Chapter IV: A Visit to Germany (2)

It is one of the discomforts of my absence, my dearest Love! that we feel the same calamities at different times--I would fain write words of consolation to you; yet I know that I shall only fan into new activity the pang which was growing dead and dull in your heart. Dear little Being! he had existed to me for so many months only in dreams and reveries, but in them existed and still exists so livelily, so like a real thing, that although I know of his death, yet when I am alone and have been long silent, it seems to me as if I did not understand it. Methinks there is something awful in the thought, what an unknown being one’s own infant is to one--a fit of sound--a flash of light--a summer gust that is as it were _created_ in the bosom of the calm air, that rises up we know not how, and goes we know not whither! But we say well; it goes! it is gone! and only in states of society in which the revealing voice of our most inward and abiding nature is no longer listened to (when we sport and juggle with abstract phrases, instead of representing our feelings and ideas), only then we say it _ceases_! I will not believe that it ceases--in this moving, stirring, and harmonious universe--I _cannot_ believe it! Can cold and darkness come from the sun? where the sun is not, there is cold and darkness! But the living God is everywhere, and works everywhere--and where is there room for death? To look back on the life of my baby, how short it seems! but consider it referently to nonexistence, and what a manifold and majestic _Thing_ does it not become? What a multitude of admirable actions, what a multitude of _habits_ of actions it learnt even before it saw the light! and who shall count or conceive the infinity of its thoughts and feelings, its hopes, and fears, and joys, and pains, and desires, and presentiments, from the moment of its birth to the moment when the glass, through which we saw him darkly, was broken--and he became suddenly invisible to us? Out of the Mount that might not be touched, and that burnt with fire, out of darkness, and blackness, and tempest, and with his own Voice, which they who heard entreated that they might not hear it again, the most high God forbade us to use his _name vainly_. And shall we who are Christians, shall we believe that he himself uses his own power vainly? That like a child he builds palaces of mud and clay in the common road, and then he destroys them, as weary of his _pastime_, or leaves them to be trod under by the hoof of Accident? That God works by _general_ laws are to me words without meaning or worse than meaningless--ignorance, and imbecility, and limitation must wish in generals. What and who are these horrible shadows necessity and general law, to which God himself must offer _sacrifices_--hecatombs of sacrifices? I feel a deep conviction that these shadows exist not--they are only the dreams of reasoning pride, that would fain find solutions for all difficulties without faith--that would make the discoveries which lie thick sown in the path of the eternal Future unnecessary; and so conceiting that there is sufficiency and completeness in the narrow present, weakens the presentiment of our wide and ever widening immortality. God works in each for all--most true--but more comprehensively true is it, that he works in all for each. I confess that the more I think, the more I am discontented with the doctrines of Priestley. He builds the whole and sole hope of future existence on the words and miracles of Jesus--yet doubts or denies the future existence of infants--only because according to his own system of materialism he has not discovered how they can be made _conscious_. But Jesus has declared that _all_ who are in the grave shall arise--and that those who should arise to perceptible progression must be ever as the infant which He held in his arms and blessed. And although the _Man_ Jesus had never appeared in the world, yet I am Quaker enough to believe, that in the heart of every man the Christ would have revealed himself, the Power of the Word, that was even in the wilderness. To me who am absent this faith is a real consolation,--and the few, the slow, the quiet tears which I shed, are the accompaniments of high and solemn thought, not the workings of pain or sorrow. When I return indeed, and see the vacancy that has been made--when nowhere anything corresponds to the form which will perhaps for ever dwell on my mind, then it is possible that a keener pang will come upon me. Yet I trust, my love! I trust, my dear Sara! that this event which has forced us to think of the death of what is most dear to us, as at all times probable, will in many and various ways be good for us. To have shared--nay, I should say--to have divided with any human being any one deep sensation of joy or of sorrow, sinks deep the foundations of a lasting love. When in moments of fretfulness and imbecility I am disposed to anger or reproach, it will, I trust, be always a restoring thought--“We have wept over the same little one,--and with whom I am angry? With her who so patiently and unweariedly sustained my poor and sickly infant through his long pains--with her, who, if I too should be called away, would stay in the deep anguish over my death-pillow! who would never forget me!” Ah, my poor Berkeley! A few weeks ago an Englishman desired me to write an epitaph on an infant who had died before its christening. While I wrote it, my heart with a deep misgiving turned my thoughts homewards.

