any rent at all from me. This of course I laughed him out of; but he absolutely refused to receive any rent for the first half-year, under the pretext that the house was not completely furnished. Hartley quite lives at the house, and it is as you may suppose, no small joy to my wife to have a good affectionate motherly woman divided from her only by a wall. Eighteen miles from our house lives Sir Guilfred Lawson, who has a princely library, chiefly of natural history--a kind and generous, but weak and ostentatious sort of man, who has been abundantly civil to me. Among other raree shows, he keeps a wild beast or two, with some eagles, &c. The master of the beasts at the Exeter 'Change, sent him down a large bear,--with it a long letter of directions, concerning the food &c. of the animal, and many solicitations respecting the agreeable quadrupeds which he was desirous to send to the baronet, at a moderate price, and concluding in this manner: 'and remain your honour's most devoted humble servant, J. P. Permit me, sir Guilfred, to send you a buffalo and a rhinoceros.' As neat a postscript as I ever heard--the tradesmanlike coolness with which these pretty little animals occurred to him just at the finishing of his letter! You will in three weeks see the letters on the 'Rise and Condition of the German Boors.' I found it convenient to make up a volume out of my journey, &c. in North Germany--and the letters (your name of course erased) are in the printer's hands. I was so weary of transcribing and composing, that when I found those more carefully written than the rest, I even sent them off as they were.... My littlest one is a very stout boy indeed. He is christened by the name of 'Derwent,'--a sort of sneaking affection you see for the poetical and novelist, which I disguised to myself under the show, that my brothers had so many children Johns, Jameses, Georges, &c. &c., that a handsome christian-like name was not to be had except by encroaching on the names of my little nephews. If you are at Gunville at Christmas, I hold out hopes to myself that I shall be able to pass a week with you there. I mentioned to you at Upcott a kind of comedy that I had committed to writing in part. This is in the wind. Wordsworth's second vol. of the 'Lyrical Ballads' will I hope, and almost believe, afford you as unmingled pleasure as is in the nature of a collection of very various poems to afford to one individual mind. Sheridan has sent to him too--requests him to write a tragedy for Drury Lane. But W. will not be diverted by any thing from the prosecution of his great work. Southey's 'Thalaba,' in twelve books, is going to the press. Remember me with great affection to your brother, and present my kindest respects to Mrs. Wedgwood. Your late governess wanted one thing, which where there is health is I think indispensable in the moral character of a young person--a light and cheerful heart. She interested me a good deal. She appears to me to have been injured by going out of the common way without any of that imagination, which if it be a Jack o' Lanthern to lead us that out way, is however, at the same time a torch to light us whither we are going. A whole essay might be written on the danger of thinking without images. God bless you, my dear sir, and him who is with grateful and affectionate esteem, Yours ever, S. T. Coleridge. Josiah Wedgewood." "Keswick, Oct. 20, 1802. My dear sir, This is my birthday, my thirtieth. It will not appear wonderful to you, when I tell you, that before the arrival of your letter, I had been thinking with a great weight of different feelings, concerning you, and your dear brother, for I have good reason to believe, that I should not now have been alive, if in addition to other miseries, I had had immediate poverty pressing upon me. I will never again remain silent so long. It has not been altogether indolence, or my habit of procrastination which have kept me from writing, but an eager wish,--I may truly say, a thirst of spirit, to have something honourable to tell you of myself. At present I must be content to tell you something cheerful. My health is very much better. I am stronger in every respect, and am not injured by study, or the act of sitting at my writing desk; but my eyes suffer if at any time I have been intemperate in the use of candle light. This account supposes another, namely, that my mind is calm, and more at ease. My dear sir, when I was last with you at Stowey, my heart was often full, and I could scarcely keep from communicating to you the tale of my distresses, but could I add to your depression, when you were low? or how interrupt, or cast a shade on your good spirits, that were so rare, and so precious to you? * * * * * I found no comfort but in the direct speculations;--in the 'Ode to Dejection,' which you were pleased with. These lines, in the original, followed the line '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 And that which suits a part infests the whole, And now is almost grown the temple of my soul.' I give you these lines for the spirit, and not for the poetry. * * * * * But better days are arrived, and are still to come, I have had visitations of--that I may yet be something of which those who love me may be proud. I cannot write that without recalling dear Poole. I have heard twice, and written twice, and I fear by a strange fatality, one of the letters will have missed him. Leslie[105] was here some time ago. I was very much pleased with him. And now I will tell you what I am doing. I dedicate three days in the week to the 'Morning Post,' and shall hereafter write, for the far greater part, such things as will be of a permanent interest as any thing I can hope to write; and you will shortly see a little essay of mine, justifying the writing in a newspaper. My comparison of the French with the Roman Empire was very favourably received. The poetry which I have sent is merely the emptying out of my desk. The epigrams are wretched indeed, but they answered Stewart's purpose, better than better things. I ought not to have given any signature to them whatsoever. I never dreamt of acknowledging, either them, or the Ode to the 'Rain.' As to feeble expressions, and unpolished lines--there is the rub! Indeed, my dear sir, I do value your opinion very highly. I think your judgment in the sentiment, the imagery, the flow of a poem, decisive; at least, if it differed from my own, and if after frequent consideration mine remained different, it would leave me at least perplexed. For you are a perfect electrometer in these things--but in point of poetic diction, I am not so well satisfied that you do not require a certain aloofness from the language of real life, which I think deadly to poetry. Very soon however I shall present you from the press with my opinions full on the subject of style, both in prose and verse; and I am confident of one thing, that I shall convince you that I have thought much and patiently on the subject, and that I understand the whole strength of my antagonist's cause. For I am now busy on the subject, and shall in a very few weeks go to press with a volume on the prose writings of Hall, Milton, and Taylor; and shall immediately follow it up with an essay on the writings of Dr. Johnson and Gibbon, and in these two volumes I flatter myself I shall present a fair history of English Prose. If my life and health remain, and I do but write half as much, and as regularly as I have done during the last six weeks, this will be finished by January next; and I shall then put together my memorandum-book on the subject of Poetry. In both I have endeavoured sedulously to state the facts and the differences clearly and accurately; and my reasons for the preference of one style to another are secondary to this. Of this be assured, that I will never give any thing to the world in _propriae personae_ in my own name which I have not tormented with the file. I sometimes suspect that my foul copy would often appear to general readers more polished than my fair copy. Many of the feeble and colloquial expressions have been industriously substituted for others which struck me as artificial, and not standing the test; as being neither the language of passion, nor distinct conceptions. Dear sir, indulge me with looking still further on in my literary life. 1 have, since my twentieth year, meditated an heroic poem on the 'Siege of Jerusalem,' by Titus. This is the pride and the stronghold of my hope, but I never think of it except in my best moods. The work to which I dedicate the ensuing years of my life, is one which highly pleased Leslie, in prospective, and my paper will not let me prattle to you about it. I have written what you more wished me to write, all about myself. Our climate (in the north) is inclement, and our houses not as compact as they might be, but it is a stirring climate, and the worse the weather, the more unceasingly entertaining are my study windows, and the month that is to come is the glory of the year with us. A very warm bedroom I can promise you, and one at the same time which commands the finest lake and mountain view. If Leslie could not go abroad with you, and I could in any way mould my manners and habits to suit you, I should of all things like to be your companion. Good nature, an affectionate disposition, and so thorough a sympathy with the nature of your complaint, that I should feel no pain, not the most momentary, at being told by you what your feelings require at the time in which they required it; this I should bring with me. But I need not say that you may say to me,--'You don't suit me,' without inflicting the least mortification. Of course this letter is for your brother, as for you; but I shall write to him soon. God bless you, S. T. Coleridge. Thomas Wedgewood, Esq." "Keswick, November 3, 1802. Dear Wedgewood, It is now two hours since I received your letter; and after the necessary consultation, Mrs. Coleridge herself is fully of opinion that to lose time is merely to lose spirits. Accordingly I have resolved not to look the children in the face, (the parting from whom is the downright bitter in the thing) but to go to London by to-morrow's mail. Of course I shall be in London, God permitting, on Saturday morning. I shall rest that day, and the next, and proceed to Bristol by the Monday night's mail. At Bristol I will go to _Cote-House_.[106] At all events, barring serious illness, serious fractures, and the et cetera of serious unforeseens, I shall be at Bristol, Tuesday noon, November 9. You are aware that my whole knowledge of French does not extend beyond the power of limping slowly, not without a dictionary crutch, or an easy French book: and that as to pronunciation, all my organs of speech, from the bottom of the Larynx to the edge of my lips, are utterly and naturally anti-Gallican. If only I shall have been any comfort, any alleviation to you I shall feel myself at ease--and whether you go abroad or no, while I remain with you, it will greatly contribute to my comfort, if I know you will have no hesitation, nor pain, in telling me what you wish me to do, or not to do. I regard it among the blessings of my life, that I have, never lived among men whom I regarded as my artificial superiors: that all the respect I have at any time paid, has been wholly to supposed goodness, or talent. The consequence has been that I have no alarms of pride; no _cheval de frise_ of independence. I have always lived among equals. It never occurs to me, even for a moment, that I am otherwise. If I have quarrelled with men, it has been as brothers, or as school-fellows quarrel. How little any man can give me, or take from me, save in matters of kindness and esteem, is not so much a thought or conviction with me, or even a distinct feeling, as it is my very nature. Much as I dislike all formal declarations of this kind, I have deemed it well to say this. I have as strong feelings of gratitude as any man. Shame upon me if in the sickness and the sorrow which I have had, and which have been kept unaggravated and supportable by your kindness, and your brother's (Mr. Josiah Wedgewood) shame upon me if I did not feel a kindness, not unmixed with reverence towards you both. But yet I never should have had my present impulses to be with you, and this confidence, that I may become an occasional comfort to you, if, independently of all gratitude, I did not thoroughly esteem you; and if I did not appear to myself to understand the nature of your sufferings; and within the last year, in some slight degree to have felt myself, something of the same. Forgive me, my dear sir, if I have said too much. It is better to write it than to say it, and I am anxious in the event of our travelling together that you should yourself be at ease with me, even as you would with a younger brother, to whom, from his childhood you had been in the habit of saying, 'Do this Col.' or 'don't do that.' All good be with you, S. T. Coleridge. Thomas Wedgewood. Esq." "Keswick, January 9, 1803. My dear Wedgewood, I send you two letters, one from your dear sister, the second from Sharp, by which you will see at what short notice I must be off, if I go to the _Canaries_. If your last plan continue in full force, I have not even the phantom of a wish thitherward struggling, but if aught have happened to you, in the things without, or in the world within, to induce you to change the place, or the plan, relatively to me, I think I could raise the money. But I would a thousand-fold rather go with you whithersoever you go. I shall be anxious to hear how you have gone on since I left you. You should decide in favour of a better climate somewhere or other. The best scheme I can think of, is to go to some part of Italy or Sicily, which we both liked. I would look out for two houses. Wordsworth and his family would take the one, and I the other, and then you might have a home either with me, or if you thought of Mr. and Mrs. Luff, under this modification, one of your own; and in either case you would have neighbours, and so return to England when the home sickness pressed heavy upon you, and back to Italy when it was abated, and the climate of England began to poison your comforts. So you would have abroad in a genial climate, certain comforts of society among simple and enlightened men and women; and I should be an alleviation of the pang which you will necessarily feel, as often as you quit your own family. I know no better plan: for travelling in search of objects is at best a dreary business, and whatever excitement it might have had, you must have exhausted it. God bless you, my dear friend. I write with dim eyes, for indeed, indeed, my heart is very full of affectionate sorrowful thoughts toward you. I write with difficulty, with all the fingers but one of my right hand very much swollen. Before I was half up the _Kirkstone_ mountain, the storm had wetted me through and through, and before I reached the top it was so wild and outrageous, that it would have been unmanly to have suffered the poor woman (guide) to continue pushing on, up against such a torrent of wind and rain: so I dismounted and sent her home with the storm in her back. I am no novice in mountain mischiefs, but such a storm as this was, I never witnessed, combining the intensity of the cold, with the violence of the wind and rain. The rain drops were pelted or slung against my face by the gusts, just like splinters of flint, and I felt as if every drop cut my flesh. My hands were all shrivelled up like a washerwoman's, and so benumbed that I was obliged to carry my stick under my arm. O, it was a wild business! Such hurry skurry of clouds, such volleys of sound! In spite of the wet and the cold, I should have had some pleasure in it, but for two vexations; first, an almost intolerable pain came into my right eye, a smarting and burning pain; and secondly, in consequence of riding with such cold water under my seat, extremely uneasy and burthensome feelings attacked my groin, so that, what with the pain from the one, and the alarm from the other, I had _no enjoyment at all!_ Just at the brow of the hill I met a man dismounted, who could not sit on horse-back. He seemed quite scared by the uproar, and said to me, with much feeling, 'O sir, it is a perilous buffeting, but it is worse for you than for me, for I have it at my back.' However I got safely over, and immediately all was calm and breathless, as if it was some mighty fountain put on the summit of Kirkstone, that shot forth its volcano of air, and precipitated huge streams of invisible lava down the road to Patterdale. I went on to Grasmere.[107] I was not at all unwell, when I arrived there, though wet of course to the skin. My right eye had nothing the matter with it, either to the sight of others, or to my own feelings, but I had a bad night, with distressful dreams, chiefly about my eye; and waking often in the dark I thought it was the effect of mere recollection, but it appeared in the morning that my right eye was blood-shot, and the lid swollen. That morning however I walked home, and before I reached Keswick, my eye was quite well, but _I felt unwell all over_. Yesterday I continued unusually unwell all over me till eight o'clock in the evening. I took no _laudanum or opium_, but at eight o'clock, unable to bear the stomach uneasiness, and achings of my limbs, I took two large tea-spoons full of Ether in a wine-glass of camphorated gum-water, and a third tea-spoon full at ten o'clock, and I received complete relief; my body calmed; my sleep placid; but when I awoke in the morning, my right hand, with three of the fingers was swollen and inflamed. The swelling in the hand is gone down, and of two of the fingers somewhat abated, but the middle finger is still twice its natural size, so that I write with difficulty. This has been a very rough attack, but though I am much weakened by it, and look sickly and haggard, yet I am not out of heart. Such a _bout_; such a 'periless buffetting' was enough to have hurt the health of a strong man. Few constitutions can bear to be long wet through in intense cold I fear it will tire you to death to read this prolix scrawled story. Affectionately dear friend, Yours ever, S. T. Coleridge." "November 12,1800. My dear sir, I received your kind letter, with the £20. My eyes are in such a state of inflammation that I might as well write blindfold, they are so blood-red. I have had leeches twice, and have now a blister behind my right ear. How I caught the cold, in the first instance, I can scarcely guess; but I improved it to its present glorious state, by taking long walks all the mornings, spite of the wind, and writing late at night, while my eyes were weak. I have made some rather curious observations on the rising up of spectra in the eye, in its inflamed state, and their influence on ideas, &c., but I cannot see to make myself intelligible to you. Present my kindest remembrance to Mrs. W. and your brother. Pray did you ever pay any particular attention to the first time of your little ones smiling and laughing? Both I and Mrs. C. have carefully watched our little one, and noticed down all the circumstances, under which he smiled, and under which he laughed, for the first six times, nor have we remitted our attention; but I have not been able to derive the least confirmation of Hartley's or Darwin's Theory. You say most truly, my dear sir, that a pursuit is necessary. Pursuit, for even praiseworthy employment, merely for good, or general good, is not sufficient for happiness, nor fit for man. I have not at present made out how I stand in pecuniary ways, but I believe that I have anticipated on the next year to the amount of Thirty or Forty pounds, probably more. God bless you, my dear sir, and your sincerely Affectionate friend, S. T. Coleridge. Josiah Wedgewood, Esq." "Friday night, Jan. 14, 1803. Dear Friend, I was glad at heart to receive your letter, and still more gladdened by the reading of it. The exceeding kindness which it breathed was literally medicinal to me, and I firmly believe, cured me of a nervous rheumatic affection, the acid and the oil, very completely at Patterdale; but by the time it came to Keswick, the oil was all atop. You ask me, 'Why, in the name of goodness, I did not return when I saw the state of the weather?' The true reason is simple, though it may be somewhat strange. The thought never once entered my head. The cause of this I suppose to be, that (I do not remember it at least) I never once in my whole life turned back in fear of the weather. Prudence is a plant, of which I no doubt, possess some valuable specimens, but they are always in my hothouse, never out of the glasses, and least of all things would endure the climate of the mountains. In simple earnestness, I never find myself alone, within the embracement of rocks and hills, a traveller up an alpine road, but my spirit careers, drives, and eddies, like a leaf in autumn; a wild activity of thoughts, imaginations, feelings, and impulses of motion rises up from within me; a sort of bottom wind, that blows to no point of the compass, comes from I know not whence, but agitates the whole of me; my whole being is filled with waves that roll and stumble, one this way, and one that way, like things that have no common master. I think that my soul must have pre-existed in the body of a chamois chaser. The simple image of the old object has been obliterated, but the feelings, and impulsive habits, and incipient actions, are in me, and the old scenery awakens them. The further I ascend from animated nature, from men, and cattle, and the common birds of the woods and fields, the greater becomes in me the intensity of the feeling of life. Life seems to me then an universal spirit, that neither has, nor can have an opposite. 