The departure of the two poets for the Continent was delayed only till they had seen their joint volume through the press. The Lyrical Ballads appeared in the autumn of 1798, and on 16th September of that year Coleridge left Yarmouth for Hamburg with Wordsworth and his sister. [1] The purpose of his two companions' tour is not known to have been other than the pleasure, or mixed pleasure and instruction, usually derivable from foreign travel; that of Coleridge was strictly, even sternly, educational. Immediately on his arrival in Germany he parted from the Wordsworths, who went on to Gozlar, [2] and took up his abode at the house of the pastor at Ratzeburg, with whom he spent five months in assiduous study of the language. In January he removed to Göttingen. Of his life here during the next few months we possess an interesting record in the Early Years and Late Reflections of Dr. Carrlyon, a book published many years after the events which it relates, but which is quite obviously a true reflection of impressions yet fresh in the mind of its writer when its materials were first collected. Its principal value, in fact, is that it gives us Coleridge from the standpoint of the average young educated Englishman of the day, sufficiently intelligent, indeed, to be sensible of his fellow-student's transcendent abilities, but as little awed by them out of youth's healthy irreverence of criticism as the ordinary English undergraduate ever has been by the intellectual supremacy of any "greatest man of his day" who might chance to have been his contemporary at Oxford or Cambridge. In Dr. Carrlyon's reminiscences and in the quoted letters of a certain young Parry, another of the English student colony at Göttingen, we get a piquant picture of the poet-philosopher of seven-and-twenty, with his yet buoyant belief in his future, his still unquenched interest in the world of things, and his never-to-be-quenched interest in the world of thought, his even then inexhaustible flow of disquisition, his generous admiration for the gifts of others, and his naïve complacency – including, it would seem, a touch of the vanity of personal appearance – in his own. "He frequently," writes Dr. Carrlyon, "recited his own poetry, and not unfrequently led us further into the labyrinth of his metaphysical elucidations, either of particular passages or of the original conception of any of his productions, than we were able to follow him. At the conclusion, for instance, of the first stanza of Christabel, he would perhaps comment at full length upon such a line as 'Tu – whit! – Tu – whoo!' that we might not fall into the mistake of supposing originality to be its sole merit." The example is not very happily chosen, for Coleridge could hardly have claimed "originality" for an onomatopoeia which occurs in one of Shakspeare's best known lyrics; but it serves well enough to illustrate the fact that he "very seldom went right to the end of any piece of poetry; to pause and analyse was his delight." His disappointment with regard to his tragedy of Osorio was, we also learn, still fresh. He seldom, we are told, "recited any of the beautiful passages with which it abounds without a visible interruption of the perfect composure of his mind." He mentioned with great emotion Sheridan's inexcusable treatment of him with respect to it. At the same time, adds his friend, "he is a severe critic of his own productions, and declares" (this no doubt with reference to his then, and indeed his constant estimate of Christabel as his masterpiece) "that his best poems have perhaps not appeared in print."

Young Parry's account of his fellow-student is also fresh and pleasing. "It is very delightful," he tells a correspondent, "to hear him sometimes discourse on religious topics for an hour together. His fervour is particularly agreeable when compared with the chilling speculations of German philosophers," whom Coleridge, he adds, "successively forced to abandon all their strongholds." He is "much liked, notwithstanding many peculiarities. He is very liberal towards all doctrines and opinions, and cannot be put out of temper. These circumstances give him the advantage of his opponents, who are always bigoted and often irascible. Coleridge is an enthusiast on many subjects, and must therefore appear to many to possess faults, and no doubt he has faults, but he has a good heart and a large mass of information with," as his fellow-student condescendingly admits, "superior talents. The great fault which his friends may lament is the variety of subjects which he adopts, and the abstruse nature of his ordinary speculations, extra homines podtas. They can easily," concludes the writer, rising here to the full stateliness of youth's epistolary style, "they can easily excuse his devoted attachment to his country, and his reasoning as to the means of producing the greatest human happiness, but they do not universally approve the mysticism of his metaphysics and the remoteness of his topics from human comprehension."

