a physiognomic expression to all the works of nature. Fifthly, A meditative pathos, a union of deep and subtle thought with sensibility: a sympathy with man as man; the sympathy, indeed, of a contemplator rather than a fellow-sufferer and co-mate (spectator, haud particeps), but of a contemplation from whose view no difference of rank conceals the sameness of the nature; no injuries of wind or weather, or toil, or even of ignorance, wholly disguise the human face divine. Last, and pre-eminently, I challenge for this poet the gift of imagination in the highest and strictest sense of the word. In the play of fancy, Wordsworth, to my feelings, is always graceful, and sometimes recondite. The likeness is occasionally too strange, or demands too peculiar a point of view, or is such as appears the creature of predetermined research, rather than spontaneous presentation. Indeed, his fancy seldom displays itself as mere and unmodified fancy. But in imaginative power he stands nearest of all modern writers to Shakspeare and Milton, and yet in a mind perfectly unborrowed, and his own. To employ his own words, which are at once an instance and an illustration, he does indeed, to all thoughts and to all objects Add the gleam, The light that never was on sea or land, The consecration and the poet's dream.' SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, a remarkable man 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 it achieved. Visions Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 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, being 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 schoolboy 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, already made illustrious by Gifford and Bloomfield. Coleridge became deputyGrecian, or head scholar, and obtained an exhibition or presentation from Christ's hospital to Jesus' college, Cambridge, where he remained from 1791 to 1793. He quitted college abruptly, without taking a degree, having 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, Bear witness for me, how I hoped and feared! Stamped her strong foot, and said she would be free, With what a joy my lofty gratulation 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 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 general, "you can run a 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 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-to be made a soldier." "Do you think," said the 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 letters, however, for all his comrades, and they Thy church tower, and, methinks, the four huge elms generous and munificent patronage' of Messrs Josiah and Thomas Wedgewood, Staffordshire, enabled the poet to proceed to Germany to complete his education, and he resided there fourteen months. At Ratzburg and Gottingen he acquired a wellgrounded 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 Grassmere. 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 Coleridge's poetical faith and belief, conveyed in language picturesque and musical :Oh! never rudely will I blame his faith In the might of stars and angels! 'Tis not merely Mr Coleridge rose 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 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 Mr Wordsworth lived at Allfoxden, about two as if that prayer might have floated in solemn silence through miles from Stowey, and the kindred feelings and the universe. The idea of St John came into my mind, of one pursuits of the two poets bound them in the closest crying in the wilderness, who had his loins girt about, and friendship. At Stowey, Coleridge wrote some of his whose food was locusts and wild honey. The preacher then launched into his subject like an eagle dallying with the wind, most beautiful poetry-his Ode to the Departing The sermon was upon peace and war-upon church and state Year; Fears in Solitude; France, an Ode; Frost at -not their alliance, but their separation-on the spirit of the Midnight; the first part of Christabel; the Ancient world and the spirit of Christianity, not as the same, but as Mariner; and his tragedy of Remorse. The luxuriant opposed to one another. He talked of those who had inscribed fulness and individuality of his poetry show that he the cross of Christ on banners dripping with human gore! He was then happy, no less than eager, in his studies. made a poetical and pastoral excursion-and to show the fatal The two or three years spent at Stowey seem to have effects of war, drew a striking contrast between the simple been at once the most felicitous and the most illus-shepherd-boy driving his team a-field, or sitting under the trious 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, Coleridge officiated as Unitarian preacher at Taunton, and afterwards at Shrewsbury.* In 1798 the *Mr Hazlitt has described his walking ten miles in a winter day to hear Coleridge preach. When I got there,' he says, the organ was playing the 100th Psalin, and when it was done, 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." The lines which we have printed in Italics are an expansion of two of Schiller's, which Mr Hayward (another German poetical translator) thus literally renders : The old fable-existences are no more; The fascinating race has emigrated (wandered out or away). 