My dear Stuart,

Since you left me, I have been reflecting a great deal on the subject of the Catholic question, and somewhat on The Courier in general. With all my weight of faults, (and no one is less likely to underrate them than myself), a tendency to be influenced by selfish motives in my friendships, or even in the cultivation of my acquaintance, will not, I am sure, be by you placed among them. When we first knew each other, it was perhaps the most interesting period of both our lives, at the very turn of the flood; and I can never cease to reflect with affectionate delight on the steadiness and independence of your conduct and principles, and how, for so many years, with little assistance from others, and with one main guide, a sympathizing tact for the real sense, feeling, and impulses of the respectable part of the English nation, you went on so auspiciously, and likewise so effectively. It is far, very far, from being an hyperbole to affirm, that you did more against the French scheme of Continental domination than the Duke of Wellington has done; or rather, Wellington could neither have been supplied by the Ministers, nor the Ministers supported by the nation, but for the tone first given, and then constantly kept up by the plain, un-ministerial, anti-opposition, anti-Jacobin, anti-Gallican, anti-Napoleon spirit of your writings, aided by a colloquial style and evident good sense, in which, as acting on an immense mass of knowledge of existing men and existing circumstances, you are superior to any man I ever met with in my life-time. Indeed you are the only human being, of whom I can say with severe truth, that I never conversed with you for an hour without rememberable instruction; and with the same simplicity I dare affirm my belief, that my greater knowledge of man has been useful to you, though, from the nature of things, not so useful as your knowledge of men has been to me.

Now, with such convictions, my dear Stuart, how is it possible that I can look back on the conduct of The Courier, from the period of the Duke of York’s restoration, without some pain? You cannot be seriously offended or affronted with me, if, in this deep confidence and in a letter, which, or its contents, can meet no eye but your own, I venture to declare, that though since then much has been done, very much of high utility to the country, by and under Mr. Street, yet The Courier itself has gradually lost that sanctifying spirit which was the life of its life, and without which, even the best and soundest principles lose half their effect on the human mind; I mean, the faith in the faith of the person and paper which brings them forward. They are attributed to the accident of their happening to be for such a side, or for such a party. In short, there is no longer any root in the paper, out of which all the various branches and fruits, and even fluttering leaves, are seen or believed to grow. But it is the old tree, barked round above the root, though the circular decortication is so small and so neatly filled up and coloured as to be scarcely visible but in its effects, excellent fruit still hanging on the boughs, but they are tied on by threads and hairs.

In all this I am well aware, that you are no otherwise to be blamed than in permitting that which without disturbance to your heart and tranquillity, you could not, perhaps, have prevented or effectively modified. But the whole plan of Street seems to me to have been motiveless from the beginning, or at least affected by the grossest miscalculations, in respect even of pecuniary interests. For, had the paper maintained and asserted not only its independence, but its appearance of it;—it is true that Mr. Street might not have had Mr. A. to dine with him, or received as many nods and shakes of the hand from Lord this or that; but at least equally true, that the ministry would have been far more effectively served, and that (I speak from facts), both the paper and its conductor would have been held by the adherents of ministers in far higher respect; and after all, ministers do not love newspapers in their hearts, not even those that support them; indeed it seems epidemic among Parliament men in general to affect to look down upon and despise newspapers, to which they owe ⁹⁹⁹/₁₀₀₀ of their influence and character, and at least ³/₅ths of their knowledge and phraseology. Enough! burn the letter, and forgive the writer, for the purity and affectionateness of his motive.”—Quoted from the Gentleman’s Magazine of June, 1838.[40]

One other point connected with Mr. C.’s writings for public journals I must advert to before concluding this chapter. Mr. Cottle finds want of memory in some part of the narrative, contained in this work, respecting the publication of The Watchman; it is as well to let him tell the story in his own way, which he does as follows. “The plain fact is, I purchased the whole of the paper for The Watchman, allowing Mr. C. to have it at prime cost, and receiving small sums from Mr. C. occasionally, in liquidation. I became responsible, also, with Mr. B. for printing the work, by which means, I reduced the price per sheet, as a bookseller (1000), from fifty shillings to thirty-five shillings. Mr. C. paid me for the paper in fractions, as he found it convenient, but from the imperfection of Mr. Coleridge’s own receipts I never received the whole. It was a losing concern altogether, and I was willing, and did bear, uncomplaining, my portion of the loss. There is some difference between this statement, and that of Mr. Coleridge, in his Biographia Literaria. A defect of memory must have existed, arising out of the lapse of twenty-two years; but my notices, made at the time, did not admit of mistake. There were but twenty sheets in the whole ten numbers of The Watchman, which, at thirty-five shillings per sheet, came to only thirty-five pounds. The paper amounted to much more than the printing.

“I cannot refrain from observing further, that my loss was augmented from another cause. Mr. C. states in the above work, that his London publisher never paid him ‘one farthing,’ but ‘set him at defiance.’ I also was more than his equal companion in this misfortune. The thirty copies of Mr. C.’s poems, and the six ‘Joans of Arc’ (referred to in the preceding letter)[41] found a ready sale, by this said ‘indefatigable London publisher,’ and large and fresh orders were received, so that Mr. Coleridge and myself successively participated in two very opposite sets of feeling; the one of exultation that our publications had found so good a sale; and the other of depression, that the time of payment never arrived!”

I take this opportunity of expressing my sense of many kind acts and much friendly conduct of Mr. Cottle towards my Father, often spoken of to me by my dear departed Mother, into whose heart all benefits sank deep, and by whom he was ever remembered with respect and affection. If I still regard with any disapproval his publication of letters exposing his friend’s unhappy bondage to opium and consequent embarrassments and deep distress of mind, it is not that I would have wished a broad influencive fact in the history of one whose peculiar gifts had made him in some degree an object of public interest, to be finally concealed, supposing it to be attested, as this has been, by clear unambiguous documents. I agree with Mr. Cottle in thinking that he would himself have desired, even to the last, that whatever benefit the world might obtain by the knowledge of his sufferings from opium,—the calamity which the unregulated use of this drug had been to him—into which he first fell ignorantly and innocently, (not as Mr. De Quincey has said, to restore the “riot of his animal spirits,” when “youthful blood no longer sustained it,” but as a relief from bodily pain and nervous irritation)—that others might avoid the rock, on which so great a part of his happiness for so long a time was wrecked; and this from the same benevolent feeling, which prompted him earnestly to desire that his body should be opened after his death, in the hope that some cause of his life-long pains in the region of the bowels might be discovered, and that the knowledge thus obtained might lead to the invention of a remedy for like afflictions. Such a wish indeed, on the former point, as well as afterwards on the latter, he once strongly expressed; but I believe myself to be speaking equally in his spirit when I say, that all such considerations of advantage to the public should be subordinated to the prior claims of private and natural interests. My own opinion is, that it is the wiser and better plan for persons connected with those, whose feats of extraordinary strength have drawn the public gaze upon them, to endure patiently that their frailties should be gazed and wondered at too; and even if they think, that any reflection to them of such celebrity, on such conditions, is far more to be deprecated than desired, still to consider that they are not permitted to determine their lot, in this respect, but are to take it as it has been determined for them, independently of their will, with its peculiar pains and privileges annexed to it. I believe that most of them would be like the sickly queen in the fairy tale of Peronella, who repented when she had obtained the country maiden’s youth and health at the loss of rank and riches. Be this as it may, they have not a choice of evils, nor can exchange the aches and pains of their portion, or its wrinkles and blemishes,—for a fair and painless obscurity. These remarks, however, refer only to the feeling and conduct of parties privately affected by such exposures. Others are bound to care for them as they are not bound to care for themselves. If a finished portrait of one, in whom they are nearly concerned, is due to the world, they alone can be the debtors, for the property by inheritance is in them. Other persons, without their leave, should not undertake to give any such portrait; their duties move on a different plane; nor can they rightly feel themselves “entitled” (to borrow the language of Mr. De Quincey, while I venture to dissent from his judgment), “to notice the most striking aspects of his character, of his disposition and his manners, as so many reflex indications of his intellectual constitution,” if this involves the publication of letters on private subjects, the relation of domestic circumstances and other such personalities affecting the living. I am sure at least that conscience would prohibit me from any such course. I should never think the public good a sufficient apology for publishing the secret history of any man or woman whatever, who had connections remaining upon earth; but if I were possessed of private notices respecting one in whom the world takes an interest, should think it right to place them in the hands of his nearest relations, leaving it to them to deal with such documents, as a sense of what is due to the public, and what belongs to openness and honesty, may demand.

