Coleridge

The next plan that came to the fertile brain was an extension of the informal class in philosophy that he held at Gillman's, and something, but not much, was done in this direction. A long visit from Mrs. Coleridge and their daughter Sara marked the comparatively cheerful close of the year 1822. Henry Nelson Coleridge, the poet's nephew, son of Colonel James Coleridge and afterwards Sara's husband, was of the party; his Table Talk, in which Coleridge shows something of his conversational quality, may still be read with interest. These visits and the poet's fast-widening social sphere suggest that the opium habit was being conquered at last, that the closing years of a strangely troubled life were bringing with them some measure of tranquillity. There is yet another indication of improvement; the fire of poetic inspiration flared up for a little while in the fall of 1823, and "Youth and Age," was the result. Aids to Reflection was in the making in these days too, though it was not given to the world until the early summer of 1825, and then in a very slovenly form, which did little or nothing to diminish its value to thinking men and women. While the reception was a mixed one, there was a fairly substantial reward. The Royal Society of Literature gave him an Associateship carrying with it the welcome annuity of 100 guineas; there was balm in Gilead at last. In return for the honour, the poet read a paper on the "Prometheus of Æschylus" before the R.S.L. (May 1825). In addition to some definite relief from financial stress, Coleridge was entering upon a mental phase of infinite comfort to his remaining years. The transcendentalist became suddenly convinced of the efficacy of prayer, of the existence of a personal God, and of other tenets peculiar to Christianity. We cannot indicate the gradual processes by which the brilliant mind reached harbour in the last days. It may be that the futility of his own struggles was becoming apparent, that his reasoning faculties, strengthened by relief from drugs, reverted to the faith of earlier times at Ottery St. Mary when, a little boy with the page of his life fair and unstained, he listened to the teachings of his father, a man of godly ways and simple belief. It may have been the final sense of defeat in the long struggle to realise ambitions, to justify the hopes of friends, and to silence those whose doubts were openly expressed. Whatever the cause, the result was eminently satisfactory; the last years saw the poet baffled and beaten by the world, but for once strong in failure, full of a conviction that there lay beyond the grave that which should atone for unsuccess. There is more dignity and less querulousness in the years that followed publication of Aids to Reflection than in almost any of those that had passed since Coleridge left Cambridge; and for this spell of comparative tranquillity his latter-day admirers must needs be grateful.

There would be interesting matter for speculation, if we had any data to assist us, how far the late-found faith of Coleridge enabled him to atone to his conscience for what seem to us the least reputable incidents of his career, and many remain to be explained away. He was too shrewd a critic, too sound a judge of life and character, to have overlooked his own failings, above all he must have been haunted by fear of his son Hartley's future and known that his own lack of self-discipline had, in all human probability, set yet another soul wandering along the paths of trouble. Perhaps we should be careful to remember, in considering the life of Coleridge, that all his faults were open to the eye. His friends discussed them with the greatest freedom and even set them down in cold print. History has turned a far more careful eye to the blemishes in a strange character than to the virtues that must have been present by their side. The worst foes of Coleridge have never denied the extraordinary influence he spread around him, or doubted that it was for good. They bear witness to the intense theoretical devotion to unattainable ideals, the respect for virtue, even in hours of backsliding, the belief in his own ability ultimately to overcome the faults that beset him and to rebuild the shattered fabric of personal honour. He was ever fighting against his own little company of devils, for ever being worsted, and yet it would be wrong to say that he abandoned the struggle for long. Doubtless, when he looked closely into his own past, he was less conscious of his faults than were his biographers; by him they were regarded as the outcome of forces he could not control. Had he pleaded his own case at the bar of public opinion, and some of his utterances come very near to constitute a plea, he could doubtless have done so with sincerity and conviction. He was at least nearer to the springs of action than were those who judged him by normal standards, forgetting that whether for good or for evil the man of genius is a law to himself, and that genius is at once a disease and a misfortune, which no sane man need covet. Certainly if Coleridge could forgive himself, we of another generation, who have had nothing but the fine fruits of his intellect for our portion, who bear no share of the burden of his weakness, are not called upon to judge him harshly, and only the fact that his life is one long record of faults and failings excuses any reference to them in a brief biography.

