Vathek.
Wm. Beckford.
When poor Chatterton—of whom we had speech not far back—was near to starving in London, he made one desperate effort to secure the favor and patronage of the Lord Mayor of the city, who was a very rich West India merchant, by the name of Beckford. Chatterton did gain an interview; did get promise of aid, and win strongly upon the good will of the Lord Mayor; but unfortunately his honor died only a few days thereafter. Had he lived, the young poet might have had a totally different career; and had he lived, the only son and heir of this benevolent Mayor,—William Beckford,[14] then a boy of ten,—would have had a different bringing up. At twenty, this youth printed—though he did not publish—some journals of continental travel which he had conducted in the spirit and with the large accompaniments of a young man who loves the splendor of life, and who had at command an annual revenue of six hundred thousand dollars, at that day said to be the largest moneyed income in England. What a little fragment of this sum which was squandered upon that splendid trail of travel through Europe would have made poor Chatterton happy! But young Beckford was by no means a brainless spendthrift; he had strong intellectual aptitudes; was a scholar in a certain limited yet true sense; and when twenty-two only, had written (in French) that strange, weird romance of Vathek; well worth your reading on a spare day, and which in its English version has made his fame, and keeps his name alive, now that his great houses and moneys are known and reverenced no more.
It is an Eastern story, with all the glow, color, and splendors of the days of the good Haroun al Raschid in it. There are crime and love in it too; and phantoms and beautiful women, and terrific punishment of the wicked. Vathek, the hero, who might be Beckford himself, wanders through a world of delights, where evil phantoms and genii assail him, and fascinating maidens allure him; and after adventures full of escapes and dangers and feastings, in which he listens to the melody of lutes and quaffs the delicious wine of Schiraz, he reaches at last, in company with the lovely Mironihar, the great hall of Eblis; here we come to something horrific and Dantesque—something which I am sure had its abiding influence upon the work of Edgar Poe.
"The place, though roofed with a vaulted ceiling, was so spacious and lofty that at first they took it for an immeasurable plain. But their eyes at length growing familiar with the grandeur of surrounding objects, they extended their view to those at a distance, and discovered rows of columns and arcades which gradually diminished till they terminated in a point radiant as the sun when he darts his last beams athwart the ocean.... The pavement, which was strewed over with gold-dust and saffron, exhaled so subtle an odor as almost overpowered them.... In the midst of this immense hall a vast multitude was incessantly passing, who severally kept their right hands on their hearts, without once regarding anything around them. They had all the livid paleness of death. Their eyes deep sunk in their sockets, resembled those phosphoric meteors that glimmer by night in places of interment."
And afterward, when a royal sufferer, who from livid lips had made warning exhortation to these wanderers, lifts his right hand in supplication, Vathek sees—through his bosom which was "transparent as crystal"—his heart enveloped in flames. Perhaps Hawthorne, in certain passages of the Scarlet Letter, may have had these red, burning hearts of this famous Hall of Eblis in mind.
Beckford wrote also a very interesting account of certain religious houses in Portugal which were the wonder of old days and are a wonder now. At Cintra, the picturesque suburb of Lisbon, he established a great Moorish country house within sight of the sea. Byron gives a glimpse of this in Childe Harold:—
"Here didst thou dwell, here schemes of pleasure plan,
Beneath yon mountain's ever beauteous brow;
But now, as if a thing unblest by man,
Thy fairy dwelling is as lone as thou!
Here giant weeds a passage scarce allow
To halls deserted, portals gaping wide.
Fresh lessons to the thinking bosom, how
Vain are the pleasaunces on earth supplied,
Swept into wrecks anon by Time's ungentle tide."
Byron would now have to mend his description, since the estate is at present owned by a London merchant, who has bought a title from the weak king-folk of Portugal, and keeps the great house in Pimlico order. It is one of the show places of Cintra; and if Moorish domes, and marble halls, and sculpture delicate as that of the Alhambra, and fountains, and palms, and oranges, and bowers of roses, and century-old oaks, and cliffs, and wooded dells, and far-off sight of sails from the Bay of Biscay are deserving of show, surely this old palace of the rich Englishman is.
