Chapter 26

“Ah! doubly blest if Love supplyLustre to the now heavy eye,And with unwonted spirit graceThat fat vacuity of face.”

The transcriber adds in a footnote, “The author was at this time, at seventeen, remarkable for a plump face.”

The “Reminiscences of an Octogenarian” (The Rev. Leapidge Smith), contributed to theLeisure Hour, convey a different 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 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.”—Leisure Hour, 1870, p. 651.

[130]Origine de tous les Cultes, ou Religion universelle.

[131]Thelwall executed his commission. The Iamblichus and the Julian were afterwards presented by Coleridge to his son Derwent. They are still in the possession of the family.

[132]The three letters to Poole, dated December 11, 12, and 13, relative to Coleridge’s residence at Stowey, were published for the first time inThomas Poole and his Friends. The long letter of expostulation, dated December 13, which is in fact a continuation of that dated December 12, is endorsed by Poole: “An angry letter, but the breach was soon healed.” Either on Coleridge’s account or his own it was among the few papers retained by Poole when, to quote Mrs. Sandford, “in 1836 he placed the greater number of the letters which he had received from S. T. Coleridge at the disposal of his literary executors for biographical purposes.”Thomas Poole and his Friends, i. 182-193. Mrs. Sandford has kindly permitted me to reprint itin extenso.

[133]“Sonnet composed on a journey homeward, the author having received intelligence of the birth of a son. September 20, 1796.”

The opening lines, as quoted in the letter, differ from those published in 1797, and again from a copy of the same sonnet sent in a letter to Poole, dated November 1, 1796. SeePoetical Works, p. 66, and Editor’s Note, p. 582.

[134]Coleridge’sPoetical Works, p. 66.

[135]Compare Lamb’s letter to Coleridge, December 5, 1796. “I am glad you love Cowper. I could forgive a man for not enjoying Milton, but I would not call that man my friend who should be offended with the ‘divine chit-chat of Cowper.’” Compare, too, letter of December 10, 1796, in which the origin of the phrase is attributed to Coleridge.Letters of Charles Lamb, i. 52, 54. See, too, Canon Ainger’s note, i. 316.

[136]“Southey misrepresented me. My maxim was and is that the name of God should not be introduced intoLove Sonnets.” MS. Note by John Thelwall.

[137]Revelation x. 1-6. Some words and sentences of the original are omitted, either for the sake of brevity, or to heighten the dramatic effect.

[138]Hebrews xii. 18, 19, 22, 23.

[139]“In reading over this after an interval of twenty-three years I was wondering what I could have said that looked like contempt of age. May not slobberers have referred not to age but to the drivelling of decayed intellect, which is surely an ill guide in matters of understanding and consequently of faith?” MS. Note by John Thelwall, 1819.

[140]Patience—permit me as a definition of the word to quote one sentence from my first Address, p. 20. “Accustomed to regard all the affairs of man as a process, they never hurry and they never pause.” In his not possessingthisvirtue, all the horrible excesses of Robespierre did, I believe, originate.—MS. note to text of letter by S. T. Coleridge.

[141]Godliness—the belief, the habitual and efficient belief, that we are always in the presence of our universal Parent. I will translate literally a passage [the passage is from Voss’sLuise. I am enabled by the courtesy of Dr. Garnett, of the British Museum, to give an exact reference:Luise, ein ländliches Gedicht in drei Idyllen, von Johann Heinrich Voss, Königsberg,MDCCXCV. Erste Idylle, pp. 41-45, lines 303-339.—E. H. C.] from a German hexameter poem. It is the speech of a country clergyman on the birthday of his daughter. Thelatter partfully expresses the spirit of godliness, and its connection with brotherly-kindness. (Pardon the harshness of the language, for it is translatedtotidem verbis.)

