Chapter 27

My dear babe,Who capable of no articulate sound,Mars all things with his imitative lisp,How he would place his hand beside his ear,His little hand, the small forefinger up,And bid us listen.

—“The Nightingale, a Conversation Poem,” written in April, 1798.Poetical Works, p. 133.

[202]Hutton Hall, near Penrith.

[203]First published in theAnnual Anthologyof 1800. SeePoetical Works, p. 146, and Editor’s Note, p. 621. According to Carlyon the lines were dictated by Coleridge and inscribed by one of the party in the “Stammbuch” of the Wernigerode Inn.Early Years, i. 66.

[204]Olaus Tychsen, 1734-1815, was “Professor of Oriental Tongues” at Rostock, in Mecklenburg-Schwerin.

[205]F. C. Achard, born in 1754, was author of an “Instruction for making sugar, molasses, and vinous spirit from Beet-root.”

[206]The Coleridges were absent from Stowey for about a month. For the first fortnight they were guests of George Coleridge at Ottery. The latter part of the time was spent with the Southeys in their lodgings at Exeter. It was during this second visit that Coleridge accompanied Southey on a walking tour through part of Dartmoor and as far as Dartmouth.

[207]Coleridge took but few notes during this tour. In 1803 he retranscribed his fragmentary jottings and regrets that he possessed no more, “though we were at the interesting Bovey waterfall [Becky Fall], through that wild dell of ashes which leads to Ashburton, most like the approach to upper Matterdale.” “I have,” he adds, “at this moment very distinct visual impressions of the tour, namely of Torbay, the village of Paignton with the Castle.” Southey was disappointed in South Devon, which he contrasts unfavourably with the North of Somersetshire, but for “the dell of ashes” he has a word of praise.Selections from Letters of Robert Southey, i. 84.

[208]Suwarrow, at the head of the Austro-Russian troops, defeated the French under Joubert at Novi near Alessandria, in North Italy, August 15, 1799.

[209]A temporary residence of Josiah Wedgwood, who had taken it on lease in order to be near his newly purchased property at Combe Florey, in Somersetshire. Meteyard’sGroup of Englishmen, 1871, p. 107.

[210]Southey’s brother, a midshipman on board the Sylph gun-brig. A report had reached England that the Sylph had been captured and brought to Ferrol.Southey’s Life and Correspondence, ii. 30.

[211]Marshal Massena defeated the Russians under Prince Korsikov at Zurich, September 25, 1799.

[212]William Jackson, organist of Exeter Cathedral, 1730-1803, a musical composer and artist. He published, among other works,The Four Ages with Essays, 1798. See letter of Southey to S. T. Coleridge, October 3, 1799,Southey’s Life and Correspondence, ii. 26.

[213]John Codrington Warwick Bampfylde, second son of Richard Bampfylde, of Poltimore, was the author ofSixteen Sonnets, published in 1779. In the letter of October 3 (see above) Southey gives an interesting account of his eccentric habits and melancholy history. In a prefatory note to four of Bampfylde’s sonnets, included by Southey in hisSpecimens of the Later English Poets, he explains how he came to possess the copies of some hitherto unpublished poems.

“Jackson of Exeter, a man whose various talents made all who knew him remember him with regret, designed to republish the little collection of Bampfylde’s Sonnets, with what few of his pieces were still unedited.

“Those poems which are here first printed were transcribed from the originals in his possession.”

“Bampfylde published his Sonnets at a very early age; they are some of the most original in our language. He died in a private mad-house, after twenty years’ confinement.”Specimens of the Later English Poets, 1808, iii. 434.

[214]“A sister of General McKinnon, who was killed at Ciudad Rodrigo.” In the same letter to Coleridge (see above) Southey says that he looked up to her with more respect because the light of Buonaparte’s countenance had shone upon her.

[215]Dr. Cookson, Canon of Windsor and Rector of Forncett, Norfolk. Dorothy Wordsworth passed much of her time under his roof before she finally threw in her lot with her brother William in 1795.