Another palace—for Beckford had an architectural mania—was built at Fonthill, the place of his birth, not far east of Salisbury. Here was a great ancestral estate, around which he caused to be erected a huge wall of masonry, some ten or twelve miles in length, to secure privacy and protect his birds. Within he built courts, towers, and halls—some six hundred men often working together night and day on these constructions—which he equipped with the rare and munificent spoils brought back from his travel. To this Fairy land, however, Byron's lament would better apply; the walls are down and the towers have fallen; the property is divided; only here and there and blended with new structures and new offices can you see traces of the old architectural extravagance. The spoiled plantations of Jamaica—whence the Vathek revenue mostly came—brought the change; enough, however, remained for the erection of a costly home in Bath, portions of which may still be seen.
A daughter of Beckford's became Duchess of Hamilton; another daughter, who declined Ducal overtures which the father favored, was treated therefor with severities that would have become an Eastern caliph—for which, maybe, he now, like the poor creatures of Eblis Hall, is holding his right hand over "a burning heart."
Robert Burns.
Burns.
We go now out of England, northward of the Solway, to find that peasant poet[15] at whose career I hinted in the last chapter, and whose burst of Scotch song was a new wakening for that kingdom of the highlands and the moors. I dare not, and will not speak critically of his verses; there they are—in their little budget of gilt-bound, or paper-bound leaves; rhythmic, tender, coarse, glowing, burning, with a grip in many of them at our heart-strings which we may not and cannot shake off. To tell you about these poems and of their special melodies would be like taking you to the sea and telling you how the waves gather and roll—with murmurs that you know—along all the shore.
Nor can I hope to tell any more of what will be new to you about his life and fate. We all know that white-washed, low, roadside cottage—a little drive out from the old Scotch town of Ayr—where he was born; we have been there perhaps; we have seen other Scottish peasants boozing there over their ale; and have noted the names scribbled over tables and cupboards and walls to testify to the world's yearnings and to its pilgrimages thither. We know, too, that other low cottage of Mossgiel, where his poor father—a gospel abiding man—made his last struggle against the fates—and who of a Saturday night—
"Collects his spades, his mattocks, and his hoes,
Hoping the morn in ease and rest to spend,
And weary, o'er the moor, his course does homeward bend."
We all know what a brave fight the two Burns boys, Gilbert and Rob, made of it when Death, "the poor man's dearest friend," took off the father; Gilbert the elder; but Robert the brighter and keener—making verselets in the fields which the elder brother approves, and says would "bear to be printed;" and so presently after, the first poor, thin, dingy volume finds it way to the light, and gives to far-away Edinboro' people their earliest hint of this strange, fine, new, human plant which has begun to blossom under the damps of Mossgiel. But the farm life is hard; the poet is wayward; his jolly friends near by who chant his songs are not helpful; his love affairs, of which he has overstock in his young wildness, run to confusion; quarrels threaten; so he books himself with what moneys the thin, dingy volume of poems have brought him, for America.
What if he had come!
But no; one low, wee encouraging voice—the piping answer to those poems—reaches him from Edinboro', and the poet goes thither in his best gear; Dugald Stewart, and Dr. Blacklock the blind poet, and Mackenzie, of whom I have already made mention, all befriend him. The gentlewomen of Edinboro' entertain him, and admire him, and flatter him; and he, in best blue and buff, with his dark, rolling eyes, and lips that command all shapes of language, holds his dignity with these fine ladies of the Northern capital; gives compliments that make them tremble; prints other and fuller edition of his poems; goes northward amongst the highlands—dropping jewels of verse as he goes—to beautiful women, to waterfalls, to noble patrons. The next season in Edinboro', however, is no longer the same; that brilliant series of fêtes and of conquests has gone by; the new lion is too audacious; he shakes his fetters with a bold rage that intimidates. So we find him with some three hundred pounds only, saved out of the new book and the junketings of the Capital, going off to lease quietly the farm of Ellisland, near to Dumfries, and turn ploughman once more.
It is a poor place, but very beautiful; it is in Nithsdale, and the murmur of the river through its wooded banks makes the poet forget the crop of pebbles which every ploughing turns to the top. He is presently in the Excise too (1789): so gets some added pence by the gauging of beer-barrels and looking after frauds upon the revenue; married too—having out of all the loose love-strings, which held him more or less weakly, at last knotted one, which ties the quiet, pretty, womanly, much injured Jean Armour to his hearth and home, forever. And he begins that Ellisland life bravely well; has prayers at night; teaches the "toddlin' wee things" their catechism; has hope and faith, and sings—and sings; and this, amongst other things, was what he sang—
"O, Willie brewed a peck o' maut,
And Bob and Allen cam to see;
Three blither hearts that lee-lang night
Ye wad na find in Christendie.
We are na fou, we're na that fou,
But just a drappie in our e'e;
The cock may craw, the day may daw,
And ay we'll taste the barley bree.
It is the moon, I ken her horn,
That's blinkin in the lift sae hie;
She shines sae bright, to wyle us hame;
But, by my sooth, she'll wait a wee.
The cock may craw, the day may daw,
And aye we'll taste the barley bree."
No wonder the pebbles began to show more and more in the plough-land; no wonder the jolly fellows of Dumfries came oftener and oftener; the long bouts too amongst the hills chilled him; the crops grew smaller and smaller; the "barley bree" better and better; he has no tact at bargaining; a stanza of Tam O'Shanter is worth more than ten plough-days, yet he makes gifts of his best songs. Household affairs go all awry, let poor Jeanie Armour struggle as she may; the cottage palings are down; debts accumulate; and so do those rollicking nights at the Globe, or in a shieling amongst the hills. Yet from out all the impending want, and the gloom, and the desperation, come such sweet notes as these, reaching the ear of humanity everywhere:—
"John Anderson, my jo, John,
We clamb the hill thegither;
And mony a canty day, John,
W've had wi' ane anither:
Now we maun totter down, John,
But hand in hand we'll go,
And sleep thegither at the foot,
John Anderson, my jo."
At last Ellisland must be given up—crops, beasties and all; and never more the wooded banks of Nithsdale shall feel his tread, or hear his chant mingling with the river murmurs. He, and they all—five souls now—just of an age to relish most the woods, the range, the fields, the daisies of Ellisland, must go to one of the foulest and least attractive streets of Dumfries, and to a home as little attractive as the street. Fifty years thereafter I went over that house and found it small, pinched, and pitifully meagre in all its appointments; twenty years later, Hawthorne speaks of both house and street as filthy. What could or should supply the place now—to the peasant poet—of the fields, the open sky, the gentle fret and murmurs of the streams of Nithsdale?
The foul fiends who taunted him in the woods now lay hold upon him in earnest; every day his fame is flying over straits and seas; every day his poems, old and new, are planting themselves in fresh hearts and brains; every day his wild passions are dealing him back-handed blows. Old neighbors have to pass him by; modest women look away; he has forfeited social position; and I suspect, welcomed in those days of July, 1796, the approaches of the disease which he knew was sapping his life:—
"Oh, Martinmas wind! when wilt thou blaw
And shake the dead leaves frae the tree?
Oh gentle death! when wilt thou come
And tak a life that wearies me?"
And it comes, in that dismal, miserable upper chamber that you can see when you go there;—his wife ill; his little children wandering aimlessly about; it comes sharply; he is on his back—"uneasy" the nurse said, and "chafing"; when suddenly by a great effort—as if at last he would shake off all the beleaguerments of sense, and the haunting phantoms swarming about him—he rallied all his powers—rose to his full height from the bed—tottered for a moment, then fell prone forward a dead man.
This was in the month of July, 1796; Burns being then only thirty-seven. Walter Scott, a young fellow of twenty-five, living in Edinboro', had just printed his translation of Leonora. Wordsworth—unknown save for a thin booklet of indifferent verse—was living down in Dorsetshire, enjoying the "winding wood-walks green," with that sister Dorothy, who "added sunshine to his daylight." These two had not as yet made the acquaintance of that coming man, S. T. Coleridge, who is living at Clevedon, over by Bristol Channel, with that newly married wife, who has decoyed him from his schemes of American migration; and the poet of the Ancient Mariner (as yet unwritten) has published his little booklet with Mr. Cottle, of Bristol, in which are some modest verses signed C. L. And Charles Lamb (for whom those initials stand) is just now in his twenty-first year, and is living in humble lodgings in Little Queen Street, London, from which he writes to Coleridge, saying that "Burns was a God of my idolatry." And in that very year (1796) the dismalest of tragedies is to overshadow those humble lodgings of Little Queen Street. Of this and of Coleridge and of Wordsworth, we shall have somewhat to say in the chapter we open upon next.
[1] Gilbert White, b. 1720; d. 1793. Oxford man; Fellow in 1744; curate of Faringdon 1758; after 1784, at Selborne.
[2] A charmingly illustrated edition of The Natural History of Selborne—showing his ivy-covered home and other objects of interest, was published by Macmillan & Co. in 1875 (edited by Frank Buckland). I am indebted for a copy to my friend, Wm. Robinson, of the London Garden.
[3] Jane Austen, b. 1775; d. 1817. Sense and Sensibility, published 1811. Life was written by her nephew J. Austen-Leigh. Her Letters, edited by Lord Brabourne, 1884.
[4] Not the dreadful, seamy, photographic reproduction of an old oil painting that Lord Brabourne gives, which must be wholly unfair to her; but the earlier engravings.
[5] Thomas Day, b. 1748; d. 1789. Oxford man; married, 1778; Sandford and Merton published 1783.
[6] Mrs. Barbauld (Anna Letitia Aikin), b. 1743; d. 1825. There is a pleasant sketch of Mrs. Barbauld and (for a wonder) an approving and commendatory notice of her in Miss Martineau's Autobiography, vol. i., pp. 228-39.
Miss Martineau's father, it appears, had been a pupil of Mrs. Barbauld.
[7] Boswell's Johnson, vol. vi., p. 28.
[8] The circumstances are given in Crabb Robinson's Diary.
[9] Maria Edgeworth, b. 1767; d. 1849. First volume of Parent's Assistant was published, 1796; Castle Rackrent, 1800; Popular Tales, 1804.
[10] Miss Honora Sneyd among them, in 1773.
[11] Maria Regina Roche, b. 1766; d. 1845. The Grand Dict. Universal du XIX. Siècle enumerates no less than thirteen other romances by her—in forty odd volumes, all translated, and now utterly forgotten!
[12] Mrs. Radcliffe (Ann Ward), b. 1764; d. 1823; Romance of the Forest, 1791; Mysteries of Udolpho, 1794.
Miss Jane Porter, b. 1776; d. 1850; Thaddeus of Warsaw, published 1803; Scottish Chiefs, 1810; Sir Edward Seaward's Narrative (in concert with her sister Anna Maria Porter), published in 1826.
[13] Senior member of the old firm of J. & J. Harper, 82 Cliff Street.
[14] William Beckford, b. 1759; d. 1844. Vathek, published (in French), 1787; better known by an unauthentic English translation, published 1784.
[15] Robert Burns, b. 1759; d. 1796. Poems published 1786. First collected edition, 1800; Cunningham edition, with life, in 1834, 4 vols.
We have still in our mind's eye, and very pleasantly, that quaint old clergyman of Hampshire, who wrote about the daws, and the swallows, and the fern-owl, in a way that has kept the name of Gilbert White alive, for a great many years. And who that has read them can ever forget the stories of that winning Hampshire lady, whose fame takes on new greenness with every spring-time? Following upon our talk of this charming authoress, we had a little discursive mention, in our last chapter, of certain books which at the close of the last century, or early in this, were written for boys and girls; chiefest among these we noted those written by that excellent woman, Miss Edgeworth. We spoke of Miss Roche, who gushed over in the loves of Amanda and Mortimer—those fond and sentimental Children of the Abbey; and of Miss Porter, with her gorgeous heroics about Poland and Scotland, and of Mrs. Radcliffe's stunning Mysteries of Udolpho. We had a glimpse of the strange work and life of William Beckford—son of the rich Lord Mayor Beckford; and we closed our chapter over the grave of that brilliant poet and wrecked man Robert Burns.
That grewsome death of the great Scotch singer occurred in a miserable house of a disorderly street in Dumfries, within four years of the close of the last century; his children—without any mastership to control, and the love that should have guided dumb—wandering in and out; no home comforts about them; the very necessities of life uncertain and precarious; all hopes narrowed for them, and all memories of theirs full of wildest alternations of joyousness and fright.
A Banker Poet.
Samuel Rogers.
You have perhaps read and enjoyed a poem called The Pleasures of Memory. It has tender passages in it; it has an easy, melodious swing:—
"Twilight's soft dews steal o'er the village green,
With magic tints to harmonize the scene;
Stilled is the hum that thro' the hamlet broke,
When round the ruins of their ancient oak
The peasants flocked to hear the minstrel play
And games and carols closed the busy day.
*****
Up springs, at every step—to claim a tear,
Some little friendship formed and cherished here;
And not the lightest leaf, but trembling teems
With golden visions and romantic dreams.
This poem, with echoes of Goldsmith in it, with echoes of Dryden, with echoes of Cowper—all caught together by a hand that was most deft, and by a taste that was most fastidious—was written and published in London, four years before Burns died, by the poet-banker Samuel Rogers.[1] It is not a name that I feel inclined to glorify very much, or that should be honored with any large reverence; but it is brought specially to the reader's notice here, because the life, career, and accomplishment of the man offers so striking a contrast to that of the Scottish poet who was his contemporary. They were born within four years of each other. One under the bare roof of an Ayrshire cottage, the other amid the luxuries of a banker's home in London; one caught inspiration amongst the hills and the woods; the other was taught melody in the drawing-rooms and libraries of London; one wrested his conquests in the kingdom of song, single-handed; and the other, his lesser and feebler ones, bolstered with all the appliances that wealth could give, or long culture suggest. The poetry of the one is rich, individual, and spirited, with sources in nature and in the passions of the man; the poetry of the other has only those congruous and tamer harmonies, whose sources lie in the utterance of deeper and stronger singers before him. Yet the life of that Ayrshire poet was a miserable failure; and the life of this other, Samuel Rogers, was—as the world counts things—a complete success. No half-starved children pulled at his skirts for bread. All luxuries were about him, and from the beginning life flowed with him as calmly as a river.
Of his early history there is not much to be said. We know that he was born at Newington Green—an old suburb lying directly north of the city, toward Stamford Hill—and now engulfed by the tide of London houses; we know he studied at good schools there, and under careful teachers at home; we know that he used to read and love Dr. Beattie's minstrel; we know that once, in boyhood (he tells the story himself), craving a sight of the great Dr. Johnson, he went to his door, but scared by the first tap of the knocker, sidled away, and so never saw that literary magnate. It was a timidity that did not cling to Mr. Rogers; in all his later years no man in London was less afraid of the pounding of a knocker.
His first volume was printed in the very year on which the poor thin book of Burns's first poems saw the light at Kilmarnock. This, however, did not make his reputation; that came six years later with the Pleasures of Memory, of which I cited a fragment; and thereafter, all down through the earlier half of the present century, there was hardly a better known man in London than Samuel Rogers, banker and poet. He voyaged widely and brought back many spoils of travel; he had luxurious tastes and fed them with the utmost discretion. He had social ambition, and rare sagacity in selecting his companions, and in timing his courtesies; he flattered critics, and was obsequious to men with titles.
His house in St. James's—with its broad upper double window, looking out upon the Green Park—was known of all men. Before yet the days of bric-à-brac had come, it was filled with beautiful things and with trophies of art. It was not large nor pretentious; but on its walls were paintings, or sketches by Raphael, by Rubens, by Titian, by Gainsborough, by Rembrandt, and by Reynolds; and in its ante-rooms, marbles by Thorwaldsen and Canova. There were no children of the house, nor was there ever a wife there to aid, or to lord the master. Yet many a lady, ranking by title, or by cleverness, has enjoyed the dinners and the breakfasts for which the house was famous. The cooking was always of the best; the wines the rarest; the meats and fruits the choicest, and the porcelain superb. Like most who have richly equipped houses, he loved to have his fine things admired; and he loved to have his fine words echoed. Few foreigners of any literary distinction visited London from 1815 to 1850, without coming to a taste of the poet's hospitality, and to a taste too, very likely, of his pretty satire. His wit flashed more sharply in his talk than in his verse; and his dinner stories were fabulous in number, in piquancy, and in sting. Like all accomplished raconteurs, he must needs tell his good stories over and over, so that Rogers's butler, it was wittily said, was next best to Rogers.
He could hardly have been called a good-natured man, and was always, I think, keener for a good thing to say, than for a good thing to do. He gave, it is true, largely in charities; but in orderly, business-like ways and with none of the unction and kindly indirectness[2] which doubles the warmth of the best giving. All London knew him as a diner out, as a connoisseur, as an opera-goer, as a patron of clever people, as a friend to those in place, as a flâneur along Piccadilly. He was cool, unimpassioned, blasé in look, never doing openly discreditable things; and he carried his reputation for unmitigated respectability, for wealth, for sharp speeches, for cleverness, for sagacious charities, down to extreme age; dying as late as 1855, ninety-three years old.
Rogers' poems.
Though the poem entitled The Pleasures of Memory made his fame, a later descriptive poem, embodying the gleanings from a trip in Italy, is perhaps better known; and it enjoys the distinction of having been illustrated and printed at a cost of $70,000 of the banker's money. Fragments of that poem you must know; the story of Ginevra, perhaps, best of all; so daintily told that it is likely to live and be cherished as long as any of the bric-à-brac which the banker poet gathered in his travels. 'Tis a story of a picture that he saw—a "lady in her earliest youth."
"She sits inclining forward as to speak,
Her lips half open, and her finger up
As though she said—Beware! Her vest of gold
Broidered with flowers, and clasped from head to foot,
An emerald stone in every golden clasp,
And on her brow, fairer than alabaster,
A coronet of pearls.... Alone it hangs
Over a mouldering heirloom, its companion,
An oaken chest, half eaten by the worms.
*****
Just as she looks there in her bridal dress
She was all gentleness and gaiety.
*****
And in the lustre of her youth, she gave
Her hand with her heart in it, to Francesco.
Great was the joy; but at the bridal feast
When all sat down, the bride was wanting there,
Nor was she to be found! Her father cried
"'Tis but to make a trial of our love!"
And filled his glass to all; but his hand shook,
And soon from guest to guest the panic spread.
'Twas but that instant she had left Francesco
Laughing, and looking back and flying still,
Her ivory tooth imprinted on his finger.
But now, alas, she was not to be found;
Nor from that hour could anything be guessed
But that she was not! Weary of his life
Francesco flew to Venice, and forthwith
Flung it away in battle with the Turk.
Orsini lived; and long mightest thou have seen
An old man wandering as in quest of something—
Something he could not find—he knew not what
When he was gone, the house remained awhile
Silent and tenantless; then, went to strangers.
Full fifty years were past, and all forgot,
When on an idle day—a day of search
Mid the old lumber in the gallery—
That mouldering chest was noticed; and 'twas said
By one as young, as thoughtless, as Ginevra,
Why not remove it from its lurking-place?
'Twas done, as soon as said; but on the way
It burst—it fell; and lo, a skeleton,
With here and there a pearl, an emerald stone,
A golden clasp—clasping a shred of gold.
All else had perished, save a nuptial ring
And a small seal—her mother's legacy,
Engraven with a name—the name of both—
"Ginevra."
A pretty delicacy certainly goes to the telling of that story; but in the tale of Christabel and of the Ancient Mariner there is something more than delicacy—more of brain and passion and far-reaching poetic insight in the poet Coleridge, than in ten such men as Samuel Rogers.
Coleridge.
Coleridge.
Yet what a sad life we have to tell you of now! A life without any repose in it;—a life haunted and goaded by its own ambitions—a life put to wreck by lack of resolute governance—a life going out at last under the shadows of great clouds.
Coleridge[3] was the son of a humble, quiet, self-forgetting, earnest clergyman in the West of England; and the boy, having no other opportunity, came to be billeted upon that famous Christ Hospital school in London—whose boys in their ancient uniform of yellow stockings and blue coats, and bare heads, still provoke the curiosity of those western travellers who wander down Newgate Street, and gaze through the iron grill upon the paved approach-way.
He knew Lamb there—Charles Lamb, who in the Essays of Elia addresses to him that famous apostrophe: "Come back into memory, like as thou wert in the dayspring of thy fancies, with hope like a fiery column before thee—the dark pillar not yet turned—Samuel Taylor Coleridge—Logician, Metaphysician, Bard!" Yet this pale-faced metaphysician and friend of Lamb gets severe beatings at the hands of the Greek master, though his sweet intonations make the corridors resound with the verse of Homer. At Cambridge, where he goes afterward for a time, he is cheated and bullied; his far-off and dreamy look upon the symphonies of a poetic world not qualifying him for the every-day contests of the cloisters; in the haze in which he lives, he loses scent of the honors he had hoped to win; there is no prospective fellowship and no establishment for him there. Disappointed and despairing he goes up to London and enlists as private in the dragoons under a feigned name; but friends detect and prevent the military sacrifice.