Of all the censors of Mr. Coleridge, Mr. De Quincey is the one whose remarks are the most worthy of attention; those of the rest in general are but views taken from a distance, and filled up by conjecture, views taken through a medium so thick with opinion, even if not clouded with vanity and self-love, that it resembles a horn more than glass or the transpicuous air;—The Opium eater, as he has called himself, had sufficient inward sympathy with the subject of his criticism to be capable in some degree of beholding his mind, as it actually existed, in all the intermingling shades of individual reality; and in few minds have these shades been more subtly intermingled than in my Father’s. But Mr. De Quincey’s portrait of Coleridge is not the man himself; for besides that his knowledge of what concerned him outwardly was imperfect, the inward sympathy of which I have spoken was far from entire, and he has written as if it were greater than it really was. I cannot but conjecture, from what he has disclosed concerning himself, that on some points he has seen Mr. Coleridge’s mind too much in the mirror of his own. His sketches of my Father’s life and character are, like all that he writes, so finely written, that the blots on the narrative are the more to be deplored. One of these blots is the passage to which I referred at the beginning of the last paragraph: “I believe it to be notorious that he first began the use of opium, not as a relief from any bodily pains or nervous irritations—for his constitution was strong and excellent—but as a source of luxurious sensations. It is a great misfortune, at least it is a great pain, to have tasted the enchanted cup of youthful rapture incident to the poetic temperament. Coleridge, to speak in the words of Cervantes, wanted better bread than was made with wheat.” Mr. De Quincey mistook a constitution that had vigour in it for a vigorous constitution. His body was originally full of life, but it was full of death also from the first; there was in him a slow poison, which gradually leavened the whole lump, and by which his muscular frame was prematurely slackened and stupified. Mr. Stuart says that his letters are “one continued flow of complaint of ill health and incapacity from ill health.” This is true of all his letters—(all the sets of them)—which have come under my eye, even those written before he went to Malta, where his opium habits were confirmed. Indeed it was in search of health that he visited the Mediterranean,—for one in his condition of nerves a most ill-advised measure,—I believe that the climate of South Italy is poison to most persons who suffer from relaxation and tendency to low fever. If my Father sought more from opium than the mere absence of pain, I feel assured that it was not luxurious sensations or the glowing phantasmagoria of passive dreams; but that the power of the medicine might keep down the agitations of his nervous system, like a strong hand grasping the jangled strings of some shattered lyre,—that he might once more lightly flash along

released, for a time at least, from the tyranny of ailments, which, by a spell of wretchedness, fix the thoughts upon themselves, perpetually drawing them inwards, as into a stifling gulf. A letter[42] of his has been given in this Supplement, which records his first experience of opium: he had recourse to it in that instance for violent pain in the face, afterwards he sought relief in the same way from the suffering of rheumatism.

I shall conclude this chapter with a poetical sketch drawn from my Father by a friend, who knew him during the latter years of his life, after spending a few days with him at Bath, in the year 1815.[43]

CHAPTER XVIII
MRS. COLERIDGE. LAST STAY AT THE LAKE DISTRICT

[Coleridge married Sarah Fricker, as we have already seen, on 5th October, 1795. The first period of Coleridge’s married life had been a happy one. Although there is reason to believe Coleridge married his wife to “heal a deeper wound,” and that Mary Evans would have been the object of his choice, there is no reason to suppose that he ever regretted his union with Sarah Fricker during the first years of their marriage. All accounts we have of the Clevedon and Stowey periods agree that Coleridge was happy in the new domestic bond. Cottle prints a glowing picture of the life at Clevedon (Reminiscences);[44] and Richard Reynell concurs regarding the Stowey cottage life (Illustrated London News, 1893). Coleridge, too, wrote most affectionately to his wife during his absence in Germany (Letters), and he was a deep lover of his children, and always in dread lest any calamity should happen to them while he was in Germany and Malta (Letters). Coleridge, above most men, was peculiarly fitted to make a good husband. He never spoke of his wife as his intellectual inferior, although he knew perfectly well she was not fitted to follow him in his Platonic imaginings. Dorothy Wordsworth’s remarks (Coleorton Memorials, p. 164) on this point are beside the mark. Coleridge never expected to find in the woman he was prepared to love intellectual grasp of his philosophic system. The woman ideals he has given us are not blue-stockings, but domestic Ophelias and Imogens. Read in this connection The Eolian Harp and Lines written on having left a Place of Retirement, Lewti, Christabel, Love, Fears in Solitude, the Day Dream. “I could,” said Coleridge to Thomas Allsop in 1822, “have been happy with a servant-girl had she only in sincerity of heart responded to my affection.” (Allsop’s Letters of S. T. Coleridge, p. 206.)

