serious one begins: the old attempt to realize the fiction of love in a cottage. On the strength of a volume of poems, for which thirty guineas are to be paid, as called for, Coleridge marries, and takes a cottage near Bristol. It was a cottage, and nothing more. Cottle says it had walls, doors, and windows; but as for furniture, only such as became a philosopher. They remained there but a short time-the new bride and bridegroom. Whether the cottage was too small for their love, or their love too small for the cottage, does not appear; but back they went to Bristol, and from thence to Nether Stowey, where Coleridge resided for two years, the best and happiest in his life. This was in 1797. He was only twenty-five years of age, but his poetical power was of a wide range and grasp. No man at twenty-five ever wrote better. Here he wrote his tragedy of Remorse, Christabel, Geneveive, The Ancient Mariner, the Ode on the Departing Year, and Fears in Solitude. He was COLERIDGE COTTAGE. visited by Lamb, Southey, Hazlitt, De Quincey, and a host of eminent men. Wordsworth lived near, at Allfoxden, and with him he was in almost daily intercourse. His studies were serious and deep; not only directed to poetry and the belles-lettres, but to the great bulk of theological philosophy. He now officiated as a Unitarian preacher at Taunton, and afterwards at Shrewsbury. Hazlitt has described his walking ten miles on a winter's day to hear him preach. Thomas and Josiah Wedgewood, the eminent Staffordshire potters, settled upon him £150 a year for life. Through their aid he quitted Stowey and England in 1798, and made the tour of Germany, with Wordsworth and his sister. From this voyage to Germany, may be dated a great change in his mind. He now became very metaphysical, and a thorough Kantist. And from this time his poetry begins to decline; it is no longer the pure ore, the thrice-refined gold that needs no gilding, but the every-day coinage-two or three carats poetry, and the rest common-place. To this journey, however, we owe his translation of Wallenstein, one of the finest translations of any poet or age. ton. In the year 1800 he returned to England again, and settled in London. He now became one of the editors of the Morning Post, writing the literary and political departments. In this situation he was ac cused by the premier of having, by his articles, broken up the peace of Amiens and renewed the war. In 1803 he went to Malta, for the benefit of his health. In 1805 he returned, by the way of Italy, where he met Washington AlsFrom this time to 1816, he vibrated between London and the west of England. In the earlier part of his life, at Bristol, for instance, while waiting for the Pantisocracy to bud, he gave several lectures on Charles the First, the French Revolution, and a range of kindred topics. Lecturing and desultory authorship were now his only means of support. His lectures on Shakspeare and Milton were much admired; as were those on metaphysics, by such as understood them-their name was not legion. If his course before has been erratic, it now becomes deplorable; for now begins, or rather we now for the first time hear of, his inordinate use of opium, the bane and blight of his intellect and life. Much has been written on this subject by all sorts of people; some of whom have perhaps been too harsh, while others have been too lenient, excusing and defending what Coleridge himself deplored and condemned. When the use of opium became a fixed habit with him, can hardly be determined. From a passage in one of his letters, it would seem to have been about 1804. At that time, or thereabouts, his aberrations and difficulties commence. He gives up writing poetry and politics, and everything definite; everything in fact that would have been likely to pay him, in a pecuniary point of view; becomes unsettled and wandering, with no definite purpose or strength of will, and at last abandons his wife and children to want-not openly, perhaps, as Smith does, when he runs off to California, nor designedly, as Jones does, when he decamps with Brown's money; but really abandons them to the mercies of the world. They find a home with Southey, who now lives out what he had only dreamed of before-the beautiful Pantisocracy! All things are in common for the wife and children of his erring friend. And he is poor, too, for he has a large and expensive family of his own; he barely lives. And Coleridge is well to do, and can make himself rich if he only chooses to do so. He has but to write. | Let him demand his price, and it will be paid. The newspapers want him; the Reviews want him; proposals after proposals are made him by the booksellers. The Quarterly and the Eclectic will give him ten guineas a sheet; but he does nothing either for himself or his family. Southey maintains them, and his friends maintain him, or do much toward it. De Quincey gives him at one time three hundred pounds, Byron another hundred, and other of his friends give, and lend, him whatever he asks for. He has a private bank of England, where he draws all he wants. He has his annuity besides, a permanent thing, and any little profit that his books may bring him in. And he does nothing! Yes, something; he consumes from a pint of laudanum a day, to two quarts a week! and pays for it too at the rate of two pound ten! That is something, surely. His eyes grow wild, his countenance sallow, his steps totter, his hands tremble, and his whole nature seems going to wreck. He is sluggish and inactive, purposeless and willless; sees strange sights, and dreams strange dreams. "For ten years," -hear him," the anguish of my spirit has been indescribable, the sense of my danger staring, but the consciousness of my guilt worse, far worse, than all! I have prayed with drops of agony on my brow, trembling, not only before the justice of my Maker, but even before the mercy of my Redeemer. 'I gave thee so many talents; what hast thou done with them?" Certainly this is something. In the same letter he speaks of placing himself in a private mad-house, that he may be watched till the crisis is over, either for life or death. His passion for opium at this time, says one of his biographers, had so completely subdued his will that he seemed carried away, without resistance, by an overwhelming flood. The impression was fixed on his mind that he should inevitably die, unless he were placed under constraint, and that constraint, he thought, could be alone effected in an asylum. For this purpose he took refuge, in 1816, under the roof of James Gilman, a surgeon at Highgate. The arrangements for board and lodging suited both parties. It was a debt of gratitude equally binding on both. Coleridge was grateful to the Gilmans RESIDENCE AT HIGHGATE. for their support and kindness, and the Gilmans were grateful to Coleridge for his friendship and esteem; so they lived together till his death, a period of nineteen years. Here he held a species of soiree, at which numbers were in the habit of attending to listen to his conversation; and here he composed the greater part of his prose works, "The Lay Sermons," "The Biographia Literaria," "Aids to Reflection," and "On the Constitution of Church and poor; judged by the standard of the age, State." "His room," says Leigh Hunt, who visited him here, "looked out upon a delicious prospect of wood and meadow, with colored gardens under the window, like an embroidery to the mantle. I thought, when I first saw it, that he had taken up his abode like an abbot. Here he cultivated his flowers, and had a set of birds for his pensioners, who came to breakfast with him. He might have been seen taking his daily stroll up and down, with his black coat, his white coat and a book in his hand; and was a great favorite of the little children. His main occupation, I believe, was reading. He loved to read old folios, and make old voyages with Purchas and Marco Polo, the sea being in good condition, and the vessel well-stocked with bargatoes." The accompanying sketch gives a fair idea of his home at Highgate, as does also the portrait of his appearance at this time" There was something," says Hunt," invincibly young in the looks of his face. It was round and fresh-colored, with agreeable features, and an open, indolent, good-natured mouth. His forehead was prodigious-a great piece of placid marble and his fine eyes, in which the activity of his mind seemed to concentrate, moved under it with a sprightly ease, as if it was pastime to them to carry all that weight of thought. I fancied him a good-natured wizard, very fond of earth, and conscious of reposing with weight enough in his easy chair, but able to con- | jure his etherealities about him in the twinkling of an eye. It was a mighty intellect put upon a sensual body, and the reason why he did little more with it than talk and dream, was, that it was agreeable to such a body to do little else." Thus he talked and dreamed till the day of his death. He died on the 25th of July, 1834, in the sixty-second year of his age, and was buried in the New Church at Highgate. So lived and died Samuel Taylor Coleridge; a page or two suffices to relate his mortal life, but volumes would hardly suffice to sum it up in its various bearings. Of Coleridge, as a poet, it is almost impossible to form an estimate; with his poetry, however, it is not so difficult. To say that it is good or bad, is to say nothing; it is both to different minds, and both per se. Judged by his own standard, most of it is much of it is excellent, and some of it the quintessence of its class. Save a few pretty lines, his juvenile volume is not worth remembering. It was not till the appearance of "The Ancient Mariner," that the world were justified in believing that a new poet had appeared. After that, any belief, however extravagant, could not have been condemned. Hazlitt considered The Ancient Mariner his most remarkable poem, and the only one that gave any idea of his great natural powers. It certainly is the most unique poem in the language probably in the world, and totally unlike anything ever before written. It carries us at once from the world of substance, to the world of shadow; lifts us from the natural to the supernatural; takes us behind the curtain; gives us admittance within the vail. The sudden appearance of the strange old mariner with his glittering eye, the troubled wedding-guest, the voyage on the unknown sea, the death of the albatros, the ice and snow, the winter at the pole, the charmed water burning around the ship, the spiritual sights and sounds, the marvelous return to land, the disappearance of the mariner again,—all must have happened, we think, in some other and older world-some world of forgotten time, where all is phantasmal and fragmentary-to which man has no admittance, save in distempered dreams or mystical revelations, like the Ancient Mariner. Similar but more real and human is Christabel; dealing with the same mysterious sympathies, the same hopes and fears. In this peculiar walk, the supernatural, Coleridge surpasses any modern writer. Others have trod therein grandly—Fieck and Hoffman in Germany, and Poe and Hawthorne in America-but no one seems so much at home in its shadows and glooms. "The Sibylline Leaves" contain the richest developments of his genius; the fruits of his two happy years at Nether Stowey, and the interval between them and his opium mania. The "Ode to the Departing Year" and "France," are noble poems. Shelley considered the last the greatest ode of modern times; and Shelley himself wrote some superlative odes. "Fears in Solitude," "Reflections on having left a Place of Retirement," "This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison," "The Nightingale," "Frost at Midnight,”—in fact most of the blank-verse poems,-are 66 But delivery, especially those on Shakspeare and Milton. The originality of his views has since been denied, and he is accused of having borrowed largely from Schlegel. His friends, however, settle that point; for they state distinctly that he promulgated his bottom there is really no similarity between them. For Coleridge's Shakspeare criticisms are merely fragmentary; glimpses of great principles carelessly applied; sky openings into the infinite, soon clouded over while those of Schlegel are systematic and finished; telescopic glances at far-off truths. The ideas of the one are few, but great; rather suggestions than thoughts; a set of dreamy Titans: while those of the other are over-grown dwarfs, who make up in number what they lack in size. admirable, and the blank verse itself is the best since Milton's. The rhythm is always finely adapted to the sense; here swelling with its freight of rich philosophies, there quietly murmuring around its flower-like fancies. In its idyllic peculiarities it resembles Theocritus, in its reflective char-views before Schlegel's appeared. But at acter the best Greek tragedians. what shall we say of the magnificent soul anthem, “The Hymn before Sun-rise in the Vale of Chamouny," and the exquisite love pastoral, 'Geneveive?" The first seems to us the finest religious poem out of the uninspired volume, the last, the second love poem of all time. We say the second, for we think Tennyson's "Gardner's Daughter," on the whole, its superior; for the "Gardner's Daughter" gives us the very sensations of youth and love, while "Geneveive" only describes them, wonderfully we admit. As a painting, a piece of dramatic grouping, a series of tableaur, we know of nothing like "Geneveive." The tragedies of "Remorse and "Zapolya," with some good passages, cannot be considered successful, even for the closet; acting is out of the question. Of the rest of the poems there is but little to say; they are of various degrees of demerit, from second and third-rate down to unreadable mediocrity. Concerning the prose of Coleridge many different opinions prevail. Hazlitt declares the greater part of it "dreary trash;" Talfourd, on the contrary, sees "the palms wave, and the pyramids tower, in its long perspective of style." As a whole, the prose books of Coleridge are tedious and unsatisfactory. He does not carry us on to a given point by a regular road, says an appreciative critic, but is ever wandering from the end proposed. We are provoked at this waywardness the more, because ever and anon we catch glimpses of beautiful localities, and look down most inviting vistas. At these promising fields of thought, and vestibules of truth, we are only permitted to glance, and then are unceremoniously hurried off in the direction that happens to please our guide's desultory humor. Musical are many of the periods, beautiful the images, and here and there comes a single idea of striking value; but for these we are obliged to hear many discursive exordiums, irrelevant episodes, and random speculations. The lectures of Coleridge were, as we have said, much admired at the time of Coleridge's originality as a philosopher has also been called in question, and with some show of truth. There are certainly many things in his system which remind us of Kant, Lessing, and other of the German metaphysicians. But if he sometimes borrowed from the Germans, he as often refused their aid, and as often contradicted them in toto; and almost always in matters of religion. Where their faith is doubtful, his is firm; where they are skeptical, he is always a Christian. Philosophy with him is but another name for Christianity; and in his letters he declares his conviction, that, so far from its having any tendency to unsettle the principles of faith, that may and ought to be common to all