"Oh! never rudely will I blame his faith In the might of stars and angels ! 'Tis not merely Since likewise for the stricken heart of love The intelligible forms of ancient poets, The power, the beauty, and the majesty, That had their haunts in dale, or piny mountain, Or chasms and watery depths; all these have vanished. And Venus who brings everything that's fair.” Coleridge next contributed articles to the Morning Post and Courier. He went to Malta, and served some time as secretary to the governor of the island, with a salary of £800 per annum, which office he held but eight months, and, after a tour in Italy, returned to England. Living again at Grassmere he issued the periodical Friend: its essays were sometimes acute and eloquent, but as often rhapsodical, imperfect, and full of German mysticism. In 1816, chiefly at the recommendation of Lord Byron, "the wild and wondrous tale" of Christobel was published. He wrote several prose disquisitions, among which are his Statesman's Manual, two Lay Sermons: more popular are his Biographia Literaria and Aids to Reflection. In the autumn of 1828 Julian Young, the son of Mr. Young, the tragedian, while travelling up the Rhine, made the acquaintance, at Rosenberg, of Coleridge and Wordsworth. His first view of each, before he knew who they were, was eminently characteristic. Wordsworth appeared before him. as a tall hale-looking man, in a broad-brimmed wide-awake, and a brown holland blouse, carrying tenderly in his hand a sprig of apple blossom, the stalk of which was overgrown with lichen. Coleridge, dressed in shabby black, and having under his arm a big folio, wrapped in his own Meditations, shuffled to and fro by the hour in down-trodden slippers. Among the papers left by the late Sir Richard Phillips, in 1841, we find the following notes: "Before he (Coleridge) went to Germany I passed a long afternoon in his company at a dinner party at Dr. Estlin's, at Bristol. Mr. Benjamin, afterwards Sir B. Benjamin, Dr. Beddoes, Mr. and Mrs. Barbauld, and some others were there. Coleridge sat next me, and he deafened me by set harangues on many trite subjects, treated in a scholastic and dogmatic way. In five or six hours the rest of the company edged in economically for a few minutes, but only while Coleridge took breath. He certainly was eloquent and very ingenious in quibbling. Though I tried the next morning to recollect something that he had said, yet the whole resembled smoke, and I could grapple with no point whatever." In a paper, dated years after, Sir Richard describes his calling upon Coleridge, at Mr. Gillman's, at Highgate. "His harangues" (says Sir Richard) "were tunes of a barrel-organ, and in half a dozen sittings you heard the same ideas and phrases, which dazzled by their boldness and poetical effusions all their first auditors. His own very dull memories are a true exposition of his character. He had studied the Mystics, and his language was that of high abstraction, such as a young man might catch from Boehmen, Jeremy Taylor, Baxter, and the old writers of the syllogic school. Nothing is more easy, and yet nothing more surprising to general readers, and work only on the active world of sensible individuality. In my opinion Coleridge never wrote anything approaching his Ode to Pitt, containing the line: Mr. and Mrs. Gillman fully appreciated their patient, and to their house invited pilgrims from far and near to listen to the wisdom, metaphysical, theological, and literary, for which his repute was high. If writing was irksome, talking was the pastime and delight of Coleridge's life. Give him but a listener, appreciative or non-appreciative, it did not matter, so that he was passive, and he would discourse to him by the hour together. "Did you ever hear me preach?" he once asked Charles Lamb. "I never heard you do anything else," was Lamb's frank reply. More than once did Coleridge assert that with pen in hand he felt a thousand checks and difficulties in the expression of his meaning, but that he never found the smallest hitch or impediment in the fullest utterance of his most abstruse thoughts and most subtle fancies by word of mouth. The effect of his monologues is variously described by different auditors; by some they are spoken of as inexpressibly tedious and unintelligible, and by others as eloquent, profound, and instructive in the highest degree. Carlyle, in his graphic style, relates: "I have heard Coleridge talk, with eager musical energy, two stricken hours, his face radiant and moist, and communicate no meaning whatever to any individual of his hearers. He began anywhere, and nothing could be more copious than his talk. He suffered no interruption, however reverent; hastily putting aside all foreign additions, annotations, or most ingenious desires for elucidation as well-meant perplexities which would never do. He had knowledge about many things and topics, much curious reading, but working within him. With Mackintosh it was otherwise. He may have been slower, more rambling, less pertinent. He did not strike at the instant as so eloquent, but then what he brought forth was fresh coined, his flowers were newly gathered, they were wet with dew, and, if you pleased, you might almost see them growing in the rich garden of his mind. The projection was visible, the enchantment was done before your eyes. To listen to Mackintosh was to inhale perfume, it pleased but did not satisfy. The effect of an hour with Coleridge was to set you thinking, his words haunted you for a week afterwards, they were spells, bright ensign revelations. In short it was, if we may venture to draw so bold a line, the whole difference between talent and genius." A very experienced short-hand writer was employed to take down Mr. Coleridge's lectures on Shakspeare, "but the manuscript was almost entirely unintelligible;" and this was the amount of the difficulty, "that with regard to every other speaker whom he had ever heard, however rapid or involved, he could almost always, by long experience in his art, guess the form of the latter part, or apodosis of the sentence by the form of the beginning, but the conclusion of every one of Coleridge's sentences was a surprise upon him." He was obliged to listen to the last word. Yet this unexpectedness was not the effect of quaintness or confusion of construction; so far from it we believe foreigners of different nations, especially Germans and Italians, have often borne very remarkable testimony to the grammatical purity and simplicity of his language, and have declared that they generally understood what he said much better than the sustained conversation of any other Englishman whom they had met. It is the uncommonness of the thoughts or the image which prevents your anticipating the end. With the Gillmans, at Highgate, on the top of that umbrageous hill, which from the north looks over London, Coleridge found a peaceful and congenial home until his death. The sad scene is thus touchingly told by Sara Coleridge, the fourth child of the poet, in the following letter-so sad, so tender, and so true : ... In "Not many hours before his death he was raised in his bed, and wrote a precious, faintly-scrawled scrap, which we shall ever preserve, recommending his faithful nurse, Harriet, to the care of his family. . . . No man has been more deeply beloved than my dear father; the servants at the Grove wept for him as for a father, and Mr. and Mrs. Gillman speak of their loss as the heaviest trial that has ever befallen them, though they have had their full share of sorrow and suffering. Mrs. Gillman's notes, written since his death, are precious testimonies to me of his worth and attaching qualities. one of them she speaks of the influence of his beautiful nature on our domestics, so often set down by friends or neighbours to my good management, his forgiving nature, his heavenly-mindedness, his care not to give offence unless duty called on him to tell home truth; his sweet and cheerful temper, and so many moral qualities of more or less value, and all adorned by his Christian principles. His was indeed Christianity. To do good was his anxious desire, his constant prayer-and all with such real humility-never any kind of worldly accommodating the truth to any one-yet not harsh or severe never pretending to faults or failings he had not, nor denying those he thought he had! But, as he himself said of a dear friend's death, "it is recovery and not death.” Blessed are they that sleep in the Lord—his life is hidden in Christ. In his Redeemer's life it is hidden, and in His glory will it be disclosed. Physiologists hold that it is during sleep chiefly that we grow; what may we not hope of such a sleep in such a Bosom?' Much more have I had from her, and formerly heard from her lips, all in the same strain; and, during my poor dear father's last sufferings, she sent a note to his room, expressing with fervency the blessings that he had conferred upon her and hers, and what a happiness and a benefit his residence under her roof had been to all his fellow-inmates."* In the preceding winter he had written the following epitaph, striking from its simplicity and humility, for himself: "Stop, Christian passer-by! Stop, child of God! And read with gentle breast. Beneath this sod He asked and hoped through Christ-do thou the same.” The fatal In a note appended to a paper in the Quarterly Review, August, 1834, we read: "It is with deep, deep regret that we announce the death of Mr. Coleridge. When the foregoing article was printed he was weak in body, but exhibited no obvious symptoms of so near a dissolution. change was sudden and decisive; and six days before his death he knew, assuredly, that his hour was come. His few worldly affairs had long been settled, and, after many tender adieus, he expressed a wish that he might be as little interrupted as possible. His sufferings were severe and constant till within thirty-six hours of his end; but they had no power to affect the deep tranquillity of his mind or the wonted sweetness of his address. His prayer from the beginning was that God would not withdraw his spirit, and that by the way in which he would bear the last struggle, he might be able to evince the sincerity of his faith in Christ. If ever man did so, Coleridge did. Mr. Coleridge breathed his last at half-past six o'clock on the morning of Friday, the 25th day of July, 1834, under the roof of his dear and kind friends, Mr. and Mrs. Gillman, of * "Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge, edited by her Daughter,” 2 vols., 1873. |