Strained relations commenced to develop between the poet and Mrs. Coleridge between the summer of 1801 and the summer of 1802; and that Coleridge was not living happily with his wife began to leak out among their acquaintances during 1802; and by 1807 it had become a recognized fact. The evidence of all this does not require to be quoted to those who have read the Journals and Letters of Dorothy Wordsworth. There are numerous notices of the estrangement, and Dorothy in a letter to Lady Beaumont (Coleorton Memorials, i, 162), enumerates what she supposes were the causes of the gulf of separation.

The causes of the estrangement were cumulative. While Coleridge never looked upon his wife as his inferior, and never expected attainments in her which she did not have, Mrs. Coleridge, as she advanced in years, could not be slow to perceive that there were other women beside herself who deeply interested themselves in her husband with his conversational fascinations and gentlemanly bearing toward woman. She could not be oblivious to the fact that Dorothy Wordsworth, for instance, was intellectually better fitted than herself to comprehend the “large discourse” which characterized Coleridge; and into Dorothy’s ear was poured many a transcendental disquisition not understandable by the wife. Very few wives, as we know from the Carlyle history, can allow their husbands to have a “Gloriana;” and it is not likely that Sarah Fricker was one of the exceptions. Later, Charlotte Brent became one of Coleridge’s Platonic sisterhood, but of what intellectual capacity she was of we cannot tell. But she added to the wife’s resentment. Opium, too, of course, had its share in irritating the discontented wife.

There is little foundation, as far as I can see, for the charge made against Mrs. Coleridge in Flagg’s Life of Allston, p. 356, that Mrs. Coleridge had a horrible and ungovernable temper. I think ill-temper was created by events and by the non-success of Coleridge, and by the unfavourable comparison Coleridge as a literary man made with Southey, who was luckily successful in his ventures while Coleridge was always unfortunate. She was doubtless sorely tried.

It must also be stated that Coleridge did not neglect his wife in the pecuniary sense. He allowed Mrs. Coleridge to enjoy the whole of the Wedgwood Pension (less £20 a year which he granted to her mother, Mrs. Fricker).[45] In his brief bursts of prosperity he also remitted her supplementary sums, £110 was sent from Malta, and £100 more promised. When Remorse was a success he sent her £100, on 20th January 1813 (Letters, 603), and another £100 was promised in a month. Coleridge also effected an insurance on his life for £1,000, with profits, before going to Malta, the premium for which was £27 5s. 6d. per annum. This was paid to the end of his life, sometimes, no doubt, by the help of friends; and the policy realized £2,560. The charge, therefore, that Coleridge neglected or deserted his wife and family is without foundation. Stuart, in an article otherwise by no means favourable to Coleridge, acquits him on this charge. He says Coleridge “never deserted them in the sense which the words imply. On the contrary, he always spoke of them to me with esteem, affection, and anxiety. He allowed to them the greatest part of his income, but that was sometimes insufficient for their comfortable subsistence, and he himself was usually more distressed for money than they;” (Gentleman’s Magazine, 1838). We may add that Coleridge was a man of a vestal purity; and, in spite of his own experience, never said anything in disparagement of the marriage bond.

Coleridge paid his last visit to the Lake District in the spring of 1812, 23rd February to 26th March (Letters, 575). He quitted his wife on cordial enough terms, and wrote an agreeable letter to her from London (Letters, 579), of date 21st April. But he never returned to Keswick. That mysterious gulf which he has described so wonderfully and weirdly in Christabel which separates sundered hearts, widened with the years; and

They stood aloof, the scars remaining!

CHAPTER XIX
REMORSE AT DRURY LANE[46]

By what I have effected, am I to be judged by my fellow-men; what I could have done is a question for my own conscience.—S. T. C.

As the Biographia Literaria does not mention all Mr. Coleridge’s writings, it will be proper to give some account of them here.

The Poetical Works in three volumes include the Juvenile Poems, Sibylline Leaves, Ancient Mariner, Christabel, Remorse, Zapolya, and Wallenstein.