The tragedy of the life we have watched for a moment at Highgate now loses something of its intensity. It gains a tranquillity we have learned to associate with evening twilight. The sudden recovery of faith calls for more than a passing word; it must have gladdened the heart not only of Coleridge, but of many of the devout admirers who have succeeded him. The thoughtful readers of our own generation can hardly turn to the life or works of Coleridge to-day without feelings of infinite pity for a man in whom the body and the spirit waged such long and uneven combat. We may remember, too, that his own generation had no perspective by which to judge him; it was unaware of his greatness, and ignored or misjudged him as it ignored Wordsworth and Elia until they had passed beyond the reach of praise or censure. Had it recognised the presence of a great force there might have been more happiness for the author of Aids to Reflection. But we can see, or think we see, that though help came to him in no small measure, there was little understanding save by the few, and in the long run the assistance he received was futile. Like every man born of woman, Coleridge had to seek and find his own salvation; it was his own effort that triumphed in the end.

To the life-long list of disappointments another was added in 1827, when the post of Paymaster of the Gentlemen Pensioners, a sinecure long since abolished, became vacant by the death of William Gifford. A big effort was made by Hookham Frere to obtain this office for Coleridge, but it was not to be. The industrious, steady, resolute Wordsworth had his sinecure, and it seems a little hard, if such things were to exist, that poor Coleridge, whose necessities were not inconsiderable and whose means of satisfying them were so scanty, should have failed to gain one. Happily he still had his pension of one hundred guineas from the Royal Society of Literature, and in 1828 an edition of three hundred copies of his poems was published in three volumes and sold out. William Pickering of London was the publisher, and the preface, with a few unimportant alterations, is a reprint of the one attached to the edition of 1803, published by Longman and Rees, which in its turn was taken from the edition of 1797. Another edition with some added verses was published in 1829. When the volumes of the 1828 edition had been passed for press, Coleridge joined William Wordsworth and his favourite child, Dora, who married Mr. Quillinan and predeceased her father, and the three went to Belgium and Germany. The journey lasted six weeks, and at Bonn the travellers met some of the leading writers of Germany, including Schlegel and Niebuhr. The German visit is recorded by Thomas Colley Grattan, the author of Beaten Paths, and by Julian Young, son of Charles Mayne Young, the actor. Although the warmth of attachment between Wordsworth and Coleridge had undoubtedly suffered since the days when the former wrote his ill-advised letter to Basil Montague, nearly twenty years before, the admiration of the one poet for the other was quite unfeigned. Wordsworth's delight in a great intellect had never faltered; he could always distinguish between a man's gifts and weaknesses, admiring the one while he condemned or regretted the other. The journey refreshed Coleridge in body and mind. He was in high spirits, and the point of his pen was still very keen; witness his lines to Cologne, written when he and his fellow-travellers had passed through that malodorous city in July:

These lines are worth quoting merely as a definite indication of the change in spirits that had come over the poet. Doubtless, for all the angry de Quincey has written to the contrary, Coleridge was in a comparatively healthy condition both mentally and physically in these closing years, nor could he have made the favourable impression upon the illuminati of Bonn had he been still addicted to excess of opium. An easier mind prompted him to take further holiday during the year, for we have a record of a week with Charles and Mary Lamb, who were then at Enfield Chase, and a month at Ramsgate towards the beginning of the winter. In the following year his well-beloved daughter Sara married her cousin Henry Nelson Coleridge, who, in the spring of 1830, resumed the Table Talk records that do so much to show us the extent, variety, and penetration of the poet's comments upon men and things. In this year Coleridge published, through the London firm of Hurst, Chance & Co., his remarkable essay "On the Constitution of the Church and State, according to the idea of each," a publication said to have been the foundation of the famous Oxford Movement.

This year saw the death of George IV, and of the pensions of the Associates of the Royal Literary Society. King William IV pleaded that his very reduced income made it impossible for him to continue the grants of his predecessor, but a strong private representation to Lord Brougham led to the offer of a private grant of £200 to Coleridge, who declined to receive it. Hookham Frere undertook to pay the pension annually as long as Coleridge lived, and the Treasury compounded with King William's conscience by paying a sum of £300 in settlement of further liabilities.