'God is everywhere' I have exclaimed, and works everywhere, and where is there room for death? In these moments it has been my creed, that death exists only because ideas exist; that life is limitless sensation; that death is a child of the organic senses, chiefly of the sight; that feelings die by flowing into the mould of the intellect becoming ideas, and that ideas passing forth into action, reinstate themselves again in the world of life. And I do believe that truth lies in these loose generalizations. I do not think it possible that any bodily pains could eat out the love of joy, that is so substantially part of me, towards hills, and rocks, and steep waters; and I have had some trial. On Monday night I had an attack in my stomach and right side, which in pain, and the length of its continuance, appeared to me by far the severest I ever had. About one o'clock the pain passed out of my stomach, like lightning from a cloud, into the extremities of my right foot. My toe swelled and throbbed, and I was in a state of delicious ease, which the pain in my toe did not seem at all to interfere with. On Tuesday I was uncommonly well all the morning, and ate an excellent dinner; but playing too long and, too rompingly with Hartley and Derwent, I was very unwell that evening. On Wednesday I was well, and after dinner wrapped myself up warm, and walked with Sarah Hutchinson, to Lodore. I never beheld anything more impressive than the wild outline of the black masses of mountain over Lodore, and so on to the gorge of Borrowdale. Even through the bare twigs of a grove of birch trees, through which the road passes; and on emerging from the grove a red planet, so very red that I never saw a star so red, being clear and bright at the same time. It seemed to have sky behind it. It started, as it were from the heavens, like an eye-ball of fire. I wished aloud at that moment that you had been with me. The walk appears to have done me good, but I had a wretched night; shocking pains in my head, occiput, and teeth, and found in the morning that I had two blood-shot eyes. But almost immediately after the receipt and perusal of your letter the pains left me, and I am bettered to this hour; and am now indeed as well as usual saving that my left eye is very much blood-shot. It is a sort of duty with me, to be particular respecting parts that relate to my health. I have retained a good sound appetite through the whole of it, without any craving after exhilarants or narcotics, and I have got well as in a moment. Rapid recovery is constitutional with me; but the former circumstances, I can with certainty refer to the system of diet, abstinence from vegetables, wine, spirits, and beer, which I have adopted by your advice. I have no dread or anxiety respecting any fatigue which either of us is likely to undergo, even in continental travelling. Many a healthy man would have been laid up with such a bout of thorough wet, and intense cold at the same time, as I had at Kirkstone. Would to God that also for your sake I were a stronger man, but I have strong wishes to be with you. I love your society, and receiving much comfort from you, and believing likewise that I receive much improvement, I find a delight very great, my dear friend! indeed it is, when I have reason to imagine that I am in return an alleviation to your destinies, and a comfort to you. I have no fears and am ready to leave home at a two days' warning. For myself I should say two hours, but bustle and hurry might disorder Mrs. Coleridge. She and the three children are quite well. I grieve that there is a lowering in politics. The 'Moniteur' contains almost daily some bitter abuse of our minister and parliament, and in London there is great anxiety and omening. I have dreaded war from the time that the disastrous fortunes of the expedition to Saint Domingo, under Le Clerc, was known in France. Write me one or two lines, as few as you like. I remain, my dear Wedgewood, with most affectionate esteem, and grateful attachment, Your sincere friend, S. T. Coleridge. Thomas Wedgewood, Esq." "Nether Stowey, Feb. 10, 1803. Dear Wedgewood, Last night Poole and I fully expected a few lines from you. When the newspaper came in, without your letter, we felt as if a dull neighbour had been ushered in after a knock at the door which had made us rise up and start forward to welcome some long absent friend. Indeed in Poole's case, this simile is less over-swollen than in mine, for in contempt of my convictions and assurance to the contrary, Poole, passing off the Brummagem coin of his wishes for sterling reasons, had persuaded himself fully that he should see you in _propria persona._ The truth is, we had no right to expect a letter from you, and I should have attributed your not writing to your having nothing to write, to your bodily dislike of writing, or, though with reluctance, to low spirits, but that I have been haunted with the fear that your sister is worse, and that you are at Cote-House, in the mournful office of comforter to your brother. God keep us from idle dreams. Life has enough of real pains. I wrote to Captain Wordsworth to get me some Bang. The captain in an affectionate letter answers me: 'The Bang if possible shall be sent. If any country ship arrives I shall certainly get it. We have not got anything of the kind in our China ships.' If you would rather wait till it can be brought by Captain Wordsworth himself from China, give me a line that I may write and tell him. We shall hope for a letter from you to-night. I need not say, dear Wedgewood, how anxious I am to hear the particulars of your health and spirits. Poole's account of his conversations, &c., in Prance, are very interesting and instructive. If your inclination lead you hither you would be very comfortable here. But I am ready at an hour's warning; ready in heart and mind, as well as in body and moveables. I am, dear Wedgewood, most truly yours, S. T. Coleridge. Thomas Wedgewood, Esq." "Stowey, Feb. 10, 1803. My dear Wedgewood, With regard to myself and my accompanying you, let me say thus much. My health is not worse than it was in the North; indeed it is much better. I have no fears. But if you fear that, my health being what you know it to be, the inconveniences of my being with you will be greater than the advantages; (I feel no reluctance in telling you so) it is so entirely an affair of spirits and feeling that the conclusion must be made by you, not in your reason, but purely in your spirit and feeling. Sorry indeed should I be to know that you had gone abroad with one, to whom you were comparatively indifferent. Sorry if there should be no one with you, who could with fellow-feeling and general like-mindedness, yield you sympathy in your sunshiny moments. Dear Wedgewood, my heart swells within me as it were. I have no other wish to accompany you than what arises immediately from my personal attachment, and a deep sense in my own heart, that let us be as dejected as we will, a week together cannot pass in which a mind like yours would not feel the want of affection, or be wholly torpid to its pleasurable influences. I cannot bear to think of your going abroad with a mere travelling companion; with one at all influenced by salary, or personal conveniences. You will not suspect me of flattering you, but indeed dear Wedgewood, you are too good and too valuable a man to deserve to receive attendance from a hireling, even for a month together, in your present state. If I do not go with you, I shall stay in England only such time as may be necessary for me to raise the travelling money, and go immediately to the south of France. I shall probably cross the Pyrennees to Bilboa, see the country of Biscay, and cross the north of Spain to Perpignan, and so on to the north of Italy, and pass my next winter at Nice. I have every reason to believe that I can live, even as a traveller, as cheap as I can in England. God bless you. I will repeat no professions, even in the superscription of a letter. You know me, and that it is my serious, simple wish, that in everything respecting me, you would think altogether of yourself, and nothing of me, and be assured that no resolve of yours, however suddenly adopted, or however nakedly communicated, will give me any pain, any at least arising from my own bearings. Yours ever, S. T. Coleridge. Thomas Wedgewood, Esq. P. S. Perhaps Leslie will go with you." "Poole's, Feb. 17, 1803. My dear Wedgewood, I do not know that I have anything to say that justifies me in troubling you with the postage and perusal of this scrawl. I received a short and kind letter from Josiah last night. He is named the sheriff. Poole, who has received a very kind invitation from your brother John, in a letter of last Monday, and which was repeated in last night's letter, goes with me, I hope in the full persuasion that you will be there (at Cote-House) before he be under the necessity of returning home. Poole is a very, very good man, I like even his incorrigibility in little faults and deficiencies. It looks like a wise determination of nature to let well alone. Are you not laying out a scheme which will throw your travelling in Italy, into an unpleasant and unwholesome part of the year? From all I can gather, you ought to leave this country at the first of April at the latest. But no doubt you know these things better than I. If I do not go with you, it is very probable we shall meet somewhere or other. At all events you will know where I am, and I can come to you if you wish it. And if I go with you, there will be this advantage, that you may drop me where you like, if you should meet any Frenchman, Italian, or Swiss, whom you liked, and who would be pleasant and profitable to you. But this we can discuss at Gunville. As to ----, I never doubted that he means to fulfil his engagements with you, but he is one of those weak moralled men, with whom the meaning to do a thing means nothing. He promises with ninety parts out of a hundred of his whole heart, but there is always a stock of cold at the core that transubstantiates the whole resolve into a lie. I remain in comfortable health,--warm rooms, an old friend, and tranquillity, are specifics for my complaints. With all my ups and downs I have a deal of joyous feeling, and I would with gladness give a good part of it to you, my dear friend. God grant that spring may come to you with healing on her wings. God bless you, my dear Wedgewood. I remain with most affectionate esteem, and regular attachment, and good wishes. Yours ever, S. T. Coleridge. Thomas Wedgewood, Esq. P. S. If Southey should send a couple of bottles, one of the red sulphate, and one of the compound acids for me, will you be so good as to bring them with you?" "Stowey, Feb. 17, 1803. My dear Wedgewood, Last night I received a four ounce parcel letter, by the post, which Poole and I concluded was the mistake or carelessness of the servant, who had put the letter into the post office, instead of the coach office. I should have been indignant, if dear Poole had not set me laughing. On opening it, it contained my letter from Gunville, and a small parcel of 'Bang,' from Purkis. I will transcribe the parts of his letter which relate to it. 'Brentford, Feb. 7, 1803. My dear Coleridge, I thank you for your letter, and am happy to be the means of obliging you. Immediately on the receipt of yours, I wrote to Sir Joseph Banks, who I verily believe is one of the most excellent and useful men of this country, requesting a small quantity of Bang, and saying it was for the use of Mr. T. Wedgewood. I yesterday received the parcel which I now send, accompanied with a very kind letter, and as part of it will be interesting to you and your friend, I will transcribe it. 'The Bang you ask for is the powder of the leaves of a kind of hemp that grows in the hot climates. It is prepared, and I believe used, in all parts of the east, from Morocco to China. In Europe it is found to act very differently on different constitutions. Some it elevates in the extreme; others it renders torpid, and scarcely observant of any evil that may befall them. In Barbary it is always taken, if it can be procured, by criminals condemned to suffer amputation, and it is said, to enable those miserables to bear the rough operations of an unfeeling executioner, more than we Europeans can the keen knife of our most skilful chirurgeons. This it may be necessary to have said to my friend Mr. T. Wedgewood, whom I respect much, as his virtues deserve, and I know them well. I send a small quantity only as I possess but little. If however, it is found to agree, I will instantly forward the whole of my stock, and write without delay to Barbary, from whence it came, for more. Sir Joseph adds, in a postscript: 'It seems almost beyond a doubt, that the Nepenthe was a preparation of the Bang, known to the Ancients' * * * * * Now I had better take the small parcel with me to Gunville; if I send it by the post, besides the heavy expense, I cannot rely on the Stowey carriers, who are a brace of as careless and dishonest rogues as ever had claims on that article of the hemp and timber trade, called the gallows. Indeed I verily believe that if all Stowey, Ward excepted, does not go to hell, it will be by the supererogation of Poole's sense of honesty.--Charitable! We will have a fair trial of Bang. Do bring down some of the Hyoscyamine pills, and I will give a fair trial of Opium, Henbane, and Nepenthe. By-the-by I always considered Homer's account of the Nepenthe as a _Banging_ lie. God bless you, my dear friend, and S. T. Coleridge." "Keswick, September 16, 1803. My dear Wedgewood, I reached home on yesterday noon. William Hazlitt, is a thinking, observant, original man; of great power as a painter of character-portraits, and far more in the manner of the old painters than any living artist, but the objects must be before him. He has no imaginative memory; so much for his intellectuals. His manners are to ninety nine in one hundred singularly repulsive; brow-hanging; shoe-contemplating--strange. Sharp seemed to like him, but Sharp saw him only for half an hour, and that walking. He is, I verily believe, kindly-natured: is very fond of, attentive to, and patient with children, but he is jealous, gloomy, and of an irritable pride. With all this there is much good in him. He is disinterested; an enthusiastic lover of the great men who have been before us. He says things that are his own, in a way of his own: and though from habitual shyness, and the outside of bear skin, at least of misanthropy, he is strangely confused and dark in his conversation, and delivers himself of almost all his conceptions with a _Forceps_, yet he _says_ more than any man I ever knew (you yourself only excepted) of that which is his own, in a way of his own: and often times when he has wearied his mind, and the juice is come out, and spread over his spirits, he will gallop for half an hour together, with real eloquence. He sends well-feathered thoughts straight forward to the mark with a twang of the bow-string. If you could recommend him as a portrait painter, I should be glad. To be your companion, he is, in my opinion utterly unfit. His own health is fitful. I have written as I ought to do: to you most freely. You know me, both head and heart, and I will make what deductions your reasons may dictate to me. I can think of no other person [for your travelling companion]--what wonder? For the last years, I have been shy of all new acquaintance. 'To live beloved is all I need, And when I love, I love indeed.' I never had any ambition, and now, I trust I have almost as little vanity. For five months past my mind has been strangely shut up. I have taken the paper with the intention to write to you many times, but it has been one blank feeling;--one blank idealess feeling. I had nothing to say;--could say nothing. How dearly I love you, my very dreams make known to me. I will not trouble you with the gloomy tale of my health. When I am awake, by patience, employment, effort of mind, and walking, I can keep the Fiend at arm's length, but the night is my Hell!--sleep my tormenting Angel. Three nights out of four, I fall asleep, struggling to lie awake, and my frequent night-screams have almost made me a nuisance in my own house. Dreams with me are no shadows, but the very calamities of my life.... In the hope of drawing the gout, if gout it should be, into my feet, I walked previously to my getting into the coach at Perth, 263 miles, in eight days, with no unpleasant fatigue; and if I could do you any service by coming to town, and there were no coaches, I would undertake to be with you, on foot in seven days. I must have strength somewhere. My head is equally strong: my limbs too are strong: but acid or not acid, gout or not gout, something there is in my stomach.... To diversify this dusky letter, I will write an _Epitaph_, which I composed in my sleep for myself while dreaming that I was dying. To the best of my recollection I have not altered a word. 'Here sleeps at length poor Col. and without screaming Who died, as he had always lived, a dreaming: Shot dead, while sleeping, by the gout within, Alone, and all unknown, at E'nbro' in an Inn.' It was Tuesday night last, at the 'Black Bull,' Edinburgh. Yours, dear Wedgewood, gratefully, and Most affectionately, S. T. Coleridge. Thomas Wedgewood, Esq." "16, Abingdon Street, Westminster, Jan. 1804. My dear friend, Some divines hold, that with God to think, and to create, are one and the same act. If to think, and even to compose had been the same as to write with me, I should have written as much too much as I have written too little. The whole truth of the matter is, that I have been very, very ill. Your letter remained four days unread, I was so ill. What effect it had upon me I cannot express by words. It lay under my pillow day after day. I should have written forty times, but as it often and often happens with me, my heart was too full, and I had so much to say that I said nothing. I never received a delight that lasted longer upon me--'Brooded on my mind and made it pregnant,' than (from) the six last sentences of your last letter,--which I cannot apologize for not having answered, for I should be casting calumnies against myself; for the last six or seven weeks, I have both thought and felt more concerning you, and relating to you, than of all other men put together. Somehow or other, whatever plan I determined to adopt, my fancy, good-natured pander of our wishes, always linked you on to it; or I made it your plan, and linked myself on. I left my home, December 20, 1803, intending to stay a day and a half at Grasmere, and then to walk to Kendal, whither I had sent all my clothes and viatica; from thence to go to London, and to see whether or no I could arrange my pecuniary matters, so as leaving Mrs. Coleridge all that was necessary to her comforts, to go myself to Madeira, having a persuasion, strong as the life within me, that one winter spent in a really warm, genial climate, would completely restore me. Wordsworth had, as I may truly say, forced on me a hundred pounds, in the event of my going to Madeira; and Stewart had kindly offered to befriend me. During the days and affrightful nights of my disease, when my limbs were swollen, and my stomach refused to retain the food--taken in in sorrow, then I looked with pleasure on the scheme: but as soon as dry frosty weather came, or the rains and damps passed off, and I was filled with elastic health, from crown to sole, then the thought of the weight of pecuniary obligation from so many people reconciled me; but I have broken off my story. I stayed at Grasmere (Mr. Wordsworth's) a month; three fourths of the time bed-ridden;--and deeply do I feel the enthusiastic kindness of Wordsworth's wife and sister, who sat up by me, one or the other, in order to awaken me at the first symptoms of distressful feeling; and even when they went to rest, continued often and often to weep and watch for me even in their dreams. I left them January the 14th, and have spent a very pleasant week at Dr. Crompton's, at Liverpool, and arrived in London, at Poole's lodgings, last night at eight o'clock. Though my right hand is so much swollen that I can scarcely keep my pen steady between my thumb and finger, yet my stomach is easy, and my breathing comfortable, and I am eager to hope all good things of my health. That gained, I have a cheering, and I trust prideless confidence that I shall make an active, and perseverant use of the faculties and requirements that have been entrusted to my keeping, and a fair trial of their height, depth, and width.[108] Indeed I look back on the last four months with honest pride, seeing how much I have done, with what steady attachment of mind to the same subject, and under what vexations and sorrows, from without, and amid what incessant sufferings. So much of myself. When I know more, I will tell you more. I find you are still at Cote-house. Poole tells me you talk of Jamaica as a summer excursion. If it were not for the voyage, I would that you would go to Madeira, for from the hour I get on board the vessel, to the time that I once more feel England beneath my feet, I am as certain as past and present experience can make me, that I shall be in health, in high health; and then I am sure, not only that I should be a comfort to you, but that I should be so without diminution of my activity, or professional usefulness. Briefly, dear Wedgewood! I truly and at heart love you, and of course it must add to my deeper and moral happiness to be with you, if I can be either assistance or alleviation. If I find myself so well that I defer my Madeira plan, I shall then go forthwith to Devonshire to see my aged mother, once more before she dies, and stay two or three months with my brothers.[109] But, wherever I am, I never suffer a day, (except when I am travelling) to pass without doing something. Poole made me promise that I would leave one side for him. God bless him! He looks so worshipful in his office, among his clerks, that it would give you a few minutes' good spirits to look in upon him. Pray you as soon as you can command your pen, give me half a score lines, and now that I am _loose,_ say whether or no I can be any good to you. S. T. Coleridge." "16, Abingdon Street, Westminster, Jan. 28, 1804. My dear friend, It is idle for me to say to you, that my heart and very soul ache with the dull pain of one struck down and stunned. I write to you, for my letter cannot give you unmixed pain, and I would fain say a few words to dissuade you. What good can possibly come of your plan? Will not the very chairs and furniture of your room be shortly more, far more intolerable to you than new and changing objects! more insufferable reflectors of pain and weariness of spirit? Oh, most certainly they will! You must hope, my dearest Wedgewood; you must act as if you hoped. Despair itself has but that advice to give you. Have you ever thought of trying large doses of opium, a hot climate, keeping your body open by grapes, and the fruits of the climate?[110] Is it possible that by drinking freely, you might at last produce the gout, and that a violent pain and inflammation in the extremities might produce new trains of motion and feeling in your stomach, and the organs connected with the stomach, known and unknown? Worse than what you have decreed for yourself cannot well happen. Say but a word and I will come to you, will be with you, will go with you to Malta, to Madeira, to Jamaica, or (if the climate, of which, and its strange effects, I have heard wonders, true or not) to Egypt. At all events, and at the worst even, if you do attempt to realize the scheme of going to and remaining at Gunville, for God's sake, my dear dear friend, do keep up a correspondence with one or more; or if it were possible for you, with several. I know by a little what your sufferings are, and that to shut the eyes, and stop up the ears, is to give one's self up to storm and darkness, and the lurid forms and horrors of a dream. I scarce know why it is; a feeling I have, and which I can hardly understand. I could not endure to live if I had not a firm faith that the life within you will pass forth out of the furnace, for that you have borne what you have borne, and so acted beneath such pressure--constitutes you an awful moral being. I am not ashamed to pray aloud for you. Your most affectionate friend, S. T. Coleridge." "March, 1804. My dear friend, Though fearful of breaking in upon you after what you have written to me, I could not have left England without having written both to you and your brother, at the very moment I received a note from Sharp, informing me that I must instantly secure a place in the Portsmouth mail for Tuesday, and if I could not, that I must do so in the light coach for Tuesday's early coach. I am agitated by many things, and only write now because you desired an answer by return of post. I have been dangerously ill, but the illness is going about, and not connected with my immediate ill health, however it may be with my general constitution. It was the cholera-morbus. But for a series of the merest accidents I should have been seized in the streets, in a bitter east wind, with cold rain; at all events have walked through it struggling. It was Sunday-night. I have suffered it at Tobin's; Tobin sleeping out at Woolwich. No fire, no wine or spirits, or medicine of any kind, and no person being within a call, but luckily, perhaps the occasion would better suit the word providentially, Tuffin, calling, took me home with him.... I tremble at every loud sound I myself utter. But this is rather a history of the past than of the present. I have only enough for memento, and already on Wednesday I consider myself in clear sunshine, without the shadow of the wings of the destroying angel. What else relates to myself, I will write on Monday. Would to heaven you were going with me to Malta, if it were but for the voyage! With all other things I could make the passage with an unwavering mind. But without cheerings of hope, let me mention one thing; Lord Cadogan was brought to absolute despair, and hatred of life, by a stomach complaint, being now an old man. The symptoms, as stated to me, were strikingly like yours, excepting the nervous difference of the two characters; the flittering fever, &c. He was advised to reduce lean beef to a pure jelly, by Papin's digester, with as little water as could secure it from burning, and of this to take half a wine glass 10 or 14 times a day. This and nothing else. He did so. Sir George Beaumont saw, within a few weeks a letter from himself to Lord St. Asaph, in which he relates the circumstance of his perseverance in it, and rapid amelioration, and final recovery. 'I am now,' he says, 'in real good health; as good, and in as cheerful spirits as I ever was when a young man.' May God bless you, even here, S. T. Coleridge." Mr. Coleridge, in the preceding letters, refers to the different states of his health. In the letter dated January, 1800, he observed, "I have my health perfectly;" and in the same letter he clearly indicates that he was no stranger to opium, by remarking, "I have a stomach sensation attached to all my thoughts, like those which succeed to the pleasurable operations of a dose of opium." I can testify, that during the four or five years in which Mr. C. resided in or near Bristol, no young man could enjoy more robust health. Dr. Carlyon[111] also, verbally stated that Mr. C; both at Cambridge, and at Gottingen, "possessed sound health." From these premises the conclusion is fair, that Mr. Coleridge's unhappy use of narcotics, which commenced thus early, was the true cause of all his maladies, his languor, his acute and chronic pains, his indigestion, his swellings, the disturbances of his general corporeal system, his sleepless nights, and his terrific dreams! * * * * * Extracts, concerning Mr. Coleridge, from letters of the late Thomas Poole, Esq., to the late Thomas Wedgewood, Esq. "Stowey, Nov. 14, 1801. ... I expect Coleridge here in a week or ten days. He has promised to spend two or three months with me. I trust this air will re-establish his health, and that I shall restore him to his family and his friends a perfect man." "Stowey, Nov. 24, 1801. I now expect daily to see Coleridge. He is detained I fear, by a thorn, which he unfortunately took in his heel a day or two before he wrote to me his last letter. He comes alone. As soon as he is here he shall write to you." "Stowey, Nov. 27, 1799. ... Coleridge went hence to Bristol as you know, to collect material for his 'School-book.' (Qy.) There he received a letter concerning Wordsworth's health, which he said agitated him deeply. He set off immediately for Yorkshire. He has since been to the lakes. I suppose we shall soon see him. T. P." "Stowey, March 15, 1804. ... Coleridge is still here with Tobin. He has taken his passage for Malta and paid half the money, so I conclude his going is fixed. They are waiting for convoy--the 'Lapwing' frigate. T. P." "16, Abingdon Street, April 3, 1804. My dear Sir, ... Poor _Col_. left London, as I suppose you know, and is now at Portsmouth, waiting for convoy. He was in a miserable state of health when he left town. Heaven grant that this expedition may establish him, body and mind. Northcote has been painting his picture for Sir George Beaumont. I am told it is a great likeness. Davy is gone to Hungerford for the holiday's fishing.... T. Poole. T. Wedgewood, Esq." Mr. Coleridge remarks, in his letter to Mr. T. Wedgewood, dated "16, Abingdon Street, London:" "Poole looks so worshipful in his office among his clerks, that it would give you a few minutes' good spirits to look in upon him." The following letter will explain this allusion. "Stowey, Sept. 14, 1803. My dear Sir, ... I thank you heartily for your kindness, and I will tell you all about my going to London. I became acquainted with Rickman, whom you saw, when you set off from Cote-house with Coleridge and myself, to London, to hear Davy's lectures at the Royal Institution. It was last January twelvemonths. I liked Rickman, and if I may judge from his conduct since, he liked me. I saw him frequently when I was in London in May and June last. We often talked about the poor laws, the sin of their first principle, their restraints, their contradictions, their abuses, their encouragement to idleness, their immense burdens to those who pay, and their degradation to those who receive. On this subject also some letters have passed between us. I have long imagined that the principles of benefit societies may be extended and modified, so as to remedy the greater part of those evils, and I have long had a plan in my mind which attempted something of this sort, and which as soon as I had leisure I meant to detail in writing, and perhaps to publish. I mentioned this to Coleridge when he was last with me. He mentioned it to Rickman, who wrote to me on the subject. Soon after this Sir George Eose introduced a bill into parliament for obtaining information from the overseers of every parish, concerning the poor, benefit societies, &c. He applied to Rickman to assist him in framing the bill; and finally requested him to get some one to make an abstract, to present to parliament, of the returns made by the overseers. This office Rickman has desired me to undertake. He states to me a variety of inducements; such as my being in London, getting much information on a subject which interests me; and in short, I have agreed to undertake it. Rickman says it will take me three months. I am to have eight clerks under me, or more if I can employ them. He says there will be twenty thousand returns. He proposes that my expenses should be paid with a douceur of three or otherwise four hundred pounds. I stipulated for the former, but told him the douceur would be the pleasure, I trusted, of being useful to the poor.... T. P." This was a rare instance of noble disinterestedness, especially in respect of government transactions. "London, 16, Abingdon Street, May 24, 1804. I saw a letter this morning from Coleridge. It was written to Lamb, from Gibraltar. He says his health and spirits are much improved, yet still he feels alarming symptoms about him. He made the passage from England in eleven days. If the wind permitted, they were to sail in two days for Malta. He says he is determined to observe a strict regimen, as to eating and drinking. He has drunk lately only lemonade, with a very small quantity of bottled porter. He anticipates better health than he has enjoyed for many years. I heard by accident that Giddy was at Davy's. I have not seen Davy for some time. T. P." * * * * * [Illustration: Portrait of S. T. Coleridge] * * * * * If the public "bide their time," there is one memorial, resembling the following, which will infallibly, if not soon, be attached to the busiest and the most celebrated name. "On Sept. 8, 1837, died at Nether Stowey, Somersetshire, Thomas Poole, Esq. He was one of the magistrates for that county, the duties of which station he discharged through a long course of years with distinguished reputation. In early life the deceased was intimately associated with Coleridge, Lamb, Sir H. Davy, Wordsworth, Southey, and other men of literary endowments, who occasionally made long sojournments at his hospitable residence, and in whose erudite and philosophical pursuits he felt a kindred delight. His usefulness and benevolence have been long recognized, and his loss will be deplored."--_Exeter Paper_. It appears that in the spring of 1816, Mr. Coleridge left Mr. Morgan's house at Calne, and, in a desolate state of mind, repaired to London; when the belief remaining strong on his mind, that his opium habits would never be effectually subdued till he had subjected himself to medical restraint, he called on Dr. Adams, an eminent physician, and disclosed to him the whole of his painful circumstances, stating what he conceived to be his only remedy. The doctor being a humane man, sympathized with his patient, and knowing a medical gentleman who resided three or four miles from town, who would be likely to undertake the charge, he addressed the following letter to Mr. Gillman. "Hatton Garden, April 9, 1816. Dear sir, A very learned, but in one respect an unfortunate gentleman, has applied to me on a singular occasion. He has for several years been in the habit of taking large quantities of opium. For some time past he has been endeavouring to break himself of it. It is apprehended his friends are not firm enough, from a dread, lest he should suffer by suddenly leaving it off, though he is conscious of the contrary; and has proposed to me to submit himself to any regimen, however severe. With this view he wishes to fix himself in the house of some medical gentleman, who will have courage to refuse him any laudanum, and under whose assistance, should he be the worse for it, he may be relieved. As he is desirous of retirement, and a garden, I could think of no one so readily as yourself. Be so good as to inform me whether such a proposal is inconsistent with your family arrangements. I should not have proposed it, but on account of the great importance of the character, as a literary man. His communicative temper will make his society very interesting, as well as useful. Have the goodness to favor me with an immediate answer, and believe me, dear sir, Your faithful humble servant, Joseph Adams." The next day Mr. Coleridge called on Mr. Gillman, who was so much pleased with his visitor, that it was agreed he should come to Highgate the following day. A few hours before his arrival, he sent Mr. G. a long letter; the part relating to pecuniary affairs was the following: "With respect to pecuniary remuneration, allow me to say, I must not at least be suffered to make any addition to your family expenses, though I cannot offer anything that would be in any way adequate to my sense of the service; for that indeed there could not be a compensation, as it must be returned in kind by esteem and grateful affection." This return of esteem and grateful affection for his lodging and board, was generously understood and acceded to, by Mr. Gillman, which, to a medical man in large practice, was a small consideration. Mr. G.'s admiration of Mr. Coleridge's talents soon became so enthusiastic, equally creditable to both parties, that he provided Mr. Coleridge with a comfortable home for nineteen years, even unto his death. My original intention was, to prepare a memoir as a contribution to Mr. Gillman's "Life of Mr. Coleridge." On my sending the MS. to Mr. Southey, he observed, in his reply, "I apprehend if you send what you have written about Coleridge and opium, it will not be made use of, and that Coleridge's biographer will seek to find excuse for the abuse of that drug." I afterwards sent the MS. to my friend Mr. Foster, who had ever taken a deep interest in all that concerns Mr. Coleridge. On returning it he thus wrote. "Stapleton, Dec. 19, 1835. My dear sir, I have read through your MS. volume, very much to the cost of my eyes, but it was impossible to help going on, and I am exceedingly obliged to you for favouring me with it;--the more so as there is no prospect of seeing any large proportion of it in print. It is I think about as melancholy an exhibition as I ever contemplated. Why was such a sad phenomenon to come in sight on earth? Was it to abase the pride of human intellect and genius? You have done excellently well to collect into a permanent substance what must else have gone into oblivion, for no one else could have exhibited even a shadow of it. But now, my dear sir, I hope you are prepared with the philosophy, or by whatever name I should designate the fortitude,--that can patiently bear the frustration of the main immediate purpose of your long and earnest labour.--For you may lay your account that the compiler of the proposed life of Coleridge will admit but a very minor part of what you have thus furnished at his request:--that especially he will not admit what you feel to be the most important, as an emphatic moral lesson, and what it has cost you the most painful resolution to set faithfully forth. No, my dear sir, the operator of the work will not, will not, will not, let the illustrious philosopher, genius, and poet, so appear. He will get over that stage with a few general expressions, and a few indistinctly presented facts. And then as to the dreadful tragical parts, he will promptly decide that it would be utter profanation to expose them to view in any such unveiled prominence as you have exhibited in your narrative. And then the solemn warning and example will be nearly kept out of sight. Quite naturally that this would be the course adopted, unless the compiler were, like yourself, intent, as his first and highest obligation, on doing faithful homage to truth, virtue, and religion. How I despise biography, as the business is commonly managed. I cannot believe that Coleridge's dreadful letters of confession will be admitted in their own unmodified form; though they ought to be. Most truly yours, John Foster." These combined intimations led me to stipulate that, whatever else was omitted, the opium letters should be printed verbatim. But this being promptly refused, I determined to throw my materials into a separate work. As this is the last time in which Mr. Southey's name will be mentioned, it is a debt of justice to subjoin the following honourable testimonials. As an evidence of the estimation in which Mr. Southey was held,--the distinctions awarded to his memory have had few parallels. His friends at Keswick, among whom he resided for thirty years, erected to him in their Church a noble monument, as a permanent memorial of their respect. His friends, in London, placed his bust in Westminster Abbey. Whilst another set of his friends in Bristol (his native city) from respect to his genius, and in admiration of his character, placed a bust of him in their own Cathedral. PRAYER OF S. T. COLERIDGE, WRITTEN IN 1831. Almighty God, by thy eternal Word, my Creator, Redeemer, and Preserver! who hast in thy communicative goodness glorified me with the capability of knowing thee, the only one absolute God, the eternal I Am, as the author of my being, and of desiring and seeking thee as its ultimate end;--who when I fell from thee into the mystery of the false and evil will, didst not abandon me, poor self-lost creature, but in thy condescending mercy didst provide an access and a return to thyself, even to the Holy One, in thine only begotten Son, the way and the truth from everlasting, and who took on himself humanity, yea, became flesh, even the man Christ Jesus, that for man he might be the life and resurrection!--O, Giver of all good gifts, who art thyself the only absolute Good, from whom I have received whatever good I have; whatever capability of good there is in me, and from thee good alone,--from myself and my own corrupted will all evil, and the consequences of evil,--with inward prostration of will, mind, and affections I adore thy infinite majesty; I aspire to love thy transcendant goodness! In a deep sense of my unworthiness, and my unfitness to present myself before thee, of eyes too pure to behold iniquity, and whose light, the beatitude of spirits conformed to thy will, is a consuming fire to all vanity and corruptions;--but in the name of the Lord Jesus, of the dear Son of thy love, in whose perfect obedience thou deignest to behold as many as have received the seed of Christ into the body of this death;--I offer this my bounden nightly sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, in humble trust that the fragrance of my Saviour's righteousness may remove from it the taint of my mortal corruption. Thy mercies have followed me through all the hours and moments of my life; and now I lift up my heart in awe and thankfulness for the preservation of my life through the past day, for the alleviation of my bodily sufferings and languors, for the manifold comforts which thou hast reserved for me, yea, in thy fatherly compassion hast rescued from the wreck of my own sins or sinful infirmities;--for the kind and affectionate friends thou hast raised up for me, especially for those of this household, for the mother and mistress of this family, whose love to me has been great and faithful, and for the dear friend, the supporter and sharer of my studies and researches; but above all for the heavenly Friend, the crucified Saviour, the glorified Mediator, Christ Jesus, and for the heavenly Comforter, source of all abiding comforts, thy Holy Spirit! that I may with a deeper faith, a more enkindled love, bless thee, who through thy Son hast privileged me to call thee Abba Father! O thou who hast revealed thyself in thy word as a God that hearest prayer; before whose infinitude all differences cease, of great and small; who like a tender parent foreknowest all our wants, yet listenest, well-pleased, to the humble petitions of thy children; who hast not alone permitted, but taught us to call on thee in all our needs,--earnestly I implore the continuance of thy free mercy, of thy protecting providence through the coming night. Thou hearest every prayer offered to thee believingly with a penitent and sincere heart. For thou in withholding grantest, healest in inflicting the wound, yea, turnest all to good for as many as truly seek thee through Christ the Mediator! Thy will be done! But if it be according to thy wise and righteous ordinances, O shield me this night from the assaults of disease, grant me refreshment of sleep, unvexed by evil and distempered dreams; and if the purpose and aspiration of my heart be upright before thee who alone knowest the heart of man, O, in thy mercy, vouchsafe me yet in this my decay of life, an interval of ease and strength, if so,--thy grace disposing and assisting--I may make compensation to thy church for the unused talents thou hast entrusted to me, for the neglected opportunities which thy loving-kindness had provided. O let me be found a labourer in thy vineyard, though of the late hour, when the Lord and Heir of the vintage, Christ Jesus calleth for his servant.--_Lit. Rem._ S. T. C." Mr. Coleridge wrote, in his life-time, his own epitaph, as follows:-- "Stop, Christian passer-by: stop, child of God, And read, with gentle breast. Beneath this sod A poet lies, or that which once seemed he-- O, lift a thought in prayer for S. T. C. That he who many a year with toil of breath Found death in life, may here find life in death; Mercy for praise-to be forgiven for fame He asked, and hoped through Christ. Do thou the same." A handsome tablet, erected in Highgate New Church, to his memory, bears the following inscription:-- "Sacred to the Memory of SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, Poet, Philosopher, Theologian. This truly great and good man resided for The last nineteen years of his life, In this Hamlet. He quitted 'the body of his death,' July 25th, 1834, In the sixty-second year of his age. Of his profound learning and discursive genius, His literary works are an imperishable record. To his private worth, His social and Christian virtues, JAMES AND ANN GILLMAN, The friends with whom he resided During the above period, dedicate this tablet. Under the pressure of a long And most painful disease, His disposition was unalterably sweet and angelic. He was an ever-enduring, ever-loving friend, The gentlest and kindest teacher, The most engaging home-companion. 'Oh, framed for calmer times and nobler hearts; O studious poet, eloquent for _truth!_ Philosopher contemning wealth and death, Yet docile, child-like, full of life and love.' HERE, On this monumental stone, thy friends inscribe thy worth, Reader, for the world mourn. A Light has passed away from the earth! But for this pious and exalted Christian, 'Rejoice, and again I say unto you, rejoice!'" Ubi Thesaurus ibi Cor. S. T. C. APPENDIX * * * * * JOHN HENDERSON. The name of John Henderson having appeared in several parts of the preceding memoir, and as, from his early death, he is not known in the Literary World, I here present a brief notice of this extraordinary man, reduced from the longer account which appeared in my "Malvern Hills," &c. John Henderson, was born at Limerick, but came to England early in life with his parents. From the age of three years, he discovered the presages of a great mind. Without retracing the steps of his progression, a general idea may be formed of them, from the circumstance of his having _professionally_ TAUGHT GREEK and LATIN in a public Seminary[112] at the age of twelve years. Some time after, his father commencing a Boarding-school in the neighbourhood of Bristol, young HENDERSON undertook to teach the classics; which he did with much reputation, extending, at the same time, his own knowledge in the sciences and general literature, to a degree that rendered him a prodigy of intelligence. At the age of eighteen, by an intensity of application, of which few persons can conceive, he had not only thoughtfully perused all the popular English authors, of later date, but taken an extensive survey of foreign literature. He had also waded through the folios of the SCHOOLMEN, as well as scrutinized, with the minutest attention, the more obsolete writers of the last three centuries; preserving, at the same time, a distinguishing sense of their respective merits, particular sentiments, and characteristic traits; which, on proper occasions, he commented upon, in a manner that astonished the learned listener, not more by his profound remarks, than by his cool and sententious eloquence. So surprisingly retentive was his memory, that he never forgot what he had once learned; nor did it appear that he ever suffered even an Image to be effaced from his mind; whilst the ideas which he had so rapidly accumulated, existed in his brain, not as a huge chaos, but in clear and well-organized systems, illustrative of every subject, and subservient to every call. It was this quality which made him so superior a disputant; for as his mind had investigated the various sentiments and hypotheses of men, so had his almost intuitive discrimination stripped them of their deceptive appendages, and separated fallacies from truth, marshalling their arguments, so as to elucidate or detect each other. But in all his disputations, it was an invariable maxim with him never to interrupt the most tedious or confused opponents, though, from his pithy questions, he made it evident, that, from the first, he anticipated the train and consequences of their reasonings. His favourite studies were, Philology, History, Astronomy, Medicine, Theology, Logic, and Metaphysics, with all the branches of Natural and Experimental Philosophy; and that his attainments were not superficial, will be readily admitted by those who knew him best.--As a Linguist, he was acquainted with the Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin languages; together with the French, Spanish, Italian, and German; and he not only knew their ruling principles and predominant distinctions, so as to read them with facility, but in the greater part conversed fluently. About the age of twenty-two, he accidentally met with the acute and learned Dr. Tucker, Dean of Gloucester, in a stage coach, who soon discovered the superiority of his companion, and after a reasonable acquaintance, in which the opinion he had at first entertained of John Henderson's surprising genius was amply confirmed, he wrote to his father, urging him to send a young man of such distinguished talents to an UNIVERSITY, where only they could expand, or be rightly appreciated; and, in the most handsome way, he accompanied this request with a present of TWO HUNDRED POUNDS. Such an instance of generosity, will confer lasting credit on the name of DEAN TUCKER. On John Henderson's arrival at Oxford, he excited no small degree of surprise among his tutors, who very naturally inquired his reason for appearing at that place, and, as might be supposed, were soon contented to learn, where they had been accustomed to teach.[113] It might be stated also, the late Edmund Rack, a gentleman possessed of much general knowledge, and antiquarian research, and whose materials for the "History of Somersetshire," formed the acknowledged basis of Collinson's valuable History of that county, thus expressed himself, in writing to a friend in London. "My friend, Henderson, has lately paid me a visit, and stayed with me three weeks. I never spent a three weeks so happily, or so profitably. He is the only person I ever knew who seems to be a complete master of every subject in literature, arts, sciences, natural philosophy, divinity; and of all the books, ancient and modern, that engage the attention of the learned; but it is still more wonderful, that at the age of twelve, he should have been master of the Latin and Greek; to which he subsequently added, the Hebrew, Italian, Spanish, German, Persian, and Syriac languages; and also, all the ancient rabbinical learning of the Jews, and the divinity of the fathers; this was, however, the case. The learned DR. KENNICOTT told me, four years since, 'That the greatest men he ever knew were mere CHILDREN, compared to HENDERSON.' In company he is ever new. You never hear a repetition of what he has said before. His memory never fails, and his fund of knowledge is inexhaustible." Dr. Kennicott, (before whom nothing superficial could have stood for a moment,) died in the year 1783, and John Henderson, at the time Dr. K, passed on him this eulogium, could have been only twenty-three years of age! One year after he had entered at Oxford. Though not of the higher order of attainments, it may not be improper to mention his singular talent for IMITATION. He could not only assume the dialect of every foreign country, but the particular tone of every district of England so perfectly, that he might have passed for a native of either: and of the variations of the human accent in different individuals his recollection was so acute, and the modulation of his voice so varied, that, having once conversed with a person, he could most accurately imitate his gestures and articulation for ever after.[114] No man had more profoundly traced the workings of the human heart than himself. A long observation on the causes and effects of moral action, with their external symbols, had matured his judgment in estimating the characters of men, and from the fullest evidence, confirmed him in a belief of the Science of PHYSIOGNOMY. Though the "Physiognomical Sensation," in a greater or less degree, may exist in all, yet the data which support it are so obscure, and at all times so difficult to be defined, that if nature does not make the Physiognomist, study never will: and to be skilled in this science requires the combination of such rare talents, that it cannot excite wonder, either that the unskilful should frequently err, or that the multitude should despise, what they know they can never attain. But John Henderson's discrimination qualified him to speak of all persons, in judging from their countenances, with an almost infallible certainty: he discovered, in his frequent decisions, not an occasional development of character, but a clear perception of the secondary as well as predominant tendencies, of the mind. "Making his eye the inmate of each bosom." COLERIDGE. It would appear like divination, if John Henderson's friends were to state the various instances they have known of that quick discernment which he possessed, that, as it were, penetrated the veil of sense, and unfolded to him the naked and unsophisticated qualities of the soul. There are many who will cordially admit the fact, when it is said, that, his eye was scarcely the eye of a man. There was a luminousness in it--a calm but piercing character, which seemed to partake more of the nature of spirit than of humanity. His conversation was such as might have been expected from a man whose fancy was so creative, whose knowledge omnifarious, and whose recollection so unbounded. He combined scholastic accuracy with unaffected ease; condensed and pointed, yet rich and perspicuous. Were it possible for his numerous friends, by any energy of reminiscence, to collect his discourse, John Henderson would be distinguished as a voluminous author, who yet preserved a Spartan frugality of words. His contemporaries at Oxford well remember, the enthusiasm with which every company received him; and his friends, in that University, consisted of all who were eminent for either talent or virtue. It would be injustice to his memory not to mention the great marks of attention which were paid him, and the high estimation in which he was held by the late Edmund Burke and Dr. Johnson; the former of whom strenuously urged him either to apply to the bar, or to the church, and told him, that, in that case, it was impossible to doubt, but that he would become either a judge or a bishop. Such was the great lexicographer's admiration, also, of John Henderson, that in his annual visits to Oxford, to whatever company he was invited, he always stipulated for the introduction of his young friend, John Henderson,[115] which, in the result, converted a favour into an obligation. It might be named also, that many of the heads of colleges and other eminent characters, habitually attended his _evening parties_; an honour unknown to have been conferred before on any other _under-graduate_. So great was John Henderson's regard for truth, that he considered it a crime, of no ordinary magnitude, to confound in any one, even for a moment, the perceptions of right and wrong; of truth and falsehood; he therefore never argued in defence of a position which his understanding did not cordially approve, unless, in some unbending moment, he intimated to those around him, that he wished to see how far error could be supported, in which case he would adopt the weakest side of any question, and there, intrenched, like an intellectual veteran, bid defiance to the separate or combined attacks of all who approached him. On these occasions it was highly interesting to remark the felicity of his illustration, together with his profound logical acuteness, that knew how to grant or deny, and both, it may be, with reference to some distant stage of the argument, when the application was made with an unexpected, but conclusive effect. From possessing this rare faculty of distinguishing the immediate, as well as of tracing the remote consequences of every acknowledgment; and, by his peculiar talent at casuistic subtleties, he has been frequently known to extort the most erroneous concessions, from men distinguished for erudition and a knowledge of polemic niceties, necessarily resulting from premises unguardedly admitted. Henderson's chief strength in disputation seemed to consist in this clear view in which he beheld the diversified bearings of every argument, with its precise congruity to the question in debate; and which, whilst it demonstrated the capacity of his own mind, conferred on him, on all occasions, a decided and systematic superiority. It must, however, be granted, that when contending for victory, or rather for the mere sharpening of his faculties, instead of convincing, he not unfrequently confounded his opponent; but whenever he had thus casually argued, and had obtained an acknowledged confutation, like an ingenious mechanic, he never failed to organize the discordant materials and to do homage to truth, by pointing out his own fallacies, or otherwise, by formally re-confuting his antagonist. It might be expected that, by such a conduct, an unpleasant impression would sometimes be left on the mind of an unsuccessful disputant, but this effect is chiefly produced when the power of the combatants is held nearly in equilibrium; no one, however, considered it a degradation to yield to John Henderson, and the peculiar delicacy of his mind was manifested in nothing more than in the graceful manner with which he indulged in these coruscations of argument. He obtained a victory without being vain, or even, from his perfect command of countenance, appearing sensible of it; and, unless he happened to be disputing with pedantry and conceit, with a dignified consciousness of strength, he never pursued an enemy who was contented to fly, by which means a defeat was often perceived rather than felt, and the vanquished forgot his own humiliation in applauding the generosity of the conqueror. In all companies he led the conversation; yet though he was perpetually encircled by admirers, his steady mind decreased not its charms, by a supercilious self-opinion of them; nor did he assume that as a right, which the wishes of his friends rendered a duty. He led the conversation; for silence or diminished discourse, in him, would have been deservedly deemed vanity, as though he had desired to make his friends feel the value of his instructions from the temporary loss of them. But in no instance was his superiority oppressive; calm, attentive, and cheerful, he confuted more gracefully than others compliment; the tone of dogmatism and the smile of contempt were equally unknown to him. Sometimes indeed he raised himself stronger and more lofty in his eloquence, then chiefly, when, fearful for his weaker brethren, he opposed the arrogance of the illiterate deist, or the worse jargon of sensual and cold-blooded atheism. He knew that the clouds of ignorance which enveloped their understandings, steamed up from the pollutions of their hearts, and, crowding his sails, he bore down upon them with salutary violence. But the qualities which most exalted John Henderson in the estimation of his friends, were, his high sense of honour, and the great benevolence of his heart; not that honour which originates in a jealous love of the world's praise, nor that benevolence which delights only in publicity of well-doing. His honour was the anxious delicacy of a christian, who regarded his soul as a sacred pledge, that must some time be re-delivered to the Almighty lender; his benevolence, a circle, in which self indeed might be the centre, but, all that lives was the circumference. This tribute of respect to thy name and virtues, my beloved Henderson! is paid by one, who was once proud to call thee tutor and friend, and who will do honour to thy memory, till his spirit rests with thine. Those who were unacquainted with John Henderson's character, may naturally ask, "What test has he left the world of the distinguished talents thus ascribed to him?"--None!--He cherished a sentiment, which, whilst it teaches humility to the proud, explains the cause of that silence so generally regretted. Upon the writer of this brief notice once expressing to him some regret at his not having benefited mankind by the result of his deep and varied investigations--he replied, "More men become writers from ignorance, than from knowledge, not knowing that they have been anticipated by others. Let us decide with caution, and write late." Thus the vastness and variety of his acquirements, and the diffidence of his own mental maturity alike prevented him from illuminating mankind, till death called him to graduate in a sphere more favourable to the range of his soaring and comprehensive mind.--He died on a visit to Oxford, in November, 1788, in the 32nd year of his age. Few will doubt but that the possession of pre-eminent colloquial talents, to a man like John Henderson, in whom so amply dwelt the spirit of originality, must be considered, on the whole, as a misfortune, and as tending to subtract from the permanency of his reputation; he wisely considered posthumous fame as a vain and undesirable bubble, unless founded on utility, but when it is considered that no man was better qualified than himself to confound vice and ennoble virtue; to unravel the mazes of error, or vindicate the pretensions of truth, it must generally excite a poignant regret, that abilities like his should have been dissipated on one generation, which, by a different application, might have charmed and enlightened futurity. It is however by no means to be concluded that he would not have written, and written extensively, if he had attained the ordinary age of man, but he whose sentiments are considered as oracular, whose company is incessantly sought by the wise and honourable, and who never speaks but to obtain immediate applause, often sacrifices the future to the present, and evaporates his distinguished talents in the single morning of life. But whilst we ascribe attributes to John Henderson, which designate the genius, or illustrate the scholar, we must not forget another quality which he eminently possessed, which so fundamentally contributes to give stability to friendship, and to smooth the current of social life. A suavity of manner, connected with a gracefulness of deportment, which distinguished him on all occasions. His participation of the feelings of others, resulting from great native sensibility, although it never produced in his conduct undue complacency, yet invariably suggested to him that nice point of propriety in behaviour which was suitable to different characters, and appropriate to the various situations in which he might be placed. Nor was his sense of right a barren perception. What the soundness of his understanding instructed him to approve, the benevolence of his heart taught him to practise. In his respectful approaches to the peer, he sustained his dignity; and in addressing the beggar, he remembered he was speaking to a man. It would be wrong to close this brief account of John Henderson, without naming two other excellencies with which he was eminently endowed. First, the ascendancy he had acquired over his temper. There are moments, in which most persons are susceptible of a transient irritability; but the oldest of his friends never beheld him otherwise than calm and collected. It was a condition he retained under all circumstances,[116] and which, to those over whom he had any influence, he never failed forcibly to inculcate, together with that unshaken firmness of mind which encounters the unavoidable misfortunes of life without repining, and that from the noblest principle, a conviction that they are regulated by Him who cannot err, and who in his severest allotments designs only our ultimate good. In a letter from Oxford, to my brother Amos, his late pupil, for whom John Henderson always entertained the highest esteem, he thus expresses himself: "See that you govern your passions. What should grieve us, but our infirmities? What make us angry, but our own faults? A man who knows he is mortal, and that all the world will pass away, and by-and-by, seem only like a tale--a sinner who knows his sufferings are all less than his sins, and designed to break him from them--one who knows that everything in this world is a seed that will have its fruit in eternity--that GOD is the best, the only good friend--that in him is all we want--that everything is ordered for the best--so that it could not be better, however we take it; he who believes this in his heart is happy. Such be you--may you always fare well, my dear Amos,--be the friend of GOD! again, farewell." The other excellence referred to, was the simplicity and condescension of his manners. From the gigantic stature of his understanding, he was prepared to trample down his pigmy competitors, and qualified at all times to enforce his unquestioned pre-eminence; but his mind was conciliating, his behaviour unassuming, and his bosom the receptacle of all the social affections. It is these virtues alone which can disarm superiority of its terrors, and make the eye which is raised in wonder, beam at the same moment with affection. There have been intellectual, as well as civil despots, whose motto seems to have been, "Let them hate, provided they fear." Such men may triumph in their fancied distinctions; but they will never, as was John Henderson, be followed by the child, loved by the ignorant, and yet emulated by the wise.... J. C. ROWLEY AND CHATTERTON The following is an extract from the extended view of the question between Rowley and Chatterton, which appeared in my "Malvern Hills," &c. (Vol. 1. p. 273.) "... Whoever examines the conduct of Chatterton, will find that he was pre-eminently influenced by one particular disposition of mind, which was, through an excess of ingenuity, to impose on the credulity of others. This predominant quality elucidates his character, and is deserving of minute regard by all who wish to form a correct estimate of the Rowleian controversy. A few instances of it are here recapitulated. 1st. The Rev. Mr. Catcott once noticed to Chatterton the inclined position of Temple church, in the city of Bristol. A few days after, the blue-coat boy brought him an old poem, transcribed, as he declared, from Rowley, who had noticed the same peculiarity in his day, and had moreover written a few stanzas on the very subject. 2ndly. A new bridge is just completed over the river Avon, at Bristol, when Chatterton sends to the printer a genuine description, in antiquated language, of the passing over the old bridge, for the first time, in the thirteenth century, on which occasion two songs are chanted, by two saints, of whom nothing was known, and expressed in language precisely the same as Rowley's, though he lived two hundred years after this event. 3rdly. Mr. Burgham, the pewterer, is credulous, and, from some whimsical caprice in his nature, is attached to heraldic honours. Chatterton, who approaches every man on his blind side, presents him with his pedigree, consecutively traced from the time of William the Conqueror, and coolly allies him to some of the noblest houses in the kingdom! 4thly. Mr. Burgham, with little less than intuitive discernment, is one of the first persons who expresses a firm opinion of the authenticity and excellence of Rowley's Poems. Chatterton, pleased with this first blossom of success, and from which he presaged an abundant harvest, with an elated and grateful heart, presents him (together with other testimonials,) with the 'Romaunte of the Cnyghte,' a poem written by John De Burgham, one of his own illustrious ancestors, who was the great ornament of a period, four hundred and fifty years antecedent; and the more effectually to exclude suspicion, he accompanies it with the same poem, modernized by himself! 5thly. Chatterton wishes to obtain the good opinion of his relation, Mr. Stephens, leather-breeches maker of Salisbury, and, from some quality, which it is possible his keen observation had noticed in this Mr. Stephens, he deems it the most effectual way, to flatter his vanity, and accordingly tells him, with great gravity, that he traces his descent from Fitz-Stephen, son of Stephen, Earl of Ammerle, who was son of Od, Earl of Bloys, and Lord of Holderness, who flourished about A.D. 1095! 6thly. The late Mr. George Catcott, (to whom the public are so much indebted for the preservation of Rowley,) is a very worthy and religious man, when Chatterton, who has implements for all work, and commodities for all customers, like a skilful engineer, adapts the style of his attack to the nature of the fortress, and presents him with the fragment of a sermon, on the divinity of the Holy Spirit, as 'wroten by Thomas Rowley.' 7thly. Mr. Barrett is zealous to establish the antiquity of Bristol. As a demonstrable evidence, Chatterton presents him with an escutcheon (on the authority of the same Thomas Rowley) borne by a Saxon, of the name of Ailward, who resided in Bristow, A.D. 718! 8thly. Mr. Barrett is also writing a comprehensive History of Bristol, and is solicitous to obtain every scrap of information relating to so important a subject. In the ear of Chatterton he expressed his anxiety, and suggested to him the propriety of his examining all Rowley's multifarious manuscripts with great care for an object of such weight. Soon after this, the blue-coat boy came breathless to Mr. Barrett, uttering, like one of old, 'I have found it!' He now presented the historian with two or three notices, (in _his own hand-writing_, copied, as _he declared_, faithfully from the originals,) of some of the ancient Bristol churches; of course, wholly above suspicion, for they were in the true old English style. These communications were regarded as of inestimable value, and the lucky finder promised to increase his vigilance, in ransacking the whole mass of antique documents for fresh disclosures. It was not long before other important scraps were discovered, conveying just the kind of information which Mr. Barrett wanted, till, ultimately, Chatterton furnished him with many curious particulars concerning the castle, and every church and chapel in the city of Bristol! and these are some of the choicest materials of Mr. Barrett's otherwise, valuable history! 9thly. Public curiosity and general admiration are excited by poems, affirmed to be from the Erse of Ossian. Chatterton, with characteristic promptitude, instantly publishes, not imitations, but a succession of genuine translations from the Saxon and Welsh, with precisely the same language and imagery, though the Saxon and Welsh were derived from different origins, the Teutonic and Celtic; (which bishop Percy has most satisfactorily shown in his able and elaborate preface to 'Mallet's Northern Antiquities,') and whose poetry, of all their writings, was the most dissimilar; as will instantly appear to all who compare Taliessin, and the other Welsh bards, with the Scandinavian Edda of Saemond. 