“Yes! my beloved daughter, I am cheerful, cheerful as the birds singing in the wood here, or the squirrel that hops among the airy branches around its young in their nest. To-day it is eighteen years since God gave me my beloved, now my only child, so intelligent, so pious, and so dutiful. How the time flies away! Eighteen years to come—how far the space extends itself before us! and how does it vanish when we look back upon it! It was but yesterday, it seems to me, that as I was plucking flowers here, and offering praise, on a sudden the joyful message came, ‘A daughter is born to us.’ Much since that time has the Almighty imparted to us of good and evil. But the evil itself was good; for his loving-kindness is infinite. Do you recollect [to his wife] as it once had rained after a long drought, and I (Louisa in my arms) was walking with thee in the freshness of the garden, how the child snatched at the rainbow, and kissed me, and said: ‘Papa! there it rains flowers from heaven! Does the blessed God strew these that we children may gather them up?’ ‘Yes!’ I answered, ‘full-blowing and heavenly blessings does the Father strew who stretched out the bow of his favour; flowers and fruits that we may gather them with thankfulness and joy.Whenever I think of that great Father then my heart lifts itself up and swells with active impulse towards all his children, our brothers who inhabit the earth around us; differing indeed from one another in powers and understanding, yet all dear children of the same parent, nourished by the same Spirit of animation, and ere long to fall asleep, and again to wake in the common morning of the Resurrection; all who have loved their fellow-creatures, all shall rejoice with Peter, and Moses, and Confucius, and Homer, and Zoroaster, with Socrates who died for truth, and also with the noble Mendelssohn who teaches that the divine one was never crucified.’”

Mendelssohn is a German Jew by parentage, anddeistby election. He has written some of the most acute books possible in favour of natural immortality, and Germany deems him her profoundest metaphysician, with the exception of the most unintelligible Immanuel Kant.—MS. note to text of letter by S. T. Coleridge.

[142]2 Peter i. 5-7.

[143]They were criticised by Lamb in his letter to Coleridge Dec. 10, 1796 (xxxi. of Canon Ainger’s edition), but in a passage first printed in theAtlantic Monthlyfor February, 1891. The explanatory notes there printed were founded on a misconception, but the matter is cleared up in theAthenæumfor June 13, 1891, in the article, “A Letter of Charles Lamb.”

[144]The reference is to a pamphlet of sixteen pages containing twenty-eight sonnets by Coleridge, Southey, Lloyd, Lamb, and others, which was printed for private circulation towards the close of 1796, and distributed among a few friends. Of this selection of sonnets, which was made “for the purpose of binding them up with the sonnets of the Rev. W. L. Bowles,” the sole surviving copy is now in the Dyce Collection of the South Kensington Museum. On the fly-leaf, in Coleridge’s handwriting, is a “presentation note” to Mrs. Thelwall. For a full account of this curious and interesting volume, see Coleridge’sPoetical and Dramatic Works, 4 vols., 1877-1880, ii. 377-379; also,Poetical Works(1893), 542-544.

[145]A folio edition of “Poems on the Death of Priscilla Farmer, by her grandson Charles Lloyd,” was printed at Bristol in 1796. The volume was prefaced by Coleridge’s sonnet, “The piteous sobs which choke the virgin’s breast,” and contained Lamb’s “Grandame.” As Mr. Dykes Campbell has pointed out, it is to this “magnificent folio” that Charles Lamb alludes in his letter of December 10, 1796 (incorrectly dated 1797), when he speaks of “my granny so gaily decked,” and records “the odd coincidence of two young men in one age carolling their grandmothers.”Poetical Works, note 99, p. 583.

[146]“To a friend (C. Lamb) who had declared his intention of writing no more poetry.”Poetical Works, p. 69. See, too, Editor’s Note, p. 583.

[147]Printed in theAnnual Anthologyfor 1799.

[148]These lines, which were published with the enlarged title “To a Young Man of Fortune who had abandoned himself to an indolent and causeless melancholy,” may have been addressed to Charles Lloyd.

The last line, “A prey to the throned murderess of mankind,” was afterwards changed to “A prey to tyrants, murderers of mankind.” The reference is, doubtless, to Catherine of Russia. Her death had taken place a month before the date of this letter, but possibly when Coleridge wrote the lines the news had not reached England. It is not a little strange that Coleridge should write and print so stern and uncompromising a rebuke to his intimate and disciple before there had been time for coolness and alienation on either side. Very possibly the reproof was aimed in the first instance against himself, and afterwards he permitted it to apply to Lloyd.

[149]Compare the line, “From precipices of distressful sleep,” which occurs in the sonnet, “No more my visionary soul shall dwell,” which is attributed to Favell in a letter of Southey’s to his brother Thomas, dated October 24, 1795. Southey’sLife and Correspondence, i. 224. See, also, Editor’s Note to “Monody on the Death of Chatterton,”Poetical Works, p. 563.

[150]TheOde on the Departing Year.

[151]Œdipus.

[152]Poetical Works, p. 459.