The first volume of Juvenile Poems was published in the Spring of 1796. It contains three sonnets by Charles Lamb, and a poetical Epistle which he called “Sara’s,” but of which my Mother told me she wrote but little. Indeed it is not very like some simple affecting verses, which were wholly by herself, on the death of her beautiful infant, Berkeley, in 1799. In May, 1797, Mr. C. put forth a collection of poems, containing all that were in his first edition, with the exception of twenty pieces and the addition of ten new ones and a considerable number by his friends, Lloyd and Lamb. The Ancient Mariner, Love,[47] The Nightingale, The Foster Mother’s Tale first appeared with the Lyrical Ballads of Mr. Wordsworth in the summer of 1798. There was a third edition of the Juvenile Poems by themselves in 1803, with the original motto from Statius, Felix curarum, etc. Silo. Lib. iv. A spirit of almost child-like sociability seemed to reign among these young poets—they were fond of joint publications.

Wallenstein, a Play translated from the German of Schiller, appeared in 1800. Christabel was not published till April 1816, but written, the first part at Stowey in 1797, the second at Keswick in 1800. It went into a third edition in the first year. The fragment called Kubla Khan, composed in 1797,[48] and the Pains of Sleep, which was annexed to the former by way of contrast, were published with the first edition of Christabel, in 1816.

The Tragedy called Remorse was written in the summer and autumn of 1797, but not represented on the stage till 1813, when it was performed at Drury Lane—on the authority of an old play-bill of the Calne Theatre, “with unbounded applause thirty successive nights.” On “the success of the Remorse,” Mr. Coleridge wrote thus to his friend Mr. Poole, on the 14th of February, 1813:

Letter 152.

“The receipt of your heart-engendered lines was sweeter than an unexpected strain of sweetest music;—or in humbler phrase, it was the only pleasurable sensation which the success of the Remorse has given me. I have read of, or perhaps only imagined, a punishment in Arabia, in which the culprit was so bricked up as to be unable to turn his eyes to the right or to the left, while in front was placed a high heap of barren sand glittering under the vertical sun. Some slight analogue of this, I have myself suffered from the mere unusualness of having my attention forcibly directed to a subject which permitted neither sequence of imagery, nor series of reasoning. No grocer’s apprentice, after his first month’s permitted riot, was ever sicker of figs and raisins than I of hearing about the Remorse. The endless rat-a-tat-tat at our black-and-blue bruised door, and my three master fiends, proof sheets, letters (for I have a raging epistolophobia), and worse than these—invitations to large dinners, which I cannot refuse without offence and imputation of pride, nor accept without disturbance of temper the day before, and a sick aching stomach for two days after—oppress me so that my spirits quite sink under it.

“I have never seen the Play since the first night. It has been a good thing for the Theatre. They will get £8,000 or £10,000 by it, and I shall get more than all my literary labours put together, nay, thrice as much, subtracting my heavy losses in The Watchman and The Friend, including the copyright.”[49]

The manuscript of the Remorse, immediately after it was written, was shown to Mr. Sheridan, “who,” says my Father, in the Preface to the first Edition, “by a twice conveyed recommendation (in the year 1797) had urged me to write a Tragedy for his theatre, who, on my objection that I was utterly ignorant of all stage tactics, had promised that he would himself make the necessary alterations, if the piece should be at all representable.” He however neither gave him any answer, nor returned him the manuscript, which he suffered to wander about the town from his house, and my Father goes on to say, “not only asserted that the Play was rejected because I would not submit to the alteration of one ludicrous line, but finally, in the year 1806, amused and delighted (as who was ever in his society, if I may trust the universal report, without being amused and delighted?) a large company at the house of a highly respectable Member of Parliament, with the ridicule of the Tragedy, as a fair specimen of the whole of which he adduced a line:

In the original copy of the Play, in the first scene of the fourth act, Isidore had commenced his soliloquy in the cavern with the words:

