Samuel Taylor Coleridge

IN the absence of any adequate biography of Coleridge, these two volumes of his letters,¹ edited by his grandson, Mr. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, will be eagerly welcomed. By far the greater part of these letters have never before been published, and among them is included the poet’s correspondence with his wife, with Southey, and with Wordsworth. But the editor has also judiciously selected from among the letters already published such as will help to preserve a continuous narrative, thus giving the entire collection an autobiographical character. The conception was a unique one, and the result has a rare value. Coleridge is allowed to reappear before us, after the lapse of two generations, to tell the story of his strange and marvelously interesting life in his own words and in his own way. Whatever was needed to make allusions intelligible the editor has furnished in careful and ample footnotes. A difficult part of his task lay in determining which letters out of the large mass of unpublished correspondence were most important. Whether his principle of selection was a true and final one may be an open question. His sole criterion in regard to any letter, as he tells us in his preface, has been, “ Is it interesting? Is it readable? . . . Coleridge’s letters lack style. The fastidious critic who touched and retouched his exquisite lyrics, and always for the better, was at no pains to polish his letters. He writes to his friends as if he were talking to them, and he lets his periods take care of themselves.” It is quite possible that among the letters which have not yet seen the light there are some which possess a deeper significance for the lover of Coleridge, because they reveal the hidden springs of his life and his thought, than those which have a purely literary character and an interest for the general reader. However that may be, we cannot but be profoundly grateful for what has been given to us; and as to that which still remains unpublished, we are consoled by the prospect of a coming biography by the same editor, in which he will surely avail himself of all the material at his disposal.

Among the attractions of these volumes are portraits of Coleridge which have hitherto been unknown ; of his brothers, James and George, the latter of whom stood in the place of a father to the poet in his early years; of his wife, also, and his children : Hartley, as a boy with a winning face, and thoughtful beyond his years ; Derwent, the father of the editor ; and Sara, the gifted and beautiful daughter. There is also a pencil sketch of Mrs. Wilson, the housekeeper at Greta Hall, which is an inimitable study for a human countenance. The frontispiece of the first volume represents Coleridge at the age of forty-seven, and has been followed in the bust in Westminster Abbey. There is another and most pathetic portrait of him at the age of fifty-six, which gives the weird, unearthly dreamer. But of all these portraits, the most self-revealing, the real man, as we think, is given in the frontispiece of the second volume, in which may be read as in one concentrated glance the story of his career. He himself has contributed to our knowledge of his personal appearance as a young man in one of his humorous letters to John Thelwall: “ My face, unless when animated by immediate eloquence, expresses great sloth, and great, indeed almost idiotic good nature. ’T is a mere carcase of a face ; fat, flabby, and expressive chiefly of inexpression. Yet I am told that my eyes, eyebrows, and forehead are physiognomic ally good ; but of this the deponent knoweth not. As to my shape, ’t is a good shape enough, if measured ; but my gait is awkward, and the walk of the whole man indicates indolence capable of energies. ... I can not breathe through my nose, so my mouth, with sensual thick lips, is almost always open.”²

There is another humorous touch of self-portraiture in the comment which he makes upon his first name. When recommending Southey to name his boy Robert, after himself, he remarks : “I would have done so but that, from my earliest years, I have had a feeling of dislike and disgust connected with my own Christian name, — such a vile short plumpness, such a dull abortive smartness in the first syllable, and this so harshly contrasted by the obscurity and indefiniteness of the syllabic vowel, and the feebleness of the uncovered liquid with which it ends, the wobble it makes, and struggling between a disand a trisyllable, and the whole name sounding as if you were abeeceeing S. M. U. L. Altogether, it is, perhaps, the worst combination of which vowels and consonants are susceptible.”

Though these letters will not greatly modify tlie estimate already formed of Coleridge’s genius and character, they do reveal the man in an intenser light, and will serve to correct misjudgments, to create a deeper reverence for his personality and a profounder sympathy for his misfortunes. Some things which were already known are here made more clear and emphatic. He was a great sufferer from physical pain during his whole life, from his boyhood, when a student at Christ’s Hospital, down to the day of his death. What Mr. Stuart said of his letters, that they were “ one continued flow of complaint of ill health and of incapacity from ill health,” is only confirmed by the fuller correspondence now before us. It does not diminish the reality of his sufferings to learn that an examination of his body after death revealed the cause of much of his pain to be nervous sympathy. His constitution was delicate and highly organized, and tremulous with quick and intense susceptibility.

As to domestic infelicity, Coleridge’s description of his wife in a letter to Southey, now for the first time made public, accounts for much that was hitherto inexplicable. His home became impossible to him, and at the age of thirty he was practically banished from it, living for the rest of his life as if a stranger or visitor in this world, with no continuing city. Mrs. Coleridge’s faults might have been virtues in some other adjustment of the marriage tie, but to her husband they were torture and the rack. “ Her mind has very little that is bad in it ; it is an innocent mind, but it, is light and unimpressible, warm in anger, cold in sympathy, and in all disputes uniformly projects itself forth to recriminate, instead of turning itself inward with a silent self-questioning. Our virtues and our vices are exact antitheses. I so attentively watch my own nature that my worst self-delusion is a complete self-knowledge so mixed with intellectual complacency that my quickness to see and readiness to acknowledge my faults is too often frustrated by the small pain which the sight of them gives me, and the consequent slowness to amend them. Mrs. C. is so stung with the thought of being in the wrong, because she never endures to look at her own mind in all its faulty parts, but shelters herself from painful self-inquiry by angry recrimination. Never, I suppose, did the stern match-maker bring together two minds so utterly contrariant in their primary and organical constitution.” A threatened separation seems to have made Mrs. Coleridge serious, and, as the letter runs, “ she promised to set about an alteration in her external manners and looks and language, and to fight against her inveterate habits of puny thwarting and unintermitting dyspathy.... I, on my part, promised to be more attentive to all her feelings of pride, etc., etc., and to try to correct my habits of impetuous censure.”