[216]The journal, or notes for a journal, of this first tour in the Lake Country, leaves a doubt whether Coleridge and Wordsworth slept at Keswick on Sunday, November 10, 1799, or whether they returned to Cockermouth. It is certain that they passed through Keswick again on Friday, November 15, as the following entry testifies:—

“1 mile and ½ from Keswick, a Druidical circle. On the right the road and Saddleback; on the left a fine but unwatered vale, walled by grassy hills and a fine black crag standing single at the terminus as sentry. Before me, that is, towards Keswick, the mountains stand, one behind the other, in orderly array, as if evoked by and attentive to the white-vested wizards.” It was from almost the same point of view that, thirty years afterwards, his wife, on her journey south after her daughter’s marriage, took a solemn farewell of the Vale of Keswick once so strange, but then so dear and so familiar.

[217]George Fricker, Mrs. Coleridge’s younger brother.

[218]A gossiping account of the early history and writings of “Mr. Robert Southey” appeared inPublic Characters for 1799-1800, a humble forerunner ofMen of the Time, published by Richard Phillips, the founder of theMonthly Magazine, and afterwards knighted as a sheriff of the city of London. Possibly Coleridge was displeased at the mention of his name in connection with Pantisocracy, and still more by the following sentence: “The three young poetical friends, Lovel, Southey, and Coleridge, married three sisters. Southey is attached to domestic life, and, fortunately, was very happy in his matrimonial connection.” It was Sir Richard Phillips, the “knight” of Coleridge’s anecdote, who told Mrs. Barbauld that he would have given “nine guineas a sheet for the last hour and a half of his conversation.”Letters, Conversations, etc., 1836, ii. 131, 132.

[219]“These various pieces were rearranged in three volumes under the title ofMinor Poems, in 1815, with this motto,Nos hæc novimus esse nihil.”Poetical Works of Robert Southey, 1837, ii., xii.

[220]Mary Hayes, a friend of Mary Wollstonecraft, whose opinions she advocated with great zeal, and whose death she witnessed. Among other works, she wrote a novel,Memoirs of Emma Courtney, andFemale Biography, or Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women. Six volumes. London: R. Phillips. 1803.

[221]He used the same words in a letter to Poole dated December 31, 1799.Thomas Poole and his Friends, i. 1.

[222]“Essay on the New French Constitution,”Essays on His Own Times, i. 183-189.

[223]The Ode appeared in theMorning Post, December 24, 1799. The stanzas in which the Duchess commemorated her passage over Mount St. Gothard appeared in theMorning Post, December 21. They were inscribed to her children, and it was the last stanza, in which she anticipates her return, which suggested to Coleridge the far-fetched conceit that maternal affection enabled the Duchess to overcome her aristocratic prejudices, and “hail Tell’s chapel and the platform wild.” It runs thus:—

Hope of my life! dearchildrenof my heart!That anxious heart to each fond feeling true,To you still pants each pleasure to impart,And soon—oh transport—reach its home and you.

From a transcript in my possession of which the opening lines are in the handwriting of Mrs. H. N. Coleridge.

[224]The libel of which Coleridge justly complained was contained in these words: “Since this time (that is, since leaving Cambridge) he has left his native country, commenced citizen of the world, left his poor children fatherless and his wife destitute.Ex his discehis friends Lamb and Southey.”Biographia Literaria, 1817, vol. i. chapter i. p. 70,n.

[225]Mrs. Robinson (“Perdita”) contributed two poems to theAnnual Anthologyof 1800, “Jasper” and “The Haunted Beach.” The line which caught Coleridge’s fancy, the first of the twelfth stanza, runs thus:—

“Pale Moon! thou Spectre of the Sky.”

Annual Anthology, 1800, p. 168.

[226]St. Leonwas published in 1799.William Godwin, his Friends and Contemporaries, i. 330.