Drip! drip! a ceaseless sound of water-drops,—

as far as I can at present recollect: for, on the possible ludicrous association being pointed out to me, I instantly and thankfully struck out the line.” I repeat this story as told by Mr. C. himself, because it has been otherwise told by others. I have little doubt that it was more pointedly than faithfully told to him, and can never believe that Mr. S. represented a ludicrous line as a fair specimen of the whole Play, or his tenacious adherence to it as the reason for its rejection. I dare say he thought it, as Lord Byron afterwards thought Zapolya, “beautiful but not practicable.” Mr. Coleridge felt that he had some claim to a friendly spirit of criticism in that quarter, because he had “devoted the firstlings of his talents,” as he says in a marginal note, “to the celebration of Sheridan’s genius,”[50] and after the treatment described “not only never spoke unkindly or resentfully of it, but actually was zealous and frequent in defending and praising his public principles and conduct in the Morning Post”—of which, perhaps, Mr. S. knew nothing. However, in lighter moods, my Father laughed at Sheridan’s joke as much as any of his auditors could have done in 1806, and repeated with great effect and mock solemnity “Drip!—Drip!—Drip!—nothing but dripping.” I suppose it was at this time,—the winter of 1806–7—that he made an unsuccessful attempt to bring out the Tragedy at Drury Lane.[51]

When first written this Play had been called Osorio, from the principal character, whose name my Father afterwards improved into Ordonio. I believe he in some degree altered, if he did not absolutely recast, the three last acts after the failure with Mr. Sheridan, who probably led him to see their unfitness for theatrical representation.[52] But of this point I have not certain knowledge. It was when Drury Lane was under the management of Lord Byron and Mr. Whitbread, and through the influence of the former, that it was produced upon the stage. Mr. Gillman says, “Although Mr. Whitbread did not give it the advantage of a single new scene, yet the popularity of the Play was such, that the principal actor, (Mr. Roe,) who had performed in it with great success, made choice of it for his benefit night, and it brought an overflowing house.” This was some time after Mr. Coleridge took up his residence at Highgate, in April, 1816. After all I am happy to think that this drama is a strain of poetry, and like all, not only dramatic poems, but highly poetic dramas, not to be fully appreciated on the stage.

Zapolya came before the public in 1817. The stage fate of this piece is alluded to in the B. L. Mr. Gillman mentions that it was Mr. Douglas Kinnaird, then the critic for Drury Lane, who rejected the Play, and complained of its “metaphysics”—a term which is not, upon all occasions, to be strictly construed, but, when used in familiar talk, seems merely to denote whatever is too fine-spun, in the texture of thought and speech, for common wear; whatever is not readily apprehensible and generally acceptable. Schoolboys call everything in books or discourse, which is graver or tenderer than they like, “metaphysics.” Mr. Kinnaird may have judged quite rightly that the Play was too metaphysical for our theatres in their present state, though certainly plays as metaphysical were once well received on the stage. Zapolya, however, had a favourable audience from the public as a dramatic poem. Mr. Gillman says this Christmas Tale, which the author “never sat down to write, but dictated while walking up and down the room, became so immediately popular that 2,000 copies were sold in six weeks.”

The collection of poems entitled Sibylline Leaves, “in allusion to the fragmentary and widely scattered state in which they had been long suffered to remain,” appeared in 1817, about the same time with Zapolya, the Biographia Literaria, and the first Lay Sermon.

The Miscellaneous Poems were composed at different periods of the author’s life, many of them in his later years. I believe that Youth and Age was written before he left the North of England in 1810,[53] when he was about seven or eight-and-thirty,—early indeed for the poet to say of himself

The whole of the Poetical Works, with the exception of a few which must be incorporated in a future edition, are contained in that in three volumes.[54] The Fall of Robespierre, an Historic drama, of which the first act was written by Mr. Coleridge, and published September 22, 1794, is printed in the first vol. of the Lit. Remains. This first act contains the Song on Domestic Peace. In the blank verse there are some faint dawnings of his maturer style, as in these lines:

and in these:

but it contains scarcely anything of his peculiar original powers, and some of the lines are in schoolboy taste; for instance,

Yet three years after the date of this composition, in 1797, which has been called his Annus Mirabilis, he had reached his poetical zenith. But perhaps it may be said that, from original temperament, and the excitement of circumstances, my Father lived fast.

