I have omitted the four lines,
printed in brackets in Campbell's edition, which were omitted, I think
rightly, by Coleridge in reprinting the poem from the _Morning Post_
of October 16, 1802.
printed in brackets in Campbell's edition, which were omitted, I think
rightly, by Coleridge in reprinting the poem from the _Morning Post_
of October 16, 1802.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Heinemann, the owner of the copyright of Dykes
Campbell's edition of Coleridge's Poetical Works (Macmillan & Co. , 1893)
for permission to use that text (one of the most carefully edited texts of
any English poet) in this volume of selections. My aim, in making these
selections, has been to give every poem of Coleridge's that seems to me
really good, and nothing else. Not every poem, none perhaps of those in
blank verse, is equal throughout; but I think readers of Coleridge will be
surprised to find how few of the poems contained in this volume are not of
almost flawless workmanship, as well of incomparable poetic genius.
Scarcely any English poet gains so much as Coleridge by not being read in a
complete edition. The gulf between his best and his worst work is as wide
as the gulf between good and evil. Even Wordsworth, even Byron, is not so
intolerable to read in a complete edition. But Coleridge, much more easily
than Byron or Wordsworth, can be extricated from his own lumber-heaps; it
is rare in his work to find a poem which is really good in parts and not
really good as a whole. I have taken every poem on its own merits as
poetry, its own technical merits as verse; and thus have included equally
the frigid eighteenth-century conceits of "The Kiss" and the modern
burlesque license of the comic fragments. But I have excluded everything
which has an interest merely personal, or indeed any other interest than
that of poetry; and I have thus omitted the famous "Ode on the Departing
Year," in spite of the esteem in which Coleridge held it, and in spite of
its one exquisite line--
"God's image, sister of the Seraphim"--
and I have omitted it because as a whole it is untempered rhetoric,
shapeless in form; and I have also omitted confession pieces such as that
early one which contains, among its otherwise too emphatic utterances, the
most delicate and precise picture which Coleridge ever drew of himself:
"To me hath Heaven with bounteous hand assigned
Energic Reason and a shaping mind,
The daring ken of Truth, the Patriot's part,
And Pity's sigh, that breathes the gentle heart--
Sloth-jaundiced all! and from my graspless hand
Drop Friendship's precious pearls, like hour-glass sand.
I weep, yet stoop not! the faint anguish flows,
A dreamy pang in Morning's feverish doze. "
Every poem that I have given I have given in full, and, without exception,
in the form in which Coleridge left it. The dates given after the poems are
Dykes Campbell's; occasionally I have corrected the date given in the text
of his edition by his own correction in the notes.
p. I. _The Ancient Mariner_. The marginal analysis which Coleridge
added in reprinting the poem (from the _Lyrical Ballads_) in
_Sibylline Leaves_, has been transferred to this place, where it can
be read without interrupting the narrative in verse.
PART I
An ancient Mariner meeteth three Gallants bidden to a wedding-feast, and
detaineth one.
The Wedding-Guest is spell-bound by the eye of the old sea-faring man, and
constrained to hear his tale.
The Mariner tells how the ship sailed southward with a good wind and fair
weather, till it reached the Line.
The Wedding-Guest heareth the bridal music; but the Mariner continueth his
tale.
The ship driven by a storm toward the south pole.
The land of ice, and of fearful sounds where no living thing was to be
seen.
Till a great sea-bird, called the Albatross, came through the snow-fog, and
was received with great joy and hospitality.
And lo! the Albatross proveth a bird of good omen, and followeth the ship
as it returned northward through fog and floating ice.
The ancient Mariner inhospitably killeth the pious bird of good omen.
PART II
His shipmates cry out against the ancient Mariner, for killing the bird of
good luck.
But when the fog cleared off, they justify the same, and thus make
themselves accomplices in the crime.
The fair breeze continues; the ship enters the Pacific Ocean, and sails
northward, even till it reaches the Line.
The ship hath been suddenly becalmed.
And the Albatross begins to be avenged.
A Spirit had followed them; one of the invisible inhabitants of this
planet, neither departed souls nor angels; concerning whom the learned Jew,
Josephus, and the Platonic Constantinopolitan, Michael Psellus, may be
consulted. They are very numerous, and there is no climate or element
without one or more.
The shipmates, in their sore distress, would fain throw the whole guilt on
the ancient Mariner:
In sign whereof they hang the dead sea-bird round his neck.
PART III
The ancient Mariner beholdeth a sign in the element afar off.
At its nearer approach, it seemeth him to be a ship; and at a dear ransom
he freeth his speech from the bonds of thirst.
A flash of joy;
And horror follows. For can it be a ship that comes onward without wind or
tide?
It seemeth him but the skeleton of a ship.
And its ribs are seen as bars on the face of the setting Sun.
The Spectre-Woman and her Death-mate, and no other on board the skeleton-
ship.
Like vessel, like crew!
Death and Life-in-Death have diced for the ship's crew, and she (the
latter) winneth the ancient Mariner.
No twilight within the courts of the Sun.
At the rising of the Moon,
One after another,
His shipmates drop down dead.
But Life-in-Death begins her work on the ancient Mariner.
PART IV
The Wedding-Guest feareth that a Spirit is talking to him;
But the ancient Mariner assureth him of his bodily life, and proceedeth to
relate his horrible penance.
He despiseth the creatures of the calm.
And envieth that they should live, and so many lie dead.
But the curse liveth for him in the eye of the dead men.
In his loneliness and fixedness he yearneth towards the journeying Moon,
and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward; and everywhere the
blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and their native
country and their own natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as lords
that are certainly expected and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival.
By the light of the Moon he beholdeth God's creatures of the great calm.
Their beauty and their happiness.
He blesseth them in his heart.
The spell begins to break.
PART V
By grace of the holy Mother, the ancient Mariner is refreshed with rain.
He heareth sounds and seeth strange sights and commotions in the sky and
the element.
The bodies of the ship's crew are inspired, and the ship moves on;
But not by the souls of the men, nor by daemons of earth or middle air, but
by a blessed troop of angelic spirits, sent down by the invocation of the
guardian saint.
The lonesome Spirit from the south-pole carries on the ship as far as the
Line, in obedience to the angelic troop, but still requireth vengeance.
The Polar Spirit's fellow-daemons, the invisible inhabitants of the element,
take part in his wrong; and two of them relate, one to the other, that
penance long and heavy for the ancient Mariner hath been accorded to the
Polar Spirit, who returneth southward.
PART VI
The Mariner hath been cast into a trance; for the angelic power causeth the
vessel to drive northward faster than human life could endure.
The supernatural motion is retarded; the Mariner awakes, and his penance
begins anew.
The curse is finally expiated.
And the ancient Mariner beholdeth his native country.
The angelic spirits leave the dead bodies,
And appear in their own forms of light.
PART VII
The Hermit of the Wood,
Approacheth the ship with wonder.
