Humphry Davy, Poet and Philosopher

by T. E. Thorpe

Of the impression he made on others, and of the influence and power he exerted on minds far more matured than his own, we have abundant evidence in the letters of his contemporaries. Miss Edgeworth’s good-humoured patronage quickly passed into amazement and ended in awe. Writing to William Taylor of Norwich, Southey calls Davy “a miraculous young man, whose talents I can only wonder at.” Amos Cottle, poet and publisher, to whom he was introduced shortly after his arrival at Bristol, says of him in the “Reminiscences of Coleridge and Southey”:—

“I was much struck with the intellectual character of his face. His eye was piercing, and when not engaged in converse, was remarkably introverted, amounting to absence, as though his mind had been pursuing some severe train of thought scarcely to be interrupted by external objects; and, from the first interview also, his ingenuousness impressed me as much as his mental superiority.”

Cottle on one occasion said to Coleridge, “During your stay in London you doubtless saw a great many of what are called the cleverest men—how do you estimate Davy in comparison with these?” Mr. Coleridge’s reply was strong but expressive: “Why, Davy can eat them all! There is an energy, an elasticity, in his mind which enables him to seize on and analyse all questions, pushing them to their legitimate consequences. Every subject in Davy’s mind has the principle of vitality. Living thoughts spring up like turf under his feet.” It can hardly be doubted that Davy’s connection with that remarkable literary coterie which made its headquarters in the neighbourhood of Bristol in the last year of the eighteenth century, strongly stimulated his intellectual activity. In one of his poems written at this period he speaks of having

“felt the warmth,
The gentle influence of congenial souls,
Whose kindred hopes have cheer’d me”

That these “congenial souls” in turn felt his influence no less strongly will be apparent from the following letters—the first from Southey, who then resided at Westbury, the others from Coleridge, who had just removed to the Lake country:—

“Thursday, May 4th, 1799.

“Your ‘Mount’s Bay,’ my dear Davy, disappointed me in its length. I expected more, and wished more, because what there is is good; there is a certain swell, an elevation in the flow of the blank verse, which, I do not know how, produces an effect like the fulness of an organ-swell upon the feeling. I have felt it from the rhythm of Milton, and sometimes of Akenside, a pleasure wholly independent from that derived from the soul of the poetry, arising from the beauty of the body only. I believe a man who did not understand a word of it would feel pleasure and emotion at hearing such lines read with the tone of a poet....

“I must not press the subject of poetry upon you, only do not lose the feeling and the habit of seeing all things with a poet’s eye; at Bristol you have a good society, but not a man who knows anything of poetry. Dr. Beddoes’ taste is very pessimism. Cottle only likes what his friends and himself write. Every person fancies himself competent to pronounce upon the merits of a poem, and yet no trade requires so long an apprenticeship, or involves the necessity of such multifarious knowledge....

“At Lymouth I saw Tobin’s friend Williams who opened upon me with an account of the gaseous oxide. I had the advantage of him, having felt what he it seems had only seen. Lymouth where he is fixed is certainly the most beautiful place I have seen in England, so beautiful that all the after-scenes come flat and uninteresting. The Valley of Stones is about half a mile distant, a strange and magnificent place, which ought to have filled the whole neighbourhood with traditions of giants, devils, and magicians, but I could find none, not even a lie preserved. I know too little of natural history to hypothesize upon the cause of this valley; it appeared to me that nothing but water could have so defleshed and laid bare the bones of the earth—that any inundation which could have overtopped these heights must have deluged the kingdom; but the opposite hills are clothed with vegetable soil and verdure, therefore the cause must have been partial—a waterspout might have occasioned it perhaps—and there my conjectures rested, or rather took a new direction to the pre-Adamite kings, the fiends who married Diocletian’s fifty daughters—their giant progeny, old Merlin and the builders of the Giant’s Causeway.

“For the next Anthology I project a poem on our Clifton rocks; the scenery is fresh in my sight, and these kind of poems derive a more interesting cast as recollections than as immediate pictures. Farewell. Yours truly,

“Robert Southey.”

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“Keswick, Friday Evening, July 25, 1800.

“My dear Davy,—Work hard, and if success do not dance up like the bubbles in the salt (with the spirit lamp under it[C]) may the Devil and his dam take success! My dear fellow! from the window before me there is a great camp of mountains. Giants seem to have pitched their tents there. Each mountain is a giant’s tent, and how the light streams from them! Davy! I ache for you to be with us.

“W. Wordsworth is such a lazy fellow, that I bemire myself by making promises for him: the moment I received your letter, I wrote to him. He will, I hope, write immediately to Biggs and Cottle. At all events, these poems must not as yet be delivered up to them, because that beautiful poem, ‘The Brothers,’ which I read to you in Paul Street, I neglected to deliver to you, and that must begin the volume. I trust, however, that I have invoked the sleeping bard with a spell so potent, that he will awake and deliver up that Sword of Argantyr, which is to rive the enchanter Gaudyverse from his crown to his feet.

“What did you think of that case I translated for you from the German? That I was a well-meaning sutor who had ultra-crepidated with more zeal than wisdom!! I give myself credit for that word ‘ultra-crepidated,’ it started up in my brain like a creation....

“We drank tea the night before I left Grasmere, on the island in that lovely lake; our kettle swung over the fire, hanging from the branch of a fir-tree, and I lay and saw the woods, and mountains, and lake all trembling, and as it were idealized through the subtle smoke, which rose up from the clear red embers of the fir-apples which we had collected; afterwards we made a glorious bonfire on the margin, by some elder bushes, whose twigs heaved and sobbed in the uprushing column of smoke, and the image of the bonfire, and of us that danced round it, ruddy, laughing faces in the twilight; the image of this in a lake, smooth as that sea, to whose waves the Son of God had said, Peace! May God, and all his sons, love you as I do.

“S. T. Coleridge.

“Sara desires her kind remembrances. Hartley is a spirit that dances on an aspen leaf: the air that yonder sallow-faced and yawning tourist is breathing, is to my babe a perpetual nitrous oxide....”

[C] Doubtless an allusion to the decomposition of ammonium nitrate, which Coleridge had frequently seen Davy effect.

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