[153]William and Joseph Strutt were the sons of Jedediah Strutt, of Derby. The eldest, William, was the father of Edward Strutt, created Lord Belper in 1856. Their sister, Elizabeth, who had married William Evans of Darley Hall, was at this time a widow. She had been struck by Coleridge’s writings, or perhaps had heard him preach when he visited Derby on hisWatchmantour, and was anxious to engage him as tutor to her children. The offer was actually made, but the relations on both sides intervened, and she was reluctantly compelled to withdraw her proposal. By way of consolation, she entertained Coleridge and his wife at Darley Hall, and before he left presented him with a handsome sum of money and a store of baby-linen, worth, if one may accept Coleridge’s valuation, a matter of forty pounds.Thomas Poole and his Friends, i. 152-154;Estlin Letters, p. 13.

[154]Probably Jacob Bryant, 1715-1804, author ofAn Address to Dr. Priestley upon his Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity, 1780;Treatise on the Authenticity of the Scriptures, 1792;The Sentiments of Philo-Judæus concerning the Logos or Word of God, 1797, etc. Allibone’sDictionary, i. 270.

[155]“Ode to the Departing-Year,” published in theCambridge Intelligencer, December 24, 1796. The lines on the “Empress,” to which Thelwall objected, are in the first epode:—

No more on Murder’s lurid faceThe insatiate Hag shall gloat with drunken eye.

Poetical Works, p. 79.

[156]Compare the well-known description of Dorothy Wordsworth, in a letter to Cottle of July, 1797: “W. and his exquisite sister are with me. She is a woman, indeed,—in mind I mean, and heart. Her information various. Her eye watchful in minutest observation of nature; and her taste a perfect electrometer. It bends, protrudes, and draws in, at subtlest beauties and most recondite faults.”

Bennett’s, or the gold leaf electroscope, is an instrument for “detecting the presence, and determining the kind of electricity in any body.” Two narrow strips of gold leaf are attached to a metal rod, terminating in a small brass plate above, contained in a glass shade, and these under certain conditions of the application of positive and negative electricity diverge or collapse.

The gold leaf electroscope was invented by Abraham Bennett in 1786. Cottle’sEarly Recollections, i. 252; Ganot’sPhysics, 1870, p. 631.

[157]His tractOn the Strength of the Existing Government (the Directory) of France, and the Necessity of supporting it, was published in 1796.

The translator, James Losh, described by Southey as “a provincial counsel,” was at one time resident in Cumberland, and visited Coleridge at Greta Hall. At a later period he settled at Jesmond, Newcastle. His name occurs among the subscribers toThe Friend.Letters from the Lake Poets, p. 453.

[158]Compare stanzas eight and nine of “The Mad Ox:”—

Old Lewis (’twas his evil day)Stood trembling in his shoes;The ox was his—what could he say?His legs were stiffened with dismay,The ox ran o’er him mid the fray,And gave him his death’s bruise.The baited ox drove on (but here,The Gospel scarce more true is,My muse stops short in mid career—Nay, gentle reader, do not sneer!I could chuse but drop a tear,A tear for good old Lewis!)

Poetical Works, p. 134.

[159]The probable date of this letter is Thursday, June 8, 1797. On Monday, June 5, Coleridge breakfasted with Dr. Toulmin, the Unitarian minister at Taunton, and on the evening of that or the next day he arrived on foot at Racedown, some forty miles distant. Mrs. Wordsworth, in a letter to Sara Coleridge, dated November 7, 1845, conveys her husband’s recollections of this first visit in the following words: “Your father,” she says, “came afterwards to visit us at Racedown, where I was living with my sister. We have both a distinct remembrance of his arrival. He did not keep to the high road, but leaped over a high gate and bounded down the pathless field, by which he cut off an angle. We both retain the liveliest possible image of his appearance at that moment. My poor sister has just been speaking of it to me with much feeling and tenderness.” A portion of this letter, of which I possess the original MS., was printed by Professor Knight in hisLife of Wordsworth, i. 111.

[160]This passage, which for some reason Cottle chose to omit, seems to imply that the second edition of the poems had not appeared by the beginning of June.

[161]

... Such, O my earliest friend!Thy lot, and such thy brothers too enjoy.At distance did ye climb life’s upland road,Yet cheered and cheering: now fraternal loveHath drawn you to one centre.

Poetical Works, p. 81, l. 9-14.

[162]

... and some most false,False, and fair-foliaged as the Manchineel,Have tempted me to slumber in their shadeE’en mid the storm; then breathing subtlest dampMixed their own venom with the rain from Heaven,That I woke poisoned.

Poetical Works, p. 82, l. 25-30.

Compare Lamb’s humorous reproach in a letter to Coleridge, September, 1797: “For myself I must spoil a little passage of Beaumont and Fletcher’s to adapt it to my feelings:—

... I am prouderThat I was once your friend, tho’ now forgot,Than to have had another true to me.

“If you don’t write to me now, as I told Lloyd, I shall get angry, and call you hard names—Manchineel, and I don’t know what else.”

Letters of Charles Lamb, i. 83.

[163]Charles Lamb’s visit to the cottage of Nether Stowey lasted from Friday, July 7, to Friday, July 14, 1797.

[164]According to local tradition, the lime-tree bower was at the back of the cottage, but according to this letter it was in Poole’s garden. From either spot the green ramparts of Stowey Castle and the “airy ridge” of Dowseborough are full in view.

[165]“He [Le Grice] and Favell ... wrote to the Duke of York, when they were at college, for commissions in the army. The Duke good-naturedly sent them.”Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, p. 72.

[166]Possibly he alludes to his appointment as deputy-surgeon to the Second Royals, then stationed in Portugal.

His farewell letter to Coleridge (undated) has been preserved and will be read with interest.

Portsmouth.My Beloved Friend,—Farewell! I shall never think of you but with tears of the tenderest affection. Our routes in life have been so opposite, that for a long time past there has not been that intercourse between us which our mutual affection would have otherwise occasioned. But at this serious moment, all your kindness and love for me press upon my memory with a weight of sensation I can scarcely endure.········You have heard of my destination, I suppose. I am going to Portugal to join the Second Royals, to which I have been appointed Deputy-Surgeon. What fate is in reserve for me I know not. I should be more indifferent to my future lot, if it were not for the hope of passing many pleasant hours, in times to come, in your society.Adieu! my dearest fellow. My love to Mrs. C. Health and fraternity to young David.Yours most affectionate,R. Allen.

Portsmouth.

My Beloved Friend,—Farewell! I shall never think of you but with tears of the tenderest affection. Our routes in life have been so opposite, that for a long time past there has not been that intercourse between us which our mutual affection would have otherwise occasioned. But at this serious moment, all your kindness and love for me press upon my memory with a weight of sensation I can scarcely endure.

········

You have heard of my destination, I suppose. I am going to Portugal to join the Second Royals, to which I have been appointed Deputy-Surgeon. What fate is in reserve for me I know not. I should be more indifferent to my future lot, if it were not for the hope of passing many pleasant hours, in times to come, in your society.

Adieu! my dearest fellow. My love to Mrs. C. Health and fraternity to young David.

Yours most affectionate,R. Allen.

[167]A friend and fellow-collegian of Christopher Wordsworth at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was a member of the “Literary Society” to which Coleridge, C. Wordsworth, Le Grice, and others belonged. He afterwards became a sergeant-at-law. He was an intimate friend of H. Crabb Robinson. See H. C. Robinson’sDiary,passim. See, too,Social Life at the English Universities, by Christopher Wordsworth, M. A., Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, 1874, Appendix.

[168]Not, as has been supposed, Charles and Mary Lamb, but Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. Mary Lamb was not and could not have been at that time one of the party. The version sent to Southey differs both from that printed in theAnnual Anthologyof 1800, and from a copy in a contemporary letter sent to C. Lloyd. It is interesting to note that the words, “My sister, and my friends,” ll. 47 and 53, which gave place in theAnthologyto the thrice-repeated, “My gentle-hearted Charles,” appear, in a copy sent to Lloyd, as “My Sara and my friend.” It was early days for him to address Dorothy Wordsworth as “My sister,” but in forming friendships Coleridge did not “keep to the high road, but leaped over a gate and bounded” from acquaintance to intimacy.Poetical Works, p. 92. For version of “This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison,” sent to C. Lloyd, seeIbid., Editor’s Note, p. 591.

[169]“Elastic, I mean.”—S. T. C.

[170]“The ferns that grow in moist places grow five or six together, and form a complete ‘Prince of Wales’s Feathers,’—that is, plumy.”—S. T. C.

[171]“You remember I am aBerkleian.”—S. T. C.

[172]“This Lime-Tree Bower,” l. 38.Poetical Works, p. 93.

[173]“Osorio,” Act V., Sc. 1, l. 39.Poetical Works, p. 507.

