And these gray rocks; this household lawn; Like something fashioned in a dream ; In which more plainly I could trace Of thoughts that lie beyond the reach What hand but would a garland cull Of the wild sea; and I would have Now thanks to Heaven! that of its grace Hath led me to this lonely place. I bear away my recompense. Laodamia. "With sacrifice before the rising morn, Vows have I made by fruitless hope inspired; And from the infernal gods, 'mid shades forlorn Restore him to my sight-great Jove, restore!' So speaking, and by fervent love endowed O terror! what hath she perceived?-O joy! Mild Hermes spake, and touched her with his wand That calms all fear: 'Such grace hath crowned thy prayer, Laodamia! that at Jove's command Thy husband walks the paths of upper air; He comes to tarry with thee three hours' space; Forth sprang the impassioned queen her lord to clasp, 'Great Jove, Laodamia, doth not leave And something also did my worth obtain ; : 'Thou knowest, the Delphic oracle foretold 'Supreme of heroes; bravest, noblest, best! "But thou, though capable of sternest deed, No spectre greets me-no vain shadow this; 'This visage tells thee that my doom is past; Nor should the change be mourned, even if the joys Of sense were able to return as fast And surely as they vanish. Earth destroys Those raptures duly-Erebus disdains; Calm pleasures there abide—majestic pains. 'Be taught, O faithful consort, to control Rebellious passion; for the gods approve The depth, and not the tumult, of the soul; A fervent, not ungovernable love. Thy transports moderate; and meekly mourn 'Ah, wherefore? Did not Hercules by force Given back to dwell on earth in vernal bloom? 'The gods to us are merciful; and they Of magic potent over sun and star, Is love, though oft to agony distressed, And though his favourite seat be feeble woman's breast. 'But if thou goest, I follow.' 'Peace!' he said; Brought from a pensive though a happy place. He spake of love, such love as spirits feel Of all that is most beauteous-imaged there And fields invested with purpureal gleams; Yet there the soul shall enter which hath earned Could draw, when we had parted, vain delight, 'Yet bitter, ofttimes bitter was the pang, My new-planned cities, and unfinished towers. 'But should suspense permit the foe to cry, Old frailties then recurred; but lofty thought, I counsel thee by fortitude to seek Our blest reunion in the shades below. The invisible world with thee hath sympathised; Aloud she shrieked; for Hermes reappears! The hours are past-too brief had they been years; Swift toward the realms that know not earthly day, Memoirs of Wordsworth were published in 1851, two volumes, by the poet's nephew, CHRISTOPHER WORDSWORTH, D.D. This is rather a meagre, unsatisfactory work, but no better has since appeared. Many interesting anecdotes, reports of conversation, letters, &c. will be found in the Diary of Henry Crabb Robinson, 1869. In 1874 was published Recollections of a Tour made in Scotland, A.D. 1803, by DOROTHY WORDSWORTH, sister of the poet, to whose talents and observation, no less than to her devoted affection, her brother was largely indebted. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, a profound thinker and rich imaginative poet, enjoyed a high reputation during the latter years of his life for his colloquial eloquence and metaphysical and critical powers, of which only a few fragmentary specimens remain. His poetry also indicated more than was achieved. Visions of grace, tenderness, and majesty seem ever to have haunted him. Some of these he embodied in exquisite verse; but he wanted concentration and steadiness of purpose to avail himself sufficiently of his intellectual riches. A happier destiny was also perhaps wanting; for much of Coleridge's life was spent in poverty and dependence, amidst disappointment and ill-health, and in the irregularity caused by an unfortunate and excessive use of opium, which tyrannised over him for many years with unrelenting severity. Amidst daily drudgery for the periodical press, and in nightly dreams distempered and feverish, he wasted, to use his own expression, 'the prime and manhood of his intellect. The poet was a native of Devonshire, born on the 20th of October 1772 at Ottery St Mary, of which parish his father was vicar. He received the principal part of his education at Christ's Hospital, where he had Charles Lamb for a schoolfellow. He describes himself as being, from eight to fourteen, 'a playless day-dreamer, a helluo librorum;' and in this instance, the child was father of the man,' for such was Coleridge to the end of his life. A stranger whom he had accidentally met one day on the streets of London, and who was struck with his conversation, made him free of a circulating library, and he read through the catalogue, folios and all. At fourteen, he had, like Gibbon, a stock of erudition that might have puzzled a doctor, and a degree of ignorance of which a school-boy would have been ashamed. He had no ambition; his father was dead, and he actually thought of apprenticing himself to a shoemaker who lived near the school. The head-master, Bowyer interfered, and prevented this additional honour to the craft of St Crispin, made