ON AN INFANT, WHO DIED BEFORE ITS CHRISTENING.

Be rather than be _call’d_ a Child of God!
Death whisper’d. With assenting Nod
Its head upon the Mother’s breast
The baby bow’d, and went without demur,
Of the kingdom of the blest
Possessor, not Inheritor.

It refers to the second question in the Church Catechism. We are well, my dear Sara. I hope to be home at the end of ten or eleven weeks. If you should be in Bristol, you will probably be shewn by Mr. Estlin three letters which I have written to him altogether--and one to Mr. Wade. Mr. Estlin will permit you to take the letters to Stowey that Poole may see them, and Poole will return them. I have no doubt but I shall repay myself by the work which I am writing, to such an amount, that I shall have spent out of my income only fifty pounds at the end of August. My love to your sisters--and love and duty to your mother. God bless you, my love! and shield us from deeper afflictions, or make us resigned unto them (and perhaps the latter blessedness is greater than the former).

Your affectionate and faithful husband,
S. T. COLERIDGE.

XCVII. TO THE SAME.

April 23, 1799.

MY DEAR SARA,--Surely it is unnecessary for me to say how infinitely I languish to be in my native country, and with how many struggles I have remained even so long in Germany! I received your affecting letter, dated Easter Sunday; and, had I followed my impulses, I should have packed up and gone with Wordsworth and his sister, who passed through (and only passed through) this place two or three days ago. If they burn with such impatience to return to their native country, _they_ who are all to each other, what must I feel with everything pleasant and everything valuable and everything dear to me at a distance--here, where I may truly say my only amusement is--to labour! But it is, in the strictest sense of the word, impossible to collect what I have to collect in less than six weeks from this day; yet I read and transcribe from eight to ten hours every day. Nothing could support me but the knowledge that if I return now we shall be embarrassed and in debt; and the moral certainty that having done what I am doing we shall be more than _cleared_--not to add that so large a work with so great a quantity and variety of information from sources so scattered and so little known, even in Germany, will of course establish my character for industry and erudition certainly; and, I would fain hope, for reflection and genius. This day in June I hope and trust that I shall be in England. Oh that the vessel could but land at Shurton Bars! Not that I should wish to see you and Poole immediately on my landing. No!--the sight, the touch of my native country, were sufficient for one _whole_ feeling, the most deep unmingled emotion--but then and after a lonely walk of three miles--then, first of _all_, whom I knew, to see you and my _Friend_! It lessens the delight of the thought of my return that I must get at you through a tribe of _acquaintances_, damping the freshness of one’s joy! My poor little baby! At this time I see the corner of the room where his cradle stood--and his cradle too--and I cannot help seeing him in the cradle. Little lamb! and the snow would not melt on his limbs! I have some faint recollections that he had that difficulty of breathing once before I left England--or was it Hartley? “A child, a child is born, and the fond heart dances; and yet the childless are the most happy.” At Christmas[198] I saw a custom which pleased and interested me here. The children make little presents to their parents, and to one another, and the parents to the children. For three or four months before Christmas the girls are all busy, and the boys save up their pocket-money, to make or purchase these presents. What the present is to be is cautiously kept secret, and the girls have a world of contrivances to conceal it, such as working when they are at a visit, and the others are not with them, and getting up in the morning long before light, etc. Then on the evening before Christmas Day, one of the parlours is lighted up by the children, into which the parents must not go. A great yew bough is fastened on the table at a little distance from the wall, a multitude of little tapers are fastened in the bough, but not so as to burn it, till they are nearly burnt out, and coloured paper, etc., hangs and flutters from the twigs. Under this bough the children lay out in great neatness the presents they mean for their parents, still concealing in their pockets what they intend for each other. Then the parents are introduced, and