[174]Thelwall’s visit brought Coleridge and Wordsworth into trouble. At the instance of a “titled Dogberry,” Sir Philip Hale of Cannington, a government spy was sent to watch the movements of the supposed conspirators, and, a more serious matter, Mrs. St. Albyn, the owner of Alfoxden, severely censured her tenant for having sublet the house to Wordsworth. See letter of explanation and remonstrance from Poole to Mrs. St. Albyn, September 16, 1797.Thomas Poole and his Friends, i. 240. See, too, Cottle’sEarly Recollections, i. 319, and for apocryphal anecdotes about the spy, etc.,Biographia Literaria, cap. x.

[175]Their proposal was to settle on Coleridge “an annuity for life of £150, to be regularly paid by us, no condition whatever being annexed to it.” See letter of Josiah Wedgwood to Coleridge, dated January 10, 1798.Thomas Poole and his Friends, i. 258. An unpublished letter from Thelwall to Dr. Crompton dated Llyswen, March 3, 1798, contains one of several announcements of “his good fortune,” made by Coleridge at the time to his numerous friends.

ToDr. Crompton, Eton House, Nr. Liverpool.Llyswen, 3d March, 1798.I am surprised you have not heard the particulars of Coleridge’s good fortune. It is not a legacy, but a gift. The circumstances are thus expressed by himself in a letter of the 30th January: “I received an invitation from Shrewsbury to be the Unitarian minister, and at the same time an order for £100 from Thomas and Josiah Wedgwood. I accepted the former and returned the latter in a long letter explanatory of my motive, and went off to Shrewsbury, where they were on the point of electing me unanimously and with unusual marks of affection, where I received an offer from T. and J. Wedgwood of an annuity of £150 to be legally settled on me. Astonished, agitated, and feeling as I could not help feeling, I accepted the offer in the same worthy spirit, I hope, in which it was made, and this morning I have returned from Shrewsbury.” This letter was written in a great hurry in Cottle’s shop in Bristol, in answer to one which a friend of mine had left for him there, on his way from Llyswen to Gosport, and you will perceive that it has a dash of the obscure not uncommon to the rapid genius of C. Whether he did or did not accept the cure of Unitarian Souls, it is difficult from the account to make out. I suppose he did not, for I know his aversion to preachings God’s holy word for hire, which is seconded not a little, I expect, by his repugnance to all regular routine and application. I also hope he did not, for I know he cannot preach very often without travelling from the pulpit to the Tower. Mount him but upon his darling hobby-horse, “the republic of God’s own making,” and away he goes like hey-go-mad, spattering and splashing through thick and thin and scattering morelevellingsedition and constructive treason than poor Gilly or myself ever dreamt of. He promised to write to me again in a few days; but, though I answered his letter directly, I have not heard from him since.

ToDr. Crompton, Eton House, Nr. Liverpool.

Llyswen, 3d March, 1798.

I am surprised you have not heard the particulars of Coleridge’s good fortune. It is not a legacy, but a gift. The circumstances are thus expressed by himself in a letter of the 30th January: “I received an invitation from Shrewsbury to be the Unitarian minister, and at the same time an order for £100 from Thomas and Josiah Wedgwood. I accepted the former and returned the latter in a long letter explanatory of my motive, and went off to Shrewsbury, where they were on the point of electing me unanimously and with unusual marks of affection, where I received an offer from T. and J. Wedgwood of an annuity of £150 to be legally settled on me. Astonished, agitated, and feeling as I could not help feeling, I accepted the offer in the same worthy spirit, I hope, in which it was made, and this morning I have returned from Shrewsbury.” This letter was written in a great hurry in Cottle’s shop in Bristol, in answer to one which a friend of mine had left for him there, on his way from Llyswen to Gosport, and you will perceive that it has a dash of the obscure not uncommon to the rapid genius of C. Whether he did or did not accept the cure of Unitarian Souls, it is difficult from the account to make out. I suppose he did not, for I know his aversion to preachings God’s holy word for hire, which is seconded not a little, I expect, by his repugnance to all regular routine and application. I also hope he did not, for I know he cannot preach very often without travelling from the pulpit to the Tower. Mount him but upon his darling hobby-horse, “the republic of God’s own making,” and away he goes like hey-go-mad, spattering and splashing through thick and thin and scattering morelevellingsedition and constructive treason than poor Gilly or myself ever dreamt of. He promised to write to me again in a few days; but, though I answered his letter directly, I have not heard from him since.