A little later, we find him in his own West of England again, at Bristol—whither we have wandered so often in search of poets—and he encounters Southey thereabout, whom he had met for the first time on a visit to Oxford in 1794; this brother poet being as hazy, and dreamy, and theosophic, and hopeful in those days as Coleridge himself. The two form a sort of garret partnership—lecture to the savages of surrounding towns—are inoculated both with the "fraternity and equality" fever which had grown out of the French Revolution—they believing that this French car of Juggernaut is to be dragged with its bloody wheels over the whole brotherhood of nations. In this faith they plot a settlement, in the new region—of which they know nothing, but the sweetly sounding name of Wyoming—upon the banks of the Susquehanna. There they would dig, and build cottages, and philosophize, and found Arcadia. With kindred poetic foresight, Coleridge marries in these days a bride as inexperienced and as poor as himself; and for a little time there is a one-volumed Arcadia on the banks of the Bristol Channel, with a lovely and pensive Sara for its presiding nymph. Only for those few early years does this nymph enter for much into the career of Coleridge. Domesticity[4] was never a shining virtue in him; and wife, and cottage, and Arcadia somehow fade out from the story of his life—as pointless, unsaving, and ineffective for him, all these, as the blurred lines with which we begin a story, and cross them out. Southey, with a practical old aunt to look sharply after his youngness, is quickly driven from his Arcadian feeding ground and for the present disappears.
But Coleridge is still in the wallow of his wild vain hopes and wild discourse, when he encounters another poet—his elder by a few years and of a cooler temperament—William Wordsworth; who about that time had established himself, with his sister Dorothy, upon the borders of Somersetshire. These two men, so unlike, cleave together from the beginning; there is a flagging now in the Unitarian discourses of Coleridge in country chapels; and instead, wanderings with the brother poets over the fair country ways that border upon the Bristol straits—looking off upon the green flats of Somerset, the tufted banks of the Avon, the shining of the sea, with trafficking ships, to the west. Out of these, and of their meditations grow the first book—a joint one—of Lyrical Ballads; its issue not making a ripple on the tide where Crabbe and Cowper were then afloat; and yet creating an epoch in the history of British verse. For in it was the story of the Ancient Mariner, and words therein that will never grow old:
"Farewell, farewell! but this I tell
To thee, thou wedding guest!
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast;
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us
He made and loveth all!"
Yet the poet does still—from time to time wandering into country chapels—hammer at strange, irregular sermons, with a mixed metaphysics and poetry; and theologies of a dim vague sort which beat on ear and hearts, like sleet on slated roofs, and bring never a beam of that warming sunshine which lies in the lines I have quoted from the Mariner.
One wonders how he lived in those times; with no moneys coming from books; only driblets from his preachments; and with not enough of commercial aptitude in him to audit a grocer's bill. The Wedgewoods—so well known by their pottery—who have a quick eye for fine wares of all sorts—recognize his rare brain, and send him over to Germany, bestowing upon him an annuity, which enables him to forego his travelling priesthood, and gives him the means of visiting various cities of the continent.
The Wordsworths make the trip with him; and after a stay of a twelve-month—mostly in Gottingen—Coleridge returns, with his translation of Wallenstein; but this counts for little. A year later, he finds his way to Keswick—to a beautiful, wooded bay, where Southey ultimately established his anchorage for life;[5] the Wordsworths were not far off, at Grasmere; and Coleridge plans that weekly paper—The Friend (finding issue some years later) with wonderful things in it, which few people read then; and so fine-drawn, that few read them now. The damps of Keswick give him rheumatic pains, for which he uses protective stimulants; good Dorothy Wordsworth has fears thereanent, and regards hopefully his appointment to some civil station at Malta. But his impracticabilities lose him the place after a very short incumbency; he crosses to Italy; sees Naples, Amain, and Vesuvius; sees, and knows well at Rome, our American painter, Washington Allston. There are bonds of sympathy we might have looked for between the author of Monaldi and the author of Christabel.
In England again, the fogs bring back old rheumatic pains; the alienation from his wife is declaring itself in more unmistakable ways; and then, or thereabout,[6] begins that terrible slavery to opium, whose chains he wore thenceforth, some twenty years, and was not entirely free until death broke his bonds. There is a dreary, yet touching pathos in this confession of his—"Alas, it is with a bitter smile, a laugh of gall and bitterness, that I recall that period of unsuspecting delusion, and how I first became aware of the maelstrom, the fatal whirlpool to which I was drawing, just when the current was already beyond my strength to stem."
But against the circling terrors of that maelstrom he does make now and then gallant struggle—goes to the house of that kindly surgeon, Gillman, at Highgate, who is charged to guard him—does guard him with exceeding kindness; the servants have orders to watch him—to follow him in the street on his lecture days. But the cunning of a man crazed by his insatiate appetite outwits them; and over and over the turbid roll of his speech—with flashing splendors in it, that give no light—betrays him. And yet it was in those very days of alternate heroic struggle and of devilish yielding that he re-vamps and extends and retouches that sweet, serene poem of Christabel, with the pure, innocent, loving, trustful, winning, blue-eyed daughter of Sir Leoline praying under the oaks, and contrasted with her that graceful, mocking, radiant Geraldine—with smiles that enchant, and alabaster front, and undying graces, and wiles of the serpent, and the damps of the pit in her breath—as if the demon that pursued and pushed him to the wall had foreshadowed himself in that mocking and most beautiful Geraldine.
In those days, too, it was that the young Carlyle used to come to Highgate and watch those bulging eyes—pressed out with excess of brain substance behind them—and listen to his poetic convolutions of speech. "The eyes," he says, "were as full of sorrow as of inspiration. I have heard him talk with eager, musical energy two stricken hours, his face radiant and moist, and communicate no meaning whatsoever to any individual of his hearers, certain of whom—I for one—still kept eagerly listening in hope."
The very children of the neighborhood stood in awe of this wildish man—who seemed talking to the trees at times; and yet their awe was broken by fits of mocking courage, and they made faces at him across the high road. He died there at last—1834 was the year; within sight of the smoke of London and the dome of St. Paul's, toward which from Highgate there stretched in that day a long line of suburban houses, with scattered open fields, hedges, trees, flowers, and the hum of bees.
Charles Lamb.
Essays of Elia.
Among those who used to come somewhiles to follow that fine, confused stream of poetic talk which poured from Coleridge's lips, was Charles Lamb,[7] his old school-fellow and friend in the blue-coat days of Christ's Hospital. And what a strange, odd friendship it seems when we contrast the tender and delicious quietude of the Essays of Elia with the portentous flow of Coleridge's speech! A quiet little stream, purling with gentle bendings and doublings along its own meadows—mated against a river that whirls in mad career, flinging foam high into trees that border it, and only losing its turbidness when it is tided away into the sea, where both brook and river end.
Charles Lamb.
I love Charles Lamb and his writings so much, that I think everybody else ought to love them. There is not great weight in those essays of his; you cannot learn from them what the capital of Hindostan is, or what Buddhism is, nor the date of the capture of Constantinople. Measured by the Dry-as-Dust standard, and there is scarce more in them than in a field of daisies, over which the sunshine and the summer breezes are at play. But what delicacy there is! what a tender humor; what gentle and regaling lapses of quaint thought that beguiles and invites and is soothing and never wearies.
Lamb's poems are not of the best; they have a haltingness—like that in his speech,—with none of Rogers's glibness and currency, and none of his shallowness either. Constraint of rhyme sat on Elia no easier than a dress-coat. But in prose he was all at home; it purled from his pen like a river. It was quaint, kindly, utterly true—with little yaws of humor in it, filling his sails of a sudden, and stirring you to smiling outbreak—then falling away and leaving him to a gently undulating forward movement which charms by its quietude, serenities, and cheerfulness.
There was not much in his life to tell you of; no cannon firing, no drum beats, no moving splendors. A thin, kindly face he had, and thin figure too; in dark or grayish clothes ordinarily, that a clerk might wear; threadbare perhaps at the elbows; not a presentable man amongst swell people; never aspiring to be;—as distinct indeed as a brown hermit-thrush amongst chattering parrots. He has a stammer, too, as I have hinted, in his voice, which may annoy but never makes this quiet man ashamed; in fact, he deploys that stammering habit so as to allow of coy advance, and opportunity for pouncing with tremulous iteration upon his little jokelets, in a way to double their execution; he put it to service, too, in some of his tenderer stories, so as to make, by his very hesitancies, an added and most touching pathos.
He was of humble origin, his father a servitor about Temple Courts—only long gunshot away from Newgate Street; and when the son—through with his Christ Hospital schooling—came to have a small stipend (first, from the South Sea House and later from the East India Company), he had his little family—the only one that ever belonged to Charles Lamb—all about him in his lodgings in Little Queen Street. There was Mary, his sister, ten years older; his poor, bedridden mother, and his father, lapsing into dotage and only happy with cribbage-board at his elbow, and Charles or other good friend to make count. It was this quiet household on which a thunderbolt fell one day. This is Lamb's mention of it in a letter to Coleridge:—