The relationship between Coleridge and Alaric Watts was not confined to the contributions to the Annuals. An agreeable social intimacy sprang up between the Highgate household and the Watts; and a correspondence between Mr. and Mrs. Watts and Coleridge took place. Five fine letters by Coleridge are contained in the Life of Alaric Watts, from which it seems Coleridge and Mr. Watts intended to collaborate in the issue of an edition of Shakespeare, which would have been a congenial task to Coleridge, and one can feel regret that it was not carried out. A feature of the edition was to be “properly critical notes, prefaces, and analyses, comprising the results of five and twenty years’ study: the object being to ascertain and distinguish what Shakespeare possessed in common with other great men of his age, or differing only in degree, and what was his, peculiar to himself” (Life of Alaric Watts, i, 243). This, of course, as any one acquainted with Coleridge’s Lectures on Shakespeare knows, was one of Coleridge’s favourite topics, and one which could have been better illustrated in an annotated edition than in popular lectures.
In one of his letters to Alaric Watts Coleridge gives the best account of the lack of voluntary power to open letters sent him; and counsels Watts if he wishes an immediate answer to his letters to send them under cover to Mrs. Gillman, who is his “outward conscience.” In another letter, sending contributions for the Annual, he encloses his poem entitled Limbo, which he says is a pretended fragment of the poet Lee.]
CHAPTER XXX
THE RHINE TOUR, AND LAST COLLECTED EDITIONS OF THE POEMS
[Coleridge and Wordsworth, who, as we have seen, had had a serious estrangement in 1810, but gradually drew together again with the softening of the years, went on tour to the Rhine in 1828; and this was Coleridge’s third time on the Continent. On their way they met Thomas Colley Grattan, novelist and miscellaneous writer. He gave in his Beaten Paths some account of the two poets as they appeared at the time—partly reproduced in Knight’s Life of Wordsworth. This passage is the best description of the two poets in their later period and the most reliable, along with Clement Carlyon’s description of Coleridge in Germany. There is no attempt in Grattan to spin rhetoric out of Coleridge, such as we find in De Quincey, Hazlitt, and Carlyle. Another diarist gave a picture of the poets during the Rhine Tour, Julian Charles Young, who wrote the memoir of his brother, Charles Mayne Young, an actor of the time. This account is also partly reproduced in Knight’s Life of Wordsworth. Grattan says: “He was about five feet five[143] inches in height, of a full and lazy appearance but not actually stout. He was dressed in black, and wore short breeches, buttoned and tied at the knees, and black silk stockings. And in his costume (the same that he describes to have been worn in his earliest voyages and travels in the year 1798), he worked along, in public coaches or barges, giving the idea of his original profession, an itinerant preacher. His face was extremely handsome, its expression placid and benevolent. His mouth was particularly pleasing, and his grey eyes, neither large nor prominent, were full of intelligent softness. His hair, of which he had plenty, was entirely white. His forehead and cheeks were unfurrowed and the latter showed a healthy bloom” (Beaten Paths, ii, 108–109). On all topics touched by Coleridge he said something to be remembered. “In almost everything that fell from Coleridge there was a dash of deep philosophy—even in the outpourings of his egotism—touches not to be given without the whole of what they illustrated” (Beaten Paths, ii, 113). “Coleridge took evident delight in rural scenes. He was in ecstasies at a group of haymakers in a field we passed. He said the little girls, standing with their rakes, the handles resting on the ground, ‘looked like little saints.’ Half-a-dozen dust-covered children going by the roadside, with a garland of roses raised above their heads, threw him into raptures” (Beaten Paths, ii, 115).
Coleridge made a new collection of his Poems in 1828, which added to the Early Poems and Sibylline Leaves seventeen new pieces. The collection was published in three volumes by Pickering, and included Remorse, Zapolya, and Wallenstein. Coleridge made many careful revisions; his corrections are a study in verse making. Another edition was issued in 1829; and here again Coleridge made alterations in twenty-one of the poems, the chief of which were in the Monody on the Death of Chatterton. The last edition of Coleridge’s Poems prepared during his life was that of 1834, in three volumes, but though the first volume was out in May, the third volume was not issued from the press till after his demise on 25th July. The corrections extend to twenty-three poems. Some are merely restorations of former readings; but they constitute a real difference from the text of 1829, and must be accepted as belonging to the Textus Receptus. Henry Nelson Coleridge superintended the edition, but it is not likely, as Dykes Campbell supposed, that he made the alterations, for Coleridge was continually readjusting his texts.
The remainder of Coleridge’s life from 1829 was taken up with visits from his old friends, in composing a Commentary on the New Testament, writing marginalia on the English Divines, and holding his Thursday at-homes. In 1830 he published his noble pamphlet On the Constitution of Church and State. Many new friends flocked round the ageing poet, to be introduced to whose acquaintance was one of the highest literary treats of London life. Friendship had been the balm of Coleridge’s life; he had had his estrangements and misunderstandings. But he knew well that
Friendship is a Sheltering Tree,
the pathos of which line can be appreciated only when we recall to mind that its writer had been denied the full enjoyment of the deeper friendship called Love.
A good sized volume could be compiled of all the contemporary accounts of Coleridge. We have already had some of these. Another we must add by a young American. Coleridge was highly appreciated on the other side of the Atlantic; his monument in Westminster Abbey was the gift of an American; and the late Emperor of Brazil was an admirer and student of Coleridge. The following account is taken from The Nation, an American literary journal, of 14th July 1910: