UNIVERSITY OF CA RIVERSIDE, LIBRARY 3 12100171221 67 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNM RIVERSIDE COLERIDGE, SHELLEY, GOETHE. BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR. THE NATION'S BIRTH, and other National Poems. i2mo, cloth $i.oo ARNOLD AND ANDRE. An Historical Play 1.50 ESSAYS >eSTHETICAL. i2mo,cloth 1.50 BRIEF ESSAYS AND BREVITIES. i2mo 1.50 SOME OF THE THOUGHTS OF JOSEPH JOUBERT. With a Biographical Notice. i6mo, tinted paper, cloth, beveled 1.50 FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE, i vol., iimo 1.50 LIFE AND WORKS OF GOETHE. An Essay. lamo, cloth 1.50 THE MAID OF ORLEANS. An Historical Tragedy... 1.50 THE LIFE OF RUBENS 1.50 CHARLOTTE VON STEIN 1.50 WORDSWORTH 1.50 LEE AND SHEPARD, Publishers, Boston. COLERIDGE, SHELLEY, GOETHE. BIOGRAPHIC ESTHETIC STUDIES. BY GEORGE H. CALVERT. BOSTON: LEE AND SHEPARD, PUBLISHERS. NEW YORK: CHARLES T. DILLINGHAM. c Copyright, i8So, By GEORGE H. CALVERT. RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE: STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED BY H. O. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY. CONTENTS. Coleridge 'i Shelley ^29 Goethe 259 COLERIDGE. TO COLERIDGE. Coleridge, for many a studious year I have been Thy thankful mate ; climbing the misty heights Of speculation, or when — the delights Of great imagination's realm serene Blessing me through th' impassioned visions seen By ravished genius — thou hast shown me sights, Revealed to mighty Poets with the lights Struck by creative frenzy; visions clean, That mind in purgatorial surges dip, And we come freshened forth, so purified, That ever anew thy rich companionship I court, to warm me at a holy fire, And be with deep soul-logic stoutly plied, Or trance-ensteeped by thy melodious lyre. COLERIDGE. Whoever would write becomingly about Coleridge must admire him, and admire him with earnest thankfulness. Sympathy, — so essential to the biographer, aye, and to the full critic, — even a several-sided sympathy, were not enough. The warmth of admiration will enkindle to its tenderest our charity, and admiration and charity, with their united glow, will dissolve into vapor any thoughts on the weaknesses and failures of this remarkable man ; so that, if we think of them at all, we think of them only with a plaintive murmur, because through them we have been bereft of some of the harvest we had a right to expect from the healthful growth of such di- verse and peerless powers. And even mild- est murmur will be hushed, through sympathy with the sufferings his weaknesses caused to 12 COLERIDGE. the author and man, our splendent gracious benefactor. Were there left of Coleridge nothing but Kiibla Khan, from this gem one might almost reconstruct, in full brightness, its great au- thor's poetic work, just as the expert zoologist reconstructs the extinct megatherium from a single fossil bone. Of this masterpiece, the chief beauty is not the noted music of the ver- sification, but the range and quality of the im- aginings embodied in this music. Were there in these no unearthly breathings, no mysteri- ous grandeur, the verse could not have been made to pulsate so rhythmically. The essence of the melody is in the fineness of the concep- tion, in the poetic imaginations. In this case, as in all cases, the spirit not only controls but creates the body. Metrical talent m'ust be there to handle the molten words as they flow from the furnace of genius, shaping and placing them while still swollen with genial warmth. Genius, the master, cannot do without talent, the servant. " 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 : " COLERIDGE. 1 3 To present of a sudden to the mind a signal thought, which springs unexpectedly but ap- propriately out of another, the meeting of the two striking a light that flashes a new and brilliant ray upon the attention, — to do this is to perform a high poetic feat. The sacred river running through wood and dale, then gliding into the earth through caverns meas- ureless to man, to sink " in tumult to a lifeless ocean : " this mysterious picture sets the mind a brooding, awakens its poetic sensibility. Suppose the passage had stopped here. Re- galed by such a fresh, impressive presentation, the mind would have grasped it as an inward boon, to be held tightly hold of by the suscep- tible reader, awakening in him, through quick affinities, thoughts of human fate and woe. But the passage does not stop here ; in the poet's mind, as in the capable reader's, are generated associations with human destiny : and so, instead of a full stop at " ocean," there is only a colon, the poet's thought springing forward into the two wonderful lines, — "And mid this tumult Kubla heard from far Ancestral voices prophesying war." And the passage, instead of leaving on the reader an impression of calm, strange beauty. 14 COLERIDGE. kindles into a startling splendor. The phys- ical tumult passes into human tumult ; the vague, hoarse swell of a torrent grows articu- late, the " caverns measureless to man " deepen into the abode of former kings, who, from the subterranean darkness to which their warrior- ambition has doomed them, throw upon the ear of their Sardanapalean descendant doleful, menacing predictions. All this, and more, is in those two lines, so laden with meaning and music, whereby the physical picture is magni- fied, deepened, vivified, through psychical par- ticipation. The poetical is ever an appeal to the deepest in the human mind, and a great burst of poetic light like this lays bare, for the imagination to roam in, a vast indefinite do- main. In another part of the short poem is a sim- ilar sudden heightening of effect by the intro- duction of humanity into a scene of purely terrene features : " But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover 1 A savage place ! as holy and enchanted As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted " These lines could have been written only by a poet with the finest ear, an internal ear. When COLERIDGE. 1 5 we come to the last word of the fourth line, we pass into a higher region : " haunted ! " Haunted by what ? " By woman wailing for her demon lover." On this single line is stamped the power of a great poet ; that is, a poet in whom breadth and depth of intellectual and sympathetic en- dowment give to the refining aspiring poetic faculty material to work upon drawn from the grander, subtler, remoter resources of the hu- man soul, — material beyond the reach of any but poets of the first order, whose right, in- deed, to a place in this order rests upon their power of higher spiritual reach united to wider intellectual range. How much is involved »in this short passage ! A landscape gift, to present in two lines a clear picture of the " savage place ; " then, by a leap of the poet's imagination, the scene is overhung by an earthly atmosphere that makes it so holy and enchanted that (and here the poet takes the final great leap) it is fit, " under a waning moon," to be haunted " By woman wailing for her demon lover." That is a poetically imaginative leap of the boldest and most beautiful. What an ethereal 1 6 COLERIDGE. springiness, what an intellectual swing, in the mind that could make such a leap ! That par- ticular one Coleridge's friend Wordsworth could not have made, strong as he was in poetic imagination. It implies almost some- thing spectral, superearthly, something uncan- ny. And what an exquisitely musical rhythm the thought weaves about itself for its poetic incarnation. Kubla Khan is a fragment, j ust as is a much longer, and his greatest, poem, Christabel. In the autumn of 1797 Coleridge, then in poor health, had retired to a lonely farmhouse on the confines of Somerset and Devonshire. One day, from the effect of an anodyne, pre- scribed to him, he fell asleep in his chair while reading in Purchases Pilgrimage a passage like* this : " Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden there- unto ; and thus ten miles of fertile ground were enclosed with a wall." He slept about three hours. When he awoke he seemed to have composed two or three hundred lines de- scribing what, in this sleep of the outward senses, he had inwardly seen and heard. So vivid was his recollection that immediately on awaking he seized a pen and began to write as COLERIDGE. I J one would when dictated to. In the midst of his writing he was called out on business. And he went out ! Suppose a great states- man and orator, in the full swing of a grave momentous speech before a public assembly, to be suddenly interrupted and asked to listen to a young lady's dream ! Not more imperti- nent were this than the interruption of Cole- ridge by a call of outward business. Nay, it were so much the less impertinent as the po- etic dreams of Coleridge were more freighted with wisdom and enduring thought than any statesman's oration. To permit himself to be arrested in an immortal flight, as was this of Kubla Khan ! to lay down his pen and go out to talk to some intruder, from a small neigh- boring town, about a prosaic, insignificant, transitory, delusive matter of fact ! And he who was a bungler at these every-day opacities, and was an expert at translucent ideals. The business of Coleridge was to dream poetic dreams, not to act. So grand and new and beautiful and significant were his dreams that, like works of Art, they become stimulative and generative of high thoughts in others. In Coleridge there was so deep an inwardness that, when abstracted from the outer world, 1 8 COLERIDGE. whether in a trance-like sleep, as when he pro- duced Kiibla Khmi, or in exalted soliloquy, there poured forth, from large sources of sen- sibility and reason, streams of richly-worded invention, floods of imaginative thought. When, after a detention of an hour, he came back and resumed his pen, the vision had faded. And so, Kubla KJian, like other of Coleridge's work, is a brilliant fragment. Kubla Khan is likewise typical of Cole- ridge's poetry in that it is more spiritual than passionate. Coleridge, while, as poet, appeal- ing to and touching the feelings, was not a man of fervent predominant desires. His sensibilities — as sound as they were delicate — were not fortified by depth and warmth of passion : he was more tender than impas- sioned. In its shining superexcellence the poetical looks extravagant and visionary, in its prepo- tency it seems preposterous. And this for the same reason why, with our earthly eyes, we cannot see any of the millions of spiritual creatures that " walk the earth both when we wake and when we sleep ; " our vision is not enough spiritualized. The best function of the poetical is to ascend to the interior spiritual COLERIDGE. I9 Source ; and to follow it thither is not easy. The poetical is a divine flame, in whose trans- figuring light the concrete grossness of earthly- realities being fused, the causative law of their being becomes discernible. When in the Ser- mon on the Mount we are enjoined to "love your enemies, bless those that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you, that you may be the children of your Father which is in heaven," we listen in despair, all this so transcends our conceptions. These in- junctions are a poetic ideal reached by the ut- terer of them through the sublime spirituality of his nature. Dwelling habitually on this up- per plane, he was enabled to seize the higher possibilities of humanity. Like the Beatitudes and the rest of this transcendent Sermon, these injunctions are the poetry of the moral sense. To the sensuous, and still more to the sensual, ear they sound impracticable, Utopian. They are a voice from the supreme altitudes, proclaiming to what elevations we are capable of mounting. In the Ancient Mariner, the hero of that great poem, after shooting the Albatross, ex claims, 20 COLERIDGE. " And I had done a hellish thing, And it would work 'em woe : For all averred, I had killed the bird That made the breeze to blow. Ah, wretch ! said they, the bird to slay. That made the breeze to blow ! " In thus reproaching him who had slain the Albatross, the crew obeyed a movement — by no means confined to superstitious sailors — of human shortsightedness, whereby men would fain force the moral law to square with their temporary desires. When the crew per- ceived that the breeze did not cease, and that the fog had disappeared, " Then all averred, I had killed the bird That brought the fog and mist. 'T was right, said they, such birds to slay. That bring the fog and mist. The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, The furrow followed free ; We were the first that ever burst Into that silent sea." Thus they sped until they reached the Line. Then the breeze suddenly ceased to blow. In a copper sky the Sun at noon stood right above the perpendicular mast. In the air was no breath ; the vessel, without motion, as if pinned to the spot, was COLERIDGE. 21 " As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean." And now the water gave out : " Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink." Their lips were baked, their tongues withered at the root. Upon the Anoient Mariner evil looks were turned : " Ah ! well-a-day ! what evil looks Had I from old and young ! Instead of the cross, the Albatross About my neck was hung." A sail ! a sail ! Hope flattered their sink- ing souls. But strange ! as the ship descried passes between them and the setting sun the face of the sun is crossed as with bars. The sail was but the skeleton-phantom of a ship. She came along side ! On the deck are two figures, Death and a woman (a harlot, symbol of death in life), playing at dice : " The game is done ! I 've won ! I 've won ! Quoth she, and whistles thrice." She had won the Ancient Mariner, but the crew is doomed. To give life to these fantastical imaginations is needed a poet's and a thinker's thought, and 22 COLERIDGE. to give to the poet's thought depth and signifi- cance is needed spirituality, with a strong sense of moral sovereignty. What is more flat and unprofitable than to hear a prosaic man tell his dreams ? That tales to which vivacity is im- parted by poetic imaginativeness are neverthe- less shallow and unattractive when wanting a moral background, is learnt when one attempts to reread the prose tales of Poe. Behind their fantasy are no depths ; their ingenuity is bar- ren ; there is no issue out of their horrors. They lack what, notwithstanding their spec- tral quality, Hawthorne's tales have, humanity. The Ancient Mariner is steeped in human- ity. And then, to these visionary inventions a charm is imparted by their inward truth. For, besides that the visions have their birth in feel- ing, in a gifted being like Coleridge his super- natural would be true to nature, because hav- ing in himself, like every other human creature, both the supernatural and the natural, — being bound alike to heaven and to earth, — his per- ceptions and his imaginations are illuminated by the revealing light both of reason and of genius. This light it is which, casting such exquisite shadows, makes the Ancient Mariner to sparkle COLERIDGE. 23 with irresistible fascination. The fearful pen- alty which follows an act so thoughtless, seem- ingly indifferent, comparatively innocent, as that of shooting an albatross, might be called the poetry of retribution. It is an ascension to the superior spiritual source, an ascension which the poet, through the elevation of his nature, is empowered to achieve, and which his aesthetic gifts enabled him to present in a captivating garb. The story of the Ancient' Mariner and the crew implicated in his act is a vdice from the supreme heights, which, ut- tered through a gifted poet, comes accompa- nied by weird, musical, significant extrava- gances. Among the high qualities of the Aftcient Mariner the highest is the symbolical meaning discernible on the brightest pages, peering through a supersensual radiance, giving in- tenseness to sparkles of poetry. Everywhere the intellectual vivacity is unflagging, and the whole is quickened by a profound moral which, though not obtruded, is uttered by the old sailor, who ends his strange tale with th'.se deep, tuneful words : " Farewell ! farewell ! but this I tell To thee, thou Wedding guest ! 24 COLERIDGE. He prayeth well, who loveth well Both man and bird and beast. " He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small ; For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all." The same sound, beautiful moral shines through as through Wordsworth's Hart-leap Well: " One lesson, Shepherd, let us two divide, Taught by what Nature shows, and what conceals ; Never to blend our pleasure or our pride With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels." Coleridge was one of the most original of men ; that is, in his mind there was a light so individual and strong that on human condi- tions and relations it cast fresh illumination ; and thence, since he wrote and talked, the problems of life are less enigmatical, its spirit- ual capabilities more apparent, its hopes more assured and more elevated. Like some other men of his high order Coleridge was too origi- nal to be at once appreciated. To men of rou- tine there is offensiveness in originality. Some people have an honest difficulty in appreciating and appropriating fresh thought. Some, when they have the culture and insight to discern COLERIDGE. 2$ new power, have not the frankness to speak out; and the taking of a pen in one's hand, far from always bracing one's moral respon- sibility, often relaxes it, through the tempta- tion offered by the pen to blacken a rival, or to lame a fresh competitor who looks formi- dable. From honest ignorance and dishonest de- traction Coleridge, like his friend Wordsworth, had, from the very originality of his genius and the superiority of his gifts, to suffer more than most new candidates for literary honors. In the short preface to Christabcl he thus, in his gentle way, refers to one of the charges brought against him by some of that class of writers called critics, but who often deserve not the high name ; for, etymologically, critic implies competency to judge. Coleridge says:. "There is amongst us a set of critics who seem to hold that every possible thought or image is traditional ; who have no notion that there are such things as fountains in the world, small as well as great ; and would therefore charitably derive every rill they see flowing from a perforation made in some other man's tank." Against the Ancient Mariner and Christabel 26 COLERIDGE. hostile criticism was as powerless as a snow- storm would be to quench Hecla in full erup- tion, or earth-fogs permanently to obscure the stars. As in the Ancient Mariner, so in CJiristabcl, excellence is aimed at by " interesting the af- fections through the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing themreal." In both the chief originality consists, not in the supernatu- ral frame in which the tales are set, — an in- vention supplied by mere fancy, — but in the quality of the poetic imagination displayed in the management of the story and in particular conjunctions. Were the whole six hundred lines of Christabel (for unhappily there are no more) in their general quality unelastic, un- imaginative, instead of being, as they are, buoy- ant and sparkling, every page vivid with intel- lectual activity, musical with poetic feeling, still one would be repaid for the reading of every paragraph, in order not to miss just these two lines which conclude the exquisite descrip- tion of the Lady Christabel praying by moon- light under the old oak tree : " And both blue eyes more bright than clear. Each about to have a tear." COLERIDGE. 2/ Coleridge had his share of earthly aflliction, — more than his share, we might say, had not much of his distress been of his own making. But whatever his burthens, they were counter- weighed by the joy of harboring within him- self, and projecting upon others, such thoughts. How blessed the brain in whose inlets nestled a perfumed gem like this : " 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." All three of these poems, Christabely the Ancient Mariner, and Knbla Khan, were writ- ten when Coleridge was in his twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth year. In each of them are beau- ties which so move our admiration they give us thrills which deeply touch and teach the soul. What was the individuality whence issued such superlative products .'' As easily can light- ning be tracked to its lair as genius : both have their birth in a fiery creative centre, too vivid with heat and light to be penetrated or ap- proached. But the conditions under which they flash into exhibition can be studied, and of the medium through which the revelation is made something may be learnt. II. The father of Coleridge was simple-minded, learned, eccentric. At the age of sixteen he quitted the house of his impoverished parents, receiving a blessing and the half of his father's last crown. He had walked but a few miles when, overcome by thoughts of his destitution, he sat down by the roadside and wept aloud. A gentleman happening to pass by recognized the son of his neighbor, took him home, and sent him to school. Here he was a hard stu- dent, married at nineteen, shortly after his marriage entered Sidney College, Cambridge, distinguished himself there in Hebrew and mathematics, and, had he not been married, would have been rewarded with a fellowship. On leaving college he became a teacher in Southampton, was afterwards appointed head- master of the school at Ottery St. Mary, Dev- onshire, and obtained the living of the parish. His son, the poet, thus speaks of him : " My father was a good mathematician, and well versed in the Greek, Latin, and Hebrew Ian- COLERIDGE. 29 guages. He published, or rather attempted to publish, several works. 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, unthumbed, uncut, were preserved free from all pollution in the family archives. 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. In learning, goodheartedness, absentness of mind, and excessive ignorance of the world, he was a perfect Parson Adams." The poet's mother, Anna Bowdon, was the second wife of the vicar. Of their ten chil- dren, nine sons and one daughter, Samuel Tay- lor, born October 21, 1772, was the youngest. The mother was an admirable economist and manager. She main aged so well that she got her sons started in professional careers, in the. army, the church, the navy. The unambitious vicar was willing that they should be brought up to trades, except the youngest, Samuel Taylor, the child of his latter years, who, he resolved, should be a parson. Several of the 30 COLERIDGE. poet's brothers died young, and his only sister, Anne, at twenty-one. Her he has immortal- ized in two lines : '* Rest, gentle Shade, and wait thy Maker's will ; Then rise unchanged, and be an angel still 1 " Circumstances, literally what stands around a man, being the offspring of general human activity, react upon individual human beings with irresistible effect. Men and circumstances, being of one blood, are indissolubly interwoven for weal or woe. Men make circumstances, and circumstances mold men. Even the most original natures, natures of such deep prolific power of soul that their mission is to generate new circumstances, whereby to lift human life to higher levels, even they cannot escape the pressure of present conditions. One of these generative minds was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a mind of such inward vital- ity that it poured fresh streams into the accu- mulated reservoirs of human thought. The mental movement which at its noon has the exceptional liveliness and momentum to gen- erate new circumstances is apt in its morning to break from routine into a path of its own making. COLERIDGE. 3 1 That in his early surroundings Coleridge was not so favored as his friend Wordsworth is apparent from the subjoined account by himself of his childhood from his fourth to his ninth year, Wordsworth, to be sure, with his decision and will, would have so reacted upon such surroundings as to have modified or even changed them. For, of those who have in them the inborn force to make new circum- stances it is the privilege (when they have the will and the self-control of a Wordsworth) to resist and in some measure to baffle exist- ing ones. Coleridge was more passive, more practically helpless than his illustrious friend. This passage, so valuable as biography, is worth something as premonition. But parents and teachers are irremediably incapable of discerning in the wayward sensitive boy an exceptional poetic genius, who ought to have exceptional treatment. Seldom does autobiog- raphy furnish a page so lively and instructive. " 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 school-boys My fa- ther was very fond of me, and I was my mother's darling ; in consequence whereof I 32 COLERIDGE. was very miserable. For Molly, who had nursed my brother Francis [next above Sam- uel Taylor in age], 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 re- ceived only thumps and ill names. " So I became fretful, and timorous, and a tell-tale ; and the school-boys 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 Hick- atJirift, yack the Giaut-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, Rob- COLERIDGE. 33 iiison Crusoe, and PJiilip Quarlcs ; and then I found the Arabian Nights' Entcrtainvients, one tale of which (the tale of a man who was com- pelled 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 J 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 char- acter. Sensibility, imagination, vanity, sloth, 3 34 COLERIDGE. and feelings of deep and bitter contempt for almost all who traversed the orbit of my un- derstanding, 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 v.'as ad- mitted into the Grammar School, and soon outstripped all of my age." Here is another relation of similar interest. Very rare are such autobiographic notes on the childhood of poets. How near were Chris- tabcl and the Ancient Marine}'- being sacrificed to that tender sensitiveness, that delicacy of cerebral fibre, out of which they grew ! " 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 cmimbly 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 favorite.' I re- turned, 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 hunc: over- him mourninsf aiid in a COLERIDGE. 35 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 stayed, 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 dis- tinctly 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, 36 COLERIDGE. and finding myself wet, and cold, and stiff, closed my eyes again that I might forget it. " In the mean time my mother waited about half an hour, expecting my return when the stilks 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 provi- dentially Sir Stafford Northcote, who had been out all night, resolved to make one other trial, and came so near that he heard me cry- ing. He carried me in his arms for nearly a COLERIDGE. 