[227]See “Mr. Coleridge’s Report of Mr. Pitt’s Speech in Parliament of February 17, 1800, On the continuance of the War with France.”Morning Post, February 18, 1800;Essays on His Own Times, ii. 293. See, too, Mrs. H. N. Coleridge’s note, and the report of the speech inThe Times.Ibid.iii. 1009-1019. The original notes, which Coleridge took in pencil, have been preserved in one of his note-books. They consist, for the most part, of skeleton sentences and fragmentary jottings. How far Coleridge may have reconstructed Pitt’s speech as he went along, it is impossible to say, but the speech as reported follows pretty closely the outlines in the note-book. The remarkable description of Buonaparte as the “child and champion of Jacobinism,” which is not to be found inThe Timesreport, appears in the notes as “the nursling and champion of Jacobinism,” and, if these were the words which Pitt used, in this instance, Coleridge altered for the worse.

[228]“The Beguines I had looked upon as a religious establishment, and the only good one of its kind. When my brother was a prisoner at Brest, the sick and wounded were attended by nurses, and these women had made themselves greatly beloved and respected.” Southey to Rickman, January 9, 1800.Life and Correspondence, ii. 46. It is well known that Southey advocated the establishment of Protestant orders of Sisters of Mercy.

[229]In a letter from Southey to Coleridge, dated February 15, 1800 (unpublished), he proposes the establishment of a Magazine with signed articles. But a “History of the Levelling Principle,” which Coleridge had suggested as a joint work, he would only publish anonymously.

[230]See Letter from Southey to Coleridge, December 27, 1799.Life and Correspondence, ii. 35.

[231]“Concerning the French, I wish Bonaparte had staid in Egypt and that Robespierre had guilloteened Sieyès. These cursed complex governments are good for nothing, and will ever be in the hands of intriguers: the Jacobins were the men, and one house of representatives, lodging the executive in committees, the plain and common system of government. The cause of republicanism is over, and it is now only a struggle for dominion. There wants a Lycurgus after Robespierre, a man loved for his virtue, and bold and inflexible, who should have levelled the property of France, and then would the Republic have been immortal—and the world must have been revolutionized by example.” From an unpublished letter from Southey to Coleridge, dated December 23, 1799.

[232]“Alas, poor human nature! Or rather, indeed, alas, poor Gallic nature! For Γραῖοι ἀεὶ μαῖδες the French are always children, and it is an infirmity of benevolence to wish, or dread, aught concerning them.” S. T. C.,Morning Post, December 31, 1797;Essays on His Own Times, i. 184.

[233]SeePoetical Works, Appendix K, pp. 544, 545. Editor’s Note, pp. 646-649.

[234]

“ThewinterMoon upon the sandA silvery Carpet made,And mark’d the sailor reach the land—And mark’dhis Murdererwash his handWhere the green billows played!”

Annual Anthology, 1800: “The Haunted Beach,” sixth stanza, p. 256.

[235]These letters, under the title of “Monopolists” and “Farmers,” appeared in theMorning Post, October 3-9, 1800. Coleridge wrote the first of the series, and the introduction to No. III. of “Farmers,” “In what manner they are affected by the War”Essays on His Own Times, ii. 413-450;Thomas Poole and his Friends, ii. 15, 16.

[236]It is impossible to explain this statement, which was repeated in a letter to Josiah Wedgwood, dated November 1, 1800. The printed “Christabel,” even including the conclusion to Part II., makes only 677 lines, and the discarded portion, if it ever existed, has never come to light. See Mr. Dykes Campbell’s valuable and exhaustive note on “Christabel,”Poetical Works, pp. 601-607.

[237]A former title of “The Excursion.”

[238]“Sunday night, half past ten, September 14, 1800, a boy born (Bracy).

“September 27, 1800. The child being very ill was baptized by the name of Derwent. The child, hour after hour, made a noise exactly like the creaking of a door which is being shut very slowly to prevent its creaking.” (MS.) S. T. C.

My father’s life was saved by his mother’s devotion. “On the occasion here recorded,” he writes, “I had eleven convulsion fits. At last my father took my mother gently out of the room, and told her that she must make up her mind to lose this child. By and by she heard the nurse lulling me, and said she would try once more to give me the breast.” She did so; and from that time all went well, and the child recovered.

[239]Afterwards Sir Anthony, the distinguished surgeon, 1768-1840.

[240]According to Dr. Davy, the editor ofFragmentary Remains of Sir H. Davy, London, 1858, the reference is to the late Mr. James Thompson of Clitheroe.

[241]William, the elder brother of Raisley Calvert, who left Wordsworth a legacy of nine hundred pounds. In that mysterious poem, “Stanzas written in my Pocket Copy of Thomson’s Castle of Indolence,” it would seem that Wordsworth begins with a blended portrait of himself and Coleridge, and ends with a blended portrait of Coleridge and William Calvert. Mrs. Joshua Stanger (Mary Calvert) maintained that “the large gray eyes” and “low-hung lip” were certainly descriptive of Coleridge and could not apply to her father; but she admitted that, in other parts of the poem, Wordsworth may have had her father in his mind. Of this we may be sure, that neither Coleridge nor Wordsworth had “inventions rare,” or displayed beetles under a microscope. It is evident that Hartley Coleridge, who said “that his father’s character and habits are here [that is, in these stanzas] preserved in a livelier way than in anything that has been written about him,” regarded the first and not the second half of the poem as a description of S. T. C. “The Last of the Calverts,”Cornhill Magazine, May, 1890, pp. 494-520.

[242]On page 210 of vol. ii. of the second edition of theLyrical Ballads(1800), there is a blank space. The omitted passage, fifteen lines in all, began with the words, “Though nought was left undone.”Works of Wordsworth, p. 134, II. 4-18.

[243]During the preceding month Coleridge had busied himself with instituting a comparison between the philosophical systems of Locke and Descartes. Three letters of prodigious length, dated February 18, 24 (a double letter), and addressed to Josiah Wedgwood, embodied the result of his studies. They would serve, he thought, as a preliminary excursus to a larger work, and would convince the Wedgwoods that hiswanderjahrhad not been altogether misspent. Mr. Leslie Stephen, to whom this correspondence has been submitted, is good enough to allow me to print the following extract from a letter which he wrote at my request: “Coleridge writes as though he had as yet read no German philosophy. I knew that he began a serious study of Kant at Keswick; but I fancied that he had brought back some knowledge of Kant from Germany. This letter seems to prove the contrary. There is certainly none of the transcendentalism of the Schelling kind. One point is, that he still sticks to Hartley and to the Association doctrine, which he afterwards denounced so frequently. Thus he is dissatisfied with Locke, but has not broken with the philosophy generally supposed to be on the Locke line. In short, he seems to be at the point where a study of Kant would be ready to launch him in his later direction, but is not at all conscious of the change. When he wrote theFriend[1809-10] he had become a Kantian. Therefore we must, I think, date his conversion later than I should have supposed, and assume that it was the study of Kant just after this letter was written which brought about the change.”

[244]Nothing is known of these lines beyond the fact that in 1816 Coleridge printed them as “Conclusion to Part II.” of “Christabel.” It is possible that they were intended to form part of a distinct poem in the metre of “Christabel,” or, it may be, they are the sole survival of an attempted third part of the ballad itself. It is plain, however, that the picture is from the life, that “the little child, the limber elf,” is the four-year-old Hartley, hardly as yet “fitting to unutterable thought, The breeze-like motion, and the self-born carol.”

[245]George Hutchinson, the fourth son of John Hutchinson of Penrith, was at this time in occupation of land at Bishop’s Middleham, the original home of the family. He migrated into Radnorshire in 1815, being then about the age of thirty-seven; but between that date and his leaving Bishop’s Middleham he had resided for some time in Lincolnshire, at Scrivelsby, where he was engaged probably as agent on the estate of the “Champion.” His first residence after migration was at New Radnor, where he married Margaret Roberts of Curnellan, but he subsequently removed into Herefordshire, where he resided in many places, latterly at Kingston. He died at his son’s house, The Vinery, Hereford, in 1866. It would seem from a letter dated July 25, 1801 (Letter CXX.), that at this time Sarah Hutchinson kept house for her brother George, and that Mary (Mrs. Wordsworth) and Joanna Hutchinson lived with their elder brother Tom at Gallow Hill, in the parish of Brompton, near Scarborough. The register of Brompton Church records the marriage of William Wordsworth and Mary Hutchinson, on October 4, 1802; but in the notices of marriages in theGentleman’s Magazine, of October, 1802, the latter is described as “Miss Mary Hutchinson of Wykeham,” an adjoining parish.

[From information kindly supplied to me by Mr. John Hutchinson, the keeper of the Library of the Middle Temple.]

[246]The historian William Roscoe (afterwards M. P. for Liverpool), and the physician James Currie, the editor and biographer of Burns, were at this time settled at Liverpool and on terms of intimacy with Dr. Peter Crompton of Eaton Hall.

[247]The Bristol merchant who lent the manor-house of Racedown to Wordsworth in 1795.

[248]In the well-known lines “On revisiting the Sea-shore,” allusion is made to this “mild physician,” who vainly dissuaded him from bathing in the open sea. Sea-bathing was at all times an irresistible pleasure to Coleridge, and he continued the practice, greatly to his benefit, down to a late period of his life and long after he had become a confirmed invalid.Poetical Works, p. 159.

[249]Francis Wrangham, whom Coleridge once described as “admirer of me and a pitier of my political principles” (Letter to Cottle [April], 1796), was his senior by a few years. On failing to obtain, it is said on account of his advanced political views, a fellowship at Trinity Hall, he started taking pupils at Cobham in Surrey in partnership with Basil Montagu. The scheme was of short duration, for Montagu deserted tuition for the bar, and Wrangham, early in life, was preferred to the benefices of Hemmanby and Folkton, in the neighborhood of Scarborough. He was afterwards appointed to a Canonry of York, to the Archdeaconry of Cleveland, and finally to a prebendal stall at Chester. He published a volume ofPoems(London, 1795), in which are included Coleridge’s Translation of the “Hendecasyllabli ad Bruntonam e Grantâ exituram,” and some “Verses to Miss Brunton with the preceding Translation.” He died in 1842.Poetical Works, p. 30. See, too, Editor’s Note, p. 569;Reminiscences of Cambridge, by Henry Gunning, London, 1855, ii. 12seq.

[250]“I took a first floor for him in King Street, Covent Garden, at my tailor’s, Howell’s, whose wife is a cheerful housewife of middle age, who I knew would nurse Coleridge as kindly as if he were her son.” D. Stuart,Gent. Mag., May, 1838. See, too,Letters from the Lake Poets, p. 7.

[251]Captain Luff, for many years a resident at Patterdale, near Ulleswater, was held in esteem for the energy with which he procured the enrolment of large companies of volunteers. Wordsworth and Coleridge were frequent visitors at his house, For his account of the death of Charles Gough, on Helvellyn, and the fidelity of the famous spaniel, seeColeorton Letters, i. 97.Letters from the Lake Poets, p. 131.

[252]Ciceronis Epist. ad Fam.iv. 10.

[253]Ib.i. 2.

[254]The lines are taken, with some alterations, from a kind ofl’envoyor epilogue which Bruno affixed to his long philosophical poem,Jordani Bruni Nolani de Innumerabilibus Immenso et Infigurabili; seu de Universo et Mundis libri octo. Francofurti, 1591, p. 654.

[255]John Hamilton Mortimer, 1741-1779. He paintedKing John granting Magna Charta, theBattle of Agincourt, theConversion of the Britons, and other historical subjects.

[256]Drayton’sPoly-Olbion, Song 22, 1-17.

[257]The Latin Iambics, in which Dean Ogle celebrated the little Blyth, which ran through his father’s park at Kirkley, near Ponteland, deserve the highest praise; but Bowles’s translation is far from being execrable. He may not have caught the peculiar tones of the Northumbrian burn which awoke the memories of the scholarly Dean, but his irregular lines are not without their own pathos and melody. Bowles was a Winchester boy, and Dr. Newton Ogle, then Dean of Winchester, was one of his earliest patrons. It was from the Dean’s son, his old schoolfellow, Lieutenant Ogle, that he claimed to have gathered the particulars of Coleridge’s discovery at Reading and discharge from the army. “Poems of William Lisle Bowles,”Galignani, 1829, p. 131; “The Late Mr. Coleridge a Common Soldier,”Times, August 13, 1834.

