He ask'd, and hoped thro' Christ. Do thou the same."
CHAPTER V
COLERIDGE AS AN OBSERVER OF NATURE
The author of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," in which the observation of natural phenomena is extraordinary, was never the child of his environment in the same degree as his friends William Wordsworth and Charles Lamb, though a great part of his life was passed in the surroundings they knew best. Wordsworth is the true offspring of the Lake Country; he carried to Racedown Lodge and Alfoxton House rich memories of the sterner north, and his genius matured at Dove Cottage. Lamb was a Londoner all the days of his life; the nearer to the metropolis, the higher were his spirits, the more brilliant his pen. Take London from Lamb and the Lakeside from Wordsworth and it is difficult to say what would remain. Coleridge, on the other hand, must have expressed himself anywhere, nor does it seem likely that the quality of his utterances would have suffered from their place of birth. While he was young and vigorous he found it hard to stay for any length of time in one district, but wherever he went he seems to have felt at home. Such complaints as Wordsworth could utter at Goslar, or Lamb at Enfield, find no place that I can trace in the poems, essays, or correspondence of Coleridge. He took no overwhelming delight in populous cities or in the open spaces of the country. If he sojourned at Keswick, it was to be near Wordsworth, and the only noticeable influence his work owes to the Lake Country is to be found in "Christabel." If he came to London it was to be within touch of work that was immediately remunerative. The one remaining force that could decide the question of a district's quality was proximity to a good library. His imagination, when the spirit moved him, annihilated distance and ignored immediate surroundings, his muse in its rare working hours knew no fetters of time or place. Friends were more necessary to him than either to Wordsworth or to Lamb, for these had a beloved sister for constant companion, and while Lamb, the most hospitable of men, could console himself for the absence of his friends with the aid of his folios, and a generous measure of beer, Wordsworth had the additional gift of loving wife and children. Then again Lamb worked for a great part of his life in the office of the East India Company, while Wordsworth was supremely conscious of the call of duty, and was anxious to read the lesson of the simple life to a generation given over to the unavailing pursuit of happiness. Of the three, only Coleridge was condemned to live in a condition of perennial anxiety for the future, an anxiety not a little due to his lack of capacity for steady work, the curse of a vagrant disposition, and a fatal surrender to self-indulgence of a peculiarly dangerous kind. The moods in which Coleridge could turn for relief to Nature and scenes of natural beauty were rare, and consequently the utterances thus directly inspired are few and far between. He had but a passing regard for flowers and birds, no marked preference for mountain, river, or plain, no very ready response to changing seasons. In a collected edition of his poetical works, the student will find less than thirty poems that seem to be suggested by Nature.
He knew the north, the west, and the south of England, but there is nothing in his work to indicate that one was more to him than the other. His genius was subjective rather than objective, and though he was a great poet he was a still greater scholar and philosopher, with more of the fruits of deep reading in his capacious brain than Wordsworth and Lamb (each a scholar) could boast between them. To the full extent that his infirmities and overmastering vice permitted, he was a man of the world, at home in any company, able to discourse de omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis, and so overflowing with ideas that he could carry on a monologue in the company of the most brilliant conversationalists and leave them well content for once to be silent. It will be seen, then, that in the case of Samuel Taylor Coleridge the question of residence, although of admitted interest, is of relatively small importance, since each might have been altered without affecting the volume, trend, or quality of his output.
Ottery St. Mary has already been described at sufficient length for the purposes of this brief essay. For all the beauty that belongs of right to Devonshire it left no lasting impression upon his mind, and though he quitted the home of his family at a tender age, we might have looked for some definite utterances, because the early years of a poet are frequently associated with very lasting impressions. Wordsworth remembered his schooldays and Dame Tyson's cottage even in old age. Christ's Hospital—by the way, does not de Quincey tell us that it should be called Christ Hospital?—was the scene of Coleridge's earliest poetic effort, and a sonnet to the autumnal moon is dated 1788, at a time when, it is generally understood, he had not returned to his mother's house. There is no direct inspiration from Nature here. He compares the appearance of the moon coming from a cloud to Hope, now brightening the eye, now hidden behind "dragon-winged Despair," and finally shining like a meteor over the "sorrow-clouded breast of Care." The lines are fluent but superficial. It may be that owing to long residence in Newgate Street with the terror of Boyer's discipline upon him the young "Grecian" had little chance to respond to such glimpses of Nature as his brief holiday rambles afforded. A year later, in some verses called "Life" he makes a passing reference to Otter's "scanty stream," and in 1790 writes some weak verses condemning the bad Devonshire roads. His "Absence," a farewell ode on quitting school for Cambridge, and "The Raven," belonging to the same year, show no influence of Nature, but in 1793, in the brave year when he was twenty-one, there are verses that show at last an awakening appreciation. The "Songs of the Pixies," the Sonnet to the River Otter, the lines "To a Beautiful Spring in a Village," and "On an Autumnal Evening" exhibit the mood of a young man to whom Nature is beginning to reveal some of the secrets of her immortal charm, but there are none of the distinctive thoughts that a Keats or a Wordsworth would have given us under the stress of similar emotion, so we may presume that neither half-remembered Ottery St. Mary, nor Christ's Hospital, nor even Jesus College, Cambridge, had served to string the poet's lyre. Out of the superabundant gift of expression and the long course of varied reading, certain emotions had proceeded, but they are never the emotions of a poet of Nature. The early verses that Coleridge contributed to the Morning Post include adaptations from the classics. The "Lines to a Nightingale" (1795) are inspired by Sarah Fricker, and she too comes into the far better compositions of the same year, "Lines composed while climbing the left ascent of Brackley Coomb, Somersetshire," written when Coleridge was dallying with Pantisocracy in company with Burnett and Southey. The maythorn, yew, and elm are the only trees he notices, and cuckoo the only bird. The "Æolian Harp," written in the same year, is inspired too by Sarah Fricker, and it must be remembered that Coleridge was then twenty-three, when the best and worst men are guilty of writing verse in which the inspiration felt is quite out of proportion to the thought expressed. Perhaps "Reflection on having left a Place of Retirement" strikes the pastoral and rural note most clearly. The "place of retirement" was the little cottage at Clevedon he found after marriage. The lines seem to be a record of the honeymoon. They are happy and speak of a certain resolution that had yet to be undermined:
"Ah! quiet dell! dear cot, and mount sublime!
I was constrained to quit you. Was it right
While my unnumbered brethren toiled and bled,
That I should dream away the entrusted hours