Coleridge.
Coleridge.
Yet what a sad life we have to tell you of now! A life without any repose in it;—a life haunted and goaded by its own ambitions—a life put to wreck by lack of resolute governance—a life going out at last under the shadows of great clouds.
Coleridge[[3]] was the son of a humble, quiet, self-forgetting, earnest clergyman in the West of England; and the boy, having no other opportunity, came to be billeted upon that famous Christ Hospital school in London—whose boys in their ancient uniform of yellow stockings and blue coats, and bare heads, still provoke the curiosity of those western travellers who wander down Newgate Street, and gaze through the iron grill upon the paved approach-way.
He knew Lamb there—Charles Lamb, who in the Essays of Elia addresses to him that famous apostrophe: "Come back into memory, like as thou wert in the dayspring of thy fancies, with hope like a fiery column before thee—the dark pillar not yet turned—Samuel Taylor Coleridge—Logician, Metaphysician, Bard!" Yet this pale-faced metaphysician and friend of Lamb gets severe beatings at the hands of the Greek master, though his sweet intonations make the corridors resound with the verse of Homer. At Cambridge, where he goes afterward for a time, he is cheated and bullied; his far-off and dreamy look upon the symphonies of a poetic world not qualifying him for the every-day contests of the cloisters; in the haze in which he lives, he loses scent of the honors he had hoped to win; there is no prospective fellowship and no establishment for him there. Disappointed and despairing he goes up to London and enlists as private in the dragoons under a feigned name; but friends detect and prevent the military sacrifice.
A little later, we find him in his own West of England again, at Bristol—whither we have wandered so often in search of poets—and he encounters Southey thereabout, whom he had met for the first time on a visit to Oxford in 1794; this brother poet being as hazy, and dreamy, and theosophic, and hopeful in those days as Coleridge himself. The two form a sort of garret partnership—lecture to the savages of surrounding towns—are inoculated both with the "fraternity and equality" fever which had grown out of the French Revolution—they believing that this French car of Juggernaut is to be dragged with its bloody wheels over the whole brotherhood of nations. In this faith they plot a settlement, in the new region—of which they know nothing, but the sweetly sounding name of Wyoming—upon the banks of the Susquehanna. There they would dig, and build cottages, and philosophize, and found Arcadia. With kindred poetic foresight, Coleridge marries in these days a bride as inexperienced and as poor as himself; and for a little time there is a one-volumed Arcadia on the banks of the Bristol Channel, with a lovely and pensive Sara for its presiding nymph. Only for those few early years does this nymph enter for much into the career of Coleridge. Domesticity[[4]] was never a shining virtue in him; and wife, and cottage, and Arcadia somehow fade out from the story of his life—as pointless, unsaving, and ineffective for him, all these, as the blurred lines with which we begin a story, and cross them out. Southey, with a practical old aunt to look sharply after his youngness, is quickly driven from his Arcadian feeding ground and for the present disappears.
But Coleridge is still in the wallow of his wild vain hopes and wild discourse, when he encounters another poet—his elder by a few years and of a cooler temperament—William Wordsworth; who about that time had established himself, with his sister Dorothy, upon the borders of Somersetshire. These two men, so unlike, cleave together from the beginning; there is a flagging now in the Unitarian discourses of Coleridge in country chapels; and instead, wanderings with the brother poets over the fair country ways that border upon the Bristol straits—looking off upon the green flats of Somerset, the tufted banks of the Avon, the shining of the sea, with trafficking ships, to the west. Out of these, and of their meditations grow the first book—a joint one—of Lyrical Ballads; its issue not making a ripple on the tide where Crabbe and Cowper were then afloat; and yet creating an epoch in the history of British verse. For in it was the story of the Ancient Mariner, and words therein that will never grow old:
"Farewell, farewell! but this I tell
To thee, thou wedding guest!
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast;
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us
He made and loveth all!"
Yet the poet does still—from time to time wandering into country chapels—hammer at strange, irregular sermons, with a mixed metaphysics and poetry; and theologies of a dim vague sort which beat on ear and hearts, like sleet on slated roofs, and bring never a beam of that warming sunshine which lies in the lines I have quoted from the Mariner.
One wonders how he lived in those times; with no moneys coming from books; only driblets from his preachments; and with not enough of commercial aptitude in him to audit a grocer's bill. The Wedgewoods—so well known by their pottery—who have a quick eye for fine wares of all sorts—recognize his rare brain, and send him over to Germany, bestowing upon him an annuity, which enables him to forego his travelling priesthood, and gives him the means of visiting various cities of the continent.