each presents his little gift--and then they bring out the others, and present them to each other with kisses and embraces. Where I saw the scene there were eight or nine children of different ages; and the eldest daughter and the mother wept aloud for joy and tenderness, and the tears ran down the cheek of the father, and he clasped all his children so tight to his heart, as if he did it to stifle the sob that was rising within him. I was very much affected, and the shadow of the bough on the wall, and arching over on the ceiling, made a pretty picture--and then the raptures of the very little ones, when at last the twigs and thread-leaves began to catch fire and snap! Oh that was a delight for them! On the next day in the great parlour the parents lay out on the tables the presents for the children; a scene of more sober joy succeeds, as, on this day, after an old custom, the mother says privately to each of her daughters, and the father to each of his sons, that which he has observed most praiseworthy, and that which he has observed most faulty in their conduct. Formerly, and still in all the little towns and villages through the whole of North Germany, these presents were sent by all the parents of the village to some one fellow, who, in high buskins, a white robe, a mask, and an enormous flax wig, personates Knecht Rupert, that is, the servant Rupert. On Christmas night he goes round to every house and says that Jesus Christ his Master sent him there; the parents and older children receive him with great pomp of reverence, while the little ones are most terribly frightened. He then enquires for the children, and according to the character which he hears from the parent he gives them the intended presents, as if they came out of Heaven from Jesus Christ; or, if they should have been bad children, he gives the parents a rod, and, in the name of his Master Jesus, recommends them to use it frequently. About eight or nine years old, the children are let into the secret; and it is curious, how faithfully they all keep it. There are a multitude of strange superstitions among the bauers;--these still survive in spite of the efforts of the Clergy, who in the north of Germany, that is, in the Hanoverian, Saxon, and Prussian dominions, are almost all Deists. But they make little or no impressions on the bauers, who are wonderfully religious and fantastically superstitious, but not in the least priest-rid. But in the Catholic countries of Germany the difference is vast indeed! I met lately an intelligent and calm-minded man who had spent a considerable time at Marburg in the Bishopric of Paderborn in Westphalia. He told me that bead-prayers to the Holy Virgin are universal, and universally, too, are magical powers attributed to one particular formula of words which are absolutely jargons; at least, the words are to be found in no known language. The peasants believe it, however, to be a prayer to the Virgin, and happy is the man among them who is made confident by a priest that he can repeat it perfectly; for heaven knows what terrible calamity might not happen if any one should venture to repeat it and blunder. Vows and pilgrimages to particular images are still common among the bauers. If any one dies before the performance of his vow, they believe that he hovers between heaven and _earth_, and at times hobgoblins his relations till they perform it for him. Particular saints are believed to be eminently favourable to particular prayers, and he assured me solemnly that a little before he left Marburg a lady of Marburg had prayed and given money to have the public prayers at St. Erasmus’s Chapel to St. Erasmus--for what, think you?--that the baby, with which she was then pregnant, might be a boy with light hair and rosy cheeks. When their cows, pigs, or horses are sick they take them to the Dominican monks, who transcribe _texts out of the holy books_, and perform exorcisms. When men or women are sick they give largely to the Convent, who on good conditions dress them in Church robes, and lay a particular and highly venerated Crucifix on their breast, and perform a multitude of antic ceremonies. In general, my informer confessed that they cured the persons, which he seemed to think extraordinary, but which I think very natural. Yearly on St. Blasius’s Day unusual multitudes go to receive the Lord’s Supper; and while they are receiving it the monks hold a Blasius’s Taper (as it is called) before the forehead of the kneeling person, and then pray to St. Blasius to drive away all headaches for the ensuing year. Their wishes are often