Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 1 (of 2)

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

My dear Sir,—I was absent on a little excursion when your letter arrived, and since my return I have been waiting and making every enquiry in the hopes of announcing the receipt of your “Orestes” and its companions, with my sincere thanks for your kindness. But I can hear nothing of them. Mr. Lamb,[267] however, goes to Penrith next week, and will make strict scrutiny. I am not to find the “Welsh Tour” among them; and yet I think I am correct in referring the ode “Netley Abbey” to that collection,—a poem which I believe I can very nearly repeat by heart, though it must have been four or five years since I last read it. I well remember that, after reading your “Welsh Tour,” Southey observed to me that you, I, and himself had all done ourselves harm by suffering an admiration of Bowles to bubble up too often on the surface of our poems. In perusing the second volume of Bowles, which I owe to your kindness, I met a line of my own which gave me great pleasure, from the thought what a pride and joy I should have had at the time of writing it if I had supposed it possible that Bowles would have adopted it. The line is,—

Had melancholy mus’d herself to sleep.[268]

I wrote the lines at nineteen, and published them many years ago in the “Morning Post” as a fragment, and as they are but twelve lines, I will transcribe them:—

Upon a mouldering abbey’s broadest wall,
Where ruining ivies prop the ruins steep—
Her folded arms wrapping her tatter’d pall
Had Melancholy mused herself to sleep.
The fern was press’d beneath her hair,
The dark green Adder’s Tongue was there;
And still as came the flagging sea gales weak,
Her long lank leaf bow’d fluttering o’er her cheek.
Her pallid cheek was flush’d; her eager look
Beam’d eloquent in slumber! Inly wrought,
Imperfect sounds her moving lips forsook,
And her bent forehead work’d with troubled thought.

I met these lines yesterday by accident, and ill as they are written there seemed to me a force and distinctness of image in them that were buds of promise in a schoolboy performance, though I am giving them perhaps more than their deserts in thus assuring them a reading from you. I have finished the “First Navigator,” and Mr. Tomkins[269] may have it whenever he wishes. It would be gratifying to me if you would look it over and alter anything you like. My whole wish and purpose is to serve Mr. Tomkins, and you are not only much more in the habit of writing verse than I am, but must needs have a better tact of what will offend that class of readers into whose hands a showy publication is likely to fall. I do not mean, my dear sir, to impose on you ten minutes’ thought, but often currente oculo a better phrase or position of words will suggest itself. As to the ten pounds, it is more than the thing is worth, either in German or English. Mr. Tomkins will better give the true value of it by kindly accepting what is given with kindness. Two or three copies presented in my name, one to each of the two or three friends of mine who are likely to be pleased with a fine book,—this is the utmost I desire or will receive. I shall for the ensuing quarter send occasional verses, etc., to the “Morning Post,” under the signature Ἔστησε, and I mention this to you because I have some intention of translating Voss’s “Idylls” in English hexameter, with a little prefatory essay on modern hexameters. I have discovered that the poetical parts of the Bible and the best parts of Ossian are little more than slovenly hexameters, and the rhythmical prose of Gesner is still more so, and reads exactly like that metre in Boethius’ and Seneca’s tragedies, which consists of the latter half of the hexameter. The thing is worth an experiment, and I wish it to be considered merely as an experiment. I need not say that the greater number of the verses signed Ἔστησε be such as were never meant for anything else but the peritura charta of the “Morning Post.”

I had written thus far when your letter of the 16th arrived, franked on the 23d from Weymouth, with a polite apology from Mr. Bedingfell (if I have rightly deciphered the name) for its detention. I am vexed I did not write immediately on my return home, but I waited, day after day, in hopes of the “Orestes,” etc. It is an old proverb that “extremes meet,” and I have often regretted that I had not noted down as they incurred the interesting instances in which the proverb is verified. The newest subject, though brought from the planets (or asteroids) Ceres and Pallas, could not excite my curiosity more than “Orestes.” I will write immediately to Mr. Clarkson, who resides at the foot of Ulleswater, and beg him to walk into Penrith, and ask at all the inns if any parcel have arrived; if not, I will myself write to Mr. Faulder and inform him of the failure. There is a subject of great merit in the ancient mythology hitherto untouched—I believe so, at least. But for the mode of the death, which mingles the ludicrous and terrible, but which might be easily altered, it is one of the finest subjects for tragedy that I am acquainted with. Medea, after the murder of her children [having] fled to the court of the old King Pelias, was regarded with superstitious horror, and shunned or insulted by the daughters of Pelias, till, hearing of her miraculous restoration of Æson, they conceived the idea of recalling by her means the youth of their own father. She avails herself of their credulity, and so works them up by pretended magical rites that they consent to kill their father in his sleep and throw him into the magic cauldron. Which done, Medea leaves them with bitter taunts of triumph. The daughters are called Asteropæa, Autonoe, and Alcestis. Ovid alludes briefly to this story in the couplet,—

“Quid referam Peliæ natas pietate nocentes,
Cæsaque virgineâ membra paterna manu?”
Ovid, Epist. XII. 129, 130.

What a thing to have seen a tragedy raised on this fable by Milton, in rivalry of the “Macbeth” of Shakespeare! The character of Medea, wandering and fierce, and invested with impunity by the strangeness and excess of her guilt, and truly an injured woman on the other hand and possessed of supernatural powers! The same story is told in a very different way by some authors, and out of their narrations matter might be culled that would very well coincide with and fill up the main incidents—her imposing the sacred image of Diana on the priesthood of Iolcus, and persuading them to join with her in inducing the daughters of Pelias to kill their father; the daughters under the persuasion that their father’s youth would be restored, the priests under the faith that the goddess required the death of the old king, and that the safety of the country depended on it. In this way Medea might be suffered to escape under the direct protection of the priesthood, who may afterwards discover the delusion. The moral of the piece would be a very fine one.

Wordsworth wrote a very animated account of his difficulties and his joyous meeting with you, which he calls the happy rencontre or fortunate rainstorm. Oh! that you had been with me during a thunder-storm[270] on Thursday, August the 3d! I was sheltered (in the phrase of the country, lownded) in a sort of natural porch on the summit of Sca Fell, the central mountain of our Giants, said to be higher than Skiddaw or Helvellyn, and in chasm, naked crag, bursting springs, and waterfall the most interesting, without a rival. When the cloud passed away, to my right and left, and behind me, stood a great national convention of mountains which our ancestors most descriptively called Copland, that is, the Land of Heads. Before me the mountains died away down to the sea in eleven parallel ridges; close under my feet, as it were, were three vales: Wastdale, with its lake; Miterdale and Eskdale, with the rivers Irt, Mite, and Esk seen from their very fountains to their fall into the sea at Ravenglass Bay, which, with these rivers, form to the eye a perfect trident.

Turning round, I looked through Borrowdale out upon the Derwentwater and the Vale of Keswick, even to my own house, where my own children were. Indeed, I had altogether a most interesting walk through Newlands to Buttermere, over the fells to Ennerdale, to St. Bees; up Wastdale to Sca Fell, down Eskdale to Devock Lake, Ulpha Kirk, Broughton Mills, Tarver, Coniston, Windermere, Grasmere, Keswick. If it would entertain you, I would transcribe my notes and send them you by the first opportunity. I have scarce left room for my best wishes to Mrs. and Miss Sotheby, and affectionate wishes for your happiness and all who constitute it.