37 quarter of a mile, when we met my father and Sir Stafford Northcote's servants. I remem- ber, 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 outrage- ous with joy. Meantime in rushed a young lady, crying out, ' I hope you '11 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." One can see the worthy, tender-souled vicar, tears of joy stealing down his face. A terri- ble blow to him would have been the death of his dear little boy in that way, and a calamity to all whose language is English would have been the cutting short of a life so laden with literary genius. I beg to add to that of Cole- ridge my detestation — a by no means un- philosophical or irreligious feeling — of the "young lady" with the ready whip. This was a hundred years ago in custom-ridden Eng« 38 COLERIDGE. land. To our shame in America the rod is still legal in some of our public schools. Colts and cubs are trained and taught more effi- ciently through love than through fear. What then must be the diabolism of the rod applied to the young immortals of human kind .-' This excellent man, John Coleridge, vicar of Ottery St. Mary, and head-master of the King's school, died when his son, Samuel Tay- lor, was in his ninth year. Connected with his death are two incidents, curious enough to be retold. On his return from Plymouth (whither he had been to start his son Fran- cis for India as midshipman under Admiral Graves), arriving late in the afternoon at Exe- ter, some friends kindly pressed him to stay all night. He declined because, although, as he said, not superstitious, he had a dream the night before that Death had appeared to him and touched him with his dart. When he reached home the family were up to receive him, all except the youngest, Samuel Taylor, who was asleep in bed. The vicar was in fine spirits and apparently in good health, and told his wife his dream of the night before. On going to bed he complained of a pain in the bowels, to which he was subject. She gave COLERIDGE. 39 him some peppermint ; he lay down again, say- ing he was better. In a few moments his wife heard a noise in his throat, and spoke to him ; but he made no answer. Again she spoke, and again, without answer. Her shriek awoke Httle Samuel, who cried out, " Papa is dead !" Thirty years afterwards Coleridge, referring to the death of his father, exclaimed : " Oh ! 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." The death of his father made an important change in the schooling of Coleridge. Judge Buller, a friend and former pupil of the vicar, obtained for his son, Samuel Taylor, admission into Christ's Hospital, the celebrated blue-coat free school of London. Coleridge was about ten years of age when he went to London. Before entering Christ's Hospital he spent two months with his uncle, Mr. Bowdon. This visit is thus described by himself : " Mr. Bow- don 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 stayed ten weeks at his house, during which I went occasionally 40 COLERIDGE. 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." Within the walls of Christ's Hospital were then lodged seven hundred boys, one third of them, like Coleridge, the sons of clergymen. For boys, hardly less than for girls, a daily, hourly need is woman's care and affection. Of human life love is the very sun, that warms and swells it into bloom. For the opening feelings and faculties of childhood love does what solar rays do for the sprouting plant, that would wither and die without their down- streaming parental glow. By removal from the maternal fireside Coleridge was not en- tirely cut off from womanly tenderness. The numerous school was divided into twelve dor- mitories with a matron for each. Then there was, in those days, the head-master's wife, a woman with a heart large enough to be a motherly friend of all the boys. A grateful COLERIDGE. 4 1 memory of her Coleridge carried into his latest years ; only a short time before his death he thus spoke of her : " 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 thunder- ing 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." Here is also a reminiscence, from the same page of the Tabic Talk, of Bowyer him- self. " 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 ; Boy ! the school is your sister ; the school is your first cousin, and your second cousin, and all the rest of your rela- tions ! Let 's have no more crying ! ' " Nevertheless, Bowyer may be looked upon as one of the good fortunes of Coleridge's life. An admirable instructor, he was, what 42 COLERIDGE. is very rare in a professional pedagogue, a sound, penetrating critic, — a superiority of slight avail to the common run of boy-learners, but of profound service to one of uncommon literary capacity. Coleridge, among whose virtues was a cordial gratefulness, thus speaks of Bowyer in the BiograpJiia Literaria : "At* school (Christ's Hospital) I enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a very sensible, though at the same time a very severe, mas- ter, the Reverend James Bowyer. He early molded my taste to the preference of Demos- thenes 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 era : and on the ground 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 Shake- speare and Milton as lessons : and they were the lessons, too, which required most time and COLERIDGE. 43 trouble to bring up, so as to escape his cen- sure. I learned from him that poetry, even that of the loftiest and, seemingly, that of the 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 the truly great poets, he would say, there is a reason assignable, not only for every word, but for the position of every word ; and I well remember that, availing himself of the synonyms to the Homer of Didymus, he made us attempt to show, with regard to each, why it would not have Answered the same purpose, and wherein consisted the peculiar fitness of the word in the original text. " In our own English composition (at least for the last three years of our school educa- tion), he showed no mercy to phrase, metaphor, or image, unsupported by a sound sense, or where the same sense might have been con- veyed with equal force and dignity in plainer words. Ltiie, harp, and lyre. Muse, Muses, and inspirations, Pegasns, Parnassus, and Hippo- crene, were all an abomination to him." In his boyhood Coleridge was a gluttonous devourer of books, for thus may be translated 44 COLERIDGE. the phrase he applies to himself, helluo libro- nim. It was a diseased, omnivorous appetite. A characteristic incident opened the way for its boundless indulgence. Walking one day in the Strand with eyes half closed, the better to give play to his inward senses, he imagined himself Leander swimming the Hellespont, and making the motions to correspond, one of his little hands came in contact with the coat pocket of a gentleman, who, turning quickly, charged him with a design of pocket-picking, but, looking into his ingenuous face, accepted at once his denial, and, engaging him in talk, was so struck with his knowledge and intelli- gence that he made him free of a circulating library in King Street, CheaiDside. Here he was entitled to two volumes a day, and would steal out to get them. Then, crumpling him- self up into a sunny corner, he would read, read, read! "Conceive," he says, "what I must have been at fourteen." At fifteen "I had bewildered myself in metaphysics and in theologic controversy." So immersed and fas- cinated was he that nothing else pleased him. History and particular facts lost all interest to his mind. Poetry, and even novels and ro- mances, became insipid. In his wanderings COLERIDGE. 45 on leavc-days, his greatest delight was to get into conversation with any passer, especially if he were dressed in black, for he soon di- rected the talk to his favorite subjects, " Of providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate, Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute. And found no end, in wandering mazes lost." In after years Coleridge deplored the effects of getting absorbed into these abstruse argu- ments, which, he says, " exercise the strength and subtlety of the understanding without awakening the feelings of the heart." From this unwholesome pursuit he was withdrawn, partly by the accidental introduction to an amiable family, but chiefly by the poetry of Bowles, the tenderness and naturalness of which were well fitted to attract and influence at that time a precocious, genial boy. From want of direction what waste of a great mind's resources in its early overflow ! In the budding season genius needs sympa- thetic guidance, tender supervision ; but where, in our actual organization, is to be had the in- sight and the sympathy t These are at pres- ent little available for this fine function. As schools go, a Coleridge was in rare luck to 46 COLERIDGE. have fallen into the hands of a genuine critic like Bowyer. To have founded at Christ's Hospital such a friendship as that with Charles Lamb was another piece of good fortune. In his reminiscences of these school-days Lamb exclaims : — " Come back into memory, like as thou wast 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 ! How have I seen the casual passer through the cloister stand still, intranced with admiration (while he weighed the disproportion between the speech and the garb of the young Mirandola) to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of lamblichus, or Plotinus (for even in those years thou waxed not pale at such philosophic draughts), or re- citing Homer in his Greek, or Pindar, — while the walls of the old Grey Friars reechoed to the accents of the inspired charity boy! " By his scholarship and acquirement at Christ's Hospital, during his long abode there of eight years, Coleridge earned an appoint- ment, by the head-master, to Cambridge, He was eighteen years of age when he entered COLERIDGE. 47 Jesus College. In the summer of 1791, only a few months after his entrance, he gained the gold medal for the Greek Ode. But at Cam- bridge, as at Christ's Hospital, he was a vo- racious reader of miscellaneous books rather than a close . student of the college course. Mathematics were neglected. He took little exercise. His delight was to talk, and this, from his school-days to the last year of his life, was his chief daily enjoyment. Taking into account the range of his knowl- edge and of his sympathies, his flow of fittest words and sure memory, the poetic light aglow within him, which gave a captivating luminous- ness to all the currents of his affluent mind, together with the innate logical exaction that kept these currents within their proper banks, and recalling the joyful facility he always had in the oral pouring forth of his rich accumula- tions, and not less rich postulations, it may be believed that Coleridge was the most eloquent and eminent and instructive talker told of in literature. This gift was a magnet that at Cambridge drew such of his fellow-students as had enough in them to enjoy good talk, and made the room of Coleridge ("the ground-floor room' on the 48 COLERIDGE. right hand of the staircase facing the great gate ") a constant rendezvous, says one of the frequenters. Those were angry times. By the heat of the French Revolution, then at boihng point, were fast engendered passionate pamphlets. Ever and anon came one from Burke. There was no need, says this reporter, to have the book present : Coleridge had read it in the morning, and could repeat whole pages in the evening verbatim. The talk and studies had a strange inter- ruption. In the autumn of 1793, from de- spondency on account of some debts, aggra- vated, it is believed, by a love-affair, Coleridge suddenly left Cambridge for London. The few shillings in his pocket were soon spent, and, attracted by a recruiting-advertisement, he en- listed as a private in the Fifteenth Regiment of Light Dragoons. This extraordinary step — a leap in the dark downwards — should not be hastily im- puted to the eccentricity of genius. Genius, as the originator, the initiator, in human af- fairs, is eccentric, flashing into new paths, into fresh domains, hereby giving proof of its superiority through its eccentricity. To be sure, it is liable to minor exhibitions, which COLERIDGE. 49 are neither tokens of its worth nor useful to mankind. But this sudden move on the part of Coleridge was due to a kind of lawlessness caused by want of strength to tighten the cords that control that helm of man's life, a prac- tical, resolute will. It came from the man, not from the poet. This kind of eccentricity Wordsworth never would have given in to, nor Shelley, nor Byron, nor Keats, nor Milton, nor Shakespeare. Of a more passive nature than any of these, his great compeers, was Cole- ridge, with less faculty of self-direction. Poets are, of course, and according to the degree of their creative force, more liable than other men to impulsions from within ; but such pro- jection is on planes of thought, not on planes of action,- and in Coleridge this poetic sensibil- ity was not accompanied by a strong enough sense of the import of outward movements in the daily prosaic world of roofs and meals un- der them. When asked his name by the enlisting of- ficer, Coleridge answered, Qimberback, a name, he says, his horse would have deemed most suitable, so little equestrian were his habits. To preserve his proper initials, to this he prefixed Silas Titus. For bad riding and 4 50 COLERIDGE. worse grooming he made amends in the troop by nursing the sick and writing letters for the well. He was a dragoon for four months. One day an officer found freshly written with pencil on the stable door : " EJieii ! qiiarn in- fort7inii miserrimum est fuisse fclicem ! " The writer was discovered to be Cumberback, whose condition the words suited so well. But the termination of his military career was brought about through his being recognized by an ac- quaintance on the street in Reading, where the regiment was stationed. Information being given to his family, he was, after some diffi- culty, discharged on the loth of April, 1794. III. An eventful year was 1794 to Coleridge. He went back to the University, and in the summer-vacation started with a companion for a tour in Wales, stopping on the way in Ox- ford to see a friend. Here he met Robert Southey. The two genial young men took to each other warmly. The minds of both were buoyant with literary projects, alight with sunny hopes. Both were hungry for knowl- edge, eager to sharpen their minds on other minds ; both were aglow with refined aspira- tions. Only a keen-sighted observer could then, in their effervescent young manhood, have perceived how radically diverse were the mental structures of these two. The one was to be a versatile, contemporaneous, literary purveyor, J:he other was destined to rank among the world's profoundest thinkers, a man whose thinking will be precious to future ages ; the one a voluminous, clever versifier, the other a richly-gifted, exquisite poet. The comparatively shallow mind of the one could 52 COLERIDGE. impart little to the deep creative resources of the other. Nevertheless, through his prudent, methodical, industrious living, and through his generosity and affectionateness, the versatile litterateur Southey was enabled in after years to give shelter for some time to the family of the profound, original, thriftless Coleridge. Not the literary fruit it bore gave signifi- cance to the meeting with Southey, but its practical consequences to the life of Coleridge ; for it designated the ticket he took in the lot- tery of marriage. After his excursion into Wales he went to Bristol by appointment with Southey, who here introduced him to Lovell, a young Quaker, just married to Mary Fricker, through whom Coleridge got acquainted with Sarah, her elder sister, who shortly after be- came his wife, Southey marrying a third sis- ter, Edith. Under the aspiring impulse which has, at different periods, moved other young men to make an effort to emerge out of th^ injustices and artificialities and multiform egoisms of the actual, very imperfect, social organiza- tion, and create around them a healthier, less smothery, self-loaded atmosphere, these three friends formed a plan to found in America, on COLERIDGE. 53 the banks of the Susquehanna, a community one of whose predominant principles should be the abolition of individual property. The project came to nothing: it was another pro- test against existing social relations, another sigh for emancipation from obstructive, debas- ing slaveries, the chains of which, being self- imposed, will some day be shattered. The possibilities of man, even in his earthly sphere, are almost infinite. From the customs, ways, conditions of Timbuctoo who could infer the conditions and institutions, political, legal, mor- al, social, aesthetical, of London or Paris or New York .■* Out of human upreachings and mental capabilities will be evolved social and industrial conditions to which those that the most advanced of Christendom now enjoy will seem as crude and insufficient as do to us those of Timbuctoo. And this will be achieved by cultivated aspiring thought, working under the sway of a sympathetic discoverer. In the beginning of September Coleridge quitted Bath, where Southey then was, and where the Fricker family lived, and went back for the last time to Cambridge. Here he pub- lished The Fall of Robespierre, in part written by Southey, a tragedy whose chief interest is 54 COLERIDGE. that it was the first poem published by Cole- ridge, whose genius was hardly more dramatic than that of his friend Wordsworth. More- over, the play was written in the very year of the overwhelming event it commemorates, an event so deeply active as to shake a poet's fac- ulties out of the moral calm which is a cardinal condition for poetic creativeness. Moreover, Coleridge's part, a third of the whole and about three hundred lines, was written in two days. On leaving the University, where he took no degree, Coleridge entered manhood vigor- ously and resolutely, devoting the spring and summer of 1795 to giving lectures in Bristol. The first six presented a comparative view of the Civil War under Charles I. and the French Revolution, their spirit vehemently hostile to the policy of Pitt, but at the same time anti- Jacobinical. Another course of six lectures followed on "Revealed Religion, its Corrup- tions and its Political Views," written in the Unitarian spirit. In his school-boy days of omnivorous reading Coleridge had coquetted with skepticism, which the stout Bowyer looked upon as a breach of the rules, demanding, not an appeal to the brain with argument, but an application of birch to a less noble part. In COLERIDGE. 55 his early manhood Coleridge preached occa- sionally in a Unitarian chapel in Taunton, and with such eloquence as to draw crowded au- diences. His Unitarianism lasted but a few years, and his relapse into Orthodoxy cost him the good will of Unitarians, they never recov- ering from the disappointment of having failed to secure, after hooking, this lively leviathan. Their spite they show by a studied deprecia- tion, of Coleridge, which in people of so much culture cannot be wholly sincere, — a depre- ciation which is costly, inasmuch as it closes or dims to them the pages of one of the rich- est writers and largest thinkers of all the ages. On the 4th of October, 1795, Coleridge was married to Sarah Fricker. They went to re- side for a time at Clevedon on the Bristol Channel. This was not- a well assorted union. Cole- ridge, with inordinate development of the rea- soning, emotional, and poetic mental elements, with deficiency of the determinative and the self-seeking impulses, needed in his life-partner the supplementary gifts of energy and will, to make out of two halves a prosperous conjugal whole. These gifts Mrs. Coleridge does not seem to have possessed in force enough to 56 COLERIDGE. counteract the practical inertness of her hus- band, to inspirit him under failures and dis- couragement. With a mind so far ranging, original, poetical, as was that of Coleridge, full sympathy was not to be looked for, nor was it necessary on the part of his wife ; but Mrs. Coleridge seems to have had none. In this re- spect his friend Wordsworth was far more fa- vored, not to speak of his noble sister, who was a second life-partner, and an especial men- tal helpmate. Nor was Wordsworth deficient where Coleridge was : he had a shrewd busi- ness talent. When, some years after Jeffrey's impotent attempt to crush Wordsworth as a poet, they first met, at a dinner-party in Lon- don, Jeffrey said that had he not been told who it was, he should have taken Wordsworth for a knowing man of the world. Three days after his marriage Coleridge, his mind brimming with happiness and hope, wrote from Clevedon to a friend, that "from their cottage he had a variegated land and sea view. Those were Coleridge's few halcyon days. His lovely bride was within the cot- tage ; his young, earnest brain teemed with confident purposes. His plan then was to re- turn to Cambridge, finish " my great work on COLERIDGE. 57 ImitationeSy^ and then issue a prospectus for a school. There was some project of a monthly- magazine. But that, he says in the letter, he gives up as " a thing of monthly anxiety and quotidian bustle." This was written on the 7th of October, 1795. And yet, in Decem- ber, only a few weeks later, he set zealous- ly about to establish a weekly journal to be called The WatcJinian. The design in estab- lishing The WatcJivian was set forth in its motto : tJiat all might knozv the truth and that the truth might wake us fire. Not only so, but with a pocket full of flaming prospectuses, Coleridge sallied forth in his own person to get subscribers. In these years of his early manhood Coleridge was a Liberal (not a Rad- ical) in politics and a Unitarian in religion. The canvassing for the paper (think of the author of Christabel thus engaged ! ) he en- tered upon in Birmingham, and his first appeal was .to a rigid Calvinist, a tallow-chandler, a tall, dingy man, with lank, dark, hard counte- nance. But he was a true lover of liberty, and had proved to the satisfaction of many that Mr. Pitt was one of the horns of the second Beast in The Revelation, that spake as a drag- on. After uttering some imperfect sentences 58 COLERIDGE. his introducer, a citizen of Birmingham, gave the cause into the hands of his principal. De- termined that no pains should be spared on his part, and that he would present his case ex- haustively, Coleridge commenced an harangue of half an hour, varying his notes through the whole gamut of eloquence "from the ratioci- native to the declamatory, and in the latter from the pathetic to the indignant. I argued, I described, I promised, I prophesied ; and be- ginning with the captivity of nations I ended with the near approach of the millennium, fin- ishing the whole with some of my own verses, describing the glorious state, out of Religions Musingsy He thus concludes the humorous scene : " My taper man of lights listened with perseverant and praiseworthy patience, though, as I was afterwards told, on complain- ing 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 four-pence,' — (Oh ! how I felt the anti-climax, the abys- mal bathos of that four-pence !) — ' only four- pence, 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 COLERIDGE. 59 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 docs 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 offense, I hope, sir, I must beg to be excused.' " Coleridge made but one more attempt in person to get subscribers, and that is described, in the tenth chapter of the Biographia Lite- raria, as amusingly as the first. At Birmingham he preached twice to im- mense audiences. In a letter to his friend Wade of Bristol he tells him : " My sermons (in great part extempore) were preciously pep- pered with politics. I have here at least double the number of subscribers I expected." Indeed, TJie Watchman might have been suc- cessful but for the procrastinating habits and the constitutional inertness, as to outward things, of Coleridge. Moreover, he was subject to fits of deep melancholy, during which he was like a man imprisoned who has no hope of liberty. 6o COLERIDGE. From Lichfield, towards the close of the canvassing tour, he wrote to Wade a letter concluding thus characteristically : " 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 mis- managed 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 stepmother 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 aching 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. 6 1 At Lichfield he would make no effort to get subscribers, because he might thereby injure the sale of TJie Iris, " the editor of which," he writes, " 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 pub- licly advertising or disposing of TJic Watchman in that town." On returning to Bristol Coleridge spent February in getting ready his first volume of poems. Mr. Cottle of Bristol had given him thirty guineas for the copyright. At the same time he was preparing the first number of The Watchmaji, to be issued on the ist of March. And his wife was ill. On the 22d of February, 1796, he writes to his friend Cottle a plaintive, despondent, touching letter, which opens thus : " It is my duty and busi- ness to thank God for all his dispensations, and to believe them the best possible ; but, in- deed, I think I should have been more thank- ful if he had made me a journeyman shoe- maker instead of an author by trade." After a few lines he continues : " I am forced to write for bread — write the flights of poetic enthusiasm, when every minute I am hearing 62 COLERIDGE. a groan from my wife ! Groans, and com- plaints, 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. Pov- erty, 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 be- forehand.' — O wayward and desultory spirit of Genius, ill canst thou brook a taskmaster ! The tenderest touch from the hand of obliga- tion wounds thee like a scourge of scorpi- ons ! " The letter concludes as follows : " If I have written petulantly, forgive me. God knows I am sore all over. God bless you ! and be- lieve me that, setting gratitude aside, I love and esteem you, and have your interest at heart full as much as my own." The Watchman mounted guard over the public welfare punctually on the ist of March. . 'On its score Coleridge soon began to receive anonymous letters. One of these ran thus : "Sir, I detest your principles; your prose I COLERIDGE. 