expressed in this form: “Mary, Mother of God, make her Son do so and so.” Yet with all this, from every information which I can collect (and I have had many opportunities of collecting various accounts), the peasants in the Catholic countries of Germany, but especially in Austria, are far better off, and a far happier and livelier race, than those in the Protestant lands.... I fill up the sheet with scattered customs put down in the order in which I happened to see them. The peasant children, wherever I have been, are dressed warm and tight, but very ugly; the dress looks a frock coat, some of coarse blue cloth, some of plaid, buttoned behind--the row of buttons running down the back, and the seamless, buttonless fore-part has an odd look. When the peasants marry, if the girl is of a good character, the clergyman gives her a Virgin Crown (a tawdry, ugly thing made of gold and silver tinsel, like the royal crowns in shape). This they wear with cropped, powdered, and pomatumed hair--in short, the bride looks ugliness personified. While I was at Ratzeburg a girl came to beg the pastor to let her be married in this crown, and she had had two bastards! The pastor refused, of course. I wondered that a reputable farmer should marry her; but the pastor told me that where a female bauer is the heiress, her having had a bastard does not much stand in her way; and yet, though little or no infamy attaches to it, the number of bastards is but small--two in seventy has been the average of Ratzeburg among the peasants. By the bye, the bells in Germany are not rung as ours, with ropes, but two men stand, one on each side of the bell, and each pushes the bell away from him with his foot. In the churches, what is a baptismal font in our churches is a great Angel with a bason in his hand; he draws up and down with a chain like a lamp. In a particular part of the ceremony down comes the great stone Angel with the bason, presenting it to the pastor, who, having taken _quant. suff._, up flies my Angel to his old place in the ceiling--you cannot conceive how droll it looked. The graves in the little village churchyards are in square or parallelogrammic wooden cases--they look like boxes without lids--and thorns and briars are woven over them, as is done in some parts of England. Perhaps you recollect that beautiful passage in Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Dying, “and the Summer brings briers to bud on our graves.” The shepherds with iron soled boots walk before the sheep, as in the East--you know our Saviour says--“My Sheep follow me.” So it is here. The dog and the shepherd walk first, the shepherd with his romantic fur, and generally knitting a pair of white worsted gloves--he walks on and his dog by him, and then follow the sheep winding along the roads in a beautiful _stream_! In the fields I observed a multitude of poles with bands and trusses of straw tied round the higher part and the top--on enquiry we found that they were put there for the owls to perch upon. And the owls? They catch the field mice, who do amazing damage in the light soil all throughout the north of Germany. The gallows near Göttingen, like that near Ratzeburg, is three great stone pillars, square, like huge tall chimneys, and connected with each other at the top by three iron bars with hooks to them--and near them is a wooden pillar with a wheel on the top of it on which the head is exposed, if the person instead of being hung is beheaded. I was frightened at first to see such a multitude of bones and skeletons of sheep, oxen, and horses, and bones as I imagined of men for many, many yards all round the gallows. I found that in Germany the hangman is by the laws of the Empire infamous--these hangmen form a caste, and their families marry with each other, etc.--and that all dead cattle, who have died, belong to them, and are carried by the owners to the gallows and left there. When their cattle are bewitched, or otherwise desperately sick, the peasants take them and tie them to the gallows--drowned dogs and kittens, etc., are thrown there--in short, the grass grows rank, and yet the bones overtop it (the fancy of _human_ bones must, I suppose, have arisen in my ignorance of comparative anatomy). God bless you, my Love! I will write again speedily. When I was at Ratzeburg I wrote one wintry night in bed, but never sent you, three stanzas which, I dare say, you will think very silly, and so they are: and yet they were not written without a yearning, yearning, yearning _Inside_--for my yearning affects more than my _heart_. I feel it all within me.