men, it does itself actually require them, nay, it supposes them, as its ground and foundation. But it is neither as a philosopher, lecturer, nor poet, that Coleridge is most celebrated. His chief fame rests on his might as a talker, and it is probable as such that he will be best known to posterity. Men of the highest talent and cultivation have recorded the charms of his conversation in the most enthusiastic terms. We are haunted by descriptions of the seer of Highgate in his rapt and genial moments. His friends are never weary of the theme. "He talked on forever," says one of them, "and you wished him to talk on forever. His genius had angelic wings, and fed on manna. His thoughts did not seem to come with labor and effort, but as if borne on the gusts of genius, and as if the wings of his imagination lifted him from off his feet. His voice rolled on the ear like the pealing organ, and its sound alone was the music of thought. His mind was clothed with wings, and raised on them he lifted philosophy to heaven. In his descriptions you then saw the progress of human happiness and liberty, in bright and neverending succession, like the steps of Jacob's ladder, with airy shapes ascending and descending, and the voice of God at the top of the ladder !" man. Gifted, but unfortunate, glorious, but criminal, we hardly know how to judge this marvelous, and "myriad-minded," That his life was a promise never fulfilled, a grand failure, even his warmest admirers are compelled to admit. And his writings, like his life, are fragmentary and unfinished-not columns and statues, but mere rough blocks, from a seldomworked quarry. We are struck at the disproportion bet veen them and his mind. In poetry he was excelled by many of his cotemporaries, because they were more industrious and practical; in metaphysics, by many lesser minds, because they were clearer and more systematic; and, in life, by the humblest Christian whose nature was in subjection. Whatever was the mind-philosophy of Coleridge, his lifephilosophy was that of Epicurus; the philosophy of indolence, of enjoyment, of appetite, of self. From his early years his life is self-involved; in boyhood commences that nursing of sensation which is the cause of his ruin. As a child he is selfish; not indeed in a worldly sense, to his own interest and welfare, for he is always singularly negligent of both-yet really and truly selfish; caring more for, and living more for, his own individuality than for his friends or the world at large, or even for the great self-denying One, his professed Lord and Master. There is no denial in his life-least of all, a denial of self. A boy, he runs away from home; a youth, he decamps from college; a man, he abandons his family to the mercy of the world. He suffers deeply, and deeply repents; his whole life is a sigh of penitence, a prayer for amendment: but he never amends; the end is like the beginning. He is always a dreamer; a builder of splendid, but useless schemes; a thoughtless visionary, idle and improvident. He has no defini e aim, no resolute will. He plans all thing, and promises all things, but performs noth ng: sitting with drowsy lids, and folded hands-"Yet a little sleep," says the sluggard, "a little folding of the hands to sleep." No fulfilling his mission; no girding up his loins for a great and earnest work; no watchfulness and prayer, and strugglings to the death. Days, months, years, wasted in dreams, and neglect of the duties of life. There is a sort of cant in vogue now-adays, that a man like Coleridge, no matter what he does or leaves undone, always does his best, and is always to be forgiven. Granting the last half of the propositionfor the best of us stand in constant need of forgiveness from God and man-we deny in toto the truth of the first half. The chief blame, the great sin of Coleridge, was a want of self-reliance; a constant habit of relying upon others. He was always praying to cloud-Jupiters to help him out of the mire, when he should have put his own shoulder to the wheel. In youth, in manhood, in age, he lived upon others; for what but living upon others, is an annuity to a man competent and capable of work, unknown sums of borrowed money, and admiration-gifts, and nineteen years gratis board and lodging? Some men are so strong that they neither ask, nor, if possible, accept aid, from God or man; others again are so weak, that they are all their lives receiving it from both. To the last class belongs Coleridge, and men of his stamp; and God seldom helps them, because they wont help themselves. Taken as a whole, the life of Coleridge was a melancholy failure. With the greatest opportunities, he advanced only what to him was the smallest things. Starting in life as a believer in the Trinity, he successively became a Unitarian, a Pantheist, a German Mystic, and at last a Trinitarian again; veering about the whole round of the circle, back to his starting point. And such was his life, a continual rounding of circles. But let us drop the curtain on this soul drama. We do so with Coleridge's own epitaph, his plea, and our last words : Stop, Christian passer-by! stop, child of God, And read with gentle heart. Beneath this sod the same! |