63 think so so ; but your poetry is so beautiful that I take in your Watchman solely on ac- count 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." Alas ! The WatcJiman kept its high watch for hardly three months. With the tenth num- ber it ceased to appear. Just before its de- cease Coleridge wrote to his friend Thomas Poole : "6^ WatcJiman, thoii hast zvatcJied in vain ! said the prophet Ezekiel, when, I sup- pose, he was taking a prophetic glimpse of my sorrow-sallowed cheeks." Poole was to Coleridge not only a sympa- thizing and generous, but an intellectually re- sponsive, friend, to whom he pours out his thoughts and feelings so confidentially and freely that his letters to Poole have the frank- ness and fullness and the naivete of a man thinking aloud or speaking to himself. From one written in November, 1796, the following is an important passage : — " I wanted such a letter as yours, for I arri very unwell. On Wednesday night I was seized with an intolerable pain from my right temple to the tip of my right shoulder, includ- 64 COLERIDGE. ing my right eye, cheek, jaw, and that side of the throat. I was nearly frantic, and ran about the house almost naked, endeavoring by every means to excite sensation in different parts of my body, and so to weaken the enemy by creat- ing 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 vio- lently, several times on Thursday, and began severer threats towards night ; but I took be- tween sixty and seventy drops of laudanum, and sopped the Cerberus just as his mouth be- gan 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 Corrica, 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 trans- pierced 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 exact- ness under the focus of some invisible burn- COLERIDGE. 6$ ing-glass, which concentrated all the rays of a Tartarean sun. My medical attendant decides it to be altogether nervous, and that it origi- nates either in severe application, or excessive anxiety. My beloved Poole, in excessive anx- iety I believe it might originate. I have a blister under my right ear, and I take twenty- five drops of laudanum every five hours, the ease and si^irits gained by which have enabled me to write to you this flighty, but not exag- gerating, account." Here then was Coleridge's first acquaint- ance with this smiling sycophantic demon, masked in the guise of a helper. How many thousands of drunkards have been begotten by unsanctified prescriptions of alcohol in cases of disease ! Certain constitutions are pecul- iarly liable to be thus permanently poisoned. Coleridge was of a lymphatic temperament. And when, in addition, we recollect how, in his tenth year, he was taken about by his uncle from tavern to tavern in London, during several weeks, "where," he relates, "I drank and talked and disputed as if I had been a man," it behooves us, when we come to the disabling effects of opium in Coleridge's mid- dle life, to be liberal of that charity we ovve to 5 66 COLERIDGE. all men, and to use an exceptional degree of forbearance towards one who was not stoutly organized and who was exceptionally afflicted and tempted. The seeds of those agonizing neuralgic at- tacks may have, been planted when, a child of six years, he lay out all night on the damp ground. On another occasion, several years later, while at Christ's Hospital, he swam across a stream in his clothes and let them dry on him. At no time of his life had Cole- ridge quite an average share of the homely virtue, prudence. He was better equij^ped with wings than with legs : he could soar to the region, and revel there, where broad vis- ionary reason overlooks and rules human af- fairs, but he could not walk steadily among them, providing for the smaller wants of the day. In few superior men has the spirit been more clogged by the body than in Coleridge. Irksome to him were the stoopings, the declen- sions, that have to be made to meet the neces- sities of the bodily being. Of him might partly be said what was spoken of Joubert by one of his lady friends, "that he seemed to be a soul that by accident had met with a body and tries to make the best of it." COLERIDGE. 67 In this partnership between soul and body, not only is the soul the head of the firm, as furnishing the capital which gives credit and power to the house, but to it is due any popu- larity and acceptability the house enjoys. To his reach and liveliness of soul Coleridge owed not merely the significance and attractiveness of his writings, prose and verse, but also his personal fascination, which was always re- markable, and which, in these the days of his first failures, became the source of nourishing streams. The noble Thomas Poole, drawn to him by the charm of his genius and conver- sation, was serviceable to Coleridge in other ways than through the sympathy he gave the poet and thinker, rare and precix)us as was to Coleridge that sympathy. A little later the two brothers Wedgwood, inventors and pros- perous manufacturers of a new tasteful delft ware, through admiration of Coleridge, be- stowed on him an annuity of one hundred and fifty pounds, which continued many years, and the half of which he enjoyed till towards the end of his life. In that day one hundred and fifty pounds a year was a very substantial con- tribution to the housekeeping fund of a young married couple. Wordsworth began on a hun- dred pounds. 68 COLERIDGE. A few years later still, De Quincey, just come of age, moved by admiration of the genius and extraordinary mental powers of Coleridge, made him an anonymous gift of three hundred pounds, through the interme- dium of a common friend, Cottle, the book- seller of Bristol. A most timely relief was this generous gift, for Coleridge was then much embarrassed and depressed, notwith- standing that a short time before he had re- ceived in one year eight hundred pounds as Secretary to the Governor of Malta. A good story is told by Coleridge of him- self and a Jew. More than usually annoyed one day in London by the nasal monotony of a crier of old .clothes, he went up to him and said : " Pray, why can't you say Old Clothes as I do ? " The Jew stopped, and looking gravely at his reprover, said in a clear and even fine tone : " 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 : " and then walked on. So confounded was Coleridge by the justice of the retort, that he ran after the man, and gave him a shilling, the only one he had. That shilling being the last is as characteristic as COLERIDGE. 69 •the generous impulse to give it to the wfonged Jew, Money burned in Coleridge's pocket. It may be doubted whether, with his organiza- tion, any probable provision — say an annuity of four hundred pounds instead of one hun- dred and fifty pounds — would have secured him against occasional pinching for want of a guinea or a shilling. Some grandly gifted men are irremediably thus constituted. Dan- iel Webster was also a victim of this magnani- mous impecuniosity, which has a noble air of large-handedness in contrast with the minute meannesses of avarice, but which closes the hand to many a generous opportunity, and constrains an honorable man to doings that bring a blush to his cheek. Coleridge was a rich-toned, sonorous, high-wrought harp, with some of the strings incorrigibly unstrung. IV. Notable years in the life of Coleridge were 1797 and 1798. In 1797 he took a house in Nether Stowey, near the TBristol Channel, and Wordsworth established himself at Alfoxden, a pleasant country-house among the Quantoc hills, in order to be near him. The friendship between Goethe and Schiller was entered upon when Goethe was in his forty-fifth and Schiller in his thirty-iifth year, and, though begun at so comparatively late a period, was prolific of good to both. Close con- tact with a younger aspiring poet rekindled in Goethe his poetic fires, which for some time had been smoldering. Schiller's intellectual horizon was enlarged by the far outlook and experience of his friend, while his poetic aims gained in definiteness and fidelity. When Wordsworth and Coleridge became intimate friends Coleridge was in his twenty-sixth year, and Wordsworth two years older. To both the brilliant boundless realm of poetry was un- folding its unspeakable attractions. And so COLERIDGE. 7 1 on the mind of his companion each beheld mirrored objects and vistas in this reahii, the whole wondrous region was doubly illuminated. What Coleridge thought, twenty years later, of the poetic faculty and performance of Words- worth is recorded in several successive chap- ters of the BiograpJiia Literai'ia, chapters which embody some of the truest and highest criti- cism, and as profound an exposition of aes- thetic principles as was ever written. So intimate was at this time between Words- worth and Coleridge interchange of thought, so cordial their association, so close their aes- thetic concord, that they undertook to write a poem conjointly. Of this the impracticability showed itself at the very outset. In a great poet the current of inspiration flows from too individual a spring and with too strong a mo- mentum to accommodate itself to the move- ment of another inspiration ; and when that other is as fresh and vigorous as its own, the two poets at once discover that between them there can be no cooperation upon the same poem. When to talent more than to genius is due the efficiency of two poets, such coopera- tion may be successful. In Coleridge and Wordsworth genius used talent as its instru- 72 COLERIDGE. ment ; and it was owing to deficiency of talent in certain directions that Wordsworth's genius was not more effective. This was the era of the Lyrical Ballads. If genius forbade the combining of their poetic forces for a joint achievement, by their contact and congenial converse the genius of each was enlivened and inflamed, and empowered for in- dependent effort. Now it was that Coleridge produced the poems commented upon in the opening chapter. Of these poems a character- istic is their objectivity. The French Revolu- tion, and the mental movement which engen- dered it, developed, stimulated individuality. The more susceptive the mind, the more liable was it to be rapt into this cyclone of thought and feeling, which promised to sweep away all barriers and obstructions to individual free- dom. Poets were filled, inspired, by the prom- ises of the time. In Wordsworth subjectiv- ity took the form of sympathy for the poor, which was a broad and noble feature of the new spirit. In him this influence was facili- tated by the republican and primitive habits of Cumberland and Westmoreland, where he was born and brought up. At the same time his intense self-consciousness made it easy, nay, ^ COLERIDGE. 73 inevitable, for him to imbue his poetry with his personality. On every page of Shelley, who came two decades later, the noblest feat- ure in the movement of the age is impressed, in the form of fiery jorotest against tyranny, of a deep yearning for emancipation. In Byron's verse much of the restlessness and tumult of the age finds expression ; but it is through the strength of his egoism that he is the most sub- jective of the brilliant band of poets of that upheaving period. His Laras and Giaours and CJiilde Harolds are but superficially variegated reduiDlications of himself. Some people have not enough of disinter- ested sympathy, of generic breadth, to be able to swing themselves beyond the circuit of their individuality. They get at last to be imjDris- oned in themselves, — the most awful form of solitary confinement. Byron is the poetic rep- resentative of this self-entombed class. He is the opposite of Shakespeare. Byron's per- sonages are mirrors in which he sees himself ; Shakespeare is himself a mirror, in which his personages are reflected. Shakespeare is in all his personages because all humanity is in him. How unlike Byron is to Shakespeare let himself declare. In the Introduction to 74 COLERIDGE. Sardanapahis is this sentence : " You will find all this very ?/wlike Shakespeare ; and so much the better in one sense, for I look upon him to be the worst of models, though the most ex- traordinary of writers. It has been my object to be as simple and severe as Alfieri, and I have broken down the poetry as nearly as I could to common language." Here is subjec- tivity with a vengeance ! That " ?^;/like Shake- speare " came from a thought, and not a mo- mentary thought, of likeness. Shakespeare is not called the greatest of poets, but the most extraordinary of writers. The greatest of poets is another Englishman. To reject Shakespeare as a bad model, and take the juiceless Alfieri as a good one! Were this a study of Byron, pages of comment might be written on this one characteristic, most signifi- cant passage. The opposite of Byron in feeling towards Shakespeare, Coleridge had not the jDresump- tion to be jealous of the mightiest of poets. He kindled his own great faculties to their brightest to pour light upon the master's page in rich, most discriminative eulogy. Straining to make admiration come up to Shakespeare's unparalleled performance, he coined a grand COLERIDGE. 75 new epithet to be applied solely to him, — myriad-in inded. Like Shakespeare himself, and unlike By- ron, was Coleridge in the objectivity of his mind's movement. His was not a nature that is self-busied while depicting imaginary per- sons and scenes. In presence of large or lively themes, the self in him was effaced. In its poetic flights, his imagination freed itself from personality. This was not owing to the largeness of his intellect, or to the power of his poetic imagination, but to the sobriety of his self-seeking impulses. Coleridge was the opposite of a self-sufficient man ; there was no assumption, no arrogance, in him. In Words- worth there was, and in Byron inordinate van- ity ; and these were largely the sources of their subjectivity as poets, — a subjectivity dif- fering in quality and degree in the two, being more intense in Byron, saturating most of his poems with himself, while imbuing many of Wordsworth's with the spirit of the times. Now in CJiristabel, The Ancient Mariner, and Knbla Khan there is not a trace, neither of the yearnings and asjDirations of the French Revolution period, nor of personal characteris- tics. They belong to no age or country ; their 'jfS COLERIDGE. personages and conditions, while warmly hu- man, have on them no soilure of the earth ; they are woven out of poetic sunbeams. They are creations of imaginative potency, more sparkling with the ethereal essence of poetic life than any product from any of his great contemporaries, except Shelley. The friendship between Wordsworth and Coleridge led to their making a trip to Ger- many together. Coleridge had at times in his mind the vision of a select school to be kept by him. To accomplish himself more thor- oughly for this duty was part of his motive for going to Germany and Gottingen. The school never came to be more than a scheme. Coleridge was a man of unexecuted projects in practical life, in philosophy, and in poetry. The difference between the ease and rapidity of imaginary work — especially to a mind so copious and creative as his — and the labor and slowness of execution, the difference be- tween building in the brain and building on the ground, was never more distinctly exhib- ited than in the case of Coleridge. But, unlike most visionaries, there was solidity as well as splendor in his thoughts. So stored are these with learning and knowledge, and, what is bet- COLERIDGE. 77 ter than either, with wisdom, that his volumes are among the most valuable, as well as the most brilliant, in our language, I was at Gottingen a quarter of a century later than Coleridge. Professor and Librarian Benecke, my very capable teacher of German, then a man of nearly sixty, told me that when the Confessions of an Opinm-Eater appeared, he attributed it to Coleridge, because when at Gottingen he took opium. The terrible drug, taken at first as medicine, transformed from a soother of pain into a syren of destruction, had now laid its enduring spell upon another illus- trious victim. Benecke related how Coleridge, shortly after his arrival, would declaim in German one of Klopstock's odes, mystifying his English fellow- students into the belief that he had mastered it. But Coleridge, before going to Gottingen, had passed several weeks at Ratzeburg, daily busied, no doubt, with dictionary and gram- mar. Before he went to Germany, Coleridge, as we have seen, had written some of his best poems. Wordsworth thought that by his visit to Germany he was drawn astray from poetry into metaphysics. By learning German he 78 COLERIDGE. was enabled to read Kant and Schelling ; but it appears that he did not give in to the study of them until some years later, Superior as well as inferior men are liable to all kinds of influences, sometimes injurious influences ; but is a man of the high poetic originality, the deep inwardness, of Coleridge likely to be in- juriously affected, to the degree that Words- worth affirms, by external attractions ? We have seen how, even in his boyhood, he be- came absorbed in speculative thinkers. He had a metaphysical as well as a poetic genius. To regret that he did not write more Christa- bels and Ancient Mariners were not only idle, but ungrateful. Few writers have left to their fellow-men so much that is good as Coleridge has. Not only should we thankfully hug what he has given, without grumbling that he gave no more, but it were perhaps wise to conclude that he gave us all he had to give. A lesser poet could not have written Christabel, from defect of poetic imagination. Coleridge left Christabel unfinished, from defect of other qualities than poetic imagination. Had he possessed these qualities to the degree he did that, they would have rounded him to a super- human perfection. Some of his inherent inev- COLERIDGE. "Ji) itable human deficiency lay behind the opium and hfted it to his lips. The first fruit of his German studies was a translation of Schiller's Wallcnstein, a trilogy, the three parts being Wallcnstein s Camp, The Piccoltiomini, and Wallenstchi s Death. The Camp is introductory, is written in rhyme, and depicts the heterogeneous character and the lawlessness of Wallenstein's army, together with its devotion to and belief in its General. This Coleridge did not translate on account of the difficulty of rendering it with fidelity and at the same time with spirit. TJie Piccoluo- vii]ii and Wallenstein's Death are two separate plays, each of five acts. Without aiming to detract from the great merit of Schiller's mas- terpiece, I cannot but think that, had the two plays been compressed into one under the name of Wallenstein, a more intense, a higher and more poetical, work of Art might have been produced. Schiller has the rare good fortune to have his greatest drama translated into a cognate tongue by one who, himself a poet, executed his labor of love with the zeal of genius. Cole- ridge is, indeed, superior, both as poet and as thinker, to Schiller himself. The translation, 80 COLERIDGE. made from manuscript, was published in Lon- don simultaneously with the original in Ger- many. Coleridge was probably hurried, in or- der to be up to time. There are frequent marks of haste, especially in the want of con- densation, and in the use of polysyllabic Latin- English, instead of monosyllabic Saxon-Eng- lish. The translation had hardly any sale, and so Coleridge had no opportunity for remedy- ing the defects caused by haste. V. When Coleridge, at the close of the last century, returned from Germany, armed with a new language and a new literature, he was in his twenty-ninth year, he was in the bloom of an uncommonly rich young manhood. Into the lively arena, where great principles were then interlocked in a death -grapple, no man in England of that wakeful period brought more mental force, more intellectual accomplishment. Mr. Stuart, the active, able conductor of The Morning Post, for which paper Coleridge was engaged to write, declared, many years after, in reviewing his connection with Coleridge at that period : " To write the leading para- graph of a newspaper I would prefer Cole- ridge to Mackintosh^ Burke, or any man I ever heard of. His observations not only were confirmed by good sense, but displayed ex- tensive knowledge, deep thought, and well- grounded foresight ; they were so brilliantly ornamented, so classically delightful. They were the writings of a scholar, a gentleman, 6 82 COLERIDGE. and a statesman, without personal sarcasm or illiberality of any kind. But when Coleridge wrote in his study without being- pressed, he wandered and lost himself. He should always have had the printer's devil at his elbow with Sir, the printers want copy!' Irresolution caused by bad health is not enough to account for the failures of Cole- ridge. He seems to have been deficient in what the phrenologists call concentrativeness, the faculty of holding the intellect continu- ously to its task. Opium, no doubt, had some- thing to do with the inaptitude for steady work. The pretended cure for disease be- came the generator of worse disease. The want of will to resist the fascination of the dis- guised demon gave this demon the power to dethrone an ill-guarded will. On another oc- casion, a few years later, speaking of what Coleridge wrote for The Courier about the war in Spain, Mr. Stuart said : " Could Coleridge have written the leading paragraph daily his services would have been invaluable, but an occasional essay could produce little effect." From a successful conductor of London daily newspapers this is strong testimony as to the capability of Coleridge. To those who COLERWGE. 83 now read his prose-volumes, with that high enjoyment imparted by the pages of Plato, drawing from him the calm inspiration of pro- found and spiritual thoughtfulness, it seems almost incredible that the same man was able to produce, in their most effective potency, those stirring paragraphs best fitted to spur men's minds to instant action. In 1804 Coleridge, on account of ill health, and to visit a friend, made a voyage to Malta. Here he became intimate with a superior man. Sir Alexander Ball, Governor of Malta, who made Coleridge for a time his secretary. From Malta he went to Rome, where he met Allston. Congenial spirits were these two, both splendidly gifted, richly poetical as well as intellectual, and both spiritually-minded. Two or three years before he died, Allston, in his studio at Cambridgeport, on my mention- ing Coleridge, spoke of him with revereace as well as intense admiration : " The greatest man that ever I accosted." In uttering these words his voice fell and his manner grew al- most solemn, as though for the moment his vision had before it his great friend. Other eminent contemporaries who came in contact with him (and the closer the contact the 84 COLERIDGE. Stronger the impression) were similarly im- pressed by his presence and converse. Charles Lamb, who admired not less than he loved Coleridge, called him, with Lamb's peculiar humor, " an archangel a little damaged." The scholarly, eloquent De Quincey, with a dash of that polished exaggeration into which he is occasionally seduced, speaks of him as " the largest and most spacious intellect, the subtlest 'and most comprehensive, in my judgment, that has yet existed amongst men." Wordsworth says : " The only wonderful man I ever knew was Coleridge," Coleridge quitted Rome suddenly, on a con- fidential hint that Napoleon had ordered his arrest. That such an order was given has been denied, on the ground that the King-crush- ing Emperor would not have condescended to notice the then unknown private English- man. But Napoleon was as minute as he was unscrupulous in the instrumentalities of his despotism, and had all the hate and dread in- stinctive to despots, of independent thinkers and bold men of genius, — a feeling deepened in this case by his hatred of England. His spies and informers were everywhere. In 1802 and 1803 Coleridge wrote in The Morning Posi COLERIDGE. 85 against him, and we know how watchful Na- poleon was, especially in those years of transi- tion, of the London newspapers, and how sen- sitive to their comments. The order may not have been issued, but the reason cited above for its non-issue is assuredly unsound. Coleridge, acting on the hint given him, made his way to Leghorn, where he took pas- sage in an American vessel bound to England. They were chased by a French cruiser, and the captain obliged Coleridge to throw over board his papers, — a precautionary measure not creditable to the captain of the American merchantman, and one less likely to be re- sorted to in 1876 than in 1806. Coleridge thus lost all the notes he had taken at Rome. On returning to England he went back to reside at Keswick, where he had left his family on starting for Malta. At this period he was again much with Wordsworth, who then had a cottage at Grasmere, thirteen miles from Kes- wick. To one so poetically gifted, so richly endowed, so highly cultivated, this decade of his life, between his thirty-fifth and forty-fifth years, ought to have been, and might have oeen, a period of joyous mental activity and productiveness and manful expansion. But 86 COLER/DGE. Coleridge was restless, unhappy, irresolute, de- pressed. For years he was the sorrowful, ab- ject slave to opium. By this accursed habit his health and spirits were blasted, his plans frustrated, his undertakings baffled, his use- fulness crippled, his conscience seared. En- gaged by the Royal Society to deliver a course of lectures on Poetry and Art, the intelligent, refined audience had sometimes to be dismissed on the plea of the sudden illness of the lect- urer. The performance of his duties at the Courier office, where he was engaged to write, was irregular. Coleridge, clogged in his movement by this impure habit, is as though an eagle, snatching from the ground a polecat, should become so infatuated with its odor as not to be able to drop it when he found his flight impeded. — This starts a reflection. The eagle, though by his size and strength, by the elevation and range of his winged sweep, the first among the fowls of the air, is a bird of prey. So there are human beings, and some among the strong- est, who are men of prey. Foremost among these was Bonaparte, and therefore most fitting it was that he should adopt as his Imperial emblem the eagle, borrowing it from Rome. COLERIDGE. 8/ Rome, as a conquering nation, is to be classed among animals of prey. Thence the eagle is not a suitable emblem for the United States, for we are not a conquering nation. Our aims are other than the ravenous devouring of neighbors, and, to bring our national emblem into harmony with our nature and principles, we should discard a carnivorous bird of prey, leaving the eagle to Prussia and Austria and Russia, all of whom have with a sound instinct chosen it ; leaving, too, to England her prowl- ing, voracious lion. — To return to Coleridge, from whom this eagle-flight has borne us away. Through TJie Watc/unan, a dozen years ear- lier, he had had proof of his unfitness to con- duct a paying periodical work, — an unsuita- bleness due to the deep alternations in his health and spirits, to his procrastinating hab- its, to the elevated range and ideal aim of his thoughts. Untaught by this trial, about the year 1810 he issued the first number of The Friend, the object of which was to present and unfold first principles in philosophy, politics, ethics, literature. The wide and lofty scope of TJic Friend is an exponent of its projector. The mental life of 88 COLERIDGE. Coleridge was in the deep places and the high places of being. So impressed was he with the power and grandeur of generative ideas, so possessed by them, so intimate with them, that he was ever striving to share them with others, to imbue the educated and thoughtful with them, and thus elevate mankind through the force and beauty there is in fundamental divine principles. His ascensions and ranges were like those of the mountain-haunting, sky- piercing eagle, but alas ! unlike those of the eagle, his were not predatory, and brought no food to his eyrie. It were easy to wish that he had been more earthly-minded, had practiced a little more worldly prudence. By this deficiency his fam- ily and contemporary friends could not but be pained and provoked. They, no doubt, did what they could to remedy it ; but for us, his posterity, the heirs of rich legacies, it becomes us to be reserved and thankful. To throw re- proachfully, even at a living fellow-man, the commonplaces about duty is not a profitable proceeding, is, indeed, immoral, weakening the thrower through assumption and self-flattery, and irritating rather than correcting the delin- quent. Moments there are when the assertion COLERIDGE. 89 of moral principles is appropriate and impera- tive ; but this is not one of them. The great and good Coleridge is not a subject for shallow rebuke. His infirmities affected those nearest to him in an indirect negative way, however potently ; directly and aggressively he never in- jured a human being, save himself. He was not ambitious, not greedy of power, and thence he was not touched by that curse to so many of his tribe, envy and jealousy. In his under- takings he was moved by aspiration after the true and good, not by worldly desires. Leaving out of view the disabling effects, of opium, it may be doubted whether Coleridge had enough of practical talent and prudence, of daily provident outlook, to supply the ever re- current demands of a family. To himself this inability was a source of anxiety, depression, self-reproach. On the margin of Lamb's copy of Dramatic Scenes by Proctor, at the end of an acute and generous criticism of Proctor's verse, he makes this reflection : " Oh ! for such a man worldly prudence is transfigured into the highest spiritual duty ! How generous is self-interest in him, whose true self is all that is good and hopeful in all ages, as far as the language of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton 90 COLERIDGE. shall become the mother-tongue." And then he adds in a separate paragraph : " A map of the road to Paradise, drawn in Purgatory, on the confines of Hell, by S. T. C. July 30th, 1 8 19." Made aware by these startling words to what a depth of soul-suffering so great a being may be brought by his own acts, we can only heave a sigh of sympathy for the illustrious victim, and reflect on the fallibility of man. Whoever would know Coleridge — and to know him well is something like a privilege — should not dwell on the picture drawn by De Quincey when, about the year 1807, Coleridge was living at the Courier ofifice, often " strug- gling with pain, his lips baked with feverish heat and often black in color," when, in short, his great soul was vexed and shadowed by the vices of the body ; but should take in the im- age of him that is presented by Henry Nelson Coleridge in the Table Talk on such a day as the 24th of June, 1827, when he "talked a vol- ume of criticism which, printed verbatim as he spoke it, would make the reputation of any other man but himself. The sun was setting behind Caen wood, and the calm of the even- ing was sa exceedingly deep that it arrested COLERIDGE. 9 1 Mr. Coleridge's attention. He left off talking, ant! 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 he was in prayer. I was awe-stricken, and remained absorbed in look- ing at the man in forgetfulness of external nature, when he recovered himself and after a word or two fell by some secret link of associa- tion upon Spenser's poetry." The Friend, as a periodical publication, was a failure ; and Coleridge, being not merely editor but publisher, lost money by it. As issued afterwards in three volumes, containing profound disquisitions, illustrated and enriched with apt and various knowledge, TJie Friend is a casket full of precious thoughts. Take this as a sample (from page 132 of Marsh's Amer- ican edition of 183 1) : " The understanding of the higher brutes has only organs of outward sense, and consequently sees material objects only ; but man's understanding has moreover organs of inward sense, and therefore the power of acquainting itself with invisible real- ities or spiritual objects." To thoughtful schol- 92 COLERIDGE. ars this is valuable ; but think of a man trying to make "the pot boil" with such fuel. Or read, on page 410, a long passage on Nature, Idea, Intuition, and Plato. Truly one who sought to meet daily family expenses through the means of such material was infatuated with high philosophy and abstruse thinking. There are, to be sure, many practical, easily intelligible sentences and pages, like this, for example : " Like arms without hearts are the widest maxims oi prii deuce disjoined from those feelings which flow forth from principle as from a fountain." The writings of Coleridge are ballasted with common sense, and his common sense is the more solid because strengthened by the ideal, and because his nature was large and lofty enough to furnish sound ideals to draw from. A man's life is multiplied, enlarged, enno- bled, by interest in his fellow-men, by devotion to those spiritual and intellectual principles that advance and uplift mankind. Thus am- plified and elevated was Coleridge. The high and wide range of his intellect and his sympa- thies is exemplified in TJie Friend, the first, chronologically, of his prose works. In this, as in those that follow it, we have everywhere COLERIDGE. 93 a clear, strong, brilliant mind disinterestedly in earnest. The thought is vivid, the expres- sion apt. He never deals in decorated or pol- ished commonplace. In the writings of Cole- ridge, through his effective intellectual endow- ment, especially through his sure perception of likeness, the associative power is uncom- monly active, and thence rare vivacity and at- tractiveness are imparted to his printed page. This, too, was a chief source of his fascinating speech, thought suggesting thought in an end- less series of concatenated imaginations, which his poetic sensibility enfolded in its radiance. And of his pages a crowning virtue it is that they all tend to the spiritualization of man. The mind of Coleridge was so copious and fluent that upon the margins of volumes he was reading it overflowed in rapid, pithy com- ment, Charles Lamb liked to lend him books, they came back, he said, so enriched. Many of these viarginalia have been collected into four volumes of Litcrmy Remains, edited by his nephew, Henry Nelson Coleridge. These volumes are a treasury of critical judgments on an endless variety of subjects, literary, philosophical, theological, all of them derived from or grounded on generative principles. 94 COLERIDGE. Whether you accept them or not, they feed your thought with suggestion or stimulation. In them is the pulse of thoughtful life, the gleam of genial light. The most valuable chapters are the reports of lectures on Liter- ature and Art and on Shakespeare. The notes on Shakespeare are a lively stream of sympa- thetic commentary, flowing from heights which stretch into the infinite and invisible, and re- plenished, invigorated, by springs that rise up from the practical along men's daily walks. These springs are deeper and these heights loftier than most men have access to, and so all critics and commentators on Shakespeare, even the most accomplished, fail not to look into Coleridge to get assurance of their suc- cess as interpreters of the profoundest of poets. From the coincidence between certain prin- ciples and judgments put forth by Coleridge and those found in Schlegel's lectures on Dra- matic Literature, it was inferred by some, whose wish was father to the thought, that Coleridge had borrowed without acknowledg- ment from Schlegel. In the following valu- able letter, written in 1818, Coleridge disposes of this calumny : " My next Friday's lecture will, if I do not COLERIDGE. 95 grossly flatter-blind myself, be interesting, and the points of view not only original, but new to the audience. I make this distinction, be- cause sixteen or rather seventeen years ago I delivered eighteen lectures on Shakespeare, at the Royal Institution ; three fourths of which appeared at that time startling paradoxes, al- though they have since been adopted even by men who then made use of them as proofs of my flighty and paradoxical turn of mind ; all tending to prove that Shakespeare's judg- ment was, if possible, still more wonderful than his genius ; or rather, that the contra- distinction itself between judgment and genius rested on an utterly false theory. This and its proofs and grounds have been — I should not have said adopted, but produced as their own legitimate children by some, and by oth- ers the merit of them attributed to a foreign writer, whose lectures were not given orally till two years after mine, rather than to their countryman; though I dare appeal to the most adequate judges, as Sir George Beaumont, the Bishop of Durham, Mr. Sotheby, and after- wards to Mr. Rogers and Lord Byron, whether there is one single principle in Schlegel's work (which is not an admitted drawback from its 96 COLERIDGE. merits) that was not established and applied in detail by me. Plutarch tells us that ego- tism is a venial fault in the unfortunate, and justifiable in the calumniated," etc. In another letter, written in 1819, he thus recurs to this subject: "The coincidence be- tween my lectures and those of Schlegel was such and so close that it was fortunate for rr^ moral reputation that I had not only from five to seven hundred ear-witnesses that the pas- sages had been given by me at the Royal Institution two years before Schlegel com- menced his lectures at Vienna, but that notes had been taken of these by several ladies and men of high rank." More even than most men of genius Cole- ridge was a target for the shafts of envious or ignorant detraction, embittered in England during the first decades of the present century by the gall of party-politics. Thus Jeffrey, in the Edinburgh Review, called Christabel " a mixture of raving and driveling." Now, nei- ther Jeffrey nor any of his coadjutors, however great their merits (and their merits were great, for the permanent breach they made in the Chinese wall of old abuses, and the example they set of bold discussion), not one of them COLERIDGE. 97 had the fineness of faculty or the winged rate and quality of motion required to reach the poetic atmosphere where such a genuinely new poem* was breathed forth. Christahel Coleridge drew out of his spirit- uality, exalted by an exquisite poetic aspira- tion. The clever company of early Edinburgh Reviewers were not a spiritually-minded set : the good work they had to do required grosser material and coarser tools than those with which Christabels are conceived and con- structed. Jeffrey, their chief critic of verse, could appreciate Scott, but not Wordsworth and Coleridge. Towards them, from spiritual and poetic deficiencies, he was unjust, and from self-complacency he gave impertinent ut- terance to his injustice, himself hardly aware that he was impertinent. Among critics and would-be critics Jeffrey will always have fol- lowers as self-sufficient as he was, cultivated but not poetically-minded men who have more ambition than insight, much more self-admi- ration than modesty. And the shallowest of this class will deal in the easy, graceless method of scoff, just as by the Edinburgh Re- viewers was fastened upon the three poet- friends, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, 7 98 COLERIDGE. the preposterous misnomer the Lake School. You will hear it now and then applied to them at this late day, so pertinaciously will a nick- name stick. The three differed in t]jeir poetic principles as well as practice, and agreed only in one thing, says Mr, Shairp, " their opposi- tion to the hard and unimaginative spirit which was then the leading characteristic of i\iQ Edinburgh Reinezv^ Political rancor, in stormy times, sprinkled wormwood in the ink of whig critics when writing of these three, especially Coleridge, who was acknowledged to be a powerful polit- ical writer ; but he was a political writer who wrote like a philosopher, not like a partisan. In 1800 Coleridge was with Fox in opposing the war with France, but when he sagacious- ly discerned, as Bonaparte unfolded himself, that he was an unscrupulous, grasping despot, he separated himself from the eloquent whig leader. The self-justification of Coleridge for going over to the tory side is complete. He passed over to the tories, he says, " only in the sense in which all patriots did so at that time, by refusing to accompany the whigs in their almost perfidious demeanor towards Napoleon. Anti-ministerial they styled their COLERIDGE. 99 policy, but it was really anti-national. It was exclusively in relation to the great feud with Napoleon that I adhered to the tories. But because this feud was so capital, so earth-shak- ing, that it occupied all hearts, and all the councils of Europe, suffering no other ques- tion almost to live in the neighborhood, hence it happened that he who joined the tories in this was regarded as their ally in everything. Domestic politics were then in fact forgotten." In more ways than one Coleridge suffered for his unworldliness. The world loves world- lings : it erects statues to ambitious public self-seekers. To the world an idealist is hate- ful, partly because it cannot understand him, but chiefly because he is a reproach to its grossness and stolidity. The world is busy with petty interests ; Coleridge dealt in large principles. He was ever looking beyond the present, either backward or forward. He had no aptness for superficiality : the world's work is, most of it, necessarily on the surface. Coleridge was a meditater, not an actor. He was, to be sure, an exquisite artist as well as a deep thinker ; but his artist-work was too deli- cate for the daily market. By the originality of his genius he opened a road which enabled lOO COLERIDGE. Scott and Byron to cultivate the more pros- perously their fields.* Them the immediate public rewarded with guineas by the thou- sands ; him it left to starve. Coleridge was always pecuniarily pinched, and those who love and admire him are pained when they think what extremities of indigence he might have suffered but for the annuity of the generous Wedgwoods. Towards the lat- ter end of his life he enjoyed a pension from the Crown, but of .this, during his very last years, when from grievous sickness he needed it most, he was deprived, through the mean- ness of some cruel adviser of the new King, William IV. VI. In literature poetry is supreme, aiming to reach the quintessence of being, to make per- ceptible the very aroma of thought and life. And, as to divulge and present the essential nature of men and things is the purpose of all high literature, in its every department should be active that creative power which at its flood swells into poetry. The orator, the historian, the critic, the philosopher, the essayist, each fails to swing up to the height of his theme, to outfill the capability of his subject, unless his pulse be enlivened by draughts of the same breath that immortalizes Hatnlet and Fmist. That his work be not tamg and unprofitable it must be illuminated by light from the beauti- ful. From this poetic source he gets a clearer insight, a readier mastery. Now Coleridge was philosopher, essayist, critic, and, in his social monologues, an irresisti- ble orator. And these diverse fields, through his rare competence to work them, had for him such attraction that they drew him from a full 102 COLERIDGE. culture of the most fruitful of all literary fields, from a field in which his genius proved itself so generative. Or was it that his vein of po- etry, genuine, rich, and refined, was neither broad nor thick ? Or was the ardor wherewith every poet plies his gift somewhat damped by outside opinion ? Coleridge was, as Words- worth said, a wonderful man. He was a giant with one arm paralyzed, a sun with deep spots in it that dimmed its radiance. Possibly, but for the crippling contradictions in him, but for his unmanning weaknesses, his many-sided splendor would have been too dazzling. What a curse opium was to him no one knew so well as himself. Whoever would reproach Coleridge, let him pause. If he is one to value what was great and good in this eminent man, his reproaches will turn into tears of sympathy after he shall have tead these sentences writ- ten by Coleridge to his friend Wade : " In the one crime of opium, what crimes have I not made myself guilty of ? Ingratitude to my Maker ; and to my benefactors injustice ; and unnatural cruelty to my poor children After my death, I earnestly entreat that a full and unqualified narrative of my wretchedness, and its guilty cause, may be made public, that COLERIDGE. IO3 at least some little good may be effected by the direful example." One of the most genuine, ever fresh and de- lightful, of Coleridge's poems is Youth and As:e. Written before he had entered his forti- eth year, it is a plaint that youth is gone and age is come ; but it is not at all a wail, it is, I should say, more imaginative than personal, I make room for a third of it : " Flowers are lovely ; Love is flower-like : Friendship is a sheltering tree ; Oh the joys that came down shower-like. Of Friendship, Love, and Liberty, Ere I was old ! Ere I was old ? Ah, woeful ere ! Which tells me Youth 's no longer here ! Youth ! for years so many and sweet, 'T is known that you and I were one ; 1 '11 think it but a fond deceit — It cannot be that thou art gone ! " Kindly, tender, affectionate, not despondent by nature, neither restless with ambitious schemes, nor cast down by ambition's disap- pointments, with immense and various intel- lectual means, Coleridge had it in him to be happy, cheerful, and successful. But, like many others, and in a greater degree than most, he was a joint victim of circumstances and 104 COLERIDGE. himself. Men of mere talent are much less liable to be injured by circumstances than men of sensibility and genius, especially of poetic genius. The world is a prosaic world. In its daily doings and aspects it shows little of the poetry it is capable of. It does not know, or care, how to cherish and help men of creative mind. Sometimes it fondles and spoils them. Neither in his childhood, his boyhood, nor his youth, had Coleridge the affectionate further- ance, the sentimental support, the sympathetic guidance, which a large sensitive nature needs, if it is to be unfolded adequately to its endow- ments and capabilities. Great men make cir- cumstances ; but boys and youths who are to become great men are, on account of that very latent power and in proportion to its strength, exposed to be diverted and partially thwarted by meagre or perverse circumstances. Coleridge was not a man of worldly ambi- tions ; he was a man of intellectual and spir- itual aspirations. Nevertheless, like other gifted natures, he had his lower moods, his moments of downward solicitation. In the re- bound from one of these he probably penned the well-known lines called Complaint and Reply. These lines are a perpetual rebuke, COLERIDGE. I05 warning, and encouragement to genuine men of letters : " How seldom, friend ! a good great man inherits Honor or wealth, with all his worth and pains ! It sounds like stories from the land of spirits, If any man obtain that which he merits, Or any merit that which he obtains. For shame, dear friend ! renounce this canting strain ! What wouldst thou have a good great man obtain ? ' Place — titles — salary — a gilded chain — Or throne of corses which his sword hath slain ? Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends ! Hath he not always treasures, always friends. The good great man ? — three treasures, love, and light, And calm thoughts, regular as infant's breath ; And three firm friends, more sure than day and night — Himself, his Maker, and the angel Death." Ktibla KJian, The Ancient Mariner, and CJiristabel — new beings begotten on the brain of genius — are fragrant with subtle meanings, penetrated by refined flames that impart to every limb poetic life, and hang around the whole an unquenchable luminous- ness. The poems he wrote in middle life have more substance and a more direct bearing on daily human affairs. If less ethereal than these famous three, they are not less spiritual. The controlling, the generative power of the soul is an ever-present thought with Cole- I06 COLERIDGE. ridge. Of this the following lines from the ode on Dejection is a happy illustration : " And would we aught behold of higher worth, Than that inanimate cold world allowed ■ To the poor, loveless, ever anxious crowd, Ah ! from the soul itself must issue forth A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud Enveloping the earth — And from the soul itself must there be sent A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth, Of all sweet sounds the life and element ! " The fidelity of Coleridge's intuitions to the divinest demands of human nature, and the prolific union in him of moral and poetical sensibility, are nowhere more distinctly pre- sented than in his poem entitled Love, Hope, and Patience in Education : " O'er wayward childhood wouldst thou hold firm rule. And sun thee in the light of happy faces ; Love, Hope, and Patience, these must be thy graces. And in thine own heart let them first keep school. For as old Atlas on his broad neck places Heaven's starry globe, and there sustains it, — so Do these upbear the little world below Of education, — Patience, Love, and Hope. Methinks, I see them grouped, in seemly show, The straightened arms upraised, the palms aslope, And robes that, touching as adown they flow. Distinctly blend, like snow embossed in snow- Oh, part them never ! If Hope prostrate lie, Love too will sink and die. 4 COLERIDGE. lO^ But Love is subtle, and cloth proof derive From her own life that Hope is yet alive ; And bending o'er with soul-transfusing eyes. And the soft murmurs of the mother Love, Woos back the fleeting spirit and half-supplies ; Thus Love repays to Hope what Hope first gave to Love, Yet haply there will come a weary day, When, overtasked, at length Both Love and Hope beneath the load give way. Then with a statue's smile, a statue's strength, Stands the mute sister, Patience, nothing loth, And both supporting does the work of both." An able critic in the London Quarterly Re- viezv for July, 1863, in an article on "Cole- ridge as a Poet," commenting on this poem, asks : " Can any other poem of this century be cited in which, within so small a compass, there is so wide a range ? " The tragedy of Remorse, written in his first period, was accepted at Drury Lane Theatre in 1813, partly owing to the good offices of Lord Byron, at that time one of the directors of Drury Lane. Remorse had a run of twenty nights. This success encouraged Coleridge to write, and offer to Drury Lane, another trag- edy, Zapolya, which was rejected. The best and brightest of Coleridge is not in his dramas. The acceptance and preparation of Remorse brought him into persojial intercourse with I08 COLERIDGE. Byron, of whose countenance he gives this vivid portraiture : " 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 made for light ; and his forehead, so am- ple, and yet so flexible, passing from marble smoothness into a hundred wreaths and lines and dimples, correspondent to the feelings and sentiments he is uttering." In 1816, after desperate but ineffectual struggles against the tyranny of opium, he voluntarily put himself under the control of Dr. Oilman, of Highgate, and took up his abode with him. Dr. and Mrs. Gilman proved to be kind, appreciative friends. Through their tender, watchful care the curse of opium was lifted from his soul. Beneath their roof he lived for eighteen years, until his death. The mind of Coleridge was multifold. It had pinions, and it was armed with blades ; it could soar, and it could delve ; it was poetical and philosophical, it was critical and creative. It was moved to embody the beautiful and to penetrate the abstruse. During his latter years he strove to dig deeper into the mines COLERIDGE. IO9 of metaphysics and theology, whose subtle problems he had sought to solve in his younger years. The first direction given, even to a mind of largest mold, is sometimes due to what is called chance. Hartley had been a member of Jesus College, Cambridge, where Coleridge had rooms, and the upper atmosphere of Cam- bridge was imbued with his philosophy, whose principles, being derived from Locke, were materialistic. With these principles Coleridge, became infected so strongly that he named his first-born son Hartley. But no mind of full rich endowment can finally rest in phil- osophical doctrines so insufficient ; and so Coleridge, before he went to Germany, was, by the movement of his own higher mental wants, drawn upward towards a wider, cleaner track. His consciousness prompted him to infer that man were an abject creature, a mere earthling, if only through the senses and ex- perience he got all his knowledge. He felt that within the mind itself there must be an originating life. The Transcendental philos- ophy confirmed this consciousness, demon- strating the existence of a priori conceptions independent of experience. If Kant did not no COLERIDGE. absolutely reveal to Coleridge a new domain in the realm of mind, he laid bare the divisions of that realm with so much comparative clear- ness, that with his support and that of Schel- ling Coleridge gave his thought freer play in the region of metaphysics and speculative philosophy. In a note to the concluding chapter of the BiograpJiia Literaria, Coleridge exclaims : " Poor unlucky Metaphysics ! and what are they? A single sentence expresses the object and thereby the contents of this science : KNOW THYSELF. And SO shalt thou know God, so far as is permitted to a creature, and in God all things. Surely, there is a strange, nay, rather a too natural, aversion in many to know themselves." Was there ever penned deeper, greater, wiser sentences than these .-' In a few lines what insight, what concentrated truth ! To know thyself were to hold in thy hand a key to that richest and most roomy of palaces, the mental constitution of man, and thereby have a clew to all that is within the ken of the human mind. We should be walking firmly, with sure hope, on the road to the solution of deepest problems, of those inclosed in met- COLERIDGE. 