loss of power which leaves half life's day in twilight; its exhibition in the fate of one whose utterances were all musical and all personal may teach us sympathy with the sorrows of many a dumb nameless life, than which genius can teach no higher lesson. tragedy quite equals in intensity that once into a region belonging to a broad humanity, and admitting no considerations which do not concern man as man. Coleridge's was a more political mind; it is said that his articles in the Morning Post had some influence in terminating the Peace of Amiens, and a legend (so it seems to us) of a French It is not an unmixed advantage to chase in the Mediterranean, specially this short life to have undertaken more motived by Napoleon's desire to capthan one kind of intellectual endeavor, ture Coleridge on his return from even if the endeavor be successful. Malta, has weighty adhesion.1 There An extended frontier is an increased is such a thing as poetry inspired by vulnerable surface, and the very wealth political feeling - whatever deserves of natures like Coleridge's is a source the name of poetry in the verse of of their danger. He was almost as Coleridge's brother-in-law, Southey, much a politician as a poet, and the appears to us of this character. A man world of politics was encumbered of Coleridge's genius and a different throughout his lifetime with the wreck character might conceivably have been of a great hope. His youth opened the Tyrtæus of the anti-Napoleonic under the glow of such anticipations war. But then his character must have for mankind as we cannot recall at any been totally different. The very fact other period of the world's history that the only poem of Coleridge's since the dawn of Christianity. "Bliss which is at once political and genwas it in that dawn to be alive, but to erally familiar-"Fire, Famine, and be young was very Heaven." How Slaughter"—suggests a set of symsoon was that gleam swallowed up in pathies rather with France than with storm ! Then as always there were England in that war, shows, when natures to which the storm was more we couple it with what is said above, full of stimulus than the gleam. Byron how many-sided and complex were embodies the spirit of the Revolution his political impulses, and how rein contention with a world of authority; his verse is impressed throughout both by the instincts of revolt, and also by the traditions of aristocracy; it thus attains that balance of antithetic impulse which forms the very life of art. There were also natures which the storm impelled towards a realm of calm, the world of struggle and disorder forming as it were a stormy sea which enisled their spirits in a domain of order such was that poet whose name must recur on every page that speaks of Coleridge. Wordsworth's political sympathies were robust, but they were not dominant. His sense of order found its home in the world of nature, and where he dips his wings into the turbid flood of politics, it is but for a moment; he returns at once to his native element, and (as in the stanzas on the expected death of Fox, for instance) the thought which starts under the impression of a national crisis soars at mote from the unimpeded swing of feeling which finds expression in telling satire or partisan ballad. On the whole, he was conservative, as was his time, but he was incompletely sympathetic with the conservatism of his time. That reaction against the sympathies roused by the French Revolution which lasted through the first half of our century (and of which our late laureate kept some faint echoes), was not so much a political influence as an influence tending to cast strong political feeling into the background of thought, and its general current was the more hostile to Coleridge's poetic genius, because his divergence from it was not striking or obvious. There is no discord so intolerable as that which is by only a semitone divided from unison, and all who have ever striven to impress their views on another mind 1 Mr. Trail believes the story. have realized that an apparent agree- | neighbor at Keswick (a retired carrier), ment may mark a far more hopeless who had no special bond with him, to barrier than a vigorous protest, or even give him his house free of rent; while an indignant contradiction. no one ever exercised more magnetic The loss of an environment of polit- influence on a group of disciples than ical sympathy was not, it is well he did; but it must be added that known, the only reason of the early the magnet was sometimes reversed. blight on Coleridge's poetic genius. Every one was ready to receive him as Perhaps the English mind is somewhat an inmate, even after experience of his inclined to overrate the importance of defects, and he spent the last eighteen an unhappy marriage. A man may years of his life as a guest in a houselack sympathy by his domestic hearth hold1 where tendance on his many and not experience the utter desolation needs seems to have been felt merely a which we