10thly. Mr. Walpole is writing the history of British painters; Chatterton, (who, to a confidential friend, had expressed an opinion that it was possible, by dexterous management, to deceive even this master in antiquities,) with full confidence of success, transmits to him 'An Account of eminent Carvellers and Peyncters who flourished in Bristol, and other parts of England, three hundred years ago, collected for Master Canynge, by Thomas Rowley!' Chatterton's communication furnishes an amusing specimen of the quaint language with which this beardless boy deceived the old antiquarian. It commences thus: 'Peyncteynge ynn Englande, haveth of ould tyme bin in use; for sayeth the Roman wryters, the Brytonnes dyd depycte themselves yn soundry wyse, of the fourmes of the sonne and moone, wythe the hearbe woade: albeytte I doubt theie were no skylled carvellers,' &c. &c. Mr. Walpole was so completely imposed upon, that, in his reply, without entertaining the slightest suspicion of the authenticity of the document, he reasons upon it as valid, and says, 'You do not point out the exact time when Rowley lived, which I wish to know, as I suppose it was long before John al Ectry's discovery of oil painting; if so, it confirms what I have guessed, and have hinted in my anecdotes, that oil painting was known here much earlier than that discovery, or revival.' Another important argument, may be adduced from the following reflection: all the poets who thus owe their existence to Chatterton, write in the same harmonious style, and display the same tact and superiority of genius. Other poets living in the same, or different ages, exhibit a wide diversity in judgment, fancy, and the higher creative faculty of imagination, so that a discriminating mind can distinguish an individual character in almost every separate writer; but here are persons living in different ages; moving in different stations; exposed to different circumstances; and expressing different sentiments; yet all of whom betray the same peculiar habits, with the same talents and facilities of composition. This is evidenced, whether it be-- The Abbatte John, living in the year - - 1186 Seyncte Baldwin - - - - - - 1247 Seyncte Warburgie - - - - - - 1247 John De Burgham - - - - - - 1320 The Rawfe Cheddar Chappmanne - - - - 1356 Syr Thybbot Gorges - - - - - - 1440 Syr Wm. Canynge - - - - - - 1469 Thomas Rowley - - - - - - 1479 Carpenter, Bishoppe of Worcester Ecca, Bishoppe of Hereforde Elmar, Bishoppe of Selseie John Ladgate, or, Mayster John à Iscam. And the whole of these poets, with the exception of Ladgate, completely unknown to the world, till called from their dormitory by Chatterton! Such a fact would be a phenomenon unspeakably more inexplicable than that of ascribing Rowley to a youth of less than sixteen, who had made 'Antique Lore' his peculiar study, and who was endued with precocious, and almost unlimited genius. Those who are aware of the transitions and fluctuation, which our language experienced in the intermediate space comprised between Chaucer and Sir Thomas More; and still greater between Robert of Gloucester, 1278, and John Trevisa, or his contemporary Wickliffe, who died 1384, know, to a certainty, that the writers enumerated by Chatterton, without surmounting a physical impossibility, could not have written in the same undeviating style. Perhaps it may be affirmed that numerous old parchments were obtained from the Muniment Room or elsewhere. This fact is undeniable; but they are understood to consist of ancient ecclesiastical deeds, as unconnected with poetry, as they were with galvanism. Let the dispassionate enquirer ask himself, whether he thinks it possible for men, living in distant ages, when our language was unformed, and therefore its variations the greater, to write in the same style? Whether it was possible for the Abbatte John, composing in the year 1186, when the amalgamation of the Saxon and the Norman formed an almost inexplicable jargon, to write in a manner, as to its construction, intimately resembling that now in vogue. On the contrary, how easy is the solution, when we admit that the person who wrote the first part of the "Battle of Hastings," and the death of "Syr Charles Bawdin," wrote also the rest. Does it not appear marvellous, that the learned advocates of Rowley should not have regarded the ground on which they stood as somewhat unstable, when they found Chatterton readily avow that he wrote the first part of the "Battle of Hastings," and discovered the second, as composed three hundred years before, by Thomas Rowley? This was indeed an unparalleled coincidence. A boy writes the commencement of a narrative poem, and then finds in the Muniment-Room, the second part, or a continuation, by an old secular priest, with the same, characters, written in the same style, and even in the same metre! Another extraordinary feature in the question, is the following; there are preserved in the British Museum, numerous deeds and proclamations, by Thomas Rowley, in Chatterton's writing, relating to the antiquities of Bristol, all in modern English, designed no doubt, by the young bard, for his friend Mr. Barrett; but the chrysalis had not yet advanced to its winged state. One of the proclamations begins thus: "To all Christian people to whom this indented writing shall come, William Canynge, of Bristol, merchant, and Thomas Rowley, priest, send greeting: Whereas certain disputes have arisen between," &c., &c. Who does not perceive that these were the first rough sketches of genuine old documents that _were to be?_ In an account of "St. Marie Magdalene's Chapele, by Thomas Rowley," deposited also in the British Museum, there is the following sentence, which implies much: "Aelle, the founder thereof, was a manne myckle stronge yn vanquysheynge the Danes, as yee maie see ynne mie unwordie Entyrlude of Ella!" It is Rome or Carthage. It is Rowley or Chatterton: and a hope is cherished that the public, from this moment, will concur in averring that there is neither internal nor external evidence, to authorize the belief that a single line of either the prose or the verse, attributed to Rowley, or the rest of his apocryphal characters, was written by any other than that prodigy of the eighteenth century, Thomas Chatterton. The opinion entertained by many, that Chatterton found part of Rowley, and invented the rest, is attended with insurmountable objections, and is never advanced but in the deficiency of better argument; for in the first place, those who favor this supposition, have never supported it by the shadow of proof, or the semblance even of fair inferential reasoning; and in the second place, he who wrote half, could have written the whole; and in the third, and principal place, there are no inequalities in the poems; no dissimilar and incongruous parts, but all is regular and consistent, and without, in the strict sense of the word, bearing any resemblance to the writers of the period when Rowley is stated to have lived. Whoever examines the beautiful tragedy of Ella, will find an accurate adjustment of plan, which precludes the possibility of its having been conjointly written by different persons, at the distance of centuries. With respect, also, to the structure of the language, it is incontrovertibly modern, as well as uniform with itself, and exhibits the most perfect specimens of harmony; which cannot be interrupted by slight orthographical redundancies, nor by the sprinkling of a few uncouth and antiquated words. The structure of Rowley's verse is so unequivocally modern, that by substituting the present orthography for the past, and changing two or three of the old words, the fact must become obvious, even to those who are wholly unacquainted with the barbarisms of the "olden time." As a corroboration of this remark, the first verse of the song to Aella may be adduced. "O thou, or what remains of thee, Aella, thou darling of futurity. Let this, my song, bold as thy courage be, As everlasting--to posterity." But, perhaps, the most convincing proof of this modern character of Rowley's verse, may be derived from the commencement of the chorus in Godwin. "When Freedom, dress'd in blood-stain'd vest, To every knight her war-song sung, Upon her head wild weeds were spread, A gory anlace by her hung. She danced on the heath; She heard the voice of death; Pale-eyed Affright, his heart of silver hue, In vain essay'd his bosom to acale, [freeze] She heard, enflamed, the shivering voice of woe, And sadness in the owlet shake the dale. She shook the pointed spear; On high she raised her shield; Her foemen all appear, And fly along the field. Power, with his head exalted to the skies, His spear a sun-beam, and his shield a star, Round, like two flaming meteors, rolls his eyes, Stamps with his iron foot, and sounds to war: She sits upon a rock, She bends before his spear; She rises from the shock, Wielding her own in air. Hard as the thunder doth she drive it on, And, closely mantled, guides it to his crown, His long sharp spear, his spreading shield, is gone; He falls, and falling, rolleth thousands down." Every reader must be struck with the modern character of these extracts, nor can he fail to have noticed the lyrical measure, so eminently felicitous, with which the preceding ode commences; together with the bold image of freedom triumphing over power. If the merits of the Rowleian Controversy rented solely on this one piece, it would be decisive; for no man, in the least degree familiar with our earlier metrical compositions, and especially if he were a poet, could hesitate a moment in assigning this chorus to a recent period. It is impossible not to believe that the whole of Rowley was written at first in modern English, and then the orthographical metamorphose commenced; and to one who had prepared himself, like Chatterton, with a dictionary, alternately modern and old, and old and modern, the task of transformation was not difficult, even to an ordinary mind. It should be remembered also, that Chatterton furnished a complete glossary to the whole of Rowley. Had he assumed ignorance, it might have checked, without removing suspicion, but at present it appears inexplicable, that our sage predecessors should not have been convinced that one who could write, in his own person, with such superiority as Chatterton indisputably did, would be quite competent to give words to another, the meaning of which he so well understood himself. But the thought will naturally arise, what could have prompted Chatterton, endued as he was, with so much original talent, to renounce his own personal aggrandizement, and to transfer the credit of his opulence to another. It is admitted to be an improvident expenditure of reputation, but no inference advantageous to Rowley can be deduced from this circumstance. The eccentricities and aberrations of genius, have rarely been restricted by line and plummet, and the present is a memorable example of perverted talent; but all this may be conceded, without shaking the argument here contended for. There is a process in all our pursuits, and the nice inspector of associations can almost uniformly trace his predilections to some definite cause. This, doubtless, was the case with Chatterton. He found old parchments early in life. In the first instance, it became an object of ambition to decipher the obscure. One difficulty surmounted, strengthened the capacity for conquering others; perseverance gave facility, till at length his vigorous attention was effectually directed to what he called "antique lore:" and this confirmed bias of his mind, connected as it was, with his inveterate proneness to impose on others, and supported by talents which have scarcely been equalled, reduces the magnified wonder of Rowley, to a plain, comprehensible question. Dean Milles, in his admiration of Rowley, appeared to derive pleasure from depreciating Chatterton, who had avowed himself the writer of that inimitable poem, "The Death of Syr Charles Bawdin," but well knowing the consequences which would follow on this admission, he laboured hard to impeach the veracity of our bard, and represented him as one who, from vanity, assumed to himself the writing of another! Dean Milles affirms, that of this "Death of Syr Charles Bawdin," "A greater variety of internal proofs may be produced, for its authenticity, than for that of any other piece in the whole collection!" This virtually, was abandoning the question; for since we know that Chatterton did write "The Death of Syr Charles Bawdin," we know that he wrote that which had stronger proofs of the authenticity of Rowley than all the other pieces in the collection! The numerous proofs adduced of Chatterton's passion for fictitious statements; of his intimate acquaintance with antiquated language; of the almost preternatural maturity of his mind; of the dissimilitude of Rowley's language to contemporaneous writers; and of the obviously modern structure of all the compositions which the young bard produced, as the writings of Rowley and others, form, it is presumed, a mass of Anti-Rowleian evidence, which proves that Chatterton possessed that peculiar disposition, as well as those pre-eminent talents, the union of which was both necessary and equal to the great production of Rowley...." J. C. THE WEARY PILGRIM Weary Pilgrim, dry thy tear, Look beyond these realms of night; Mourn not, with redemption near, Faint not, with the goal in sight. Grief and pain are needful things, Sent to chasten, not to slay; And if pleasures have their wings, Sorrows quickly pass away. Where are childhood's sighs and throes? Where are youth's tumultuous fears? Where are manhood's thousand woes? Lost amidst the lapse of years! There are treasures which to gain, Might a seraph's heart inspire; There are joys which will remain When the world is wrapt in fire. Hope, with her expiring beam, May illume our last delight; But our trouble soon will seem, Like the visions of the night. We too oft remit our pace, And at ease in slumbers dwell; We are loiterers in our race, And afflictions break the spell. Woe to him, whoe'er he be, Should (severest test below!) All around him like a sea, Health, and wealth, and honors, flow! When unclouded suns we hail, And our cedars proudly wave; We forget their tenure frail, With the bounteous hand that gave. We on dangerous paths are bound, Call'd to battle and to bleed; We have hostile spirits round, And the warrior's armour need. We, within, have deadlier foes, Wills rebellious, hearts impure; God, the best physician, knows What the malady will cure. Earth is lovely! dress'd in flowers! O'er her form luxuriant thrown, But a lovelier world is ours, Visible to faith alone. Here the balm and spicy gales, For a moment fill the air; Here the mutable prevails, Permanence alone is there. Heaven to gain is worth our toil! Angels call us to their sphere; But to time's ignoble soil We are bound, and will not hear. Heaven attracts not! On we dream; Cast like wrecks upon the shore Where perfection reigns supreme, And adieus are heard no more. What is life? a tale! a span! Swifter than the eagle's flight; What the boasted age of man? Vanishing beneath the sight. Yet, our ardours and desires Centred, circumscribed by earth; Whilst eternity retires-- As an object nothing worth! Oh, the folly of the proud! Oh, the madness of the vain! After every toy to crowd, And unwithering crowns disdain! Mighty men in grand array, Magnates of the ages past, Kings and conquerors, where are they? Once whose frown a world o'ercast? Faded! yet by fame enroll'd, With their busts entwined with bays; But if God his smile withhold, Pitiful is human praise. With what sadness and surprise, Must Immortals view our lot;-- Eager for the flower that dies, And the Amaranth heeding not. May we from our dreams awake, Love the truth, the truth obey; On our night let morning break-- Prelude of a nobler day. Harmony prevails above, Where all hearts together blend; Let the concords sweet of love, Now begin and never end. Have we not one common sire? Have we not one home in sight? Let the sons of peace conspire Not to sever, but unite. Hence, forgetful of the past, May we all as brethren own, Whom we hope to meet at last-- Round the everlasting throne. Father! source of blessedness, In thy strength triumphant ride; Let the world thy Son confess, And thy name be magnified! Let thy word of truth prevail, Scattering darkness, errors, lies; Let all lands the treasure hail-- Link that binds us to the skies. Let thy spirit, rich and free, Copious shed his power divine, Till (Creation's Jubilee!) All Earth's jarring realms are thine! Saints who once on earth endured-- Beating storm and thorny way, Have the prize they sought secured, And have enter'd perfect day. Wiser taught,--with vision clear, (Kindled from the light above) Now their bitterest woes appear-- Charged with blessings, fraught with love:-- For, as earthly scenes withdrew, In their false, but flattering guise, They, rejoicing, fix'd their view-- On the mansions in the skies. Art thou fearful of the end? Dread not Jordan's swelling tide; With the Saviour for thy friend! With the Spirit for thy guide! Why these half subdued alarms-- At the prospect of thy flight? Has thy Father's house no charms?-- There to join the Saints in Light? Terrors banish from thy breast, Hope must solace, faith sustain; Thou art journeying on to rest, And with God shalt live and reign. Then, fruition, like the morn, Will unlock her boundless store;-- Roses bloom without a thorn, And the day-star set no more. But, an ocean lies between-- Stormy, to be cross'd alone; With no ray to intervene-- O'er the cold and dark unknown! Lo! a soft and soothing voice Steals like music on my ears;-- "Let the drooping heart rejoice; See! a glorious dawn appears!" "When thy parting hours draw near, And thou trembling view'st the last; Christ and only Christ can cheer, And o'er death a radiance cast!" Weary Pilgrim, dry thy tear, Look beyond these shades of night; Mourn not with Redemption near, Faint not with the goal in sight. J. C. _Bristol, March 9, 1846._ Footnotes: [1] The reader will bear in mind that the present work consists of Autobiography, and therefore, however repugnant to the writer's feelings, the apparent egotism has been unavoidable. [2] Robert Lovell, himself was a poet, as will appear by the following being one of his Sonnets. STONEHENGE. Was it a spirit on yon shapeless pile? It wore, methought, a holy Druid's form, Musing on ancient days! The dying storm Moan'd in his lifted locks. Thou, night! the while Dost listen to his sad harp's wild complaint, Mother of shadows! as to thee he pours The broken strain, and plaintively deplores The fall of Druid fame! Hark! murmurs faint Breathe on the wavy air! and now more loud Swells the deep dirge; accustomed to complain Of holy rites unpaid, and of the crowd Whose ceaseless steps the sacred haunts profane. O'er the wild plain the hurrying tempest flies, And, mid the storm unheard, the song of sorrow dies. [3] I had an opportunity of introducing Mr. Southey at this time, to the eldest Mrs. More, who invited him down to spend some whole day with her sister Hannah, at their then residence, Cowslip Green. On this occasion, as requested, I accompanied him. The day was full of converse. On my meeting one of the ladies soon after, I was gratified to learn that Mr. S. equally pleased all five of the sisters. She said he was "brim full of literature, and one of the most elegant, and intellectual young men they had seen." [4] It might he intimated, that, for the establishment of these lectures, there was, in Mr. Coleridge's mind, an interior spring of action. He wanted to "build up" a provision for his speedy marriage with Miss Sarah Fricker: and with these grand combined objects before him, no effort appeared too vast to be accomplished by his invigorated faculties. [5] Copied from his MS. as delivered, not from his "Conciones ad Populum" as printed, where it will be found in a contracted state. [6] Muir, Palmer, and Margarot. [7] An eminent medical man in Bristol, who greatly admired Mr. Coleridge's conversation and genius, on one occasion, invited Mr. C. to dine with him, on a given day. The invitation was accepted, and this gentleman, willing to gratify his friends with an introduction to Mr. C. invited a large assemblage, for the express purpose of meeting him, and made a splendid entertainment, anticipating the delight which would be universally felt from Mr. C. a far-famed eloquence. It unfortunately happened that Mr. Coleridge had forgotten all about it! and the gentleman, [with his guests, after waiting till the hot became cold] under his mortification consoled himself by the resolve, never again to subject himself to a like disaster. No explanation or apology on my part could soothe the choler of this disciple of Glen. A dozen subscribers to his lectures fell off from this slip of his memory. "Sloth jaundiced all! and from my graspless hand Drop friendship's precious perls, like hour-glass sand. I weep, yet stoop not! the faint anguish flows, A dreamy pang in morning's feverish doze," [8] This honest upholsterer, (a Mr. W. a good little weak man) attended the preaching of the late eloquent Robert Hall. At one time an odd fancy entered his mind, such as would have occurred to none other; namely, that he possessed ministerial gifts; and with this notion uppermost in his head, he was sorely perplexed, to determine whether he ought not to forsake the shop, and ascend the pulpit. In this uncertainty, he thought his discreetest plan would be to consult his Minister; in conformity with which, one morning he called on Mr. Hall, and thus began. "I call on you this morning, Sir, on a very important business!" "Well Sir." "Why you must know, Sir--I can hardly tell how to begin." "Let me hear, Sir." "Well Sir, if I must tell you, for these two months past I have had a strong persuasion on my mind, that I possess ministerial talents."