[176]Count Benyowsky, or the Conspiracy of Kamtschatka, a Tragi-comedy.Translated from the German by the Rev. W. Render, teacher of the German Language in the University of Cambridge. Cambridge, 1798.

[177]Coleridge’s copy of Monk Lewis’ play is dated January 20, 1798.

[178]The following memoranda, presumably in Wordsworth’s handwriting, have been scribbled on the outside sheet of the letter: “Tea—Thread fine—needles Silks—Strainer for starch—Mustard—Basil’s shoes—Shoe horn.

“The sun’s course is short, but clear and blue the sky.”

[179]“Duplex nobis vinculum, et amicitiæ et similium junctarumque Camœnarum; quod utinam neque mors solvat, neque temporis longinquitas.”

[180]The Task, Book V., “A Winter’s Morning Walk.”

[181]A later version of these lines is to be found at the close of the fourth book of “The Excursion.”Works of Wordsworth, 1889, p. 467.

[182]In the series of letters to Dr. Estlin, contributed to the privately printed volumes of the Philobiblon Society, the editor, Mr. Henry A. Bright, dates this letterMay(? 1797). A comparison with a second letter to Estlin, dated May 14, 1798 (Letter LXXXII.), with a letter to Poole, dated May 28, 1798 (Letter LXXXIV.), with a letter to Charles Lamb belonging to the spring of 1798 (Letter LXXXV.), and with an entry in Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal for May 16, 1798, affords convincing proof that the date of the letter should be May, 1798.

The MS. note of November 10, 1810, to which a previous reference has been made, connects a serious quarrel with Lloyd, and consequent distress of mind, with the retirement to “the lonely farm-house,” and a first recourse to opium. If, as the letters intimate, these events must be assigned to May, 1798, it follows that “Kubla Khan” was written at the same time, and not, as Coleridge maintained in the Preface of 1816, “in the summer of 1797.”

It would, indeed, have been altogether miraculous if, before he had written a line of “Christabel,” or “The Ancient Mariner,” either in an actual dream, or a dreamlike reverie, it had been “given to him” to divine the enchanting images of “Kubla Khan,” or attune his mysterious vision to consummate melody.

[183]Berkeley Coleridge, born May 14, 1798, died February 10, 1799.

[184]The original MS. of this letter, which was preserved by Coleridge, is, doubtless, a copy of that sent by post. Besides this, only three of Coleridge’s letters to Lamb have been preserved,—the “religious letter” of 1796, a letter concerning the quarrel with Wordsworth, of May, 1812 [Letter CLXXXIV.], and one written in later life (undated, on the particulars of Hood’sOdes to Great People).

[185]Charles Lloyd.

[186]The three sonnets of “Nehemiah Higginbottom” were published in theMonthly Magazinefor November, 1797. Compare his letter to Cottle (E. R.i. 289) which Mr. Dykes Campbell takes to have been written at the same time.

“I sent to theMonthly Magazine, three mock sonnets in ridicule of my own Poems, and Charles Lloyd’s and Charles Lamb’s, etc., etc., exposing that affectation of unaffectedness, of jumping and misplaced accent, in commonplace epithets, flat lines forced into poetry by italics (signifying how well and mouthishly the author would read them), puny pathos, etc., etc. The instances were all taken from myself and Lloyd and Lamb. I signed them ‘Nehemiah Higginbottom.’ I hope they may do good to our young bards.”

The publication of these sonnets in November, 1797, cannot, as Mr. Dykes Campbell points out (Poetical Works, p. 599), have been the immediate cause of the breach between Coleridge and Lamb which took place in the spring or early summer of 1798, but it seems that during the rise and progress of this quarrel the Sonnet on Simplicity was the occasion of bitter and angry words. As Lamb and Lloyd and Southey drew together, they drew away from Coleridge, and Southey, who had only been formally reconciled with his brother-in-law, seems to have regarded this sonnet as an ill-natured parody of his earlier poems. In a letter to Wynn, dated November 20, 1797, he says, “I am aware of the danger of studying simplicity of language,” and he proceeds to quote some lines of blank verse to prove that he could employ the “grand style” when he chose.

A note from Coleridge to Southey, posted December 8, 1797, deals with the question, and would, if it had not been for Lloyd’s “tittle-tattle,” have convinced both Southey and Lamb that in the matter they were entirely mistaken.

········

I am sorry, Southey! very sorry that I wrote or published those sonnets—but ‘sorry’ would be a tame word to express my feelings, if I had written them with the motives which you have attributed to me. I have not been in the habit of treating our separation with levity—nor ever since the first moment thought of it without deep emotion—and how could you apply to yourself a sonnet written to ridicule infantine simplicity, vulgar colloquialisms, and lady-like friendships? I have no conception, neither I believe could a passage in your writings have suggested to me or any man the notion ofyour‘plainting plaintively.’ I am sorry that I wrote thus, because I am sorry to perceive a disposition in you to believe evil of me, of which your remark to Charles Lloyd was a painful instance. I say this to you, because I shall say it to no other being. I feel myself wounded and hurt and write as such. I believe in my letter to Lloyd I forgot to mention that the Editor of theMorning Postis called Stuart, and that he is the brother-in-law of Mackintosh. Yours sincerely,

S. T. Coleridge.

Thursday morning.Post-mark, Dec. 8, 1797.

Mr. Southey, No. 23 East Street, Red Lion Square, London.

[187]Charles Lloyd’s novel,Edmund Oliver, was published at Bristol in 1798. It is dedicated to “His friend Charles Lamb of the India House.” He says in the Preface: “The incidents relative to the army were given me by an intimate friend who was himself eye-witness of one of them.” The general resemblance between the events of Coleridge’s earlier history and the story of Edmund Oliver is not very striking, but apart from the description of “his person” in the first letter of the second volume, which is close enough, a single sentence from Edmund Oliver’s journal, i. 245, betrays the malignant nature of the attack. “I have at all times a strange dreaminess about me which makes me indifferent to the future, if I can by any means fill the present with sensations,—with that dreaminess I have gone on here from day to day; if at any time thought-troubled, I have swallowed some spirits, or had recourse to my laudanum.” In the same letter, the account which Edmund Oliver gives of his sensations as a recruit in a regiment of light horse, and the vivid but repulsive picture which he draws of his squalid surroundings in “a pot-house in the Borough,” leaves a like impression that Coleridge confided too much, and that Lloyd remembered “not wisely but too well.” How Coleridge regarded Lloyd’s malfeasance may be guessed from one of his so-called epigrams.

TO ONE WHO PUBLISHED IN PRINT WHAT HAD BEEN INTRUSTED TO HIM BY MY FIRESIDE.Two things hast thou made known to half the nation,My secrets and my want of penetration:For oh! far more than all which thou hast penned,It shames me to have called a wretch, like thee, my friend!

TO ONE WHO PUBLISHED IN PRINT WHAT HAD BEEN INTRUSTED TO HIM BY MY FIRESIDE.

Two things hast thou made known to half the nation,My secrets and my want of penetration:For oh! far more than all which thou hast penned,It shames me to have called a wretch, like thee, my friend!

Poetical Works, p. 448.

[188]In a letter dated November 1, 1798, Mrs. Coleridge acquaints her husband with the danger and the disfigurement from smallpox which had befallen her little Berkeley. “The dear child,” she writes, “is getting strength every hour; but ‘when you lost sight of land, and the faces of your children crossed you like a flash of lightning,’ you sawthatface for the last time.”

[189]“Fears in Solitude, written in 1798, during the alarm of an invasion. To which are added, France, an Ode; and Frost at Midnight. By S. T. Coleridge. London: Printed for J. Johnson, in St. Paul’s Churchyard. 1798.”

[190]According to Burke’sPeerage, Emanuel Scoope, second Viscount Howe, and father of the Admiral, “Our Lord Howe,” married, in 1719, Mary Sophia, daughter of Baron Kielmansegge, Master of the Horse to George I. Coleridge’s countess must have been a great-granddaughter of the baron. In her reply to this letter, dated December 13, 1798, Mrs. Coleridge writes: “I am very proud to hear that you are so forward in the language, and that you are so gay with the ladies. You may give my respects to them, and say that I am not at all jealous, for I know my dear Samuel in her affliction will not forget entirely his most affectionate wife, Sara Coleridge.”

[191]The “Rev. Mr. Roskilly” had been curate-in-charge of the parish of Nether Stowey, and the occasion of the letter was his promotion to the Rectory of Kempsford in Gloucestershire. Mrs. S. T. Coleridge, in a late letter (probably 1843) to her sister, Mrs. Lovell, writes: “In March [1800] I and the child [Hartley] left him [S. T. C.] in London, and proceeded to Kempsford in Gloucestershire, the Rectory of Mr. Roskilly; remained there a month. Papa was to have joined us there, but did not.” SeeThomas Poole and his Friends, i. 25-27, andLetters from the Lake Poets, p. 6.

