Arrived at the moment when she must speak, if ever, Helen's courage and foresight failed her utterly. She found herself no nearer to knowing what to say, or how to say it, than she had been at the first moment when she heard the girls talking on the rocks. To tell him her fears, and the grounds for them, would be the fatal blunder. How could she say to a man like Bayard, "Your life is in danger. Come on a wedding - trip, and save yourself"? Yet how could she quibble or be dumb before the truth? Following no plan or little preacted part, but only the moment's impulse of her love and her trouble, Helen broke into girlish sobs, the first that he had ever heard from her, and hid her wet face against his cheek. "Oh," she breathed, "I don't know how to tell you! But I am so unhappy - and I have grown so anxious about you! I don't see . . how I can bear it . . . as we are!" ... Her heart beat against his so wildly that she could have said no more if she had tried. But she had no need to try; for he said, "Would you marry me this summer, dear? It would make me very happy. . . . I have not dared to ask it." "I would marry you to-morrow." Helen lifted her head, and “shame departed, shamed," from her sweet, wet face. "I would marry you to-day. I want to be near you. I want. if anything whatever comes." "Whatever comes," he answered solemnly, "we ought to be together-now." Thus they deceived each other - neither owning to the tender fault-with the divine deceit of love. Helen comforted herself that she had not said a word of threat or danger or escape, and that Bayard suspected nothing of the cloudburst which hung over him. He let her think so, smiling tenderly; for he knew it all the time, and more, far more than Helen ever knew. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. In the absence of any adequate biography of Coleridge, these two volumes of his letters,1 edited by his grandson, Mr. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, will be eagerly welcomed. By far the greater part of these letters have never before been published, and among them is included the poet's correspondence with his wife, with Southey, and with Wordsworth. But the editor has also judiciously selected from among the letters already published such as will help to preserve a continuous narrative, thus giving the entire collection an autobiographical character. The conception was a unique one, and the result has a rare value. Coleridge is allowed to reappear before 1 Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by ERNEST HARTLEY COLERIDGE. In two us, after the lapse of two generations, to tell the story of his strange and marvelously interesting life in his own words and in his own way. Whatever was needed to make allusions intelligible the editor has furnished in careful and ample footnotes. A difficult part of his task lay in determining which letters out of the large mass of unpublished correspondence were most important. Whether his principle of selection was a true and final one may be an open question. His sole criterion in regard to any letter, as he tells us in his preface, has been, "Is it interesting? Is it readable? . . . Coleridge's letters lack style. The fastidious critic who touched and retouched his exvolumes. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1895. ... quisite lyrics, and always for the better, was at no pains to polish his letters. He writes to his friends as if he were talking to them, and he lets his periods take care of themselves." It is quite possible that among the letters which have not yet seen the light there are some which possess a deeper significance for the lover of Coleridge, because they reveal the hidden springs of his life and his thought, than those which have a purely literary character and an interest for the general reader. However that may be, we cannot but be profoundly grateful for what has been given to us; and as to that which still remains unpublished, we are consoled by the prospect of a coming biography by the same editor, in which he will surely avail himself of all the material at his disposal. Among the attractions of these volumes are portraits of Coleridge which have hitherto been unknown; of his brothers, James and George, the latter of whom stood in the place of a father to the poet in his early years; of his wife, also, and his children: Hartley, as a boy with a winning face, and thoughtful beyond his years; Derwent, the father of the editor; and Sara, the gifted and beautiful daughter. There is also a pencil sketch of Mrs. Wilson, the housekeeper at Greta Hall, which is an inimitable study for a human countenance. The frontispiece of the first volume represents Coleridge at the age of forty-seven, and has been followed in the bust in Westminster Abbey. There is another and most pathetic portrait of him at the age of fifty-six, which gives the weird, unearthly dreamer. But of all these portraits, the most self-revealing, the real man, as we think, is given in the frontispiece of the second volume, in which may be read as in one 1 The Rev. Leapidge Smith, in the Reminiscences of an Octogenarian, 1870, gives a differont impression: "In person he was a tall, dark, handsome young man, with long, black, flowing hair; eyes not merely dark, but black and keenly penetrating; a fine forehead; a reer. concentrated glance the story of his caHe himself has contributed to our knowledge of his personal appearance as a young man in one of his humorous letters to John Thelwall: " My face, unless when animated by immediate eloquence, expresses great sloth, and great, indeed almost idiotic good nature. 'Tis a mere carcase of a face; fat, flabby, and expressive chiefly of inexpression. Yet I am told that my eyes, eyebrows, and forehead are physiognomically good; but of this the deponent knoweth not. As to my shape, 't is a good shape enough, if measured; but my gait is awkward, and the walk of the whole man indicates indolence capable of energies. . . . I can not breathe through my nose, so my mouth, with sensual thick lips, is almost always open.' "1 There is another humorous touch of self-portraiture in the comment which he makes upon his first name. When recommending Southey to name his boy Robert, after himself, he remarks: “I would have done so but that, from my earliest years, I have had a feeling of dislike and disgust connected with my own Christian name, such a vile short plumpness, such a dull abortive smartness in the first syllable, and this so harshly contrasted by the obscurity and indefiniteness of the syllabic vowel, and the feebleness of the uncovered liquid with which it ends, the wobble it makes, and struggling between a dis- and a trisyllable, and the whole name sounding as if you were abeeceeing S. M. U. L. Altogether, it is, perhaps, the worst combination of which vowels and consonants are susceptible." Though these letters will not greatly modify the estimate already formed of Coleridge's genius and character, they do deep-toned, harmonious voice; a manner never to be forgotten, full of life, vivacity, and kindness; dignified in person; and, added to all these, exhibiting the elements of his future greatness." (Quoted in Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, i. 181.) reveal the man in an intenser light, and will serve to correct misjudgments, to create a deeper reverence for his personality and a profounder sympathy for his misfortunes. Some things which were already known are here made more clear and emphatic. He was a great sufferer from physical pain during his whole life, from his boyhood, when a student at Christ's Hospital, down to the day of his death. What Mr. Stuart said of his letters, that they were 66 one continued flow of complaint of ill health and of incapacity from ill health," is only confirmed by the fuller correspondence now before us. It does not diminish the reality of his sufferings to learn that an examination of his body after death revealed the cause of much of his pain to be nervous sympathy. His constitution was delicate and highly organized, and tremulous with quick and intense susceptibility. As to domestic infelicity, Coleridge's description of his wife in a letter to Southey, now for the first time made public, accounts for much that was hitherto inexplicable. His home became impossible to him, and at the age of thirty he was practically banished from it, living for the rest of his life as if a stranger or visitor in this world, with no continuing city. Mrs. Coleridge's faults might have been virtues in some other adjustment of the marriage tie, but to her husband they were torture and the rack. "Her mind has very little that is bad in it; it is an innocent mind, but it is light and unimpressible, warm in anger, cold in sympathy, and in all disputes uniformly projects itself forth to recriminate, instead of turning itself inward with a silent self-questioning. Our virtues and our vices are exact antitheses. I so attentively watch my own nature that my worst self-delusion is a complete self-knowledge so mixed with intellectual complacency that my quickness to see and readiness to acknowledge my faults is too often frustrated by the small pain which the sight of them gives me, and the consequent slowness to amend them. Mrs. C. is so stung with the thought of being in the wrong, because she never endures to look at her own mind in all its faulty parts, but shelters herself from painful self-inquiry by angry recrimination. Never, I suppose, did the stern match-maker bring together two minds so utterly contrariant in their primary and organical constitution." A threatened separation seems to have made Mrs. Coleridge serious, and, as the letter runs, "she promised to set about an alteration in her external manners and looks and language, and to fight against her inveterate habits of puny thwarting and unintermitting dyspathy. . . . I, on my part, promised to be more attentive to all her feelings of pride, etc., etc., and to try to correct my habits of impetuous censure." Of course this is but one side of the story, and Mrs. Coleridge's version of what she had to endure from the difficult character of her husband can be easily supplied with no great effort of the imagination. The portrait of Mrs. Coleridge given here seems to accord with her husband's description, as does also the account of Dorothy Wordsworth, one of the keenest of women. De Quincey has remarked that Coleridge once told him that he had been forced into the marriage with Sarah Fricker by Southey, who insisted that he had gone so far with his attentions to her as to make it dishonorable to retreat. The correspondence apparently confirms this statement. One is led to conclude that Coleridge married partly on the rebound after his disappointment with Mary Evans, partly at Southey's instigation, and in part because he was then absorbed in the scheme of a Pantisocracy to be set up on the banks of the Susquehanna, and it was regarded among the friends of the project as the proper thing for each of them to secure a wife before their departure. As to Cottle's testimony that if ever a man was in love, Coleridge was in love with Sarah Fricker, it does not seem to be borne out by his correspondence with his wife, which has a certain formal character, and not only reveals less of the real inwardness of the man than any other set of his correspondence, but is keyed in a lower tone. Another feature of Coleridge's life, the opium-eating habit, is here traced back to an earlier period than has been generally supposed. The habit, indeed, was not confirmed until the spring of 1801, when Coleridge was twenty-nine years of age, but the first traces of it belong to his boyhood, when he suffered from rheumatism, and learned the value of "the accursed drug" as an opiate for pain. In 1795, he writes to a friend that "for the last fortnight I have been obliged to take laudanum almost every night." Nor does it appear that he ever quite overcame the habit, although, under the loving care of the Gillmans, he submitted to restraint, and opium was allowed only under careful supervision. I. One source of the curious interest which attaches to Coleridge beyond any of his contemporaries was his abandonment of poetry for metaphysics and theology. The amount of poetic achievement was relatively small, but a few things which