There are few incidents in the life of the literary man to make any narrations of sufficient importance or sufficiently amusing for the readers, and the readers only of works of amus.e.m.e.nt. The biography of such men is supposed to contain the faithful history and growth of their minds, and the circ.u.mstances under which it is developed, and to this it must be confined.
What has been done by Coleridge himself, and where he has been his own biographer, will be carefully noticed and given here, when it falls in with the intention and purposes of this work; for this reason the Biographia Literaria has been so frequently quoted. Coleridge had pa.s.sed nearly half his life in a retirement almost amounting to solitude, and this he preferred. First, he was anxious for leisure to pursue those studies which wholly engrossed his mind; and secondly, his health permitted him but little change, except when exercise was required; and during the latter part of his life he became nearly crippled by the rheumatism. His character will form a part in the Philosophical History of the Human Mind, which will be placed in the s.p.a.ce left for it by his amiable and most faithful friend and disciple, whose talents, whose heart and acquirements makes him most fit to describe them, and whose time was for so many years devoted to this great man. But, to continue in the order of time, in June, 1797, he was visited by his friend Charles Lamb and his sister.
On the morning after their arrival, Coleridge met with an accident which disabled him from walking during the whole of their stay. One evening, when they had left him for a few hours, he composed the poem, "This Lime-tree Bower my Prison," in which he refers to his old friend, while watching him in fancy with his sister, winding and ascending the hills at a short distance, himself detained as if a prisoner:
"Yes! they wander on In gladness all; but thou, methinks, most glad, My gentle-hearted Charles! for thou hast pined And hunger"d after nature, many a year; In the great city pent, winning thy way With sad yet patient soul, through evil, and pain, And strange calamity! Ah! slowly sink Behind the western ridge, thou glorious sun!
Shine in the slant beams of the sinking orb, Ye purple heath flowers! richlier burn, ye clouds!
Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves!
And kindle, thou blue ocean! So my friend Struck with deep joy may stand, as I have stood, Silent with swimming sense; yea, gazing round On the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem Less gross than bodily; and of such hues As veil the Almighty Spirit, when yet he makes Spirits perceive his presence."
During his residence here, Mr. William Hazlitt became acquainted with him, which is thus vividly recorded in the "Liberal":
"My father was a dissenting minister at Wem, in Shropshire; and in the year 1798, Mr. Coleridge came to Shrewsbury, to succeed Mr. Rowe in the spiritual charge of a Unitarian congregation there. He did not come till late on the Sat.u.r.day afternoon before he was to preach, and Mr. Rowe, who himself went down to the coach in a state of anxiety and expectation, to look for the arrival of his successor, could find no one at all answering the description, but a round-faced man, in a short black coat (like a shooting jacket), which hardly seemed to have been made for him, but who appeared to be talking at a great rate to his fellow-pa.s.sengers. Mr. Rowe had scarcely returned to give an account of his disappointment, when the round-faced man in black entered, and dissipated all doubts on the subject, by beginning to talk. He did not cease while he stayed, nor has he since that I know of. [22]
He held the good town of Shrewsbury in delightful suspense for three weeks that he remained there, "fluttering the proud Salopians like an eagle in a dove-cot;" and the Welsh mountains, that skirt the horizon with their tempestuous confusion, agree to have heard no such mystic sounds since the days of
"High-born Hoel"s harp or soft Llewellyn"s lyre!"
My father lived ten miles from Shrewsbury, and was in the habit of exchanging visits with Mr. Rowe, and Mr. Jenkins of Whitchurch (nine miles further on), according to the custom of dissenting ministers in each other"s neighbourhood. A line of communication is thus established, by which the flame of civil and religious liberty is kept alive, and nourishes its mouldering fire unquenchable, like the fires in the Agamemnon of aeschylus, placed at different stations, that waited for ten long years to announce, with their blazing pyramids, the destruction of Troy.
Coleridge had agreed to come once to see my father, according to the courtesy of the country, as Mr. Rowe"s probable successor; but in the meantime I had gone to hear him preach the Sunday after his arrival. A poet and a philosopher getting up into a Unitarian pulpit to preach the gospel was a romance in these degenerate days,--which was not to be resisted.
It was in January, 1798, that I rose one morning before daylight, to walk ten miles in the mud, to hear this celebrated person preach.
Never, the longest day I have to live, shall I have such another walk as this cold, raw, comfortless one, in the winter of the year 1798.
"Il y a des impressions que ni le tems, ni les circonstances peuvent effacer. Dusse-je vivre des siecles entiers, le doux tems de ma jeunesse ne peut renaitre pour moi, ni s"effacer jamais dans ma memoire." When I got there, the organ was playing the 100th psalm; and, when it was done, Mr. Coleridge rose and gave out his text,--"He departed again into a mountain "himself alone"." As he gave out this text, his voice "rose like a stream of rich distilled perfumes;" and when he came to the two last words, which he p.r.o.nounced loud, deep, and distinct, it seemed to me, who was then young, as if the sounds had echoed from the bottom of the human heart, and as if that prayer might have floated in solemn silence through the universe. The idea of St. John came into my mind, "of one crying in the wilderness, who had his loins girt about, and whose food was locusts and wild honey." The preacher then launched into his subject, like an eagle dallying with the wind. The sermon was upon peace and war--upon church and state--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 afield, 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:
"Such were the notes our once loved poet sung;"
and, for myself, I could not have been more delighted if I had heard the music of the spheres. Poetry and Philosophy had met together.
Truth and Genius had embraced under the eye and with the sanction of Religion. This was even beyond my hopes. I returned home well satisfied. The sun that was still labouring pale and wan through the sky, obscured by thick mists, seemed an emblem of the "good cause"; and the cold dank drops of dew, that hung half melted on the beard of the thistle, had something genial and refreshing in them--
"On the Tuesday following, the half-inspired speaker came. I was called down into the room where he was, and went half-hoping, half-afraid. He received me very graciously, and I listened for a long time without uttering a word, and did not suffer in his opinion by my silence. "For those two hours (he was afterwards pleased to say) he was conversing with W. H."s forehead." His appearance was different from what I had antic.i.p.ated from seeing him before. At a distance, and in the dim light of the chapel, there was to me a strange wildness in his aspect, a dusky obscurity, and I thought him pitted with the small-pox. His complexion was at that time clear, and even bright,
"As are the children of yon azure sheen."
His forehead was broad and high, as if built of ivory, with large projecting eyebrows, and his eyes rolling beneath them like a sea with darkened l.u.s.tre.
"A certain tender bloom his face o"erspread;"
a purple tinge, as we see it in the pale, thoughtful complexions of the Spanish portrait painters, Murillo and Velasquez. His mouth was rather open, his chin good-humoured and round, and his nose small.
Coleridge in his person was rather above the common size, inclining to the corpulent. His hair (now, alas! grey, and during the latter years of his life perfectly white) was then black, and glossy as the raven"s wing, and fell in smooth ma.s.ses over his forehead. This long liberal hair is peculiar to enthusiasts." [23]
(The Liberal, vol. ii. pp. 23-27.)
He used, in his hours of relaxation, to relate the state of his feelings, and his adventures during the short time he was a preacher.
His congregations were large, and if he had the power of attracting one man of such talents from a distance, it may well be understood how the many near the chapel flocked to listen to him; in short, if one is to give credence to current report, he emptied churches and chapels to hear him. If he had needed any stimulus, this would have been sufficient, but such a mind so intensely occupied in the search after truth needed no external excitement.
He has often said, that one of the effects of preaching was, that it compelled him to examine the Scriptures with greater care and industry.
These additional exertions and studies a.s.sisted mainly to his final conversion to the whole truth; for it was still evident that his mind was perplexed, and that his philosophical opinions would soon yield to the revealed truth of Scripture.
He has already pointed out what he felt on this important question, how much he differed from the generally received opinions of the Unitarians, confessing that he needed a thorough revolution in his philosophical doctrines, and that an insight into his own heart was wanting.
"While my mind was thus perplexed, by a gracious providence," says he, "for which I can never be sufficiently grateful, the generous and munificent patronage of Mr. Josiah and Mr. Thomas Wedgewood enabled me to finish my education in Germany. Instead of troubling others with my own crude notions, and juvenile compositions, I was thenceforward better employed in attempting to store my own head with the wisdom of others. I made the best use of my time and means; and there is therefore no period of my life on which I can look back with such unmingled satisfaction."
He quitted Clevedon and his cottage in the following farewell lines:--
"Ah! quiet dell! dear cot, and mount sublime!
I was constrain"d to quit you. Was it right, While my unnumber"d brethren toil"d and bled, That I should dream away the entrusted hours On rose-leaf beds, pampering the coward heart With feelings all too delicate for use?
Sweet is the tear that from some Howard"s eye Drops on the cheeks of one he lifts from earth: And he that works me good with unmoved face, Does it but half: he chills me while he aids,-- My benefactor, not my brother man!
Yet even this, this cold beneficence Praise, praise it, O my Soul! oft as thou scann"st The Sluggard Pity"s vision-weaving tribe!
Who sigh for wretchedness, yet shun the wretched, Nursing in some delicious solitude Their slothful loves and dainty sympathies!
I therefore go, and join head, heart, and hand, Active and firm, to fight the bloodless fight Of Science, freedom, and the truth in Christ.
Yet oft when after honourable toil Rests the tired mind, and waking loves to dream, My spirit shall revisit thee, dear cot!
Thy jasmin and thy window-peeping rose, And myrtles fearless of the mild sea-air.
And I shall sigh fond wishes--sweet abode!
Ah! had none greater! And that all had such!
It might be so, but, oh! it is not yet.
Speed it, O Father! Let thy Kingdom come."
He drew his own character when he described that of Satyrane, the idolocast or breaker of idols, the name he went by among his friends and familiars.
"From his earliest youth," says he, "Satyrane had derived his highest pleasures from the admiration of moral grandeur and intellectual energy; and during the whole of his life he had a greater and more heartfelt delight in the superiority of other men to himself than men in general derive from their belief of their own. His readiness to imagine a superiority where it did not exist, was for many years his predominant foible; his pain from the perception of inferiority in others whom he had heard spoken of with any respect, was unfeigned and involuntary, and perplexed him as a something which he did not comprehend. In the child-like simplicity of his nature he talked to all men as if they were his equals in knowledge and talents, and many whimsical anecdotes could be related connected with this habit; he was constantly scattering good seed on unreceiving soils. When he was at length compelled to see and acknowledge the true state of the morals and intellect of his contemporaries, his disappointment was severe, and his mind, always thoughtful, became pensive and sad:--_for to love and sympathize with mankind was a necessity of his nature_."
He sought refuge from his own sensitive nature in abstruse meditations, and delighted most in those subjects requiring the full exercise of his intellectual powers, which never seemed fatigued--and in his early life never did sun shine on a more joyous being!
"There was a time when, though my path was rough, This joy within me dallied with distress, And all misfortunes were but as the stuff Whence fancy made me dreams of happiness: For hope grew round me, like the twining vine, And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seem"d mine.
But now afflictions bow me down to earth Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth, But oh! each visitation Suspends what nature gave me at my birth, My shaping spirit of imagination.
For not to think of what I needs must feel, But to be still and patient, all I can; And haply by abstruse research to steal From my own nature all the natural man-- This was my sole resource, my only plan: Till that which suits a part infects the whole, And now is almost grown the habit of my soul." [24]
It was indeed an inauspicious hour "when he changed his abode from the happy groves of Jesus" College to Bristol." But it was so ordained! He sought literature as a trade,--and became an author:
"whatever," he would say, "I write, that alone which contains the truth _will live, for truth only is permanent_. The rest will deservedly perish."
He wrote to supply the fountain which was to feed the fertilizing rills,--to develope the truth was that at which he aimed, and in which he hoped to find his reward.
On the 16th of September, 1798, he sailed from Great Yarmouth to Hamburg, in company with Mr. Wordsworth and his sister in his way to Germany, and now for the first time beheld "his native land" retiring from him.
In a series of letters, published first in the "Friend," afterwards in his "Biographia Literaria," is to be found a description of his pa.s.sage to Germany, and short tour through that country. His fellow pa.s.sengers as described by him were a motley group, suffering from the usual effects of a rolling sea. One of them, who had caught the customary antidote to sympathy for suffering, to witness which is usually painful, began his mirth by not inaptly observing,
"That Momus might have discovered an easier way to see a man"s inside than by placing a window in his breast. He needed only to have taken a salt-water trip in a pacquet-boat."