illustrious by Gifford and Bloomfield. Coleridge became deputy-Grecian, or head-scholar, and obtained an exhibition or presentation from Christ's Hospital to Jesus College, Cambridge, where he remained from 1791 to 1793. In his first year at college he gained the Brown gold medal for the Greek ode; next year he stood for the Craven scholarship, but lost it; and in 1793 he was again unsuccessful in a competition for the Greek ode on astronomy. By this time he had incurred some debts, not amounting to 100; but this so weighed on his mind and spirits, that he suddenly left college, and went to London. He had also become obnoxious to his superiors from his attachment to the principles of the French Revolution. When France in wrath her giant-limbs upreared, And with that oath which smote air, earth, and sea, Unawed I sang, amid a slavish band: And flung a magic light o'er all her hills and groves, To all that braved the tyrant-quelling lance, I dimmed thy light, or damped thy holy flame; In London, Coleridge soon felt himself forlorn and destitute, and he enlisted as a soldier in the 15th, Elliot's Light Dragoons. 'On his arrival at the quarters of the regiment,' says his friend and biographer, Mr Gillman, 'the general of the district inspected the recruits, and looking hard at 66 a He seems Coleridge, with a military air, inquired: "What's your name, sir?" "Comberbach." (The name he had assumed.) What do you come here for, sir?" as if doubting whether he had any business there. "Sir," said Coleridge, "for what most other persons come-to be made a soldier." "Do you think," said the general, "you can run Frenchman through the body?" "I do not know," replied Coleridge, "as I never tried; but I'll let a Frenchman run me through the body before I'll run away." "That will do," said the general, and Coleridge was turned into the ranks." The poet made a poor dragoon, and never advanced beyond the awkward squad. He wrote letters, however, for all his comrades, and they attended to his horse and accoutrements. After four months' serviceDecember 1793 to April 1794-the history and circumstances of Coleridge became known. According to one account, he had written under his saddle on the stable-wall, Eheu! quam infortunii miserrimum est fuisse felicem, which led to inquiry on the part of the captain of his troop, who had more regard for the classics than Ensign Northerton in Tom Jones. Another account attributes the termination of his military career to a chance recognition on the street. His family being apprised of his situation, his discharge was obtained on the 10th of April 1794.* then to have set about publishing his Juvenile Poems by subscription, and while at Oxford in June of the same year, he met with Southey, and an intimacy immediately sprung up between them. Coleridge was then an ardent republican and a Socinian-full of high hopes and anticipations, the golden exhalations of the dawn.' In conjunction with his new friend Southey; with Robert Lovell, the son of a wealthy Quaker; George Burnett, a fellow-collegian from Somersetshire; Robert Allen, then at Corpus Christi College; and Edmund Seaward, of a Herefordshire family, also a fellow-collegian, Coleridge planned and proposed to carry out a scheme of emigration to America. They were to found in the New World a Pantisocracy, or state of society in which each was to have his portion of work, and their wives-all were to be married-were to cook and perform domestic offices, the poets cultivating literature in their hours of leisure, with neither king nor priest to mar their felicity. From building castles in the air,' as Southey has said, 'to framing commonwealths was an easy transition.' For some months this delusion lasted; but funds were wanting, and could not be readily raised. Southey and Coleridge gave a course of public lectures, and wrote a tragedy on the Fall of Robespierre, and the former soon afterwards proceeding with his uncle to Spain and Portugal, the Pantisocratic scheme was abandoned. Coleridge and Southey married two sisters-Lovell, who died in the following year, had previously been married to a third sisterladies of the name of Fricker, amiable, but wholly without fortune. Coleridge, still ardent, wrote two political pamphlets, concluding that truth should be *Miss Mitford states that the arrangement for Coleridge's discharge was made at her father's house at Reading. Captain Ogle -in whose troop the poet served-related at table one day the story of the learned recruit, when it was resolved to make exertions for his discharge. There would have been some difficulty in the case, had not one of the servants waiting at table been induced to enlist in his place. The poet, Miss Mitford says, never forgot her father's zeal in the cause. 1798, the 'generous and munificent patronage' of Messrs Josiah and Thomas Wedgwood, Staffordshire, enabled the poet to proceed to Germany to complete his education, and he resided there fourteen months. At Ratzeburg and Göttingen he acquired a well-grounded knowledge of the German language and literature, and was confirmed in his bias towards philosophical and metaphysical studies. On his return in 1800, he found Southey established at Keswick, and Wordsworth at Grasmere. He went to live with the former, and there his opinions underwent a total change. The Jacobin became a royalist, and the Unitarian a warm and devoted believer in the Trinity. In the same year he published his translation of Schiller's Wallenstein, into which he had thrown some of the finest graces of his own fancy. The following passage may be considered a revelation of Cole spoken at all times, but more especially at those times when to speak truth is dangerous. He established also a periodical in prose and verse, entitled The Watchman, with the motto, 'That all might know the truth, and that the truth might make us free.' He watched in vain. Coleridge's incurable want of order and punctuality, and his philosophical theories, tired out and disgusted his readers, and the work was discontinued after the ninth number. Of the unsaleable nature of this publication, he relates an amusing illustration. Happening one day to rise at an earlier hour than usual, he observed his servant-girl putting an extravagant quantity of paper into the grate, in order to light the fire, and he mildly checked her for her wastefulness. La, sir,' replied Nanny, 'why, it is only Watchmen.' He went to reside in a cottage at Nether Stowey, at the foot of the Quantock Hills a rural retreat which he has commemor-ridge's poetical faith and belief, conveyed in lanated in his poetry : And now, beloved Stowey! I behold Thy church-tower, and, methinks, the four huge elms At Stowey, Coleridge wrote some of his most A noticeable man with large grey eyes, guage picturesque and musical: Oh! never rudely will I blame his faith In the might of stars and angels ! 'Tis not merely Since likewise for the stricken heart of love That had their haunts in dale, or piny mountain, Or chasms and watery depths; all these have vanished. They live no longer in the faith of reason! The old fable-existences are no more; The fascinating race has emigrated (wandered out or away). The two or three years spent at Stowey seem to have been at once the most felicitous and the most illustrious of Coleridge's literary life. He had established his name for ever, though it was long in struggling to distinction. During his residence at Stowey, the poet officiated as Unitarian preacher at Taunton, and afterwards at Shrewsbury.* In The lines which we have printed in Italics are an expansion of two of Schiller's, which Mr Hayward Hazlitt walked ten miles in a winter day to hear Coleridge-another German poetical translator-thus literpreach. When I got there,' he says, 'the organ was playing the Tooth Psalm, and when it was done, Mr Coleridge rose and gave ally renders : 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 last two words, which he pronounced loud, deep, and distinct, it seemed to me, who was then young, as if the sounds had echoed from the bottom of the human heart, and as if that prayer might have floated in solemn silence through the universe. The idea of St John came into my mind, of one crying in the wilderness, who had his loins girt about, and whose food was locusts and wild-honey. 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 human gore! He made a poetical and pastoral excursion-and to shew the fatal effects of war, drew a striking contrast between the simple shepherd-boy driving his team afield, or sitting under the hawthorn, piping to his flock, as though he should never be old, and the same poor country lad, crimped, kidnapped, brought into town, made drunk at an alehouse, turned 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 once loved poet sung:" and, for myself, I could not have been more delighted if I had heard the music of the spheres.' As a means of subsistence, Coleridge reluctantly consented to undertake the literary and political department of the Morning Post, in which he supported the measures of government. In 1804, we find him in Malta, secretary to the governor, Sir Alexander Ball. He held this office only nine months, and, after a tour in Italy, returned to England to resume his precarious labours as an author and lecturer. The desultory, irregular habits of the poet, caused partly by his addiction to opium, and the dreamy indolence and procrastination which marked him throughout life, seem to have frustrated every chance and opportunity of self-advancement. Living again at Grasmere, he issued a second periodical, The Friend, which extended to twenty-seven numbers. times committing a golden thought to the blank The essays were sometimes acute and eloquent, leaf of a book or to a private letter, but generally but as often rhapsodical, imperfect, and full of content with oral communication-the poet's time German mysticism. In 1816, chiefly at the recom- glided past. He had found an asylum in the mendation of Lord Byron, the 'wild and wondrous house of a private friend, Mr James Gillman, tale' of Christabel was published. The first part, surgeon, Highgate, where he resided for the last as we have mentioned, was written at Stowey as nineteen years of his life. Here he was visited far back as 1797, and a second had been added by numerous friends and admirers, who were happy on his return from Germany in 1800. The poem to listen to his inspired monologues, which he was still unfinished; but it would have been poured forth with exhaustless fecundity. 