he has done, The Ancient Mariner, Christabel, Kubla Khan, The Pains of Sleep, these, and some others which deserve to be associated with them, have an unparalleled beauty, which is distinctive, and of its kind very rare. His exquisite musical diction, "the magical use of words," as it has been called, gives to his poetry a certain divine appeal which slides into the soul. He was not only a poet, but the founder of a new school in English poetry. Wordsworth was great in production, and made the new principle his own; but the suggestion and advocacy of the principle belonged to Coleridge, to whom Wordsworth never failed to acknowledge his intellectual in debtedness. Why, then, did he cease to write poetry when he had hardly reached the age of thirty? Why did he stop singing, and betake himself to delving in the barren wastes of unintelligible metaphysical speculation? Such is the problem of Coleridge's life as so many of his literary critics have conceived it. His life has seemed to them to lack unity, as if his early years were separated from his later by a deep, impassable gulf, over which brood impenetrable mists. One of his latest biographers, Mr. Traill, has ventured once more to penetrate the thickets of his philosophical speculations, but finds the task empty and vain. Carlyle also sneered at the procreations of his philosophical moods, "the strange centaurs, spectral Puseyisms, monstrous illusory hybrids, and ecclesiastical chimeras which now roam the earth in a very lamentable manner.” This has been, in the main, the estimate of Coleridge's career, that his life began with the rarest promise, and ended in failure, as if he were deserving our resentment for having done so little when he might have done so much, for raising great expectations only to disappoint them. Coleridge himself also appears to sanction such a judgment, for in his Ode on Dejection, which belongs to the border-line between the two periods of his life, he laments with his own peculiar pathos the loss of his poetic power: "But now afflictions bow me down to earth: In a letter written to Southey in 1802, in which he inclosed these lines, he adds this further comment: "As to myself, all my poetic genius (if ever I really possessed any genius, and it was not rather a mere general aptitude of talent and quickness in imitation) is gone, and I have been fool enough to suffer deeply in my mind regretting the loss, which I attribute to my long and exceedingly severe metaphysical investigations, and these partly to ill health and partly to private afflictions, which rendered any subjects immediately connected with feeling a source of pain and disquiet to me." But the common estimate which gives Coleridge a high place among English poets, and yet discerns no unity in his life, dismissing his later work as having no large significance or enduring value, must be partial and inadequate. It may be true that ill health and poverty, domestic trials and the evils begotten by opium-eating, united to destroy that “natural gladness of heart" with which he was by nature so richly endowed, and thus to weaken the springs of poetic creativeness. But even this strong combination of adverse circumstances does not quite explain the abandonment of poetry and the transition to metaphysics. If the poetic fire is genuine, it has vitality and is not easily extinguished. Milton wrote Paradise Lost after he had become poor and old and blind, and when his domestic happiness had been torn into shreds and tatters; taking refuge in poetry from the ills of life, as Coleridge fled from poetry to metaphysics. Coleridge's judgment varied as to whether he were more of a poet or a philosopher. In one of his earlier letters he remarks, "I think too much for a poet; " and on Southey he also comments at the same time, "He thinks too little for a great poet." He thought that if he and Southey could have been rolled into one, it would have made an ideal combination. When we turn to contemporary opinions about the greatness of Coleridge, it is the marvelous scope of his intellectual power which inspires such boundless admiration, rather than any poetic achievement. The familiar apostrophe of Charles Lamb, which one is never tired of quoting, has the ring of true insight into the potent attractiveness of a rarely gifted personality: "Come back into memory, like as thou wert in the dayspring of thy fancies, with hope like a fiery column beNO. 455. VOL. LXXVI. 26 fore thee, the dark pillar not yet turned, ... Samuel Taylor Coleridge,- Logician, Metaphysician, Bard! How have I seen the casual passer through the cloisters stand still, entranced with admiration, .. to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of Jamblichus or Plotinus; for even in those years thou waxedst not pale at such philosophic draughts, or reciting Homer in his Greek, or Pindar, while the walls of the old Grey Friars reëchoed to the accents of the inspired Charity boy!" It is not as a poet that Shelley describes him in his letter to Maria Gisborne, where he is enumerating the treasures to be found in London, but rather as the thinker and the sage: "You will see Coleridge - he who sits ob scure In the exceeding lustre, and the pure Which, with its own internal lightening blind, Carlyle also discerned this aspect of the true greatness of Coleridge, though blind, perhaps willfully blind, to the profound significance of his thought: "Coleridge sat on the brow of Highgate Hill in those years, looking down on London and its smoke tumult, like a sage escaped from the inanity of life's battle; attracting toward him the thoughts of innumerable brave souls still engaged there; . . . a sublime man who, alone in those dark days, had saved his crown of spiritual manhood; escaping from the black materialisms and revolutionary deluges with God, Freedom, Immortality still his; a king of men." Of the pupils of Coleridge to whom Carlyle refers as among the younger inquiring men with whom he had "a higher than literary, a kind of prophetic or magician character," there were two who deeply stirred the current of religious thought in the Church of England, both of whom dedicated to Coleridge, as |