The ship suddenly sinketh.
The ancient Mariner is saved in the Pilot's boat.
The ancient Mariner earnestly entreateth the Hermit to shrieve him; and the
penance of life falls on him.
And ever and anon throughout his future life an agony constraineth him to
travel from land to land,
And to teach, by his own example, love and reverence to all things that God
made and loveth.
p. 27. _Christabel_. Coleridge at his best represents the imaginative
temper in its essence, pure gold, with only just enough alloy to give it
firm bodily substance. "Christabel" is not, like "Kubla Khan," a
disembodied ecstasy, but a coherent effort of the imagination. Yet, when we
come to the second part, the magic is already half gone out of it. Rossetti
says, in a printed letter, with admirable truth: "The conception, and
partly the execution, of the passage in which Christabel repeats by
fascination the serpent-glance of Geraldine, is magnificent; but that is
the only good narrative passage in part two. The rest seems to have reached
a fatal facility of jingling, at the heels whereof followed Scott. " A few
of the lines seem to sink almost lower than Scott, and suggest a Gilbert
parody:
"He bids thee come without delay
With all thy numerous array.
* * * * *
And he will meet thee on the way
With all his numerous array. "
But in the conclusion, which has nothing whatever to do with the poem,
Coleridge is his finest self again: a magical psychologist. It is
interesting to know that Crashaw was the main influence upon Coleridge
while writing "Christabel," and that the "Hymn to the Name and Honour of
the admirable S. Teresa" was "ever present to his mind while writing the
second part. "
p. 61. _Love_. This poem was originally published, in the _Morning
Post_ of December 21, 1799, as part of an "Introduction to the Tale of
the Dark Ladie. " This introduction begins:
"O leave the lily on its stem;
O leave the rose upon the spray;
O leave the elder-bloom, fair maids!
And listen to my lay.
A cypress and a myrtle bough
This morn around my harp you twined,
Because it fashion'd mournfully
Its murmurs in the wind.
And now a tale of love and woe,
A woeful tale of love I sing;
Hark, gentle maidens! hark, it sighs
And trembles on the string. "
p. 65. _The Three Graves_. Coleridge only published what he calls "the
following humble fragment" of what was to have been a poem in six parts;
but he wrote an imperfect sketch of the first two parts, which was
published from the original MS. by Dykes Campbell in his edition. The poem
as Coleridge left it is sufficiently complete, and I have ventured to
divide it into Part I. and Part II. , instead of the usual Part III. and
Part IV. It is Coleridge's one attempt to compete with Wordsworth on what
Wordsworth considered his own ground, and it was first published by
Coleridge in _The Friend_ of September 21, 1809, on the advice of
Wordsworth and Southey. "The language," we are told in an introductory
note, "was intended to be dramatic; that is, suited to the narrator; and
the metre corresponds to the homeliness of the diction. It is therefore
presented as the fragment, not of a poem, but of a common Ballad-tale.
Whether this is sufficient to justify the adoption of such a style, in any
metrical composition not professedly ludicrous, the Author is himself in
some doubt. At all events, it is not presented as poetry, and it is in no
way connected with the Author's judgment concerning poetic diction. Its
merits, if any, are exclusively psychological. " Exclusively, it would be
unjust to say; but to a degree beyond those of any similar poem of
Wordsworth, certainly.
p. 78. _Dejection_. This ode was originally addressed to Wordsworth,
but before it was published in its first form, the "William" of the still
existing MS. was changed to "Edmund"; in later editions "Edmund" was
changed to "Lady," except in the seventh stanza, where "Otway" is
substituted. The reference in this stanza is to Wordsworth's "Lucy Gray,"
and the germ of the passage occurs in a letter of Coleridge to Poole,
printed by Dykes Campbell in the notes to his edition: "Greta Hall, Feb. 1,
1801. --O my dear, dear Friend! that you were with me by the fireside of my
study here, that I might talk it over with you to the tune of this night-
wind that pipes its thin, doleful, climbing, sinking notes, like a child
that has lost its way, and is crying aloud, half in grief, and half in the
hope to be heard by its mother. "
p. 9O. _Fears in Solitude_. Coleridge, who was so often his own best
critic, especially when the criticism was to remain inactive, wrote on an
autograph copy of this poem now belonging to Professor Dowden: "N. B. --The
above is perhaps not Poetry,--but rather a sort of middle thing between
Poetry and Oratory--_sermoni propriora_. --Some parts are, I am
conscious, too tame even for animated prose. " It is difficult to say
whether, in such poems as this, Coleridge is overtaken by his besetting
indolence, or whether he is deliberately writing down to the theories of
Wordsworth. Another criticism of his own on his early blank verse, where he
speaks of "the utter want of all rhythm in the verse, the monotony and dead
_plumb down_ of the pauses, and the absence of all bone, muscle and
sinew in the single lines," applies only too well to the larger part of
his work in this difficult metre, so apt to go to sleep by the way.
p. 1O7. _Hymn before Sun-rise_. Coleridge was never at Chamouni, and
the suggestion of his poem is to be found in a poem of twenty lines by a
German poetess, Frederike Brun. Some of the rhetoric of his poem Coleridge
got from the German poetess; the imagination is all his own. It is perhaps
a consequence of its origin that the imagination and the rhetoric never get
quite clear of one another, and that, in spite of some magical lines
(wholly Coleridge's) like:
"O struggling with the darkness all the night,
And visited all night by troops of stars:"
the poem remains somewhat external, a somewhat deliberate heaping up of
hosannas.
p. 114. _The Nightingale_. The persons supposed to take part in this
"conversation poem" are of course William and Dorothy Wordsworth.
p. 134. _A Day-Dream_. "There cannot be any doubt, I think, that the
'Asra' of this poem is Miss Sarah Hutchinson; 'Mary,' her sister (Mrs.
Wordsworth); 'our sister and our friend,' Dorothy and William Wordsworth. "
(DYKES CAMPBELL. )
p. 142. _Work without Hope_. "What could be left to hope for when the
man could already do such work? " asks Mr. Swinburne. With this exquisite
poem, in which Coleridge's style is seen in its most faultless union of his
finest qualities, compare this passage from a letter to Lady Beaumont,
about a year earlier: "Though I am at present sadly below even _my_
par of health, or rather unhealth, and am the more depressed thereby from
the consciousness that in this yearly resurrection of Nature from her
winter sleep, amid young leaves and blooms and twittering nest-building
birds, the sun so gladsome, the breezes with such healing on their wings,
all good and lovely things are beneath me, above me, and everywhere around
me, and all from God, while my incapability of enjoying, or, at best,
languor in receiving them, is directly or indirectly from myself, from past
procrastination, and cowardly impatience of pain. " It was always upon some
not less solid foundation that Coleridge built these delicate structures.