sometimes imagine as the privilege. He found, in his relation to portion of all who have not here found a united pair, that sense of a stable their true union. The world of friend- environment, which gives the fragment ship is so rich in its possibilities we know as a self, the complement of moral stimulus and encompassing which makes it a unity. It is the expewarmth, that it affords some compen- rience of all happy marriage, but not sation even for this central disappoint- so exclusively confined to marriage as ment; nor need this be quite so bitter we are apt to suppose. as is sometimes imagined, provided it It is a misfortune that the bonds be pure from remorse, and softened by by which complex human beings are kindliness, as there is every reason to united are so much more various than think was the case with the Coleridges. the names by which we define them. But affection was more necessary to It prevents our realizing that love Coleridge than to most people, and the may fail in other respects than that of loss of a happy home infused some- quantity. In the strange misfits of this thing baleful into his friendships. stage of our being it does sometimes When he wrote of himself, "to be be- appear as if unkindness itself were not loved is all I need," he said what is more separating than an unsuitable not quite true of any human being; kind of affection. but, probably, it was as nearly true of itation, we know, are but different spehim as of any one. When he added, cies of attraction, but their laws are "and whom I love I love indeed," he different, and it sometimes happens to was a little under the influence of the human beings to find themselves in mistake which he ascribed to Words-circumstances which we may dimly worth, when he wrote in 1818, evi- shadow forth by imagining a planet to dently referring to him, "It is a mistake to which affectionate natures are too liable-the mistaking those who are desirous and well pleased to be loved by you, for those who love you." There he seems to us to have revealed his own temptations in an un- as unchangeable as physical law, and just reference to another. He sometimes stood in the same relation to the 1 Of course the connection could not have origiaffections which he called into exist- the circumstances on both sides is enough to cornated on this footing, but the mere knowledge of ence, as he did to his own children. roborate the tradition in the Gillman family that He awakened hopes which he could it became substantially one of hospitality. I would take this opportunity of naming with gratitude a not satisfy, and created relations which granddaughter of the Gillmans, now wife of the he could not continue. His attractive Rev. Henry Watson, to whose liberal communicapower seems to have been almost uni- tion of Coleridge's marginalia, and records of the deep reverence with which his memory was treasversal, its influence even may be measured by her grandparents, the present sketch owes ured by the desire of his landlord and its origin. Cohesion and grav be endowed with consciousness and forced to conform to the laws which regulate the attraction of a molecule. The needs of each human being for his special distance from those to whom he is united in one system seem almost when external circumstances defy | welcome ready for Coleridge in that them, moral disaster seems inevitable. comfortable dwelling, which he could We say 66 seems," ," for no one can say reach by merely crossing the garden what perfect rightness would produce attached to it, could not possibly ineven against natural tendency, or how clude his wife. Mr. Poole was the near human beings might approach to kindest of men, and doubtless did all in perfect rightness, if this were their his power to make her at home in his sole object. We are only urging that house, but he cannot have been always for imperfect human beings in this glad to see her, and his relations seem world to be, as it were, out of focus, is to have sometimes made it plain that to be apparently cut off from the possi- they would have preferred her room to bility of mutual understanding. That her company. In the trials here sugColeridge passed the last eighteen gested love seems to have been badly years of his life as a member of a hurt; it revived apparently in the year family circle, in what we should have which Coleridge spent in Germany, or imagined the most unpropitious cir- at least his thoughts of her in absence cumstances possible, and left only ten- were—as in kind hearts the thoughts der and reverent memories, is no of those who have once been dear are confutation of our belief that his affec-always-tender and affectionate; but tions demanded, as it were, a certain outward reunion seems only to have space of separation from their object, revealed the hopelessness of inward for the difference between conjugal disunion. What has been well called closeness and any other is almost as the swan song of his muse, the "Ode great when friends live in the same to Dejection," was also the elegy of his house as when they live a thousand love; it is interesting to observe the miles apart. He was adapted to the disguise thrown in the poem over the life of gravitation, and in early youth feeling of miserable estrangement, exhe plunged rashly into the life of cohe-pressed at the same time in that perilsion. With a nature like his-thirsty ous luxury of complaint, after which for love, lacking in moral fortitude we hardly need any other explanation of his disasters. He seems to have loved his wife tenderly at first, but the ebb came soon. In the first year of their marriage they went to live in a tiny cottage, the attraction to which consisted in its close proximity to the house of his excellent friend, Thomas Poole, at Nether Stowey, under whose roof, he said, he felt more at home than under his own. Had the arrangement been planned by an enemy, it could not have been more hostile to his domestic happiness. Close contact is a strain upon all but the warmest love; with ill-health on both sides (and two babies in two years must have secured to Mrs. Coleridge that experience of physical ill which was the lifelong portion of her husband), the mere fact of being shut up in a few small rooms with no possibility of absolute solitude, would probably be a strain on any love. And then, to make matters worse, the hearty all oblivion is impossible. Alienation from those who should be and have been dear is always complicated with jealousy. Mrs. Coleridge never seems to have had either cause for or temptation to jealousy in its darker aspect; but when he had ceased to love her, she would have been more than human if she could watch his love for his friends with complacency, and he may have been wanting in sympathy for her comparative friendlessness; at any rate, the want of a welcome from her for them was as trying to him at Keswick as the want of a welcome from them for her had been trying at Stowey. Alas! it is easy and needless to account for the estrangement of an ill-matched pair. Perhaps in such a case all external circumstances seem in retrospect almost alleviations, affording the wounded heart some semblance of excuse in its self-reproach. The bitterest reflection of all is that which Coleridge expresses later in some lines which, by their very unlikeness to his more cus tomary rhythm and music, seem to lent on the warmth of the heart. In express, in a peculiar degree, some the case of Coleridge's contemporary waft from his own experience: Idly we supplicate the powers above: 'There is no resurrection for a love and admirer, Byron, it would appear that disappointment did but drive. creative energy more imperiously to an That unperturbed, unshadowed, wanes ideal world. But with Coleridge the away In the chilled heart by inward self-decay. yore. A little while ago there was a correspondence in the newspapers as to what in the opinion of their readers was the most pathetic couplet in the language. If we ever undertook to answer that question, the last two lines of this quotation would be what we should be greatly tempted to bring forward as our choice. escape was thereby rendered impossible. His muse could breathe only in the atmosphere of kindness, and took flight at the approach of discord. When he wrote "my genial spirits fail" he was using the word genial in its classical sense; he was expressing that most grievous bereavement, perhaps, which befalls a human being, when that spring of literary production which is the source of almost the keenest delight that man can know, dries up under some baleful influence and leaves life empty. The loss of a happy home may some- It is an instructive, but often a very times enrich the world of friendship, melancholy exercise, to trace in warnbut such compensation is rare. Fewings and aspirations the inverted picinfluences are more hurtful to a sec-ture of experience. Some sentences, ondary attachment than the endeavor bearing on the duty of mutual kindto make it do the work of a primary ness, which we might collect from the one, and it needs wonderful self-poems of Coleridge, are a little prosaic, control to refrain from that endeavor and rather like references in a sermon wherever the temptation to it exists. or moral essay (and these are not to Self-control is not often united with our mind the least pathetic of them); genius, and in the case of Coleridge but the best known, which is also the there was less of it than in the case of best known quotation from his writany other man equally distinguished. |ings, and almost from the English lanOne rises from the account of his quar-guage, is not richer in moral emphasis rels with a paradoxical combination of than in poetic beauty. No anthology admiration for the tolerance of his omits the extract from "Christabel," friends and sympathy for his own sen- which-knowing how rarely what is sitiveness; few men have met with so familiar is remembered accurately — much forbearance, and yet few inspire we are