I.

If I had but two little wings,
And were a little feath’ry bird,
To you I’d fly, my dear!
But thoughts like these are idle things--
And I stay here.

II.

But in my sleep to you I fly:
I’m always with you in my sleep--
The World is all one’s own.
But then one wakes--And where am I?--
All, all alone!

III.

Sleep stays not, though a monarch bids:
So I love to wake ere break of day:
For though my sleep be gone,
Yet while ’tis dark, one shuts one’s lids,
And still dreams on![199]

If Mrs. Southey be with you, remember me with all kindness and thankfulness for their attention to you and Hartley. To dear Mrs. Poole give my filial love. My love to Ward. Why should I write the name of Tom Poole, except for the pleasure of writing it? It grieves me to the heart that Nanny is not with you--I cannot bear changes--Death makes enough!

God bless you, my dear, dear wife, and believe me with eagerness to clasp you to my heart, your ever faithful husband,

S. T. COLERIDGE.

XCVIII. TO THOMAS POOLE.

May 6, 1799, Monday morn.

My dear Poole, my dear Poole!--I am homesick. Society is a burden to me; and I find relief only in labour. So I read and transcribe from morning till night, and never in my life have I worked so hard as this last month, for indeed I must sail over an ocean of matter with almost spiritual speed, to do what I have to do in the time in which I _will_ do it or leave it undone! O my God, how I long to be at home! My _whole Being_ so yearns after you, that when I think of the moment of our meeting, I catch the fashion of German joy, rush into your arms, and embrace you. Methinks my hand would swell if the whole force of my feeling were crowded there. Now the Spring comes, the vital sap of my affections rises as in a tree! And what a gloomy Spring! But a few days ago all the new buds were covered with snow; and everything yet looks so brown and wintry, that yesterday the roses (which the ladies carried on the ramparts, their promenade), beautiful as they were, so little harmonized with the general face of nature, that they looked to me like silk and made roses. But these leafless Spring Woods! Oh, how I long to hear you whistle to the Rippers![200] There are a multitude of nightingales here (poor things! they sang in the snow). I thought of my own[201] verses on the nightingale, only because I thought of Hartley, my _only_ Child. Dear lamb! I hope he won’t be dead before I get home. There are moments in which I have such a power of life within me, such a _conceit_ of it, I mean, that I lay the blame of my child’s death to my absence. _Not intellectually_; but I have a strange sort of sensation, as if, while I was present, none could die whom I entirely loved, and doubtless it was no absurd idea of yours that there may be unions and connections out of the visible world.

Wordsworth and his sister passed through here, as I have informed you. I walked on with them five English miles, and spent a day with them. They were melancholy and hypped. W. was affected to tears at the thought of not being near me--wished me of course to live in the North of England near Sir Frederick Vane’s great library.[202] I told him that, independent of the expense of removing, and the impropriety of taking Mrs. Coleridge to a place where she would have no acquaintance, two insurmountable objections, the library was no inducement to me--for I wanted old books chiefly, such as could be procured anywhere better than in a gentleman’s new fashionable collection. Finally I told him plainly that _you_ had been the man in whom _first_ and in whom alone I had felt an _anchor_! With all my other connections I felt a dim sense of insecurity and uncertainty, terribly incompatible. W. was affected _to tears_, very much affected; but he deemed the vicinity of a library absolutely _necessary_ to his health, nay to his existence. It is painful to me, too, to think of not living near him; for he is a _good_ and _kind_ man, and the only one whom in _all_ things I feel my superior--and you will believe me when I say that I have few feelings more pleasurable than to find myself, in intellectual faculties, an inferior.