p. 147. _Phantom_. This, almost Coleridge's loveliest fragment of
verse, was composed in sleep, like "Kubla Khan," "Constancy to an Ideal
Object," and "Phantom or Fact? " There is a quality, in this and some other
poems of Coleridge, which he himself has exquisitely rendered in the
passage on Ariel in the lectures on Shakespeare: "In air he lives, from air
he derives his being, in air he acts; and all his colours and properties
seem to have been obtained from the rainbow and the skies. There is nothing
about Ariel that cannot be conceived to exist either at sunrise or sunset:
hence all that belongs to Ariel belongs to the delight the mind is capable
of receiving from the most lovely external appearances. "Coleridge is the
Ariel of English Poetry: glittering in the song from "Zapolya," translucent
in the "Phantom," infantine, with a note of happy infancy almost like that
of Blake, in "Something Childish, but very Natural. " In these poems, and in
the "Ode to the Rain," and the "Inscription for a Fountain on a Heath,"
there is a unique way of feeling, which he can render to us on those rare
occasions when his sensations are uninterrupted; by thought, which clouds
them, or by emotion, which disturbs them. He reveals mysterious intimacies
with natural things, the "flapping" flame or a child's scarcely more
articulate moods. And in some of them, which are experiments in form, he
seems to compete gaily with the Elizabethan lyrists, doing wonderful things
in jest, like one who is for once happy and disengaged, and able to play
with his tormentor, verse.
p. 153. _Forbearance_. "Gently I took that which urgently came" is
from Spenser's "Shepherds' Calendar": "But gently tooke that ungently
came. "
p. 154. _Sancti Dominici Pallium_. The "friend," as Dykes Campbell
points out, was Southey, whose "Book of the Church" had been attacked by
Charles Butler. This is one of Coleridge's most masterly experiments in
dealing with material hardly possible to turn into poetry. What exquisite
verse, and what variety of handling! The eighteenth-century smooth force
and pungency of the main part of it ends in an anticipation of the
burlesque energy of some of Mr. George Meredith's most characteristic
verse. Anyone coming upon the lines:
"More than the Protestant milk all newly lapt,
Impearling a tame wild-cat's whiskered jaws,"
would have assigned them without hesitation to the writer of "A Certain
People" and other sonnets in the "Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth. "
p. 158. _Ne plus ultra_. This mysterious fragment is one of the most
original experiments which Coleridge ever made, both in metre and in
language (abstract terms becoming concrete through intellectual passion)
and may seem to anticipate "The Unknown Eros. "
p. 164. _The Pains of Sleep_. In a letter to Sir George and Lady
Beaumont, dated September 22, 1803, Coleridge wrote, describing his journey
to Scotland: "With the night my horrors commence. During the whole of my
journey three nights out of four I have fallen asleep struggling and
resolving to lie awake, and, awaking, have blest the scream which delivered
me from the reluctant sleep. . . . These dreams, with all their mockery of
guilt, rage, unworthy desires, remorse, shame, and terror, formed at the
time the subject of some Verses, which I had forgotten till the return of
my complaint, and which I will send you in my next as a curiosity. "
p. 169. _Names_. Coleridge was as careless as the Elizabethans in
acknowledging the originals of the poems which he translated, whether, as
in this case, he was almost literal, or, as in the case of the Chamouni
poem, he used his material freely. The lines "On a Cataract" are said to be
"improved from Stolberg" in the edition of 1848, edited by Mrs. H. N.
Coleridge; and the title may suit the whole of them.
p. 182. Answer to a Child's Question.
I have omitted the four lines,
printed in brackets in Campbell's edition, which were omitted, I think
rightly, by Coleridge in reprinting the poem from the _Morning Post_
of October 16, 1802.
p. 183. _Lines on a Child_. This exquisite fragment is printed in
Coleridge's works in a prefatory note to the prose "Wanderings of Cain. " It
was written, he tells us, "for the purpose of procuring a friend's judgment
on the metre, as a specimen" of what was to have been a long poem, in
imitation of "The Death of Abel," written in collaboration with Wordsworth.
"The Ancient Mariner was written instead. "
p. 188. _The two Round Spaces on the Tombstone_. This poem was printed
in the _Morning Post_ of December 4, 180O, under the title: "The two
Round Spaces: a Skeltoniad;" and it is this text which is here given, from
Campbell's edition. The "fellow from Aberdeen" was Sir James Mackintosh.
Coleridge apologised for reprinting the verses, "with the hope that they
will be taken, as assuredly they were composed, in mere sport. " No apology
was needed; they are the most rich, ripe, and Rabelaisian comic verses he
ever wrote, full-bodied and exultant in their exuberance of wayward and
good-humoured satire.
p. 192. _Sonnets Attempted in the Manner of Contemporary Writers_.
Dykes Campbell quotes a letter of Coleridge to Cottle, which he attributes
to the year 1797, in which Coleridge says: "I sent to the _Monthly
Magazine_ three mock sonnets in ridicule of my own Poems, and Charles
Lloyd's, and Charles Lamb's, etc. etc. , exposing that affectation of
unaffectedness, of jumping and misplaced accent, in commonplace epithets,
flat lines forced into poetry by italics (signifying how well and
mouthishly the author would read them), puny pathos, etc. etc. The
instances were all taken from myself and Lloyd and Lamb. I signed them
'Nehemiah Higginbottom. ' I think they may do good to our young Bards. "
Coleridge's humour, which begins as early as 1794, with the lines on
"Parliamentary Oscillators," is one of the outlets of an oppressively
ingenious mind, over-packed with ideas, which he cannot be content to
express in prose. He delights, as in an intellectual exercise, in the
grapple with difficult technique, the victorious wrestle with grotesque
rhymes. All the comic poems are unusually rich and fine in rhythm, which
seems to exult in its mastery over material so foreign to it.
Yet he has not always or wholly command of this humour. The famous "Lines
to a Young Ass" were first written as a joke, and there is some burlesque
strength in such lines as:
"Where Toil shall wed young Health, that charming Lass!
And use his sleek cows for a looking-glass. "
But the mood went, the jest was so far forgotten as to be taken seriously
by himself, and turned into the sober earnest which it remains; a kind of
timidity of the original impression crept in, and we are left to laugh
rather at than with the poet.
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Title: Specimens of the Table Talk of S. T. Coleridge
Author: Coleridge
Release Date: July, 2005 [EBook #8489]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on July 26, 2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TABLE TALK OF S. T. COLERIDGE ***
Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Jerry Fairbanks, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
[The Greek transliterations throughout this file are either missing or
very suspect. ]
[Illustration: F. Finden sculp.
_London, John Murray, Albernarle St. 1837_]
[autographed:
Dear Sir,
Your obliged servant.
S. T. Coleridge]
SPECIMENS
OF THE
TABLE TALK
OF
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.
TO
JAMES GILLMAN, ESQUIRE,
OF THE GROVE, HIGHGATE, AND TO
MRS. GILLMAN,
This Volume IS GRATEFULLY INSCRIBED.
PREFACE.
* * * * *
It is nearly fifteen years since I was, for the first time, enabled to
become a frequent and attentive visitor in Mr. Coleridge's domestic
society. His exhibition of intellectual power in living discourse struck me
at once as unique and transcendant; and upon my return home, on the very
first evening which I spent with him after my boyhood, I committed to
writing, as well as I could, the principal topics of his conversation in
his own words. I had no settled design at that time of continuing the work,
but simply made the note in something like a spirit of vexation that such a
strain of music as I had just heard, should not last forever. What I did
once, I was easily induced by the same feeling to do again; and when, after
many years of affectionate communion between us, the painful existence of
my revered relative on earth was at length finished in peace, my occasional
notes of what he had said in my presence had grown to a mass, of which this
volume contains only such parts as seem fit for present publication. I
know, better than any one can tell me, how inadequately these specimens
represent the peculiar splendour and individuality of Mr. Coleridge's
conversation. How should it be otherwise? Who could always follow to the
turning-point his long arrow-flights of thought? Who could fix those
ejaculations of light, those tones of a prophet, which at times have made
me bend before him as before an inspired man? Such acts of spirit as these
were too subtle to be fettered down on paper; they live--if they can live
any where--in the memories alone of those who witnessed them. Yet I would
fain hope that these pages will prove that all is not lost;--that something
of the wisdom, the learning, and the eloquence of a great man's social
converse has been snatched from forgetfulness, and endowed with a permanent
shape for general use. And although, in the judgment of many persons, I may
incur a serious responsibility by this publication; I am, upon the whole,
willing to abide the result, in confidence that the fame of the loved and
lamented speaker will lose nothing hereby, and that the cause of Truth and
of Goodness will be every way a gainer. This sprig, though slight and
immature, may yet become its place, in the Poet's wreath of honour, among
flowers of graver hue.
If the favour shown to several modern instances of works nominally of the
same description as the present were alone to be considered, it might seem
that the old maxim, that nothing ought to be said of the dead but what is
good, is in a fair way of being dilated into an understanding that every
thing is good that has been said by the dead. The following pages do not, I
trust, stand in need of so much indulgence. Their contents may not, in
every particular passage, be of great intrinsic importance; but they can
hardly be without some, and, I hope, a worthy, interest, as coming from the
lips of one at least of the most extraordinary men of the age; whilst to
the best of my knowledge and intention, no living person's name is
introduced, whether for praise or for blame, except on literary or
political grounds of common notoriety. Upon the justice of the remarks here
published, it would be out of place in me to say any thing; and a
commentary of that kind is the less needed, as, in almost every instance,
the principles upon which the speaker founded his observations are
expressly stated, and may be satisfactorily examined by themselves. But,
for the purpose of general elucidation, it seemed not improper to add a few
notes, and to make some quotations from Mr. Coleridge's own works; and in
doing so, I was in addition actuated by an earnest wish to call the
attention of reflecting minds in general to the views of political, moral,
and religious philosophy contained in those works, which, through an
extensive, but now decreasing, prejudice, have hitherto been deprived of
that acceptance with the public which their great preponderating merits
deserve, and will, as I believe, finally obtain. And I can truly say, that
if, in the course of the perusal of this little work, any one of its
readers shall gain a clearer insight into the deep and pregnant principles,
in the light of which Mr. Coleridge was accustomed to regard God and the
World,--I shall look upon the publication as fortunate, and consider myself
abundantly rewarded for whatever trouble it has cost me.
A cursory inspection will show that this volume lays no claim to be ranked
with those of Boswell in point of dramatic interest. Coleridge differed
not more from Johnson in every characteristic of intellect, than in the
habits and circumstances of his life, during the greatest part of the time
in which I was intimately conversant with him. He was naturally very fond
of society, and continued to be so to the last; but the almost unceasing
ill health with which he was afflicted, after fifty, confined him for many
months in every year to his own room, and, most commonly, to his bed. He
was then rarely seen except by single visiters; and few of them would feel
any disposition upon such occasions to interrupt him, whatever might have
been the length or mood of his discourse. And indeed, although I have been
present in mixed company, where Mr. Coleridge has been questioned and
opposed, and the scene has been amusing for the moment--I own that it was
always much more delightful to me to let the river wander at its own sweet
will, unruffled by aught but a certain breeze of emotion which the stream
itself produced. If the course it took was not the shortest, it was
generally the most beautiful; and what you saw by the way was as worthy of
note as the ultimate object to which you were journeying. It is possible,
indeed, that Coleridge did not, in fact, possess the precise gladiatorial
power of Johnson; yet he understood a sword-play of his own; and I have,
upon several occasions, seen him exhibit brilliant proofs of its
effectiveness upon disputants of considerable pretensions in their
particular lines. But he had a genuine dislike of the practice in himself
or others, and no slight provocation could move him to any such exertion.
He was, indeed, to my observation, more distinguished from other great men
of letters by his moral thirst after the Truth--the ideal truth--in his
own mind, than by his merely intellectual qualifications. To leave the
everyday circle of society, in which the literary and scientific rarely--
the rest never--break through the spell of personality;--where Anecdote
reigns everlastingly paramount and exclusive, and the mildest attempt to
generalize the Babel of facts, and to control temporary and individual
phenomena by the application of eternal and overruling principles, is
unintelligible to many, and disagreeable to more;--to leave this species
of converse--if converse it deserves to be called--and pass an entire day
with Coleridge, was a marvellous change indeed. It was a Sabbath past
expression deep, and tranquil, and serene. You came to a man who had
travelled in many countries and in critical times; who had seen and felt
the world in most of its ranks and in many of its vicissitudes and
weaknesses; one to whom all literature and genial art were absolutely
subject, and to whom, with a reasonable allowance as to technical details,
all science was in a most extraordinary degree familiar. Throughout a
long-drawn summer's day would this man talk to you in low, equable, but
clear and musical, tones, concerning things human and divine; marshalling
all history, harmonizing all experiment, probing the depths of your
consciousness, and revealing visions of glory and of terror to the
imagination; but pouring withal such floods of light upon the mind, that
you might, for a season, like Paul, become blind in the very act of
conversion. And this he would do, without so much as one allusion to
himself, without a word of reflection on others, save when any given act
fell naturally in the way of his discourse,--without one anecdote that was
not proof and illustration of a previous position;--gratifying no passion,
indulging no caprice, but, with a calm mastery over your soul, leading you
onward and onward for ever through a thousand windings, yet with no pause,
to some magnificent point in which, as in a focus, all the party-coloured
rays of his discourse should converge in light. In all this he was, in
truth, your teacher and guide; but in a little while you might forget that
he was other than a fellow student and the companion of your way,--so
playful was his manner, so simple his language, so affectionate the glance
of his pleasant eye!
There were, indeed, some whom Coleridge tired, and some whom he sent
asleep. It would occasionally so happen, when the abstruser mood was strong
upon him, and the visiter was narrow and ungenial. I have seen him at times
when you could not incarnate him,--when he shook aside your petty questions
or doubts, and burst with some impatience through the obstacles of common
conversation.
Campbell's edition of Coleridge's Poetical Works (Macmillan & Co. , 1893)
for permission to use that text (one of the most carefully edited texts of
any English poet) in this volume of selections. My aim, in making these
selections, has been to give every poem of Coleridge's that seems to me
really good, and nothing else. Not every poem, none perhaps of those in
blank verse, is equal throughout; but I think readers of Coleridge will be
surprised to find how few of the poems contained in this volume are not of
almost flawless workmanship, as well of incomparable poetic genius.
Scarcely any English poet gains so much as Coleridge by not being read in a
complete edition. The gulf between his best and his worst work is as wide
as the gulf between good and evil. Even Wordsworth, even Byron, is not so
intolerable to read in a complete edition. But Coleridge, much more easily
than Byron or Wordsworth, can be extricated from his own lumber-heaps; it
is rare in his work to find a poem which is really good in parts and not
really good as a whole. I have taken every poem on its own merits as
poetry, its own technical merits as verse; and thus have included equally
the frigid eighteenth-century conceits of "The Kiss" and the modern
burlesque license of the comic fragments. But I have excluded everything
which has an interest merely personal, or indeed any other interest than
that of poetry; and I have thus omitted the famous "Ode on the Departing
Year," in spite of the esteem in which Coleridge held it, and in spite of
its one exquisite line--
"God's image, sister of the Seraphim"--
and I have omitted it because as a whole it is untempered rhetoric,
shapeless in form; and I have also omitted confession pieces such as that
early one which contains, among its otherwise too emphatic utterances, the
most delicate and precise picture which Coleridge ever drew of himself:
"To me hath Heaven with bounteous hand assigned
Energic Reason and a shaping mind,
The daring ken of Truth, the Patriot's part,
And Pity's sigh, that breathes the gentle heart--
Sloth-jaundiced all! and from my graspless hand
Drop Friendship's precious pearls, like hour-glass sand.
I weep, yet stoop not! the faint anguish flows,
A dreamy pang in Morning's feverish doze. "
Every poem that I have given I have given in full, and, without exception,
in the form in which Coleridge left it. The dates given after the poems are
Dykes Campbell's; occasionally I have corrected the date given in the text
of his edition by his own correction in the notes.
p. I. _The Ancient Mariner_. The marginal analysis which Coleridge
added in reprinting the poem (from the _Lyrical Ballads_) in
_Sibylline Leaves_, has been transferred to this place, where it can
be read without interrupting the narrative in verse.
PART I
An ancient Mariner meeteth three Gallants bidden to a wedding-feast, and
detaineth one.
The Wedding-Guest is spell-bound by the eye of the old sea-faring man, and
constrained to hear his tale.
The Mariner tells how the ship sailed southward with a good wind and fair
weather, till it reached the Line.
The Wedding-Guest heareth the bridal music; but the Mariner continueth his
tale.
The ship driven by a storm toward the south pole.
The land of ice, and of fearful sounds where no living thing was to be
seen.
Till a great sea-bird, called the Albatross, came through the snow-fog, and
was received with great joy and hospitality.
And lo! the Albatross proveth a bird of good omen, and followeth the ship
as it returned northward through fog and floating ice.
The ancient Mariner inhospitably killeth the pious bird of good omen.
PART II
His shipmates cry out against the ancient Mariner, for killing the bird of
good luck.
But when the fog cleared off, they justify the same, and thus make
themselves accomplices in the crime.
The fair breeze continues; the ship enters the Pacific Ocean, and sails
northward, even till it reaches the Line.
The ship hath been suddenly becalmed.
And the Albatross begins to be avenged.
A Spirit had followed them; one of the invisible inhabitants of this
planet, neither departed souls nor angels; concerning whom the learned Jew,
Josephus, and the Platonic Constantinopolitan, Michael Psellus, may be
consulted. They are very numerous, and there is no climate or element
without one or more.
The shipmates, in their sore distress, would fain throw the whole guilt on
the ancient Mariner:
In sign whereof they hang the dead sea-bird round his neck.
PART III
The ancient Mariner beholdeth a sign in the element afar off.
At its nearer approach, it seemeth him to be a ship; and at a dear ransom
he freeth his speech from the bonds of thirst.
A flash of joy;
And horror follows. For can it be a ship that comes onward without wind or
tide?
It seemeth him but the skeleton of a ship.
And its ribs are seen as bars on the face of the setting Sun.
The Spectre-Woman and her Death-mate, and no other on board the skeleton-
ship.
Like vessel, like crew!
Death and Life-in-Death have diced for the ship's crew, and she (the
latter) winneth the ancient Mariner.
No twilight within the courts of the Sun.
At the rising of the Moon,
One after another,
His shipmates drop down dead.
But Life-in-Death begins her work on the ancient Mariner.
PART IV
The Wedding-Guest feareth that a Spirit is talking to him;
But the ancient Mariner assureth him of his bodily life, and proceedeth to
relate his horrible penance.
He despiseth the creatures of the calm.
And envieth that they should live, and so many lie dead.
But the curse liveth for him in the eye of the dead men.
In his loneliness and fixedness he yearneth towards the journeying Moon,
and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward; and everywhere the
blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and their native
country and their own natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as lords
that are certainly expected and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival.
By the light of the Moon he beholdeth God's creatures of the great calm.
Their beauty and their happiness.
He blesseth them in his heart.
The spell begins to break.
PART V
By grace of the holy Mother, the ancient Mariner is refreshed with rain.
He heareth sounds and seeth strange sights and commotions in the sky and
the element.
The bodies of the ship's crew are inspired, and the ship moves on;
But not by the souls of the men, nor by daemons of earth or middle air, but
by a blessed troop of angelic spirits, sent down by the invocation of the
guardian saint.
The lonesome Spirit from the south-pole carries on the ship as far as the
Line, in obedience to the angelic troop, but still requireth vengeance.
The Polar Spirit's fellow-daemons, the invisible inhabitants of the element,
take part in his wrong; and two of them relate, one to the other, that
penance long and heavy for the ancient Mariner hath been accorded to the
Polar Spirit, who returneth southward.
PART VI
The Mariner hath been cast into a trance; for the angelic power causeth the
vessel to drive northward faster than human life could endure.
The supernatural motion is retarded; the Mariner awakes, and his penance
begins anew.
The curse is finally expiated.
And the ancient Mariner beholdeth his native country.
The angelic spirits leave the dead bodies,
And appear in their own forms of light.
PART VII
The Hermit of the Wood,
Approacheth the ship with wonder.
The ship suddenly sinketh.
The ancient Mariner is saved in the Pilot's boat.
The ancient Mariner earnestly entreateth the Hermit to shrieve him; and the
penance of life falls on him.