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, with a salary of £800 per annum. He held this lucrative office only nine months, having disagreed with the governor; 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 Grassmere, he issued a second periodical, The Friend, which extended to twenty-seven numbers. The essays were sometimes acute and eloquent, but as often rhapsodical, imperfect, and full of German mysticism. In 1816, chiefly at the recommendation of Lord Byron, the wild and wondrous tale' of 'Christabel' was published. The first part, as we have mentioned, was written at Stowey as far back as 1797, and a second had been added on his return from Germany in 1800. The poem was still unfinished; but it would have been almost as difficult to complete the Faery Queen, as to continue in the same spirit that witching strain of supernatural fancy and melodious verse. Another drama, Za poyla (founded on the Winter's Tale), was published by Coleridge in 1818, and, with the exception of some minor poems, completes his poetical works. He wrote several characteristic prose disquisitionsThe Statesman's Manual, or the Bible the Best Guide to Political Skill and Foresight; a Lay Sermon (1816); a Second Lay Sermon, addressed to the Higher and Middle Classes on the existing Distresses and Discontents (1817); Biographia Literaria, two volumes, 1817; Aids to Reflection (1825); On the Constitution of the Church and State (1830); &c. He meditated a great theological and philosophical work, his magnum opus, on Christianity as the only revelation of permanent and universal validity,' which was to 'reduce all knowledge into harmony'-to unite the insulated fragments of truth, and therewith to frame a perfect mirror.' He planned also an epic poem on the destruction of Jerusalem, which he considered the only subject now remaining for an epic poem ; a subject which, like Milton's Fall of Man, should interest all Christendom, as the Homeric War of Troy interested all Greece. Here,' said he, there would be the completion of the prophecies; the termination of the first revealed national religion under the violent assault of paganism, itself the immediate forerunner and condition of the spread of a revealed mundane religion; and then you would have the character of the Roman and the Jew; and the awfulness, the completeness, the justice. I schemed it at twenty-five, but, alas! venturum expectat.' This ambition to execute 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, And even as life returns upon the drowned, Life's joy rekindling roused a throng of painsKeen pangs of love, awakening as a babe Turbulent, with an outcry in the heart; And fears self-willed, that shunned the eye of hope; And hope that scarce would know itself from fear; Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain ; And all which I had culled in wood-walks wild, And genius given, and knowledge won in vain ; And all which patient toil had reared, and all Commune with thee had opened out-but flowers Strewed on my corse, and borne upon my bier, In the same coffin, for the self-same grave! These were prophetic breathings, and should be a warning to young and ardent genius. In such magnificent alternations of hope and despair, and in discoursing on poetry and philosophy-sometimes committing a golden thought to the blank leaf of a book or to a private letter, but generally content with oral communication-the poet's time glided past. He had found an asylum in the house of a private friend, Mr James Gillman, surgeon, Highgate, where he resided for the last nineteen years of his life. Here he was visited by numerous friends Mr Gillman's House, Highgate, the last residence of Coleridge. and admirers, who were happy to listen to his inspired monologues, which he poured forth with exhaustless fecundity. We believe,' says one of these rapt and enthusiastic listeners, 'it has not been the lot of any other literary man in England, since Dr Johnson, to command the devoted admiration and steady zeal of so many and such widely-differing disciples-some of them having become, and others being likely to become, fresh and independent sources of light and moral action in themselves upon the principles of their common master. One half of these affectionate disciples have learned their lessons of philosophy from the teacher's mouth. He has been to them as an old oracle of the academy or Lyceum. The fulness, the inwardness, the ultimate scope of his doctrines, has never yet been published in print, and, if disclosed, it has been from time to time in the higher moments of conversation, when occasion, and mood, and person, begot an exalted crisis. More than once has Mr Coleridge said that, with pen in hand, he felt a thousand checks and difficulties in the expression of his meaning; but that-authorship aside-he never found the smallest hitch or impediment in the fullest utterance of his most subtle fancies by word of mouth. His ab strusest thoughts became rhythmical and clear when chanted to their own music.'* Mr Coleridge died at Highgate on the 25th of July 1834. In the preceding winter he had written the following epitaph, striking from its simplicity and humility, for himself: Stop, Christian passer-by! Stop, child of God! And read with gentle breast. Beneath this sod A poet lies, or that which once seemed heOh! lift a thought in prayer for S. T. C.! That he, who many a year, with toil of breath, Found death in life, may here find life in death! Mercy for praise-to be forgiven for fame, He asked and hoped through Christ-do thou the same. 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 Shakspearian criticism. They attest his profound thought and curious erudition, and display his fine critical taste and discernment. In penetrating into and embracing the whole meaning of a favourite author-unfolding the nice shades and distinctions of thought, character, feeling, or melody-darting on it the light of his own creative mind and suggestive fancy--and perhaps linking the whole to some glorious original conception or image, Coleridge stands unrivalled. He does not appear as a critic, but as an eloquent and gifted expounder of kindred excellence and genius. He seems like one who has the key to every hidden chamber of profound and subtle thought and every ethereal conception. We cannot think, however, that he could ever have built up a regular system of ethics or criticism. He wanted the art to combine and arrange his materials. He was too languid and irresolute. He had never attained the art of writing with clearness and precision; for he is often unintelligible, turgid, and verbose, as if he struggled in vain after perspicacity and method. His intellect could not subordinate the 'shaping spirit' of his imagination. The