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SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.

ten years after the Lake School was first talked of. Likely enough Coleridge found Wordsworth more original and suggestive than Southey. The singleness and wholeness of moral purpose which inspired the lives of both his friends, must have been to Coleridge a continual rebuke; and Southey, perhaps, if we may argue from his letters, on the strength of his near relationship, and his greater opportunities of seeing the domestic unhappiness caused by Coleridge's neglect, may have added to the silent reproof of his example, admonitions more openly expressed. In August 1603, Wordsworth and his sister visited Coleridge at Keswick, and took him with them on that first tour in Scotland of which Wordsworth, and his sister too, have left such imperishable memorials. Most of the way they walked, from Dumfries up Nithsdale, over Crawfordmuir by the Falls of Clyde, and so on to Loch Lomond. Coleridge, never in good health, being at this time in bad spirits, and somewhat too much in love with his own dejection, left his two companions somewhere about Loch Lomond to return home. But either at this, or some other time not specially recorded, he must have got farther north, for we find him, in his Second Lay Sermon, speaking of his solitary walk from Loch Lomond to Inverness, and describing the impression made upon him by the sight of the recently unpeopled country, and by the recital he heard from an old Highland widow near Fort Augustus of the wrongs she and her kinsfolk and her neighbours had suffered in those sad clearBut if Scotland woke in him no poetry on this his first, and perhaps only visit, and if Scotchmen have had some severe things said of them by him, they can afford to pardon them. The land is none the less beautiful for not having been sung by him; and if from the people he could have learned some of that shrewdness of which they have enough and to spare, his life would have been other and more successful than it

to the Governor, Sir Alexander Ball, and during a change of secretaries Coleridge served for a time as a temporary secretary. The official task-work, and not less the official parade, which he was expected but never attempted to maintain, were highly distasteful to him, and he gladly resigned, as soon as the new secretary could relieve him. He made, however, the friendship of the Governor, whose character he has painted glowingly in The Friend. Whether Sir Alexander Ball merited this high encomium we cannot say, but Professor Wilson mentions that Coleridge's craze for the three B.'s, Ball, Bell, and Bowyer, was a standing joke among his friends. sought at Malta he did not find. The health he change at first seemed beneficial, but soon The came the reaction, with his limbs "like lifeless tools, violent internal pains, labouring and oppressed breathing." For relief from these he had resource to the sedative, which he had begun to use so far back as 1796, and the habit became now fairly confirmed. Leaving Malta in September 1805, he came to Rome, and there spent some time in seeing what every traveller sees, but what Coleridge would see with other eyes and keener insight than most men. vations on these things he noted down for after use. There, too, he made the acquainFull obsertance of the German poet Tieck, of an American painter, Alston, and of Humboldt, the brother of the great traveller. Gilman informs us that Coleridge was told by Humboldt that his name was on the list of the proscribed at Paris, owing to an article which he (Coleridge) had written against Buonaparte in the Morning Post; that the arrest had already been sent to Rome, but that one morning Coleridge was waited on by a noble Benedictine, sent to him by the kindness of the Pope, bearing a passport signed by the Pope, and telling him that a carriage was ready to bear him at once to Leghorn. Coleridge took the hint; at Leghorn embarked on board of an American If the Lake country had suited Coleridge's French ship; and was, during the chase, vessel sailing for England; was chased by a constitution, and if he had turned to advan- forced by the captain to throw overb ard tage the scenery and society it afforded, in all his papers, and among them his notes no part of England, it might seem, could he and observations made in Rome. So writes have found a fitter home. But the damp- Coleridge's biographer. Wilson laughs at ness of the climate brought out so severely the thought of the Imperial eagle stooping the rheumatism from which he had suffered to pursue such small game as Coleridge. since boyhood, that he was forced to seek a And certainly it does seem hardly credible refuge from it on the shores of the Mediter- that Buonaparte should have so noted the ranean, — a doubtful measure, it is said, for secrets of the London newspaper press, or one in his state of nerves. Malta in April 1804, he soon became known stray member of that corps. De Quincey, Arriving at taken such pains to get his hands on one

ances.

was.

however, argues from Buonaparte's charac- | teeth so many stationary smiles; his eyes ter and habits that the thing was by no the open portals of the sun- things of means improbable.

light, and made for light; and his forehead, so ample, 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." But lecturing, or conversation, or intercourse with brother poets, even taken at their best, is no sufficient account of the prime years of such geuius as Coleridge was intrusted with.

