he died a few months later, in 1801. Wordsworth's biographers have said nothing of this friend, and it may be well to reproduce here a letter, most characteristic in sentiment, which, shortly before his death, Mathews wrote to his brother. In his remote island home he has no thought but that of warning the actor's wife against "superstition and religious bigotry."

"The whole history of mankind is but a relation of the fatal and mischievous effects of this diabolical tyrant, who has uniformly preyed upon the enlightened few that have dared to lift up their heads against the oppressor of their afflicted brethren, and has gnawed the very vitals of social existence. There is no part of the globe that is not even now groaning beneath her baneful pressure; and, whatever form she assumes, she still arrogates to herself the claim of infallibility, and her votaries, of whatever sect they may be, damn by wholesale all the rest of the world.

"A freedom from superstition is the first blessing we can enjoy. Religion in some shape seems necessary to political existence. The wise man laughs at the follies of the vulgar, and in the pure contemplation of a benevolent Author of all Beings, finds that happiness which others in vain look for amid the load of trumpery and ceremonies with which they think the Creator is gratified. If He can be gratified by any exertion of feeble mortals, it must be when they imitate his perfection by mutual benevolence and kindness." 1

Though we possess nothing else written by Mathews, we may form from this letter some idea of the conversations and the correspondence he maintained with Wordsworth. Mathews and Wordsworth attacked religion in the name of reason. Coleridge, though in a state of indecision, was already beginning to assail the understanding in the name of religion. If here and there Coleridge still inveighs against superstition, elsewhere he retracts and already does homage to it. He starts a newspaper with the motto: Knowledge is Power, but he begins an address to those whom he hopes to gain as subscribers with the words, "I am far from convinced that a Christian is permitted to read either newspapers or any other works

1 Letter of the 5th June 1801. Memoirs of Charles Mathews, comedian, by Mrs Mathews, 4 vols., 1839, i. pp. 321-322.

of merely political or temporary interest."1 If the passion for disinterested speculation, in which, happily, he never lost his faith, led him, in conversation, to avow the most irreverent opinions, his poetry, which contains all that was best in him, expresses nothing but fervent piety.

Wordsworth was naturally one of the first to receive the new truths from the lips of Coleridge, as he gradually discovered them. These at first were but flashes of eloquence, whence a few ideas stood out in strong relief and sank into the depths of Wordsworth's mind, although they did not adapt themselves to its atmosphere without undergoing some modification.

The first meetings of the two men were characteristic. Each brought the best work he had yet produced. Wordsworth read his Guilt and Sorrow; Coleridge his Religious Musings.2

These Musings were a hymn to God, whose name is Love. Every man, through love, can attain, as Christ did, to a measure of divinity in his death; can annihilate himself in the bosom of God, his identity, who is the all in all, "Nature's essence, mind, and energy."

Tis the sublime of man,

Our noontide majesty, to know ourselves

Parts and proportions of one wondrous whole!
This fraternizes man.1

At the thought that God alone exists, evil being but a transient appearance, every fear vanishes. He who knows this loves all creation, "and blesses it, and calls it very good." 5 All terror springs from superstition. The priest hides God. It is the priest who incites and bestows his benediction on the despicable princes leagued against France in the name of Jesus, the man of love. But priests and princes alike are themselves the unconscious agents of an unknown good. Everything, even vice and crime, serves to build up the Good. It is man's desire for luxury, his greed and ambition, that have enabled him to rise above his primitive savagery; it is the sensual wants that have 1 Biographia Literaria, ch. x.

2 Religious Musings, a desultory poem written on the 3 Religious Musings, 1. 48. 4 Ibid., l. 126-129.

Christmas Eve of 1794. 5 Ibid., ll. 112-113.

1

"unsensualized the mind," and accustomed it to take pleasure in its own activity. Transformed through the agency of Religion, the evil passions become the energetic auxiliaries of virtue. Then come the Bards and Philosophers, bringing Science, and Liberty, the daughter of Science. And last of all, the multitude of the wretched finds its way towards the light, which hitherto none have seen but the flower of the human race. The millennium is at hand; yet not on earth, but only in a world of pure intelligence, will man attain to happiness. Earthly life is but a vision, and that vision is but the shadow of truth.

Let us supplement this outburst of mystical rejoicing by some earlier verses, expressive of a sort of poetic pantheism. In the Eolian Harp, for example, Coleridge described how a lute, which had been placed in a window of the cottage where he spent the first months of his wedded life, vibrated in response to every wind. Even so, it seemed to him, the universe was one harmony; for him it would have been impossible

Not to love all things in a world so filled;
When the breeze warbles, and the mute still air
Is Music slumbering on her instrument.

And what if all of animated Nature

Be but organic harps diversely framed,
That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps,
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,

At once the soul of each and God of all? 3

2

No sooner had Coleridge asked himself the question than, in the same poem, he repelled this invasion of human pride, and returned to humble faith and reverential adoration of the Incomprehensible. Wordsworth, at a later period, took up his friend's idea and made it his own.

But in his Destiny of Nations Coleridge approached more nearly to the ideas which afterwards became his settled convictions. The poem begins with a Platonic image:

All that meets the bodily sense I deem

Symbolical, one mighty alphabet

For infant minds; and we in this low world

1 Religious Musings, ll. 209-210.

2 The Eolian Harp, 1795, ll. 30-33.

3 Ibid., 11. 49-53.

Placed with our backs to bright reality,

That we may learn with young unwounded ken
The substance from its shadow.1

The substance of all things is God, or infinite Love by love alone perceived; hence Coleridge expresses contempt for those who seek truth by means of reasoning alone:

But some there are who deem themselves most free
When they within this gross and visible sphere
Chain down the winged thought, scoffing ascent,
Proud in the meanness and themselves they cheat
With noisy emptiness of learned phrase,
Their subtle fluids, impacts, essences,
Self-working tools, uncaused effects, and all
Those blind omniscients, those almighty slaves,
Untenanting creation of its God.2

He felt drawn, on the contrary, to Imagination, by philosophers regarded with suspicion; and to Superstition, the object of their contempt.

Fancy is the power

That first unsensualizes the dark mind,
Giving it new delights; and bids it swell
With wild activity; and peopling air,
By obscure fears of beings invisible,
Emancipates it from the grosser thrall
Of the present impulse, teaching self-control,
Till Superstition, with unconscious hand
Seat Reason on her throne.3

Love as the law of the world, God as the soul of the universe, intuition preferred to analysis and reasoning for the discovery of truth, visible things considered as symbols of reality, all beings, including animals and flowers, regarded as "Monads of the infinite Mind "—these, for Wordsworth, were all new and wonderful conceptions. The gloomy pupil of Christ's Hospital furnished the joyous Hawkshead schoolboy with the foundations on which he was afterwards to build his optimism and his natural religion; or, rather, he put into his head the idea of a mighty synthesis. Windy as were the imaginings of Coleridge, by 1 The Destiny of Nations, ll. 18-22. 2 Ibid., 26-34. 3 Ibid., 79-87.

reason of their novelty and breadth they made a deep impression on one who at this time was "at least a semi-atheist,"1 and had never attempted such far-reaching explorations.

Above everything else in the Religious Musings, Wordsworth delighted in the vision, widely as it differed from his own, of the earth as regenerated by the return of pure Faith and meek Piety victorious over atheism, and in the description of the daily joys of those who are in constant communion with heaven. Man will then enjoy

such delights

As float to earth, permitted visitants!
When on some solemn jubilee of Saints
The sapphire-blazing gates of Paradise
Are thrown wide open, and thence voyage forth
Detachments wild of seraph-warbled airs,
And odours snatched from beds of amaranth,
And they, that from the chrystal river of life
Spring up on freshen'd wing, ambrosial gales!
The favor'd good man in his lonely walk
Perceives them, and his silent spirit drinks

Strange bliss which he shall recognize in heaven.2

He admired also the following description of the end of the world, when it is received into the bosom of Christ.

O Years! the blest pre-eminence of Saints!
Sweeping before the rapt prophetic gaze

Bright as what glories of the jasper throne
Stream from the gorgeous and face-veiling plumes
Of Spirits adoring! Ye, blest years! must end,
And all beyond is darkness! Heights most strange!
Whence Fancy falls, fluttering her idle wing.
For who of woman born may paint the hour,
Whence seiz'd in his mid course the Sun shall wane
Making noon ghastly! who of woman born

May image in his wildly working thought,

1 A letter from Coleridge to Thelwall, 13th May 1796, says: "A very dear friend of mine who is, in my opinion, the best poet of the age (I will send you his poem when published), thinks that the lines from 364 to 375 and from 403 to 428 the best in the volume-indeed, worth all the rest. And this man is a republican, and, at least, a semi-atheist." The lines quoted below from the original edition of 1796 are those here alluded to. 2 Religious Musings, ll. 364-375. Poems on Various Subjects, 1796.