Farewell! and when thy days are told, To a Highland Girl. [At Inversneyde, upon Loch Lomond.] Sweet Highland girl! a very shower And those gray rocks; that household lawn ; Of the wild sea; and I would have Now thanks to Heaven! that of its grace In spots like these it is we prize Our memory, feel that she hath eyes: Then, why should I be loath to stir? Laodamia. 'With sacrifice before the rising morn, Restore him to my sight-great Jove, restore!' So speaking, and by fervent love endowed With faith, the suppliant heavenward lifts her hands; O terror! what hath she perceived?-O joy! Mild Hermes spake, and touched her with his wand prayer, Laodamia! that at Jove's command Thy husband walks the paths of upper air; Forth sprang the impassioned queen her lord to clasp; 'Great Jove, Laodamia! doth not leave Thou knowest, the Delphic oracle foretold 'Supreme of heroes; bravest, noblest, best! But thou, though capable of sternest deed, Jove frowned in heaven; the conscious Parcæ threw "This visage tells thee that my doom is past; And surely as they vanish. Earth destroys Thy transports moderate; and meekly mourn Given back to dwell on earth in vernal bloom? And though his favourite seat be feeble woman's breast. Of all that is most beauteous-imaged there Yet there the soul shall enter which hath earned Yet bitter, ofttimes bitter was the pang, Old frailties then recurred; but lofty thought, Our blest reunion in the shades below. One of the most enthusiastic admirers of Wordsworth was Coleridge, so long his friend and associate, and who looked up to him with a sort of filial veneration and respect. He has drawn his poetical character at length in the Biographia Literaria, and if we consider it as applying to the higher characteristics of Wordsworth, without reference to the absurdity or puerility of some of his early fables, incidents, and language, it will be found equally just and felicitous. First, An austere purity of language, both grammatically and logically; in short, a perfect appropriateness of the words to the meaning. Secondly, A correspondent weight and sanity of the thoughts and sentiments won, not from books, but from the poet's own meditations. They are fresh, and have the dew upon them. Even throughout his smaller poems, there is not one which is not rendered valuable by some just and original reflection. Thirdly, The sinewy strength and originality of single lines and paragraphs; the frequent curiosa felicitas of his diction. Fourthly, The perfect truth of nature in his images and descriptions, as taken immediately from nature, and proving a long and genial intimacy with the very spirit which gives a physiognomic expression to all the works of nature. Fifthly, A meditative pathos, a union of deep and subtle thought with sensibility: a sympathy with man as man; the sympathy, indeed, of a contemplator rather than a fellow-sufferer and co-mate (spectator, haud particeps), but of a contemplation from whose view no difference of rank conceals the sameness of the nature; no injuries of wind or weather, or toil, or even of ignorance, wholly disguise the human face divine. Last, and pre-eminently, I challenge for this poet the gift of imagination in the highest and strictest sense of the word. In the play of fancy, Wordsworth, to my feelings, is always graceful, and sometimes recondite. The likeness is occasionally too strange, or demands too peculiar a point of view, or is such as appears the creature of predetermined research, rather than spontaneous presentation. Indeed, his fancy seldom displays itself as mere and unmodified fancy. But in imaginative power he stands nearest of all modern writers to Shakspeare and Milton, and yet in a mind perfectly unborrowed, and his own. To employ his own words, which are at once an instance and an illustration, he does indeed, to all thoughts and to all objects Samuel Taylor Coleridge. daily drudgery for the periodical press, and in nightly dreams distempered and feverish, he wasted, to use his own expression, the prime and manhood of his intellect.' The poet was a native of Devonshire, being born on the 20th of October 1772 at Ottery St Mary, of which parish his father was vicar. He received the principal part of his education at Christ's hospital, where he had Charles Lamb for a schoolfellow. He describes himself as being, from eight to fourteen, a playless day-dreamer, a helluo librorum;' and in this instance the child was father of the man,' for such was Coleridge to the end of his life. A stranger whom he had accidentally met one day on the streets of London, and who was struck with his conversation, made him free of a circulating library, and he read through the catalogue, folios and all. At fourteen, he had, like Gibbon, a stock of erudition that might have puzzled a doctor, and a degree of ignorance of which a schoolboy would have been ashamed. He had no ambition; his father was dead, and he actually thought of apprenticing himself to a shoemaker who lived near the school. The head master, Bowyer, interfered, and prevented this additional honour to the craft of St Crispin, already made illustrious by Gifford and Bloomfield. Coleridge became deputyGrecian, or head scholar, and obtained an exhibition or presentation from Christ's hospital to Jesus' college, Cambridge, where he remained from 1791 to 1793. He quitted college abruptly, without taking a degree, having become obnoxious to his superiors from his attachment to the principles of the French Revolution. When France in wrath her giant-limbs upreared, And with that oath which smote air, earth, and sea, Unawed I sang, amid a slavish band: And flung a magic light o'er all her hills and groves, To all that braved the tyrant-quelling lance, I dimmed thy light, or damped thy holy flame; In London, Coleridge soon felt himself forlorn and destitute, and he enlisted as a soldier in the 15th, Elliot's Light Dragoons. On his arrival at the quarters of the regiment,' says his friend and biographer Mr Gillman, 'the general of the district inspected the recruits, and looking hard at Coleridge, with a military air, inquired, "What's your name, sir ?" "Comberbach." (The name he had assumed.) "What do you come here for, sir?" as if of grace, tenderness, and majesty, seem ever to have doubting whether he had any business there. "Sir," haunted him. Some of these he embodied in exquisite said Coleridge, "for what most other persons come verse; but he wanted concentration and steadiness of-to be made a soldier." "Do you think," said the purpose to avail himself sufficiently of his intellectual general, "you can run a Frenchman through the riches. A happier destiny was also perhaps wanting; body?" "I do not know," replied Coleridge," as I for much of Coleridge's life was spent in poverty and never tried; but I'll let a Frenchman run me through dependence, amidst disappointment and ill-health, the body before I'll run away." "That will do," and in the irregularity caused by an unfortunate and said the general, and Coleridge was turned into the excessive use of opium, which tyrannised over him ranks.' The poet made a poor dragoon, and never for many years with unrelenting severity. Amidst advanced beyond the awkward squad. He wrote. letters, however, for all his comrades, and they generous and munificent patronage' of Messrs attended to his horse and accoutrements. After Josiah and Thomas Wedgewood, Staffordshire, enfour months' service (December 1793 to April 1794), abled the poet to proceed to Germany to complete the history and circumstances of Coleridge became his education, and he resided there fourteen months. known. He had written under his saddle, on the At Ratzburg and Gottingen he acquired a wellstable wall, a Latin sentence (Eheu! quam in- grounded knowledge of the German language and fortunii miserrimum est fuisse felicem !') which led literature, and was confirmed in his bias towards to an inquiry on the part of the captain of his troop, philosophical and metaphysical studies. On his who had more regard for the classics than Ensign return in 1800, he found Southey established at Northerton in Tom Jones. Coleridge was dis- Keswick, and Wordsworth at Grassmere. He went charged, and restored to his family and friends. to live with the former, and there his opinions The same year he published his Juvenile Poems, and underwent a total change. The Jacobin became a a drama on the Fall of Robespierre. He was then an royalist, and the Unitarian a warm and devoted ardent republican and a Socinian-full of high hopes believer in the Trinity. In the same year he puband anticipations, the golden exhalations of the lished his translation of Schiller's Wallenstein,' into dawn.' In conjunction with two other poetical en- which he had thrown some of the finest graces of his thusiasts-Southey and Lloyd-he resolved on emi-own fancy. The following passage may be considered grating to America, where the party were to found, a revelation of Coleridge's poetical faith and belief, amidst the wilds of Susquehanna, a Pantisocracy, conveyed in language picturesque and musical:— or state of society in which all things were to be Oh! never rudely will I blame his faith in common, and neither king nor priest could In the might of stars and angels! "Tis not merely mar their felicity. From building castles in the The human being's pride that peoples space air,' as Southey has said, 'to framing commonWith life and mystical predominance; wealths, was an easy transition.' The dream was Since likewise for the stricken heart of love never realised (it is said from a very prosaic causeThis visible nature, and this common world, the want of funds), and Coleridge, Southey, and Is all too narrow: yea, a deeper import Lloyd married three sisters-the Miss Frickers of Lurks in the legend told my infant years, Bristol. Coleridge, still ardent, wrote two political Than lies upon that truth we live to learn. pamphlets, concluding that truth should be spoken For fable is love's world, his house, his birthplace; at all times, but more especially at those times when Delightedly dwells he 'mong fays, and talismans, to speak truth is dangerous.' He established also a And spirits; and delightedly believes periodical in prose and verse, entitled The Watchman, Divinities, being himself divine. with the motto, 'that all might know the truth, and The intelligible forms of ancient poets, that the truth might make us free.' He watched in The fair humanities of old religion, vain. Coleridge's incurable want of order and puncThe power, the beauty, and the majesty, tuality, and his philosophical theories, tired out and disgusted his readers, and the work was discontinued after the ninth number. Of the unsaleable nature of this publication, he relates an amusing illustration. Happening one day to rise at an earlier hour than usual, he observed his servant girl putting an extravagant quantity of paper into the grate, in order to light the fire, and he mildly checked her for her wastefulness. 'La, sir, (replied Nanny) why, it is only Watchmen.' He went to reside in a cottage at Nether Stowey, at the foot of the Quantock hills, Somersetshire, which he has commemorated in his poetry. And now, beloved Stowey! I behold Thy church tower, and, methinks, the four huge elms Mr Wordsworth lived at Allfoxden, about two miles from Stowey, and the kindred feelings and pursuits of the two poets bound them in the closest friendship. At Stowey, Coleridge wrote some of his most beautiful poetry-his Ode on the Departing Year; Fears in Solitude; France, an Ode; Frost at Midnight; the first part of Christabel; the Ancient Mariner; and his tragedy of Remorse. The luxuriant fulness and individuality of his poetry show that he was then happy, no less than eager, in his studies. The two or three years spent at Stowey seem to have been at once the most felicitous and the most illustrious of Coleridge's literary life. He had established his name for ever, though it was long in struggling to distinction. During his residence at Stowey, Coleridge officiated as Unitarian preacher at Taunton, and afterwards at Shrewsbury.* In 1798 the That had their haunts in dale, or piny mountain, Mr Coleridge rose and gave out his text-" He departed again not their alliance, but their separation on the spirit of the world and the spirit of Christianity, not as the same, but as opposed to one another. He talked of those who had inscribed the cross of Christ on banners dripping with human gore! He made a poetical and pastoral excursion-and to show the fatal effects of war, drew a striking contrast between the simple shepherd-boy driving his team a-field, or sitting under the hawthorn, piping to his flock, as though he should never be old, and the same poor country lad, crimped, kidnapped, brought into town, made drunk at an alehouse, turned into a wretched drummer-boy, with his hair sticking on end with powder and pomatum, a long cue at his back, and tricked out in the finery of the profession of blood: * Mr Hazlitt has described his walking ten miles in a winter day to hear Coleridge preach. When I got there,' he says, 'the organ was playing the 100th Psalm, and when it was done, I heard the music of the spheres." "Such were the notes our once loved poet sung:" and, for myself, I could not have been more delighted if I had The lines which we have printed in Italics are an expansion of two of Schiller's, which Mr Hayward (another German poetical translator) thus literally renders: The old fable-existences are no more; The fascinating race has emigrated (wandered out or away). And even as life returns upon the drowned, As a means of subsistence Coleridge reluctantly consented to undertake the literary and political department of the Morning Post, in which he supported the measures of government. In 1804 we find him in Malta, secretary to the governor, Sir Alexander Ball, with a salary of £800 per annum. He held this lucrative office only nine months, having disagreed with the governor; and, after a tour in Italy, returned to England to resume his precarious labours as an author and lecturer. The desultory irregular habits of the poet, caused partly by his addiction to opium, and the dreamy indolence and procrastination which marked him throughout life, seem to have frustrated every chance and opportunity of self-advancement. Living again at Grassmere, he issued a second periodical, The Friend, which extended to twenty-seven numbers. The essays were sometimes acute and eloquent, but as often rhapsodical, imperfect, and full of German mysticism. In 1816, chiefly at the recommendation of Lord Byron, the wild and wondrous tale' of 'Christabel' was published. The first part, as we have mentioned, was written at Stowey as far back as 1797, and a second had been added on his return from Germany in 1800. The poem was still unfinished; but it would have been almost as difficult to complete the Faëry Queen, as to continue in the same spirit that witching strain of supernatural fancy and melodious verse. Another drama, Zapoyla (founded on the Winter's Tale), was published by Coleridge in 1818, and, with the exception of some minor poems, completes his poetical works. He wrote several characteristic prose disquisitionsThe Statesman's Manual, or the Bible the Best Guide to Political Skill and Foresight; a Lay Sermon (1816); a Second Lay Sermon, addressed to the Higher and Middle Classes on the existing Distresses and Discontents (1817); Biographia Literaria, two volumes, 1817; Aids to Reflection (1825); On the Constitution of the Church and State (1830); &c. He meditated a great theological and philosophical work, his magnum opus, on Christianity as the only revelation of permanent and universal validity,' which was to reduce all knowledge into harmony'-to unite the insulated fragments of truth, and therewith to frame a perfect mirror.' He planned also an epic poem on the destruction of Jerusalem, which he considered the only subject now remaining for an epic poem; a subject which, like Milton's Fall of Man, should interest all Christendom, as the Homeric War of Troy Mr Gillman's House, Highgate, the last residence of Coleridge. interested all Greece. Here,' said he, 'there would and admirers, who were happy to listen to his inbe the completion of the prophecies; the termination spired monologues, which he poured forth with of the first revealed national religion under the vio-exhaustless fecundity. We believe,' says one of lent assault of paganism, itself the immediate fore- these rapt and enthusiastic listeners, it has not been runner and condition of the spread of a revealed the lot of any other literary man in England, since mundane religion; and then you would have the Dr Johnson, to command the devoted admiration character of the Roman and the Jew; and the awful- and steady zeal of so many and such widely-differing ness, the completeness, the justice. I schemed it at disciples-some of them having become, and others twenty-five, but, alas! venturum expectat.' This being likely to become, fresh and independent sources ambition to execute some great work, and his consti- of light and moral action in themselves upon the tutional infirmity of purpose, which made him defer principles of their common master. One half of or recoil from such an effort, he has portrayed with these affectionate disciples have learned their lessons great beauty and pathos in an address to Words- of philosophy from the teacher's mouth. He has worth, composed after the latter had recited to him been to them as an old oracle of the academy or a poem on the growth of an individual mind:'Lyceum. The fulness, the inwardness, the ultimate scope of his doctrines, has never yet been published in print, and, if disclosed, it has been from time to Ah! as I listened with a heart forlorn, |