Mr. Coleridge’s Description of a Green Field.
‘I have at this moment before me, in the flowery meadow on which my eye is now reposing, one of Nature’s most soothing chapters, in which there is no lamenting word, no one character of guilt or anguish. For never can I look and meditate on the vegetable creation, without a feeling similar to that with which we gaze at a beautiful infant that has fed itself asleep at its mother’s bosom, and smiles in its strange dream of obscure yet happy sensations. The same tender and genial pleasure takes possession of me, and this pleasure is checked and drawn inward by the like aching melancholy, by the same whispered remonstrance, and made restless by a similar impulse of aspiration. It seems as if the soul said to herself—“From this state” (from that of a flowery meadow) “hast thou fallen! Such shouldst thou still become, thyself all permeable to a holier power! Thyself at once hidden and glorified by its own transparency, as the accidental and dividuous in this quiet and harmonious object is subjected to the life and light of nature which shines in it, even as the transmitted power, love and wisdom, of God over all fills, and shines through, Nature! But what the plant is, by an act not its own, and unconsciously—that must thou make thyself to become! must by prayer, and by a watchful and unresisting spirit, join at least with the preventive and assisting grace to make thyself, in that light of conscience which inflameth not, and with that knowledge which puffeth not up.”’
This will do. It is well observed by Hobbes, that ‘it is by means of words only that a man becometh excellently wise or excellently foolish.’
COLERIDGE’S LITERARY LIFE
Vol. xxviii.] [August 1817.
There are some things readable in these volumes; and if the learned author could only have been persuaded to make them a little more conformable to their title, we have no doubt that they would have been the most popular of all his productions. Unfortunately, however, this work is not so properly an account of his Life and Opinions, as an Apology for them. ‘It will be found,’ says our Auto-Biographer, ‘that the least of what I have written concerns myself personally.’ What then, it may be asked, is the work taken up with? With the announcement of an explanation of the author’s Political and Philosophical creed, to be contained in another work—with a prefatory introduction of 200 pages to an Essay on the difference between Fancy and Imagination, which was intended to form part of this, but has been suppressed, at the request of a judicious friend, as unintelligible—with a catalogue of Mr. Southey’s domestic virtues, and author-like qualifications—a candid defence of the Lyrical Ballads—a critique on Mr. Wordsworth’s poetry—quotations from the Friend—and attacks on the Edinburgh Review. There are, in fact, only two or three passages in the work which relate to the details of the author’s life,—such as the account of his school-education, and of his setting up the Watchman newspaper. We shall make sure of the first of these curious documents, before we completely lose ourselves in the multiplicity of his speculative opinions.
‘At school, I enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a very sensible, though at the same time, a very severe master, the Rev. James Bowyer, many years Head Master of the Grammar-School, Christ’s Hospital. He early moulded my taste to the preference of Demosthenes to Cicero, of Homer and Theocritus to Virgil, and again, of Virgil to Ovid. He habituated me to compare Lucretius (in such extracts as I then read), Terence, and, above all, the chaster poems of Catullus, not only with the Roman poets of the so called silver and brazen ages, but with even those of the Augustan era; and, on grounds of plain sense, and universal logic, to see and assert the superiority of the former, in the truth and nativeness both of their thoughts and diction. At the same time that we were studying the Greek tragic poets, he made us read Shakespeare and Milton as lessons: and they were the lessons, too, which required most time and trouble to bring up, so as to escape his censure. I learnt from him, that Poetry, even that of the loftiest, and, seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more, and more fugitive causes. In the truly great poets, he would say, there is a reason assignable, not only for every word, but for the position of every word; and I well remember, that, availing himself of the synonimes to the Homer of Didymus, he made us attempt to show, with regard to each, why it would not have answered the same purpose; and wherein consisted the peculiar fitness of the word in the original text.
‘I had just entered on my seventeenth year, when the Sonnets of Mr. Bowles, twenty in number, and just then published in a quarto pamphlet, were first made known and presented to me, by a school-fellow who had quitted us for the University, and who, during the whole time that he was in our first form (or, in our school language, a Grecian), had been my patron and protector. I refer to Dr. Middleton, the truly learned, and every way excellent Bishop of Calcutta—
‘Qui laudibus amplis
Ingenium celebrare meum, calamumque solebat,