And ever and anon throughout his future life an agony constraineth him to
travel from land to land,
And to teach, by his own example, love and reverence to all things that God
made and loveth.
p. 27. _Christabel_. Coleridge at his best represents the imaginative
temper in its essence, pure gold, with only just enough alloy to give it
firm bodily substance. "Christabel" is not, like "Kubla Khan," a
disembodied ecstasy, but a coherent effort of the imagination. Yet, when we
come to the second part, the magic is already half gone out of it. Rossetti
says, in a printed letter, with admirable truth: "The conception, and
partly the execution, of the passage in which Christabel repeats by
fascination the serpent-glance of Geraldine, is magnificent; but that is
the only good narrative passage in part two. The rest seems to have reached
a fatal facility of jingling, at the heels whereof followed Scott. " A few
of the lines seem to sink almost lower than Scott, and suggest a Gilbert
parody:
"He bids thee come without delay
With all thy numerous array.
* * * * *
And he will meet thee on the way
With all his numerous array. "
But in the conclusion, which has nothing whatever to do with the poem,
Coleridge is his finest self again: a magical psychologist. It is
interesting to know that Crashaw was the main influence upon Coleridge
while writing "Christabel," and that the "Hymn to the Name and Honour of
the admirable S. Teresa" was "ever present to his mind while writing the
second part. "
p. 61. _Love_. This poem was originally published, in the _Morning
Post_ of December 21, 1799, as part of an "Introduction to the Tale of
the Dark Ladie. " This introduction begins:
"O leave the lily on its stem;
O leave the rose upon the spray;
O leave the elder-bloom, fair maids!
And listen to my lay.
A cypress and a myrtle bough
This morn around my harp you twined,
Because it fashion'd mournfully
Its murmurs in the wind.
And now a tale of love and woe,
A woeful tale of love I sing;
Hark, gentle maidens! hark, it sighs
And trembles on the string. "
p. 65. _The Three Graves_. Coleridge only published what he calls "the
following humble fragment" of what was to have been a poem in six parts;
but he wrote an imperfect sketch of the first two parts, which was
published from the original MS. by Dykes Campbell in his edition. The poem
as Coleridge left it is sufficiently complete, and I have ventured to
divide it into Part I. and Part II. , instead of the usual Part III. and
Part IV. It is Coleridge's one attempt to compete with Wordsworth on what
Wordsworth considered his own ground, and it was first published by
Coleridge in _The Friend_ of September 21, 1809, on the advice of
Wordsworth and Southey. "The language," we are told in an introductory
note, "was intended to be dramatic; that is, suited to the narrator; and
the metre corresponds to the homeliness of the diction. It is therefore
presented as the fragment, not of a poem, but of a common Ballad-tale.
Whether this is sufficient to justify the adoption of such a style, in any
metrical composition not professedly ludicrous, the Author is himself in
some doubt. At all events, it is not presented as poetry, and it is in no
way connected with the Author's judgment concerning poetic diction. Its
merits, if any, are exclusively psychological. " Exclusively, it would be
unjust to say; but to a degree beyond those of any similar poem of
Wordsworth, certainly.
p. 78. _Dejection_. This ode was originally addressed to Wordsworth,
but before it was published in its first form, the "William" of the still
existing MS. was changed to "Edmund"; in later editions "Edmund" was
changed to "Lady," except in the seventh stanza, where "Otway" is
substituted. The reference in this stanza is to Wordsworth's "Lucy Gray,"
and the germ of the passage occurs in a letter of Coleridge to Poole,
printed by Dykes Campbell in the notes to his edition: "Greta Hall, Feb. 1,
1801. --O my dear, dear Friend! that you were with me by the fireside of my
study here, that I might talk it over with you to the tune of this night-
wind that pipes its thin, doleful, climbing, sinking notes, like a child
that has lost its way, and is crying aloud, half in grief, and half in the
hope to be heard by its mother. "
p. 9O. _Fears in Solitude_. Coleridge, who was so often his own best
critic, especially when the criticism was to remain inactive, wrote on an
autograph copy of this poem now belonging to Professor Dowden: "N. B. --The
above is perhaps not Poetry,--but rather a sort of middle thing between
Poetry and Oratory--_sermoni propriora_. --Some parts are, I am
conscious, too tame even for animated prose. " It is difficult to say
whether, in such poems as this, Coleridge is overtaken by his besetting
indolence, or whether he is deliberately writing down to the theories of
Wordsworth. Another criticism of his own on his early blank verse, where he
speaks of "the utter want of all rhythm in the verse, the monotony and dead
_plumb down_ of the pauses, and the absence of all bone, muscle and
sinew in the single lines," applies only too well to the larger part of
his work in this difficult metre, so apt to go to sleep by the way.
p. 1O7. _Hymn before Sun-rise_. Coleridge was never at Chamouni, and
the suggestion of his poem is to be found in a poem of twenty lines by a
German poetess, Frederike Brun. Some of the rhetoric of his poem Coleridge
got from the German poetess; the imagination is all his own. It is perhaps
a consequence of its origin that the imagination and the rhetoric never get
quite clear of one another, and that, in spite of some magical lines
(wholly Coleridge's) like:
"O struggling with the darkness all the night,
And visited all night by troops of stars:"
the poem remains somewhat external, a somewhat deliberate heaping up of
hosannas.
p. 114. _The Nightingale_. The persons supposed to take part in this
"conversation poem" are of course William and Dorothy Wordsworth.
p. 134. _A Day-Dream_. "There cannot be any doubt, I think, that the
'Asra' of this poem is Miss Sarah Hutchinson; 'Mary,' her sister (Mrs.
Wordsworth); 'our sister and our friend,' Dorothy and William Wordsworth. "
(DYKES CAMPBELL. )
p. 142. _Work without Hope_. "What could be left to hope for when the
man could already do such work? " asks Mr. Swinburne. With this exquisite
poem, in which Coleridge's style is seen in its most faultless union of his
finest qualities, compare this passage from a letter to Lady Beaumont,
about a year earlier: "Though I am at present sadly below even _my_
par of health, or rather unhealth, and am the more depressed thereby from
the consciousness that in this yearly resurrection of Nature from her
winter sleep, amid young leaves and blooms and twittering nest-building
birds, the sun so gladsome, the breezes with such healing on their wings,
all good and lovely things are beneath me, above me, and everywhere around
me, and all from God, while my incapability of enjoying, or, at best,
languor in receiving them, is directly or indirectly from myself, from past
procrastination, and cowardly impatience of pain. " It was always upon some
not less solid foundation that Coleridge built these delicate structures.