poetical works of Coleridge have been collected and published in three volumes. They are various in style and manner, embracing ode, tragedy, and epigram, love poems, and strains of patriotism and superstition-a wild witchery of imagination, and, at other times, severe and stately thought and intellectual retrospection. His language is often rich and musical, highly figurative and ornate. Many of his minor poems are characterised by tenderness and beauty, but others are disfigured by passages of turgid sentimentalism and puerile affectation. The most original and striking of his productions is his well-known tale of The Ancient Mariner. According to De Quincy, the germ of this story is contained * 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. We have known three men of genius, all poets, who frequently listened to him, and yet described him as generally obscure, pedantic, and tedious. In his happiest moods he must, however, have been great and overwhelming. His voice and countenance were harmonious and beautiful. in a passage of Shelvocke, one of the classical circumnavigators of the earth, who states that his second captain, being a melancholy man, was possessed by a fancy that some long season of foul weather was owing to an albatross which had steadily pursued the ship, upon which he shot the bird, but without mending their condition. Coleridge makes the ancient mariner relate the circumstances attending his act of inhumanity to one of three wedding guests whom he meets and detains on his way to the marriage feast. 'He holds him with his glittering eye,' and invests his narration with a deep preternatural character and interest, and with touches of exquisite tenderness and energetic description. The versification is irregular, in the style of the old ballads, and most of the action of the piece is unnatural; yet the poem is full of vivid and original imagination. There is nothing else like it,' says one of his critics; it is a poem by itself; between it and other compositions, in pari materia, there is a chasm which you cannot overpass. The sensitive reader feels himself insulated, and a sea of wonder and mystery flows round him as round the spellstricken ship itself.' Coleridge further illustrates his theory of the connection between the material and the spiritual world in his unfinished poem of 'Christabel,' and the most remarkable modulation of verse. The a romantic supernatural tale, filled with wild imagery versification is founded on what the poet calls a new principle (though it was evidently practised by in each line the number of accentuated words, not Chaucer and Shakspeare), namely, that of counting the number of syllables. Though the latter,' he says, may vary from seven to twelve, yet in each line the accents will be found to be only four.' This irregular harmony delighted both Scott and Byron, by whom it was imitated. We add a brief speci men : A The night is chill; the forest bare; Jesu Maria shield her well! She foldeth her arms beneath her cloak, There she sees a damsel bright, I guess 'twas frightful there to see finer passage is that describing broken friendships : Alas! they had been friends in youth; And life is thorny; and youth is vain: Doth work like madness in the brain. Each spake words of high disdain And insult to his heart's best brother: But never either found another The marks of that which once hath been. This metrical harmony of Coleridge exercises a sort of fascination even when it is found united to incoherent images and absurd conceptions. Thus, in Khubla Khan, a fragment written from recollections of a dream, we have the following melodious rhapsody: The shadow of the dome of pleasure A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice! A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw : It was an Abyssinian maid, And on her dulcimer she played, Her symphony and song, To such deep delight 'twould win me, And all who heard should see them there, The odes of Coleridge are highly passionate and elevated in conception. That on France was considered by Shelley to be the finest English ode of modern times. The hymn on Chamouni is equally lofty and brilliant. His 'Genevieve' is a pure and exquisite love-poem, without that gorgeous diffuseness which characterises the odes, yet more chastely and carefully finished, and abounding in the delicate and subtle traits of his imagination. Coleridge was deficient in the rapid energy and strong passion necessary for the drama. The poetical beauty of certain passages would not, on the stage, atone for the paucity of action and want of interest in his two plays, though, as works of genius, they vastly excel those of a more recent date which prove highly successful in representation. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. He holds him with his glittering eye- The wedding-guest sat on a stone, He cannot choose but hear; And thus spake on that ancient man, The ship was cheered, the harbour cleared, Below the kirk, below the hill, The sun came up upon the left, And he shone bright, and on the right Higher and higher every day, The wedding-guest here beat his breast, The bride hath paced into the hall, Nodding their heads before her goes The wedding-guest he beat his breast, And now the storm-blast came, and he He struck with his o'ertaking wings, With sloping masts and dripping prow, The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast, And now there came both mist and snow, And ice mast-high came floating by, And through the drifts the snowy cliffs Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken- The ice was here, the ice was there, It cracked and growled, and roared and howled, At length did cross an albatross, It ate the food it ne'er had eat, And a good south wind sprung up behind, And every day for food or play, Came to the mariner's hollo! In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud, It perched for vespers nine; Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white, Glimmered the white moonshine. 64 |