Whilst Byron was residing in St. James’s Street, publishing the English Bards and writing the first canto of Childe Harold, Coleridge was living in a house at Portland Place, Hammersmith, that is now known as No. 7 Addison Bridge Place. Somehow, one does not readily connect Coleridge with London, even though he had lodged for many years at Highgate before he died there. But one time and another he spent quite a large part of his life in the metropolis. He was at school with Lamb, of course, at Christ’s Hospital; and are not Lamb’s letters strewn with yearning remembrances of the glorious evenings he and Coleridge and Hazlitt and others passed, in later years, in the smoky parlour of “The Salutation and Cat,” in Newgate Street? At various dates, he lived at Buckingham Street, and at Norfolk Street, Strand, in Pall Mall, and in King Street, Covent Garden, when he was working on the staff of the Morning Post; to say nothing of visits to London when he put up at one or another of Lamb’s many homes in the City; and there is still in one of the courts of Fetter Lane that Newton Hall where he delivered a series of lectures in 1818.
By 1810, when he came to London and settled for a period at 7 Addison Bridge Place, Coleridge had done all his great work as a poet, and under stress of financial difficulties was turning more and more from poetry to lecturing and journalism as sources of income. There is a letter of Lamb’s to Hazlitt, dated 28th November 1810, when Hazlitt was holidaying and working at Winterslow, in which he mentions towards the close—“Coleridge is in town, or at least at Hammersmith. He is writing or going to write in the Courier against Cobbett and in favour of paper money.” Byron wrote to a friend in the succeeding year, “Coleridge is lecturing. ‘Many an old fool,’ said Hannibal to some such lecturer, ‘but such as this, never’”; and to the same friend two days later, “Coleridge has been lecturing against Campbell. Rogers was present, and from him I derive the information. We are going to make a party to hear this Manichean of poesy”; and on the same day to another friend, “Coleridge has attacked the Pleasures of Hope, and all other pleasures whatsoever. Mr. Rogers was present, and heard himself indirectly rowed by the lecturer”; and next week, “To-morrow I dine with Rogers, and am to hear Coleridge, who is a kind of rage at present.”
COLERIDGE. ADDISON BRIDGE PLACE.
Coleridge was then only thirty-eight, and had another twenty-four years of life before him. He was already, and had for long past, been struggling in the toils of the opium habit, and his poetical inspiration was leaving him, for though Christabel and Kubla Khan were not published until 1816 they were written nearly ten years before. There are a number of minor poems bearing later dates; several in 1809, many long after that, but only one dated 1810, which may be supposed to have been written in that Hammersmith house, and this is nothing but a respectable translation of a passage in Ottfried’s metrical paraphrase of the Gospels. But his lectures were a wonder and a delight, Byron’s disapproval notwithstanding. He was always an eloquent preacher, and became a chief among lecturers as he did among poets. “Have you ever heard me preach?” he asked Lamb, and Lamb replied with his whimsical stammer, “I never heard you do anything else!” But you remember that fine essay of Hazlitt’s in which he recounts his first acquaintance with Coleridge?—how he rose before daylight and walked ten miles in the mud to hear him preach. “When I got there, the organ was playing the hundredth psalm, and when it was done Mr. Coleridge rose and gave out his text, ‘And he went up into the mountain to pray, Himself, alone.’ As he gave out his text his voice ‘rose like a steam 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 as if that prayer might have floated in solemn silence through the universe.” He describes the sermon, and goes on, “I could not have been more delighted if I had heard the music of the spheres. Poetry and Philosophy had met together.... I returned home well satisfied.” Then Coleridge called to see his father, a dissenting minister in the neighbourhood, and for two hours he talked and Hazlitt listened spellbound, and when he went, Hazlitt walked with him six miles on the road. “It was a fine morning,” he says, “in the middle of winter, and he talked the whole way.” And with what a fine generosity he acknowledges what that meeting and this talk of Coleridge’s had meant to him. “I was stunned, startled with it as from a deep sleep.... I was at that time dumb, inarticulate, helpless, like a worm by the wayside, crushed, bleeding, lifeless; but now, bursting the deadly bands that bound them—
‘With Styx nine times round them,’
my ideas float on winged words, and as they expand their plumes catch the golden light of other years. My soul has indeed remained in its original bondage, dark, obscure, with longings infinite and unsatisfied; my heart, shut up in the prison-house of this rude clay, has never found nor will it ever find a heart to speak to; but that my understanding also did not remain dumb and brutish, or at length found a language to express itself, I owe to Coleridge.” That was when Coleridge was twenty-six and Hazlitt twenty. These twelve years after that, when Coleridge was lecturing in London, his fancy and imagination were as dazzling and as powerful as ever, and his voice and language had lost none of their magic. But his thoughts were perhaps tending towards that transcendental obscurity that reached its worst when he was established in his closing days at Highgate, with his little group of worshipping disciples around him, and when Carlyle went to hear and to ridicule him. Anyhow, here is an account Rogers gives of a visit he paid to him when he had transferred himself from Hammersmith to Pall Mall:—
“Coleridge was a marvellous talker. One morning when Hookham Frere also breakfasted with me, Coleridge talked for three hours without intermission, about poetry, and so admirably that I wish every word he uttered had been written down. But sometimes his harangues were quite unintelligible, not only to myself, but to others. Wordsworth and I called upon him one afternoon, when he was in a lodging off Pall Mall. He talked uninterruptedly for about two hours, during which Wordsworth listened to him with profound attention, every now and then nodding his head, as if in assent. On quitting the lodgings I said to Wordsworth, ‘Well, for my part, I could not make head or tail of Coleridge’s oration; pray did you understand it?’ ‘Not one syllable of it,’ was Wordsworth’s reply.”
He talked like one inspired, but his looks, except whilst he was talking, belied him. “My face,” he said justly of himself, “unless when animated by immediate eloquence, expresses great sloth and great, indeed almost idiotic, good nature. ’Tis a mere carcase of a face, flat, flabby, and expressive chiefly of unexpression. Yet I am told that my eye, eyebrows, and forehead are physiognomically good.” De Quincey says there was a peculiar haze or dimness mixed with the light of his eyes; and when he was roused to animation Lamb thought he looked like “an archangel a little damaged.” But whether that haze of his eyes got into his talk, whether his thoughts were obscurely uttered, or whether it was they were too high and great for his auditors to take in so easily as a listener expects to grasp what is said to him is, at least, an open question. It may well be that Shelley hit the truth in the Letter to Maria Gisborne that he wrote from Leghorn, in 1820:—