He had four poetical epochs, which represented, in some sort, boyhood, youthful manhood, middle age, and the decline of life. The first commenced a little on this side childhood, when he wrote Time real and Imaginary, and ended in 1796. This period embraces the Juvenile Poems, concluding with Religious Musings, written on the Christmas Eve of 1794, a few months after The Fall of Robespierre: The Destiny of Nations was composed a little earlier. Lewti, written in 1795, The Æolian Harp, and Reflections on having left a place of Retirement, written soon after, are more finished poems, and exhibit more of his peculiar vein than any which he wrote before them; though one poet, Mr. Bowles, has said that he never surpassed the Religious Musings! Fire, Famine, and Slaughter belongs to 1796. The Lines to a Friend (Charles Lamb) who had declared his intention of writing no more poetry, and those To a Young Friend (Charles Lloyd) were composed in the same year. These poems of 1794–5-6 may be considered intermediate in power as in time, and so forming a link between the first epoch and the next.[55]

Then came his poetic prime, which commenced with the Ode to the Departing Year, composed at the end of December, 1796. The year following, the five-and-twentieth of his life, produced the Ancient Mariner, Love, and The Dark Ladie, the first part of Christabel, Kubla Khan, Remorse, in its original cast, France, and This Lime-tree bower. Fears in Solitude, The Nightingale, and The Wanderings of Cain, were written in 1798. Frost at Midnight,[56] The Picture,[57] the Lines to the Rev. G. Coleridge,[58] and those To W. Wordsworth,[59] are all of this same Stowey period. It was in June, 1797, that my Father began to be intimate with Mr. Wordsworth, and this doubtless gave an impulse to his mind. The Hymn before Sunrise,[60] and other strains produced in Germany, link this period to the next. The Hexameters written during a temporary blindness, and the Catullian Hendecasyllables (which are freely translated from Matthisson’s Milesisches Mährchen) Mr. Cottle seems to place in 1797,[61] but the Author has marked the former as produced in 1799, and I believe that the latter are of the same date. The Night Scene, Myrtle leaf that ill besped,[62] Maiden that with sullen brow, are of this period, and so I believe are Lines composed in a concert-room, and some others.

The poems which succeed are distinguished from those of my Father’s Stowey life by a less buoyant spirit. Poetic fire they have, but not the clear bright mounting flame of his earlier poetry. Their meditative vein is graver, and they seem tinged with the sombre hues of middle age; though some of them were written before the Author was thirty-five years old. A characteristic poem of this period is Dejection, an Ode: composed at Keswick, April 4, 1802. Wallenstein had been written in London in 1800. The Three Graves was composed in 1805 or 6;[63] the second part of Christabel soon after the Author’s settling in the Lake country (in 1801);[64] Youth and Age not long before he quitted it as a residence for ever (in 1810).[65] Recollections of Love must have been written on his return to Keswick from Malta in 1806: The Happy Husband at that time, or earlier. The small fragment called The Knight’s Tomb probably belongs to the North. The Devil’s Thoughts appeared in The Morning Post in 1800.[66] This production certainly has in it more of youthful sprightliness than of middle-aged soberness; still it is less fantastic and has more of world-wisdom in its satire than the War Eclogue of 1796. The Complaint and Reply first appeared in 1802. The Ode to Tranquillity was published in The Friend, March, 1809.

The poems of his after years, even when sad, are calmer in their melancholy than those produced while he was ceasing to be young. We are less heavy-hearted when youth is out of sight than when it is taking its leave. Duty surviving Self-Love, The Pang more sharp than all, Love’s Apparition and Evanishment, The Blossoming of the solitary Date tree, and some other poems of his latter years, have this character of resigned and subdued sadness. Work without Hope was written at fifty-six. The Visionary Hope and The Pains of Sleep,[67] which express more agitation and severer suffering, are of earlier date. These and all in the Sibylline Leaves were written before the end of 1817, when he had completed his forty-fifth year. The productions of the fourth epoch, looked at as works of imagination, are tender, graceful, exquisitely finished, but less bold and animated than those of his earlier day. This may be said of Zapolya, Alice du Clos,[68] The Garden of Boccaccio,[69] The Two Founts, Lines suggested by the last Words of Berengarius, Sancti Dominici Pallium, and other poems written, I believe, when the poet was past forty, the four last-named after he was fifty years old. Love, Hope, and Patience in Education was, I think, one of his latest poetical efforts, if not the very last.

The following prose compositions are included in the poetical volumes, and the Apologetic Preface to Fire, Famine and Slaughter, containing a comparison between Milton and Jeremy Taylor, is placed at the end of Vol. I: An Allegoric Vision, first published in The Courier in 1811, and New Thoughts on Old Subjects, which first appeared in The Keepsake, are inserted in Vol. II.

The whole of the Poetical Works, except a few which have been reprinted in the Literary Remains, are contained in the stereotyped edition in three volumes. The Poems without the Dramas have been collected in a single volume,[70] from which some of the Juvenile Poems, and two or three of later date, are excluded, and which includes a few not contained in the three vol. edition.

I now proceed to Mr. Coleridge’s compositions in Prose. Conciones ad Populum, are two addresses to the People, delivered at the latter end of February,[71] and then thrown into a small pamphlet. “After this,” says Mr. Cottle, “he consolidated two other of his lectures, and published them under the title of The Plot Discovered.” A moral and political Lecture delivered at Bristol by Mr. C. was published in the same year. I do not know whether he printed any of his other Bristol orations of the year ninety-five. The Watchman was carried on in 1796. The first number appeared March 1; the tenth and last, May 13. These were youthful immature productions. Whatever was valuable and of a permanent nature in them was transferred into his later productions, or included in later publications.

The Friend, a Literary, Moral, and Political Weekly Paper, excluding personal and party politics and the events of the day, was written and published at Grasmere. The first number appeared on Thursday, June 1st, 1809, the 27th and last of that edition, March 15, 1810. The Friend next appeared before the public in 3 vols. in 1818. This was “rather a rifacimento,” as the Author said, “than a new edition, the additions forming so large a proportion of the whole work, and the arrangement being altogether new.” (Essays V-XIII, pp. 38–128, treat of the Duty of communicating truth, and the conditions under which it may be safely communicated; Essay V is on the expediency of pious frauds, etc.). The third edition of 1837 gave the Author’s last corrections, an appendix containing the parts thrown out in the recast, with some other miscellanea, and a synoptical table of the contents by the Editor. There is now a fourth edition.

The two Lay Sermons were published, the one in 1816, the other in 1817. The first is entitled The Statesman’s Manual, or The Bible the best Guide to Political skill and foresight: a Lay Sermon addressed to the higher classes of society, with an Appendix, containing comments and essays connected with the study of the inspired writings:—the second A Lay Sermon, addressed to the Higher and Middle Classes, on the existing distresses and discontents. Mr. Gillman says he “had the intention of addressing a third to the lower classes.”

The Biographia Literaria was published in 1817, but parts of the first volume must have been composed some years earlier.[72] The Edinburgh Review in its August number of that year was as favourable to the book as could be expected.”[73]

CHAPTER XX
COTTLE’S DARK CHAPTER

“A reconciliation has taken place, but the feeling, which I had previous to that moment, when the (three-fourth) calamity burst, like a thunderstorm from a blue sky, on my soul, after fifteen years of such religious, almost superstitious idolatry and self-sacrifice. Oh no! that, I fear, can never return. All outward actions, all inward wishes, all thoughts and admirations will be the same—are the same, but—aye, there remains an immedicable But.”

Not much is known regarding Coleridge’s whereabouts in the summer of 1813. In September Southey came to London and took him to see Madame De Staël (Letters of Southey, ii, 332), who as we know was drowned by his monologue. In the end of October Coleridge left for Bristol, and reached the then second city of England to deliver a fifth course of lectures on poetry which had been arranged for by his friends there (Cottle’s Rem., 353). The course lasted from 28th October to 16th November (Bohn Library, Shakespeare Lectures, p. 456). Cottle says the first lecture was on Hamlet; but the report from the Bristol papers (Ashe, Bohn Library, 458) contradicts this, the lecture on Hamlet being the third. A sixth course of lectures was arranged for, which Cottle says were well attended (Rem., 354). Another course of four lectures on Milton, between 5th and 14th April (Ashe, Bohn Library, 457), was indifferently attended. His eighth course of lectures, this time on Homer, scarcely paid expenses (Cottle, 355). Although Coleridge must have repeated himself frequently in these lectures, they were new to Bristol. C. R. Leslie, a painter of some note in his day, speaks favourably of them (Leslie’s Autobiography, etc., vol. 1, chap. 3). The following letters belong to the visit to Bristol.

Letter 153. To Wade

* * * Since my arrival at the Greyhound, Bath, I have been confined to my bed-room, almost to my bed. Pray for my recovery, and request Mr. Roberts’s[74] prayers, for my infirm, wicked heart; that Christ may mediate to the Father, to lead me to Christ, and give me a living instead of a reasoning faith! and for my health, so far only as it may be the condition of my improvement, and final redemption.

My dear affectionate friend, I am your obliged, and grateful, and affectionate, friend,