In the month of May 1799 Coleridge set out with a party of his fellow-students on a walking tour through the Harz Mountains, an excursion productive of much oral philosophising on his part, and of the composition of the Lines on ascending the Brocken, not one of the happiest efforts of his muse. As to the philosophising, "he never," says one of his companions on this trip, "appeared to tire of mental exercise; talk seemed to him a perennial pastime, and his endeavours to inform and amuse us ended only with the cravings of hunger or the fatigue of a long march, from which neither his conversational powers nor his stoicism could protect himself or us." It speaks highly for the matter of Coleridge's allocutions that such incessant outpourings during a mountaineering tramp appear to have left no lasting impression of boredom behind them. The holiday seems to have been thoroughly enjoyed by the whole party, and Coleridge, at any rate, had certainly earned it. For once, and it is almost to be feared for the last time in his life, he had resisted his besetting tendency to dispersiveness, and constrained his intelligence to apply itself to one thing at a time. He had come to Germany to acquire the language, and to learn what of German theology and metaphysics he might find worth the study, and his five months' steady pursuit of the former object had been followed by another four months of resolute prosecution of the latter. He attended the lectures of Professor Blumenbach, and obtained through a fellow-student notes from those of Eichhorn. He suffered no interruption in his studies, unless we are to except a short visit from Wordsworth and his sister, who had spent most of their stay abroad in residence at Gozlar; and he appears, in short, to have made in every way the best use of his time. On 24th June 1799 he gave his leave-taking supper at Göttingen, replying to the toast of his health in fluent German but with an execrable accent; and the next day presumably he started on his homeward journey.

His movements for the next few months are incorrectly stated in most of the brief memoirs prefixed to the various editions of the poet's works, – their writers having, it is to be imagined, accepted without examination a misplaced date of Mr. Gillman's. It is not the fact that Coleridge "returned to England after an absence of fourteen months, and arrived in London the 27th of November." His absence could not have lasted longer than a year, for we know from the evidence of Miss Wordsworth's diary that he was exploring the Lake country (very likely for the first time) in company with her brother and herself in the month of September 1799. The probability is that he arrived in England early in July, and immediately thereupon did the most natural and proper thing to be done under the circumstances – namely, returned to his wife and children at Nether Stowey, and remained there for the next two months, after which he set off with the Wordsworths, then still at Alfoxden, to visit the district to which the latter had either already resolved upon, or were then contemplating, the transfer of their abode. The 27th of November is no doubt the correct date of his arrival in London, though not "from abroad." And his first six weeks in the metropolis were spent in a very characteristic fashion – in the preparation, namely, of a work which he pronounced with perfect accuracy to be destined to fall dead from the press. He shut himself up in a lodging in Buckingham Street, Strand, and by the end of the above-mentioned period he had completed his admirable translation of Wallenstein, in itself a perfect, and indeed his most perfect dramatic poem. The manuscript of this English version of Schiller's drama was purchased by Messrs. Longman under the condition that the translation and the original should appear at the same time. Very few copies were sold, and the publishers, indifferent to Coleridge's advice to retain the unsold copies until the book should become fashionable, disposed of them as waste paper. Sixteen years afterwards, on the publication of Christabel, they were eagerly sought for, and the few remaining copies doubled their price. It was while engaged upon this work that he formed that connection with political jouralism which lasted, though with intermissions, throughout most of the remainder of his life. His early poetical pieces had, as we have seen, made their first appearance in the Morning Post, but hitherto that newspaper had received no prose contribution from his pen. His engagement with its proprietor, Mr. Daniel Stuart, to whom he had been introduced during a visit to London in 1797, was to contribute an occasional copy of verses for a stipulated annual sum; and some dozen or so of his poems (notably among them the ode to France and the two strange pieces Fire Famine and Slaughter and The Devil's Thoughts) had entered the world in this way during the years 1798 and 1799.

Misled by the error above corrected, the writers of some of the brief memoirs of Coleridge's life represent him as having sent verse contributions to the Morning Post from Germany in 1799; but as the earliest of these only appeared in August of that year there is no reason to suppose that any of them were written before his return to England. The longest of the serious pieces is the well-known Ode to Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, which cannot be regarded as one of the happiest of Coleridge's productions. Its motive is certainly a little slight, and its sentiment more than a little overstrained. The noble enthusiasm of the noble lady who, "though nursed in pomp and pleasure," could yet condescend to "hail the platform wild where once the Austrian fell beneath the shaft of Tell," hardly strikes a reader of the present day as remarkable enough to be worth "gushing" over; and when the poet goes on to suggest as the explanation of Georgiana's having "learned that heroic measure" that the Whig great lady had suckled her own children, we certainly seem to have taken the fatal step beyond the sublime! It is to be presumed that Tory great ladies invariably employed the services of a wet-nurse, and hence failed to win the same tribute from the angel of the earth, who, usually, while he guides

"His chariot-planet round the goal of day, All trembling gazes on the eye of God,"

but who on this occasion "a moment turned his awful face away" to gaze approvingly on the high-born mother who had so conscientiously performed her maternal duties.

Very different is the tone of this poem from that of the two best known of Coleridge's lighter contributions to the Morning Post. The most successful of these, however, from the journalistic point of view, is in a literary sense the less remarkable. One is indeed a little astonished to find that a public, accustomed to such admirable political satire as the Anti-Jacobin, should have been so much taken as it seems to have been by the rough versification and somewhat clumsy sarcasm of the Devil's Thoughts. The poem created something like a furore, and sold a large reissue of the number of the Morning Post in which it appeared. Nevertheless it is from the metrical point of view doggerel, as indeed the author admits, three of its most smoothly-flowing stanzas being from the hand of Southey, while there is nothing in its boisterous political drollery to put its composition beyond the reach of any man of strong partisan feelings and a turn for street-humour. Fire Famine and Slaughter, on the other hand, is literary in every sense of the word, requiring indeed, and very urgently, to insist on its character as literature, in order to justify itself against the charge of inhuman malignity. Despite the fact that "letters four do form his name," it is of course an idealised statesman, and not the real flesh and blood Mr. Pitt, whom the sister furies, Fire, Famine, and Slaughter, extol as their patron in these terrible lines. The poem must be treated as what lawyers call an "A. B. case." Coleridge must be supposed to be lashing certain alphabetical symbols arranged in a certain order. This idealising process is perfectly easy and familiar to everybody with the literary sense. The deduction for "poetic license" is just as readily, though it does not, of course, require to be as frequently, made with respect to the hyperbole of denunciation as with respect to that of praise. Nor need we doubt that this deduction had in fact been made by all intelligent readers long before that agitating dinner at Mr. Sotheby's, which Coleridge describes with such anxious gravity in his apologetic preface to the republication of the lines. On the whole one may pretty safely accept De Quincey's view of the true character of this incident as related by him in his own inimitable fashion, namely, that it was in the nature of an elaborate hoax, played off at the poet's expense. [3] The malice of the piece is, as De Quincey puts it, quite obviously a "malice of the understanding and fancy," and not of the heart. There is significance in the mere fact that the poem was deliberately published by Coleridge two years after its composition, when the vehemence of his political animosities had much abated. Written in 1796, it did not appear in the Morning Post till January 1798.

He was now, however, about to draw closer his connection with the newspaper press. Soon after his return from Germany he was solicited to "undertake the literary and political department in the Morning Post," and acceded to the proposal "on condition that the paper should thenceforward be conducted on certain fixed and announced principles, and that he should be neither obliged nor requested to deviate from them in favour of any party or any event." Accordingly, from December 1799 until about midsummer of 1800, Coleridge became a regular contributor of political articles to this journal, sometimes to the number of two or three in one week. At the end of the period of six months he quitted London, and his contributions became necessarily less frequent, but they were continued (though with two apparent breaks of many months in duration) [4] until the close of the year 1802. It would seem, however, that nothing but Coleridge's own disinclination prevented this connection from taking a form in which it would have profoundly modified his whole future career. In a letter to Mr. Poole, dated March 1800, he informs his friend that if he "had the least love of money" he could "make sure of £2000 a year, for that Stuart had offered him half shares in his two papers, the Morning Post and the Courier, if he would devote himself to them in conjunction with their proprietor. But I told him," he continues, "that I would not give up the country and the lazy reading of old folios for two thousand times two thousand pounds, – in short, that beyond £350 a year I considered money as a real evil." Startlingly liberal as this offer will appear to the journalist, it seems really to have been made. For, writing long afterwards to Mr. Nelson Coleridge, Mr. Stuart says: "Could Coleridge and I place ourselves thirty years back, and he be so far a man of business as to write three or four hours a day, there is nothing I would not pay for his assistance. I would take him into partnership, and I would enable him to make a large fortune." Nor is there any reason to think that the bargain would have been a bad one for the proprietor from the strictly commercial point of view. Coleridge in later years may no doubt have overrated the effect of his own contributions on the circulation of the Morning Post, but it must have been beyond question considerable, and would in all likelihood have become far greater if he could have been induced to devote himself more closely to the work of journalism. For the fact is – and it is a fact for which the current conception of Coleridge's intellectual character does not altogether prepare one – that he was a workman of the very first order of excellence in this curious craft. The faculties which go to the attainment of such excellence are not perhaps among the highest distinctions of the human mind, but, such as they are, they are specific and well marked; they are by no means the necessary accompaniments even of the most conspicuous literary power, and they are likely rather to suffer than to profit by association with great subtlety of intellect or wide philosophic grasp. It is not to the advantage of the journalist, as such, that he should see too many things at a time, or too far into any one thing, and even the gifts of an active imagination and an abundant vocabulary are each of them likely to prove a snare. To be wholly successful, the journalist – at least the English journalist – must not be too eloquent, or too witty, or too humorous, or too ingenious, or too profound. Yet the English reader likes, or thinks he likes, eloquence; he has a keen sense of humour, and a fair appreciation of wit; and he would be much hurt if he were told that ingenuity and profundity were in themselves distasteful to him. How, then, to give him enough of these qualities to please and not enough to offend him – as much eloquence as will stir his emotions, but not enough to arouse his distrust; as much wit as will carry home the argument, but not enough to make him doubt its sincerity; as much humour as will escape the charge of levity, as much ingenuity as can be displayed without incurring suspicion, and as much profundity as may impress without bewildering? This is a problem which is fortunately simplified for most journalists by the fact of their possessing these qualities in no more than, if in so much as, the minimum required. But Coleridge, it must be remembered, possessed most of them in embarrassing superfluity. Not all of them indeed, for, though he could be witty and at times humorous, his temptations to excess in these respects were doubtless not considerable. But as for his eloquence, he was from his youth upwards Isoo torrentior, his dialectical ingenuity was unequalled, and in disquisition of the speculative order no man was so apt as he to penetrate more deeply into his subject than most of his readers would care to follow him. À priori, therefore, one would have expected that Coleridge's instincts would have led him to rhetorise too much in his diction, to refine too much in his arguments, and to philosophise too much in his reflections, to have hit the popular taste as a journalist, and that at the age of eight-and-twenty he would have been unable to subject these tendencies either to the artistic repression of the maturer writer or to the tactical restraints of the trained advocate. This eminently natural assumption, however, is entirely rebutted by the facts. Nothing is more remarkable in Coleridge's contributions to the Morning Post than their thoroughly workmanlike character from the journalistic point of view, their avoidance of "viewiness," their strict adherence to the one or two simple points which he is endeavouring at any particular juncture in politics to enforce upon his readers, and the steadiness with which he keeps his own and his readers' attention fixed on the special political necessities of the hour. His articles, in short, belong to that valuable class to which, while it gives pleasure to the cultivated reader, the most commonplace and Philistine man of business cannot refuse the to him supreme praise of being eminently "practical." They hit the nail on the head in nearly every case, and they take the plainest and most direct route to their point, dealing in rhetoric and metaphor only so far as the strictly "business" ends of the argument appear to require. Nothing, for instance, could have been better done, better reasoned and written, more skilfully adapted throughout to the English taste, than Coleridge's criticism (3lst Dec. 1799) on the new constitution established by Bonaparte and Sieyes on the foundation of the Consulate, with its eighty senators, the "creatures of a renegade priest, himself the creature of a foreign mercenary, its hundred tribunes who are to talk and do nothing, and its three hundred legislators whom the constitution orders to be silent." What a ludicrous Purgatory, adds he, "for three hundred Frenchmen!" Very vigorous, moreover, is he on the ministerial rejection of the French proposals of peace in 1800, arguing against the continuance of the war on the very sound anti-Jacobin ground that if it were unsuccessful it would inflame French ambition anew, and, if successful, repeat the experience of the results of rendering France desperate, and simply reanimate Jacobinism.

Effective enough too, for the controversial needs of the moment, was the argument that if France were known, as Ministers pretended, to be insincere in soliciting peace, "Ministers would certainly treat with her, since they would again secure the support of the British people in the war, and expose the ambition of the enemy;" and that, therefore, the probability was that the British Government knew France to be sincere, and shrank from negotiation lest it should expose their own desire to prosecute the war. [5] Most happy, again, is his criticism of Lord Grenville's note, with its references to the unprovoked aggression of France (in the matter of the opening of the Scheldt, etc.) as the sole cause and origin of the war. "If this were indeed true, in what ignorance must not Mr. Pitt and Mr. Windham have kept the poor Duke of Portland, who declared in the House of Lords that the cause of the war was the maintenance of the Christian religion?"

To add literary excellence of the higher order to the peculiar qualities which give force to the newspaper article is for a journalist, of course, a "counsel of perfection;" but it remains to be remarked that Coleridge did make this addition in a most conspicuous manner. Mrs. H. N. Coleridge's three volumes of her father's Essays on his own Times deserve to live as literature apart altogether from their merits as journalism. Indeed among the articles in the Morning Post between 1799 and 1802 may be found some of the finest specimens of Coleridge's maturer prose style. The character of Pitt, which appeared on 19th March 1800, is as remarkable for its literary merits as it is for the almost humorous political perversity which would not allow the Minister any single merit except that which he owed to the sedulous rhetorical training received by him from his father, viz. "a premature and unnatural dexterity in the combination of words." [6] The letters to Fox, again, though a little artificialised perhaps by reminiscences of Junius, are full of weight and dignity. But by far the most piquant illustration of Coleridge's peculiar power is to be found in the comparison between his own version of Pitt's speech of 17th February 1800, on the continuance of the war, with the report of it which appeared in the Times of that date. With the exception of a few unwarranted elaborations of the arguments here and there, the two speeches are in substance identical; but the effect of the contrast between the minister's cold state-paper periods and the life and glow of the poet-journalist's style is almost comic. Mr. Gillman records that Canning, calling on business at the editor's, inquired, as others had done, who was the reporter of the speech for the Morning Post, and, on being told, remarked drily that the report "did more credit to his head than to his memory."

On the whole one can well understand Mr. Stuart's anxiety to secure Coleridge's permanent collaboration with him in the business of journalism; and it would be possible to maintain, with less of paradox than may at first sight appear, that it would have been better not only for Coleridge himself but for the world at large if the editor's efforts had been successful. It would indeed have been bowing the neck to the yoke; but there are some natures upon which constraint of that sort exercises not a depressing but a steadying influence. What, after all, would the loss in hours devoted to a comparatively inferior class of literary labour have amounted to when compared with the gain in much-needed habits of method and regularity, and – more valuable than all to an intellect like Coleridge's, – in the constant reminder that human life is finite and the materials of human speculation infinite, and that even a world-embracing mind must apportion its labour to its day? There is, however, the great question of health to be considered – the question, as every one knows, of Coleridge's whole career and life. If health was destined to give way, in any event – if its collapse, in fact, was simply the cause of all the lamentable external results which followed it, while itself due only to predetermined internal conditions over which the sufferer had no control – then to be sure cadit qu'stio. At London or at the Lakes, among newspaper files or old folios, Coleridge's life would in that case have run the same sad course; and his rejection of Mr. Stuart's offer becomes a matter of no particular interest to disappointed posterity. But be that as it may, the "old folios" won the day. In the summer of 1800 Coleridge quitted London, and having wound up his affairs at his then place of residence, removed with his wife and children to a new and beautiful home in that English Lake country with which his name was destined, like those of Southey and Wordsworth, to be enduringly associated.

Footnotes

1. De Quincey's error, in supposing that Coleridge's visit to Germany to "complete his education" was made at an earlier date than this journey with the Wordsworths, is a somewhat singular mistake for one so well acquainted with the facts of Coleridge's life. Had we not his own statement that this of 1798 was the first occasion of his quitting his native country, it so happens that we can account in England for nearly every month of his time from his leaving Cambridge until this date.

2. It has only within a comparatively recent period been ascertained that the visit of the Wordsworths to Germany was itself another result of Thomas Wedgwood's generous appreciation of literary merit. It appears, on the incontrovertible testimony of the Wedgwoods' accounts with their agents at Hamburg, that the expenses of all three travellers were defrayed by their friend at home. The credits opened for them amounted, during the course of their stay abroad, to some £260. – Miss Meteyard's A Group of Englishmen, p. 99.

3. After quoting the two concluding lines of the poem, "Fire's" rebuke of her inconstant sisters, in the words

4. Sic in Essays on his own Times by S. T. C., the collection of her father's articles made by Mrs. Nelson (Sara) Coleridge; but without attributing strange error to Coleridge's own estimate (in the Biographia Literaria) of the amount of his journalistic work, it is impossible to believe that this collection, forming as it does but two small volumes, and a portion of a third, is anything like complete.

5. Alas, that the facts should be so merciless to the most excellent arguments! Coleridge could not foresee that Napoleon would, years afterwards, admit in his own Memoirs the insincerity of his overtures. "I had need of war; a treaty of peace...would have withered every imagination." And when Mr. Pitt's answer arrived, "it filled me with a secret satisfaction."

6. The following passage, too, is curious as showing how polemics, like history, repeat themselves. "As his reasonings were, so is his eloquence. One character pervades his whole being. Words on words, finely arranged, and so dexterously consequent that the whole bears the semblance of argument and still keeps awake a sense of surprise; but, when all is done, nothing rememberable has been said; no one philosophical remark, no one image, not even a pointed aphorism. Not a sentence of Mr. Pitt's has ever been quoted, or formed the favourite phrase of the day – a thing unexampled in any man of equal reputation." With the alteration of one word – the proper name – this passage might have been taken straight from some political diatribe of to-day.

The "effusion" in question has parted company with the autobiographical note, and the author of the prefatory memoir above quoted conjectures it to have been a little poem entitled the Visionary Hope; but I am myself of opinion, after a careful study of both pieces, that it is more probably the Pains of Sleep, which moreover is known to have been written in 1803. But whichever it be, its date is fixed in that year by the statement in the autobiographical note of 1826 that the stanzas referred to in it were written "twenty-three years ago." Thus, then, we have the two facts established, that the opium-taking habit had its origin in a bodily ailment, and that at some time in 1803 that habit had become confirmed. The disastrous experiment in amateur therapeutics, which was the means of implanting it, could not have taken place, according to the autobiographical note, until at least six months after Coleridge's arrival at Keswick, and perhaps not for some months later yet. At any rate, it seems tolerably certain that it was not till the spring of 1801, when the climate of the Lake country first began to tell unfavourably on his health, that the "Kendal Black Drop" was taken. Possibly it may have been about the time (April 1801) when he wrote the letter to Southey which has been quoted above, and which, it will be remembered, contained "so gloomy an account of his health." How painfully ailing he was at this time we know from a variety of sources, from some of which we also gather that he must have been a sufferer in more or less serious forms from his boyhood upwards. Mr. Gillman, for instance, who speaks on this point with the twofold authority of confidant and medical expert, records a statement of Coleridge's to the effect that, as a result of such schoolboy imprudences as "swimming over the New River in my clothes and remaining in them, full half the time from seventeen to eighteen was passed by me in the sick ward of Christ's Hospital, afflicted with jaundice and rheumatic fever." From these indiscretions and their consequences "may be dated," Mr. Gillman thinks, "all his bodily sufferings in future life." That he was a martyr to periodical attacks of rheumatism for some years before his migration to Keswick is a conclusion resting upon something more than conjecture. The Ode to the Departing Year (1796) was written, as he has himself told us, under a severe attack of rheumatism in the head. In 1797 he describes himself in ill health, and as forced to retire on that account to the "lonely farmhouse between Porlock and London on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire," where Kubla Khan was written. [1]

Thus much is, moreover, certain, that whatever were Coleridge's health and habits during the first two years of his residence at Keswick, his career as a poet – that is to say, as a poet of the first order – was closed some months before that period had expired. The ode entitled Dejection, to which reference has so often been made, was written on the 4th of April 1802, and the evidential importance which attaches, in connection with the point under inquiry, to this singularly pathetic utterance has been almost universally recognised. Coleridge has himself cited its most significant passage in the Biographia Literaria as supplying the best description of his mental state at the time when it was written. De Quincey quotes it with appropriate comments in his Coleridge and Opium-Eating. Its testimony is reverently invoked by the poet's son in the introductory essay prefixed by him to his edition of his father's works. The earlier stanzas are, however, so necessary to the comprehension of Coleridge's mood at this time that a somewhat long extract must be made. In the opening stanza he expresses a longing that the storm which certain atmospheric signs of a delusively calm evening appear to promise might break forth, so that

"Those sounds which oft have raised me, whilst they awed, And sent my soul abroad, Might now perhaps their wonted impulse give, Might startle this dull pain, and make it move and live."

And thus, with ever-deepening sadness, the poem proceeds:

"A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear, A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief, Which finds no natural outlet, no relief, In word, or sigh, or tear – O Lady! in this wan and heartless mood, To other thoughts by yonder throstle woo'd, All this long eve, so balmy and serene, Have I been gazing on the western sky, And its peculiar tint of yellow green: And still I gaze – and with how blank an eye! And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars, That give away their motion to the stars; Those stars, that glide behind them or between, Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen: Yon crescent Moon as fixed as if it grew In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue; I see them all so excellently fair, I see, not feel how beautiful they are!

"My genial spirits fail, And what can these avail To lift the smothering weight from off my breast? It were a vain endeavour, Though I should gaze for ever On that green light that lingers in the west: I may not hope from outward forms to win The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.

"O Lady! we receive but what we give, And in our life alone does nature live: Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud! And would we aught behold, of higher worth, Than that inanimate cold world allowed To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd, Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth, A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud Enveloping the earth – And from the soul itself must there be sent A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth, Of all sweet sounds the life and element!

"O pure of heart! thou need'st not ask of me What this strong music in the soul may be! What, and wherein it doth exist, This light, this glory, this fair luminous mist, This beautiful and beauty-making power. Joy, virtuous Lady! Joy that ne'er was given, Save to the pure, and in their purest hour, Life, and Life's effluence, cloud at once and shower, Joy, Lady! is the spirit and the power, Which, wedding Nature to us, gives in dower A new Earth and new Heaven, Undreamt of by the sensual and the proud – Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud – We in ourselves rejoice! And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight, All melodies the echoes of that voice, All colours a suffusion from that light."

And then follows the much quoted, profoundly touching, deeply significant stanza to which we have referred: –

"There was a time when, though my path was rough, This joy within me dallied with distress, And all misfortunes were but as the stuff Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness: For hope grew round me, like the twining vine, And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seemed mine. But now afflictions how me down to earth: Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth, But O! each visitation Suspends what nature gave me at my birth, My shaping spirit of Imagination. For not to think of what I needs must feel, But to be still and patient, all I can; And haply by abstruse research to steal From my own nature all the natural Man – This was my sole resource, my only plan: Till that which suits a part infects the whole, And now is almost grown the habit of my Soul."

Sadder lines than these were never perhaps written by any poet in description of his own feelings. And what gives them their peculiar sadness – as also, of course, their special biographical value – is that they are not, like Shelley's similarly entitled stanzas, the mere expression of a passing mood. They are the record of a life change, a veritable threnody over a spiritual death. For there can be no doubt – his whole subsequent history goes to show it – that Coleridge's "shaping spirit of Imagination" was in fact dead when these lines were written. To a man of stronger moral fibre a renascence of the poetical instinct in other forms might, as I have suggested above, been possible; but the poet of Christabel and the Ancient Mariner was dead. The metaphysician had taken his place, and was striving, in abstruse research, to live in forgetfulness of the loss. Little more, that is to say, than a twelvemonth after the composition of the second part of Christabel the impulse which gave birth to it had passed away for ever. Opium-taking had doubtless begun by this time – may conceivably indeed have begun nearly a year before – and the mere mood of the poem, the temporary phase of feeling which directed his mind inwards into deeper reflections on its permanent state, is no doubt strongly suggestive, in its excessive depression, of the terrible reaction which is known to follow upon opium-excitement. But, I confess, it seems to me improbable that even the habitual use of the stimulant for so comparatively short a time as twelve months could have produced so profound a change in Coleridge's intellectual nature. I cannot but think that De Quincey overstates the case in declaring that "opium killed Coleridge as a poet," though it may well be that, after the collapse of health, which appears to me to have been the real causa causans in the matter, had killed the poet as we know him, opium prevented his resurrection in another and it may be but little inferior form. On the whole, in fact, the most probable account of this all-important era in Coleridge's life appears to me to be this: that in the course of 1801, as he was approaching his thirtieth year, a distinct change for the worse – precipitated possibly, as Mr. Gillman thinks, by the climate of his new place of abode – took place in his constitution; that his rheumatic habit of body, and the dyspeptic trouble by which it was accompanied became confirmed; and that the severe attacks of the acute form of the malady which he underwent produced such a permanent lowering of his vitality and animal spirits as, first, to extinguish the creative impulse, and then to drive him to the physical anodyne of opium and to the mental stimulant of metaphysics.

From the summer of 1801, at any rate, his malaise, both of mind and body, appears to have grown apace. Repeated letters from Southey allow us to see how deeply concerned he was at this time about his friend's condition. Plans of foreign travel are discussed between them, and Southey endeavours in vain to spur his suffering and depressed correspondent to "the assertion of his supremacy" in some new literary work. But, with the exception of his occasional contributions to the press, whatever he committed to paper during these years exists only, if at all, in a fragmentary form. And his restlessness, continually on the increase, appears by the end of 1802 to have become ungovernable. In November of that year he eagerly accepted an offer from Thomas Wedgwood to become his companion on a tour, and he spent this and the greater part of the following month in South Wales with some temporary advantage, it would seem, to his health and spirits. "Coleridge," writes Mr. Wedgwood to a friend, "is all kindness to me, and in prodigious favour here. He is quite easy, cheerful, and takes great pains to make himself pleasant. He is willing, indeed desirous, to accompany me to any part of the globe." "Coll and I," he writes on another occasion, the abbreviation of name having been suggested to him by Coleridge himself, "harmonise amazingly," and adds that his companion "takes long rambles, and writes a great deal." But the fact that such changes of air and scene produced no permanent effect upon the invalid after his return to his own home appears to show that now, at any rate, his fatal habit had obtained a firm hold upon him. And his "writing a great deal resulted" only in the filling of many note-books, and perhaps the sketching out of many of those vast schemes of literary labour of which he was destined to leave so remarkable a collection at his death. One such we find him forwarding to Southey in the August of 1803 – the plan of a Bibliotheca Britannica, or "History of British Literature, bibliographical, biographical, and critical," in eight volumes. The first volume was to contain a "complete history of all Welsh, Saxon, and Erse books that are not translations, but the native growth of Britain;" to accomplish which, writes Coleridge, "I will with great pleasure join you in learning Welsh and Erse." The second volume was to contain the history of English poetry and poets, including "all prose truly poetical." The third volume "English prose, considered as to style, as to eloquence, as to general impressiveness; a history of styles and manners, their causes, their birthplace and parentage, their analysis." The fourth volume would take up "the history of metaphysics, theology, medicine, alchemy; common, canon, and Roman law from Alfred to Henry VII." The fifth would "carry on metaphysics and ethics to the present day in the first half, and comprise in the second half the theology of all the reformers." In the sixth and seventh volumes were to be included "all the articles you (Southey) can get on all the separate arts and sciences that have been treated of in books since the Reformation; and by this time," concludes the enthusiastic projector, "the book, if it answered at all, would have gained so high a reputation that you need not fear having whom you liked to write the different articles – medicine, surgery, chemistry, etc.; navigation, travellers' voyages, etc., etc." There is certainly a melancholy humour in the formulation of so portentous a scheme by a man who was at this moment wandering aimlessly among the lakes and mountains, unable to settle down to any definite piece of literary work, or even to throw off a fatal habit, which could not fail, if persevered in, to destroy all power of steady application in the future. That neither the comic nor the pathetic element in the situation was lost upon Southey is evident from his half-sad, half-satirical, wholly winning reply. "Your plan," he writes, "is too good, too gigantic, quite beyond my powers. If you had my tolerable state of health and that love of steady and productive employment which is now grown into a necessary habit with me, if you were to execute and would execute it, it would be beyond all doubt the most valuable work of any age or any country; but I cannot fill up such an outline. No man can better feel where he fails than I do, and to rely upon you for whole quartos! Dear Coleridge, the smile that comes with that thought is a very melancholy one; and if Edith saw me now she would think my eyes were weak again, when in truth the humour that covers them springs from another cause." A few weeks after this interchange of correspondence Coleridge was once again to prove how far he was from possessing Southey's "tolerable state of health." Throughout the whole of this year he had been more restless than ever. In January 1803 we find him staying with Southey at Bristol, "suffering terribly from the climate, and talking of going abroad." A week later he is at Stowey, planning schemes, not destined to be realised, of foreign travel with Wedgwood. Returning again to Keswick, he started, after a few months' quiescence, on 15th August, in company with Wordsworth and his sister, for a tour in Scotland, but after a fortnight he found himself too ill to proceed. The autumn rains set in, and "poor Coleridge," writes Miss Wordsworth, "being very unwell, determined to send his clothes to Edinburgh, and make the best of his way thither, being afraid to face much wet weather in an open carriage." It is possible, however, that his return to Keswick may have been hastened by the circumstance that Southey, who had paid a brief visit to the Lake country two years before, was expected in a few days at the house which was destined to be his abode for the longest portion of his life. He arrived at Greta Hall on 7th September 1803, and from time to time during the next six months his correspondence gives us occasional glimpses of Coleridge's melancholy state. At the end of December, his health growing steadily worse, he conceived the project of a voyage to Madeira, and quitted Keswick with the intention, after paying a short visit to the Wordsworths, of betaking himself to London to make preparations. His stay at Grasmere, however, was longer than he had counted on. "He was detained for a month by a severe attack of illness, induced, if his description is to be relied on, by the use of narcotics. [2] Unsuspicious of the cause, Mrs. and Miss Wordsworth nursed him with the tenderest affection, while the poet himself, usually a parsimonious man, forced upon him, to use Coleridge's own words, a hundred pounds in the event of his going to Madeira, and his friend Stuart offered to befriend him." From Grasmere he went to Liverpool, where he spent a pleasant week with his old Unitarian friend, Dr. Crompton, and arrived in London at the close of 1803. Here, however, his plans were changed. Malta was substituted for Madeira, in response to an invitation from his friend Mr., afterwards Sir John, Stoddart, then resident as judge in the Mediterranean island. By 12th March, as we gather from the Southey correspondence, the change of arrangements had been made. Two days afterwards he receives a letter of valediction from his "old friend and brother" at Greta Hall, and on 2d April 1804, he sailed from England in the Speedwell, dropping anchor sixteen days later in Valetta harbour.

Footnotes

1. Were it not for Coleridge's express statement that he first took opium at Keswick, one would be inclined to attribute the gorgeous but formless imagery of that poem to the effects of the stimulant. It is certainly very like a metrical version of one of the pleasant variety of opium-dreams described in De Quincey's poetic prose.

2. See Miss Meteyard (A Group of Englishmen, p. 223). Her evidence, however, on any point otherwise doubtful in Coleridge's history should be received with caution, as her estimate of the poet certainly errs somewhat on the side of excessive harshness.