1 1 1 aphysics, in theology, in politics, in philosophy, in aesthetics. Thus armed, Coleridge could have cut his way through what he calls "the holy jungle of transcendental metaphysics." But, like most other metaphysical thinkers, he took such delight in his own subjective mental activities that he could not gather up his intellectual forces for an unbiassed delib- eration upon certain startling objective phe- nomena then lately laid bare, and thus seize their immense significance. That there is a close connection between brain and mind, especially intellectual mind, has always been vaguely acknowledged, or, rather, indistinctly felt. Toward the end of the last century. Dr. Gall, a physician of Vi- enna, proved, by a thoroughly Baconian method, not only that there is a connection, close and indissoluble, between them, but that the brain is the indispensable organ of every kind of mental power ; and further, that, instead of being one single organ, it is a congeries of or- gans, and that every intellectual aptitude, every animal propensity, every aspiration, every sen- timental movement, has in the brain its individ- ual instrument. What a helpful auxiliary was here offered to the metaphysician, to the psy- 112 COLERIDGE. chologist, to the theologian, to the moralist ! Kant's rare intuition would have caused new delight in Coleridge, who, by means of this new potent objective discovery of Gall, could have given precision, enlargement, definite- ness, depth, to the subjective conclusions of Kant and of himself. Through the various and urgent activity of his splendid brain, Coleridge had also given in to theological speculation. A Unitarian in his young manhood, he had in middle life plumped out into a high churchman. But he was too independent a thinker, and too much of a thinker, for any body of priests. In her Intro- duction to the Biographia Litcraria, — an In- troduction worthy of her great father, — his daughter says : " My Father's affectionate re- spect for Luther is enough to alienate from him the High Anglican party, and his admiration of Kant enough to bring him into suspicion with the anti-philosophic part of the religious world, — which is the whole of it, except a very small portion indeed." And here, from Aids to Reflection, is an aphorism too pro- foundly true and verifiable to be grateful to sectarians : " He who begins by loving Chris- tianity better than truth, proceeds by loving COLERIDGE. 1 1 3 his own sect or church better than Christian- ity, and ends in loving himself better than all." Through Spurzheim, a pupil of Gall, who was in London about the year 1826, Coleridge got a glimpse of the gfeat discovery. But whether from being too old (most people are, after forty, to accept a large, new, revolutionary truth), or whether, though having an intellect apt for philosophic search, he yet lacked the warm hospitality to new truths, what may be called the philosophic temperament, which not many even capacious minds are blessed with, or whether he was not just then in the mood for such study, — whatever the cause, while he admitted to his nephew (see Table Talk) that " all the coincidences which have been observed could scarcely be by accident," the presentation of the new phenomena did not flash into his mind the light of a new pro- lific principle, as the fall of an apple did into that of Newton. Had he seized the import of these phenomena, by following the high logic of their revelations, both his philosophy and his theology would have been expanded, clarified. The division made by Kant of mental fac- 8 114 COLERIDGE. iiltics under the two heads of Vevnunft and Verstand (Reason and Understanding), — a division which involves the transcendental principles, — he would have discovered to be incomplete and even crude, however firmly grounded in truth, and however admirable as an intuition. On the wings of his fine sensi- bility, guided now by this new, infallible com- pass, mounting into the hallowed infinitudes of human spirituality, he would have discov- ered how deeply and solidly are laid in the constitution of man the saving, elevating prin- ciples of hopefulness, justice, love, disinterest- edness, and of reverence, " that angel of the world," as Shakespeare calls it. The consciousness of Coleridge, his deep spiritual inwardness, would have made easy for him the acceptance of the commanding position, impregnably fortified by these new phenomena, that, innate in man, are loftiest spiritual and moral capabilities. But as he did not look i)ito the phenomena, only at them half playfully, the theological fruit of his conscious- ness remained what it had always been, mere notions, what himself declares the luiica sub- stantia oi Spinosa to be, " di subject of the mind and no object at all." What lay at the foun- COLERIDGE. I I 5 dation-stone of his theology was not only a sub- ject of the mind, a subjectivity, it was a foreign fiction, an adopted imagination, for the garden of Eden and man's fall and consequent expul- sion from the garden are Hebrew mythology, and a mythology which does not imply a very elevated conception of divine rule and methods. Modern theology, issuing out of the brains of mediaeval ascetics and scholastic dreamers, has adopted the fall as its fundamental belief, all Christian denominations agreeing to make it the kernel, the soul, of their various creeds. Being a mere notion, a subject of the mind, a subject concreted into a fable, an imaginative representation, it cannot be a perennial source of binding law, but was from the first doomed to pass away, and is just now fast losing its factitious authority. Love Mercy, Do Jus- tice, Walk Humbly, being substantial reali- ties in the depths of man's nature, objective truths, "not mere subjects of the mind, being sovereign principles in Deity and in Humanity, can never pass away. Astrology is notional, subjective. Astronomy is objective : theologies are subjective, transitory, religious and moral principles are objective, eternal. Had Coleridsre taken the hint offered to him 116 COLERIDGE. by a pupil of Gall, a hint almost more pregnant even than that given to Newton in the fall of an apple, he would have got to know — not through his consciousness merely to believe — that spiritual disinterested impulses are objec- tive principles, inborn in human nature. Be- lief and truth may be as far asunder as nadir and zenith. When coincident with truth be- lief is elevating, when not it is lowering. Be- lief is often the child of ignorance and egotism, as is the heathen belief in fetishes and the Christian belief in relics, and in arbitrary dog- mas, which are spiritual relics. Infinitely easier is it to believe than to know. A faith may be false, but nothing is so religious as truth. Coleridge, with his philosophic faculty, would have been among the first to acknowledge the unsoundness of making imaginations the basis of religious beliefs ; but the " Fall of Man " and all its theosophic corollaries are so im- bedded in the modern mind, so interwoven with the aspirations and spiritual yearnings of many noble and highly endowed men, that the dogmatic, mechanical, non-vital elements of belief usurp upon the dynamic and vital, and thus lead towards cxclusiveness, intolerance, Pharisaism. COLERIDGE. WJ But Coleridge was by nature too large and liberal to become the victim of any Calvinistic hardness and narrowess. Through his ecclesi- asticism shone the genuine Christian ; and the genuine Christian is he who, convinced of the primordial inherence in man of certain un- selfish, spiritual, moral feelings, and of their rightful supremacy in life, aims and strives to make these feelings, and the principles they father, rule in his conduct. He need not, in- deed, take cognizance of them theoretically, if he proves that he walks daily in their sun- shine, by being just, merciful, hopeful, hum- ble. Thence it is that the pages of Coleridge have more life and light in them than those of most writers. While he was both a thinker and a poet, he had besides, springing out of his consciousness, a generous conception of the capabilities of human nature. And this con- ception gives warmth and depth and truth to his delineations and reflections. From the printed pages of Coleridge, rich, various, and original as they are, we do not get a full image of his mental stature. He had a marvelous, a unique, gift of speech. He was a sovereign talker, sovereign through Il8 COLERIDGE. the range, elevation, luminousness, fluency of his talk. All through his manhood, even from the days when at Cambridge he drew a choice circle around him, he instructed, he stimulated, he awakened men's minds by his affluent, ready, expressive discourse. Nay, we have seen that strangers, visiting Christ's Hospital, were arrested to listen to the eloquent outgiv- ings of the charity-boy. In early manhood Wordsworth, his equal as poet and thinker, and his senior by two years, was his pupil, the two friends being to each other both teacher and scholar. De Ouincey had the good fortune to come in contact with Coleridge, or, rather, had the early discern- ment to seek him, in his own budding man- hood, and had his literary and philosophic fac- ulties expanded, encouraged, and emboldened, his powers all quickened, by converse with one whose mental gifts he continued through life to regard with unabated admiration. But it was in the last quarter of his life, particularly in its last decade, that Coleridge was sought for the eloquence and wisdom of his speech, and that the parlors of Dr. and Mrs. Oilman at Highgate were resorted to by many eager, admiring listeners, among them COLERIDGE. I 1 9 some of the master-spirits of the age, in whose susceptive brains he sowed ideas that are still coming up laden with nutritious thought. Among these were Arnold of Rugby, who said that Coleridge was the greatest intellect that England had produced within his memory ; and Julius Hare, and J. H. Newman, and Mau- rice, and Hazlitt, who was called a brain-sucker of Coleridge and Carlyle. Carlyle, in a chapter on Coleridge in the Life of Sterling, describes him " as a kind of Magiis, girt in mystery and enigma ; his Dodona oak-grove (Mr. Oilman's house at Highgate) whispering strange things, uncertain whether oracles or jargon." At the same time, almost in the same sentence, he calls Coleridge "A sublime man ; who, alone in those dark days, had saved his crown of spiritual manhood, es- caping from the black materialisms and revo- lutionary deluges with ' God, Freedom, Im- mortality' still his : a King of men.". To one who would have a view of Coleridge in his lat- ter years, when he talked so wonderfully at Highgate, indispensable is this chapter, exe- cuted in Carlyle's most vivid strain, at once picturesque and penetrating, broad and keen, touched, though it be, with that grudging 1 20 COLERIDGE. jealous spirit toward eminent contemporaries which is a blot on Mr. Carlyle's brilliant page. Of the soundness of Coleridge's critical and ethical judgments, of his range of knowledge and fertility of resources as exhibited in con- versation, we have convincing evidence in the volume of Table Talk. And rich as those pages are, they are but a partial expression of what fell from Coleridge in the converse of a dozen years between him and his nephew and son-in- law, Henry Nelson Coleridge. The admiring, but not unduly partial, reporter concludes his preface with these cordial, honest words : " 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 that 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 punish- ment for his errors, whilst the world at large h^s the unwithering fruit of his labors, his genius, and his sacrifice." COLERIDGE. 121 In a thoughtful vokniic, published ten years ago, entitled Notivclles Etudes Morales stir le Temps Present, M. Caro, in a paper on Heine, quotes approvingly from the witty German the following passage on Schelling : " Schelling is one of those beings whom nature has endowed with more taste for poetry than poetic faculty, and who, incapable of satisfying the Muses, betake them to the forests of philosophy, where they contract with abstract Hamadriads liaisons that are utterly unproductive." A keener stroke of satirical wit it were hard to find ; but that M. Caro is justified in his full approval of it as aimed at Schelling may be doubted, seeing the large place filled by Schel- ling in the annals of German philosophy. Coleridge, too, had penetrated into the forests of philosophy and got entangled in the "jungle of metaphysics," but, being at the same time a genuine poet, this satire is inapplicable to him. Philosophy itself, whatever may be the short- comings of philosophers, is a genuine and a great thing, its aim being to reach first prin- ciples in all subjects, to get down to and up to primordial elements, controlling causes. He who would master philosophy must descend 122 COLERIDGE. into the deepest deeps, mount to the highest heights, grasp with his thought the principles which rule all science and all art and all prac- tice. Philosophers, lovers and seekers of this highest wisdom, have failed to compass their object partly from want in themselves of com- plete mental endowment, partly from want of outward material in the yet imperfectly un- folded human knowledge. Kant was too pre- dominantly intellectual, lacking in full measure the spiritual religious faculties. Coleridge, with a grand intellect, was probably too sen- timental, and thence set too much value on ecclesiasticism. Socrates and Plato, whatever may have been their inborn faculty, certainly wanted material, verified data. That Coleridge had a philosophic mind, that^ is, a mind that sought and could reach first principles, is apparent in every chapter of his prose volumes. His large discourse of reason, his emotional sensibilities, his sense of the beautiful, give to his pages that unfading life which is sustained by constant reference to the most comprehensive and vital truths. When, on the 25th of July, 1834, Coleridge passed away from the earth, in his sixty-third year, there was in the minds of the multitude COLERIDGE. 1 23 little reverberation of the solemn toll that announced his decease. His name had never been lifted and flattered by the breath of popularity. The funeral bell had a much livelier and wider echo at the decease of Byron or Scott. * And yet, the life-work of Coleridge is more valuable than that of either of these. His poetic genius was at least equal to theirs, and he, much more than either of them, dealt in ideas, in generative thought. Only a choice circle felt what a void was made in the intel- lectual atmosphere of England. The pen and tongue of an. original thinker, of an eloquent expounder of fruitful truths, had ceased to move forever. By one who had known him from boyhood, who for fifty years had enjoyed the privilege of unbroken friendship with him, a touch- ing tribute was paid to Coleridge. For some weeks after his decease, in the midst of con- versation among friends, the noble counte- nance of Charles Lamb would suddenly grow abstracted, and solemnly, half interrogatively, he would exclaim, " Coleridge is dead ! " as though such a death were too enormous to be taken into the mind : " Coleridge is dead ! " SHELLEY. TO SHELLEY. Upon thy subtile nature was a bloom, Unearthly in its tender, gleamful glow, As thou hadst strayed from some sane star where blow But halcyon airs, and here, blinded by gloom. Didst stumble, for the lack of light and room. And strike and wound with purposed good ; and so. Through Highest pity, thou hadst leave to go Early to where for each earth-life its doom Awaits it, as the fruit the seed, and where Thy multitudinous imaginings, So truthful pure, on Heaven's fulgent stair Fit issue find, and mid the radiant rings Of mounting Angels thy great spirit's glare Adds to the brightness of the brightest things. SHELLEY. I. Man might be symbolized by the attitude of Mercury a-tiptoe on the earth, his figure tend- ing, and his eyes and upper limbs turned, sky- ward, with wings on his heels, to waft him toward the Heaven whence he came. Man on earth is an aspiring animal, the only animal that aspires, the only animal that can behold the constellations, and, therefore, more than an animal, " A budded angel graft on clay." He is both spirit and matter, ethereal and gross, celestial and earthly. The conflict of these within him, — the upward swing of spirit, the downward pull of sense, — while it unfolds and displays his inborn powers, developing and disciplining his nature, schools him for pro- gression and immortality. The equipment of man being thus com- pounded of the immeasurable elements of spirit 9 130 SHELLEY. and matter, the scale of humanity is immense, from the black abysms of beastly earthiness in the Emperor Vitellius ascending to the celes- tial spirituality of Jesus, the lower half of the countless intermediate degrees being repre- sented by Louis Napoleon, who was of the earth earthy, of the world worldly ; the upper half by Goethe, in whose orbicular brain there was a prolific equilibrium, and who, being in warm sympathy with all the affections, was yet enough under the supreme sway of the spirit- ual and moral elements to make renunciation his law, and active beneficence his practice, and who, a born poet, became, through his rich humanity, a luminous sage, while he remained a genial man of the world. High on the upper division of the scale glows Shelley. From spiritual currents were distilled into his brain the finer essences of humanity. His eyes glistened with messages from the Infinite : his was the privilege to hear angels whisper. With the earthy he was not in full sympathy, and from the worldly he was repelled. In him the human compound of spirit and matter lacked closest fusion, and thence his composite being had not the com- plete elastic play needed for the most effective SHELLEY. 131 outward expression and practical manifesta- tion, such play as is exhibited in the being of Shakespeare. But Shelley was drowned in the Mediterranean at the age of thirty. Had he lived on earth the other twenty-two years, who can presume to guess what he would or would not have been or done ? On the 4th of August, 1792, at Field Place in Sussex, the seat of his father, Timothy Shelley, was born Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose lot it was, through the light of resplen- dent poetic genius, to make an ancient and honorable name forever illustrious. He was called Percy after an aunt distantly connected with the Northumberland family. Ambition of aristocratic affiliation must have been in- ordinate, even desperate, when an aunt's being " distantly connected " with (not related to) the house of Northumberland was seized upon in order to give the infant heir of the Shelleys the semblance of relationship to the famous Percys. And see the irony of fate. If by such spasmodic effort anybody would get a flitting glimmer of glory, it was not to be the house of Shelley that this baptismal act would serve, but the house of Northumberland, thenceforth presumed to have some kinship to the exalted 132 SHELLEY. poet. To another poet, the greatest of poets, to the transfiguring pen of Shakespeare, this house owes most of its historic renown and all of its immortality. In pertinacity of will, in dauntless courage, Shelley is not unlike his namesake, Shakespeare's great Harry. The name of Bysshe the poet had from his paternal grandfather, who, born in 1731, was made a baronet in 1806. Bysshe was re- markably handsome, tall, courteous, and clever. He eloped with two heiresses of good family, and thereby strengthened his interest in his county, and at the same time so enlarged his pecuniary basis, that, by economy and shrewd management, he was enabled to leave at his death in 18 15 ^300,000 in the funds and an estate in land that yielded ^20,000 a year. The man who, beginning poor, piled up such a fortune and got himself made a baronet, de- serves to be called the refounder of his family. Money and influence got him a title, and the title added to his influence and dignified his wealth. Sir Bysshe Shelley's eldest son, Timothy, born in 1753, married in 1791 Elizabeth Pil- fold, a woman of rare beauty. Of their six children, two sons and four daughters, all SHELLEY. 133 beautiful, the poet was the first-born. Timo- thy Shelley was a commonplace country gen- tleman, not cultivated, a little pompous on occasion, hospitable and kindly, and a good landlord. One wonders how a mind so unil- luminated could be the immediate precedent of a mental blaze. Lightning transpierces dense material without coruscation; and so the de- scending stream of genius passes through, without kindling the brain that is not its des- tined point of discharge, to explode at the next human stage in a burst of electric life. The poet's mother, besides being beautiful, is said to have been of a mild and liberal nat- ure, intelligent, with some culture. In her talent for letter-writing she gave token of lit- erary capacity. More akin was the poet to his grandfather than to his father. Sir Bysshe had mental power ; he could take the initiative, and he was independent in his speculative opinions. His son Timothy he did not like, and would at times curse him to his face. At the .begin- ning of the present century the manners of English gentlemen were coarser than they are now. Timothy did not go to the trouble of having speculative opinions ; he was a con- 134 SHELLEY. formist and a nominal Christian. Like his father he swore roundly at times, and like him was somewhat penurious. As was the case with most of his class at that day, in morals his model was Lord Chesterfield, whom he at- tempted to imitate ; he told his son Percy that he would provide for any number of illegiti- mate children, but would not forgive a mhal- liance. One could linger on the lives of the imme- diate progenitors of the poet, and delve far back into genealogy, if the search could yield any light on the mystery of poetic genius ; but this celestial fire is as untraceable to its origin as it is incommunicable when present. Of Shelley's earliest years nothing is re- corded, nor could there be much to record. To mothers and genuine nurses no two infants are alike, any more than to shepherds are any two sheep ; nevertheless, with their little ways and doings, their tears and smiles, they can- not in their callowness have much individual- ity, and, like spring buds in an orchard, their bloom is quickly swallowed up by devouring sapful growth. Happily Shelley, as he was in boyhood from his seventh to his tenth year and later, is SHELLEY. 135 brought before us in the recollections of one of his sisters. A beautiful boy, with large blue eyes, his head covered with ringlets, a slender figure and finely formed hands and feet, he was uncommonly intelligent, gentle, loving, and beloved by every one. Delight in the marvelous, a hunger to know, interest in the transearthly, showed themselves in these early years, and, backed by his daring spirit, made him a fearless questioner, an ar- dent investigator. Already the invisible world had great charm for him. As a boy he was haunted by curiosity about death. He longed to see a ghost. He was ever on the watch to catch some glimpse into the mysteries of nat- ure. In that wild, beautiful poern, Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude, written in his early manhood, in an opening passage addressed to the " Mother of this unfathomable world," he says : " I have made my bed In charnels and on coffins, where black death Keeps record of the trophies won from thee, Hoping to still these obstinate questionings Of thee and thine, by forcing some lone ghost, Thy messenger, to render up the tale Of what we are. In lone and silent hours. When night makes a weird sound of its own stillness, Like an inspired and desperate alchymist 136 SHELLEY. Staking his very life on some dark hope, Have I mixed awful talk and asking looks With my most innocent love." At Field Place there was a large garret, and a room which had been closed for years except an entrance made by the removal of a board in the garret floor. This mysterious room Bysshe made the abode of an old alchemist with a long beard. To his sisters, on and about his knees, listening breathless with a " pleasant dread," Bysshe would, evening after evening, weave out of his boy's brain wonderful stories of this magician, promising them that " some day " they should go and see him. Then he would make them enact strange tales, dressing them as spirits and |iends. A little later, when with premature curiosity he had taken to chemistry, he nearly set fire to the laundry with his experiments. He would collect his sisters and as many other children as he could, place them hand in hand around the nursery-table, and give them a shock with an electric machine. His memory was astonishing ; as a child of eight or nine years he recited Gray's lines on the Cat and the Goldfish, after once reading them. At the bidding of his father he would repeat pieces of Latin verse. SHELLEY. 137 His sister relates that he was " full of cheer- ful fun, and had all the comic vein so agreeable in a household." This is noteworthy ; it tends to show what was his essential nature. At home with his sisters and mother, he was cheerful, ready with playful tricks, happy as boys are. At school he came in contact with the coarseness and tyranny of the world, and, being refined, independent, and, though gentle, not acquiescent, contact turned into conflict. An earnest seeker after hidden and forbidden knowledge so early as ten, his mind was in ad- vance of his years. At Sion House, a private academy in Brentford, he kept aloof from boys' games ; for him physical sports had no attrac- tion. Already in his brain were fermenting the juices from which were to be distilled some of the most poetically-perfumed pages in our language. The prescribed lessons he mastered without effort. Greek and Latin he seemed to learn by intuition. Shelley was precocious as boy and as man ; he was ahead of his school-fellows, far ahead of his fellow-men. Ever reaching forward for more and better than was around him, instead of sympathy he met with frowning opposition. To one of his nature it was a joy to give pleas- 138 SHELLEY. Lire, and he was ever giving offense. The prod- uct of his Kfe here turns out to be a source of deUght to all who can value whatever is best in literature ; but as to himself, he was uncom- fortably misplaced. Ever on the stretch after something purer and higher than he found about him, he was in boyhood and in youth so much in conflict with persons and institutions, that he seemed like one astray on the earth. Shelley was occasionally subject to somnam- bulism. This began so early as his tenth year. Within the sleepwalker are mysterious agen- cies that move him, that guide him safely along precipices with his eyes shut, and empower him to act and speak beside himself, as it were. For the time a passive instrument, when he awakes he has no consciousness of what hap- pened in the sleepwalking state. As boy, as youth, as man, Shelley had a yearning towards the world of spirits. He watched and prayed to see a ghost. This was an unlikeness to his companions that would help to isolate him. Poets, the higher poets, are inspired media for the annunciation and presentation of beauty and truth. Inspiration descends upon the poet. By mere effort of will he cannot write a line ; he is dependent SHELLEY. 