The record of his writings, from 1801 till 1816, contains only one work of real importance. This was The Friend, a periodical of weekly essays, intended to help to the formation of opinions on moral, political, and artistic subjects, grounded upon true and permanent principles. Undertaken with the countenance of, and with some slight aid from, Wordsworth, it began to be published in June 1809, and ceased in March 1810, because it did not pay the cost of publishing, which Coleridge had imprudently taken on himself. The original work having been much enlarged and recast, was published again in its present three-volume form in 1818. Even as it now stands, the ground-swell after the great French Revolution tempest can be distinctly felt. It is full of the political problems cast up by the troubled waters of the then recent years, and of the attempt to discriminate between the first truths of morality and maxims of political expediency, and to ground each on their own proper basis. No one can read this work without feeling the force of Southey's remark:

It is hardly worth while to attempt to trace all the changes of his life for the next ten years after his return from Malta. S metimes at Keswick, where his family still lived; sometimes with Wordsworth at the town-end of Grasmere; sometimes in London, living in the office of the Courier, and writing for its pages; sometimes lecturing at the Royal Institution, often, according to De Quincey, disappointing his audience by non-appearance; anon an inmate in Wordsworth's new home at Allan Bank, while The Excurs on was being composed; then taking final fare well of the Lakes in 1810, travelling with Basil Montagu to London, and leaving h's family at Keswick, for some years, under care of Southey; domiciled now with Basil Montagu, now with a Mr. Morgan at Hammersmith, or Calne, now with other friends in or not far from London: so passed those homeless, unsatisfactory years of his middle manhood. No doubt, there were bright spots here and there, when his marvellous powers found vent in lecturing on some congenial subject, or flowed forth in that stream of thought and speech which was his native element. During these wanderings he met now and then with the wits of the time, either in rivalry not of his own seeking, or in friendly intercourse. Scott has recorded a rencounter he had with Coleridge at a dinner party, when some London littérateurs sought to lower Scott by exalting Coleridge. Coleridge had been caled on to recite some of his own unpublished poems, and had done" The vice of The Friend is its round-aboutScott, called on to contribute his share, ness." But whoever will be content to refused, on the plea that he had none to bear with this and to read right on, will produce, but offered to recite some clever find all through fruit more than worth the lines which he had lately read in a newspa- labour, with essays here and there which per. The lines were the unfortunate Fire, are nearly perfect both in matter and in Famine, and Slaughter, of which Coleridge form. But its defects, such as they are, was the then unacknowledged author. It must have told fatally against its success is amusing to see the two sides of the story; when it appeared in its early periodical the easy, off hand humour with which Scott shape. It was Coleridge's misfortune in tells it in a letter, or in his journal; and the this, as in so many of his works, to have to laborious self-defence with which Coleridge try to combine two things, hard, if not imu-hers in the lines in his published poems. possible to reconcile, immediate populariMore friendly was his intercourse with Lord ty, and the profit accruing therefrom, with Byron, who, while he was lesse of a Lon- the attempt to dig deep, and to implant don theatre, had brought forward Coleridge's Remorse, and had taken much interest in its success. This brought the two poets frequently into company, and in April 1816, Coleridge thus speaks of Byron's appearance:-"6 If you had seen Lord Byron you could scarcely disbelieve him. So beautiful a countenance I scarcely ever saw; his

so.

new truths which can only be taken in by an effort of painful thought, such as readers of periodicals will seldom give. Few writers have attained present popularity and enduring power, and least of all could Coleridge do so. The Friend contains in its present, and probably it did in its first shape, clear indications of the change that

Coleridge's mind had gone through in philo- began to revolve. Long before this coming

sophy, as well as in his religious belief. But of this we shall have to speak again. This middle portion of Coleridge's life may, perhaps, be not inaptly closed by the description of his appearance and manner, as these were when De Quincey first saw him

in 1807: ·

"I had received directions for finding out the house where Coleridge was visiting; and in riding down a main street of Bridgewater, I noticed a gateway corresponding to the description given me. Under this was standing and gazing about him a man whom I will describe. In height he might seem to be about five feet eight (he was in reality about an inch and a half taller, but his figure was of an order which drowns the height); his person was tall and full, and tended even to corpulence; his complexion was fair, because it was associated with black hair; his eyes were large and soft in their expression; and it was from the peculiar appearance of haze or dreaminess which mixed with their light that I recognized my object. This was Coleridge. I examined him steadfastly for a minute or more, and it struck me that he saw neither myself nor any other object in the street. He was in a deep reverie, for I had dismounted and advanced close to him before he had apparently become conscious of my presence. The sound of my voice, announcing my own name, first awoke him; he started, and for a moment seemed at a loss to understand my purpose or his own situation. There was no mauvaise honte' in his manner, but simple perplexity, and an apparent difficulty in recovering his position amongst daylight realities. This little scene over, he re

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ceived me with a kindness of manner so mark

ed, that it might be called gracious. The hospitable family with whom he was domesticated all testified for Coleridge deep affection and esteem; sentiments in which the whole town of Bridgewater seemed to share.

Coleridge led me to the drawing-room, rung the bell for refreshments, and omitted no point of a courteous reception. That

point being settled, Coleridge, like some great Orellana, or the St. Lawrence, that, having been checked and fretted by rocks or thwarting islands, suddenly recovers its volume of waters, and its mighty music, swept at once, as if returning to his natural business, into a continuous strain of eloquent dissertation, certain ly the most novel, the most finely illuminated, and traversing the most spacious fields of thought, by transitions the most just and logical, that it was possible to conceive. Coleridge to many people, and often I have heard the complaint, seemed to wander; and he seemed then to wander the most when in fact his resistance to the wandering instinct was greatest, viz., when the compass and huge circuit, by which his illustrations moved, travelled farthest into remote regions, before they

round commenced, most people had lost him, and naturally enough supposed that he had lost himself. They continued to admire the separate beauty of the thoughts, but did not see their relations to the dominant theme. However, I can assert, upon my long and intimate knowledge of Coleridge's mind, that logic

the most severe was as inalienable from his modes of thinking as grammar from his language."

Admirable as in the main the essay is from which this sketch is taken, it contains some serious blemishes. De Quincey dwells on some alleged faults of Coleridge with a loving minuteness which the pure love of truth can hardly account for; and with regard to the great and all-absorbing fault, the habit of opium-taking, his statements are directly opposed to those made by Coleridge himself, and by those of his biographers who had the best means of knowing the truth. He says that Coleridge first took opium, "not as a relief from bodily pains or nervous irritations, for his constitution was naturally strong and excellent, but as a source of luxurious sensations." Here De Quincey falls into two errors. First, Coleridge's constitution was not really strong. Though full of life and energy, his body was also full of disease, which gradually poisoned the springs of life. All his letters bear witness to this, by the many complaints of ill-health which they contain, before he ever touched opium. Again, as we have already seen, what he sought in opium was not pleasurable sensations, but freedom from pain, antidote to the nervous agitations under which he suffered. But whatever may have been the beginning of the habit, the result of continued indulgence in it was equally disastrous. We have given the letter which marks his first recourse to the fatal drug in 1796. As his ailments increased, so did his use of it. At Malta, opium-taking became a confirmed habit with him, and from that time for ten years it quite overmastered him. In 1807, the year when De Quincey first met him, he writes of himself as "rolling rudderless," with an increasing and overwhelming sense of wretchedness. The craving went on growing, and his consumption of the drug had reached a quite appalling height, when, in 1814, Cottle having met Coleridge, and seeing what a wreck he had become, discovered the fatal cause, and took courage to remonstrate by letter. Coleridge makes no concealment, pleads guilty to the evil habit, and confesses that he is utterly miserable. Sadder letters were perhaps never written than those cries out

- an

of the depths of that agony. He tells Cottle that he had learned what "sin is against an imperishable being, such as is the soul of man; that he had had more than one glimpse of the outer darkness and the worm that dieth not; that if annihilation and the possibility of heaven were at that moment offered to his choice, he would prefer the former." More pitiful still is that letter to his friend Wade:- "In the one crime of opium, what crime have I not made myself guilty of? Ingratitude to my Maker; and to my benefactors injustice; and unnatural cruelty to my poor children. . . . After my death, I earnestly entreat that a full and unqualified narrative of my wretchedness, and of its guilty cause, may be made public, that at least some little good may be effected by the dire ful example." It is painful to dwell on these things, nor should they have been reproduced here, had it not been that, as they have been long since made fully known, it might seem that we had given a too partial picture of the man had we avoided altogether this its darkest side.

Strange and sad as it is to think that one so gifted should have fallen so low, it is hardly less strange that from that degradation he should ever have been enabled to rise. The crisis seems to have come about the time when those.letters passed between Cottle and him in 1814. For some time there followed a struggle against the tyrant vice, by various means, but all seemingly ineffectual. At last he voluntarily arranged to board himself with the family of Mr. Gilman, a physician, who lived at Highgate in a retired house, in an airy situation, surrounded by a large garden. It was in April, 1816, that he first entered this house at Highgate, which continued to be his home for eighteen years till his death. The letter in which he opens his grief to Mr. Giland commends himself to his care, is very striking, showing at once his strong desire to overcome the inveterate habit, and his feeling of inability to do so, unless he were placed under a watchful eye and external restraint. In this home he learned to abandon opium, and here, though weighed down by ever increasing bodily infirmity, and often by great mental depression, he found on the whole "the best quiet to his course allowed." That the vice was overcome might be inferred from the very fact that his life was so prolonged. And though statements to the contrary have been made from quarters whence they might least have been expected, yet we know from the most trustworthy authorities now living, that there was no ground for these statements,

man,

and that the friends of Coleridge who had best access to the truth, believed that at Highgate he obtained that self-mastery which he sought. No doubt, the habit left a bane behind it, a body shattered, and a mind shorn of much of its power for continuous effort, ever-recurring seasons of despondency, and visitings of self-reproach for so much of life wasted, so great powers given, and so little done. Still, under all these drawbacks, he labored earnestly to redeem what of life remained; and most of what is satisfactory to remember of his life belongs to these last eighteen years. It was a time of gathering up of the fragments that remained-of saving splinters washed ashore from a mighty wreck. But to this time, such as it is, we are indebted for most of that by which Coleridge is now known to men, and by which, if at all, he has benefited his kind. During these years the great religious change that had long been going on was completed and confirmed. As far back as 1800 his adherence to the Hartleian philosophy and his belief in Unitarian theology had been shaken. By 1805 he was in some manner a believer in the Trinity, and had entered on a closer study of Scripture, especially of St. Paul and St. John. There were in him, as De Quincey observed, the capacity of love and faith, of self-distrust, humility, and child-like docility, waiting but for time and sorrow to bring them out. Such a discipline the long ineffectual struggle with his infirmity supplied. The sense of moral weakness, and of sin, working inward contrition, made him seek for a more practical, upholding faith, than his early years had known. And so he learned that while the consistency of Christianity with right reason and the historic evidence of miracles are the outworks, yet that the vital centre of faith lies in the believer's feeling of his great need, and the experience that the redemption which is in Christ is what he needs; that it is the "sorrow rising from beneath and the consolation meeting it from above," the actual trial of the faith in Christ, which is its ultimate and most satisfying evidence. With him, too, as with so many before, it was credidi, ideoque intellexi. The Highgate time was also the period of his most prolonged and undisturbed study. Among much other reading, the old English divines were diligently perused and commented on; and his criticisms and reflections on them fill nearly the whole of the third and fourth volumes of his Literary Remains. A discriminating, often a severe critic of these writers, he was still a warm admirer, in this a striking contrast to Ar

THIRD SERIES. LIVING AGE. VOL. XXXII. 1447.

nold, who certainly unduly depreciated that day. Edward Irving, Julius Hare, them.