'We almost as difficult to complete the Faery Queen, believe,' says one of these rapt and enthusiastic as to continue in the same spirit that witching listeners, 'it has not been the lot of any other strain of supernatural fancy and melodious verse. literary man in England, since Dr Johnson, to Another drama, Zapoyla-founded on the Winter's command the devoted admiration and steady zeal Tale-was published by Coleridge in 1818, and, of so many and such widely differing discipleswith the exception of some minor poems, com- some of them having become, and others being pletes his poetical works. He wrote several char-likely to become, fresh and independent sources acteristic prose_disquisitions-The Statesman's of light and moral action in themselves upon the Manual, or the Bible the Best Guide to Political principles of their common master. One half of Skill and Foresight; A Lay Sermon (1816); A│these affectionate disciples have learned their Second Lay Sermon, addressed to the Higher lessons of philosophy from the teacher's mouth. and Middle Classes, on the existing Distresses and He has been to them as an old oracle of the Discontents (1817); Biographia Literaria, two academy or Lyceum. The fulness, the inwardness, volumes (1817); Aids to Reflection (1825); On the the ultimate scope of his doctrines, has never yet Constitution of the Church and State (1830); &c. been published in print, and, if disclosed, it has He meditated a great theological and philosophical been from time to time in the higher moments work, his magnum opus, on 'Christianity as the of conversation, when occasion, and mood, and only revelation of permanent and universal valid-person begot an exalted crisis. More than once ity, which was to 'reduce all knowledge into has Mr Coleridge said that, with pen in hand, he harmony'-to 'unite the insulated fragments of felt a thousand checks and difficulties in the truth, and therewith to frame a perfect mirror.' expression of his meaning; but that-authorship He planned also an epic poem on the destruction aside-he never found the smallest hitch or imof Jerusalem, which he considered the only sub- pediment in the fullest utterance of his most subtle ject now remaining for an epic poem; a subject fancies by word of mouth. His abstrusest thoughts which, like Milton's Fall of Man, should interest became rhythmical and clear when chanted to all Christendom, as the Homeric War of Troy their own music."* Mr Coleridge died at Highinterested all Greece. Here,' said he, 'there gate on the 25th of July 1834. In the preceding would be the completion of the prophecies; the winter he had written the following epitaph, striktermination of the first revealed national religion ing from its simplicity and humility, for himself: under the violent assault of paganism, itself the Stop, Christian passer-by! Stop, child of God! immediate forerunner and condition of the spread And read with gentle breast. Beneath this sod of a revealed mundane religion; and then you A poet lies, or that which once seemed hewould have the character of the Roman and the Oh! lift a thought in prayer for S. T. C.! Jew; and the awfulness, the completeness, the That he, who many a year, with toil of breath, justice. I schemed it at twenty-five, but, alas! Found death in life, may here find life in death! venturum expectat. This ambition to execute Mercy for praise-to be forgiven for fame, some great work, and his constitutional infirmity of purpose, which made him defer or recoil from such an effort, he has portrayed with great beauty and pathos in an address to Wordsworth, composed after the latter had recited to him a poem "on the growth of an individual mind :' Ah! as I listened with a heart forlorn, The pulses of my being beat anew: And fears self-willed, that shunned the eye of hope; He asked and hoped through Christ-do thou the same. It is characteristic of this remarkable man that on the last evening of his life (as related by his daughter) 'he repeated a certain part of his religious philosophy, which he was specially anxious to have accurately recorded.' Immediately on the death of Coleridge, several compilations were made of his table-talk, correspondence, and literary remains. His fame had been gradually extending, and public curiosity was excited with respect to the genius and opinions of a man who combined such various and dissimilar powers, and who was supposed capable of any task, however gigantic. Some of these Titanic fragments are valuable-particularly his Shakspearean criticism. They attest his profound thought and curious Quarterly Review, vol. lii. p. 5. With one so impulsive as Coleridge, and liable to fits of depression and to ill-health, these appearances must have been very unequal. Carlyle, in his Life of Sterling, ridicules Coleridge's monologues as generally tedious, hazy, and unintelligible. We have known three men of genius, all poets, who frequently listened to him, and yet described him as In his happiest moods generally obscure, pedantic, and tedious. he must, however, have been great. His voice and countenance were harmonious and beautiful. 71 |