The Wordsworths make the trip with him; and after a stay of a twelve-month—mostly in Gottingen—Coleridge returns, with his translation of Wallenstein; but this counts for little. A year later, he finds his way to Keswick—to a beautiful, wooded bay, where Southey ultimately established his anchorage for life;[[5]] the Wordsworths were not far off, at Grasmere; and Coleridge plans that weekly paper—The Friend (finding issue some years later) with wonderful things in it, which few people read then; and so fine-drawn, that few read them now. The damps of Keswick give him rheumatic pains, for which he uses protective stimulants; good Dorothy Wordsworth has fears thereanent, and regards hopefully his appointment to some civil station at Malta. But his impracticabilities lose him the place after a very short incumbency; he crosses to Italy; sees Naples, Amain, and Vesuvius; sees, and knows well at Rome, our American painter, Washington Allston. There are bonds of sympathy we might have looked for between the author of Monaldi and the author of Christabel.
In England again, the fogs bring back old rheumatic pains; the alienation from his wife is declaring itself in more unmistakable ways; and then, or thereabout,[[6]] begins that terrible slavery to opium, whose chains he wore thenceforth, some twenty years, and was not entirely free until death broke his bonds. There is a dreary, yet touching pathos in this confession of his—"Alas, it is with a bitter smile, a laugh of gall and bitterness, that I recall that period of unsuspecting delusion, and how I first became aware of the maelstrom, the fatal whirlpool to which I was drawing, just when the current was already beyond my strength to stem."
But against the circling terrors of that maelstrom he does make now and then gallant struggle—goes to the house of that kindly surgeon, Gillman, at Highgate, who is charged to guard him—does guard him with exceeding kindness; the servants have orders to watch him—to follow him in the street on his lecture days. But the cunning of a man crazed by his insatiate appetite outwits them; and over and over the turbid roll of his speech—with flashing splendors in it, that give no light—betrays him. And yet it was in those very days of alternate heroic struggle and of devilish yielding that he re-vamps and extends and retouches that sweet, serene poem of Christabel, with the pure, innocent, loving, trustful, winning, blue-eyed daughter of Sir Leoline praying under the oaks, and contrasted with her that graceful, mocking, radiant Geraldine—with smiles that enchant, and alabaster front, and undying graces, and wiles of the serpent, and the damps of the pit in her breath—as if the demon that pursued and pushed him to the wall had foreshadowed himself in that mocking and most beautiful Geraldine.
In those days, too, it was that the young Carlyle used to come to Highgate and watch those bulging eyes—pressed out with excess of brain substance behind them—and listen to his poetic convolutions of speech. "The eyes," he says, "were as full of sorrow as of inspiration. I have heard him talk with eager, musical energy two stricken hours, his face radiant and moist, and communicate no meaning whatsoever to any individual of his hearers, certain of whom—I for one—still kept eagerly listening in hope."
The very children of the neighborhood stood in awe of this wildish man—who seemed talking to the trees at times; and yet their awe was broken by fits of mocking courage, and they made faces at him across the high road. He died there at last—1834 was the year; within sight of the smoke of London and the dome of St. Paul's, toward which from Highgate there stretched in that day a long line of suburban houses, with scattered open fields, hedges, trees, flowers, and the hum of bees.
Charles Lamb.
Essays of Elia.
Among those who used to come somewhiles to follow that fine, confused stream of poetic talk which poured from Coleridge's lips, was Charles Lamb,[[7]] his old school-fellow and friend in the blue-coat days of Christ's Hospital. And what a strange, odd friendship it seems when we contrast the tender and delicious quietude of the Essays of Elia with the portentous flow of Coleridge's speech! A quiet little stream, purling with gentle bendings and doublings along its own meadows—mated against a river that whirls in mad career, flinging foam high into trees that border it, and only losing its turbidness when it is tided away into the sea, where both brook and river end.
Charles Lamb.