139 on his Muse. An ideal presentation of the poet were an upturned countenance listening with dreamy, intelligent joy. The poet, the genuine poet, he who is liable to inspiration, is conscious that fresh thoughts, new combina- tions, flashes of beauty, come to him suddenly, unsought for, unbidden, come, he knows not whence. Shelley's worM was within ; but thence he drew inspirations to nourish his aims in the outward world. In these aims there was no self-seeking. At school — and the lesson is repeated at college — boys are taught, with ingenious method, to be selfishly ambitious. The universal system of extreme competition of itself embodies this teaching, and insures its success. Who can make the best show is the best man. And the instruction is bettered at home, most parents being in full accord with the intellectually superior mother who, being asked as to her son at school, whether he was fulfilling her expectations, answered : " Yes : he is ambitious, and that, you know, is ev^ery- thing." Now Shelley was not ambitious. The aim, the earnest aim, of his manhood and his youth, aye, and of his boyhood, was to better his mind, I40 SHELLEY. to emancipate his fellows. More light in him- self and other men, not more power for him- self that he might rule other men, this was his incessant desire. All his pulses throbbed with love, and therefore he hated tyranny, and he instinctively felt that ambition is the root of tyranny. Had ever a noble life so young a consciousness of its destiny .? Did ever a great man take so early a resolution to be benefi- cent .'' Did ever a benefactor leap in boyhood into his high career } Shelley was about twelve years of age when he made that lofty — stern shall I call it .■' — vow : " I will be wise, And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies Such power." But the whole passage should be given. Of- ten as it may have been read, it will bear read- ing again, and should be quoted in full, as it describes a most important moment in the life of Shelley : " Thoughts of great deeds were mine, dear Friend, when first The clouds which wrap this world from youth did pass. I do remember well the hour which burst My spirit's sleep : a fresh May-dawn it was, When I walked forth upon the glittering grass, And wept, I knew not why ; until there rose. From the near school-room, voices, that, alas ! SHELLEY. 141 Were but one echo from a world of woes — The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes. " And then I clasped my hands and looked around — But none was near to mock my streaming eyes, Which poured their wan drops on the sunny grouai — So without shame I spake : ' I will be wise, And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies Such power, for I grow weary to behold The selfish and the strong still tyrannize Without reproach or check.' I then controlled My tears, my heart grew calm, and I was meek and bold. " And from that hour did I with earnest thought Heap knowledge from forbidden mines of lore, Yet nothing that my tyrants knew or taught I cared to learn, but from that secret store Wrought linked armour for my soul, before It might walk forth to war among mankind. Thus power and hope were strengthened more and more Within me, till there came upon my mind A sense of loneliness, a thirst with which I pined." Shelley was always going out of himself. So deep, and so beautiful in its depths, is hu- man nature, so wonderful in its composite ele- ments and seeming contradictions, that there is no truth more sohd and prolific than this, that the surest, happiest way of serving one's self is to forget one's self. Shelley began when young to practice this profound truth. As a boy he had the wish to be helpful to 142 SHELLEY. Others. When not much more than a child himself he took a sort of paternal interest in children. His sister relates how he wanted to purchase a little girl to bring her up into better conditions. A tumbler, who came to the back door at Field Place to perform her feats, at- tracted his attention for this purpose. A boy had no means of setting a practical hand to such a project, but his heart was in it. When he went to see his sisters at the boarding- school in Clapham he would ask questions about their comfort. One day his ire was roused at finding one of them with a black mark hung about her neck for some slight of- fense. His wrath was more against the sys- tem than that his sister should be so punished. At the age of fourteen or fifteen his clear pure intuitions told him that for the healthfullest unfolding of the faculties in youthful education more profitable are appeals to the higher feel- ings than to the lower. With all this unjuvenile interest in others, this forward-reaching benevolence, Percy was a thorough boy in animal spirits and fondness for fun. On one occasion he came to the school with the elders of the family, and was so full of pranks that the assistance of his SHELLEY. 143 cousin Harriet Grove, his first love, had to be invoked to keep the wild boy quiet. He was fifteen when sent to Eton. At the core of Shelley there was an intense fire that heated his impulses to irresistible momentum, and projected him into manhood prematurely in certain directions. At Eton he was a de- fiant member of the institution. He defied his teachers by chafing against their rule, and by neglecting their imposed exercises, giving his time to translating Pliny's Natural History, and to getting an insight into the mysteries of chemistry and electricity. He defied his school-fellows by standing aloof from their games and sports, by exceptional studies, and more than all by resistance to the fagging system, against which he tried to organize re- volt. Fagging, whereby the younger boys were made to do the bests of the older, even at times in menial offices, was the result of ar- istocratic privilege, which fosters a domineer- ing spirit, combined — strange as this may sound — with a British love of freedom, whose spirit tends by no means to equality, but to each one being free to exercise his powers as he pleases and can. A satirist might say that this combination was soldered together by 144 SHELLEY. English animalism, which is sometimes bru- tality. Wanting the bold spirits who take the initi- ative in resisting tyranny and abuses, civili- zation would stagnate, its vitality smothered under formalism and usurpation. The most glorious and venerable figures in history are they whose sounder instincts and clearer vis- ion made them beneficent prophets, and whose courageous speech made them martyrs for truth, through the ignorance and obliquity of their contemporaries. The directors of Eton were too obtuse, and too much ruled by routine in place of principle, to take a hint from the preference of their brightest- scholar for natural history, a scholar so bright that without effort he was at the same time one of the foremost in Greek and Latin. The great soul of Shelley revolted, against the odious practice of fagging, and by his courage and the individual force of his per- sonality he successfully resisted its application to himself. His school-fellows would sometimes goad him into a momentary rage, and then run away : their offensive mischievousness he re- quited by helping them with their tasks. The SHELLEY. 145 boys of his own age are said to have been de- voted to him ; but it is the nature and fate of high gifts to isolate their possessor. That which is the source of new revealments of beauty and life, for the delight and profit of millions through the ages, is often the cause of unpopularity and even odium among con- temporaries. At Eton, Shelley was sometimes called the " mad Shelley." Genius, having few fellows, is at first cut off from one of the sweet- est joys of humanity, fellow-feeling. This is the price paid for its superiority. Shelley may be accounted rarely fortunate in that he found in one of his teachers a sympathizing friend. Dr. Lind, a tutor at Eton, appreciated and loved him, encouraged him in his fondness for chemistry, and assisted him in the study. What a boon was this sympathy to his young, warm, hungering heart, already dimly athrob with the coming music of Prometheus and Ado- nais. The gratitude of Shelley has given Dr. Lind a twofold immortality, in the form of re- vered sages, one in the Revolt of Islam, the other in Prince Athanase, where he is thus presented : " Prince Athanase had one beloved friend ; An old, old man, with hair of silver white, 10 146 SHELLEY. And lips where heavenly smiles would hang and blend With his wise words, and eyes whose arrowy light Shone like the reflex of a thousand minds." In Shelley " love and life were twins." Love will ever be giving, and in all ways during his whole life Shelley was a giver. When, just before leaving Eton, he received from a publisher forty pounds for Zastrozzi, a novel, he spent most of the money in giving a supper to eight of his young friends. Zas- troszi, written at the age of seventeen, is de- scribed as an extravagant tale, without sub- stance or form. At this early age Shelley dashed courageously into the battle-field of authorship. That he was as crude as he was young, we learn from this, that his favorite poets were Southey and Monk Lewis, and that he delighted in Mrs. Radcliffe's romances. He and his sister Elizabeth offered to Mathews a play of their joint production, which was at once declined. When he was eighteen he sent a poem to Thomas Campbell for his opinion of it. Campbell returned it with the comment that there were only two good lines in it : " It seemed as if an angel's sigh Had breathed the i^laintive symphony." At this time the beautiful earnest youth SHELLEY. 147 seems to have so magnetized the publisher Stockdale as to make him the instrument of bringing into the world volumes that were, as merchantable wares, of very little value. As Mr. Symonds, in his admirable Life of Shel- ley, says : " Throughout his life Shelley exer- cised a wonderful fascination over the people with whom he came in contact, and almost always won his way with them as much by personal charm as by determined and impas- sioned will." Between Shelley's quitting Eton and his entering Oxford there is an interval of many months. He is said to have left Eton ab- ruptly, withdrawn to avoid expulsion. This may have been. A youth of seventeen, ten- der, yearning for love and finding little, disin- terested, wrathful at injustice, premature in mental capacity, with the insight and impul- siveness of genius, and with that unreserve which is sometimes an attendant upon genius, wanting in worldly self-restraint and prudence, would, in a public school such as Eton then was, inevitably be a protester and a rebel. But his revolt was the opposite of Lucifer's ; it was a revolt, not against God but against the Devil, not against good but against evil. Shel- 148 SHELLEY. ley ever chafed at unjust inequalities. The world around him — and Eton was a type of the world — bristled with such inequalities, was encrusted with the obstructive indurations of custom, was offensive with soulless formali- ties and pedantries, with fat pretensions and lean performance, with lies that would pass themselves off for truth. This chapter cannot be more fitly closed than with a letter from a friend and school-fel- low of Shelley. Mr. Halliday, one can discern in his beautiful letter, is a clear-minded, sound- hearted, genial gentleman, whose name, as that of one of the few who loved and valued Shelley, deserves to be associated with that of the immortal poet. Glenthorne, February 27, 1857. My dear Madam, — Your letter has taken me back to the sunny time of boyhood, " when thought is speech, and speech is truth ; " when I was the friend and companion of Shelley at Eton. What brought us together in that small world was, I suppose, kindred feelings, and the predominance of fancy and imagination. Many a long and happy walk have I had with him in the beautiful nei nor Byron, nor Keats. As cause of this something may be attributed to his life being a fragment. It may be believed that had he lived to three score, or even to two score, some of these be- ginnings would have been carried to their ends, many of the shorter bits would have been worked up ; but even then the pile would have remained large, leaving out of account the additions that would surely have been made to it through Shelley's remarkable verbal facility, whereby was seized and secured any fresh thought that darted to the surface from inte- rior depths, or flashed from without, and thus suddenest fancies, abruptest suggestions, were instantly embodied, and, by virtue of poetic demands, rhythmically embodied. Coupled 234 SHELLEY. with this facility, which all his rivals, except Wordsworth, shared with him, there was in Shelley an individual eagerness, a fiery precip- itance, combined with keenest intellectual vig- ilance, that pounced upon all poetic prey with the passionateness of the tiger's spring. One can hardly recall a poet of the first class who did not write profusely. Even Mil- ton, who gave eighteen of his prime years wholly to politics and the cause of civic free- dom, left between fifteen and twenty thousand lines. Of course we do not hereby mean to im- ply that the quantity of verse a poet produces is the measure of his genius, or to hint that, because Shelley, before he was thirty, wrote twenty thousand lines, and Gray, before he was fifty-five, only two thousand, Shelley was ten times as good a poet as Gray. The con- trast in quantity is marked only for the pur- pose of exhibiting the mental prodigality of Shelley, — a prodigality which may be called unparalleled, when is taken into account the high quality of nearly every page that he wrote. Nevertheless, Shelley and Gray do stand in expressive aesthetic contrast to each other, — Gray representing the class of writers who SHELLEY. 235 laboriously compose poetry, drawing their ma- terial chiefly from without; Shelley represent- ing the class of spontaneous poets, who draw their material chiefly from within, their souls being fresh, deep fountains of thought and poetry. VII. Since their arrival in Italy Shelley and his wife had moved about, dwelling only for a few months in one place, — at the baths of Lucca, at Este near Venice, at Florence, at Naples, at Rome, leading in each place a secluded life. This continued isolation did not suit Shelley, fond as he was of solitude, and it was oppress- ive to Mary, who had a healthy liking for so- cial company. In the beginning of 1820 they established themselves at Pisa. Here they had around them a limited but congenial cir- cle. Medwin, a cousin of Shelley, was for a time a guest in their house. With Williams and Jane, his wife, there grew up an intimacy, Shelley and Williams boated together, and to Jane were addressed several sweet poems, among them the one beginning "Ariel to Mi- randa." Trelawney, manly, clear-headed Tre- lawney, became a valuable friend to Shelley. Byron, partly to be near Shelley, hired the finest palace in Pisa. The noted Italian sur- geon, Vacca, was an acquaintance. The fa- SHELLEY. 237 moLis Greek chief, Mavrocordato, visited Shel- ley and inspired him to write Hellas. But the Pisan acquaintance of whom the poet has left the deepest record was a young Italian girl. To her the world owes one of Shelley's most beautiful, most passionate poems, Epipsychi- dion. Emilia Viviani was shut up in a convent by her father until he should have chosen for her a husband. Shelley, whose noble heart was ever open to sympathy for any form of oppression, was taken to see Emilia, and was fascinated by a loveliness so extraordinary that she seemed to be the realization of even his ideal of feminine beauty. He took Mary to see her. They got permission for her to come to them at times. They sent her flowers and books, for she had more culture than most Italian girls. In his imaginative ecstasy Emilia became to Shelley the embodiment of that heavenly dream in Alastor. Her position as a victim of domestic tyranny heightened to Shelley's eyes the glow of the almost unearthly beauty of Emilia. EpipsycJiidion is the subtlest picture of ideal, uncarnal love. There is pointed sig- nificance in the name of the poem : it means 238 SHELLEY. of the soul. The poem has nothing about the body. In EmiHa the poet loves the sudden dazzling revelation of purest poetic imaginings. A creative mind revels and triumiihs in the discovery of a preconceived radiance. He calls her "spouse, sister, angel." In the rela- tion between Emilia and Shelley there was Jiot a shadow of evil ; nay, there was substantial good, for it gave birth to an immortal poem. As for the " Angel " herself, she was soon taken from the convent to be given to a sposo of her father's choice. In a few years she sepa- rated from her husband, with her father's ajD- proval, and died shortly afterwards, in her real marriage j^resenting a sad contrast to the ideal union in the Eden-island so wonderfully de- scribed in Epipsychidio7i : " The winged storms, chaunting their thunder-psalm To other lands, leave azure chasms of calm Over this isle, or weep themselves in dew From which its fields and woods ever renew Their green and golden immortality." Although the love of the poet for Emilia was poetical and innocent, and his wife shared his interest in and admiration of her, it is nevertheless not surprising that EpipsycJiidion is the only one of the longer poems of Shelley SHELLEY. 239 to which Mary has not written an explanatory note. To Trelawney the world owes a picture of Shelley in the last year of his life drawn by a masterly hand. A man of rare insight into his fellow-men, Trelawney was at the same time an artist with his pen, an artist the more faithful for his unconsciousness. Both of Shelley and Byron he has left a memorial which is priceless. His own manliness and intelligence captivated both. He became in- timate with both, saw them almost daily for several months. One day, a few weeks only after his arrival in Pisa, talking with Shelley of Byron, Shelley cried out to his wife : " Mary, Trelawney has found out Byron already. How stupid we were — how long it took us." On the 23d of February, 1821, died at Rome, in his twenty-fifth year, John Keats. In the previous autumn, Shelley, hearing of his pur- posed journey to Italy, had invited Keats to stay with him. In May, 1821, Shelley wrote his great elegy on Keats, Adojiais. In another volume (^Bricf Essays and Brev- ities') I have ventured to call Adonais the finest elegy in literature. The subject of Adonais is far higher and richer than that of Lycidas. 240 SHELLEY. Young King, the subject of Milton's monody, owes his immortality entirely to Milton. Keats is the peer of the immortal Shelley. The men- tal power of Keats, his wrongs, the resplendent group of jDoets about him, all these demand a wider range of thought, a deeper movement, more tearful griefs, and these demands are all met with the sweep and glow of intellectual and poetic mastership. In comparison with the heights and deeps of Adonais, Lycidas is superficial, with an air of elegant convention- ality. Every one of the fifty-five Spenserian stanzas, making four hundred and ninety-five lines, quivers with fervor : Lycidas, with its one hundred and ninety-three lines is com- paratively cold. A curious coincidence it is, that at the time of writing Lycidas and Adon- ais Milton and Shelley were each in his twenty-ninth year, while King and Keats were each in his twenty-fifth. The sustained splendor of Adonais is aston- ishing. Fifty-five Spenserian stanzas, each a new bar of musical thought, each resting, to the eye on, and to the ear supported by, the rhythmic strength of the final Alexandrine ; each as fresh and original as a succession of May mornings, every one of which seems to SHELLEY. 241 surpass the preceding in the glittering beauty of its auroral dewiness ; all glorified by the mysterious creative life out of which spring the earth and the stars. The soul of Shelley was an exhaustless deep of beautiful thought. His imaginations are as poetic as they are abundant. Here is the fourteenth stanza, not more poetical and melodious than others, only, from its subject, more condensed : " All he had loved, and moulded into thought, From shape, and hue, and odour, and sweet sound, Lamented Adonais. Morning sought Her eastern watch-tower, and her hair unbound, Wet with the tears which should adorn the ground, Dimmed the aerial eyes that kindle day ; Afar the melancholy thunder moaned. Pale Ocean in unquiet slumber lay. And the wild winds flew round, sobbing in their dismay." The fineness and freshness of Shelley's poetic invention is nowhere more effectively exhibited than where he represents " the quick Dreams " mourning round the body of Keats. No one knew better than Shelley what a gift to the poet — it might be called his capital outfit — is the power of day-dreaming. Take these two stanzas ; they are typical of Shelley, so new, so springy, so laden with musical mind, so inwardly lucent : 16 242 SHELLEY. " O, weep for Adonais ! — The quick Dreams, The passion-winged Ministers of thought, Who were his flocks, whom near the living streams Of his young spirit he fed, and whom he taught The love which was its music, wander not, — Wander no more, from kindling brain to brain. But droop there, whence they sprung ; and mourn their lot Round the cold heart, where, after their sweet pain. They ne'er will gather strength, or find a home again. "And one with trembling hands clasps his cold head, And fans him with her moonlight wings, and cries : - ' Our love, our hope, our sorrow, is not dead ; See, on the silken fringe of his faint eyes. Like dew upon a sleeping flower, there lies A tear some Dream has loosened from his brain.' Lost Angel of a ruined Paradise ! She knew not 't was her own ; as with no stain She faded, like a cloud which had outwept its rain." A poet is great in proportion as out of in- ward resources he throws light on nature and man, — a new light, because kindled at a new poetic flame. By this recreative illumination man and nature are transfigured, and thence are seen more vividly, because seen more in their reality, that is, in their spiritual being. Hence, the poet's pictures and expositions are true and distinct and beautiful and significant, SHELLEY. 243 not according to the grandeur and variety of men and scenery his outward eyes have rested on, but according to the variety and fullness of his interior wealth of sensibility. A great poet is a new man, — a new radiant man. Such is Shelley, and nowhere is his radiance more new and warming than in Adonais. Here are three more stanzas, ever abloom with poetic soul. Sixty years ago it was a high, imagina- tive leap, a prophetic cry, to exclaim, *' 'T is Death is dead, not he." " Peace, peace ! he is not dead, he doth not sleep — He hath awakened from the dream of life — 'T is we, who, lost in stormy visions, keep With phantoms an unprofitable strife, And in mad trance, strike with our spirit's knife Invulnerable nothings. — We decay Like corpses in a charnel ; fear and grief Convulse us and consume us day by day, And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay. " He has outsoared the shadow of our night ; Envy and calumny and hate and pain, And that unrest which men miscall delight. Can touch him not and torture not again ; From the contagion of the world's slow stain He is secure, and now can never mourn A heart grown cold, a head grown gray in vain j 244 SHELLEY. Nor, when the spirit's self has ceased to burn. With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn. " He lives, he wakes — 't is Death is dead, not he ; Mourn not for Adonais. — Thou young Dawn Turn all thy dew to splendour, for from thee The spirit thou lamentest is not gone ; Ye caverns and ye forests, cease to moan ! Cease ye faint flowers and fountains, and thou Air, Which like a mourning veil thy scarf hadst thrown O'er the abandoned Earth, now leave it bare Even to the joyous stars which smile on its despair ! " Whoever has enough poetic susceptibiHty to read and study Adonais will^ be able, through its stanzas, — so alight are they with spiritual imaginativeness, — better than through almost any other pages, to get down to the founda- tions of poetry, to inhale its aromatic essence, to finger, as it were, its very roots. Four stanzas of Adonais are given by Shel- ley to himself. Nor are the wonderful stanzas thus dedicated in the least stained with vanity or egoism. Appropriate, inevitable, imperative was it that these few stanzas should be given to him " Who in another's fate now wept his own." That he did so, deepens the pathos of this great poem. These autobiographical thirty- SHELLEY. 245 six lines are a peerless Elegy on himself by the great poet, a self-portraiture touching and powerful. This is the last of the four stanzas : " AH stood aloof, and at his partial moan Smiled through their tears ; well knew that gentle band Who in another's fate now wept his own ; As in the accents of an unknown land, He sung new sorrow ; sad Urania scanned The Stranger's mien, and murmured : ' Who art thou ?' He answered not, but with a sudden hand Made bare his branded and ensanguined brow, Which was like Cain's or Christ's — Oh ! that it should be so ! " It were easy to go on for pages in this strain of eulogy, for each stanza vibrates with feeling embalmed in the fragrance of the beautiful. The last stanzas are laden with the weird monitions of the seer. Deep sympathy with man makes the thoughtful poet prophetic. Shelley loved to dally with Death : he was fond of peering over the fence that separates man from the angels. He could not swim. One day, bathing with Trelawney in the Arno, he got into deep water. Trelawney plunged after him and found him lying on the bottom, making no effort to save himself. When he 246 SHELLEY. recovered his breath, he said : " I always find the bottom of the well, and they say Truth lies there. In another minute I should have found it, and you would have found an empty shell. It is an easy way of getting rid of the body." Trelawney narrates with great vividness what on another occasion occurred in a frail little boat with Jane (Mrs. Williams) and her two children, when a woman's tact and presence of mind turned Shelley away from the thought of "solving the great mystery." The whole narrative — too long for this page — is strik- ingly illustrative of Shelley in one of his fear- fully inquisitive moods. In the fifty-second stanza of Adonais he ex- claims, "Die, If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek I Follow where all is fled ! " The next three stanzas conclude the poem : " Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart ? Thy hopes are gone before : from all things here They have departed ; thou shouldst now depart ! A light is past from the revolving year, And man, and woman ; and what still is dear Attracts to crush, repels to make thee wither. The soft sky smiles, — the low wind whispers near; SHELLEY. 