p. 147. _Phantom_. This, almost Coleridge's loveliest fragment of
verse, was composed in sleep, like "Kubla Khan," "Constancy to an Ideal
Object," and "Phantom or Fact? " There is a quality, in this and some other
poems of Coleridge, which he himself has exquisitely rendered in the
passage on Ariel in the lectures on Shakespeare: "In air he lives, from air
he derives his being, in air he acts; and all his colours and properties
seem to have been obtained from the rainbow and the skies. There is nothing
about Ariel that cannot be conceived to exist either at sunrise or sunset:
hence all that belongs to Ariel belongs to the delight the mind is capable
of receiving from the most lovely external appearances. "Coleridge is the
Ariel of English Poetry: glittering in the song from "Zapolya," translucent
in the "Phantom," infantine, with a note of happy infancy almost like that
of Blake, in "Something Childish, but very Natural. " In these poems, and in
the "Ode to the Rain," and the "Inscription for a Fountain on a Heath,"
there is a unique way of feeling, which he can render to us on those rare
occasions when his sensations are uninterrupted; by thought, which clouds
them, or by emotion, which disturbs them. He reveals mysterious intimacies
with natural things, the "flapping" flame or a child's scarcely more
articulate moods. And in some of them, which are experiments in form, he
seems to compete gaily with the Elizabethan lyrists, doing wonderful things
in jest, like one who is for once happy and disengaged, and able to play
with his tormentor, verse.
p. 153. _Forbearance_. "Gently I took that which urgently came" is
from Spenser's "Shepherds' Calendar": "But gently tooke that ungently
came. "
p. 154. _Sancti Dominici Pallium_. The "friend," as Dykes Campbell
points out, was Southey, whose "Book of the Church" had been attacked by
Charles Butler. This is one of Coleridge's most masterly experiments in
dealing with material hardly possible to turn into poetry. What exquisite
verse, and what variety of handling! The eighteenth-century smooth force
and pungency of the main part of it ends in an anticipation of the
burlesque energy of some of Mr. George Meredith's most characteristic
verse. Anyone coming upon the lines:
"More than the Protestant milk all newly lapt,
Impearling a tame wild-cat's whiskered jaws,"
would have assigned them without hesitation to the writer of "A Certain
People" and other sonnets in the "Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth. "
p. 158. _Ne plus ultra_. This mysterious fragment is one of the most
original experiments which Coleridge ever made, both in metre and in
language (abstract terms becoming concrete through intellectual passion)
and may seem to anticipate "The Unknown Eros. "
p. 164. _The Pains of Sleep_. In a letter to Sir George and Lady
Beaumont, dated September 22, 1803, Coleridge wrote, describing his journey
to Scotland: "With the night my horrors commence. During the whole of my
journey three nights out of four I have fallen asleep struggling and
resolving to lie awake, and, awaking, have blest the scream which delivered
me from the reluctant sleep. . . . These dreams, with all their mockery of
guilt, rage, unworthy desires, remorse, shame, and terror, formed at the
time the subject of some Verses, which I had forgotten till the return of
my complaint, and which I will send you in my next as a curiosity. "
p. 169. _Names_. Coleridge was as careless as the Elizabethans in
acknowledging the originals of the poems which he translated, whether, as
in this case, he was almost literal, or, as in the case of the Chamouni
poem, he used his material freely. The lines "On a Cataract" are said to be
"improved from Stolberg" in the edition of 1848, edited by Mrs. H. N.
Coleridge; and the title may suit the whole of them.
p. 182. Answer to a Child's Question.
I have omitted the four lines,
printed in brackets in Campbell's edition, which were omitted, I think
rightly, by Coleridge in reprinting the poem from the _Morning Post_
of October 16, 1802.
p. 183. _Lines on a Child_. This exquisite fragment is printed in
Coleridge's works in a prefatory note to the prose "Wanderings of Cain. " It
was written, he tells us, "for the purpose of procuring a friend's judgment
on the metre, as a specimen" of what was to have been a long poem, in
imitation of "The Death of Abel," written in collaboration with Wordsworth.
"The Ancient Mariner was written instead. "
p. 188. _The two Round Spaces on the Tombstone_. This poem was printed
in the _Morning Post_ of December 4, 180O, under the title: "The two
Round Spaces: a Skeltoniad;" and it is this text which is here given, from
Campbell's edition. The "fellow from Aberdeen" was Sir James Mackintosh.
Coleridge apologised for reprinting the verses, "with the hope that they
will be taken, as assuredly they were composed, in mere sport. " No apology
was needed; they are the most rich, ripe, and Rabelaisian comic verses he
ever wrote, full-bodied and exultant in their exuberance of wayward and
good-humoured satire.
p. 192. _Sonnets Attempted in the Manner of Contemporary Writers_.
Dykes Campbell quotes a letter of Coleridge to Cottle, which he attributes
to the year 1797, in which Coleridge says: "I sent to the _Monthly
Magazine_ three mock sonnets in ridicule of my own Poems, and Charles
Lloyd's, and Charles Lamb's, etc. etc. , exposing that affectation of
unaffectedness, of jumping and misplaced accent, in commonplace epithets,
flat lines forced into poetry by italics (signifying how well and
mouthishly the author would read them), puny pathos, etc. etc. The
instances were all taken from myself and Lloyd and Lamb. I signed them
'Nehemiah Higginbottom. ' I think they may do good to our young Bards. "
Coleridge's humour, which begins as early as 1794, with the lines on
"Parliamentary Oscillators," is one of the outlets of an oppressively
ingenious mind, over-packed with ideas, which he cannot be content to
express in prose. He delights, as in an intellectual exercise, in the
grapple with difficult technique, the victorious wrestle with grotesque
rhymes. All the comic poems are unusually rich and fine in rhythm, which
seems to exult in its mastery over material so foreign to it.
Yet he has not always or wholly command of this humour. The famous "Lines
to a Young Ass" were first written as a joke, and there is some burlesque
strength in such lines as:
"Where Toil shall wed young Health, that charming Lass!
And use his sleek cows for a looking-glass. "
But the mood went, the jest was so far forgotten as to be taken seriously
by himself, and turned into the sober earnest which it remains; a kind of
timidity of the original impression crept in, and we are left to laugh
rather at than with the poet.
End of Project Gutenberg's Poems of Coleridge, by Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
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Title: Specimens of the Table Talk of S. T. Coleridge
Author: Coleridge
Release Date: July, 2005 [EBook #8489]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on July 26, 2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TABLE TALK OF S. T. COLERIDGE ***
Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Jerry Fairbanks, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
[The Greek transliterations throughout this file are either missing or
very suspect. ]
[Illustration: F. Finden sculp.
_London, John Murray, Albernarle St. 1837_]
[autographed:
Dear Sir,
Your obliged servant.
S. T. Coleridge]
SPECIMENS
OF THE
TABLE TALK
OF
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.
TO
JAMES GILLMAN, ESQUIRE,
OF THE GROVE, HIGHGATE, AND TO
MRS. GILLMAN,
This Volume IS GRATEFULLY INSCRIBED.
PREFACE.
* * * * *
It is nearly fifteen years since I was, for the first time, enabled to
become a frequent and attentive visitor in Mr. Coleridge's domestic
society. His exhibition of intellectual power in living discourse struck me
at once as unique and transcendant; and upon my return home, on the very
first evening which I spent with him after my boyhood, I committed to
writing, as well as I could, the principal topics of his conversation in
his own words. I had no settled design at that time of continuing the work,
but simply made the note in something like a spirit of vexation that such a
strain of music as I had just heard, should not last forever. What I did
once, I was easily induced by the same feeling to do again; and when, after
many years of affectionate communion between us, the painful existence of
my revered relative on earth was at length finished in peace, my occasional
notes of what he had said in my presence had grown to a mass, of which this
volume contains only such parts as seem fit for present publication. I
know, better than any one can tell me, how inadequately these specimens
represent the peculiar splendour and individuality of Mr. Coleridge's
conversation. How should it be otherwise? Who could always follow to the
turning-point his long arrow-flights of thought? Who could fix those
ejaculations of light, those tones of a prophet, which at times have made
me bend before him as before an inspired man? Such acts of spirit as these
were too subtle to be fettered down on paper; they live--if they can live
any where--in the memories alone of those who witnessed them. Yet I would
fain hope that these pages will prove that all is not lost;--that something
of the wisdom, the learning, and the eloquence of a great man's social
converse has been snatched from forgetfulness, and endowed with a permanent
shape for general use. And although, in the judgment of many persons, I may
incur a serious responsibility by this publication; I am, upon the whole,
willing to abide the result, in confidence that the fame of the loved and
lamented speaker will lose nothing hereby, and that the cause of Truth and
of Goodness will be every way a gainer. This sprig, though slight and
immature, may yet become its place, in the Poet's wreath of honour, among
flowers of graver hue.
If the favour shown to several modern instances of works nominally of the
same description as the present were alone to be considered, it might seem
that the old maxim, that nothing ought to be said of the dead but what is
good, is in a fair way of being dilated into an understanding that every
thing is good that has been said by the dead. The following pages do not, I
trust, stand in need of so much indulgence. Their contents may not, in
every particular passage, be of great intrinsic importance; but they can
hardly be without some, and, I hope, a worthy, interest, as coming from the
lips of one at least of the most extraordinary men of the age; whilst to
the best of my knowledge and intention, no living person's name is
introduced, whether for praise or for blame, except on literary or
political grounds of common notoriety. Upon the justice of the remarks here
published, it would be out of place in me to say any thing; and a
commentary of that kind is the less needed, as, in almost every instance,
the principles upon which the speaker founded his observations are
expressly stated, and may be satisfactorily examined by themselves. But,
for the purpose of general elucidation, it seemed not improper to add a few
notes, and to make some quotations from Mr. Coleridge's own works; and in
doing so, I was in addition actuated by an earnest wish to call the
attention of reflecting minds in general to the views of political, moral,
and religious philosophy contained in those works, which, through an
extensive, but now decreasing, prejudice, have hitherto been deprived of
that acceptance with the public which their great preponderating merits
deserve, and will, as I believe, finally obtain. And I can truly say, that
if, in the course of the perusal of this little work, any one of its
readers shall gain a clearer insight into the deep and pregnant principles,
in the light of which Mr. Coleridge was accustomed to regard God and the
World,--I shall look upon the publication as fortunate, and consider myself
abundantly rewarded for whatever trouble it has cost me.
A cursory inspection will show that this volume lays no claim to be ranked
with those of Boswell in point of dramatic interest. Coleridge differed
not more from Johnson in every characteristic of intellect, than in the
habits and circumstances of his life, during the greatest part of the time
in which I was intimately conversant with him. He was naturally very fond
of society, and continued to be so to the last; but the almost unceasing
ill health with which he was afflicted, after fifty, confined him for many
months in every year to his own room, and, most commonly, to his bed. He
was then rarely seen except by single visiters; and few of them would feel
any disposition upon such occasions to interrupt him, whatever might have
been the length or mood of his discourse. And indeed, although I have been
present in mixed company, where Mr. Coleridge has been questioned and
opposed, and the scene has been amusing for the moment--I own that it was
always much more delightful to me to let the river wander at its own sweet
will, unruffled by aught but a certain breeze of emotion which the stream
itself produced. If the course it took was not the shortest, it was
generally the most beautiful; and what you saw by the way was as worthy of
note as the ultimate object to which you were journeying. It is possible,
indeed, that Coleridge did not, in fact, possess the precise gladiatorial
power of Johnson; yet he understood a sword-play of his own; and I have,
upon several occasions, seen him exhibit brilliant proofs of its
effectiveness upon disputants of considerable pretensions in their
particular lines. But he had a genuine dislike of the practice in himself
or others, and no slight provocation could move him to any such exertion.
He was, indeed, to my observation, more distinguished from other great men
of letters by his moral thirst after the Truth--the ideal truth--in his
own mind, than by his merely intellectual qualifications. To leave the
everyday circle of society, in which the literary and scientific rarely--
the rest never--break through the spell of personality;--where Anecdote
reigns everlastingly paramount and exclusive, and the mildest attempt to
generalize the Babel of facts, and to control temporary and individual
phenomena by the application of eternal and overruling principles, is
unintelligible to many, and disagreeable to more;--to leave this species
of converse--if converse it deserves to be called--and pass an entire day
with Coleridge, was a marvellous change indeed. It was a Sabbath past
expression deep, and tranquil, and serene. You came to a man who had
travelled in many countries and in critical times; who had seen and felt
the world in most of its ranks and in many of its vicissitudes and
weaknesses; one to whom all literature and genial art were absolutely
subject, and to whom, with a reasonable allowance as to technical details,
all science was in a most extraordinary degree familiar. Throughout a
long-drawn summer's day would this man talk to you in low, equable, but
clear and musical, tones, concerning things human and divine; marshalling
all history, harmonizing all experiment, probing the depths of your
consciousness, and revealing visions of glory and of terror to the
imagination; but pouring withal such floods of light upon the mind, that
you might, for a season, like Paul, become blind in the very act of
conversion. And this he would do, without so much as one allusion to
himself, without a word of reflection on others, save when any given act
fell naturally in the way of his discourse,--without one anecdote that was
not proof and illustration of a previous position;--gratifying no passion,
indulging no caprice, but, with a calm mastery over your soul, leading you
onward and onward for ever through a thousand windings, yet with no pause,
to some magnificent point in which, as in a focus, all the party-coloured
rays of his discourse should converge in light. In all this he was, in
truth, your teacher and guide; but in a little while you might forget that
he was other than a fellow student and the companion of your way,--so
playful was his manner, so simple his language, so affectionate the glance
of his pleasant eye!
There were, indeed, some whom Coleridge tired, and some whom he sent
asleep. It would occasionally so happen, when the abstruser mood was strong
upon him, and the visiter was narrow and ungenial. I have seen him at times
when you could not incarnate him,--when he shook aside your petty questions
or doubts, and burst with some impatience through the obstacles of common
conversation.