It is well that there were friends at hand in these latter days, for the star of Coleridge had set; he was to publish nothing more. His mind retained its pristine vigour, but his body was failing fast. Wordsworth, Lamb, Crabb Robinson, Walter Savage Landor, Harriet Martineau, Emerson and Poole were among the visitors to Highgate, where the poet, now seldom able to leave the house, waited with patience and resignation for the hour to come when "the dust returns to earth as it was, and the spirit unto God who gave it." He rallied sufficiently to attend the baptism of his granddaughter Edith, and in 1833 he went to the meeting of the British Association at Cambridge, the return to his old haunts being the occasion of great emotion. Too weak to rise betimes, he received old friend and new in his bedchamber. Then he returned to Highgate, never again to leave the Gillmans' hospitable house. In May 1834 his old and faithful comrade Thomas Poole, the man our memory loves to dwell upon, visited him, and Coleridge remarked that all the incidents of his life were now seen by him in a clear light "reconciled and harmonised." A bad attack of weakness in the last days of July was the signal of the end. In his last hours he communicated to his pupil J. H. Green a statement of his religious philosophy, and tired by the supreme effort passed peacefully from the lesser to the greater sleep. He was buried on August 2, in the Churchyard at Highgate. He had written his own epitaph not a year before he died, and no excuse is needed for its quotation here. There are several versions, differing but slightly from each other:

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:

The lines, of which the above are a part, are important in so far as they show that even on his honeymoon and in the most delightful country Coleridge was not yet on intimate terms with natural objects. He writes of rose and myrtle and jasmine and "the bare bleak mountain speckled thin with sheep." He knew neither the small nor the great on terms of intimacy, and here again we have further proof that there is nothing local about his genius, and that his homes and haunts did little more than influence his health upon occasions; they never stirred his pen or turned him to seek nature knowledge. Doubtless, had he been left to spend his boyhood by the Otter's banks, he would have gathered some small lore of tree, and bird, and plant, but London, though it did much for him, left him quite ill-equipped. The Clevedon cottage where he spent his honeymoon is still to be seen by the tourist and lover of the poet, who may well pause to wonder how Wordsworth would have sung such a peaceful and yet stimulating spot. In the February of 1796 come lines "On observing a blossom on the first of February," and this will make the most modest botanist smile, for by the first of February the winter jasmine, the Christmas rose, and the winter aconite, to name but three flowers at random, have been blossoming for some time, and so, too, has many a pleasant weed. Later in the same year the first primrose of the season tempted him to some charming lines, of which four may be quoted:

This is very pretty and naïve, but quite childish, and the lines are prefaced by a quotation from Ovid. In June 1797, at Nether Stowey, Coleridge wrote the exquisite poem, "This Lime Tree Bower my Prison." It was addressed to Charles Lamb, and on a copy of this poem, thirty-seven years later, he wrote his last words, "Charles and Mary Lamb, dear to my heart, yea, as it were, my heart." Here for once the spirit of Nature descends for a moment upon him. He sees his surroundings with what Sir Joshua would have called "a dilated eye." There are lines in it with which memory loves to dwell; they bring Coleridge nearer to some of us than many of the poems upon which his reputation stands secure:

The recurrence of the word "and" in four consecutive lines is perhaps the most noticeable blemish here.

It is at Nether Stowey when Coleridge was five-and-twenty years old that we find the first utterance which seems to treat Nature as the theme and not merely as a subsidiary aid to the expression of certain thoughts. "Frost at Midnight," belonging to 1798, has some fine lines addressed to little Hartley:

This is full of promise, and so too is the "Conversation Poem" called "The Nightingale," written in April of that year, in which Coleridge shows the true instinct by rejecting the suggestion that the bird's notes are sad:

If the presence of Lamb inspired the "Lime Tree Bower" music, it is undoubtedly to the happy association at Alfoxden with the Wordsworths that we owe the "Nightingale" song, though the image of his child, presumably little Berkeley, the short-lived second-born, runs sparkling through the closing lines.

Some years pass now before Coleridge responds again to Nature, this time in his magnificent "Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni." This is as stately an invocation as ever the poet penned, and to the same year belongs the well-known "Inscription for a Fountain on a Heath." After this date one will look in vain to Coleridge for a direct response to Nature or for any prolonged utterance founded upon the beauty of earth, sea, or sky. The year 1802, in which this side of the poet's work seems to fail, is the date of the "Ode to Dejection," a twelvemonth before the visit to Scotland and two years before the visit to Malta and Italy. Is it unreasonable, then, to suggest that the Nature love and study that the poems of Coleridge reveal are associated only with the early years of courtship and marriage, and the first long association with the Wordsworths in and around Nether Stowey and Alfoxden? We know that by the time "Kubla Khan" was written (1798) Coleridge was already beginning to surrender himself to opium, and a very few years of close devotion to this drug would have served to deprive him, not only of the spring joy of life, but of response to Nature. He was not a Nature lover at heart, and consequently there was little to be rooted out. Courtship and the birth of children kindled some light that the drug was to quench effectually, and after 1802, Coleridge turned but seldom to Nature even for pictorial imagery. His mind wandered farther and farther into fields of abstruse and difficult speculation, the poet in him mingled with the scholar, and in the later years his essays were, from the standpoint of fine thought, expressed in terse, vigorous English that lacked neither wit nor humour upon occasion, far more important than his poetry. Lamb's essays breathe the spirit of a poet; much of Coleridge's later work, whether dramatic or lyrical, is in the first place the effort of an accomplished man of letters and philosopher. This brings me back to the first statement of the chapter; Coleridge was not influenced by residence, but by the circumstances of his life, by his failure to earn sufficient money, a failure due in its turn to his besetting weakness. We cannot name any place of the poet's uneasy sojourn and say the district exercised an abiding influence upon his poetry.

Here we have material for a very painful reflection. We know how largely some of the saddest lives in literature have been soothed or brightened by close communion with what we call common things, because they are within reach of all. Had Coleridge been able to take comfort in them, had he possessed, with William and Dorothy Wordsworth, the "inward eye that is the bliss of solitude," his life would have been immeasurably happier, long periods of keen distress would have been spared him. No man stands so much alone as he who, having no home-life to which he can turn for comfort, is unable to find any abiding happiness in contemplation of the life the seasons show. To make matters worse, we can see Coleridge was profoundly conscious that such a healing power existed. Surely nobody who was in Wordsworth's company, or even in Robert Southey's, could have failed to realise this. Coleridge and Southey lived together, and Southey, though he walked book in hand, tells us of the sights that delighted him on his rambles, and how on winter mornings he would take his little ones to the hill-tops "for the sake of getting the first sunshine on the mountains." But Coleridge could not grasp this gift, so keenly appreciated by the two future Poets Laureate, any more than he could grasp the opportunities extended to him on every side by men who realised at once the extent of his troubles and his gifts. To him the sources of most human consolations "were barr'd and bann'd, forbidden fare." If only for this, his harshest critic who can see his life in true perspective must respond to the appeal of the epitaph the poet wrote for himself when he saw the end of a weary pilgrimage in sight. Never did man so richly blessed with friends and well-wishers travel along a more lonely road, and when we consider the conditions under which the most of his work was written, the comparatively few hours in which he was the master of his own soul, we are left with a feeling of surprise at the quantity and quality of his accomplishment. Coleridge will receive from most kindly human judges the mercy and forgiveness for which he pleads, but at the same time the fame remains, nor can the praise be withheld.

But by reason of his close association with Wordsworth, and his considerable sojourn by the Lakes and in Somersetshire, Coleridge is often considered in his relations to Nature, and a few selected poems from which free quotation has been made here, are brought forward to suggest that he too was in his turn a Nature poet. It has been shown that such an opinion is hard to justify; it would be more fair to say that as far as the introduction of the imagery of nature is concerned, Coleridge bears the same relation to Wordsworth that Horace bears to Virgil. Horace used nature to illustrate his philosophy, to clothe or adorn his imagery dealing with matters outside the countryside; Coleridge did the same, but not so well, for he lacked the Horatian humour. The second epode of Horace explodes for all time in its closing lines the theory that Horace has the country man's love for the country. It suggests that the Augustan age had its cry of "back to the land," and that the cry was insincere. Horace turned it to good account, though doubtless the little estate among the Sabine hills near Roccagiavone and the Licenza valley that he owed to the kindness of Mæcenas was a source of infinite delight to him. But the pleasure came from the opportunity it afforded of quiet and uninterrupted work when Rome was too hot to be pleasant and all the interesting people had left the city. One can imagine that Coleridge would have looked with much the same regard upon a country-house that cost him nothing and gave complete assurance of privacy. With Virgil, as with Wordsworth, the case was different. The Mantuan loved the country as Wordsworth loved it, and, for his time, with a much more studied appreciation. Virgil and Wordsworth hold the ear and stimulate the mind when they write of rural life and scenery. Horace and Coleridge, for all their exquisite facility, fail to utter the litany to which the heart of the country lover responds. The comparison between the Mantuan peasant and the son of a slave on the one hand, and two eighteenth-century poets who had their education rounded off by the University on the other, may seem at first a little strained, but if it were possible to pursue it here we might find many points that, mutatis mutandis, connect Coleridge with Horace and Wordsworth with Virgil in the relation of the poets to the country and the country life. Moreover, each of the latter-day poets was indebted to patrons, as were their great prototypes, if such a word be permissible. There is something in the Bucolics and Georgics which connects Virgil with the best period of Wordsworth, if we will remember that the men saw life in a different age, under different skies, and in the light of different faiths. Even those who will not admit as much will acknowledge that Virgil and Wordsworth ring true to the country man, while neither Horace nor Coleridge, though they call the country to their aid for an illustration, or a moral or philosophical lesson, could have written:

"O fortunatos nimium, sua si bona norint Agricolas!"

But it is time to turn from a general survey of Coleridge's work to a more detailed consideration of certain examples.

CHAPTER VI
COLERIDGE AS POET AND CRITIC

Before entering upon any attempt, however brief and inadequate it be, to estimate the multiform genius of Coleridge, it is well to remember that its permanent expression was, at least, three-sided. To-day he is regarded chiefly as a poet; for a dozen who know something of his poetry, there is hardly one who troubles to read his prose. The Biographia Literaria, for example, attracts few students; the Table Talk recorded by his nephew, and Thomas Allsop's Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge, passed out of fashion about the middle of the Victorian Era. His Aids to Reflection is only now returning to public notice after long neglect. The book enjoyed about twenty years' popularity in England and America, and then seemed to pass from the service of readers. But it is clear that quite apart from his poetry and prose, Coleridge's gifts found complete expression not only in lectures and letters, but in those casual discourses which held complete strangers entranced. He has been described as the finest conversationalist since Samuel Johnson. The printed work that bears his name falls far short of doing him justice. It suffers on the prose side from the modern lack of interest in his precise attitude towards the metaphysical speculations that meant so much to him and his times. On the side of poetry it suffers from the widening of the boundaries that then marked the confines of legitimate poetic expression, and from the unfortunate truth that the poet in him died young. Coleridge the poet employed a very limited palette, not because he had no more colours, but because their use was discountenanced by his own early training and by the canons of contemporary criticism. To estimate the tradition that went to the making of the poet, and the long road he had to follow before he could find himself, turn to his Sonnet to the Evening Star, written when he was eighteen. It opens:

And it closes:

Though it is generally unfair to divorce lines from their context, it is permissible here, just to show what passed current as legitimate poetic expression, and we have to remember that within ten years of the writing of the sonnet, the poet in Coleridge had given place to the critic, after enriching poetry with many immortal lines. Clearly one may not hope, save in certain inspired moments, for much in the way of beauty of untrammelled form; the thought must be sought beneath the cumbrous wrapping, and modern readers have less leisure for this than was granted to Coleridge's contemporaries. The "Lines on an Autumnal Evening," written perhaps three years later than the sonnet, show a marked improvement: the poet is beginning to prove stronger than the formal limitations that beset him, but the spirit of the time is displayed through a curious incident. The poem was first printed in the little volume offered to the public in 1796, and is accompanied by an apology for printing such "intolerable stuff" as lines 57-70. At the same time he declares that he has not imitated Rogers' "Pleasure of Memory" in certain other lines (27-36), and suggests that Rogers himself had borrowed his story from "Lochleven," a poem by Michael Bruce. In a second edition Coleridge gives reasons for "reprieving his own poem from immediate oblivion," and proceeds to apologise to Rogers in terms of which the following are part: "No one can see more clearly the littleness and futility of imagining plagiarisms in the works of men of genius; but nemo omnibus horis sapit; and my mind at the time of writing that note was sick and sore with anxiety and weakened through much suffering. I have not the most distant knowledge of Mr. Rogers save as a correct and elegant poet. If any of my readers should know him personally, they would oblige me by informing him that I have expiated a sentence of unfounded detraction by an unsolicited and self-originating apology."