247 ' T is Adonais calls ! oh, hasten thither, No more let Life divide what Death can join together. "That Light whose smile kindles the Universe, That Beauty in which all things work and move. That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love Which through the web of being blindly wove By man and beast and earth and air and sea, Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of The fire for which all thirst ; now beams on me. Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality. " The breath whose might I have invoked in song Descends on me ; my spirit's bark is driven. Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng Whose sails were never to the tempest given ; The massy earth and sphered skies are riven ! I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar; Whilst burning through the inmost veil of Heaven, The soul of Adonais, like a star, Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are." And now it is time to conclude this Study, so unsatisfactory in its incompleteness, and yet attractive through its loving fullness of Shelley. Is he idealized in these insufficient pages } Who can write faithfully about Shel- ley without giving into idealization .-' Happy if he can reach up to him even then, for he was an ideality, a great ideal reality. In 248 SHELLEY. Studying and getting intimate with Shelley, while one's mind is delightfully exercised, one's idea of humanity is elevated and deep- ened. He was a man from whose soul sweet- est emanations, loftiest aspirings, were as pro- fusely thrown out as are the spring's blossoms that fail not to issue in savory fruit. To build his core the true, the good, the beautiful, were fragrantly interlinked, the bond among them kept ever willing and flexible by the warmth of love. In Genevra, a poem of about two hundred lines, written in 1821, the year before Shelley passed from the earth, there seems to me to be more, than in any other of his works, of what is a characteristic of Shelley, — at once a mark and source of his greatness, — a rich plenitude of mind, pointing to an infinitude of power. Feeling evokes feeling, thought awakens thought, and they leap forth nimbly as if rejoicing to get out of an overcrowded brain. Out of this copiousness are great poems born, such as are many of Shelley's. Among them all, preeminent in pathos, in po- etic lightning, in moral might, is Genevra. Were not the ocean so wide and deep, re- freshing, fructifying rains would fail us. Only SHELLEY. 249 deep, full sensibilities beget poetic deeps, of which, therefore, there are far more in Shelley than in Byron. Byron, talking one day with Shelley and Trelawney, told them that Murray (the publisher) advised him to go back to his "Corsair style to please the ladies." Shelley repelled the advice indignantly, and added : "Write nothing but what your conviction of its truth inspires you to write ; you should give counsel to the wise, not take it from the foolish. Time will reverse the judgment of the vulgar. Contemporary criticism only rep- resents the amount of ignorance genius has to contend with." Besides Hellas, a lyrical drama of thirteen or fourteen hundred lines, Shelley wrote in 1821, including Adonais and Genevra, about twelve hundred lines in minor poems. All of these, like the poems of all his years, are written from within, — this is the source of their power ; and nearly all were inspired by love, and this gives warmth to their beauty. The Hymn to Intellectual Beauty ends with these lines : " Thus let thy power, which like the truth Of nature on my passive youth Descended, to my onward life supply Its calm — to one who worships thee, And every form containing thee, 250 SHELLEY. Whom, Spirit fair, thy spells did bind To fear himself, and love all human kind." Between this great Hymn, written in his twenty-fourth year, and Gencvra, written in his twenty-ninth, lie inclosed Mont Blanc, Lines written among the Enganian Hills, Julian and Maddalo, Stanzas written in Dejection near Naples, Ode to the West Wind, The Sen- sitive Pla7it, To a Skylark, Ode to Liberty, EpipsycJiidion, The Witch of Atlas, Hymn of Apollo, Ode to Naples, Adonais, and others hardly less good, but shorter, besides such great fragments as The Triumph of Life and Prince Athanese. Add to these The Cenci and his other long poems already noticed, and it may be asked, Do the poems of any one of his illustrious contemporaries attain to such uniformity of excellence ? Nay, when are re- called the five or six best of the above-named poems, and how in them the finest poetic essence is breathed through most musically rhythmic forms, the intense life of fresh sub- stance rounded into blooming gracefulness, and how, above all, is notable the glowing fu- sion of all the parts into rapid continuity, — an especial token this of creative life in the soul that feeds the flow of lustrous words, — SHELLEY. 251 when all this is before us, may we not ask, not whether Wordsworth or Coleridge or Byron or Keats has surpassed Shelley in the degree of poetic excellence reached, but has any one of them quite equalled him ? Spontaneity, fervor, sincerity, close clinging together of thought, feeling, and diction, give to each stanza of Adonais, of the Ode to the West Wind, the Skylark, Hymn of Apollo, and to every sentence of EpipsycJiidion and of Ge- nevra, a buoyancy like that of his own mount- ing lark, " As from thy presence showers a rain of melody," while the united stanzas or paragraphs of each poem build a whole as compact and Surely or- ganized as a swift joyous flight of wild-fowl high up towards heaven, held together in wedge-like symmetry by the invisible cords of divine love kindled in each of them by the cre- ative fire which warms the Universe into one- ness, each poem, by this vital concord with consecrated nature, exhibiting a consumma- tion of winged Art. The richer and deeper the nature the more time is needed for its full earthly unfolding. Shelley, on the day of his drowning, wanted 252 SHELLEY. twenty-seven days to have reached the end of his thirtieth year. The poetic product of even Shakespeare, before his thirty-first year, was not so vast and valuable as that of Shelley, certainly not so various and matured. Such maturity may be a sign of rapid development, as it was with Byron, who at thirty-four had done his best in poetry. It may be thought that at thirty Shelley had scaled the summit of his poetic elevation. But that he was in the full swing of growth is proved by the closer tissue, the firmer handling, in Adotiais, in The Cenci, in Epipsychidion, in Genevra. When we consider his temperate habits (he was a water-drinker and vegetarian), and that his health was stronger in his latest year than in several years before ; that he was ever as- piring, never vulgarly ambitious ; that he was quickened by a divine sense of the beautiful which the purity of his nature and his life kept ever acute ; that all this was conspicuous in his latter verse ; that his chief love — he was a man of many loves — was the love of truth, truth the resistless leader, the self-renewing spring of life and new power, — when we con- sider all this, we can but believe that, had Shelley lived a score of years longer, his rich, SHELLEY. 253 chaste mind would have gained a more nervous grasp of human life, a tighter hold of the act- ual, through the warmth of experience, and that many more of his sentences would have become marrowy with that wisdom which is the fruit of marriage between illuminated ide- alism and heartiest realism. This was not to be. On the 8th of July, 1822, he and his friend Williams went down in the beautiful Bay of Spezzia, whether by the foundering of their boat in the night- storm, or by her being run into by a felucca, is not certainly ascertained. When Shelley's body was found his hand still clutched a vol- ume of -iEschylus, and in his coat pocket was a volume of Keats just lent him by Leigh Hunt, who had arrived at Leghorn a few days before. In a small band of rare distinction was made a chasm, the width and depth of which the warmest friend of Shelley could not have foreseen, much as he was valued and loved. Retiring, undemonstrative, never self-seeking, he was yet the soul of the circle. His coming was always the awakener of bright expecta- tion, even more on account of the sweetness and unselfishness of his nature and manners, 254 SHELLEY. than of the brilliancy of his talk. Byron said of Shelley : " A more perfect gentleman never crossed a drawing-room." When the tall, thin figure of this gentleman, — scholar, poet, thinker, friend, with his mobile, boy-like coun- tenance, his abundant wavy hair, and large blue eyes agleam with the latent lightnings of poetry, a benediction to all mankind behind his expressive features, — whenever he glided in among his friends, his presence was a joyful animation. When assurance of their loss came home to all hearts there was wild desolation. Leigh Hunt wept and could not be comforted ; he felt like a lone one from whose side had just been snatched a whole family of brothers. The pallid countenance of Byron grew paler, and his cynical lips quivered. Even the stout- hearted Trelawney trembled. The suddenly widowed mothers, Mary and Jane, sobbed con- vulsively in one another's arms, and threw themselves in agony upon their orphan chil- dren. Mary was left suddenly in the dark : the light of her life had been quenched. All about her, where there had been bright illu- mination, was thick gloom. And yet for her, as for every human being in utmost extremity, SHELLEY. 255 there was a possible consolation. When there should come a lull in the storm of her grief, it might have been whispered to her : Oh, wherefore weep for Percy ! he is not dead ! The thunder-cloud and wind he loved, and sea, Have borne his body to its earthen bed Of elemental life, while thankful, he Springing agaze into the immensity Where his creative thought aye joyed to roam, His being aglow with livelier life, and free From fleshly bonds and bars and fretted foam, A raptured angel is he in his heavenly home. GOETHE. ■7 TO GOETHE. Teutonic leader, — in the foremost file Of that picked corps, whose rapture 't is to feel With subtler closer sense all woe and weal. And forge the feeling into rhythmic pile Of words, so tuned they sing the sigh and smile Of all humanity, — meek did'st thou kneel At Nature's pious altars, midst the peal Of prophet-organs, thy great self the while All ear and eye, thou greatest of the band, Whose voices waked their brooding Luther-land, At last left lone in Weimar, famed through thee, Wearing with stately grace thy triple crown Of science, statesmanship, and poesy. Enrobed in age and love and rare renown. GOETHE.^ Germany, in her twenty centuries of vigor- ous life, has been rich in men, many of them men in whom fermented so much of the finer marrow of humanity, that their individual being and doing was the flaming of a light, strong enough to be a new illumination, not to Ger- many merely, but to Christendom. Of this effulgent class of Germans there is but one man whose life-work exercised, and exercises, a wider and more liberating influence on the thought of the civilized world than John Wolf- gang Goethe. That sublime single one is Martin Luther. And the chief glory of Luther is, that he created the conditions, moral and intellectual, that made a Goethe possible. Goethe was a great poet. This is why we are assembled here to-day to do him honor. 1 Address delivered before the Goethe Club of the city of New York, January lo, 1877. 262 GOETHE. A great poet is a great power among men ; he is — what no other great man is, however val- ued — the personal friend, the intimate, the bosom friend, of every man. In our hearts he makes himself a place, and from that place he warms us, he expands and refines our being : this is his heavenly privilege. And Goethe is much else. Wordsworth is a great poet, so is Shelley, and this is surely enough ; but they are nothing besides. Shakespeare is the greatest of poets ; but from him we have only poems. Save what we can infer from his po- etry we know hardly anything of him. These poems, to be sure, are the richest literary be- quest ever left to mankind, a legacy which can- not be wasted, a possession which cannot be alienated, through all the ages a grant to every one who chooses to accept it, a gain of hght for guidance, an intellectually spiritual gift to every one who will reach out to take it, to the world an inextinguishable illumination, an un- ceasing beneficence, a force in every soul, a divine presence whose blessing is ever upon us, especially upon us this evening when we are met to talk together of his mighty com- peer, second only to him. Goethe was a chief favorite of fortune. This GOETHE. 263 form of speech we use because it is not given to us to delve into mysterious sources and be- hold the interior workings of the immeasura- ble, invisible, supervisive power, whose action is the order and law of our earthly world. Fortunate was Goethe in the time of his birth, the very middle of the eighteenth century, when Europe, agitated as never before by mental movement, was beginning to heave with the throes that were soon to burst forth in fearful revolution. Fortunate in his par- ents, each a strongly marked individuality ; the father, devoted to acquirement, — intellectual, methodical, orderly, precise, a little stern in the enforcement of rules ; the mother, cheerful, practical, genial, mobile, with the intuitions of the best womanhood. Fortunate was he in meeting with the young Duke of Weimar, and most fortunate in the character and capacity of the Duke, and equally fortunate in the character and capacity of the noble Duchess, Louise of Darmstadt, his consort. But the chief favoritism was the gift to him of the fire of genius, which enlivened and made produc- tive a potent intellect and a rich sensibility. This union of genius with mental solidity and versatility, this inward fire warming great 264 GOETHE. inward resources, would have made Goethe a distinguished man anywhere at any period. Stijl his own principle holds good, that the Artist, for his unfolding, requires favorable conditions. A Statesman, a military chief, is necessarily dependent on outward events ; much more the Artist, who is an Artist partly through his openness to impressions from with- out. To be an artist a man must be of more than common sensibility, of quick impressibil- ity ; he must be one who, through the poetic, the supreme gift, projects out of himself, in forms of beauty, conceptions and visions, the material for these forms being supplied by a keen perception of and warm susceptibility to what is present, what is around him, what is before his senses. The young Goethe, palpi- tating with this susceptibility, was a many- sided mirror in the midst of an insurrection- ary world, a beautifying mirror, on which struck, to be poetically reflected, its scenes and passions. His was a large soul, yearning in its depths with all the mysterious feeling of a prolific epoch, — a fresh clear mind, a vast mind, passionate, reflective, creative, with the power, and the unconscious impulse, to give voice to the wants and feelings of an impas- sioned age. GOE THE. 265 Time and place were propitious; and so, in Goethe's twenty-third year, Goetz von Ber- lichingen burst into life, Goetz with the iron hand, a protesting shout against the tyranny of custom, a defiant assertion of individual in- deiDendence, a revolutionary shock to litera- ture, a tearing up of worn dramatic highways, a startling new phenomenon. Right upon Goetz came Werther, which may be called a musical shriek of despair, a shriek that sent a thrill through the heart of Germany, of Eu- rope. Suddenly, with two bounds, the young giant leapt into a great renown. This renown brought him into contact with Karl August, Duke of Weimar. Goethe was twenty-six when he went to Weimar. On the invitation of the Duke he came to spend a few weeks : he staid fifty-seven years. He began by leading the gay, wild court life of fun and frolic, led by a young sovereign full of force and animal spirits, and not yet out of his teens : he remained to teach the Duke how to work and how to govern. He began, the centre of an admiring circle of waltzers : he ended by being the head of a band of workers, scientific, artistic, political workers, who wrought the Duchy of Weimar into the brighest domain of 266 GOETHE. Germany. He came as a temporary, spark- • ling guest : he remained as a permanent, solid benefactor. The opening season, the first decade, of Goethe's living and doing in Weimar presents a unique picture of what a young man can perform, — a performance, in this case, which if not so imposing as that of the young Napo- leon in the first ten adult years of his wonder- ful career, is more spiritually instructive as an example, and more valuable in its practical bearings. The Duke, fascinated by the talk and demeanor of him whom Wieland called " the godlike splendid youth," as others were fascinated, as Wieland himself was, and the dowager-Duchess and Duchess Louise, and all the Court, the Duke soon began to feel the deeper attraction of Goethe's mind and char- acter, and to perceive how useful Goethe might be to him," — a perception sharpened, if not originated, by growing attachment to his young friend, who, so young, was seven years older than himself. Karl August was a pro- gressive man, one not afraid of new ideas, new discoveries, new principles. Men of aspiration and of culture, and of confident readiness to grasp fresh thought and to recognize its e.\- GOETHE. 267 pansive potency, such men are stamped by nature with superiority ; they are the elite among their fellows. The Duke and Goethe began by playing to- gether : very soon they took to working to- gether, and the Duke, with that rare insight and judgment which quickly discern and ap- preciate greatness, and which are the most legitimate titles to sovereignty, raised Goethe, six months after his arrival, to a seat in the Privy Council, with corresponding title and salary. Goethe was twenty-seven, Karl Au- gust twenty. With a deep groan groaned the ofRcial world, and red tape turned pale. A young, un- known stranger, and a plebeian, without drudg- ing through the subordinate grades, lifted sud- denly over the heads of faithful old servants of routine ! All Weimar howled ! So brist- ling was the discontent it took the form of a written protest from the Duke's ministers. The boy-Duke held firm. He was a genuine Duke, a leader. He felt that by his side he had a man worth more than scores of ordinary privy councillors and ministers. In this young stranger he had got possession of a powerful genius, that is, a man whose brain is full of 268 GOETHE. light. And soon — as is the way with a power- ful genius, when furthered and not obstructed — Goethe began to penetrate, to guide all de- partments. Among his superiorities Goethe had the organizing capacity, and to make things bet- ter was a need of his nature. He improved the public-school system of the Duchy ; he put new life into the University of Jena ; he brought order into the finances, and made the generous Duke a wiser economist. He re- opened the neglected mines of Ilmenau, having taken hold of Science, — for which he had a natural aptitude, — in order that he might do more thorough service in several administra- tive departments ; he established a fire-brigade ; in the middle of the night he would leap out of bed at a cry of fire, and hurry to a neighbor- ing village, coming back in the morning with feet blistered and hair singed. He rode from town to town to superintend the diafting of men for the war contingent ; with the master of the forests he would ride through the public domain, teaching and learning. He reformed and directed the theatre, and created the beau- tiful park at Weimar. When the President of the Chambers died, the Duke insisted that he GOETHE. 269 should fill that place too. He was the soul of the government, the good genius of the com- munity, throwing the light of a piercing intel- ligence upon all public interests, seeing to everything, teaching everybody, helping every- body, uplifting everybody : the most efficient of practical workers, openly beneficent, secretly charitable. The case related by Lewes, in his admirable Life of Goethe, of his having upheld and supported for years, by sympathy and money, a desolate man whom he had never seen, is one of the most touching and beautiful exemplificatioils ever brought to light of the refined and generous spirit of the Christian gentleman. During this early period Merk, the cynic, wrote from Weimar : " Who can withstand the disinterestedness of this man ? " It was Goethe's happiness to lend a helping hand to artists and othel" men of worth. He induced the Duke to call Herder to Weimar as court-chaplain. His influence it was that had Schiller appointed to a professorship in Jena, and afterwards obtained a pension for him, which enabled Schiller to domesticate himself in Weimar. He helped to get some of Wie- land's numerous children provided for. In the midst of this various work, as the 2/0 GOETHE. chief steward of the Duke and Duchy, Goethe found time, nay, he gave his best time, his brightest moments, to poetry, working at Faust, or WilJicIm Meisicr, or IpJiigcnia, according to the mood, or throwing off some of those match- less lyrics that bloom perennially in their sim- plicity and significance, ever as fresh and fra- grant as the newest, sweetest flowers of a June morning. When one takes into view what Goethe wrought in those first ten years of his young manhood, how he shone in all places upon all men, how he grew so deeply into the thoughts of men that while he was in Italy Weimar suf- fered as in eclipse, her sunlight withdrawn from her, we can, without much extravagance, figure him to ourselves, in his beaming cre- ativeness and magnetic beauty, as akin to the Apollo of Greek imagination, a very God of poetry, honored too as the healer, and the har- monizer of discords. And now, at the end of ten such well- worked years, he had earned a holiday. In the beginning of the autumn of 1786, his pur- pose made known to no one but the Duke, he slipped away, and under an assumed name, — that he might not be obstructed by his re- GOETHE. 271 nown, — crossing the Alps, he found himself in Italy. His feeling towards Italy had come to be a yearning. In one of those original sagacious sentences that abound in him Goethe says, you cannot enter a room where hangs an engraving and go out the same as you came in. Active in him was the liability to be transformed by im- pressions from without ; and this liability is a primary qualification of the poet, for it comes from the warmth and readiness of the man's feelings. The image of an object without, falling upon rich emotional capabilities within, a flame is enkindled which, purified by sensi- bility to the beautiful, is the very substance of poetry. During the eighteen months that Goethe passed in Italy his susceptive, hungry mind was in a glow. Of this light he made the most, working in his best moments, at Rome and Naples, at unfinished manuscripts he had brought with him. From Italy he came back refreshed, strengthened, calmed ; his horizoig enlarged, his appetite for knowl- edge allayed, his thoughts on Art harmonized, compacted. He returned, not to resume his former manifold functions, but to dedicate him- self to his inborn vocation, poetry and litera- 272 GOETHE. ture, retaining control only over the artistic and scientific institutions of Weimar. Upon them he brought to bear his vast acquired knowledge, his ripened thoughtfulness, and while serving them, through such service deepening, refining his own culture. Goethe was an incessant worker, an unceas- ing learner. Simply by supplying the needs of his own nature, his life was the putting in practice of a broad counsel of Voltaire : " Give to the soul all possible forms : it is a fire which God has confided to us : we should feed it with whatever is most precious. Our being should be made to partake of all imaginable condi- tions : the doors of the mind should be opened to all knowledge, all feeling. Provided they don't enter pell-mell, there is room for all." And this counsel Goethe could follow, because, having an omnivorous appetite for whatever can be known and whatever can be felt, he had within his intellect that high logical method — an indispensable requirement for all large per- formance — which could so class and coordi- nate his vast stores as to have them all readily available, and make room for an endless sup- ply. No man ever held closer, wiser watch over his knowledge and his feelings, in order GOETHE. 273 to keep his stores sweet and incorruptible. In all efforts, practical and theoretical, for found- ing or bettering institutions, for combating or diffusing ideas, he strove to obey — and for obeying had clearer insights, deeper intui- tions, than most men — the mandate conveyed in the simple words of Jesus : " Every plant which my Heavenly Father has not planted shall be rooted up." Seeking always, unremit- tingly, through four score yea*rs, his personal improvement, — improvement moral, aesthet- ical, intellectual, — intently did he aim to make these profound words the touchstone of his own inward motions. After middle life Goethe wrote : " I, who have known and suffered from the perpetual agitation of feelings and opinions in myself and in others, delight in the sublime repose which is produced by contact with the great and eloquent silence of nature." The man who " suffers from the perpetual agitation of feelings in himself and others " is endowed with richest material for poetry : he suffers because he feels so keenly. Sympathy is the poet's capital ; and when to this wealth of sensibility he adds the decisive poetic gift, sense of the beautiful, the refining transfigur- 18 274 GOETHE. ing- power, he is a poet in posse, for he pos- sesses "the vision and the faculty divine." To be a poet in esse, he must have in fur- ther addition the " accomplishment of verse." Wordsworth says : " Oh, many are the poets that are sown By nature ; men endowed with highest gifts, The vision and the faculty divine, Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse." So, too, with poetic painters : some, with fine gifts, cannot acquire manipulating dexter- ity. This seems to have been the case with Hazlitt, and somewhat with Haydon, who thence failed as Artists ; for it is the power adequately to embody poetic conceptions and feelings that makes the Artist. When Cole- ridge says of Shakespeare that his judgment is equal to his genius, he proclaims him a great Artist. Shakespeare's intellectual re- sources for turning to best account his deep glowing sensibilities were of the highest. To his great conceptions he knew how to give dramatic form with a nicety of adaptation, with an accuracy of adjustment, which show them to the best advantage. He has the art to incarnate his ideas and feelings in firm, brilliant, transparent forms, and he has a sure eye for proportion. GOETHE. 275 Never did man more fully than Goethe -earn the high title of Artist. I call it a high title, because genuine Art, really Fine Art, im- plies the power of giving expression to poetic thought and sentiment, and, in its highest range, to broadest and deepest poetic thought and sentiment. There can be no Fine Art without " the vision and the faculty divine," Facility in clothing thought with words, rare definiteness of perception, delight in the con- crete, — the combination of aptitudes that em- power the poetic mind to give clean, clear ex- pression to its workings, and with these the instinct and judgment to choose the most fit- ting form, — in all this Goethe is unsurpassed. Thence in his performance there is the grace and buoyancy which are the charm of the best Art. From his brief epigrams and distichs to songs and ballads, and thence to his longer poems, Iphigenia, and Tasso, and Herman, and Dorothea, and Faust, in all there is, I had al- most said, artistic perfection, resulting from the harmonious marriage between sentiment and diction, between thought and word, be- tween substance and form. His best work — and much of it is best — is truly classical ; 2/6 GOETHE. that is, it embodies healthy sentiment, just thought, in choice language the most fitting to express them. A high characteristic of Goethe is his simplicity of diction, — a quality by no means common to all good poets, — • which in him comes from the clearness of his mind and his sincerity. All Goethe's works are the offspring of his interior self. His pen took no bribes from vanity or ambition, or from poverty. Especially were his works the offspring of his love. What he wrote he wrote from sympathy with his subject, — the only pure source of literary work ; and how wide were his sympathies may be learned from the unprecedented range of his subjects. More trustfully and deeply than any one else, Nature let him into her confidence, so vari- ous and delicate and so piercing were his per- ceptions. And, with all his rich command of individualities, he was a far-reaching general- izer, a sure thinker ; and thus his multifarious work, both as Artist and Naturalist, has a clean fidelity as well as rare vividness. Goethe lived in constant intimacy with Nat- ure ; he delighted to consort with her in all her moods. A year or two after his arrival in Weimar, while rebuilding his " garden-house," GOETHE. 277 he slept out-of-doors wrapt in his cloak. On the 19th of May, 1777, he writes to Frau von Stein : " Last night I slept on the terrace under my blue cloak, awoke three times, at twelve, two, and four, and at each time there was a new glory around me in the sky." Here is another passage which shows the spirit in which he worked. It occurs in a note to Her- der in 1784: "I hasten to tell you of the for- tune that has befallen me ; I have found nei- ther gold nor silver, but that which gives rae inexpressible joy, the os i?itcri)iaxilla)'e (inter- maxillary bone) in man ! I compared the skulls of men and beasts in company with Loder, came on the trace of it, and lo ! there it is," Sympathy with Nature, delight in her as- pects, her phenomena, her procedure, is the most solid foundation for competence in Art. Nature ever dominates Art ; as Shakes^Deare says, " Nature is made better by no mean. But Nature makes that mean ; so, o'er that art Which, you say, adds to nature, is an art That nature makes." A chief source of Goethe's preeminence is the union in him, each in such high degree, of the poetic and the scientific, the two cardinal 278 GOETHE. tendencies of human faculty. All men have some capacity for classification and for appre- hension of law, which is the initiatory move- ment toward science ; and science is simply knowledge methodized ; and all men have some feeling for the beautiful, which is the primary element of poetry. But to have both these tendencies combined, each with liveliest im- pulsion, and opportunities for their play, to- gether with length of years, has been given only to ■ the preeminent German poet-sage. Shelley is the only other great poet who, to the love of nature native to all poets, added a love for investigating her phenomena ; but Shelley died before even the summer of life had sunned his faculties into ripe productive- ness. Coleridge was metaphysical rather than scientific, and Wordsworth's intense love of nature was sentimental, not intellectual. In the age of Shakespeare and Milton Science had not unfolded itself into organic form. Goethe was a great, I had almost said a sublime, naturalist, so high were his gifts for enjoying, for apprehending, for interpreting nature. He was at once a poetic and an in- tellectual lover of nature, — nature, that vast mysterious presence, in which and by which GOETHE. 279 we live, whose outward aspect is for us an hourly wonder, an unfading charm, and whose inward movement is a deeper wonder, reveal- ing forever fresh power and beauty to man, — man, a spiritual, intellectual, conscious creat- ure, and yet a child of Nature, his being so closely interwoven with hers that he is partly her vassal, partly her lord. Of this mighty, mysterious, myriad-organed power Goethe was a favorite, but not a spoilt, child (there are no spoilt children of Nature, only of fortune), a favorite from his docility to her teachings, his disinterested love of her, his delight in her profusion, his openness to her manifold attrac- tion, his cheerful recognition of her multiplex, kindly, inexorable law. Through his love and obedience, from vassal he came to hold much of the privilege of lord. Goethe was too genuine a naturalist to be fond of metaphysics or of ecclesiastical theol- ogy. As a master-mind he apprehended them, and discerned their unavoidable subjectivity, and thence their one-sidedness and insuffi- ciency. He was not, as Coleridge says of him- self, " early bewildered in metaphysics and in theological controversy." In after years Cole- ridge deplored the having in his youth given 280 GOETHE. SO much time to what in his Biographia Liter- aria he calls "this preposterous pursuit," from which he had been, he says, happily with- drawn by awakened interest in poetry ; and he reiterates his condemnation in the follow- ing emphatic passage : " Well would it have been for me, perhaps, had I never relapsed into the same mental disease; if I had con- tinued to pluck the flowers and reap the har- vest from the cultivated surface, instead of delving in the unwholesome quicksilver mines of metaphysic lore. And if in after time I have sought a refuge from bodily pain and misman- aged sensibility in abstruse researches, which exercise the strength and subtlety of the un- derstanding without awakening the feelings of the heart, still there was a long and blessed interval, during which my natural faculties were allowed to expand, and my original ten- dencies to develop themselves, — my fancy, and the love of nature, and the sense of beauty in forms and sounds." As in Coleridge it was the poet who de- tected the defect of abstract research, when uncheered and unguidcd by the maternal voices of nature, in Goethe it was both the poet and the naturalist ; for the sound natu- GOETHE. 281 ralist refuses to build with imaginings or as- sumptions, which are the chief resource of the theologian and the metaphysician. At the same time Goethe, being a large thinker, a man of ideas, with an originating mind, a mind in such close contact with nature that, as was said of Kepler, he " could think the thoughts of God," he would have curtailed his high privilege, maimed his mental action, had he refused to let his thought have its full sweep in surmising, in conceiving, in imagin- ing the procedure of nature. The capacity to discover a law of nature involves a power of somewhat preconceiving it. Without this power — a very high, uncommon one — of originating ideas within the mind, the mind could not put itself upon the track to discover a law of nature. With profound insight Kant lays down the position : " What truth soever is necessary and of universal extent is derived to the mind by its own operation, and does not rest on observation and experience." The inductive method supposes, of course, a capac- ity in the mind to class and coordinate facts, and the power to coordinate facts involves necessarily the power to preconceive, before making the induction, the law that rules them. 282 GOETHE. To congenial, piercing minds nature gives hints, and such minds delight in taking such hints, in seizing at a glance, by a flashing im- aginative process, a law, or the elements of a law. These rich guesses, these prolific imag- inations, before they can be used as safe build- ing material, are to be subjected to strictest tests. This union of theorizing creative med- itation with scrupulous and efficient verifica- tion by induction of facts, this it is that con- stitutes Goethe's claim to the title of great naturalist. Reason, which is the arbiter in all investigations conducted by man, in whatever sphere, — reason is an interior, invisible might. They who seek the reason of all tilings from tvithoiit preclude reason, is the import of the motto to one of Coleridge's philosophical es- says in The Friend. Never was a man more susceptible than Goethe to impressions from without, more eager for facts ; and, at the same time, never one carried within himself a stronger, clearer light to sift and class facts and to detect their governing law. The natu- ralist, to be great, must have, like Goethe, a philosophic mind, that is, a mind which loves to search for, and can reach, first principles. But to this part of Goethe's greatness must GOETHE. 283 not be given too much of our limited time. His best moods he gave to poetry. Fresh poetry can only be written in the best moods that a man is capable of. When Goethe could write poetry, he wrote that and nothing else. When inspiration folds the faculties in its glowing embrace, they become insensible to all save its breathings. That Goethe devoted so much thought to science proves the rich fullness of his mental endowmient, and that when he could not write poetry he had the spring and strength and means for centring his attention on the next highest work, — into which, too, he brought some of his creative power. He had easy command over the dif- fering mental instrumentalities which science and poetry work with. When producing po- etry he was obeying subjectively and irresisti- bly the most emphatic will of God as to him- self; when intent on discovering the laws of nature, he was finding out objectively what is the will of God. The creative gift constitutes the poet : to make, to create, is the meaning of the Greek word from which the term poet is derived. By virtue it is of his livelier sympathy with being that the poet is empowered to, humanly, ere- 284 GOETHE. ate, to reproduce, being. He has a keener apprehension of, a warmer feehng for, life. Through the intensity of this feeling he can imaginatively re-live another's life, and thus represent it from within, — re-live another life, as he re-lives his own daily life through inward motion. Only what is thus brought forth, by help of light from the beautiful, is poetry, is creation. Fresh poetry must come from the inmost self, and that self must be so deep and true as to hold more humanity than one man's share, and is thus able, is im- pelled, to throw off fragments of humanity that shall be as veritable as those we meet on the market-place. From this teeming fullness comes the inward urgency, the spontaneous flood. Like all the most abundant and vital and honest minds, Goethe was eminently spontane- ous. He wrote, not only from within out- wardly, but from an inward pressure. He did not take up promising subjects from without and adorn them ; but a feeling shaped itself within him, thus weaving for itself a fresh body, — the true creative process, whereby the generative spirit makes the material in which to embody itself. At other times he adopted GOETHE. 285 a form already known, and reanimated it, re- baptized it ; thus, by means of his inward fire, putting a new soul into an old story, and by re- generative power giving fascination to an un- promising subject, causing it to sparkle with fresh movement, through the quickening life of genius, working with clean, warm human sympathies. Much verse is written in the opposite way. Acceptable, attractive subjects are deftly, gracefully treated with more or less poetic spirit. Old popular themes are taken in hand, to be reembodied, a new face is given to them, — but no new soul is breathed into them. Even the great friend of Goethe, Schil- ler, worked much in this fashion. He was ever casting about for subjects. In one of his letters to Goethe he complains of a dearth of them. Goethe never felt this dearth : in him subjects bubbled up abundantly from the spring within. He could afford to give up subjects to his friend, as he did William Tell. To this exuberance of feeling, this readiness of sympathy, Goethe added largeness and fine- ness of intellectual faculty, which, assiduously cultivated, gave him command of strong, flex- ible, intellectual implements, so that he pos- sessed a rarely complete equipment for the 286 GOETHE. high function of poet and artist, and could bring within the range of his Art an unusually full circle of human interests. Goethe was one of the wisest of men. This implies a rich humanity of nature. To be very wise a man must enjoy that penetrating, easy vision into the most subtle, as well as the most necessary, human relations, which is only en- joyed when keenest intellectual arrows are tempered in a flood of disinterested feeling. Goethe's wisdom makes the jDermanent attrac- tion of his writings, verse as well as prose ; for the best poetry, to be the best, must issue from the warm depths where tenderness is by intellect ingeniously wrought into adamantine chains of meaning. Along the lines of Goethe's pen wisdom sparkled like verdure along the path of a spring-swollen brook. To his larger works it gives their weighty import and their inward- ness of beauty, interlacing their fibre with golden threads of significancy. On distich and quatrain and other short poems wisdom glistens like solitary diamond on a white, sup- ple finger. Take this as a sample : " Do thou what 's right in thy affairs : The rest's done for thee unawares." GOETHE. 287 Or this : " Nothing could make me deeper moan, Than being in Paradise alone." Or this ' To sweetly remember and finely to think, Is tasting of life at its deep inmost brink." Or this " When in thy head and heart it stirs, How bettered could thy doom be ? Who no more loves and no more errs Had better in his tomb be." Or this : " For what is greatest no one strives, But each one envies others' lives : The worst of enviers is the elf Who thinks that all are like himself." Many pages might be filled with similar brill- iants. Goethe said of Heine that he wants love. From its abundance in himself he knew the value and high import of this element in liter- ary production. To his own pages this su- preme attribute of mankind gives mellowness, imparts to his plots and characters a higher specific gravity. This controlling humanity of feeling turns the Pagan Princess Iphigeiiia into a Christian heroine ; gives arterial color 288 GOETHE. and rounded fullness to all the personages of that beautiful idyllic epic, Hermann and Doro^ t/iea, — ideal personages who, thiough the po- etic potency of their maker, seem more real than their living counterparts in a small Ger- man town ; makes of The God and the Baya- dere the most significant, the most profound, and the most exquisite of ballads ; pervades the wise pages of WilJielvi Meister, and is the very soul of the mastership that presided over the birth and growth of that marvelous crea- tion Mignon. This perfusive fellow-feeling steeps all Goethe's writings in its life-strength- ening current. And this man has been called cold ! So has been that controlled volcano, Washington. Goethe once said : " The most important thing is to learn to rule one's self. If I gave way to my impulses, I have such as might ruin me and all about me." The love of man was in Goethe accompanied, I may say surmounted, by what may be termed the uplifting, the transfiguring element in the poetic organization, — vivid consciousness of a transearthly spiritual world, enfolding our earthworld, — living belief in a hereafter, where the spirit, man, divested of his clay-clothes, shall continue to live and to advance. This GOETHE. 289 soaring element is as active in Dante as in Homer, working the evolution of one of the richest products of human genius, the Di- vina Commedia. This belief inspired Milton with our great English Epic, is an awful pres- ence in Hamlet, and the animating principle of Wordsworth's immortal ode. It hallows the conclusion of both parts of Faust. At the end of the last sublime scene of the First Part, when Margaret, about to be executed, ex- claims : " Thine am I, Father ! save me ! Ye Angels, ye holy ones, guard me, Camp ye around here to ward me. Henry, I shudder for thee ! " and Mephistopheles, like the consummate worldling that he is, pronounces : " She is judged ! " comes a voice from above : " She is saved ! " The moral grandeur of this utterance is con- current with its aesthetic beauty. The terrible gloom needed a flash of redeeming light ; the agonizing sympathy with Margaret longed for a solace. To draw this voice from Heaven Goethe's tenderness of nature was backed by his faith. 19 290 GOETHE. Towards the end of the Second Part, at the moment of the death of Faust, his soul is snatched away from Mephistopheles by An- gels, one of them singing: " Who bestirs him, striving ever, Him can we surely deliver." As they bear Faust upward, he is met by Mar- garet attended by bands of Angels, singing : " Almighty Love upbuildeth all, And saves them even when they fall." Goethe sends Margaret and Faust to Heav- en, because he believed in it for himself. Be- ing a good as well as a great man, and having absolute faith in the "Almighty Love," his was not at all a religion of fear. " At the age of seventy-five " he once said to his secretary, Eckerman, " one must, of course, think fre- quently of death. But this thought never gives me the least uneasiness, I am so fully convinced that the soul is indestructible, and that its activity will continue through eternity. It is like the sun, which seems to our earthly eyes to set in night, but is in reality gone to diffuse its light elsewhere." And again, on another occasion : " I could in nowise dis- pense with the happiness of believing in our GOETHE. 291 future existence, and, indeed, could say, with Lorenzo dei Medici, that those are dead for this life even who have no hope for another." Goethe's belief was not notional, it did not come from the mere understanding partially- illuminated by the finer emotions, as does so much of what is called religious belief ; a kind of belief which is not truly religious is, indeed, only formal and dogmatic, and is apt to be accompanied by intolerance, and especially by Pharisaism. Goethe agreed with the devout Joubert, who says : " We know God easily, provided we do not constrain ourselves to de- fine him." The God of sectarians is a subjec- tive God, made after the image of the secta- rian, in whose organization are predominant, not the nobler disinterested emotions, but the understanding and the self-seeking impulses. The religious faith of an emotional man with large reasoning range, like Goethe, is objec- tive. Goethe believed in the immanence (to use a technical term) of the creative spirit in all nature ; but he, at the same time, believed in a transcending Mind, that sustains and rules the whole. Sensuous as was his nature, it was so large and fully furnished that, while never seeking to know intellectually the un- 292 GOETHE. knowable, and especially not drawing impera- tive dogmas out of assumptions and imagina- tions, he had within, in his higher conscious- ness, a deep, strong feeling for the invisible spiritual, the far and yet near supernal, the vast, celestial, inscrutable Might. And thus in Faust, in the great ballads of the Bayadere and the Unfaithfttl Boy, he delights to round off with a limitless atmosphere, sending the reader's imagination into the Infinite. For Goethe as for Joubert it was not diffi- cult to "know God," because their aim, and at times their struggle, to live obediently to his will brought them nearer to him, and their glowing gifts clarified their vision for the di- vine perfections. There is but one way to know God, and that is to live his law. This Goethe was ever striv- ing to do, ever aiming to better himself mor- ally, spiritually, intellectually. Living under the momentum of a never-remitted aspiration, he lived the highest life that the individual can live. And Goethe, a man of genius and superior mental powers, having lived this high life more busily, for a longer stretch of years than almost any other man, his writings, in which the best and brightest of him is skill- GOETHE. 293 fully embodied with purest art, are, to any competent reader, a most profitable and en- riching study. Filling- more than fifty vol- umes, in their manifoldness and their extent they almost form a literature of themselves. And to these are to be added thousands of let- ters, happily preserved, and given to the world in six volumes of correspondence, during ten years, between him and Schiller ; six volumes of that with Zelter, during thirty years ; three volumes, running through half a century, of notes and letters to the Frau von Stein ; two volumes between him and his noble friend and Sovereign Karl August, for fifty-two years ; two with Knebel, covering the long space of fifty-seven years ; besides a series of single volumes to Lavater, to Jacobi, to Merk, to the Countess Stolberg, to Voight and others ; and three, lately published, of letters written be- tween his fifteenth and twenty-sixth years to his youthful friends and companions, — the whole forming a collection of the most valua- ble letters from one man ever published or penned, the most intellectual, fluent, lively, wise, honest, — a vast varied correspondence, disclosing the affectionateness and dutifulness of his nature, the breadth and depth of his knowled2:e and culture. 294 GOETHE. Thus lived this illustrious man his long life, ever seeking truth ; by love of it moved to send forth his rare capacities on many paths in the search. A gentle nature, though so ener- getic : no bitterness in his being. Hardly was he capable of hatred : this was almost a de- fect in him. And his other defects.-' Have you nothing to say of his faults } Nothing. A man's faults — save in people of one-sided selfishness — are mostly perversions of useful qualities, perversions which, under healthiest conditions, could not be. Especially is this the case with one of so compact and complete a mental organism as Goethe. Such a man's faults are temporary misdirections of sound impulses and appetites. In a full, rounded, active nature, defects are interwoven with ex- cellences, — are not to be divided from these without laceration ; they make part of the motion and exceptional glow of the individual being. From those perversions which sometimes disfigure the characters even of good and great men, Goethe was singularly free. He was not vain, he was not proud, he was not envious ; he was aspiring, but not ambitious, nor avaricious, nor covetous of others' goods ; GOETHE. 295 nor was he narrow or prejudiced. He was a just man and a generous ; charitable he was and genuinely religious, dutiful, forbearing, more exacting towards himself than towards others. Within his best being Goethe carried an ideal, to which he strove to conform his daily doings, — an ideal so clean and high that those who have taken on themselves to sit in adverse judgment on him could not conceive of, could hardly understand. That the possessor of such varied, brilliant, and solid gifts strove ever, in the exercise of them, to approach a lofty standard, which only a poet who was a good man could erect and keep before him, to this it is owing that to ponder and endeavor studiously to fathom his life and life-work is an enjoyment, a disci- pline, a progress. He charms and instructs us, as he charmed and instructed his contem- porary acquaintance. In his opening career at Weimar he so captivated all by his sympa- thizing ways, his playfulness, his genius, that Knebel wrote of him : " He rose like a star ; every body worshiped him." And that star has had, will have, no setting. Niebuhr, the historian, well versed in the characteristics of great men, said of him : " He towers above all 296 GOETHE. whom Germany has produced." Burger, the poet, called him " The astonishing magician." The greatest and the least who came into close contact with him loved, admired, trusted him. The brothers Humboldt, and other statesmen and philosophers and highest teachers, all ac- knowledged their obligations to him. Some of them sought his company to refresh and strengthen their minds. The noble, enlight- ened ducal family of Weimar, through three generations, have continued the worship of ad- miring love towards the friend and benefactor of their house. Wieland and Herder, his il- lustrious contemporaries and neighbors, were comforted by his friendship, elevated by his genius. Schiller said of him : " If he were not as a man more admirable than any I have ever known, I should only marvel at his genius from the distance. But I can truly say that in the six years I have lived with him, I have never for one moment been deceived in his character. He has a high truth and integrity, and is thoroughly in earnest for the Right and the Good." Earnestly, indefatigably, faithfully, resplen- dently, did John Wolfgang Goethe work through fourscore years, cultivating his com- GOETHE. 297 prehensive, many-sided, musical mind ; his soul so high-strung, that to him the singing of the spheres, the divine rliythm of creation, was more audible than to most men ; and so su- perbly gifted that he could echo it in the choicest tones of wisdom and poetry. Bori* in Frankfort-on-the-Main the 28th of August, 1749, he breathed his last in Weimar on the 22d of March, 1832, tranquilly, without pain, seated in an arm-chair beside his bed. In full possession of his great faculties, he went up to higher spheres, where Dante and Shake- speare awaited him. The last words from his lips, just before he expired, were, " more LIGHT." DATE DUE RUG^' k\m Aye t e 1971 i MAY ? 1972 Wni * MAY 1' tQ7? 7 iAO^ MAR 8 \383 APR 1 5 ).*-)^i« , : M^D ? 1PM C D GAYLORD PR.NTED.rvU S A UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY AA 001 283 537 7