bold enough to reproduce. so much pity. In the lack of that The reader who studies it will, we bewarmth at home which would have lieve, hold the clue to a large part of made all outside misunderstandings the problem of the poet's life : mere lamentable incidents, they con stituted his atmosphere. That his Alas, they had been friends in youth, suspicions of Lamb or Wordsworth But whispering tongues can poison truth, were unreasonable did not preclude And constancy dwells in realms above, - possibly it increased their paraAnd life is thorny, and youth is vain; lyzing influence. What is utterly un- And to be wroth with one we love reasonable is irrefutable. It remains unapproachable by anything but the urgency of an emotion which faithful affection may lack, and thus the very injustice of resentment in some cases secures its permanence. The poetic temperament is not invariably depend Doth work like madness in the brain. Each spoke words of high disdain And insult to his heart's best brother. They parted— ne'er to meet again, But never either found another They stood aloof, the scars remaining; But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder The marks of that which once had been. Ication to a brother was felt inadequate. Sometimes his suspiciousness provokes a melancholy smile. He told a friend, for instance, that the kindred of his excellent friend Poole had manifested a great dislike towards himself and every one belonging to him, including his "poor little boy." Hartley seems to have been the idol of every one that had anything to do with him, and at all events he was not five years old when he was taken away from the neighborhood of the Pooles. It is credible enough that they did not feel particularly cordial towards a family every member of which must, unless have been sometimes in their way, and no doubt the "fairy child" who inspired Wordsworth's loveliest lines may have been troublesome. But there is something ludicrous in resenting annoyance with the troublesomeness of a little child; and the soreness betrayed here will discover the work of whispering tongues in every transient cooling of affection. - To present the readers of a review with lines so familiar is a proof of some courage, but the passage is even more interesting as a contribution to the biography of Coleridge than as a fragment of immortal verse. The only part which seems to us to lack perennial truth has a special value as a revelation of individual history. The beauty of the passage lies, on the whole, in its broad human application, gifted with supernatural discretion, its reference to the life of every day. Where it deviates into an expression of something exceptional we are sensible of a want of harmony with the restan intrusion of a dramatic expression into a reflection on life. When the poet tells us that "to be wroth with one we love doth work like madness in the brain," he puts into words which every child can understand an emotion which all human No doubt such fancies sometimes beings, as they look back upon life, realize themselves. The bitterest alienremember having felt or witnessed.ation of Coleridge's life next to that When he tells us that "whispering from his wife-that which for some tongues can poison truth," he leads us years divided him from Wordsworth, to a region where we dare to say nine and prevented their intimacy ever out of ten of his readers will remember again being what it had been, was ocnothing at all. The sentence paints an casioned by an unwise and exaggerated experience as unforgettable as rare; it repetition of a caution given by Wordsis one of which fiction has so largely worth to Basil Montague. And what availed itself, that perhaps its actual would have been the next bitterest but rarity is somewhat disguised; but any that, much to the honor of boun parwho will interrogate his own ties, it was transient his quarrel with memory will allow that it belongs to Charles Lamb - does seem also to exceptional natures in exceptional cir- have had some origin of this kind. cumstances. While the rest reveals to The whisperer was a now forgotten us an insight into human nature, this poet, a certain Charles Lloyd, who had one line, given in the same key as the been associated with Coleridge both in rest, and not with any modulation into a common publication and a common something dramatic, expresses not in-household. It was inevitable that sight, but that tendency to morbid there should have been some disagreesuspicion which is most blinding. But ment, and when it came it must have it cannot be denied that Coleridge's been specially painful, for the loss of was a suspicious character. Here and an inmate of easy fortune was inconthere his reader, without any evidence venient as well as distressing, it reexcept the general experience of life, moved Coleridge's chief source of ventures to discard as a sick dream income. What was worse was that such a statement as that a warm dedi- Lloyd passed on something to Lamb one |