The Bristol Lectures--Marriage--Life at Clevedon--The
_Watchman_--Retirement to Stowey--Introduction to Wordsworth.
[1794-1797.]
The reflections of the worthy Master of Jesus upon the strange reply of
the wayward young undergraduate would have been involved in even
greater perplexity if he could have looked forward a few months into
the future. For after a winter spent in London, and enlivened by those
_noctes conoque Deûm_ at the "Cat and Salutation," which Lamb has so
charmingly recorded, Coleridge returned with Southey to Bristol at the
beginning of 1795, and there proceeded to deliver a series of lectures
which, whatever their other merits, would certainly not have assisted
Dr. Pearce to grasp the distinction between a Pantisocrat and a
Jacobin. As a scholar and a man of literary taste he might possibly
have admired the rhetorical force of the following outburst, but,
considering that the "HE" here gibbeted in capitals was no less a
personage than the "heaven-born minister" himself, a plain man might
well have wondered what additional force the vocabulary of Jacobinism
could have infused into the language of Pantisocracy. After summing up
the crimes of the Reign of Terror the lecturer asks: "Who, my brethren,
was the cause of this guilt if not HE who supplied the occasion and the
motive? Heaven hath bestowed on _that man_ a portion of its ubiquity,
and given him an actual presence in the sacraments of hell, wherever
administered, in all the bread of bitterness, in all the cups of
blood." And in general, indeed, the _Conciones ad Populum_, as
Coleridge named these lectures on their subsequent publication, were
rather calculated to bewilder any of the youthful lecturer's
well-wishers who might be anxious for some means of discriminating his
attitude from that of the Hardys, the Horne Tookes, and the Thelwalls
of the day. A little warmth of language might no doubt be allowed to a
young friend of liberty in discussing legislation which, in the
retrospect, has staggered even so staunch a Tory as Sir Archibald
Alison; but Coleridge's denunciation of the Pitt and Grenville Acts, in
the lecture entitled _The Plot Discovered_, is occasionally startling,
even for that day of fierce passions, in the fierceness of its
language. It is interesting, however, to note the ever-active play of
thought and reasoning amid the very storm and stress of political
passion. Coleridge is never for long together a mere declaimer on
popular rights and ministerial tyranny, and even this indignant address
contains a passage of extremely just and thoughtful analysis of the
constituent elements of despotism. Throughout the spring and summer of
1795 Coleridge continued his lectures at Bristol, his head still
simmering--though less violently, it may be suspected, every
month--with Pantisocracy, and certainly with all his kindred political
and religious enthusiasms unabated.
A study of these crude but vigorous addresses reveals to us, as does
the earlier of the early poems, a mind struggling with its half-formed
and ever-changing conceptions of the world, and, as is usual at such
peculiar phases of an intellectual development, affirming its temporary
beliefs with a fervour and vehemence directly proportioned to the
recency of their birth. Commenting on the _Conciones ad Populum_ many
years afterwards, and invoking them as witnesses to his political
consistency as an author, Coleridge remarked that with the exception of
"two or three pages involving the doctrine of philosophical necessity
and Unitarianism," he saw little or nothing in these outbursts of his
youthful zeal to retract, and, with the exception of "some
flame-coloured epithets" applied to persons, as to Mr. Pitt and others,
"or rather to personifications"--for such, he says, they really were to
him--as little to regret.
We now, however, arrive at an event, important in the life of every
man, and which influenced that of Coleridge to an extent not the less
certainly extraordinary because difficult, if not impossible, to define
with exactitude. On the 4th of October 1795 Coleridge was married at
St. Mary Redcliffe Church, Bristol, to Sarah (or as he preferred to
spell it Sara) Fricker, and withdrew for a time from the eager
intellectual life of a political lecturer to the contemplative quiet
appropriate to the honeymoon of a poet, spent in a sequestered cottage
amid beautiful scenery, and within sound of the sea. No wonder that
among such surroundings, and with such belongings, the honeymoon should
have extended from one month to three, and indeed that Coleridge should
have waited till his youthful yearnings for a life of action, and
perhaps (though that would have lent itself less gracefully to his poem
of farewell to his Clevedon cottage) his increasing sense of the
necessity of supplementing the ambrosia of love with the bread and
cheese of mortals, compelled him to re-enter the world. No wonder he
should have delayed to do so, for it is as easy to perceive in his
poems that these were days of unclouded happiness as it is melancholy
to reflect by how few others like them his life was destined to be
brightened. The _Æolian Harp_ has no more than the moderate merits,
with its full share of the characteristic faults, of his earlier
productions; but one cannot help "reading into it" the poet's
after-life of disappointment and disillusion--estrangement from the
"beloved woman" in whose affection he was then reposing; decay and
disappearance of those "flitting phantasies" with which he was then so
joyously trifling, and the bitterly ironical scholia which fate was
preparing for such lines as
"And tranquil muse upon tranquillity."
One cannot in fact refrain from mentally comparing the _'olian Harp_ of
1795 with the _Dejection_ of 1803, and no one who has thoroughly felt
the spirit of both poems can make that comparison without emotion. The
former piece is not, as has been said, in a literary sense remarkable.
With the exception of the one point of metrical style, to be touched on
presently, it has almost no note of poetic distinction save such as
belongs of right to any simple record of a mood which itself forms the
highest poetry of the average man's life; and one well knows whence
came the criticism of that MS. note inscribed by S. T. C. in a copy of
the second edition of his early poems, "This I think the most perfect
poem I ever wrote. Bad may be the best perhaps." One feels that the
annotator might just as well have written, "How perfect was the
happiness which this poem recalls!" for this is really all that
Coleridge's eulogium, with its touching bias from the hand of memory,
amounts to.
It has become time, however, to speak more generally of Coleridge's
early poems. The peaceful winter months of 1795-96 were in all
likelihood spent in arranging and revising the products of those poetic
impulses which had more or less actively stirred within him from his
seventeenth year upwards; and in April 1797 there appeared at Bristol a
volume of some fifty pieces entitled _Poems on Various Subjects, by S.
T. Coleridge, late of Jesus College Cambridge_. It was published by his
friend Cottle, who, in a mixture of the generous with the speculative
instinct, had given him thirty guineas for the copyright. Its contents
are of a miscellaneous kind, consisting partly of rhymed irregular
odes, partly of a collection of _Sonnets on Eminent Characters_, and
partly (and principally) of a blank verse poem of several hundred
lines, then, and indeed for years afterwards, regarded by many of the
poet's admirers as his masterpiece--the _Religious Musings_. [1]
To the second edition of these poems, which was published in the
following year, Coleridge, at all times a candid critic (to the limited
extent to which it is possible even for the finest judges to be so) of
his own works, prefixed a preface, wherein he remarks that his poems
have been "rightly charged with a profusion of double epithets and a
general turgidness," and adds that he has "pruned the double epithets
with no sparing hand," and used his best efforts to tame the swell and
glitter both of thought and diction. "The latter fault, however, had,"
he continues, "so insinuated itself into my _Religious Musings_ with
such intricacy of union that sometimes I have omitted to disentangle
the weed from fear of snapping the flower." This is plain-spoken
criticism, but I do not think that any reader who is competent to
pronounce judgment on the point will be inclined to deprecate its
severity. Nay, in order to get done with fault-finding as soon as
possible, it must perhaps be added that the admitted turgidness of the
poems is often something more than a mere defect of style, and that the
verse is turgid because the feeling which it expresses is exaggerated.
The "youthful bard unknown to fame" who, in the _Songs of the Pixies_,
is made to "heave the gentle misery of a sigh," is only doing a natural
thing described in ludicrously and unnaturally stilted terms; but the
young admirer of the _Robbers_, who informs Schiller that if he were to
meet him in the evening wandering in his loftier mood "beneath some
vast old tempest-swinging wood," he would "gaze upon him awhile in mute
awe" and then "weep aloud in a wild ecstasy," endangers the reader's
gravity not so much by extravagance of diction as by over-effusiveness
of sentiment. The former of these two offences differs from the latter
by the difference between "fustian" and "gush." And there is, in fact,
more frequent exception to be taken to the character of the thought in
these poems than to that of the style. The remarkable gift of
eloquence, which seems to have belonged to Coleridge from boyhood,
tended naturally to aggravate that very common fault of young poets
whose faculty of expression has outstripped the growth of their
intellectual and emotional experiences--the fault of wordiness. Page
after page of the poems of 1796 is filled with what one cannot, on the
most favourable terms, rank higher than rhetorical commonplace; stanza
after stanza falls pleasantly upon the ear without suggesting any image
sufficiently striking to arrest the eye of the imagination, or
awakening any thought sufficiently novel to lay hold upon the mind. The
_Æolian Harp_ has been already referred to as a pleasing poem, and
reading it, as we must, in constant recollection of the circumstances
in which it was written, it unquestionably is so. But in none of the
descriptions either of external objects or of internal feeling which
are to be found in this and its companion piece, the _Reflections on
having left a Place of Retirement_, is there anything which can fairly
be said to elevate them above the level of graceful verse. It is only
in the region of the fantastic and supernatural that Coleridge's
imagination, as he was destined to show by a far more splendid example
two years afterwards, seems to acquire true poetic distinction. It is
in the _Songs of the Pixies_ that the young man "heaves the gentle
misery of a sigh," and the sympathetic interest of the reader of today
is chilled by the too frequent intrusion of certain abstract ladies,
each preceded by her capital letter and attended by her
"adjective-in-waiting;" but, after all deductions for the
conventionalisms of "white-robed Purity," "meek-eyed Pity," "graceful
Ease," etc., one cannot but feel that the _Songs of the Pixies_ was the
offspring not of a mere abundant and picturesque vocabulary but of a
true poetic fancy. It is worth far more as an earnest of future
achievement than the very unequal _Monody on the Death of Chatterton_
(for which indeed we ought to make special allowance, as having been
commenced in the author's eighteenth year), and certainly than anything
which could be quoted from the _Effusions_, as Coleridge, unwilling to
challenge comparison with the divine Bowles, had chosen to describe his
sonnets. It must be honestly said indeed that these are, a very few
excepted, among the least satisfactory productions of any period of his
poetic career. The Coleridgian sonnet is not only imperfect in form and
in marked contrast in the frequent bathos of its close to the steady
swell and climax of Wordsworth, but, in by far the majority of
instances in this volume, it is wanting in internal weight. The "single
pebble" of thought which a sonnet should enclose is not only not neatly
wrapped up in its envelope of words, but it is very often not heavy
enough to carry itself and its covering to the mark. When it is so, its
weight, as in the sonnet to Pitt, is too frequently only another word
for an ephemeral violence of political feeling which, whether displayed
on one side or the other, cannot be expected to reproduce its effect in
the minds of comparatively passionless posterity. Extravagances, too,
abound, as when in _Kosciusko_ Freedom is made to look as if, in a fit
of "wilfulness and sick despair," she had drained a mystic urn
containing all the tears that had ever found "fit channel on a
Patriot's furrowed cheek." The main difficulty of the metre, too--that
of avoiding forced rhymes--is rarely surmounted. Even in the three fine
lines in the _Burke_---
"Thee stormy Pity and the cherished lure
Of Pomp and proud precipitance of soul,
Wildered with meteor fires"--
we cannot help feeling that "lure" is extremely harsh, while the
weakness of the two concluding lines of the sonnet supplies a typical
example of the disappointment which these "effusions" so often prepare
for their readers.
Enough, however, has been said of the faults of these early poems; it
remains to consider their merits, foremost among which, as might be
expected, is the wealth and splendour of their diction in these
passages, in which such display is all that is needed for the literary
ends of the moment. Over all that wide region of literature, in which
force and fervour of utterance, depth and sincerity of feeling avail,
without the nameless magic of poetry in the higher sense of the word,
to achieve the objects of the writer and to satisfy the mind of the
reader, Coleridge ranges with a free and sure footstep. It is no
disparagement to his _Religious Musings_ to say that it is to this
class of literature that it belongs. Having said this, however, it must
be added that poetry of the second order has seldom risen to higher
heights of power. The faults already admitted disfigure it here and
there. We have "moon blasted Madness when he yells at midnight;" we
read of "eye-starting wretches and rapture-trembling seraphim," and the
really striking image of Ruin, the "old hag, unconquerable, huge,
Creation's eyeless drudge," is marred by making her "nurse" an
"impatient earthquake." But there is that in Coleridge's aspirations
and apostrophes to the Deity which impresses one even more profoundly
than the mere magnificence, remarkable as it is, of their rhetorical
clothing. They are touched with so penetrating a sincerity; they are so
obviously the outpourings of an awe-struck heart. Indeed, there is
nothing more remarkable at this stage of Coleridge's poetic development
than the instant elevation which his verse assumes whenever he passes
to Divine things. At once it seems to take on a Miltonic majesty of
diction and a Miltonic stateliness of rhythm. The tender but low-lying
domestic sentiment of the _Æolian Harp_ is in a moment informed by it
with the dignity which marks that poem's close. Apart too from its
literary merits, the biographical interest of _Religious Musings_ is
very considerable. "Written," as its title declares, but in reality, as
its length would suggest and as Mr. Cottle in fact tells us, only
_completed_, "on the Christmas eve of 1794," it gives expression to the
tumultuous emotions by which Coleridge's mind was agitated at this its
period of highest political excitement. His revolutionary enthusiasm
was now at its hottest, his belief in the infant French Republic at its
fullest, his wrath against the "coalesced kings" at its fiercest, his
contempt for their religious pretence at its bitterest. "Thee to
defend," he cries,
"Thee to defend, dear Saviour of mankind!
Thee, Lamb of God! Thee, blameless Prince of Peace!
From all sides rush the thirsty brood of war--
Austria, and that foul Woman of the North,
The lustful murderess of her wedded lord,
And he, connatural mind! whom (in their songs,
So bards of elder time had haply feigned)
Some Fury fondled in her hate to man,
Bidding her serpent hair in tortuous fold
Lick his young face, and at his mouth imbreathe
Horrible sympathy!"
This is vigorous poetic invective; and the effect of such outbursts is
heightened by the rapid subsidence of the passion that inspires them
and the quick advent of a calmer mood. We have hardly turned the page
ere denunciations of Catherine and Frederick William give place to
prayerful invocations of the Supreme Being, which are in their turn the
prelude of a long and beautiful contemplative passage: "In the prim'val
age, a dateless while," etc., on the pastoral origin of human society.
It is as though some sweet and solemn strain of organ music had
succeeded to the blast of war-bugles and the roll of drums. In the _Ode
to the Departing Year_, written in the last days of 1796, with its
"prophecy of curses though I pray fervently for blessings" upon the
poet's native country, the mood is more uniform in its gloom; and it
lacks something, therefore, of those peculiar qualities which make the
_Religious Musings_ one perhaps of the most pleasing of all Coleridge's
earlier productions. But it shares with the poems shortly to be noticed
what may be called the autobiographic charm. The fresh natural emotion
of a young and brilliant mind is eternally interesting, and Coleridge's
youthful Muse, with a frankness of self-disclosure which is not the
less winning because at times it provokes a smile, confides to us even
the history of her most temporary moods. It is, for instance, at once
amusing and captivating to read in the latest edition of the poems, as
a footnote to the lines--
"Not yet enslaved, not wholly vile,
O Albion! O my mother isle!"
the words--
"O doomed to fall, enslaved and vile--1796."
Yes; in 1796 and till the end of 1797 the poet's native country _was_
in his opinion all these dreadful things, but, directly the mood
changes, the verse alters, and to the advantage, one cannot but think,
of the beautiful and often-quoted close of the passage--
"And Ocean mid his uproar wild
Speaks safety to his island child.
Hence for many a fearless age
Has social Quiet loved thy shore,
Nor ever proud invader's rage,
Or sacked thy towers or stained thy fields with gore."
And whether we view him in his earlier or his later mood there is a
certain strange dignity of utterance, a singular confidence in his own
poetic mission, which forbids us to smile at this prophet of
four-and-twenty who could thus conclude his menacing vaticinations:--
"Away, my soul, away!
I, unpartaking of the evil thing,
With daily prayer and daily toil
Soliciting for food my scanty soil,
Have wailed my country with a loud lament.
Now I recentre my immortal mind
In the deep Sabbath of meek self-content,
Cleansed from the vaporous passions which bedim
God's image, sister of the Seraphim."
If ever the consciousness of great powers and the assurance of a great
future inspired a youth with perfect and on the whole well-warranted
fearlessness of ridicule it has surely done so here.
Poetry alone, however, formed no sufficient outlet for Coleridge's
still fresh political enthusiasm--an enthusiasm which now became too
importunate to let him rest in his quiet Clevedon cottage. Was it
right, he cries in his lines of leave-taking to his home, that he
should dream away the entrusted hours "while his unnumbered brethren
toiled and bled"? The propaganda of Liberty was to be pushed forward;
the principles of Unitarianism, to which Coleridge had become a convert
at Cambridge, were to be preached. Is it too prosaic to add that what
poor Henri Murger calls the "chasse aux piecè de cent sous" was in all
probability demanding peremptorily to be resumed?
Anyhow it so fell out that in the spring of the year 1796 Coleridge
took his first singular plunge into the unquiet waters of journalism,
instigated thereto by "sundry philanthropists and anti-polemists,"
whose names he does not record, but among whom we may conjecturally
place Mr. Thomas Poole of Stowey, with whom he had formed what was
destined to be one of the longest and closest friendships of his life.
Which of the two parties--the advisers or the advised--was responsible
for the general plan of this periodical and for the arrangements for
its publication is unknown; but one of these last-mentioned details is
enough to indicate that there could have been no "business head" among
them. Considering that the motto of the _Watchman_ declared the object
of its issue to be that "all might know the truth, and that the truth
might make them free," it is to be presumed that the promoters of the
scheme were not unwilling to secure as many subscribers as possible for
their sheet of "thirty-two pages, large octavo, closely printed, price
only fourpence." In order, however, to exempt it from the stamp-tax,
and with the much less practical object of making it "contribute as
little as possible to the supposed guilt of a war against freedom," it
was to be published on every eighth day, so that the week-day of its
appearance would of course vary with each successive week--an
arrangement as ingeniously calculated to irritate and alienate its
public as any perhaps that the wit of man could have devised. So,
however, it was to be, and accordingly with "a naming prospectus,
'Knowledge is Power,' to cry the state of the political atmosphere,"
Coleridge set off on a tour to the north, from Bristol to Sheffield,
for the purpose of procuring customers, preaching Unitarian sermons by
the way in most of the great towns, "as an hireless volunteer in a blue
coat and white waistcoat that not a rag of the woman of Babylon might
be seen on me." How he sped upon his mission is related by him with
infinite humour in the _Biographia Literaria_. He opened the campaign
at Birmingham upon a Calvinist tallow-chandler, who, after listening to
half an hour's harangue, extending from "the captivity of the nations"
to "the near approach of the millennium," and winding up with a
quotation describing the latter "glorious state" out of the _Religious
Musings_, inquired what might be the cost of the new publication.
Deeply sensible of "the anti-climax, the abysmal bathos" of the answer,
Coleridge replied, "Only fourpence, each number to be published every
eighth day," upon which the tallow-chandler observed doubtfully that
that came to "a deal of money at the end of the year." What determined
him, however, to withhold his patronage was not the price of the
article but its quantity, and not the deficiency of that quantity but
its excess. Thirty-two pages, he pointed out, was more than he ever
read all the year round, and though "as great a one as any man in
Brummagem for liberty and truth, and them sort of things, he begged to
be excused." Had it been possible to arrange for supplying him with
sixteen pages of the paper for twopence, a bargain might no doubt have
been struck; but he evidently had a business-like repugnance to
anything in the nature of "over-trading." Equally unsuccessful was a
second application made at Manchester to a "stately and opulent
wholesale dealer in cottons," who thrust the prospectus into his pocket
and turned his back upon the projector, muttering that he was "overrun
with these articles." This, however, was Coleridge's last attempt at
canvassing. His friends at Birmingham persuaded him to leave that work
to others, their advice being no doubt prompted, in part at least, by
the ludicrous experience of his qualifications as a canvasser which the
following incident furnished them. The same tradesman who had
introduced him to the patriotic tallow-chandler entertained him at
dinner, and, after the meal, invited his guest to smoke a pipe with him
and "two or three other _illuminati_ of the same rank." The invitation
was at first declined on the plea of an engagement to spend the evening
with a minister and his friends, and also because, writes Coleridge, "I
had never smoked except once or twice in my lifetime, and then it was
herb-tobacco mixed with Oronooko." His host, however, assured him that
the tobacco was equally mild, and "seeing, too, that it was of a yellow
colour," he took half a pipe of it, "filling the lower half of the
bowl," for some unexplained reason, "with salt." He was soon, however,
compelled to resign it "in consequence of a giddiness and distressful
feeling" in his eyes, which, as he had drunk but a single glass of ale,
he knew must have been the effect of the tobacco. Deeming himself
recovered after a short interval, he sallied forth to fulfil the
evening's engagement; but the symptoms returned with the walk and the
fresh air, and he had scarcely entered the minister's drawing-room and
opened a packet of letters awaiting him there than he "sank back on the
sofa in a sort of swoon rather than sleep." Fortunately he had had time
to inform his new host of the confused state of his feelings and of its
occasion; for "here and thus I lay," he continues, "my face like a wall
that is whitewashing, deathly pale, and with the cold drops of
perspiration running down it from my forehead; while one after another
there dropped in the different gentlemen who had been invited to meet
and spend the evening with me, to the number of from fifteen to twenty.