[258]One of a series of falls made by the Dash Beck, which divides the parishes of Caldbeck and Skiddaw Forest, and flows into Bassenthwaite Lake.

The following minute description is from an entry in a note-book dated October 10, 1800:—

“The Dash itself is by no means equal to the Churnmilk (sic) at Eastdale (sic) or the Wytheburn Fall. This I wrote standing under and seeing the whole Dash; but when I went over and descended to the bottom, then I onlysawthe realFalland the curve of the steep slope, and retracted. It is, indeed, so seen, a fine thing. It falls parallel with a fine black rock thirty feet, and is more shattered, more completely atomized and white, than any I have ever seen.... The Fall of the Dash is in a horse-shoe basin of its own, wildly peopled with small ashes standing out of the rocks. Crossed the beck close by the white pool, and stood on the other side in a complete spray-rain. Here it assumes, I think, a still finer appearance. You see the vast rugged net and angular points and upright cones of the black rock; the Fall assumes a variety and complexity, parts rushing in wheels, other parts perpendicular, some in white horse-tails, while towards the right edge of the black [rock] two or three leisurely fillets have escaped out of the turmoil.”

[259]I have been unable to discover any trace of the MS. of this translation.

[260]The “Ode to Dejection,” of which this is the earliest version, was composed on Sunday evening, April 4, and published six months later, in theMorning Postof October 4, 1802. It was reprinted in theSibylline Leaves, 1817. A comparison of the Ode, as sent to Sotheby, with the first printed version (Poetical Works, Appendix G, pp. 522-524) shows that it underwent many changes before it was permitted to see the “light of common day” in the columns of theMorning Post. The Ode was begun some three weeks after Coleridge returned to Keswick, after an absence of four months. He had visited Southey in London, he had been a fellow guest with Tom Wedgwood for a month at Stowey, he had returned to London and attended Davy’s lectures at the Royal Institution, and on his way home he had stayed for a fortnight with his friend T. Hutchinson, Wordsworth’s brother-in-law, at Gallow Hill.

He left Gallow Hill “on March 13 in a violent storm of snow, wind, and rain,” and must have reached Keswick on Sunday the 14th or Monday the 15th of March. On the following Friday he walked over to Dove Cottage, and once more found himself in the presence of his friends, and, once again, their presence and companionship drove him into song. The Ode is at once a confession and a contrast, a confession that he had fled from the conflict with his soul into the fastnesses of metaphysics, and a contrast of his own hopelessness with the glad assurance of inward peace and outward happiness which attended the pure and manly spirit of his friend.

But verse was what he had been wedded to,And his own mind did like a tempest strongCome thus to him, and drove the weary wight along.

A MS. note-book of 1801-2, which has helped to date his movements at the time, contains, among other hints and jottings, the following almost illegible fragment: “The larches in spring push out their separate bundles of ... into green brushes or pencils which ... small tassels;”—and with the note may be compared the following lines included in the version contained in the letter, but afterwards omitted:—

In this heartless mood,To other thoughts by yonder throstle woo’d,That pipes within the larch-tree, not unseenThe larch that pushes out in tassels greenIts bundled leafits—woo’d to mild delights,By all the tender sounds and gentle sightsOf this sweet primrose-month, and vainly woo’d!O dearest Poet, in this heartless mood—

Another jotting in the same note-book: “A Poem on the endeavour to emancipate the mind from day-dreams, with the different attempts and the vain ones,” perhaps found expression in the lines which follow “My shaping spirit of Imagination,” which appeared for the first time in print inSibylline Leaves, 1817, but which, as Mr. Dykes Campbell has rightly divined, belonged to the original draft of the Ode.Poetical Works, p. 159. Appendix G, pp. 522-524. Editor’s Note, pp. 626-628.

[261]“A lovely skye-canoe.”Morning Post.The reference is to the Prologue to “Peter Bell.” Compare stanza 22,

“My little vagrant Form of light,My gay and beautiful Canoe.”

Wordsworth’sPoetical Works, p. 100.

[262]For Southey’s reply, dated Bristol, August 4, 1802, seeLife and Correspondence, ii. 189-192.

[263]The Right Hon. Isaac Corry, Chancellor of the Exchequer for Ireland, to whom Southey acted as secretary for a short time.

[264]“On Sunday, August 1st, ½ after 12, I had a shirt, cravat, 2 pairs of stockings, a little paper, and half dozen pens, a German book (Voss’s Poems), and a little tea and sugar, with my night cap, packed up in my natty green oil-skin, neatly squared, and put into my net knapsack, and the knapsack on my back and the besom stick in my hand, which for want of a better, and in spite of Mrs. C. and Mary, who both raised their voices against it, especially as I left the besom scattered on the kitchen floor, off I sallied over the bridge, through the hop-field, through the Prospect Bridge, at Portinscale, so on by the tall birch that grows out of the centre of the huge oak, along into Newlands.” MS. Journal of tour in the Lake District, August 1-9, 1802, sent in the form of a letter to the Wordsworths and transcribed by Miss Sarah Hutchinson.

[265]“The following month, September (1802), was marked by the birth of his first child, a daughter, named after her paternal grandmother, Margaret.”Southey’s Life and Correspondence, ii. 192.

[266]Southey’s reply, which was not in the affirmative, has not been preserved. The joint-residence at Greta Hall began in September, 1803.

[267]Charles and Mary Lamb’s visit to Greta Hall, which lasted three full weeks, must have extended from (about) August 12 to September 2, 1802.Letters of Charles Lamb, i. 180-184.

[268]

“Here melancholy, on the pale crags laid,Might muse herself to sleep; or Fancy come,Watching the mind with tender cozenageAnd shaping things that are not.”

“Coombe-Ellen, written in Radnorshire, September, 1798.” “Poems of William Lisle Bowles,”Galignani, p. 139. For “Melancholy, a Fragment,” seePoetical Works, p. 34.

[269]I have not been able to verify this reference.

[270]“O my God! what enormous mountains there are close by me, and yet below the hill I stand on.... And here I am,lounded[i. e., sheltered],—so fully lounded,—that though the wind is strong and the clouds are hastening hither from the sea, and the whole air seaward has a lurid look, and we shall certainly have thunder,—yet here (but that I am hungered and provisionless),hereI could be warm and wait, methinks, for to-morrow’s sun—and on a nice stone table am I now at this moment writing to you—between 2 and 3 o’clock, as I guess. Surely the first letter ever written from the top of Sca Fell.”

“After the thunder-storm I shouted out all your names in the sheep-fold—where echo came upon echo, and then Hartley and Derwent, and then I laughed and shouted Joanna. It leaves all the echoes I ever heard far, far behind, in number, distinctness and humanness of voice; and then, not to forget an old friend, I made them all say Dr. Dodd etc.”MS. Journal, August 6, 1802. Compare Lamb’s Latin letter of October 9, 1802:—

“Ista tua Carmina Chamouniana satis grandia esse mihi constat; sed hoc mihi nonnihil displicet, quod in iis illæ montium Grisosonum inter se responsiones totidem reboant anglicé,God, God, haud aliter atque temet audivi tuas [sic] montes Cumbrianas [sic] resonare docentes,Tod, Tod, nempe Doctorem infelicem: vocem certe haud Deum sonantem.”Letters of Charles Lamb, i. 185. See, too, Canon Ainger’s translation and note,ibid.p. 331. See, also, Southey’s Letter to Grosvenor Bedford, January 9, 1804.Life and Correspondence, ii. 248.

[271]“The Spirit of Navigation and Discovery.” “Bowles’s Poetical Works,”Galignani, p. 142.

[272]These lines form part of the poem addressed “To Matilda Betham. From a Stranger.” The date of composition was September 9, 1802, the day before they were quoted in the letter to Sotheby.Poetical Works, p. 168.

[273]The “Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni” was first printed in theMorning Post, September 11, 1802. It was reprinted in the original issue ofThe Friend, No. xi. (October 16, 1809, pp. 174-176), and again inSibylline Leaves, 1817. As De Quincey was the first to point out, Coleridge was indebted to the Swiss poetess, Frederica Brun, for the framework of the poem and for many admirable lines and images, but it was his solitary walk on Scafell, and the consequent uplifting of spirit, which enabled him “to create the dry bones of the German outline into the fulness of life.”

Coleridge will never lose his title of aLake Poet, but of the ten years during which he was nominally resident in the Lake District, he was absent at least half the time. Of his greater poems there are but four, the second part of “Christabel,” the “Dejection: an Ode,” the “Picture,” and the “Hymn before Sunrise,” which take their colouring from the scenery of Westmoreland and Cumberland.

He was but twenty-six when he visited Ottery for the last time. It was in his thirty-fifth year that he bade farewell to Stowey and the Quantocks, and after he was turned forty he never saw Grasmere or Keswick again. Ill health and theres angusta domiare stern gaolers, but, if he had been so minded, he would have found a way to revisit the pleasant places in which he had passed his youth and early manhood. In truth, he was well content to be a dweller in “the depths of the huge city” or its outskirts, and like Lamb, he “could notlivein Skiddaw.”Poetical Works, p. 165, and Editor’s Note, pp. 629, 630.

[274]Coleridge must have presumed on the ignorance of Sotheby and of his friends generally. He could hardly have passed out of Boyer’s hands without having learned that Ἔστησε signifies, “He hath placed,” not “He hath stood.” But, like most people who have changed their opinions, he took an especial pride in proclaiming his unswerving allegiance to fixed principles. The initials S. T. C., Grecised and mistranslated, expressed this pleasing delusion, and the Greek, “Punic [sc. punnic] Greek,” as he elsewhere calls it, might run the risk of detection.

[275]Parts III. and IV. of the “Three Graves”—were first published inThe Friend, No. vi. Sept. 21, 1809. Parts I. and II. were published for the first time inThe Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Macmillan, 1893. The final version of this stanza (ll. 509-513) differs from that in the text. “A small blue sun” became “A tiny sun,” and for “Ten thousand hairs of colour’d light” Coleridge substituted “Ten thousand hairs and threads of light.” SeePoetical Works, p. 92, and Editor’s Note, pp. 589-591.

[276]The six essays to which he calls Estlin’s attention are reprinted inEssays on His Own Times, ii. 478-585.

[277]The residence of Josiah Wedgwood.

[278]Paley’s last work, “Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of A Deity, collected from the Appearances of Nature,” was published in 1802.

[279]For Southey’s well known rejoinder to this “ebullience of schematism,” seeLife and Correspondence, ii. 220-223.

[280]Southey’s correspondence contains numerous references to the historian Sharon Turner [1768-1847], and to William Owen, the translator of theMabinogionand author of theWelsh Paradise Lost.

[281]It may be interesting to compare the following unpublished note from Coleridge’s Scotch Journal with the well known passage in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journal of her tour in the Highlands (Memoir of Wordsworth, i. 235): “Next morning we went in the boat to the end of the lake, and so on by the old path to the Garrison to the Ferry House by Loch Lomond, where now the Fall was in all its fury, and formed with the Ferry cottage, and the sweet Highland lass, a nice picture. The boat gone to the preaching we stayed all day in the comfortless hovel, comfortless, but the two little lassies did everything with such sweetness, and one of them, 14, with such native elegance. Oh! she was a divine creature! The sight of the boat, full of Highland men and women and children from the preaching, exquisitely fine. We soon reached E. Tarbet—all the while rain. Never, never let me forget that small herd-boy in his tartan-plaid, dim-seen on the hilly field, and long heard ere seen, a melancholy voice calling to his cattle! nor the beautiful harmony of the heath, and the dancing fern, and the ever-moving birches. That of itself enough to make Scotland visitable, its fields of heather giving a sort of shot silk finery in the apotheosis of finery. On Monday we went to Arrochar. Here I left W. and D. and returned myself to E. Tarbet, slept there, and now, Tuesday, Aug. 30, 1803, am to make my own way to Edinburgh.”

Many years after he added the words: “O Esteese, that thou hadst from thy 22nd year indeed made thyownway andalone!”

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