One can hardly resist the temptation of applying to the youthful writer of such stuff as this his own opening line of the address "To a Young Ass," written one year after the lines to the Autumnal Evening, and three years earlier than the above apology:

It is in his "Ode on the Departing Year" (1796) that Coleridge seems for the first time to discover his own full power, but the classical top-hamper accompanying it shows that the limitations upon freedom of expression are still there. The poem is preceded by a quotation from the "Agamemnon" of Æschylus, and when published in a small quarto pamphlet held dedicatory letter to Tom Poole, into which a long quotation from Statius forces unwelcome way. Capital letters, quotations, italics, notes of exclamation were ever to the fore in the early days of the nineteenth century. But 1797-8 brought some of the finest lines the poet has given us. "The Three Graves" has much that one is pleased to remember, and the lines addressed to Charles Lamb—"This Lime Tree Bower my Prison," and referred to with a quotation in a previous chapter, show keen appreciation of Nature and natural beauty. Reference has been made elsewhere in this little paper to the limited response that Coleridge shows to his surroundings, but this poem shows that he was not quite oblivious of them. One cannot help feeling that the inspiration came suddenly and unexpectedly, born of compulsory solitude and the fine June evening; the limited appeal of Nature to the poet is shown by the fact that the poem was omitted from the 1803 edition of his work, and that, in the lines near the end, "My Sarah and my friends" was substituted for "My gentle-hearted Charles," rather to Elia's annoyance.

Of the famous "Kubla Khan" fragment, written in a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire, it has been pointed out that opium was in all probability the source of inspiration. The poet had been reading a passage from Purchas his Pilgrimage—it runs as follows:

"In Xamdu did Cublai Can build a stately Palace, encompassing sixteene miles of plaine ground within a wall wherein are fertile Meadowes, pleasant Springs, delightfull Streames, and all sorts of beasts of chase and game, and in the middle thereof a sumptuous house of pleasure."

Coleridge used to recite his strange fragment to Lamb, who told Wordsworth that it brought Heaven and Elysian bowers into his parlour, but added in the same letter his fear lest in the light of cold print it should appear "no better than nonsense."

There is a clear suggestion of transient force behind the lines. For example, we read in the beginning (lines 3-5):

And in line 18:

Then in line 27 the poet harks back to an earlier image:

while earlier in line 24 he reverts to the ill-conditioned adverb of his 18th line:

But, as was suggested earlier, the explanation of "Kubla Khan" may be found in its last two lines:

Next in order of composition comes "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," the poem which is the most widely read of any that Coleridge wrote, though it may be doubted whether the full extent of the poet's achievement is grasped by more than a minority of those who know it. The "Ancient Mariner" has many merits; it is one of the greatest ballads in English poetry. The sheer music of the lines, the romance they enshrine, the sense they convey of a vivid description of things actually seen, have given an abridged version of the poem a place in schoolbooks without number, and will probably continue to do so for generations to come, so that "The Mariner" is the first figure of his kind to touch the youthful imagination. Wordsworth has told us how the poem came to be written, when he, his sister Dorothy, and Coleridge had left Stowey to visit the Valley of Rocks, near Linton, on a November day in 1797. They had planned an excursion, and proposed to pay for it out of the proceeds of some poetry then to be written. In the course of the walk Coleridge discussed the poem with his two friends; he was founding it upon the dream of Mr. Cruickshank, a friend of his. Wordsworth, who had been reading a book of travels dealing with a journey round Cape Horn (Shelvocke's Voyage Round the World), suggested the incident of the albatross and the navigation of the ship by dead men. On the same evening the work started, Wordsworth contributing a few lines—less than a dozen at most. A great deal has been written about the Wordsworth contribution, which, upon his own showing, was quite slight in substance, though it was valuable in suggestion. Shelvocke's story of the doubling of Cape Horn and the meeting with albatrosses prompted Wordsworth, and Coleridge may have derived some of his details from a book by Captain Thomas James, published in 1633, and dealing with the "intended discovery of a North-West Passage in to the South Sea." But we are less concerned with this than with the implicit logic that Coleridge has packed into his poem. His vivid imagination traced the whole course of the Ancient Mariner's journey in fashion that demands and will repay the closest observation.

For example, turn to the sixth stanza: