given to the religious subscribers by an essay Unitarian chapels in the neighbourhood. against fast-days, to his democratic patrons The subjects which he there discussed seem by inveighing against Jacobinism and French to have been somewhat miscellaneous, and philosophy, to the Tories by abuse of Pitt, to the Whigs by not more heartily backing Fox, the subscription list rapidly thinned, and he was glad to close the concern at a dead loss of money to himself, not to mention his wasted labour. Though this failure was to him a very serious matter, he could still laugh heartily at the ludicrous side of it. He tells how one morning when he had risen earlier than usual, he found the servant girl lighting the fire with an extravagant quantity of paper. On his remonstrating against the waste, "La, sir!" replied poor Nanny, "why, it's only The Watch

man."

The third of the Bristol enterprises was the publication of his Juvenile Poems, in the April of 1796, while The Watchman was still struggling for existence. For the copyright of these he received thirty guineas from Joseph Cottle, a Bristol bookseller, who to his own great credit undertook to publish the earliest works of Southey, of Coleridge, and of Wordsworth, at a time when those highér in the trade would have nothing to say to them. If Cottle long afterwards, when their names had waxed great, published a somewhat gossiping book of reminiscences, and gave to the public many petty details which a wiser man would have withheld, it should always be remembered to his honour, that he showed true kindness and liberality towards these men, especially towards Coleridge, when he greatly needed it, and that he had a genuine admiration of their genius for its own sake, quite apart from its marketable value. No doubt, if any one wishes to see the seamy side of genius he will find it in the letters and anecdotes of Coleridge preserved in Cottle's book. But though these details, petty and painful as they are, in any complete estimate of Coleridge's character are not to be disregarded, in this brief notice we gladly pass them by.

the reports of his success vary. Nothing can be more dreary, if it were not grotesque, than Cottle's description of his début as a preacher in an Unitarian chapel in Bath. On the appointed Sunday morning, Coleridge, Cottle, and party, drove from Bristol to Bath in a post-chaise. Coleridge mounted the pulpit in blue coat and white waistcoat, and for the morning service, choosing a text from Isaiah, treated his audience to a lecture against the Corn Laws; and, in the afternoon, he gave them another on the Hair-Powder Tax. The congregation at the latter service consisted of seventeen, of whom several walked out of the chapel during the service. The party returned to Bristol disheartened, Coleridge from a sense of failure, the others with a dissatisfying sense of a Sunday wasted. Compare this with Hazlitt's account of his appearance sometime afterwards before a Birmingham congregation :

:

"It was in January, 1798, that I rose one morning before daylight, to walk ten miles in the mud to hear this celebrated person preach. Never, the longest day I have to live, shall I have such another walk as that cold, raw, comfortless one. When I got there the organ was playing the 100th Psalm, and when it was done, Mr. Coleridge arose and gave out his text, 'He departed again into a mountain himself alone.' As he gave out this text, his voice rose like a stream of rich distilled perfumes; and when he came to the two last words, which he pronounced lond, deep, and distinct, it seemed to me, who was then young, as if the sound had echoed from the bottom of the human heart, and as if that prayer might have floated in solemn silence through the universe. The preacher then launched into his subject, like an eagle dallying with the wind. The sermon was upon peace and war, upon Church and State-not their alliance, but their separation; on the spirit of the world and the spirit of Christianity

not as the same, but as opposed to one another. He talked of those who had inscribed the cross of Christ on banners dripping with Other plans for a livelihood were venti-human gore. He made a poetical and pastoral lated during this Bristol sojourn, such as writing for the Morning Chronicle and taking private pupils, but as these came to nought, we need only notice one other line in which Coleridge's energies found at this time occasional vent, which he once, at least, thought of taking up as a profession. We have seen that before leaving Cambridge he had become an Unitarian, and so he continued till about the time of his visit to Germany. While he was in Bristol he was engaged from time to time to preach in the

excursion, and to show the fatal effects of war,
drew a striking contrast between the simple
shepherd boy, driving his team a-field, or sitting
under the hawthorn, piping to his flock as
though he never should be old; and the same
into town, made drunk at an alehouse, turned
poor country lad, crimped, kidnapped, brought
into a wretched drummer-boy, with his hair
sticking on end with powder and pomatum, a
long cue at his back, and tricked out in the
finery of the profession of blood.
"Such were the notes our own loved poet
sung."

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.

"And for myself, I could not have been more delighted if I had heard the music of the spheres. Poetry and Philosophy had met together, Truth and Genius had embraced, under the eye and sanction of Religion. This was even beyond my hopes."

or

Which of the two was right in his estimate of Coleridge's preaching, Cottle Hazlitt? Or were both right, and is the difference to be accounted for by Coleridge, like most men of genius, having his days when he was now above himself and now fell below? With one more passage from Hazlitt, descriptive of his talk at that time, close his Bristol life:

we may

"He is the only person I ever knew who answered to the idea of a man of genius. He is the only person from whom I ever learned any thing. There is only one thing he might have learned from me in return, but that he has not. He was the first poet I ever knew. His genius at that time had angelic wings, and fed on manna. He talked wished him to talk on for ever. on for ever; and you did not seem to come with labour and effort; His thoughts but as if borne on the gusts of genius, and as if the wings of imagination lifted him off his feet. His voice rolled on the ear like a pealing organ, and its sound alone was the music of thought. His mind was clothed with wings; and raised on them he lifted philosophy to heaven. In his descriptions, you then saw the progress of human happiness and liberty in bright and neverending succession, like the steps of Jacob's ladder, with airy shapes ascending and descending. And shall I who heard him then, listen to him now? Not I! That spell is broke; that time is gone for ever; that voice is heard no more: but still the recollection comes rushing by with thoughts of long-past years, and rings in my ears with never-dying sound."

It is pitiful to turn from such high-flown descriptions to the glimpses of poverty and painful domestic cares which his letters of this date exhibit. Over these we would gladly draw the veil. Whoso wishes to linger on them may turn him to Cottle. There are many more incidents of this time which we can but name: his residence for some months in a rose-bound cottage in the neighbouring village of Clevedon; the birth of his first son, whom he named Hartley, for love of the philosopher; his complete reconciliation with Southey on his return from Portugal. One little of November, 1796, is sadly memorable as entry, in a letter the first appearance of

"The little rift within the lute,

Which soon will make the music mute."

the face, which for the time was like to
between sixty and seventy drops of lauda-
overpower him.
"But," he writes, "I took
num, and sopped the Cerberus." That sop
was soon to become the worst Cerberus of
the two.

It was early in 1797 that Coleridge moved his tent in the village of Nether Stowey, with his family from Bristol, and pitched under the green hills of Quantock. One of the kindest and most hospitable of his friends, Mr. Poole, had a place hard by; and Coleridge having in June made a visit to Wordsworth at Racedown, persuaded this young poet, and his scarcely less origibouring mansion of Alfoxden. With such nal sister, to adjourn thence to the neighfriends for daily intercourse, with the most delightful country for walks on every side, and with apparently fewer embarrassments, Coleridge here enjoyed the most genial and happy years that were ever granted him in his changeful existence. Wherever we valleys, with small brooks running down turn we have woods, smooth downs, and them, through green meadows to the sea. The hills that cradle these valleys are either covered with ferns and bilberries or oak woods. Walks extend for miles over the hill tops, the great beauty of which is their wild simplicity; they are perfectly smooth,

without rocks."

Quantock the two young poets wandered for hours together, rapt in fervid talk: Coleeridge, no doubt, the chief speaker, Wordsworth not the less suggestive. Never before converse. or since have these downs heard such high able blessing, and to him I looked up with "His society I found an invaluequal reverence as a poet, a philosopher, and a man.' himself wholly to poetry as his work for So wrote Coleridge in after life. Alfoxden saw the birth of many of years. By this time Wordsworth had given the happiest, most characteristic of his shorter poems. Coleridge had some years before this, when he first fell in with Words

Over these green hills of

worth's Descriptive Sketches, found even in these the opening of a new vein. He himself, too, had from time to time turned aside

from more perplexing studies, and found poetry to be its own exceeding great reward. But in this Nether Stowey time Coleridge came all at once to his poetic from the material ills of life which he found manhood. Whether it was the freedom in the aid and kindly shelter of Mr. Poole, or the secluded beauty of the Quantock, or the converse with Wordsworth, or all combined, that stirred him, there cannot be any

He complains of a violent neuralgic pain in doubt that this was, as it has been called,

about Midsummer 1798. About the same time the two Messrs. Wedgewood settled on Coleridge £150 a year for life, which made him think no more of Unitarian chapels, and enabled him to undertake, what he had for some time longed for, a continental tour. In September of that year the two poets bade farewell, Wordsworth, with his sister, to Alfoxden, Coleridge to Nether Stowey, and together set sail for Hamburg.

So ended the Nether Stowey time, to Coleridge the brief blink of a poetic morning which had no noon; to Wordsworth but the fresh dawn of a day which completely fulfilled itself.

his annus mirabilis, his poetic prime. This was the year of Genevieve, The Dark Ladie, Kubla Khan, France, the lines to Wordsworth on first hearing The Prelude read aloud, the Ancient Mariner, and the first part of Christabel, not to mention many other poems of less mark. The occasion which called forth the two latter poems, to form part of a joint volume with Wordsworth, has been elsewhere noticed. But if Coleridge could have only maintained the high strain he then struck, with half the persistency of his brother poet, posterity may perhaps have reason to regret that he should ever have turned to other subjects. During all his time at Nether Stowey he Landed at Hamburg, Wordsworth was kept up a fire of small letters to Cottle in interpreter, as he had French, Coleridge Bristol, at one time about poems or other nothing but English and Latin. After literary projects, at another asking Cottle having an interview with the aged poet to find him a servant-maid, "simple of Klopstock, the two young poets parted comheart, physiognomically handsome, and sci- pany, Wordsworth, with his sister, settling entific in vaccimulgence!" When they had at Goslar, there to compose, by the German composed poems enough to form one or firestoves, the poems on Matthew, Nutting, more joint volumes, Cottle is summoned Ruth, the Poet's Epitaph, and others, in his from Bristol to visit them. Cottle drove happiest vein; while Coleridge made for Wordsworth thence to Alfoxden in his gig, Ratzeburg, where he lived for four months picking up Coleridge at Nether Stowey. in a pastor's family, to learn the language, They had brought the viands for their din- and then passed on to Göttingen to attend ner with them in the gig: a loaf, a stout lectures, and consort with German students piece of cheese, and a bottle of brandy. As and professors. Among the lectures were they neared their landing-place, a beggar, those of Blumenbach on Natural History, whom they helped with some pence, re- while Eichhorn's lectures on the New Testurned their kindness by helping himself to tament were repeated to him from notes by the cheese from the back of the gig. Ar- a student who had himself taken them rived at the place, Coleridge unyoked the down. Wordsworth kept sending Colehorse, dashed down the gig shafts with a ridge the poems he was throwing off during jerk, which rolled the brandy bottle from this prolitic winter, and Coleridge replied the seat, and broke it to pieces before their in letters full of hope that their future eyes. Then Cottle set to unharnessing the homes might be in the same neighbourhood: horse, but could not get off the collar. "Whenever I spring forward into the fuWordsworth next essayed it, with no better ture with noble affections, I always alight success. At last Coleridge came to the by your side." His whole time in Germany, charge, and worked away with such vio- he seems to have overflowed with exuberant lence that he nearly thrawed the poor spirits and manifold life. "Instead of trouhorse's head off his neck. He too was bling others with my own crude notions, I forced to desist, with a protest that "the was better employed in storing my head horse's head must have grown since the with the notions of others. I made the collar was put on." While the two poets best use of my time and means, and there and their publisher were standing thus non- is no period of my life to which I look back plussed, the servant-girl happened to pass with such unmingled satisfaction." He had through the stable-yard, and seeing their passed within a zone of thought new to perplexity, exclaimed, "La! master, you himself, and up to that time quite unknown don't go about the work the right way, you in England; one of the great intellectual should do it like this." So saying, she movements such as occur but rarely, and at turned the collar upside down, and slipped long intervals, in the world's history. The it off in a trice. Then came the dinner," a philosophic genius of Germany, which superb brown loaf, a dish of lettuces, and, awoke in Kant during the latter part of instead of the brandy, a jug of pure water." last century, is an impulse the most original, The bargain was struck, and Cottle under- the most far reaching, and the most protook the publication of the first edition of found, which Europe has of late years the famous Lyrical Ballads, which appeared seen. It has given birth to linguistic

But though he thus was constrained to come round to Pitt's foreign policy, he never, that we know, recanted the invectives with which he assailed that minister in 1800. The first fruits, however, of his newly There is still extant, among "The Essays acquired German were poetic, not philo- on his Own Times," a well-known character sophic. Arriving in London in November of Pitt from the pen of Coleridge, which 1799, he set to work to translate Schiller's appeared in the Morning Post. Coleridge, Wallenstein, and accomplished in three weeks what many competent judges regard as, notwithstanding some inaccuracies, the best translation of any poem into the English language. It is a free translation, with

character of Pitt appeared, the character | lake of Bassenthwaite; and on our left, Derof Buonaparte was promised for "to-mor- wentwater and Lodore in full view, and the row," but that to-morrow never arrived. fantastic mountains of Borrowdale. Behind us What the portrait would have been may two chasms and a tent-like ridge in the larger. the massy Skiddaw, smooth, green, high, with perhaps be gathered from a paragraph on A fairer scene you have not seen in all your the same subject, contained in Appendix B. wanderings." to the First Lay Sermon. The will, dissevered from moral feeling and religion,