Of course this is but one side of the story, and Mrs. Coleridge’s version of what she had to endure from the difficult character of her husband can be easily supplied with no great effort of the imagination. The portrait of Mrs. Coleridge given here seems to accord with her husband’s description, as does also the account of Dorothy Wordsworth, one of the keenest of women. De Quincey has remarked that Coleridge once told him that he had been forced into the marriage with Sarah Fricker by Southey, who insisted that he had gone so far with his attentions to her as to make it dishonorable to retreat. The correspondence apparently confirms this statement. One is led to conclude that Coleridge married partly on the rebound after his disappointment with Mary Evans, partly at Southey’s instigation, and in part because he was then absorbed in the scheme of a Pantisocracy to be set up on the banks of the Susquehanna, and it was regarded among the friends of the project as the proper thing for each of them to secure a wife before their departure. As to Cottle’s testimony that if ever a man was in love, Coleridge was in love with Sarah Fricker, it does not seem to be borne out by bis correspondence with his wife, which has a certain formal character, and not only reveals less of the real inwardness of the man than any other set of his correspondence, but is keyed in a lower tone.

Another feature of Coleridge’s life, the opium-eating habit, is here traced back to an earlier period than has been generally supposed. The habit, indeed, was not confirmed until the spring of 1801, when Coleridge was twenty-nine years of age, but the first traces of it belong to his boyhood, when he suffered from rheumatism, and learned the value of “ the accursed drug ” as an opiate for pain. In 1795, he writes to a friend that “ for the last fortnight I have been obliged to take laudanum almost every night.” Nor does it appear that he ever quite overcame the habit, although, under the loving care of the Gillmans, he submitted to restraint, and opium was allowed only under careful supervision.

I.

One source of the curious interest which attaches to Coleridge beyond any of his contemporaries was his abandonment of poetry for metaphysics and theology. The amount of poetic achievement was relatively small, but a few things which he has done, The Ancient Mariner, Cbristabel, Kubla Khan, The Pains of Sleep, — these, and some others which deserve to be associated with them, have an unparalleled beauty, which is distinctive, and of its kind very rare. His exquisite musical diction, “ the magical use of words,” as it has been called, gives to his poetry a certain divine appeal which slides into the soul. He was not only a poet, but the founder of a new school in English poetry. Wordsworth was great in production, and made the new principle his own ; but the suggestion and advocacy of the principle belonged to Coleridge, to whom Wordsworth never failed to acknowledge his intellectual indebtedness.

Why, then, did he cease to write poetry when he had hardly reached the age of thirty ? Why did he stop singing, and betake himself to delving in the barren wastes of unintelligible metaphysical speculation ? Such is the problem of Coleridge’s life as so many of his literary critics have conceived it. His life has seemed to them to lack unity, as if his early years were separated from his later by a deep, impassable gulf, over which brood impenetrable mists. One of his latest biographers, Mr. Traill, has ventured once more to penetrate the thickets of his philosophical speculations, but finds the task empty and vain. Carlyle also sneered at the procreations of his philosophical moods, “ the strange centaurs, spectral Puseyisms, monstrous illusory hybrids, and ecclesiastical chimeras which now roam the earth in a very lamentable manner.” This has been, in the main, the estimate of Coleridge’s career, that his life began with the rarest promise, and ended in failure, as if he were deserving our resentment for having done so little when he might have done so much, for raising great expectations only to disappoint them. Coleridge himself also appears to sanction such a judgment, for in his Ode on Dejection, which belongs to the border-line between the two periods of his life, he laments with his own peculiar pathos the loss of his poetic power : —

In a letter written to Southey in 1802, in which he inclosed these lines, he adds this further comment: “As to myself, all my poetic genius (if ever I really possessed any genius, and it, was not rather a mere general aptitude of talent and quickness in imitation) is gone, and I have been fool enough to suffer deeply in my mind regretting the loss, which I attribute to my long and exceedingly severe metaphysical investigations, and these partly to ill health and partly to private afflictions, which rendered any subjects immediately connected with feeling a source of pain and disquiet to me.”

But the common estimate which giveS Coleridge a high place among English poets, and yet discerns no unity in his life, dismissing his later work as having no large significance or enduring value, must be partial and inadequate. It may be true that ill health and poverty, domestic trials and the evils begotten by opium-eating, united to destroy that “ natural gladness of heart ” with which he was by nature so richly endowed, and thus to weaken the springs of poetic creativeness. But even this strong combination of adverse circumstances does not quite explain the abandonment of poetry and the transition to metaphysics. If the poetic fire is genuine, it has vitality and is not easily extinguished. Milton wrote Paradise Lost after he had become poor and old and blind, and when his domestic happiness had been torn into shreds and tatters ; taking refuge in poetry from the ills of life, as Coleridge fled from poetry to metaphysics. Coleridge’s judgment varied as to whether he were more of a poet or a philosopher. In one of his earlier letters he remarks, “ I think too much for a poet; ” and on Southey he also comments at the same time, “ He thinks too little for a great poet.” He thought that if he and Southey could have been rolled into one, it would have made an ideal combination.

When we turn to contemporary opinions about the greatness of Coleridge, it is the marvelous scope of his intellectual power which inspires such boundless admiration. rather than any poetic achievement. The familiar apostrophe of Charles Lamb, which one is never tired of quoting, has the ring of true insight into the potent attractiveness of a rarely gifted personality : “ 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 ! How have I seen the casual passer through the cloisters stand still, entranced with admiration, ... to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of Jamblichus or Plotinus ; for even in those years thou waxedst not pale at such philosophic draughts, or reciting Homer in his Greek, or Pindar, while the walls of the old Grey Friars reëchoed to the accents of the inspired Charity boy! ”

It is not as a poet that Shelley describes him in his letter to Maria Gisborne, where he is enumerating the treasures to be found in London, but rather as the thinker and the sage : —

Carlyle also discerned this aspect of the true greatness of Coleridge, though blind, perhaps willfully blind, to the profound significance of his thought: “ Coleridge sat on the brow of Highgate Hill in those years, looking down on London and its smoke tumult, like a sage escaped from the inanity of life’s battle ; attracting toward him the thoughts of innumerable brave souls still engaged there; . . . a sublime man who, alone in those dark days, had saved his crown of spiritual manhood ; escaping from the black materialisms and revolutionary deluges with God, Freedom, Immortality still his; a king of men.”

Of the pupils of Coleridge to whom Carlyle refers as among the younger inquiring men with whom he had “ a higher than literary, a kind of prophetic or magician character,” there were two who deeply stirred the current of religious thought in the Church of England, both of whom dedicated to Coleridge, as their master, the firstfruits of their labors. Archdeacon Hare, one of the authors of the Guesses at Truth, calls him “ the Christian philosopher, who through dark and winding ways of speculation was led to the light, . . . whose writings have helped to discern the sacred concord and unity of human and divine truth.” The late Rev. F. D. Maurice felt so strongly the personal tie which bound him to Coleridge that “ he could not bear to think of him chiefly as a writer of books, nor did he feel that he could do justice to his poems as works of art, on account of their intensely painful reality.”³

The impression which Coleridge’s poetry made upon De Quincey, when still a young man, transcended the effect of ordinary poetry, and became “ an absolute revelation of untrodden worlds, teeming with power and beauty, as yet unsuspected among men.” It was the desire to know the man who had written such poetry which arrested and enthralled De Quincey ; and under the same spell Southey and Wordsworth and many others of less note had succumbed. He had a wonderful gift of drawing to himself devoted friends whom he inspired with supreme confidence in his power. There was something in the man even more interesting than what he wrote, while in his writings it is the personal revelation which is often more valuable than the thought. It is this which gives unity to all the varied manifestations of his genius. De Quincey studied him, analyzed and dissected him, in the conviction that he surpassed Milton in the richness and variety of his intellectual endowment. He was a poet, a journalist and politician, a literary critic, an extensive and brilliant scholar, a metaphysician and philosopher, a theologian, and was the wonder of his age for his gift of conversation. And in all these lines he excelled. “ Had the poet in him,” says Mr. Traill, “ survived until years had ‘ brought the philosophic mind,’ he would doubtless have done for the human spirit in its purely isolated self-communings what Wordsworth did for it in its communion with nature.” He appeared for a short time in the pulpit, and “ had he chosen to remain faithful to this new employment,” says the same writer, “he might have rivaled the reputation of the greatest preacher of the time.” “ Assuredly,” said De Quincey, “ Coleridge deserved beyond all other men that were ever connected with the press to be regarded with distinction. . . . Nowhere does there lie such a bed of pearls confounded with the rubbish and purgaments of ages as in the political papers of Coleridge.” As a philosopher he was the most suggestive of thinkers, and though he left no system, perhaps because he left none, he has profoundly influenced the direction of all subsequent philosophical thought on its ideal and transcendental side. And as a theologian there has been no one in the English Church since the days of Wycliffe whose thought marks a more vital and far-reaching influence. Carlyle, in one of his atrabilious moods, disparaged his conversation, but the Table Talk remains to tell what it was like, one of the few most interesting, most stimulating books that have been written.

II.

It is not, then, as a poet that Coleridge must be primarily or exclusively regarded. We understand him better if we think of him as a Dr. Johnson of the nineteenth century, but living in an ampler ether and breathing a diviner air. When he turned from poetry to philosophy, there was no contradiction in the unity of his experience ; he was only coming to the clearer recognition of himself. While his mind was thus maturing, he discerned that he was not so entirely at one with Wordsworth as he had taken for granted when together they sent forth their Lyrical Ballads with its new theory of poetry. It was Wordsworth’s mission to interpret nature to man. But Coleridge had now begun to doubt whether it were true, as Wordsworth believed, that the inspiration to interpret the outer world came from its direct Study or observation. He began to differ from Wordsworth in his idea of the nature of the human imagination. “ O Wordsworth ! ” — so ran the Ode on Dejection in its original form, -

In turning away from poetry as the sole vehicle of his expression, Coleridge was not narrowing his sphere, but rather enlarging it, nor was he abandoning the principle which had inspired his poetry. When conversing with Wordsworth about the essential nature of the poetic, two things had been urged as not incompatible, — “the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colors of the imagination.” But what was this imagination which, like moonlight or sunset, invested with an unwonted glow and as if supernatural effect all common objects and familiar scenes ? Whatever it was that Coleridge understood by imagination, it was this that constituted the thread of unity in his multifarious intellectual life or spiritual experience. When he made the transition to philosophy, he was obeying the stronger impulse, extending the application of the imagination as he conceived it till it included the whole range of human interest.

It is one of the curiosities of literature to be found in the Biographia Literaria that although the book seems to have been written in order to lead up to the definition of the imagination, yet when it comes to the vital issue the writer declines the task, unless in very brief and, except to the already initiated, unintelligible form. For that chapter which is entitled Imagination he makes elaborate preparation, announcing it beforehand in the preceding chapter, and warning oif the reader who is not capable of appreciating it when it shall be reached. But when he comes to write the chapter, he inserts an anonymous letter, — it may have been written by himself to himself, — in which he is advised not to undertake to treat the subject of the imagination at length, but to reserve it for his great unpublished work, his magnum opus, on the Logos, or Communicative Intellect in Man and Deity. This pseudo-anonymous advice he thinks fit to follow, and the great chapter which was to have been written is reduced to these few words, without further comment: “The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am. The secondary imagination I consider as an echo of the former, coexisting with the conscious will, yet as still identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate ; or when this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.”

Among the many projected books of Coleridge which never got themselves written, there is one which towers above all the rest. He refers to it in several places in these letters before us, the subject always the same, but the title varying with his changing moods ; as when he was in great physical suffering or depression, it was to be called Consolations and Comforts from the Exercise and Right Application of the Reason, the Imagination, the Moral Feelings, “ addressed especially to those in sickness, adversity, or distress of mind from speculative gloom ; ” again, it should be known to the world as Logosophia ; or again, Christianity Considered as Philosophy, and the only Philosophy. His letters bear abundant witness, as do his other works, to the greater importance which he attached to this project than to his poetry or his criticism : to complete it was the supreme desire of his life; he prays to be spared until it is done. Sometimes he almost ventures to allude to it as if it were already finished, and might be contemplated as his greatest achievement. Perhaps this latter mood had grounds as sufficient for its justification as his less confident moods. The magnum opus was in reality his life’s lesson ; those scattered hints in his writings and conversation, which, when put together, do not indeed form a system, but are animated and unified by one common sentiment. He could not have told, for it was beyond the power of the human mind to formulate it clearly, the fullness of the motive which inspired him. But if we may dare point to the difference by which he is still distinguished from other poets or literary critics, from philosophers or theologians, it is in regarding all life, all literature and institutions, all thought, and all religion as a divine revelation ; and the imagination, about which he talked so largely and so vaguely, was simply the power of sight which discerns the world and human life in their higher aspects as they exist in the mind of God, —

Or in his own words : “ They only can acquire the philosophic imagination who know and feel that the potential works in them as the actual works on them.

. . . The organs of sense are framed for a corresponding world of sense, and we have it; all the organs of Spirit are framed for a correspondent world of spirit, though the latter organs are not developed in all alike.”

The peculiar quality which distinguishes Coleridge’s thought, though it may be called transcendental, was not originally borrowed from Kant or from German philosophy. If its source may be traced, it goes back to a remote origin, those ancient writers of the Neoplatonist school, Jamblichus and Plotinus, passages from whose works Charles Lamb represents Coleridge as declaiming while yet at Christ’s Hospital. Coleridge himself tells us that at the age of fifteen he had translated the hymns of Synesius, who was at once a Neoplatonist and a Christian bishop. In a letter to Thelwall, written in 1796, when he was twenty-four years of age, he incloses a five-guinea note, with a request that his friend will send him from London the following books which he has seen advertised in catalogues : Jamblichus, Proclus, Porphyrins, Plotini Opera a Ficino, Juliani Opera ; in a word, almost the whole body of Neoplatonist literature. The revival of the Neoplatonic conception of the world and its reimportation into English thought is primarily owing to Coleridge, though others had facilitated the process before him. But he made it possible, and even popular, by his poetry and by the principle which lay beneath the poetry, — the effort “ to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and semblance of truth to characters supernatural and romantic.”

It was for this reason that Carlyle may have thought he detected an affinity between Coleridge’s influence and those spectral Puseyisms, as he called them, which his soul abhorred. Newman also had given Coleridge a place among the forerunners of the Oxford movement, for he too, at an early age, had caught something in the air which was akin to Coleridge’s motive ; as when, speaking of angels, he could say, “ Every breath of air and ray of light and heat, every beautiful prospect, is, as it were, the skirts of their garments, the waving of the robes of those whose faces see God.”

But the difference between Coleridge and Newman was far greater than the resemblance. Newman and his friends trembled for a moment in the balance, when it was uncertain whether they would follow the spirit and method of Coleridge or turn back to the Latin fathers as their guides. For Neoplatonism was associated in its origin with a declining civilization, and with a dying world which was hurling its anathema upon the whole creation. Coleridge had been impressed with the Neoplatonic doctrine of revelation, but he had refused its alliance with the old heathen conception of the world as evil. He saw a new creation resplendent with supernatural beauty, when the idea of a living communion with the divine was associated with a living, growing world, upon which was brooding the divine approval and benediction.

The Neoplatonic conception of life finds one of its best expositions in a poem by Coleridge entitled The Destiny of Nations : —

About the time when this poem was written, in the years 1796-98, when the poetic power of Coleridge was at its height, we have also from his notebook a similar utterance of his Neoplatonic creed : “ Certainly, there are strange things in the other world, and so there are in all the steps to it; and a little glimpse of heaven,—a moment’s conversing with an angel, — any ray of God, any communication from the spirit of comfort which God gives to his servants in strange and unknown manners, are infinitely far from illusions. We shall understand them when we feel them, and when in new and strange needs we shall be refreshed by them.”

Such was the creed with which Coleridge stimulated the genius of Wordsworth in their early acquaintance and communion, which also dates from these memorable years. Each of these men gave something to the other which was sorely needed: Wordsworth calmed and steadied the impulses of Coleridge, who was too much carried away with his tumultuous vitality, till he was in danger of losing his self-possession ; while Coleridge gave to Wordsworth the encouragement of sympathy and admiration, the courage which was alone needed to place him on his feet, with full confidence in his powers. But if we would weigh the relative indebtedness of these great souls to each other, to Coleridge belongs the credit and the immortal honor of having suggested the doctrine which was the motive of Wordsworth’s poetry and his own. It was he who became the founder of the Lake School of Poetry, as it is called, whose principle was in such sharp contrast with that which underlay the classical poetry of the last century, — the Neoplatonic doctrine that outward nature is a radiation from a divine life, that supernatural communion is mediated by unearthly powers, that human thought corresponds to some eternal reality. What Coleridge had taught, under this inspiration of Hellenic and Egyptian mysticism combined, appears in Wordsworth’s poetry in a more restrained and sober form, taking on its most exquisite expression in his Ode to Immortality. As years went by. Wordsworth dropped his own original theory, according to which poetry was to consist in rustic scenes and ordinary events clothed in the plain language of common life ; devoting his powers of description, in which he far surpassed Coleridge, to a delineation of the feelings which nature, and nature always as it is revealed in its surpassing loveliness in the Lake Country, inspires in an unworldly soul. A contemporary criticism of Wordsworth’s poetry in Blackwood’s Magazine for December, 1818, enforces this aspect of its teaching as its most distinctive characteristic : “ The reverential awe and the far - extended sympathy with which he looks upon the whole system of existing things, and the silent moral connections which he supposes to exist among them, are visible throughout all his writings. He tunes his mind to nature with a feeling of religious obligation ; and where others behold only beautiful colors making their appearance according to optical laws, or feel pleasant sensations resulting from a pure atmosphere or from the odoriferous exhalations of herbage, or enjoy the pleasure of measuring an extended prospect as an amusement for the eye, this poet, whether justly or not, thinks he traces something more in the spectacle than the mere reflection of his own feelings painted upon external objects by means of the association of ideas.”

As for Coleridge, his deepest interest was in humanity, and not in nature. He was destined to react from his earlier mood, to turn away from Plotinus, his first master, in proportion as the problem of human evil and suffering was forced upon his attention. He led Wordsworth back to the Lake Country, where for a few years they remained together in harmonious and loving association. That Coleridge could abandon such exquisite scenery, and bury himself in the crowded city, never again returning to Keswick or Grasmere even for a visit, after his final departure in 1810, reveals the essential difference between the men, and discloses the mission of Coleridge move clearly. Poetry was but an incident in his career. The effort which it required was a pressure from without which he could not endure. It hurt him, in his poetic moods, to feel that he was writing for money and must make haste. He hints also at 11 the limited sphere of mental activity in the artist.” So far as he continued to write poetry, it was for the purpose of inward relief. When the charge of egotism was alleged against him, he replied, “It is not egotism when, in order to relieve my heart, I sing my own sorrows ; but it is a law of my nature. He who labors under a strong feeling is compelled to seek sympathy, and the poet’s feelings are always strong.”

III.

The autobiography, the history of a soul, which is found in Coleridge’s poetry was continued in other and many devious forms, but the thread of unity binds them together in an organic whole. His life stands for a spiritual process, in which was reproduced the intellectual and moral and religious experience of humanity on a vaster scale than by any other in this modern day. He explored the wide ocean of human thought, sounding it to its depth, and to this end his life ministered in all its strange and sad vicissitudes.

The different phases of Coleridge’s life have been summarized by Mr. Dykes Campbell, one of his latest biographers, in these beautiful words : “A brief dawn of unsurpassed promise and achievement; ‘ a trouble as of ‘ clouds and weeping rain ; ’ then a long summer evening’s work, done by the setting sun’s pathetic light. Such was Coleridge’s day, the afterglow of which is still in the sky.” But if there is any fault to be found with this enumeration, it is in not recognizing the positive value of the second period in Coleridge’s life as having a high redeeming quality. This has been also the common judgment: that from the time when the opium habit was established, about 1802, the intervening years until the residence at Highgate began, in 1816, were for the most part unproductive and unprofitable. And yet it was during these years, when the natural indolence of his constitution was augmented by frequent and long-continued illness and by the influence of opium, that he really accomplished the greater part of the work of his life. To this period we owe most of the material contained in the two volumes of The Friend; the three volumes of Essays on his own Times, which include his articles for the Morning Post and the Courier ; the Biographia Literaria, which was written and got ready for the press, though not published till later; the lectures, also, on Shakespeare, and other critical studies in literature which make him the founder of the higher English literary criticism, a department in which he has never been surpassed. During these dark, unhappy years he carried on his philosophical studies, especially of Kant and Schelling; he was engaged in that wide, discursive process of reading which laid at his feet the intellectual and spiritual treasures of the world. And of course, beyond and above all this, he was always brooding at his leisure over the mystery and the phenomena of human life, in himself or in the world ; threading the labyrinths of his own thought, where he was at liberty to wander at his will. On the whole, it would seem as if the biographers of Coleridge had erred in depreciating the value of these melancholy years. In the evening of his life, which set in so early after he went to Highgate, he produced but one important book, his Aids to Reflection, unless we add that small but most significant treatise, The Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit. We do not wonder that Coleridge himself should have protested against the sentence which did him such great injustice: “ 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.”

The story of Coleridge’s career reads like a series of detachments from all the ordinary ties and relationships of life. The opium habit may have had much to do with evils that befell him, but there was some deeper hidden cause, whose action was only intensified by opium, which of itself alone explains the strange and sad vicissitudes, the failure, the poverty, the disappointments, the humiliations beneath which he groaned, but through all of which he carried his higher integrity unharmed. This deeper cause, oftentimes lying beneath his consciousness, acting indirectly, but never losing its potency, was his passion for freedom, individual freedom as well as national and ecclesiastical. It was this passionate love of freedom which in his early years appeared in his visionary scheme for an ideal community on the Susquehanna, where men should be delivered from the gross burdens of life and the responsibility of earning a livelihood. This same mood created his intense and burning enthusiasm for the French Revolution, a devotion to the emancipation of humanity in which he surpassed his most advanced contemporaries. He abandoned these dreams of his youth, and from being a revolutionist became an ardent anti - Jacobin; but the love of freedom still burned unquenched, the most powerful motive of his being. Even duty, whenever it presented itself as an external obligation, interfering with his inward impulse or inclination, became for him an impossibility. It was not altogether his natural indolence or the natural infirmity of a weak will to which were owing his many sins of omission. He could not act unless his inner being coincided with the demand of external order. For this reason, mainly, though other causes combined with it, he was detached, but also set free from relationships and from dependence on every tie which hampered the working of the spirit within him. Bitter agony, the tears of repentance, mortification of heart, attended the process, as he broke away or was forced away from family and friends, from reputation, while yet in his inmost soul he was acquitted of any guilt or stain upon his higher manhood.

Coleridge never ceased to struggle against his natural infirmities. The correspondence reveals anew the heroic efforts he made to support his family. But he was never quite adequately equipped for the practical side of life ; he had no capacity for affairs ; and added to this was that strange difficulty that it seemed to paralyze his powers when he attempted to curb his spirit in the harness and turn out poetry for a money compensation. As we read the letters of the early years, we forecast the end to which he was drifting. The struggle with poverty and anxiety, with depression and hopelessness, with ill health, also, which began when he was so young, could not be maintained for long without some catastrophe. At the age of twenty-three he had married a girl who, like himself, was penniless, when he had no other prospect of support than Cottle’s promise to pay liberally for all the poetry he would write. If it was well-nigh impossible for him to write when money was in contemplation, how hopeless was the task when he had already received the money in advance ! Not only was there his own support and that of his growing family to be provided for, but he seems to have been under a pledge to contribute to the support of his wife’s relations. The unequal struggle went on for six years or more before he confessed defeat. More than most men Coleridge would seem to have needed the support and consolation of the family. Like Schleiermacher, like Wesley, he was greatly dependent on the friendship of women. He was a devoted father, proud of his children, and his description of their looks and ways deserves a high place in the literature of children. In this respect he reminds us of Luther, who has immortalized his children by the profound interest and sympathy with which he entered into their youthful lives.

If Coleridge had been willing — or able, perhaps we should say — to work regularly even for a few hours a day, there would have been no lack of an adequate income. In one of his letters to Poole, March, 1800, he writes : “ If I had the least love of money I could make almost sure of £2000 a year, for Stuart has offered me half shares in the two papers, the Morning Post and the Courier, if I could devote myself with him to them — but I told him 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 £250 a year I consider money as a real evil — at which he stared.” This was written at a moment when Coleridge was in the greatest stress of his efforts to maintain his family. He may not describe correctly the offer of Stuart, for the latter was a man of business, and knew the weakness of his friend. But Stuart did say, later in life, when speaking of Coleridge, that if they were both young, and Coleridge were only willing to work regularly, there was nothing he would not have given for the aid which Coleridge could render, and that he could have made his fortune. The man, however, who could have accepted Stuart’s offer was not the Coleridge we know; nor if he had done so should we have had the Coleridge whom, despite his failures, we revere and love.

As to his separation from his wife, and what seemed like the desertion of his family, we are no longer called upon to express any moral indignation. There was in it something of the nature of fate. It is plain enough that after the opium habit had gained the mastery, he could not with any self-respect continue to reside at Greta Hall. There he met with the tears, the reproaches, possibly even the contempt of his alienated wife. It was better also for his children, if they were to retain their reverence for their father, that he should be away. The constant presence of Southey in his even and mechanical activity, or of Wordsworth in his economical, well-regulated life and smug prosperity, was a source of bitterness and torture to one who, with the consciousness of genius and of vast unexpended powers, was yet unable to apply them in order to gain his daily bread. We can see now what they were not able then to make allowance for: that his ill health was no fancied complaint ; that he fell under the influence of opium, when, under the guidance of a wise physician, he might have been recovered to some extent, at least, from his physical infirmities. At any rate, there has been no lack of moral condemnation for his offense, either on his own part or on that of his friends. For the wrong of which he may have been guilty he paid the penalty to the utmost farthing.

In extenuation of Southey’s attitude, much, of course, may be said. The responsibility of Coleridge’s family fell upon him at a time when he was sufficiently burdened with his own anxieties and labors. It does not diminish the value of his kindness or the nobility of his behavior that we have learned that he was reimbursed for his expenses on this account, or that Mrs. Coleridge rendered indispensable services in his household. But while Southey did his duty, the spirit in which it was done was cold and ungracious. He recognized no mission with which Coleridge might still be charged, which he was still executing amid physical suffering as well as the agonies of a stricken conscience. He saw only the weakness, the failure, and the wrong. He became indignant, so that he could not trust himself to speak, when he thought of Coleridge’s long-continued absences from his home, of the silence which he maintained as to his whereabouts or doings, of the letters sent to him which he did not answer, and which, it was afterwards learned, he did not even read. Southey refused to believe that physical pain was the motive in resorting to opium, but rather attributed the evil habit to the luxury of selfindulgence. When reports came to him of the fascination and the spell which Coleridge was exercising in such extraordinary degree, of how his wonderful gift of conversation was winning him renown in the higher circles of London society, he uttered his doleful prophecy : “ What will become of Coleridge himself? He may continue to find men who will give him board and lodging for the sake of his conversation, but who will pay his other expenses ? I cannot but apprehend some shameful and dreadful end to this deplorable course.”

It was a memorable event in the higher walks of the intellectual life, in that year of the divine grace 1797, when Coleridge and Wordsworth met; and very beautiful, too, had been the friendship of the two poets, in which Dorothy Wordsworth had also entered as an equal partner. But now Wordsworth had lost faith in his friend, and had spoken words which, to be sure, had gained in their mischief-making power by repetition, but words which he would not retract or recall, for they contained his deep conviction. As for Coleridge and how he felt, there was no man living whom he so honored and loved as Wordsworth. Whether those lines in Christabel, which he quotes from himself in one of his letters as “the best and sweetest lines I ever wrote,” referred originally to Southey or not, they are equally applicable to his broken friendship with Wordsworth: —

It is one of the remarks of Renan, which indicates his insight into the workings of life, that if a man set up to be a reformer of the world in any one department of human interest, he must at least be conservative of the world’s traditions in all other respects. It was because Coleridge failed to fulfill this condition that he was called upon to pay a heavier fine for his attempt to teach the world than is exacted from most of its teachers. It fell to his lot to endure obloquy and ostracism, the personal malice of those who influenced the average popular opinion. The Edinburgh Review, under the editorship of Jeffrey, pursued him for years with its rancorous criticism, while its rival, the great Quarterly, treated him with indifference or with silent contempt. On account of his early sympathies with the French Revolution, which had inspired his earlier poetry, he was suspected, when the reaction had set in, of being a dangerous character who was undermining the foundations of the social order. He was denounced as a pantheist, a word which covered a bottomless, nameless fear and hatred. In philosophy, as in theology, he was condemned as an innovator, overthrowing the accepted principles of Locke with a vague, confusing transcendentalism which led no one knew whither ; and in literature he was defying the canons of taste and criticism upon which rested all that was great and dear in English poetry. Add to all this his reputation for utter shiftlessness of character; the lack of dependence to be put on his engagements or promises ; his willingness to take money or to solicit loans; the name of an opium-eater who was wasting his powers in idle dreaming, or spending them in the meaningless flow of conversation ; above all, the abandonment of his family to the charity of the world.

One thing more was needed to complete his humiliation : that he should be wounded in his intellectual pride. When the invitation came to him from Mr. Murray, the publisher, to furnish a translation of Faust, he resented the slight which the offer might seem to carry. “ Some one or other of my partial friends,” he writes in reply, “ has induced you to consider me as the man most likely to execute the work adequately; those excepted, of course, whose higher powers (established by the solid and satisfactory ordeals of the wide and rapid sale of their works) it might seem profanation to employ in any other manner than in the development of their own organization.” As a piece of satire nothing could be better. But it has always been a source of regret that, in this instance, Coleridge did not swallow his pride, and attempt a task which no one could have performed so well. His reproduction of the poem might have been, as in the case of his Wallenstein, no mere servile translation, but an improved conception, with an original quality breathed into it by an imagination in no degree inferior to that of its great author. But again, he was sorely wounded by what he calls the “ insolence ” of another of Mr. Murray’s proposals: “that he would publish an edition of my poems, on the condition that a gentleman in his confidence — Mr. Milman! I understand "(Henry Hart Milman, who became the distinguished historian and dean of St. Paul’s) — “ was to select and make such omissions and corrections as should he thought advisable. ” These things left their impression upon his personal appearance. In his old age, he gave one, says Carlyle, “ the idea of a life that had been full of sufferings ; a life heavy laden, half vanquished, still swimming painfully in seas of manifold physical and other bewilderment. . . . The deep eyes, of a light hazel, were as full of sorrow as of inspiration; confused pain looked mildly from them as in a kind of mild astonishment.”

During his lifetime Coleridge was suspected of plagiarism, and after he was dead the charge was alleged against him with indignant severity ; as though, in addition to his other failures, he had been deceiving the English people, who, in their ignorance of German philosophy and literature, had naively supposed that at least his thought was his own. “A gross literary pirate, whose plunderings were only limited by his ignorance,” was the vindictive accusation made by the late Sir William Hamilton, who for a brief moment posed as a sort of oracle, on the ground of his supposed learning. The charge has now been practically disproved. Coleridge did indeed freely appropriate the thought of others, as well as suggestions and materials of thought, but his acknowledgment was in most cases ample enough to cover his indebtedness. If there were things which he did not acknowledge, yet he always placed the thought which he received from others in new combinations, and, above all, he impressed upon it the stamp of his peculiar genius, so that what passed through his mind came forth again with a distinctive quality of his own. As has been well said, what he took he repaid again with interest. In the words of Mr. Brandl, who has made an admirable study of Coleridge’s literary work, “ no one who conscientiously weighs his expressions will call him a plagiarist.” De Quincey, who was the first to detect what seemed like petty pilfering, was amazed that Coleridge should borrow, when he was already rich in himself beyond all estimate; “ when he could spin daily and at all hours, for mere amusement of his own activities and from the loom of his own magical brain, theories more gorgeous by far and supported by a pomp and luxury of images such as Schelling — no, nor any German that ever breathed, not John Paul could have emulated in his dreams.”

Such, then, were the obstacles against which Coleridge’s reputation had to struggle. But there was, after all, a certain divine purpose and consistency in his career, when he was set free from business of every kind, from occupation or profession, from family ties, detached also from his best friends, with hardly even a reputation to sustain ; for he was also set free to fulfill his mission to the world in pure, disinterested love, with nothing to lose or gain. Dr. Arnold of Rugby, who was his warm eulogist, also thought that “his mind was a little diseased by the want of a profession, and the consequent unsteadiness of his mind and purposes ; it always seemed to me that the very power of contemplation becomes impaired or diverted, when it is made the main employment of life.” There may be truth in the remark, but, on the other hand, whether justly or not, those who are identified with a profession upon which they are dependent for support do not escape the suspicion of interested motives, as in the widespread conviction of the last century that priests and law-givers created systems of jurisprudence or religion for economical reasons, for the benefit of the few instead of the well-being of the many. From that suspicion Coleridge is exonerated. He was set free to speak out his thought to the world, without fear or favor. It is this which gives to his writings an element of sincerity and power, which was indeed dearly purchased, but was well worth the sacrifice it cost. He became a revelation of the native content of the human soul. He was like some visitant to this earth from another sphere, reading its meaning as no one of its denizens could do. He looked upon it with a keen, impartial eye, noting in the picture it presents a beauty hitherto undiscerned, so that he might

It is a peculiarity of these letters of Coleridge that they are as fresh as if they had been written yesterday, so that as we read we can hardly realize that one hundred years have gone by since his rich and exuberant life was finding its first expression. We can also understand better, by their perusal, the impression which he left upon all who came in contact with him, the unbounded admiration and affection which, without any effort, he evoked. We can understand better the rapture into which he threw his friends by his presence and conversation ; how Lamb could say of him that “the neighborhood of such a man is as exciting as the presence of fifty ordinary persons ; ” how his friend Thomas Poole, one of the most sensible of men, could say that “ God never made a creature more divinely endowed ; ” or Allston, an American artist who painted his portrait when they were together in Rome, that “ in his high poetic mood his countenance was quite beyond the painter’s art; it was indeed ‘ spirit made visible.’ ” While we may not be able to formulate the secret of his fascination, or explain how he should have risen to fame when only a youth, while his achievement was still so slight, yet some things about him are more clearly evident than they were. In the first place, the world did not lose when he turned from poetry to prose. And in the second place, it was not the opium habit, melancholy as were its effects, which prevented him from giving the complete and permanent form to his thought which the world expected, and perhaps had a right to demand. The misfortune of his intellectual life was in the circumstance that much of his best thought, his rich learning, his deepest inspiration and conviction, should have found its vent in conversation rather than in letters. It may have been that he needed the stimulus of a visible present audience and its immediate response in order to the freedom of the mysterious genius which dwelt within him ; or it may have been that in conversation he found the pathway which offered least resistance to his powers, hampered as they were by indolence and weakness of the will. His unexampled power as a talker was exerted while still a student at Cambridge, it was growing through all the years of his misery and depression, and at last it came to its perfection when he took refuge at Highgate. Every man who thinks and observes must needs have some form of utterance, and for this end conversation has its advantages. Its defect as a mode of expression is that it takes the edge of novelty from thought, so that what has been said in speech must afterwards appear as a feebler reminiscence should it be put in writing, and it also deters one from the labor of formal composition. But no estimate of Coleridge is complete which does not allow for the thought and impulse communicated to the world, of which the traces no longer exist except in the testimony of those who sat at his feet to hear, and came away to record the impression. Coleridge took this view of his life when he was charged with dreaming it away to no purpose: “ Would that the criterion of a scholar’s utility were the number and moral value of the truths which he has been the means of throwing into the general circulation ; or the number and value of the minds whom, by his conversation and letters, he has excited into activity and supplied with the germs of their aftergrowth ! ”

Coleridge died at Highgate in 1834, at the age of sixty-two. During the hours of the last night of his life, when the power of articulation was almost gone, he was dictating to his friend Mr. Greene a passage for his magnum opus, that mysterious work of which he spoke so often, but which it is now believed had taken form only in his imagination. When Southey heard of his death, he was writing to a friend. “ It is just forty years since I became acquainted with Coleridge; he had long been dead to me, but his decease has naturally wakened up old recollections. . . . All who were of his blood were in the highest degree proud of his reputation, but this was their only feeling concerning him.” The voice of Wordsworth broke as he read the news, but he recovered himself, and repeated the remark that “ he was the most wonderful man he had ever known.” Charles Lamb, who survived his friend only a few months, went about saying to himself, “ Coleridge is dead.” He alone of the many friends gave the deeper expression of the mood of the hour : “ His great and dear spirit haunts me ; never saw I his likeness, nor probably the world can see again. I seem to love the house he died in more passionately than when he lived. What was his mansion is consecrated to me a chapel.”

In 1885 the long-delayed recognition was accorded him, when his bust was placed in the shrine of England’s greatest dead, the abbey church of Westminster. Since then three biographies have been written of him, to which are now added these autobiographical volumes of his correspondence : intimations, it may be, that now at last his name and reputation are emerging from the shadows of unmerited obloquy ; that he is to be judged on his own merits and by the work which he accomplished; that the failures of his life are to be forgotten in grateful commemoration of the good, the beautiful, and the true which it was his mission to reveal to the world.

A few sentences are here taken at random from his letters which deserve a place in his Table Talk: “ It is among the feeblenesses of our nature that we are often, to a certain degree, acted on by stories, gravely asserted, of which we do yet most religiously disbelieve every syllable ; nay, which perhaps we know to be false.” “ It is as much my nature to evolve the fact from the law as that of a practical man to deduce the law from the fact.” “ I find it wise and human to believe, even on slight evidence, opinions the contrary to which cannot be proved, and which promote our happiness without hampering our intellect.” “ Men of genius have, indeed, as an essential of their composition, great sensibility ; but they have likewise great confidence in their own powers.” “ Deep thinking is attainable only by a man of deep feeling, and all truth is a species of revelation.”

And this is a sentence which gives the concentrated essence of the life of Coleridge: “I once had the presumption to address this advice to an actor on the London stage: ‘Think in order that you may be able to observe ! Observe in order that you may have the materials to think upon ! And, thirdly, keep awake ever the habit of instantly embodying and realizing the results of the two; but always think ! ’ ”