Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1.

C >> Coleridge, ed. Turnbull >> Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1.

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Two other poems of Mr. C. besides the one in which his sister is
mentioned, are addressed to Mr. Lamb--"This Lime-tree-bower my Prison",
and the lines "To a Friend, who had declared his intention of writing no
more Poetry".--("Poetical Works", i, p. 201 and p. 205.) In a letter to
the author ("Ainger", i, p. 121), Lamb inveighs against the soft epithet
applied to him in the first of these. He hoped his ""virtues" had done
"sucking""--and declared such praise fit only to be a "cordial to some
greensick sonnetteer."

"Yes! they wander on
In gladness all; but thou, methinks, most glad,
My "gentle-hearted" Charles! for thou hast pined
And hungered 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."

In the next poem he is called "wild-eyed boy." The two epithets,
"wild-eyed" and "gentle-hearted," will recall Charles Lamb to the minds
of all who knew him personally. Mr. Talfourd seems to think that the
special delight in the country, ascribed to him by my father, was a
distinction scarcely merited. I rather imagine that his indifference to
it was a sort of "mock apparel" in which it was his humour at times to
invest himself. I have been told that, when visiting the Lakes, he took
as much delight in the natural beauties of the region as might be
expected from a man of his taste and sensibility. [b]

[[Sub-footnote b:

"Thou wert a scorner of the field, my Friend,
But more in show than truth."

From Mr. W.'s poem "To a good man of most dear memory", quoted in p.
323.]]

Mr. Coleridge's expression, recorded in the "Table Talk", that he
"looked on the degraded men and things around him like moonshine on a
dunghill, that shines and takes no pollution," partly alludes to that
tolerance of moral evil, both in men and books, which was so much
remarked in Charles Lamb, and was, in so good a man, really remarkable.
His toleration of it in books is conspicuous in the view he takes of the
writings of Congreve and Wycherley, in his essay on the artificial
comedy of the last century ("Works", vol. ii, p. 322), and in many of
his other literary criticisms. His toleration of it in men--at least his
faculty of merging some kinds and degrees of it in concomitant good, or
even beholding certain errors rather as objects of interest, or of a
meditative pity and tenderness, than of pure aversion and condemnation,
Mr. Talfourd has feelingly described in his "Memoir" (vol. ii, p.
326-9), "Not only to opposite opinions," he says, "and devious habits of
thought was Lamb indulgent; he discovered the soul of goodness in things
evil so vividly, that the surrounding evil disappeared from his mental
vision." This characteristic of his mind is not to be identified with
the idolizing propensity common to many ardent and imaginative spirits.
He "not only loved his friends in spite of their errors," as Mr.
Talfourd observes, "but loved them, "errors and all";" which implies
that he was not unconscious of their existence. He saw the failings as
plainly as any one else, nay, fixed his gentle but discerning eye upon
them; whereas the idolizers behold certain objects in a bedarkening
blaze of light, or rather of light-confounding brightness, the
multiplied and heightened reflection of whatever is best in them, to the
obscurity or transmutation of all their defects. Whence it necessarily
follows that the world presents itself to their eyes divided, like a
chess-board, into black and white compartments--a moral and intellectual
chequer-work; not that they love to make darkness, but that they
luxuriate too eagerly in light: and their "over-muchness" toward some
men involves an over-littleness towards others, whom they involuntarily
contrast, in all their poor and peccant reality, with gorgeous
idealisms. The larger half of mankind is exiled for them into a
hemisphere of shadow, as dim, cold, and negative as the unlit portion of
the crescent moon. Lamb's general tendency, though he too could warmly
admire, was in a different direction; he was ever introducing streaks
and gleams of light into darkness, rather than drowning certain objects
in floods of it; and this, I think, proceeded in him from indulgence
toward human nature rather than from indifference to evil. To his friend
the disposition to exalt and glorify co-existed, in a very remarkable
manner, with a power of severe analysis of character and poignant
exhibition of it,--a power which few possess without exercising it some
time or other to their own sorrow and injury. The consequence to Mr.
Coleridge was that he sometimes seemed untrue to himself, when he had
but brought forward, one after another, perfectly real and sincere moods
of his mind.

In his fine poem commemorating the deaths of several poets, Mr.
Wordsworth thus joins my father's name with that of his almost life-long
friend:

"Nor has the rolling year twice measured,
From sign to sign, its steadfast course,
Since every mortal power of Coleridge
Was frozen at its marvellous source;
The rapt One of the godlike forehead,
The heaven-eyed creature sleeps in earth;
And Lamb, the frolic and the gentle,
Has vanished from his lonely hearth."

S. C. Footnote 1 ends: main text resumes:]

Numerous retrospective notices by himself and others exist of this
period; but none of his really boyish letters have been preserved. The
exquisite Essay intitled, "Christ's Hospital five and thirty years
ago", by Lamb, is principally founded on that delightful writer's
recollections of the boy Coleridge, and that boy's own subsequent
descriptions of his school days. Coleridge is Lamb's "poor friendless
boy."--"My parents and those who should care for me, were far away.
Those few acquaintances of theirs, which they could reckon upon being
kind to me in the great city, after a little forced notice, which they
had the grace to take of me on my first arrival in town, soon grew tired
of my holiday visits. They seemed to them to recur too often, though I
thought them few enough; and, one after another, they all failed me, and
I felt myself alone among six hundred playmates. O the cruelty of
separating a poor lad from his early homestead! The yearnings which I
used to have toward it in those unfledged years! How, in my dreams would
my native town, far in the west, come back with its church, its trees,
and faces! How I would wake weeping, and in the anguish of my heart
exclaim upon sweet "Calne in Wiltshire!""

Yet it must not be supposed that Coleridge was an unhappy boy. He was
naturally of a joyous temperament, and in one amusement, swimming, he
excelled and took singular delight. Indeed he believed, and probably
with truth, that his health was seriously injured by his excess in
bathing, coupled with such tricks as swimming across the New River in
his clothes, and drying them on his back, and the like. But reading was
a perpetual feast to him. "From eight to fourteen," he writes, "I was a
playless day-dreamer, a "helluo librorum", my appetite for which was
indulged by a singular incident: a stranger, who was struck by my
conversation, made me free of a circulating library in King Street,
Cheapside."--"Here," he proceeds, "I read through the catalogue, folios
and all, whether I understood them, or did not understand them, running
all risks in skulking out to get the two volumes which I was entitled to
have daily. Conceive what I must have been at fourteen; I was in a
continual low fever. My whole being was, with eyes closed to every
object of present sense, to crumple myself up in a sunny comer, and
read, read, read,--fancy myself on Robinson Crusoe's island, finding a
mountain of plum-cake, and eating a room for myself, and then eating it
into the shapes of tables and chairs--hunger and fancy!"--"My talents
and superiority," he continues, "made me for ever at the head in my
routine of study, though utterly without the desire to be so; without a
spark of ambition; and as to emulation, it had no meaning for me; but
the difference between me and my form-fellows, in our lessons and
exercises, bore no proportion to the measureless difference between me
and them in the wide, wild, wilderness of useless, unarranged book
knowledge and book thoughts. Thank Heaven! it was not the age for
getting up prodigies; but at twelve or fourteen I should have made as
pretty a juvenile prodigy as was ever emasculated and ruined by fond and
idle wonderment. Thank Heaven! I was flogged instead of being flattered.
However, as I climbed up the school, my lot was somewhat alleviated."

CHAPTER II

CAMBRIDGE AND PANTISOCRACY

(1791 to 1795)

Come back into memory, like as thou wert in the day-spring of thy
fancies, with Hope like a fiery column before thee--the dark pillar
not yet turned--Samuel Taylor Coleridge--Logician, Metaphysician,
Bard!--

S. T. Coleridge entered at Jesus College, Cambridge, the 5th of
February, 1791. [He did not go into residence till October 1791.]

The poems he wrote about this time and during his first vacation at
College are rather conventional, and give few indications of his future
deft handling of verse. His "Mathematical Problem" sent to his brother
George, is a piece of droll nonsense, but the letter accompanying it is
much better than the verse. It reads as follows:

LETTER 6. TO GEORGE COLERIDGE, WITH A POEM ENTITLED "A MATHEMATICAL
PROBLEM"

Dear Brother,

I have often been surprised that Mathematics, the quintessence of Truth,
should have found admirers so few and so languid. Frequent consideration
and minute scrutiny have at length unravelled the cause; viz. that
though Reason is feasted, Imagination is starved; whilst Reason is
luxuriating in its proper Paradise, Imagination is wearily travelling on
a dreary desert. To assist Reason by the stimulus of Imagination is the
design of the following production. In the execution of it much may be
objectionable. The verse (particularly in the introduction of the ode)
may be accused of unwarrantable liberties, but they are liberties
equally homogeneal with the exactness of Mathematical disquisition, and
the boldness of Pindaric daring. I have three strong champions to defend
me against the attacks of Criticism: the Novelty, the Difficulty, and
the Utility of the work. I may justly plume myself that I first have
drawn the nymph Mathesis from the visionary caves of abstracted idea,
and caused her to unite with Harmony. The first-born of this Union I now
present to you; with interested motives indeed--as I expect to receive
in return the more valuable offspring of your Muse.

Thine ever S. T. C.

Christ's Hospital, March 31, 1791. [1]

[Footnote 1: Letters VIII-XXXI follow No. 6 of our collection.]

The piece of doggerel, to which this epistle is a preface, will be found
in vol. ii, p. 386, of the Aldine Edition of Coleridge's Poems.

Coleridge's brother George also wrote verses, and "Mathematical Problem"
is just one of the cantrips in verse that passed between the brothers.]

He gained Sir William Browne's gold medal for the Greek Ode in the
summer of that year. It was on the Slave Trade. The poetic force and
originality of this Ode were, as he said himself, much beyond the
language in which they were conveyed. In the winter of 1792-3 he stood
for the University (Craven) Scholarship with Dr. Keate, the late
head-master of Eton, Mr. Bethell (of Yorkshire) and Bishop Butler, who
was the successful candidate. In 1793 he wrote without success for the
Greek Ode on Astronomy, the prize for which was gained by Dr. Keate. The
original is not known to exist, but the reader may see what is probably
a very free version of it by Mr. Southey in his Minor Poems. ("Poetical
Works", vol. ii, p. 170.) "Coleridge"--says a schoolfellow [1] of his
who followed him to Cambridge in 1792, "was very studious, but his
reading was desultory and capricious. He took little exercise merely for
the sake of exercise: but he was ready at any time to unbend his mind in
conversation; and, for the sake of this, his room, (the ground-floor
room on the right hand of the staircase facing the great gate,) was a
constant rendezvous of conversation-loving friends. I will not call them
loungers, for they did not call to kill time, but to enjoy it. What
evenings have I spent in those rooms! What little suppers, or "sizings",
as they were called, have I enjoyed; when Aeschylus, and Plato, and
Thucydides were pushed aside, with a pile of lexicons and the like, to
discuss the pamphlets of the day. Ever and anon a pamphlet issued from
the pen of Burke. There was no need of having the book before
us;--Coleridge had read it in the morning, and in the evening he would
repeat whole pages "verbatim"."--"College Reminiscences, Gentleman's
Mag"., Dec. 1834.

[Footnote 1: C. V. Le Grice.]

In May and June, 1793, Frend's trial took place in the Vice-
Chancellor's Court, and in the Court of Delegates, at Cambridge. Frend
was a Fellow of Jesus, and a slight acquaintance had existed between
him and Coleridge, who however soon became his partizan. Mr. C. used
to relate a remarkable incident, which is thus preserved by Mr.
Gillman:--"The trial was observed by Coleridge to be going against
Frend, when some observation or speech was made in his favour;--a
dying hope thrown out, as it appeared, to Coleridge, who in the midst
of the Senate House, whilst sitting on one of the benches, extended
his hands and clapped them. The Proctor in a loud voice demanded who
had committed this indecorum. Silence ensued. The Proctor, in an
elevated tone, said to a young man sitting near Coleridge, "Twas you,
Sir!' The reply was as prompt as the accusation; for, immediately
holding out the stump of his right arm, it appeared that he had lost
his hand;--'I would, Sir,' said he, 'that I had the power!' That no
innocent person should incur blame, Coleridge went directly afterwards
to the Proctor, who told him that he saw him clap his hands, but fixed
on this person, who he knew had not the power. 'You have had,' said
he, 'a narrow escape.'"--"Life of S. T. C"., i, p. 55.

Coleridge passed the summer of 1793 at Ottery, and whilst there wrote
his "Songs of the Pixies" ("Poetical Works", i, p. 13), and some other
little pieces. He returned to Cambridge in October, but, in the
following month, in a moment of despondency and vexation of spirit,
occasioned principally by some debts not amounting to L100 he suddenly
left his college and went to London. In a few days he was reduced to
want, and observing a recruiting advertisement he resolved to get bread
and overcome a prejudice at the same time by becoming a soldier. He
accordingly applied to the sergeant, and after some delay was marched
down to Reading, where he regularly enlisted as a private in the 15th
Light Dragoons on the 3d of December, 1793. He kept his initials under
the names of Silas Tomkyn Comberbacke. "I sometimes," he writes in a
letter, "compare my own life with that of Steele, (yet O! how
unlike!)--led to this from having myself also for a brief time borne
arms, and written 'private' after my name, or rather another name; for,
being at a loss when suddenly asked my name, I answered "Cumberback",
and verily my habits were so little equestrian, that my horse, I doubt
not, was of that opinion." Coleridge continued four months a light
dragoon, during which time he saw and suffered much. He rode his horse
ill, and groomed him worse; but he made amends by nursing the sick, and
writing letters for the sound. His education was detected by one of his
officers, Captain Nathaniel Ogle, who observed the words,--"Eheu! quam
infortunii miserrimum est fuisse felicem!"--freshly written in pencil on
the stable-wall or door, and ascertained that Comberbacke was the
writer. But the termination of his military career was brought about by
a chance recognition in the street: his family was apprized of his
situation, and after some difficulty he was duly discharged on the both
of April, 1794, at Hounslow.

Coleridge now returned to Cambridge, and remained there till the
commencement of the summer vacation. But the adventures of the preceding
six months had broken the continuity of his academic life, and given
birth to new views of future exertion. His acquaintance with Frend had
materially contributed to his adoption of the system called
Unitarianism, which he now openly professed, and this alone made it
imperative on his conscience to decline availing himself of any
advantages dependent on his entering into holy orders, or subscribing
the Articles of the English Church. He lived, nevertheless, to see and
renounce his error, and to leave on record his deep and solemn faith in
the catholic doctrine of Trinal Unity, and the Redemption of man through
the sacrifice of Christ, both God and Man. Indeed his Unitarianism, such
as it was, was not of the ordinary quality. "I can truly say"--were
Coleridge's words in after life--"that I never falsified the Scripture.
I always told the Unitarians that their interpretations of the Scripture
were intolerable upon any principles of sound criticism; and that if
they were to offer to construe the will of a neighbour as they did that
of their Maker, they would be scouted out of society. I said then
plainly and openly that it was clear enough that John and Paul were not
Unitarians. But at that time I had a strong sense of the repugnancy of
the doctrine of vicarious atonement to the moral being, and I thought
nothing could counterbalance that. 'What care I,' I said, 'for the
Platonisms of John, or the Rabbinisms of Paul?--My conscience revolts!'
That was the ground of my Unitarianism."--"Table Talk", Bohn Library
edition, p. 290.

At the commencement of the Long Vacation, in June, 1794, Coleridge went
to Oxford on a visit to an old school-fellow, intending probably to
proceed afterwards to his mother at Ottery. But an accidental
introduction to Robert Southey, then an under-graduate at Balliol
College, first delayed, and ultimately prevented, the completion of this
design, and became, in its consequences, the hinge on which a large part
of Coleridge's after life was destined to turn.

The first letter to Southey was written from Gloucester on 6th July
1794, and it shows the degree of intimacy on which the two
undergraduates stood at this time. They had met only about a month
before, for Southey writes on 12th June to his friend Grosvenor Bedford:
"Allen is with us daily and his friend from Cambridge, Coleridge, whose
poems you will oblige me by subscribing to, either at Hookam's or
Edward's. He is of most uncommon merit, of the strongest genius, the
clearest judgment, the best heart. My friend he already is, and must
hereafter be yours," ("Life and Correspondence of Southey", i, 210). The
poems mentioned were a projected volume of "Imitations from Modern Latin
Poets", of which an ode after Casimir is the only relic. Coleridge's
first letter to Southey reads as follows:

LETTER 7. TO SOUTHEY

6 July 1794.

You are averse to gratitudinarian flourishes, else would I talk about
hospitality, attention, &c. &c.; however, as I must not thank you, I
will thank my stars. Verily, Southey, I like not Oxford, nor the
inhabitants of it. I would say thou art a nightingale among owls; but
thou art so songless and heavy towards night that I will rather liken
thee to the matin lark, thy "nest" is in a blighted cornfield, where the
sleepy poppy nods its red-cowled head, and the weak-eyed mole plies his
dark work; but thy soaring is even unto heaven. Or let me add (for my
appetite for similes is truly canine at this moment), that as the
Italian nobles their new-fashioned doors, so thou dost make the
adamantine gate of Democracy turn on its golden hinges to most sweet
music. [1]

[Footnote 1: Letter XXXII gives the full text of No. 7. Letter XXXIII is dated
15 July, 1794.]

For the next fifteen months Coleridge and Southey were close companions,
Coleridge being the elder by two years.

Upon the present occasion, however, he left Oxford with an acquaintance,
Mr. Hucks, for a pedestrian tour in Wales. [2] Two other friends,
Brookes and Berdmore, joined them in the course of their ramble; and at
Caernarvon Mr. Coleridge wrote the following letter to Mr. Martin, of
Jesus College.

[Footnote 2: It is to this tour that he refers in the "Table Talk", p.
88.--"I took the thought of "grinning for joy" in that poem ("The
Ancient Mariner") from my companion (Berdmore's) remark to me, when we
had climbed to the top of Penmaenmaur, and were nearly dead with thirst.
We could not speak from the constriction, till we found a little puddle
under a stone. He said to me,--'You grinned like an idiot.' He had done
the same."]

LETTER 8. To HENRY MARTIN [1]

July 22d, 1794.

Dear Martin,

From Oxford to Gloucester,+ to Ross,+ to Hereford, to Leominster, to
Bishop's Castle,+ to Montgomery, to Welshpool, Llanvelling,+ Llangunnog,
Bala,+ Druid House,+ Llangollin, Wrexham,++ Ruthin, Denbigh,+ St. Asaph,
Holywell,+ Rudland, Abergeley,+ Aberconway,+ Abber,+ over a ferry to
Beaumaris+ (Anglesea), Amlock,+ Copper Mines, Gwindu, Moeldon, over a
ferry to Caernarvon, have I journeyed, now philosophizing with Hucks, 1
now melancholizing by myself, or else indulging those daydreams of
fancy, that make realities more gloomy. To whatever place I have affixed
the mark +, there we slept. The first part of our tour was intensely
hot--the roads, white and dazzling, seemed to undulate with heat--and
the country, bare and unhedged, presenting nothing but stone fences,
dreary to the eye and scorching to the touch. At Ross we took up our
quarters at the King's Arms, once the house of Mr. Kyrle, the celebrated
Man of Ross. I gave the window-shutter a few verses, Which I shall add
to the end of the letter. The walk from Llangunnog to Bala over the
mountains was most wild and romantic; there are immense and rugged
clefts in the mountains, which in winter must form cataracts most
tremendous; now there is just enough sun-glittering water dashed down
over them to soothe, not disturb the ear. I climbed up a precipice on
which was a large thorn-tree, and slept by the side of one of them near
two hours.

At Bala I was apprehensive that I had caught the itch from a Welsh
democrat, who was charmed with my sentiments; he bruised my hand with a
grasp of ardour, and I trembled lest some discontented citizens of the
"animalcular" republic might have emigrated. Shortly after, in came a
clergyman well dressed, and with him four other gentlemen. I was asked
for a public character; I gave Dr. Priestley. The clergyman whispered
his neighbour, who it seems is the apothecary of the
parish--"Republicans!" Accordingly when the doctor, as they call
apothecaries, was to have given a name, "I gives a sentiment, gemmen!
may all republicans be "gull"oteened!" Up starts the democrat; "May all
fools be gulloteened, and then you will be the first!" Fool, rogue,
traitor, liar, &c. flew in each other's faces in hailstorms of
vociferation. This is nothing in Wales--they make if necessary
vent-holes for the sulphureous fumes of their temper! I endeavoured to
calm the tempest by observing that however different our political
opinions might be, the appearance of a clergyman assured me that we were
all Christians, though I found it rather difficult to reconcile the last
sentiment with the spirit of Christianity! "Pho!" quoth the clergyman;
"Christianity! Why we a'nt at "church" now, are we? The gentleman's
sentiment was a very good one, because it shows him to be sincere in his
principles." Welsh politics, however, could not prevail over Welsh
hospitality; they all shook hands with me (except the parson), and said
I was an open-speaking, honest-hearted fellow, though I was a bit of a
democrat.

On our road from Bala to Druid House, we met Brookes and Berdmore. Our
rival pedestrians, a "Gemini" of Powells, were vigorously marching
onward, in a postchaise! Berdmore had been ill. We were not a little
glad to see each other. Llangollen is a village most romantically
situated; but the weather was so intensely hot that we saw only what was
to be admired--we could not admire.

At Wrexham the tower is most magnificent; and in the church is a white
marble monument of Lady Middleton, superior, "mea quidem sententia", to
anything in Westminster Abbey. It had entirely escaped my memory, that
Wrexham was the residence of a Miss E. Evans, a young lady with whom in
happier days I had been in habits of fraternal correspondence; she lives
with her grandmother. As I was standing at the window of the inn, she
passed by, and with her, to my utter astonishment, her sister, Mary
Evans, "quam afflictim et perdite amabam",--yea, even to anguish. They
both started, and gave a short cry, almost a faint shriek; I sickened,
and well nigh fainted, but instantly retired. Had I appeared to
recognise her, my fortitude would not have supported me:

Vivit, sed mihi non vivit--nova forte marita.
Ah, dolor! alterius nunc a cervice pependit.
Vos, malefida valete accensae insomnia mentis,
Littora amata valete; vale ah! formosa Maria.

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