[192]In his letter of January 20, 1799, Josiah Wedgwood acknowledges the receipt of a letter dated November 29, 1798, but adds that an earlier letter from Hamburg had not come to hand. A third letter, dated Göttingen, May 21, 1799, was printed by Cottle in hisReminiscences, 1848, p. 425.

[193]Miss Meteyard, in herGroup of Englishmen, 1871, p. 99, gives extracts from the account-current of Messrs. P. and O. Von Axen, the Hamburg agents of the Wedgwoods. According to her figures, Coleridge drew £125 from October 20 to March 29, 1799, and, “conjointly with Wordsworth,” £106 10s.on July 8, 1799. Mr. Dykes Campbell, in a footnote to hisMemoir, p. xliv., combats Miss Meteyard’s assertion that these sums were advanced by the Wedgwoods to Coleridge and Wordsworth, and argues that Wordsworth merely drew on the Von Axens for sums already paid in from his own resources. Coleridge, he thinks, had only his annuity to look to, but probably anticipated his income. In a MS. note-book of 1798-99, Coleridge inserted some concise but not very business-like entries as to expenditures and present resources, but says nothing as to receipts.

“March 25th, being Easter Monday, Chester and S. T. C., in a damn’d dirty hole in the Burg Strasse at Göttingen, possessed at that moment eleven Louis d’ors and two dollars. When the money is spent in common expenses S. T. Coleridge will owe Chester 5 pounds 12 shillings.

“Note.—From September 8 to April 8 I shall have spent £90, of which £15 was in Books; and Cloathes, mending and making, £10.

“May 10. We have 17 Louis d’or, of which, as far as I can at present calculate, 10 belong to Chester.”

The most probable conclusion is that both Coleridge and Chester were fairly well supplied with money when they left England, and that the £178 10s.which Coleridge received from the Von Axens covered some portion of Chester’s expenses in addition to his own. I may add that a recent collation of the autograph letter of Coleridge to Josiah Wedgwood dated May 21, 1799, Göttingen, with the published version in Cottle’sReminiscences, pp. 425-429, fully bears out Mr. Campbell’s contention, that though Coleridge anticipated his annuity, he was not the recipient of large sums over and above what was guaranteed to him.

[194]A portion of this description of Ratzeburg is included in No. III. ofSatyrane’s Letters, originally published in No. 10 ofThe Friend, December 21, 1809.

[195]The following description of the frozen lake was thrown into a literary shape and published in No. 19 ofThe Friend, December 28, 1809, as “Christmas Indoors in North Germany.”

[196]A letter from Mrs. Coleridge to her husband, dated March 25, 1799, followed Poole’s letter of March 15. (Thomas Poole and his Friends, i. 290.) She writes:—

“My dearest Love,—I hope you will not attribute my long silence to want of affection. If you have received Mr. Poole’s letter you will know the reason and acquit me. My darling infant left his wretched mother on the 10th of February, and though the leisure that followed was intolerable to me, yet I could not employ myself in reading or writing, or in any way that prevented my thoughts from resting on him. This parting was the severest trial that I have ever yet undergone, and I pray to God that I may never live to behold the death of another child. For, O my dear Samuel, it is a suffering beyond your conception! You will feel and lament the death of your child, but you will only recollect him a baby of fourteen weeks, but I am his mother and have carried him in my arms and have fed him at my bosom, and have watched over him by day and by night for nine months. I have seen him twice at the brink of the grave, but he has returned and recovered and smiled upon me like an angel,—and now I am lamenting that he is gone!”

In her old age, when her daughter was collecting materials for a life of her father, Mrs. Coleridge wrote on the back of the letter:—

“No secrets herein. I will not burn it for the sake of my sweet Berkeley.”

[197]From “Osorio,” Act V. Sc. 1.Poetical Works, p. 506.

[198]The following description of the Christmas-tree, and of Knecht Rupert, was originally published, almost verbatim, in No. 19 of the original issue ofThe Friend, December 28, 1809.

[199]First published inAnnual Anthologyof 1800, under the signatureCordomi. SeePoetical Works, p. 146, and Editor’s Note, p. 621.

[200]The men who rip the oak bark from the logs for tanning.

[201]

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