As the poison of tobacco acts but for a short time, I at length awoke
from insensibility and looked round on the party, my eyes dazzled by
the candles, which had been lighted in the interim. By way of relieving
my embarrassment one of the gentlemen began the conversation with:
'Have you seen a paper to-day, Mr. Coleridge?' 'Sir,' I replied,
rubbing my eyes, 'I am far from convinced that a Christian is permitted
to read either newspapers or any other works of merely political and
temporary interest.'" The incongruity of this remark, with the purpose
for which the speaker was known to have visited Birmingham, and to
assist him in which the company had assembled, produced, as was
natural, "an involuntary and general burst of laughter," and the party
spent, we are told, a most delightful evening. Both then and
afterwards, however, they all joined in dissuading the young projector
from proceeding with his scheme, assuring him "in the most friendly and
yet most flattering expressions" that the employment was neither fit
for him nor he for the employment. They insisted that at any rate "he
should make no more applications in person, but carry on the canvass by
proxy," a stipulation which we may well believe to have been prompted
as much by policy as by good nature. The same hospitable reception, the
same dissuasion, and, that failing, the same kind exertions on his
behalf, he met with at Manchester, Derby, Nottingham, and every other
place he visited; and the result of his tour was that he returned with
nearly a thousand names on the subscription list of the _Watchman_,
together with "something more than a half conviction that prudence
dictated the abandonment of the scheme." Nothing but this, however, was
needed to induce him to persevere with it. To know that a given course
of conduct was the dictate of prudence was a sort of presumptive proof
to him at this period of life that the contrary was the dictate of
duty. In due time, or rather out of due time,--for the publication of
the first number was delayed beyond the day announced for it,--the
_Watchman_ appeared. Its career was brief--briefer, indeed, than it
need have been. A naturally short life was suicidally shortened. In the
second number, records Coleridge, with delightful _naïveté_, "an
essay against fast-days, with a most censurable application of a text
from Isaiah [2] for its motto, lost me near five hundred subscribers at
one blow." In the two following numbers he made enemies of all his
Jacobin and democratic patrons by playing Balaam to the legislation of
the Government, and pronouncing something almost like a blessing on the
"gagging bills"--measures he declared which, "whatever the motive of
their introduction, would produce an effect to be desired by all true
friends of freedom, as far as they should contribute to deter men from
openly declaiming on subjects the principles of which they had never
bottomed, and from pleading to the poor and ignorant instead of
pleading for them." At the same time the editor of the _Watchman_
avowed his conviction that national education and a concurring spread
of the Gospel were the indispensable conditions of any true political
amelioration. We can hardly wonder on the whole that by the time the
seventh number was published its predecessors were being "exposed in
sundry old iron shops at a penny a piece."
And yet, like everything which came from Coleridge's hand, this
immature and unpractical production has an interest of its own. Amid
the curious mixture of actuality and abstract disquisition of which
each number of the _Watchman_ is made up, we are arrested again and
again by some striking metaphor or some weighty sentence which tells us
that the writer is no mere wordy wielder of a facile pen. The paper on
the slave trade in the seventh number is a vigorous and, in places, a
heart-stirring appeal to the humane emotions. There are passages in it
which foreshadow Coleridge's more mature literary manner--the manner of
the great pulpit orators of the seventeenth century--in a very
interesting way. [3] But what was the use of No. IV containing an
effective article like this when No. III. had opened with an
"Historical Sketch of the Manners and Religion of the Ancient Germans,
introductory to a sketch of the Manners, Religion, and Politics of
present Germany"? This to a public who wanted to read about Napoleon
and Mr. Pitt! No. III. in all probability "choked off" a good
proportion of the commonplace readers who might have been well content
to have put up with the humanitarian rhetoric of No. IV., if only for
its connection with so unquestionable an actuality as West Indian
sugar. It was, anyhow, owing to successive alienations of this kind
that on 13th May 1796 the editor of the _Watchman_ was compelled to bid
farewell to his few remaining readers in the tenth number of his
periodical, for the "short and satisfactory" reason that "the work does
not pay its expenses." "Part of my readers," continues Coleridge,
"relinquished it because it did not contain sufficient original
composition, and a still larger part because it contained too much;"
and he then proceeds with that half-humorous simplicity of his to
explain what excellent reasons there were why the first of these
classes should transfer their patronage to Flower's _Cambridge
Intelligencer_, and the second theirs to the _New Monthly Magazine_.
It is not, however, for the biographer or the world to regret the short
career of the _Watchman_, since its decease left Coleridge's mind in
undivided allegiance to the poetic impulse at what was destined to be
the period of its greatest power. In the meantime one result of the
episode had been to make a not unimportant addition to his friendships.
Mention has already been made of his somewhat earlier acquaintance with
Mr. Thomas Poole of Nether Stowey, a man of high intelligence and mark
in his time; and it was in the course of his northern peregrinations in
search of subscribers that he met with Charles Lloyd. This young man,
the son of an eminent Birmingham banker, was so struck with Coleridge's
genius and eloquence as to conceive an "ardent desire to domesticate
himself permanently with a man whose conversation was to him as a
revelation from heaven;" and shortly after the decease of the
_Watchman_ he obtained his parents' consent to the arrangement.
Early, therefore, in the year 1797 Coleridge, accompanied by Charles
Lloyd, removed to Nether Stowey in Somersetshire, where he occupied a
cottage placed at his disposal by Mr. Poole. His first employment in
his new abode appears to have been the preparation of the second
edition of his poems. In the new issue nineteen pieces of the former
publication were discarded and twelve new ones added, the most
important of which was the _Ode to the Departing Year_, which had first
appeared in the _Cambridge Intelligencer_, and had been immediately
afterwards republished in a separate form as a thin quarto pamphlet,
together with some lines of no special merit "addressed to a young man
of fortune" (probably Charles Lloyd), "who abandoned himself to an
indolent and causeless melancholy." To the new edition were added the
preface already quoted from, and a prose introduction to the sonnets.
The volume also contained some poems by Charles Lloyd and an enlarged
collection of sonnets and other pieces by Charles Lamb, the latter of
whom about the time of its publication paid his first visit to the
friend with whom, ever since leaving Christ's Hospital, he had kept up
a constant and, to the student of literature, a most interesting
correspondence. [4] In June 1797 Charles and Mary Lamb arrived at the
Stowey cottage to find their host disabled by an accident which
prevented him from walking during their whole stay. It was during their
absence on a walking expedition that he composed the pleasing lines--
"The lime-tree bower my prison,"
in which he thrice applies to his friend that epithet which gave such
humorous annoyance to the "gentle-hearted Charles." [5]
But a greater than Lamb, if one may so speak without offence to the
votaries of that rare humorist and exquisite critic, had already made
his appearance on the scene. Some time before this visit of Lamb's to
Stowey Coleridge had made the acquaintance of the remarkable man who
was destined to influence his literary career in many ways importantly,
and in one way decisively. It was in the month of June 1797, and at the
village of Racedown in Dorsetshire, that he first met William
Wordsworth.
FOOTNOTES
1. The volume contained also three sonnets by Charles Lamb, one of
which was destined to have a somewhat curious history.
2. "Wherefore my bowels shall sound like an harp."--Is. xvi. 11.
3. Take for instance this sentence: "Our own sorrows, like the Princes
of Hell in Milton's Pandemonium, sit enthroned 'bulky and vast;' while
the miseries of our fellow-creatures dwindle into pigmy forms, and are
crowded in an innumerable multitude into some dark corner of the
heart." Both in character of imagery and in form of structure we have
here the germ of such passages as this which one might confidently defy
the most accomplished literary "taster" to distinguish from Jeremy
Taylor: "Or like two rapid streams that at their first meeting within
narrow and rocky banks mutually strive to repel each other, and
intermix reluctantly and in tumult, but soon finding a wider channel
and more yielding shores, blend and dilate and flow on in one current
and with one voice."--_Biog. Lit._ p. 155.
4. Perhaps a "correspondence" of which only one side exists may be
hardly thought to deserve that name. Lamb's letters to Coleridge are
full of valuable criticism on their respective poetical efforts.
Unfortunately in, it is somewhat strangely said, "a fit of dejection"
he destroyed all Coleridge's letters to him.
5. Lamb's Correspondence with Coleridge, Letter XXXVII.