--Mr. Hall (whose ideas were high of ministerial requisites) saw his delusion, and determined at once to check it. The Upholsterer continued: "Though a paper-hanger by trade, yet, sir, I am now satisfied that I am called to give up my business, and attend to something better; for you know, Mr. Hall, I should not bury my talents in a napkin." "O Sir," said Mr. H. "you need not use a napkin, a pocket-handkerchief will do." This timely rebuke kept the good man to his paper-hangings for the remainder of his days, for whenever he thought of the ministry, this same image of the pocket-handkerchief, always damped his courage. [9] Gilbert's derangement was owing to the loss of a naval cause at Portsmouth, in which he was concerned as an Advocate. Among other instances, one time when at his lodgings, he interpreted those words of Christ personally, "Sell all that thou hast and distribute to the poor," when, without the formality of selling, he thought the precept might be more summarily fulfilled, and therefore, one morning he tumbled every thing he had in his room, through the window, into the street, that the poor might help themselves; bed, bolsters, blankets, sheets, chairs! &c., &c, but unfortunately, it required at that season a higher exercise of the clear reasoning process than he possessed, to distinguish accurately between his own goods and chattels and those of his landlady! He had all the volubility of a practised advocate, and seemed to delight in nothing so much as discussion, whether on the unconfirmed parallactic angle of Sirius, or the comparative weight of two straws. Amid the circle in which he occasionally found himself, ample scope was often given him for the exercise of this faculty. I once invited him, for the first time, to meet the late Robert Hall. I had calculated on some interesting discourse, aware that each was peculiarly susceptible of being aroused by opposition. The anticipations entertained on this occasion were abundantly realized. Their conversation, for some time, was mild and pleasant, each, for each, receiving an instinctive feeling of respect; but the subject happened to be started, of the contra-distinguishing merits of Hannah More and Ann Yearsley. By an easy transition, this led to the quarrel that some time before had taken place between these two remarkable females; the one occupying the summit, and the other moving in about the lowest grade of human society; but in genius, compeers. They at once took opposite sides. One argument elicited another, till at length each put forth his utmost strength, and such felicitous torrents of eloquence could rarely have been surpassed; where on each side ardour was repelled with fervency, and yet without the introduction of the least indecorous expression. Gilbert was an astrologer; and at the time of a person's birth, he would with undoubting confidence predict all the leading events of his future life, and sometimes (if he knew anything of his personal history) even venture to declare the past. The caution with which he usually touched the second subject, formed a striking contrast with the positive declarations concerning the first. I was acquainted at this time with a medical man of enlarged mind and considerable scientific attainments; and accidentally mentioning to him that a friend of mine was a great advocate for this sublime science, he remarked, "I should like to see him, and one half hour would be sufficient to despoil him of his weapons, and lay him prostrate in the dust." I said, "if you will sup with me I will introduce you to the astrologer, and if you can beat this nonsense out of his head, you will benefit him and all his friends." When the evening arrived, it appeared fair to apprise William Gilbert that I was going to introduce him to a doctor, who had kindly and gratuitously undertaken to cure him of all his astrological maladies. "Will he?" said Gilbert. "The malady is on his side. Perhaps I may cure him." Each having a specific business before him, there was no hesitation or skirmishing, but at first sight they both, like tried veterans, in good earnest addressed themselves to war. On one side, there was a manifestation of sound sense and cogent argument; on the other, a familiarity with all those arguments, combined with great subtlety in evading them; and this sustained by new and ingenious sophisms. My medical friend, for some time stood his ground manfully, till, at length, he began to quail, apparently from the verbal torrent with which he was so unexpectedly assailed. Encountered thus by so fearful and consummate a disputant, whose eyes flashed fire in unison with his oracular tones and empassioned language, the doctor's quiver unaccountably became exhausted, and his spirit subdued. He seemed to look around for some mantle in which to hide the mortification of defeat; and the more so from his previous confidence. Never was a more triumphant victory, as it would superficially appear, achieved by ingenious volubility in a bad cause, over arguments, sound, but inefficiently wielded in a cause that was good. A fresh instance of the man of sense vanquished by the man of words. [10] I would here subjoin, that when money, in future, may thus be collected for ingenious individuals, it might be the wisest procedure to transfer the full amount, at once, to the beneficiary, (unless under very peculiar circumstances.) This is felt to be both handsome and generous, and the obligation is permanently impressed on the mind. If the money then be improvidently dissipated, he who acts thus ungratefully to his benefactors, and cruelly to himself, reflects on his own folly alone. But when active and benevolent agents, who have raised subscriptions, will entail trouble on themselves, and with a feeling almost paternal, charge themselves with a disinterested solicitude for future generations, without a strong effort of the reasoning power, the favour is reduced to a fraction. Dissatisfaction almost necessarily ensues, and the accusation of ingratitude is seldom far behind. [11] The Rev. James Newton, was Classical Tutor at the Bristol Baptist Academy, in conjunction with the late Dr. Caleb Evans, and, for a short season, the late Robert Hall. He was my most revered and honoured friend, who lived for twenty years an inmate in my Father's family, and to whom I am indebted in various ways, beyond my ability to express. His learning was his least recommendation. His taste for elegant literature; his fine natural understanding, his sincerity, and conciliating manners justified the eulogium expressed by Dr. Evans in preaching his Funeral Sermon, 1789, when he said (to a weeping congregation), that "He never made an enemy, nor lost a friend." Mr. Newton was on intimate terms with the late Dean Tucker, and the Rev. Sir James Stonehouse, the latter of whom introduced him to Hannah More, who contracted for him, as his worth and talents became more and more manifest, a sincere and abiding friendship. Mr. Newton had the honour of teaching Hannah More Latin. The time of his instructing her did not exceed ten months. She devoted to this one subject the whole of her time, and all the energies of her mind. Mr. Newton spoke of her to me as exemplifying how much might be attained in a short time by talent and determination combined; and he said, for the limited period of his instruction, she surpassed in her progress all others whom he had ever known. H. More was in the habit of submitting her MSS. to Mr. N.'s judicious remarks, and by this means, from living in the same house with him, I preceded the public in inspecting some of her productions; particularly her MS. Poem on the "Slave Trade," and her "Bas Bleu." When a boy, many an evening do I recollect to have listened in wonderment to colloquisms and disputations carried on in Latin between Mr. Newton and John Henderson. It gives me pleasure to have borne this brief testimony of respect toward one on whom memory so often and so fondly reposes! Best of men, and kindest of friends, "farewell till we do meet again!"-(Bowles.) [12] From his natural unassumed dignity, Mr. Foster used to call Mr. Hall "_Jupiter_." [13] Mr. Hall broke down all distinction of sects and parties. On one of his visits to Bristol, when preaching at the chapel in Broadmead, a competent individual noticed in the thronged assembly an Irish Bishop, a Dean, and thirteen Clergymen. The late Dr. Parr was an enthusiastic admirer of Mr. Hall. He said to a friend of the writer, after a warm eulogium on the eloquence of Mr. H. "In short, sir, the man is inspired." Hannah More has more than once said to the writer, "There was no man in the church, nor out of it, comparable in talents to Robert Hall." [14] I presented Mr. C. with the three guineas, but forbore the publication. [15] I received a note, at this time, from Mr. Coleridge, evidently written in a moment of perturbation, apologising for not accepting an invitation of a more congenial nature, on account of his "Watch drudgery." At another time, he was reluctantly made a prisoner from the same cause, as will appear by the following note. "April, 1796. My dear Cottle, My eye is so inflamed that I cannot stir out. It is alarmingly inflamed. In addition to this, the Debates which Burnet undertook to abridge for me, he has abridged in such a careless, slovenly manner, that I was obliged to throw them into the fire, and am now doing them myself!... S. T. C." [16] This "sheet" of Sonnets never arrived. [17] A late worthy bookseller of Bristol, who by his exertions obtained one hundred and twenty subscribers for Mr. C. [18] "My Bristol printer of the Watchman refused to wait a month for his money, and threatened to throw me into jail for between _eighty_ and _ninety_ pounds; when the money was paid by a friend."--_Biographia Literaria_. Mr. C.'s memory was here grievously defective. The fact is, Biggs the printer (a worthy man) never threatened nor even importuned for his Money. Instead also of _nine_ numbers of the Watchman, there were _ten_; and the printing of these ten numbers, came but to _thirty five_ pounds. The whole of the Paper (which cost more than the Printing) was paid for by the Writer. [19] It is evident Mr. C. must have had cause of complaint against one or more of the booksellers before named. It could not apply to myself, as I invariably adhered to a promise I had at the commencement given Mr. Coleridge, not to receive any allowance for what copies of the 'Watchman' I might be so happy as to sell for him. [20] In all Mr. Coleridge's lectures, he was a steady opposer of Mr. Pitt, and the then existing war; and also an enthusiastic admirer of Pox, Sheridan, Grey, &c., &c., but his opposition to the reigning politics discovered little asperity; it chiefly appeared by wit and sarcasm, and commonly ended in that which was the speaker's chief object, a laugh. Few attended Mr. C.'s lectures but those whose political views were similar to his own; but on one occasion, some gentlemen of the opposite party came into the lecture-room, and at one sentiment they heard, testified their disapprobation by the only easy and safe way in their power; namely, by a hiss. The auditors were startled at so unusual a sound, not knowing to what it might conduct; but their noble leader soon quieted their fears, by instantly remarking with great coolness, "I am not at all surprised, when the red-hot prejudices of aristocrats are suddenly plunged iuto the cool water of reason, that they should go off with a hiss!" The words were electric. The assailants felt as well as testified, their confusion, and the whole company confirmed it by immense applause! There was no more hissing. [21] A law just then passed. [22] It is this general absence of the dates to Mr. C.'s letters, which may have occasioned me, in one or two instances, to err in the arrangement. [23] Mr. Wordsworth, at this time resided at Allfoxden House, two or three miles from Stowey. [24] How much is it to be deplored, that one whose views were so enlarged as those of Mr. Coleridge, and his conceptions so Miltonic, should have been satisfied with theorizing merely; and that he did not, like his great Prototype, concentrate all his energies, so as to produce some one august poetical work, which should become the glory of his country. [25] Sister of the Premier. [26] It appears from Sir James Macintosh's Life, published by his son, that a diminution of respect towards Sir James was entertained by Mr. For, arising from the above two letters of Mr. Coleridge, which appeared in the Morning Post. Some enemy of Sir James had informed Mr. Fox that these two letters were written by Macintosh, and which exceedingly wounded his mind. Before the error could be corrected, Mr. Fox died. This occurrence was deplored by Sir James, in a way that showed his deep feeling of regret, but which, as might be supposed, did not prevent him from bearing the amplest testimony to the social worth and surpassing talents of that great statesman. Mr. Coleridge's Bristol friends will remember that once Mr. Fox was idolized by him as the paragon of political excellence; and Mr. Pitt depressed in the same proportion. [27] The following is the Sonnet to Lord Stanhope, in the first edition, now omitted. "Not STANHOPE! with the _patriot's_ doubtful name I mock thy worth, FRIEND OF THE HUMAN RACE! Since, scorning faction's low and partial aim, Aloof thou wendest in thy stately pace, Thyself redeeming from that leprous stain-- NOBILITY! and, aye unterrified, Pourest thy Abdiel warnings on the train That sit complotting with rebellious pride 'Gainst her, who from th' Almighty's bosom leapt, With whirlwind arm, fierce minister of love! Wherefore, ere virtue o'er thy tomb hath wept. Angels shall lead thee to the throne above, And thou from forth its clouds shalt hear the voice-- Champion of FREEDOM, and her God, rejoice! [28] The Skylark. [29] It is to be regretted that Mr. C. in his emendations, should have excluded from the second verse of the first poem, the two best lines in the piece. "And thy inmost soul confesses Chaste Affection's majesty." [30] Mr. C. afterward requested that the "allegorical lines" might alone be printed in his second edition, with this title: "To an Unfortunate Woman, whom the Author had known in the days of her innocence." The first Poem, "Maiden, that with sullen brow," &c. he meant to re-write, and which he will be found to have done, with considerable effect. [31] Mr. Wordsworth lived at Racedown, before he removed to Allfoxden. [32] Mr. C. after much hesitation, had intended to begin his second edition with this Poem from the "Joan of Arc," in its enlarged, but imperfect state, and even sent it to the press; but the discouraging remarks, which he remembered, of one and another, at the last moment, shook his resolution, and occasioned him to withdraw it wholly. He commenced his volume with the "Ode to the Departing Year." [33] WRITTEN, (1793) WITH A PENCIL, ON THE WALL OP THE ROOM IN BRISTOL NEWGATE, WHERE SAVAGE DIED. Here Savage lingered long, and here expired! The mean--the proud--the censored--the admired! If, wandering o'er misfortune's sad retreat, Stranger! these lines arrest thy passing feet, And recollection urge the deeds of shame That tarnish'd once an unblest Poet's fame; Judge not another till thyself art free, And hear the gentle voice of charity. "No friend received him, and no mother's care Sheltered his infant innocence with prayer; No father's guardian hand his youth maintained, Call'd forth his virtues, or from vice restrain'd." Reader! hadst thou been to neglect consign'd, And cast upon the mercy of mankind; Through the wide world, like Savage, forced to stray, And find, like him, one long and stormy day; Objects less noble might thy soul have swayed, Or crimes around thee cast a deeper shade. While poring o'er another's mad career, Drop for thyself the penitential tear; Though prized by friends, and nurs'd in innocence, How oft has folly wrong'd thy better sense: But if some virtues in thy breast there be, Ask, if they sprang from _circumstance_, or _thee!_ And ever to thy heart the precept bear, When thine own conscience smites, a wayward brother spare! J. C. [34] My brother, when at Cambridge, had written a Latin poem for the prize: the subject, "Italia, Vastata," and sent it to Mr. Coleridge, with whom he was on friendly terms, in MS. requesting the favor of his remarks; and this he did about six weeks before it was necessary to deliver it in. Mr. C. in an immediate letter, expressed his approbation of the Poem, and cheerfully undertook the task; but with a little of his procrastination, he returned the MS. with his remarks, just one day after it was too late to deliver the poem in! [35] Verbatim, from Burns's dedication of his Poems to the nobility and gentry of the Caledonian Hunt. [36] It appears that Mr. Burnet had been prevailed upon by smugglers to buy some prime cheap brandy, but which Mr. Coleridge affirmed to be a compound of Hellebore, kitchen grease, and Assafoetida! or something as bad. [37] Mr. George Burnet died at the age of thirty-two, 1807. [38] The reader will have observed a peculiarity in most of Mr. Coleridge's conclusions to his letters. He generally says, "God bless you, and, or eke, S. T. C." so as to involve a compound blessing. [39] Mrs. Newton, Chatterton's sister, had complained to me of the dishonorable conduct of a gentleman, who, some years prior, had called on her, expressing an enthusiastic admiration of her brother's genius, and requesting the melancholy pleasure of seeing all the letters, then in her and her mother's possession. The gentleman appeared quite affected when he saw her brother's writings, and begged to be allowed to take them to his inn, that he might read them at leisure; the voice of sympathy disarmed suspicion, and the timely present of a guinea and a half induced them to trust him with the MSS., under the promise of their being returned in half an hour. They were never restored, and some months afterwards the whole were incorporated and published in a pamphlet, entitled "Love and Madness," by Mr. Herbert Croft. Mrs. Chatterton felt the grievous wrong that had been done her by this publication for the benefit of another, as she often received presents from strangers who called to see her son's writings; she remonstrated with Mr. Croft on the subject, and received £10 with expressions of his regard. Here the affair rested, till 1796, when Mrs. Newton was advised to write to Mr. Croft, for further remuneration. To this letter, no answer was returned. Mrs. N. then wrote again, intimating that, acting by the advice of some respectable friends, if no attention was paid to this letter, some public notice would he taken of the manner in which he had obtained her brother's papers. Upon this he replied, "The sort of threatening letter which Mrs. Newton's is, will never succeed with me ... but if the clergyman of the parish will do me the favour to write me word, through Mrs. Newton, what Chatterton's relations consist of, and, _what characters they bear!_ I will try by everything in my power, to serve them; yet certainly not, if any of them pretend to have the smallest _claim_ upon me." During Mr. Southey's residence in Bristol, I informed him of this discreditable affair, and accompanied him to Mrs. Newton, who confirmed the whole of the preceding statement. We inquired if she still possessed any writings of her brother's? Her reply was, "Nothing. Mr. Croft had them all," with the exception of one precious relic of no value as a publication, which she meant to retain till death.--The identical pocket book, which Chatterton took with him to London, and in which he had entered his cash account while there, with a list of his political letters to the Lord Mayor, and the first personages in the laud. I now wrote to Mr. Croft, pointing out Mrs. Newton's reasonable chums, and urging him, by a timely concession, to prevent that publicity which, otherwise, would follow. I received no answer. Mr. Southey then determined to print by subscription, all Chatterton's works, including those ascribed to Rowley, for the benefit of Mrs. Newton and her daughter. He sent "Proposals" to the Monthly Magazine, in which he detailed the whole case between Mrs. Newton and Mr. Croft, and published their respective letters. The public sympathized rightly on the occasion, for a handsome subscription followed. Mr. Croft, at that time resided at Copenhagen, when having heard of Mr. S.'s exposure, he published a pamphlet, with the following title. "Chatterton, and Love and Madness. A Letter from Denmark, respecting an unprovoked attack made upon the writer, during his absence from England, &c." By the Rev. Sir Herbert Croft, Bart. In this he says:-- "I cannot be expected, by any man of honour! or feeling, to descend to answer a scurrilous person, signing himself Robert Southey. "I have ever reverenced the little finger of Chatterton, more than Mr. Southey knows how to respect the poor boy's whole body. "I learn so much of Mr. Southey's justice from his abuse, that I should be ashamed of myself, were this person ever to disgrace me by his praise; which might happen, did he wish to gain money, or fame! by becoming the officious editor of MY WORKS! "Innocence would less often fall a prey to villany, if it boldly met the whole of a nefarious accusation! "The great Mr. Southey writes prose somewhat like bad poetry, and poetry somewhat like bad prose. "Chatterton was the glory of that Bristol which I hope Mr. S. will not farther disgrace. "Mr. Southey, not content with trying to 'filch from me my good name,' in order to enrich himself, (conduct agreeable enough to what I have heard of BRISTOL Pantisocracy,) but condescends to steal from me my humble prose!" &c. &c. This edition of Chatterton's works was published in three volumes, 8vo. during a ten months' residence of mine, in London, in the year 1802. Mr. Southey allowed me to make what observations I thought proper in the course of the work, provided that I affixed to them my initials; and, with the generosity which was natural to him, thus wrote in the preface: "The editors (for so much of the business has devolved on Mr. Cottle, that the plural term is necessary) have to acknowledge," &c. &c. "They have felt peculiar pleasure, as natives of the same city, in performing this act of justice to Chatterton's fame, and to the interests of his family." The result of our labours was, that Mrs. Newton, received more than three hundred pounds, as the produce of her brother's works. This money rendered comfortable the last days of herself and daughter, and Mr Southey and myself derived no common satisfaction in having contributed to so desirable an end. In this edition Mr. Southey arranged all the old materials, and the consideration of the authenticity of Rowley, I regret to say, devolved exclusively on me. Mr. S. would doubtless have been more successful in his investigations at the Bristol Museum and Herald's College than myself. I however did not spare my best efforts, and was greatly assisted by the late Mr. Haslewood, who had collected one copy of every work that had been published in the Controversy. And as I had obtained much new documentary evidence since that period, besides knowing many of Chatterton's personal friends, I condensed the arguments in his favor into four essays, distinguished by the initials, "J. C." In the year 1829, having received still an accession of fresh matter, I enlarged these Essays, and printed them in the fourth edition of "Malvern Hills, Poems, and Essays." I thought the subject worthy a full discussion, and final settlement; and to this point I believe it now to be brought. Higher authority than that of Mr. Wordsworth could hardly be adduced, who on being presented by me with a copy of the above work thus replied, "My dear sir, I received yesterday, through the hands of Mr. Southey, a very agreeable mark of your regard, in a present of two volumes of your miscellaneous works, for which accept my sincere thanks. I have read a good deal of your volumes with much pleasure, and, in particular, the 'Malvern Hills,' which I found greatly improved. I have also read the 'Monody on Henderson,' both favorites of mine. And I have renewed my acquaintance with your observations on Chatterton, which I always thought very highly of, _as being conclusive on the subject of the forgery_.... With many thanks, I remain, my dear Mr. Cottle, Your old and affectionate friend, William Wordsworth. Patterdale, August 2nd, 1829." [40] War, a Fragment. [41] John the Baptist, a Poem. [42] Monody on John Henderson. [43] Miss Sarah Fricker, afterwards, Mrs. Coleridge. [44] Relating to these Sonnets, chiefly satirising himself, Mr. C. has said, in his "Biographia;" "So general at that time, and so decided was the opinion concerning the characteristic vices of my style, that a celebrated physician, (Dr. Beddoes) speaking of me, in other respects, with his usual kindness, to a gentleman who was about to meet me at a dinner party, could not however resist giving him a hint not to mention, in my presence, 'The House that Jack Built' for that I was as sore as a boil about that sonnet, he not knowing that I myself was the author of it." Mr. Coleridge had a singular taste for satirising himself. He has spoken of another ludicrous consequence arising out of this indulgence. "An amateur performer in verse, expressed to a common friend, a strong desire to be introduced to me, but hesitated in accepting my friend's immediate offer, on the score that 'he was, he must acknowledge, the author of a confounded severe epigram on Mr. C.'s 'Ancient Mariner,' which had given him great pain.' I assured my friend, that if the epigram was a good one, it would only increase my desire to become acquainted with the author, and begged to hear it recited; when, to my no less surprise than amusement, it proved to be one which I had myself, sometime before, written and inserted in the Morning Post." TO THE AUTHOR OF THE ANCIENT MARINER. Your Poem must eternal be, Dear Sir, it cannot fail, For 'tis incomprehensible, And without head or tail." [45] The motto was the following: Duplex nobis vinculum, et amicitae et similium junctarumque Camoenarum; quod utinam neque mors solvat, neque temporis longinquitas!--_Groscoll. Epist. ad Car. Utenhov. et Ptol. Lux. Tast._ [46] Eminent writers, particularly poets, should ever remember, they wield a mighty engine for evil or for good. An author, like Mr. Coleridge, may confidently talk of consigning to "pitch black oblivion," writings which he deems immoral, or calculated to disparage his genius; but on works once given to the world, the public lay too tenacious a hold, to consult even the wishes of writers themselves. Improve they may, but withdraw they cannot! So much the more is circumspection required. [47] Chemical Lectures, by Dr. Beddoes, delivered at the Red Lodge. [48] A portrait of Mr. Wordsworth, correctly and beautifully executed, by an artist then at Stowey; now in my possession. [49]Joan of Arc, 4to. first edition, had twenty lines in a page. [50] Did the report of the "still," in the former page, originate in this broken bottle of brandy? [51] "Robert Southey and Edith Pricker were married, in St. Mary Redcliffe Church, in the City of Bristol, the 14th day of November, 1795, as appears by the Register of the Parish. George Campbell, Curate. Witnesses--Joseph Cottle, Sarah Cottle." [52] At the instant Mr. Southey was about to set off on his travels, I observed he had no stick, and lent him a stout holly of my own. In the next year, on his return to Bristol, "Here" said Mr. S. "Here is the holly you were kind enough to lend me!"--I have since then looked with additional respect on my old igneous traveller, and remitted a portion of his accustomed labour. It was a source of some amusement, when, in November of 1836, Mr. Southey, in his journey to the West, to my great gratification, spent a few days with me, and in talking of Spain and Portugal, I showed him his companion, the Old Holly! Though somewhat bent with age, the servant (after an interval of forty years) was immediately recognised by his master, and with an additional interest, as this stick, he thought, on one occasion, had been the means of saving his purse, if not his life, from the sight of so efficient an instrument of defence having intimidated a Spanish robber. [53] See page 32 [Paragraph starting with "The deepest sorrow often admits...." Transcriber.]. [54] During the French war, Spanish dollars received the impression of the King's head, and then passed as the current coin at 4s 6d. [55] Dr. Hunter, translated St. Pierre. [56] Dr. Gregory's life was prefixed entire the collection of Chatterton's works, 8 vols. 8vo. Mr. Southey never fulfilled his intention of writing a life Shatterton. The able review of this week, in the Edinburgh was written by Sir Walter Scott. [57] It was not true, but a vain fancy; causelessly entertained, by, at least, four other ladies, under the same delusion as Miss. W. [58] On visiting Mr. Southey, at Christ-Church, he introduced to me this Mr. Rickman, whom I found sensible enough, and blunt enough, and seditions enough; that is, simply anti-ministerial. The celebrated Sir G. Rose, had his seat in the vicinity. Sir George was a sort of King of the district. He was also Colonel of a regiment of volunteers. Mr. Rickman told me that the great man had recently made a feast for the officers of his regiment, about a dozen of them, the substantial yeomen of the neighbourhood. After the usual bumper had uproariously been offered to the "King and Constitution; and confusion to all Jacobins," the Colonel, Sir G. called on the Lieutenant-Colonel, after the glasses were duly charged, for a lady-toast. "I'll give you," he replied, "Lady Rose." This being received with all honours, the Major was now applied to for his lady-toast "I can't mend it," he replied, "I'll give Lady Rose." A Captain was now called on; said he, "I am sure I can't mend it, Lady Rose." So that the whole of these military heroes, concurred in drinking good Lady Rose's health. One of the officers, it appeared, was a bit of a poet, and had composed a choice song for this festive occasion, and which was sung in grand chorus, the Right Honourable Colonel himself, heartily joining. The whole ditty was supremely ludicrous. I remember only the last verse. "Sir George Rose is our Commander, He's as great as Alexander; He'll never flinch, nor stir back an inch, He loves fire like a Salamander. CHORUS--He loves fire like a Salamander." [59] Walter Savage Landor. [60] The character of Exeter has been completely changed since the period when this letter was written; and from a town, the least attractive, for improvements of every description it may now vie with any town in England. [61] Mr. Southey paid this second visit to Lisbon, accompanied by Mrs. Southey. [62] By comparing Mr. Cattcott's copy with the original, it appeared that Mr. C. had very generally altered the orthography so as to give the appearance of greater antiquity, as 'lette' or 'let,' and 'onne' for 'on,' &c. [63] The home of an 'Ap (son of) Griffiths, ap Jones, ap Owen, ap Thomas.' Some of the old Welsh families carry their Apping pedigrees down to Noah, when the progress is easy to Adam. Mr. Coleridge noticed how little diversity there was in the Welsh names. Thus in the list of subscribers to 'Owen's Welsh Dictionary,' to which none but Welshmen would subscribe, he found of The letter D, of 31 names, 21 were Davis or Davies E, 30 16 ... ... Evans G, 30 two-thirds ... ... Griffiths H, all Hughes and Howell I, 66 all ... ... Jones L, all Lloyds, except 4 Lewises, and 1 Llewellyn M, four-fiths ... ... Morgans O, all ... ... Owen R, all Roberts, or Richards T, all ... ... Thomases V, all ... ... Vaughans W, 64 56 ... ... Williams Mr. Southey felt great satisfaction when he had found a house in Wales that exactly suited him. It was half way up one of the Glamorganshire mountains; well wooded; the immediate scenery fine; the prospect magnificent. The rent was approved, the time of entrance arranged, when, before the final settlement, Mr. S. thought, on a second survey, that a small additional kitchen was essential to the comfort of the house, and required it of the proprietor, preparatory to his taking a lease. To so reasonable a request the honest Welshman stoutly objected; and on this slight occurrence, depended whether the Laurent should take up, perhaps, his permanent residence in the Principality, or wend his way northward, and spend the last thirty years of his life in sight of Skiddaw. [64] Wm. Churchey was a very honest worthy lawyer, of Brecon, who unfortunately adopted the notion that he was a poet, and to substantiate his claim published the most remarkable book the world ever saw! It was a poem called 'Joseph,' with other poems, in 4to, and of a magnitude really awful! a mountain among the puny race of modern books. The only copy I ever saw was af an old book stall, and I have regretted that I did not purchase it, and get some stout porter to carry it home. Wm. Churchey was a friend of John Wesley. His prodigious 4to was published by subscription, and given away at the paltry sum of one guinea. I have an autograph letter of John Wesley, to his friend Churchey, in which he says, "My dear brother, ... I have procured one hundred guineas, and hope to procure fifty more. John Wesley." Mr. Churchey's pamphlet is thus entitled, "An Apology, by Wm. Churchey, for his public appearance as a Poet. Printed at Trevecca, Breconshire, by Hughes and Co., 1805; and sold by the author, at Brecon, price 6d." The first paragraph in the 'Apology,' begins thus, the italics the author's own. "The author has been ostracised from Parnassus by some tribe of the critics on his former work of _Weight_, if not _Merit_, one set of whom --the most ancient, the wisest of them all--condemned it in the _lump_. A whole volume of ten thousand lines, in _one_ paragraph of their _Monthly Catalogue_, for which they were _paid--nothing!_ without quoting _one_ line! Whereas a _score (!)_ out of some idle _sonnet_, or some _wire-drawn_ Cibberian ode, shall be _held up_ out of the _mud_ with a placid grin of applause. The author _has_ forgiven them, and keeps, therefore, the _name_ of their pamphlet in the back ground, in the _charitable_ hope of their having fifteen years ago, _repented_ of that _injustice_' This ponderous work however, to which the author alludes, was his 'Poems and Imitations of the British Poets, in one _large_ vol. in 4to, price only £1 1s. on _excellent_ paper and print! The same price as even 'Jeffrey Gambado's _Gambol of Horsemanship_' went off as current, at the same time. He _out-jockied_ me; I always was a bad Horseman." &c., &c. As illustrating one of the extreme points of human nature, I may casually mention that, after Mr. Churchey's death, which soon succeeded the issuing of his 'Apology,' from understanding that his widow was in straitened circumstances, and meeting with a gentleman who was going to Brecon, I requested the favour of him to convey to her a guinea, as a small present. A week after, I received a letter from the widow, thanking me for my kind remembrance, but she said that she was not benefited by it, as Mr. ---- said to her, 'This is a guinea, sent to you from Mr. Cottle, of Bristol, but as your husband owed me money, I shall carry it to the credit of his account'; when, buttoning his pocket, he walked away.' I immediately sent another guinea, and requested her not to name so disreputable an action, in one, from whom I had hoped better conduct. This gentleman, till the period of his death, twenty years after, always shunned me! At the time the abstraction took place, he was a wealthy man, and kept his carriage; but from that time he declined in prosperity, and died in indigence. [65] In a better sent to me by Mr. Foster, dated June 22, 1843, he thus explains the mysterious circumstances, relating to the publication of "Wat Tyler." "My dear sir, ... I wonder if Mr. Southey ever did get at the secret history of that affair. The story as I heard it was, that Southey visited Winterbottom in prison, and just as a token of kindness, gave him the M.S. of 'Wat Tyler.' It was no fault of Winterbottom that it was published. On a visit to some friends at Worcester, he had the piece with him; meaning I suppose, to afford them a little amusement, at Southey's expense, he being held in great reproach, even contempt, as a turn-coat. At the house where Winterbottom was visiting, two persons, keeping the piece in their reach at bed-time, sat up all night transcribing it, of course giving him no hint of the manoeuvre. This information I had from one of the two operators.... [66] Poor John Morgan was the only child of a retired spirit merchant of Bristol, who left him a handsome independence. He was a worthy kind-hearted man, possessed of more than an average of reading and good sense; generally respected, and of unpresuming manners. He was a great friend and admirer of Mr. Coleridge; deploring his habits, and labouring to correct them. Except Mr. Gillman, there was no individual, with whom Mr. Coleridge lived gratuitously so much, during Mr. M's. residence in London, extending to a domestication of several years. When Mr. Morgan removed to Calne, in Wiltshire, for a long time, he gave Mr. C. an asylum, and till his affairs, through the treachery of others, became involved, Mr. Coleridge, through him, never wanted a home. That so worthy, and generous a minded man should have been thus reduced, or rather ruined in his circumstances, was much deplored by all who knew him, and marked the instability of human possessions and prospects, often little expected by industrious parents. [67] A large collection of animal bones, many of them in fossil state, consisting of the jaws and other bones, of tigers, hyenas, wolves, foxes, the horse, the bos, &c., the whole obtained by me, in the year 1822, from the Oreston caves, near Plymouth. The number of bones amounted to nearly two thousand. Many of the specimens were lent to Professor Buckland, to get engraved, for a new geological work of his. The major part of the collection I presented to the Bristol Philosophical Institution. [68] The decrease of the remarkable young lady, Sarah Saunders, my niece, to whom the later Mr. Foster addressed a series of letters, during her illness. These letters are printed in Mr. F's. "Life and Correspondence." [69] LIST OF ARTICLES WRITTEN BY ROBERT SOUTHEY IN THE QUARTERLY REVIEW, TO APRIL, 1825. No. 1 Baptist Mission in India 2 Portuguese Literature 3 South Sea Missions -- Lord Valentia's Travels 4 American Annals 5 Life of Nelson 6 Season at Tongataboo -- Graham's Georgics 7 Observador Portuguez 8 Feroe Islands -- On the Evangelical Sects 11 Bell and Lancaster 12 The Inquisition -- Montgomery's Poems 13 Iceland 14 French Revolutionists 15 Count Julian -- Calamities of Authors 16 Manufacturing system and the Poor 19 Bogue and Bennett's History of the Dissenters 21 Nicobar Islands -- Montgomery's World before the Flood 22 23 British Poets 23 Oriental Memoirs 24 Lewis and Clark's Travels -- Barrè Roberts 25 Miot's Expedition to Egypt 25 Life of Wellington 26 do. do. 28 Alfieri 29 Me. La Roche Jacqueline -- The Poor 30 Ali Bey's Travels -- Foreign Travellers in England 31 Parliamentary Reform 32 Porter's Travels -- Rise and Progress of Disaffection 33 Tonga Islands 35 Lope de Vega 37 Evelyn on the means of Improving the People 41 Copy-Right Act 42 Cemeteries 43 Monastic Institutions 45 Life of Marlborough 46 New Churches 48 Life of Wm. Huntington, S.S. 50 Life of Cromwell 52 Dobrizhoffer 53 Camoens 55 Gregorie's Religious Sects 56 Infidelity 57 Burnett's Own Times 59 Dwight's Travels 62 Hayley -- Mrs. Baillie's Lisbon Mr. Southey expressed an intention of sending me a list of all his remaining papers, in the "Quarterly," which intention was not fulfilled. Presuming on the accuracy of the present list, from Mr. S. himself, there must be some mistakes in the account of Mr. Southey's contributions, as stated in that old and valuable periodical, the "Gentleman's Magazine," for 1844 and 1845. [70] Every effort was made by me both by advertising and inquiry, but no tidings of the first edition of Bunyan could be obtained in these parts. Very recently I learnt that the first edition had been discovered, and that the particulars might be learned of E. B. Underhill, Esq., Newmarket House, near Nailsworth, Gloucestershire. Upon my writing to this gentleman he politely favoured me with the following gratifying reply. "Feb. 27, 1847. Dear Sir, In answer to your inquiry, the first edition of the first part of the Pilgrim's Progress is the property of J. S. Holford, Esq., a gentleman of large possessions in this county. It was first made known I believe, by the Art Union, that this unique volume was in existence. Some time last summer I applied to Mr. H. for liberty to inspect it, and if agreeable to him, to reprint it. This he at once most liberally granted, and at the request of the council of the Hanserd Knollys' Society, George Offer, Esq., one of our members undertook the task of editor. The book is in a high state of preservation; both the paper and binding being as fresh as they left the hands of the binder. Mr. Offer has most laboriously collated it with subsequent editions, and has found many curious and singular discrepancies. I remain, yours most truly, Edwd. B. Underhill. Jos. Cottle." In this publication will be found all the desired information on this interesting subject. Letter from Mr. Offer to Mr. Cottle, on transmitting to him Mr. O.'s correspondence with Mr. Southey, relating to a charge of Plagiarism in John Bunyan. "Hackney, March 6, 1847. Dear sir, Enclosed I send you copies of the correspondence relative to 'Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress,' with Mr. Southey. About the year 1825, two gentlemen called to see my book rarities, and among them a copy of 'Duyfken's ande Willemynkyns Pilgrimagee,' with five cuts by Bolswert, published at Antwerp, 1627, the year before Bunyan's birth. The first plate represents a man asleep--a pilgrim by his bed-side--in the perspective two pilgrims walking together, they are then seen on the ground by some water--in the extreme distance the sun setting. Another plate represents the two pilgrims in a fair, Punch and Judy, &c. A third, one pilgrim under a rock, within a circle of candles, a magician with his wand, smoke and demons over the dismayed pilgrim's head. A fourth, two pilgrims ascending a steep hill, one of them falling head-long down. From a glance of a few moments at this curious book, there shortly afterwards appeared in a newspaper in the North, an account of Banyan's having borrowed some of his plot from this work. This was answered by Mr. Montgomery, and others. Upon Mr. Southey not being able to find the book, when he had undertaken to write the 'Life and Times of Bunyan,' he addressed a letter to his publisher, Mr. Major, in which he says, 'Can you give me Mr. Donce's direction, that I may ask him for some account of the French poem? Cottle refers me to 'Dunlop's History of Fiction,' for an account of a German book, which is of the same character. Bunyan I am sure knew nothing either of the one or the other. If the allegory was not an extension of the most common and obvious of all similitudes--the _germ_ of it might be found in his own works.' Major asked my advice, and I shewed him the book and gave him some little account of it; and soon after I received from Dr. Southey the following letter. 'Keswick, 16 April, 1829. Sir,--Mr. Major has favoured me with your account of the Dutch work in your possession, which in many parts bears a remarkable resemblance to the 'Pilgrim's Progress.' It would require the strongest possible evidence to convince me, against my will, that Bunyan is not an original writer. The book we know he could not have read in the original; and if there had been a translation of it, it is hardly likely that it should have remained undiscovered till this time; it being almost impossible that it should come into the hands of any one who had not read the Pilgrim's Progress. This is possible, that Bunyan may have heard an account of the book from some Dutch baptist in England, or some English one who had seen it in Holland. I do not think that his obligations to it can have been more than this; but of this I can better judge when I have perused the book, which my knowledge of the language enables me to do, if you favor me with it. Great men have sometimes been plagiarists; a grave charge of this kind has recently been proved upon Lord Bacon,--no less than that of having taken the fundamental principle of his philosophy from his name-sake, Roger, and claimed it as his own. Bunyan, I am fully persuaded, was too honest and too righteous a man to be guilty of any such baseness. He was in a beaten path of Allegory,--a name, a hint he may have taken, but I think nothing more. You will judge from this, sir, how very far from my intentions or inclination, it would be, in the slightest respect, to depreciate John Bunyan, whose book I have loved from my childhood. And whatever his obligations to the Dutchman may have been, if any there should prove to be, it is surely better that they should be stated by one who loves and honours his memory, than brought forward hereafter by some person in a different spirit; for nothing of this kind can long escape discovery now. My present persuasion is, that he owes nothing to it directly. Something perhaps, indirectly, but not much. And I promise you that I will do him no wrong. Should you favor me by entrusting me with the book, I shall of course make due mention of the obligation you have conferred. I remain, sir, yours with respect, Robert Southey. To George Offer, Esq.' The book was immediately sent, and shortly returned with the following note and letter. 'Keswick, 25 April, 1829. Sir,--Your book has been four and twenty hours in my possession, and I return it with many thanks, having perused it carefully, made notes from it, and satisfied myself most completely, that there is not the slightest reason for supposing Bunyan had ever heard of it, nor that he could ever have taken even a hint from it, if he had read it. I remain, sir, yours truly, Robert Southey. To George Offer, Esq.' The following letter was addressed to Mr. Major. 'Keswick, April 25,1829. Dear Sir, You will perceive by the return of one of your treasures, that the precious parcel arrived safely. I have read through the 'Dutch Original,' and made notes from it;--there is not the slightest resemblance in it to anything in the 'Pilgrim's Progress. The three striking circumstances which you mentioned of the 'Hill of Difficulty,' the 'Slough of Despond,' and 'Vanity Fair,' do not afford any ground for supposing that Bunyan had ever heard of this book; or that even if he had read it, he should have taken one hint from it. Here the incidents are, 1st that the wilful Pilgrim stops in a village crowd to see some juggler's tricks at a fair, and certain vermin in consequence shift their quarters from some of the rabble close to her, to her person. 