Chapter XXI: Book I: have suffered to remain suspended chiefly because the thoughts (2)

Yes, dearest poet, yes!
There was a time when tho’ my path was rough,
The joy within me dallied with distress,
And all misfortunes were but as the stuff
Whence fancy made me dreams of happiness:
For Hope grew round me, like the climbing vine,
And fruit, and foliage, not my own, seemed mine.
But now afflictions bow me down to earth:
Nor care I, that they rob me of my mirth,
But oh! each visitation
Suspends what nature gave me at my birth,
My shaping spirit of Imagination.

* * * * *

For not to think of what I needs must feel,
But to be still and patient, all I can;
And haply by abstruse research to steal
From my own nature all the natural man--
This was my sole resource, my wisest plan:
And that which suits a part infects the whole,
And now is almost grown the temper of my soul.

Thank heaven! my better mind has returned to me, and I trust I shall go on rejoicing. As I have nothing better to fill the blank space of this sheet with, I will transcribe the introduction of that poem to you, that being of a sufficiently general nature to be interesting to you. The first lines allude to a stanza in the Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence: “Late, late yestreen I saw the new moon with the old one in her arms, and I fear, I fear, my master dear, there will be a deadly storm.”

Letter, written Sunday evening, April 4.

Well! if the Bard was weatherwise, who made
The dear old Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence,
This night, so tranquil now, will not go hence
Unrous’d by winds, that ply a busier trade
Than that, which moulds yon clouds in lazy flakes,
Or the dull sobbing draft, that drones and rakes
Upon the strings of this Eolian lute,
Which better far were mute.
For lo! the New Moon, winter-bright!
And overspread with phantom light
(With swimming phantom light o’erspread,
But rimmed and circled with a silver thread)
I see the Old Moon in her lap foretelling
The coming on of rain and squally blast!
And O! that even now the gust were swelling,
And the slant night-shower driving loud and fast.

* * * * *

A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear!
A stifling, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,
That finds no natural outlet, no relief,
In word, or sigh, or tear!
This, William, well thou know’st,
Is that sore evil which I dread the most,
And oftnest suffer. In this heartless mood,
To other thoughts by yonder throstle woo’d,
That pipes within the larch-tree, not unseen,
The larch, that pushes out in tassels green
Its bundled leafits, woo’d to mild delights,
By all the tender sounds and gentle sights
Of this sweet primrose-month, and vainly woo’d!
O dearest Poet, in this heartless mood,
All this long eve, so balmy and serene,
Have I been gazing on the Western sky,
And its peculiar tint of yellow-green:
And still I gaze--and with how blank an eye!
And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars,
That give away their motion to the stars;
Those stars, that glide behind them, or between,
Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen;
Yon crescent moon, as fix’d as if it grew
In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue,
A boat becalm’d! thy own sweet sky-canoe![261]
I see them all, so exquisitely fair!
I see, not _feel_! how beautiful they are!
My genial spirits fail;
And what can these avail,
To lift the smoth’ring weight from off my breast?
It were a vain endeavour,
Though I should gaze for ever
On that green light that lingers in the west;
I may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.

* * * * *

O Wordsworth! we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does Nature live;
Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud!
And would we aught behold, of higher worth,
Than that inanimate, cold world, _allow’d_
To the poor, loveless, ever-anxious crowd,
Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth,
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud
Enveloping the earth!
And from the soul itself must there be sent
A sweet and powerful voice, of its own birth,
Of all sweet sounds the life and element!
O pure of heart! thou need’st not ask of me
_What_ this strong music in the soul may be?
What and wherein it doth exist,
This light, this glory, this fair luminous mist,
This beautiful and beauty-making Power.
Joy, blameless poet! Joy that ne’er was given
Save to the pure, and in their purest hour,
Joy, William, is the spirit and the power
That wedding Nature to us gives in dower,
A new Earth and new Heaven,
Undream’d of by the sensual and proud--
We, we ourselves rejoice!
And thence comes all that charms or ear or sight,
All melodies an echo of that voice!
All colours a suffusion from that light!
Calm, steadfast spirit, guided from above,
O Wordsworth! friend of my devoutest choice,
Great son of genius! full of light and love,
Thus, thus, dost thou rejoice.
To thee do all things live, from pole to pole,
Their life the eddying of thy living Soul!
Brother and friend of my devoutest choice,
Thus mayst thou ever, ever more rejoice!

* * * * *

I have selected from the poem, which was a very long one and truly written only for the solace of sweet song, all that could be interesting or even pleasing to you, except, indeed, perhaps I may annex as a fragment a few lines on the “Æolian Lute,” it having been introduced in its dronings in the first stanza. I have used Yule for Christmas.

Nay, wherefore did I let it haunt my mind,
This dark, distressful dream?
I turn from it and listen to the wind
Which long has rav’d unnotic’d! What a scream
Of agony by torture lengthened out,
That lute sent out! O thou wild storm without,
Bare crag, or Mountain Tairn, or blasted tree,
Or pine-grove whither woodman never clomb,
Or lonely house, long held the witches’ home,
Methinks were fitter instruments for thee
Mad Lutanist! that, in this month of showers,
Of dark-brown gardens, and of peeping flowers,
Mak’st devil’s Yule, with worse than wintry song,
The blossoms, buds, and timorous leaves among!
Thou Actor, perfect in all tragic sounds!
Thou mighty Poet, even to frenzy bold!
What tell’st thou now about?
’Tis of the rushing of an host in rout,
With many groans from men, with smarting wounds--
At once they groan with pain, and shudder with the cold!
But hush! there is a pause of deeper silence!
Again! but all that noise, as of a rushing crowd,
With groans, and tremulous shudderings--all is over!
And it has other sounds, less fearful and less loud--
A tale of less affright,
And tempered with delight,
As thou thyself had’st fram’d the tender lay--
’Tis of a little child,
Upon a heath wild,
Not far from home, but she has lost her way--
And now moans low in utter grief and fear;
And now screams loud, and hopes to make her mother _hear_.

* * * * *

My dear sir! ought I to make an apology for troubling you with such a long, verse-cramm’d letter? Oh, that instead of it, I could but send to you the image now before my eyes, over Bassenthwaite. The sun is setting in a glorious, rich, brassy light, on the top of Skiddaw, and one third adown it is a huge, enormous mountain of cloud, with the outlines of a mountain. This is of a starchy grey, but floating past along it, and upon it, are various patches of sack-like clouds, bags and woolsacks, of a shade lighter than the brassy light. Of the clouds that hide the setting sun,--a fine yellow-red, somewhat more than sandy light, and these, the farthest from the sun, are suffused with the darkness of a stormy colour. Marvellous creatures! how they pass along! Remember me with most respectful kindness to Mrs. and Miss Sotheby, and the Captains Sotheby.

Truly yours,
S. T. COLERIDGE.

CXXVII. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.[262]

GRETA HALL, KESWICK, July 29, 1802.

MY DEAR SOUTHEY,--Nothing has given me half the pleasure, these many, many months, as last week did Edith’s heralding to us of a minor Robert; for that it will be a boy, one always takes for granted. From the bottom of my heart I say it, I never knew a man that better deserved to be a father by right of virtues that eminently belonged to him, than yourself; but beside this I have cheering hopes that Edith will be born again, and be a healthy woman. When I said, nothing had given me half the pleasure, I spoke truly, and yet said more than you are perhaps aware of, for, by Lord Lonsdale’s death, there are excellent reasons for believing that the Wordsworths will gain £5,000, the share of which (and no doubt Dorothy will have more than a mere share) will render William Wordsworth and his sister quite independent. They are now in Yorkshire, and he returns in about a month _one of us_.... Estlin’s Sermons, I fear, are mere moral discourses. If so, there is but small chance of their sale. But if he had published a _volume_ of _sermons_, of the same kind with those which he has published singly, _i. e._ apologetical and ecclesiastico-historical, I _am almost_ confident, they would have a respectable circulation. To publish single sermons is almost always a foolish thing, like single sheet quarto poems. Estlin’s sermon on the Sabbath really surprised me. It was well written in style, I mean, and the reasoning throughout is not only sound, but has a cast of novelty in it. A superior sermon altogether it appeared to me. I am myself a little theological, and if any bookseller will take the risque, I shall in a few weeks, possibly, send to the press a small volume under the title of “Letters to the British Critic concerning Granville Sharp’s Remarks on the uses of the Definitive article in the Greek Text of the New Testament, and the Revd C. Wordsworth’s Six Letters, to G. Sharp Esqr, in confirmation of the same, together with a Review of the Controversy between Horsley and Priestley respecting the faith of the Primitive Christians.” This is no mere dream, like my “Hymns to the Elements,” for I have written more than half the work. I purpose afterwards to publish a book concerning Tythes and Church Establishment, for I conceit that I can throw great light on the subject. You are not apt to be much surprised at any change in my mind, active as it is, but it will perhaps please you to know that I am become very fond of History, and that I have read much with very great attention. I exceedingly like the job of Amadis de Gaul. I wish you may half as well like the job, in which I shall very shortly appear. Of its sale I have no doubt; but of its prudence? There’s the rub. “Concerning Poetry and the characteristic merits of the Poets, our contemporaries.” One volume Essays, the second Selections.--The Essays are on Bloomfield, Burns, Bowles, Cowper, Campbell, Darwin, Hayley, Rogers, C. Smith, Southey, Woolcot, Wordsworth--the Selections from every one who has written at all, any being above the rank of mere scribblers--Pye and his Dative Case Plural, Pybus, Cottle, etc., etc. The object is not to examine what is good in each writer, but what has _ipso facto_ pleased, and to what faculties, or passions, or habits of the mind they may be supposed to have given pleasure. Of course Darwin and Wordsworth having given each a defence of their mode of poetry, and a disquisition on the nature and essence of poetry in general, I shall necessarily be led rather deeper, and these I shall treat of either first or last. But I will apprise you of one thing, that although Wordsworth’s Preface is half a child of my own brain, and arose out of conversations so frequent that, with few exceptions, we could scarcely either of us, perhaps, positively say which first started any particular thought (I am speaking of the Preface as it stood in the second volume), yet I am far from going all lengths with Wordsworth. He has written lately a number of Poems (thirty-two in all), some of them of considerable length (the longest one hundred and sixty lines), the greater number of these, to my feelings, very excellent compositions, but here and there a daring humbleness of language and versification, and a strict adherence to matter of fact, even to prolixity, that startled me. His alterations, likewise, in “Ruth” perplexed me, and I have thought and thought again, and have not had my doubts solved by Wordsworth. On the contrary, I rather suspect that somewhere or other there is a radical difference in our theoretical opinions respecting poetry; this I shall endeavour to go to the bottom of, and, acting the arbitrator between the old school and the new school, hope to lay down some plain and perspicuous, though not superficial canons of criticism respecting poetry. What an admirable definition Milton gives, quite in an “obiter” way, when he says of poetry, that it is “_simple, sensuous, passionate_!” It truly comprises the whole that can be said on the subject. In the new edition of the L. Ballads there is a valuable appendix, which I am sure you must like, and in the Preface itself considerable additions; one on the dignity and nature of the office and character of a Poet, that is very grand, and of a sort of Verulamian power and majesty, but it is, in parts (and this is the fault, _me judice_, of all the latter half of that Preface), obscure beyond any necessity, and the extreme elaboration and almost constrainedness of the diction contrasted (to my feelings) somewhat harshly with the general style of the Poems, to which the Preface is an introduction. Sara (why, dear Southey! will you write it always Sarah? Sar_a_, methinks, is associated with times that you and I cannot and do not wish ever to forget), Sara, said, with some acuteness, that she wished all that part of the Preface to have been in blank verse, and _vice versâ_, etc. However, I need not say, that any diversity of opinion on the subject between you and myself, or Wordsworth and myself, can only be small, taken in a _practical_ point of view.

I rejoice that your History marches on so victoriously. It is a noble subject, and I have the fullest confidence of your success in it. The influence of the Catholic Religion--the influence of national glory on the individual morals of a people, especially in the downfall of the nobility of Portugal,--the strange fact (which seems to be admitted as with one voice by all travellers) of the vileness of the Portuguese nobles compared with the Spanish, and of the superiority of the Portuguese commonalty to the same class in Spain; the effects of colonization on a small and not very fruitful country; the effects important, and too often forgotten of absolute accidents, such as the particular character of a race of Princes on a nation--Oh what awful subjects these are! I long to hear you read a few chapters to me. But I conjure you do not let “Madoc” go to sleep. Oh that without words I could cause you to _know_ all that I think, all that I feel, all that I hope concerning that Poem! As to myself, all my poetic genius (if ever I really possessed any _genius_, and it was not rather a mere general _aptitude_ of talent, and quickness in imitation) is gone, and I have been fool enough to suffer deeply in my mind, regretting the loss, which I attribute to my long and exceedingly severe metaphysical investigations, and these partly to ill-health, and partly to private afflictions which rendered any subjects, immediately connected with feeling, a source of pain and disquiet to me.

There was a Time when tho’ my Path was rough,
I had a heart that dallied with distress;
And all misfortunes were but as the stuff
Whence Fancy made me dreams of Happiness;
For Hope grew round me like the climbing Vine,
And Fruits and Foliage, not my own, seemed mine!
But now afflictions bow me down to earth,
Nor car’d I that they robb’d me of my mirth.
But oh! each visitation
Suspends what Nature gave me at my Birth,
My shaping Spirit of Imagination!

Here follow a dozen lines that would give you no pleasure, and then what follows:--

For not to _think_ of what I needs must feel,
But to be still and patient, all I can;
And haply by abstruse Research to steal
From my own Nature all the Natural Man,
This was my sole Resource, my wisest Plan!
And that which suits a part, infects the whole,
And now is almost grown the Temper of my Soul.

Having written these lines, I rejoice for you as well as for myself, that I am able to inform you, that now for a long time there has been more love and concord in my house than I have known for years before. I had made up my mind to a very awful step, though the struggles of my mind were so violent, that my sleep became the valley of the shadows of Death and my health was in a state truly alarming. It did alarm Mrs. Coleridge. The thought of separation wounded her pride,--she was fully persuaded that deprived of the society of my children and living abroad without any friends I should pine away, and the fears of widowhood came upon her, and though these feelings were wholly selfish, yet they made her _serious_, and that was a great point gained. For Mrs. Coleridge’s mind has very little that is _bad_ in it; it is an innocent mind; but it is light and _unimpressible_, warm in anger, cold in sympathy, and in all disputes uniformly _projects itself forth_ to recriminate, instead of turning itself inward with a silent self-questioning. Our virtues and our vices are exact antitheses. I so attentively watch my own nature that my worst self-delusion is a complete self-knowledge so mixed with intellectual complacency, that my quickness to see and readiness to acknowledge my faults is too often frustrated by the small pain which the sight of them gives me, and the consequent slowness to amend them. Mrs. C. is so stung with the very first thought of being in the wrong, because she never endures to look at her own mind in all its faulty parts, but shelters herself from painful self-inquiry by angry recrimination. Never, I suppose, did the stern match-maker bring together two minds so utterly contrariant in their primary and organical constitution. Alas! I have suffered more, I think, from the amiable propensities of my nature than from my worst faults and most erroneous habits, and I have suffered much from both. But, as I said, Mrs. Coleridge was made _serious_, and for the first time since our marriage she felt and acted as beseemed a wife and a mother to a husband and the father of her children. She promised to set about an alteration in her external manners and looks and language, and to fight against her inveterate habits of puny thwarting and unintermitting dyspathy, this immediately, and to do her best endeavours to cherish other feelings. I, on my part, promised to be more attentive to all her feelings of pride, etc., etc., and to try to correct my habits of impetuous censure. We have both kept our promises, and she has found herself so much more happy than she had been for years before, that I have the most confident hopes that this happy revolution in our domestic affairs will be permanent, and that this external conformity will gradually generate a greater inward likeness of thoughts and attachments than has hitherto existed between us. Believe me, if you were here, it would give you a _deep_ delight to observe the difference of our minutely conduct towards each other, from that which, I fear, could not but have disturbed your comfort when you were here last. Enough. But I am sure you have not felt it tedious.

So Corry[263] and you are off? I suspected it, but Edith never mentioned an iota of the business to her sister. It is well. It was not your destiny. Wherever you are, God bless you! My health is weak enough, but it is so far amended that it is far less dependent on the influences of the weather. The mountains are better friends in this respect. Would that I could flatter myself that the same would be the case with you. The only objection on my part is now,--God be praised!--done away. The services and benefits I should receive from your society and the spur of your example would be incalculable. The house consists--the first floor (or rather ground floor) of a kitchen and a back kitchen, a large parlour and two nice small parlours; the second floor of three bedrooms, one a large one, and one large drawing-room; the third floor or floors of three bedrooms--in all twelve rooms. Besides these, Mr. Jackson offers to make that nice outhouse or workshop either two rooms or one noble large one for a study if I wish it. If it suited you, you might have one kitchen, or (if Edith and Sara thought it would answer) we might have the two kitchens in common. You might have, I say, the whole ground floor, consisting of two sweet wing-rooms, commanding that loveliest view of Borrowdale, and the great parlour; and supposing we each were forced to have two servants, a nursemaid and a housemaid, the two housemaids would sleep together in one of the upper rooms, and the nursemaids have each a room to herself, and the long room on the ground floor must be yours and Edith’s room, and if Mary be with you, the other hers. We should have the whole second floor, consisting of the drawing-room, which would be Mrs. Coleridge’s parlour, two bedrooms, which (as I am so often ill, and when ill cannot rest at all, unless I have a bed to myself) is absolutely necessary for me, and one room for you if occasion should be, or any friend of yours or mine. The highest room in the house is a very large one intended for two, but suffered to remain one by my desire. It would be a capital healthy nursery. The outhouse would become my study, and I _have_ a couch-bed on which I am now sitting (in bed) and writing to you. It is now in the study; of course it would be removed to the outhouse when that became my study, and would be a second spare bed. I have no doubt but that Mr. Jackson would willingly let us retain my present study, which might be your library and study room. My dear Southey, I merely state these things to you. All our lot on earth is compromise. Blessings obtained by blessings foregone, or by evils undergone. I should be glad, no doubt, if you thought that your health and happiness would find a home under the same roof with me; and I am sure you will not accuse me as indelicate or obtrusive in mentioning things as they are; but if you decline it altogether, I shall know that you have good reasons for doing so, and be perfectly satisfied, for if it detracted from your comfort it could, of course, be nothing but the contrary of all advantage to me. You would have access to four or five libraries: Sir W. Lawson’s, a most magnificent one, but chiefly in Natural History, Travels, etc.; Carlton House (I am a _prodigious_ favourite of Mrs. Wallis, the owner and resident, mother of the Privy Counsellor Wallis); Carlisle, Dean and Chapter; the Library at Hawkshead School, and another (of what value I know not) at St. Bees, whither I mean to walk to-morrow to spend five or six days for bathing. It is four miles from Whitehaven by the seaside. Mrs. Coleridge is but poorly, children well. Love to Edith and May, and to whom I am at all interested. God love you. If you let me hear from you, it is among my firmest resolves--God ha’ mercy on ’em!--to be a regular correspondent of yours.

S. T. COLERIDGE.

P. S. Mrs. C. must have one room on the ground floor, but this is only putting one of your rooms on the second floor.

CXXVIII. TO THE SAME.

Monday night, August 9, 1802.

MY DEAR SOUTHEY,--Derwent can say his letters, and if you could but see his darling mouth when he shouts out Q! This is a digression.

On Sunday, August 1st,[264] after morning church, I left Greta Hall, crossed the fields to Portinscale, went through Newlands, where “Great Robinson looks down upon Marden’s Bower,” and drank tea at Buttermere, crossed the mountains to Ennerdale, and slept at a farm-house a little below the foot of the lake, spent the greater part of the next day mountaineering, and went in the evening through Egremont to St. Bees, and slept there; returned next day to Egremont, and slept there; went by the sea-coast as far as Gosforth, then turned off and went up Wasdale, and slept at T. Tyson’s at the head of the vale. Thursday morning crossed the mountains and ascended Scafell, which is more than a hundred yards higher than either Helvellyn or Skiddaw; spent the whole day among clouds, and one of them a frightening thunder-cloud; slipped down into Eskdale, and there slept, and spent a good part of the next day; proceeded that evening to Devock Lake, and slept at Ulpha Kirk; on Saturday passed through the Dunnerdale Mountains to Broughton Vale, Tarver Vale, and in upon Coniston. On Sunday I surveyed the lake, etc., of Coniston, and proceeded to Bratha, and slept at Lloyd’s house; this morning walked from Bratha to Grasmere, and from Grasmere to Greta Hall, where I now am, quite sweet and ablute, and have not even now read through your letter, which I will answer by the night’s post, and therefore must defer all account of my very interesting tour, saying only that of all earthly things which I have beheld, the view of Scafell and from Scafell (both views from its own summit) is the most heart-exciting.