Almost the whole of his prose works were the product of this time. First the Two Lay Sermons, published in 1816 and 1817. Then the Biographia Literaria, published in 1817, though in part composed some years before. In 1818 followed the recast and greatly enlarged edition of The Friend; and in 1825 he gave to the world the most mature of all his works, the Aids to Reflection. Incorporated especially with the earlier part of this work, are selections from the writings of Archbishop Leighton, of which he has said that to him they seemed "next to the inspired Scriptures, yea, as the vibration of that once-struck hour remaining on the air." The main substance of the work, however, contains his own thoughts on the grounds of morality and religion, and of the relation of these to each other, along with his own views on some of the main doctrines of the faith. The last work that appeared during his lifetime was that on Church and State, published in 1830. After his death appeared his posthumous works, viz., the four volumes of Literary Remains, and the small volume on the inspiration of Scripture, entitled Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit.

Sterling, and many more who might be named, were among his frequent and most devoted listeners. Most came to wonder, and hear, and learn. But some came and went to shrug their shoulders and pronounce it unintelligible; or in after years to scoff, as Mr. Carlyle. Likely enough this latter came craving a solution of some pressing doubt or bewildering enigma; and to receive instead a prolonged and circuitous disquisition must to his then mood of mind have been tantalizing enough. But was it well done, O great Thomas! for this, years afterwards, to jeer at the old man's enfeebled gait, and caricature the tones of his voice?

In the summer of 1833, Coleridge was seen for the last time in public, at the meeting of the British Association at Cambridge. Next year, on the 25th of July, he died in Mr. Gilman's house in The Grove, Highgate, which had been so long his home, and was laid hard by in his last resting-place within the old churchyard by the roadside.

Twelve days before his death, not knowing it to be so near, he wrote to his godchild this remarkable letter, which, gathering up the sum of his whole life's experience, reads like his unconscious epitaph on himself:

--

Years

"MY DEAR GODCHILD, must pass before you will be able to read with an understanding heart what I now write; but I trust that the all-gracious God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, who, by his only begotten Son (all mercies in one sovereign mercy), has redeemed you from of darkness, but into light; out of death, but the evil ground, and willed you to be born out into life; out of sin, but into righteousness, even into the Lord our Righteousness, trust that He will graciously hear the prayers of your dear parents, and be with you as the spirit of health and growth in body and mind.

-I

It is by these works alone, incomplete as many of them are, that posterity can judge of him. But the impression of pre-eminent genius which he left on his contemporaries was due not so much to his writings as to his wonderful talk. Printed books have made us undervalue this gift, or at best regard it more as a thing of display than as a genuine thought-communicating power. But as an organ of teaching truth, speech is older than books, and for this end Plato, among others, preferred the living voice to dead letters. Measured by this standard, Coleridge had no equal in his own, and few in any age. How his gift of discourse in his younger days arrested Hazlitt and De Quincey, we have already seen; and in his declining years at Highgate, when bodily ailments allowed, and during the pauses of study and writing, fuller and more continuous than ever the marvellous monologue went on. Some faint echoes of what then fell from him have been caught up and on the conviction) that health is a great blesspreserved in the well-known Table Talk, by his nephew and son-in-law, Henry Nelson Coleridge, who in his preface has finely described the impression produced by his uncle's conversation on congenial listeners. To that retirement at Highgate flocked, as on a pilgrimage, most of what was brilliant in intellect or ardent in youthful genius at

I, too, your godfather, have known what the enjoyments and advantages of this life are, and what the more refined pleasbestow; and with the experience which more ures which learning and intellectual power can than threescore years can give, I now, on the eve of my departure, declare to you (and earnestly pray that you may hereafter live and act

ing, competence obtained by honourable industry a great blessing, and a great blessing it is to have kind, faithful, and loving friends and relatives; but that the greatest of all blessings, as it is the most ennobling of all privileges, is to be indeed a Christian. But I have been

*This letter was written on the 13th, and he died on the 25th day of July.

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