But my resolve is fixed, _not to leave you till you leave me_! I still think that Wordsworth will be disappointed in his expectation of relief from reading without society; and I think it highly probable that where I live, there he will live; unless he should find in the North any person or persons, who can feel and understand him, and reciprocate and react on him. My many weaknesses are of some advantage to me; they unite me more with the great mass of my fellow-beings--but dear Wordsworth appears to me to have hurtfully segregated and isolated his being. Doubtless his delights are more deep and sublime; but he has likewise more hours that prey upon the flesh and blood. With regard to _Hancock’s_ house, if I can get no place within a mile or two of Stowey I must try to get that; but I confess I like it not--not to say that it is not altogether pleasant to live directly opposite to a person who had behaved so rudely to Mrs. Coleridge. But these are in the eye of reason trifles, and if no other house can be got--in my eye, too, they shall be trifles.

* * * * *

O Poole! I am homesick. Yesterday, or rather yesternight, I dittied the following horrible ditty; but my poor Muse is quite gone--perhaps she may return and meet me at Stowey.

’Tis sweet to him who all the week
Through city-crowds must push his way,
To stroll alone through fields and woods,
And hallow thus the Sabbath-day.

And sweet it is, in summer bower,
Sincere, affectionate, and gay,
One’s own dear children feasting round,
To celebrate one’s marriage day.

But what is all to his delight,
Who having long been doomed to roam,
Throws off the bundle from his back,
Before the door of his own home?

Home-sickness is no baby pang--
This feel I hourly more and more:
There’s only musick in thy wings,
Thou breeze that play’st on Albion’s Shore.[203]

The Professors here are exceedingly kind to all the Englishmen, but to me they pay the most flattering attentions, especially Blumenbach and Eichhorn. Nothing can be conceived more delightful than Blumenbach’s lectures, and, in conversation, he is, indeed, a most interesting man. The learned Orientalist Tychsen[204] has given me instruction in the Gothic and Theotuscan languages, which I can now read pretty well; and hope in the course of a year to be thoroughly acquainted with all the languages of the North, both German and Celtic. I find being learned is a mighty easy thing, compared with any study else. My God! a miserable poet must he be, and a despicable metaphysician, whose acquirements have not cost him more trouble and reflection than all the learning of Tooke, Porson, and Parr united. With the advantage of a great library, learning is nothing--methinks, merely a sad excuse for being idle. Yet a man gets reputation by it, and reputation gets money; and for reputation I don’t care a damn, but money--yes--money I must get by all honest ways. Therefore at the end of two or three years, if God grant me life, expect to see me come out with some horribly learned book, full of manuscript quotations from Laplandish and Patagonian authors, possibly, on the striking resemblance of the Sweogothian and Sanscrit languages, and so on! N. B. Whether a sort of parchment might not be made of old shoes; and whether apples should not be grafted on oak saplings, as the fruit would be the same as now, but the wood far more valuable? _Two ideas of mine._--To extract _aqua fortis_ from cucumbers is a discovery not yet made, but sugar from _bete_, oh! all Germany is mad about it. I have seen the sugar sent to Blumenbach from Achard[205] the great chemist, and it is good enough. They say that an hundred pounds weight of _bete_ will make twelve pounds of sugar, and that there is no expense in the preparation. It is the _Beta altissima_, belongs to the _Beta vulgaris_, and in Germany is called _Runkelrübe_. Its leaves resemble those of the common red _bete_. It is in shape like a clumsy nine pin and about the size of a middling turnip. The flesh is white but has rings of a reddish cast. I will bring over a quantity of the seed.

* * * * *

A stupid letter!--I believe my late proficiency in learning has somewhat stupified me, but live in hopes of one better worth postage. In the last week of June, I trust, you will see me. Chester is well and desires love and duty to his family. To your dear Mother and to Ward give my kind love, and to all who ask after me.

My dear Poole! don’t let little Hartley die before I come home. That’s silly--true--and I burst into tears as I wrote it. Yours

S. T. COLERIDGE.

CHAPTER V

FROM SOUTH TO NORTH

1799-1800