2nd. That by following a cow's track instead of keeping the high road, she falls into a ditch. And 3rd. That going up a hill at the end of their journey, from whence Jerusalem is in sight, she climbs too high in a fit of presumption, is blown down, and falls into the place whence there is no deliverance. I am very glad to have had an opportunity of comparing it with the French translation, in which, as you may suppose, every thing which is national, and peculiar, and racy, is lost. The author's name is not to be found in 'Poppen's Bibliotheca Belgica.' Another and larger bible of the same country, ought to be on its way to me from Brussels at this time, and there I shall no doubt find an account of him. But the inquiry is not worth much trouble, seeing how completely all imitation or even resemblance will be disproved by an account of the book. By the by, it cannot be very rare in its own country, seeing it was popular enough for a French translation to be _re_-printed more than a hundred years after its first appearance. Believe me, dear sir, Yours faithfully, Robert Southey.' The volume contains 294 pages in Dutch. Read, analysed, and a very correct account of it completed in 24 hours!! I am, my dear sir, yours truly, George Offer. Joseph Cottle." [71] Mr. Southey in a letter to me, dated May 13, 1799, thus writes: "Arch, who purchased of you the first edition of Wordsworth's 'Lyrical Ballads,' tells me, that he expects to lose by them!" It reflects credit on Hannah More, to whom I had presented the first volume, that she immediately perceived the merits of the "Lyrical Ballads." On my visiting Barley Wood soon after, she said to me, "Your young friend Wordsworth, surpasses all your other young friends," when producing the book, she requested me to read several of the poems, which I did, to the great amusement of the ladies. On concluding, she said, "I must hear 'Harry Gill,' once more." On coming to the words, "O, may he never more be warm!" she lifted up her hands, in smiling horror. [72] The house of the Pneumatic Institution was situated in Dowry Square, Hotwells; the house in the corner, forming the north-east angle of the Square. [73] Mr. Davy often asked me to attend his experiments, at the Wells, and as an evidence of the zeal with which he wished to induce as many as he could to pursue his favourite chemistry, in consequence of my taking great interest in his proceedings, he urged me to pursue chemistry, as a science. To prove that he was in earnest, he bought for me a box of chemical tests, acids, alkalies, glass tubes, retorts, blow-pipe, trough, &c. &c. and assisted me in some of my first experiments. The trough I occasionally use at the present time. [74] This young Philosopher was suspected to be Mr. Davy, himself. [75] The late Archdeacon Wrangham. [76] Afterwards incorporated in another poem. [77] These three initials would be the proper S. T. C. affixed to his garments. [78] This account of Mr. Coleridge's military life, I read to Mr. Wade, who remarked that the greater part of what he had heard, Mr. Coleridge had, at different times, repeated to him. Mr. W. having been an old and steady friend of Mr. C. I expressed a desire that, he would read the whole MS. Memoir thoughtfully, in my presence, on successive mornings, and, without hesitation, dissent, if he thought it needful, from any of my statements. He afterwards remarked, "I have read deliberately the whole manuscript with intense interest, as all who knew Coleridge will, and, I think, those who knew him not. It is Coleridge himself, undisguised. All the statements I believe to be correct. Most of them I know to be such. There is nothing in this Memoir of our friend to which I object; nothing which I could wish to see omitted." He continued, "With respect to those letters relating to opium, I think you would be unfaithful, if you were to suppress them: but that letter addressed to me, must be published, (according to Mr. Coleridge's solemn injunction,) either by you, or myself. The instruction to be derived from this and his penitential letters addressed to you, is incalculable. All my friends unite with me in this opinion." Mr. W. related, at this time, one circumstance, received by him from Mr. Coleridge, which was new to me, and which is as follows. One of the men in Mr. C.'s company, had, it appeared a bad case of the small pox, when Mr. C. was appointed to be his _nurse_, night and day. The fatigue and anxiety, and various inconveniences, involved in the superintendence on this his sorely diseased comrade, almost sickened him of hospital service; so that one or two more such cases would have reconciled him to the ranks, and have made him covet, once more, the holiday play of rubbing down his horse. [79] At the time Mr. Coleridge belonged to the 15th Light Dragoons, the men carried carbines, in addition to swords and pistols. More recently, a shorter gun has been substituted, called a fusce. [80] Mr. Stoddart was a gentleman of whom he often talked, and spoke feelingly of Mr. S.'s chagrin, in the earlier part of his professional career. Briefs were then scarce, yet one evening an attorney called with the object of his desire, but Mr. S. was not at home, and the urgency of the case required it to be placed in other hands. This was long a subject of lamentation to the young barrister, and also to his friends; but success followed. [81] Mr. Coleridge sustained one serious loss, on quitting Malta, which he greatly deplored. He had packed in a large case, all his books and MSS. with all the letters received by him during his residence on the island. His directions were, to be forwarded to England, by the first ship; with Bristol, as its ultimate destination. It was never received, nor could he ever learn what became of it. It may be lying at this moment in some custom-house wareroom, waiting for the payment of the duty! Of which Mr. C. probably was not aware. [82] It was a remarkable quality in Mr. Coleridge's mind, that _edifices_ excited little interest in him. On his return from Italy, and after having resided for some time in _Rome_, I remember his describing to me the state of society; the characters of the Pope and Cardinals; the gorgeous ceremonies, with the superstitions of the people, but not one word did he utter concerning St. Peter's, the Vatican, or the numerous _antiquities_ of the place. As a further confirmation, I remember to have been with Mr. Coleridge at York on our journey into Durham, to see Mr. Wordsworth, when, after breakfast at the inn, perceiving Mr. C. engaged, I went out alone, to see the York Minster, being, in the way, detained in a bookseller's shop. In the mean time, Mr. C. having missed me, he set off in search of his companion. Supposing it _probable_ that I was gone to the _Minster_, he went up to _the door_ of that magnificent structure, and inquired of the porter, whether such an individual as myself had gone in there. Being answered in the negative, he had _no further curiosity_, not even _looking_ into the _interior_, but turned away to pursue his search! so that Mr. C. left York, without beholding, or wishing to behold, the chief attraction of the city, or being at all conscious that he had committed by his neglect, _high treason against all architectural beauty!_ This deficiency in his regard for edifices, while he was feverishly alive to all the operations of _mind_, and to all intellectual inquiries, formed a striking and _singular_ feature in Mr. Coleridge's mental constitution worthy of being noticed. [83] It was a favourite citation with Mr. Coleridge, "I in them, and thou in me, that they all may he one in us." [84] In corroboration of this remark, an occurrence might be cited, from the Life of Sir Humphry, by his brother, Dr. Davy.--Sir Humphry, in his excursion to Ireland, at the house of Dr. Richardson, met a large party at dinner, amongst whom, were the Bishop of Raphoe, and another Clergyman. A Gentleman, one of the company, in his zeal for Infidelity, began an attack on Christianity, (no very gentlemanly conduct) not doubting but that Sir H. Davy, as a Philosopher, participated in his principles, and he probably anticipated, with so powerful an auxiliary, an easy triumph over the cloth. With great confidence he began his flippant sarcasms at religion, and was heard out by his audience, and by none with more attention than by Sir Humphry. At the conclusion of his harangue, Sir H. Davy, instead of lending his _aid_, entered on a comprehensive defence of Christianity, 'in so fine a tone of eloquence' that the Bishop stood up from an impulse similar to that which sometimes forced a whole congregation to rise at one of the impassioned bursts of Massillon. The Infidel was struck dumb with mortification and astonishment, and though a guest for the night, at the assembling of the company the next morning at breakfast, it was found that he had taken _French leave_, and at the earliest dawn had set off for his own home. [85] The father's remark on the occasion was, "There's an end of him! A fine high-spirited fellow!" [86] Perhaps, the most valuable production of Mr. Foster, as to style and tendency, is the Essay which he prefixed to the Glasgow edition of Doddridge's "Rise and Progress of Religion." Mr. F. having sent me a letter relating to the above Essay, just as it was completed, it may not be unacceptable to the Reader; where he will behold a fresh instance of the complex motives, in which the best of human productions often originate. "Sept. 10, 1825. My dear sir, I am truly sorry not to have seen you, excepting on one short evening for so long a time, and as I expect to go on Monday next to Lyme, I cannot be content without leaving for you a line or two, as a little link of continuity, if I may so express it, in our friendly communications. The preventive cause of my not seeing you, has been the absolute necessity of keeping myself uninterruptedly employed to finish a literary task which had long hung as a dead weight on my hands. Dr. Chalmers some three years since started a plan of reprinting in a neat form a number of respectable religious works, of the older date, with a preliminary Essay to each, relating to the book, or to any analagous topic, at the writer's discretion. The Glasgow booksellers, Chalmers and Collins, the one the Doctor's brother, and the other his most confidential friend, have accordingly reprinted a series of perhaps now a dozen works, with essays, several by Dr. C.; several by Irving; one by Wilberforce; one by Daniel Wilson, &c. &c. I believe Hall, and Cunningham promised their contributions. I was inveigled into a similar promise, more than two years since. The work strongly urged on me for this service, in the first instance, was "Doddridge's Rise and Progress," and the contribution was actually promised to be furnished with the least possible delay, on the strength of which the book was immediately printed off--and has actually been lying in their warehouse as dead stock these two years. I was admonished and urged again and again, but in spite of the mortification, and shame, which I could not but feel, at these occasioning the publisher a positive loss, my horror of writing, combined with ill health, invincibly prevailed, and not a paragraph was written till toward the end of last year, when I did summon resolution for the attempt. When I had written but a few pages, the reluctant labour was interrupted, and suspended, by the more interesting one of writing those letters to our dear young friend, your niece. (Miss Saunders.) Not of course that this latter employment did not allow me time enough for the other, but by its more lively interest it had the effect of augmenting my disinclination to the other. Soon after her removal, I resumed the task, and an ashamed to acknowledge such a miserable and matchless slowness of mental operation, that the task has held me confined ever since, till actually within these few days. I believe that nothing but a strong sense of the duty of fulfilling my engagement, and of not continuing to do a real injury to the publishers, could have constrained me to so much time and toil. The article is indeed of the length of nearly one half of Doddridge's book, but many of my contemporary makers of sentences, would have produced as much with one fifth part of the time and labour. I have aimed at great correctness and condensation, and have found the labour of revisal and transcription not very much less than that of the substantial composition. The thing has been prolonged, I should say spun out to three times the length which was at first intended, or was required. It has very little reference to the book which it accompanies; has no special topic, and is merely a serious inculcation of the necessity of Religion on young persons, and men of the world. In point of merit, (that you know is the word in such matters) I rate it very moderately, except in respect to correctness, and clearness of expression. If it do not possess this quality, a vast deal of care and labour has been sadly thrown away. I suppose the thing is just about now making up to be sent from the publishers' warehouse. I shall have a little parcel of copies, and shall presume to request the acceptance of one in Dighton Street. My dear sir, I am absolutely ashamed to have been led into this length of what is no better than egotism, when I was meaning just in five lines, to tell what has detained me from the pleasure of seeing you.... My dear sir. Yours most truly, John Foster." [87] "I think Priestley must be considered the author of modern Unitarianism. I owe, under God, my return to the faith, to my having gone much farther than the Unitarians, and so having come round to the other side. I can truly say, I never falsified the scriptures. I always told them that their interpretations of scripture were intolerable, on any principles of sound criticism; and that, if they were to offer to construe the will of their neighbour, as they did that of their Maker, they would be scouted out of society. I said, plainly and openly, that it was clear enough, John and Paul were not Unitarians. I make the greatest difference between 'ans' and 'isms.' I should deal insincerely, if I said, that I thought _Unitarianism_ was Christianity. No, as I believe, and have faith in the doctrine, it is not the truth in Jesus Christ. By-the-by, what do you (Unitarians) mean, by exclusively assuming the title of Unitarians? As if Trio-Unitarians were not necessarily Unitarians, as much (pardon, the illustration) as an apple-pie, must of course be a pie! The schoolmen would perhaps have called you _Unicists_, but your proper name is _Psilanthropists_, believers in the mere human nature of Christ.... Unitarianism, is in effect, the worst of one kind of Atheism, joined to one of the worst kinds of Calvinism. It has no covenant with God, and it looks upon prayer as a sort of self-magnetizing;--a getting of the body and temper into a certain _status_, desirable, _per se_, but having no covenanted reference to the Being to whom the prayer is addressed. The _pet_ texts of Socinians are quite enough for their confutation with acute thinkers. If Christ had been a mere man, it would have been ridiculous in him to call himself the 'Son of Man;' but being God and _man_, it then became, in his own assumption, a peculiar and mysterious title. So, if Christ had been a mere man, his saying, 'My father is greater than I,' (John xv. 28.) would have been as unmeaning. It would be laughable, for example, to hear me say, my 'Remorse' succeeded indeed, but Shakspeare is a greater dramatist than I,' But how immeasurably more foolish, more monstrous, would it not be for a man, however honest, good, or wise, to say 'But Jehovah is greater than I.' "Either we have an immortal soul, or we have not. If we have not, we are beasts; the first and wisest of beasts it may be, but still true beasts. We shall only differ in degree, and not in kind; just as the elephant differs from the slug. But by the concession of all the materialists, of all the schools, or almost all, we are not of the same kind as beasts; and this also we say, from our own consciousness. Therefore, methinks, it must be the possession of a soul within us, that makes the difference. "Read the first chapter of the Book of Genesis without prejudice, and you will be convinced at once. After the narrative of the creation of the earth and brute animals, Moses seems to pause, and says, 'And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.' And in the next chapter, he repeats the narrative.--'And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life;' and then he adds these words, 'and man became a living soul.' Materialism will never explain these last words." [88] The following notice of Mr. C.'s opium habits, with the reasons for disclosing them, were prefixed to the "Early Recollections," ten years ago, but the arguments are equally applicable at this time, 1847. [89] A Dissenting minister of Bristol. [90] It is apprehended that this must be a mistake. I sent Mr. Coleridge five guineas for my Shakespeare ticket, and entertain no doubt but that some others did the same. But his remark may refer to some succeeding lecture, of which I have no instinct recollection. [91] A request of permission from Mr. Coleridge, to call on a few of his known friends, to see if we could not raise an annuity for him of one hundred a year, that he might pursue his literary objects without pecuniary distractions. [92] A worthy medical Friend of Bristol, who first in that city, interested himself in the establishment of infant schools. [93] This long sentence, between brackets, was struck out by Mr. Southey, in perusing the MS., through delicacy, as it referred to himself; but the present occasion it is restored. [94] Some supplemental lecture. [95] Mr. Coleridge, in his "Church and State," speaks of employing a drawer in which were "too many of my _unopened letters._" [96] These four lines in the edition of Mr. C.'s Poems, published after his death, are oddly enough thrown into the "Monody on Chatterton," and form the four opening lines. Many readers may concur with myself in thinking, that the former commencement was preferable; namely;-- "when faint and sad o'er sorrow's desert wild, Slow journeys onward poor misfortune's child;" &c. [97] This man must hare been just the kind of vigilant superintendent Mr. C. desired; ready to fetch a book, or a box of snuff, &c., at command. The preceding occurrence would not have been introduced, but to illustrate the supreme ascendancy which opium exercises over its unhappy votaries. [98] This statement requires an explanation, which none now can give. Was the far larger proportion of this £300 appropriated to the discharge of Opium debts? This does not seem unlikely, as Mr. C. lived with friends, and he could contract few other debts. [99] Such were omitted in the published work. [100] When Coleridge dwelt at the 'Oat and Salutation,' in Newgate Street, and talked of leaving it, his conversation had brought so many customers to the house, that the landlord offered him _free-quarters_ if he would only stay and continue to talk. [101] Mr. Poole, who requested it as a favour, came all the way from Stowey to peruse my MS. "Recollections of Coleridge," and who I have good reason to believe, without any unkind intention, communicated a report to _C.'s relations._ [102] Mr. Southey's grandfather lived in the old manor-house at Bedminster, where, in his younger days. Mr. S. passed many of his happiest hours. When spending a week with me at Bedminster, with a year of the date of this letter, he went to the old house, and requested permission of the strangers who inhabited his grandfather's mansion, to walk round the garden, and renew his acquaintance with the old trees which he used to climb nearly six years before; a request which was readily granted. The revival of such interesting associations, had they occurred at a former period, would doubtless have produced some exquisite poetical record. [103] The illness of Mrs. Edith Southey. [104] Mr. S. deemed it an admirable likeness of Mr. W. as he appeared in younger life; and said that it bore at the present time, a striking resemblance to Mr. W.'s son. [105] The eminent Edinburgh Professor. For three years the private tutor of Mr. T. Wedgewood. [106] Westbury, near Bristol, the then residence of Mr. John Wedgewood, Esq. [107] The then residence of Mr. Wordsworth. [108] List of Works and Poems which Mr. Coleridge _intended_ to write, with the pages in which they are noticed. [Transcriber's note: After the page number the starting words of the matching paragraph are given.] Poem on the Nativity (800 lines), p. 66 ["He speaks in the same letter"] Plan of General Study, p. 66 ["In a letter of Mr. C. dated"] Pantisocracy, 4to., p. 73 ["Before I enter on an important"] 17 other works, p. 73 [See previous.] Translations of Modern Latin Poets 2 vols. 8vo., p. 73 [See previous.] 8 Sonnets, p. 81 ["With regard to the Poems I mean to"] A book on Morals, in answer to Godwin, p. 102 ["Wordsworth's conversation aroused me"] Oberon of Wieland (Trans.), p. 160 ["P. S. I am translating the"] Ballad. 340 lines, p. 173 ["I have finished my Ballad, it is"] 3 Works, promised, p. 292 ["Coleridge has left London for Keswick"] New Review, p. 306 ["The preceding letter of Mr. Coleridge led"] Lectures on Female Education, p. 357 ["Even so the two far, far more"] Odes on the different sentences of the Lord's Prayer, p. 387 ["You will wish to know something of myself"] Treatise on the Corn Laws, p. 390 ["Indeed from the manner in which it"] Hist. of German Belles Lettres, p. 427 ["What have I done in Germany"] Life of Lessing, p. 427 [See previous.] Introduction to Lessing's Life, p. 437 ["Have you seen my translation"] Progressiveness of all Nature, p. 430 ["Now I make up my mind to a sort"] Principles of Population, p. 431 ["I shall remain in London till April"] Finishing of Christabel, p. 438 ["There happen frequently little odd"] Letters and condition of German Boors, p. 442 [See previous.] A Comedy, p. 442 ["My littlest one is a very stout boy"] Essay on writing in Newspapers, p. 445 ["I cannot write that without"] Essay on Style in Prose and Verse, p. 446 ["Very soon however I shall present"] Essay on Hall, Milton, and Taylor, p. 446 [See previous.] Essay on Johnson and Gibbon, p. 446 [See previous.] Book on the subject of Poetry, p. 446 [See previous.] Heroic Poem on the Siege of Jerusalem, p. 447 ["I have, since my twentieth year"] [109] An intention not fulfilled. [110] Mr. Thomas Wedgewood visited the continent in 1803, with Mr. Underwood as his travelling companion. He purposed to have proceeded to the continent in 1804; but his disorders increasing, he retired to his seat, near Blandford, and died July 10, 1805, aged 34. Mr. Coleridge, in vain, recommended a continental journey. Josiah Wedgewood, Esq., died July 13, 1843, aged 74. [111] Mr. Coleridge, when at the University of Gottingen, found pleasant English society. With several gentlemen (students) whom he there met, (Dr. Parry, the present eminent physician of Bath; Dr. Carlyon, the no less eminent physician of Truro; Captain Parry, the North Pole Navigator; and Mr. Chester.) They together made an excursion to the Hartz mountains. Many striking incidents respecting this pedestrian excursion are before the public, in Mr. C.'s own letters; and it may here be added, Dr. Carlyon has published a work, entitled "Early Years and Late Reflections," which gives among other valuable matter, many additional particulars connected with this visit to the Brockhen, as well as interesting notices concerning Mr. Coleridge, during his residence in Germany. Dr. C. has more recently published a second volume, with able dissertations, chiefly on Medical Science. [112] Trevecka, a college established by Lady Huntingdon. [113] After JOHN HENDERSON'S acquaintance and friendship had been matured with Dean Tucker, he informed a particular friend, the Rev. James Newton, "that whenever he was in the company of young Henderson, he considered himself as a Scholar in the presence of his Tutor." The late Robert Hall also well knew John Henderson, and in the latter part of his life, referring to him, told me, that he considered John Henderson to have been a Prodigy, and that, when in his company, he always considered himself as a pupil. [114] A German at Oxford was once much frightened by coming into the room while JOHN HENDERSON was exercising his mimicry, for, as he protested, he thought he heard himself talking at a distance. No person needed to have gone out of HENDERSON'S company to have heard and almost seen Dr. Johnson. During one of the Doctor's annual visits to Oxford, HENDERSON and he one evening, for several hours, amused those around them, by conversing expressly in hard words. It was generally admitted that JOHN HENDERSON discovered the greater talent at this verbal forgery. And to meet the Doctor on his own ground, was indeed a presumptuous thing. Their conversations, in Latin, (often extending through a whole evening,) were deemed splendid, as they were classically chaste. Dr. Adams, it was said, was the only man in Oxford who approximated toward an equality with JOHN HENDERSON in Latin colloquisms. [115] His rooms, at Pembroke College, were those which had been occupied by _Dr Johnson_. [116] As a proof of his self-command, the following incident may be adduced. During his residence at Oxford, a student of a neighbouring college, proud of his logical acquirements, was solicitous of a private disputation with the renowned Henderson; some mutual friends introduced him, and having chosen his subject, they conversed for some time with equal candour and moderation; but at length Henderson's antagonist, perceiving his confutation inevitable, in the height of passion, threw a full glass of wine in John Henderson's face. J. H. without altering his features or changing his position, gently wiped his face, and then coolly replied, "This, sir, is a digression; now for the argument." It is hardly necessary to add, the insult was resented by the company turning the aggressor out of the room.