And now for business. The rent of the whole house, including taxes and the furniture we have, will not be under forty, and not above forty-two, pounds a year. You will have half the house and half the furniture, and of course your share will be either twenty pounds or twenty guineas. As to furniture, the house certainly will not be wholly, that is, completely furnished by Jackson. Two rooms we must somehow or other furnish between us, but not immediately; you may pass the winter without it, and it is hard if we cannot raise thirty pounds in the course of the winter between us. And whatever we buy may be disposed of any Saturday, to a moral certainty, at its full value, or Mr. Jackson, who is uncommonly desirous that you should come, will take it. But we can get on for the winter well enough.

Your books may come all the way from Bristol either to Whitehaven, Maryport, or Workington; sometimes directly, always by means of Liverpool. In the latter case, they must be sent to Whitehaven, from whence waggons come to Keswick twice a week. You will have twenty or thirty shillings to lay out in tin and crockery, and you must bring with you, or buy here (which you may do at eight months’ credit), knives and forks, etc., and all your linen, from the diaper subvestments of the young jacobin[265] to diaper table clothes, sheets, napkins, etc. But these, I suppose, you already have.

What else I have to say I cannot tell, and indeed shall be too late for the post. But I will write soon again. I was exceedingly amused with the Cottelism; but I have not time to speak of this or of other parts of your letter. I believe that I can execute the criticisms with no offence to Hayley, and in a manner highly satisfactory to the admirers of the poet Bloomfield, and to the friends of the man Bloomfield. But there are certainly other objections of great weight.

Sara is well, and the children pretty well. Hartley is almost ill with transport at my Scafell expedition. That child is a poet, spite of the forehead, “villainously _low_,” which his mother smuggled into his face. Derwent is more beautiful than ever, but very backward with his tongue, although he can say all his letters.--N. B. Not out of the book. God bless you and yours!

S. T. COLERIDGE.

If you are able to determine, you will of course let me know it without waiting for a second letter from me; as if you determine in the affirmative[266] of the scheme, it will be a great motive with Jackson, indeed, a most infallible one, to get immediately to work so as to have the whole perfectly furnished six weeks at least before your arrival. Another reason for your writing immediately is, that we may lay you in a stock of coals during the summer, which is a saving of some pounds; when I say _determine_, of course I mean such determination as the thousand contingencies, black and white, permit a wise man to make, and which would be enough for me to act on.

Sara will write to Edith soon.

I have just received a letter from Poole; but I have found so many letters that I have opened yours only.

CXXIX. TO W. SOTHEBY.

Thursday, August 26, 1802.

MY DEAR SIR,--I was absent on a little excursion when your letter arrived, and since my return I have been waiting and making every enquiry in the hopes of announcing the receipt of your “Orestes” and its companions, with my sincere thanks for your kindness. But I can hear nothing of them. Mr. Lamb,[267] however, goes to Penrith next week, and will make strict scrutiny. I am not to find the “Welsh Tour” among them; and yet I think I am correct in referring the ode “Netley Abbey” to that collection,--a poem which I believe I can very nearly repeat by heart, though it must have been four or five years since I last read it. I well remember that, after reading your “Welsh Tour,” Southey observed to me that you, I, and himself had all done ourselves harm by suffering an admiration of Bowles to bubble up too often on the surface of our poems. In perusing the second volume of Bowles, which I owe to your kindness, I met a line of my own which gave me great pleasure, from the thought what a pride and joy I should have had at the time of writing it if I had supposed it possible that Bowles would have adopted it. The line is,--

Had melancholy mus’d herself to sleep.[268]

I wrote the lines at nineteen, and published them many years ago in the “Morning Post” as a fragment, and as they are but twelve lines, I will transcribe them:--

Upon a mouldering abbey’s broadest wall,
Where ruining ivies prop the ruins steep--
Her folded arms wrapping her tatter’d pall
Had Melancholy mused herself to sleep.
The fern was press’d beneath her hair,
The dark green Adder’s Tongue was there;
And still as came the flagging sea gales weak,
Her long lank leaf bow’d fluttering o’er her cheek.

Her pallid cheek was flush’d; her eager look
Beam’d eloquent in slumber! Inly wrought,
Imperfect sounds her moving lips forsook,
And her bent forehead work’d with troubled thought.

I met these lines yesterday by accident, and ill as they are written there seemed to me a force and distinctness of image in them that were buds of promise in a schoolboy performance, though I am giving them perhaps more than their deserts in thus assuring them a reading from you. I have finished the “First Navigator,” and Mr. Tomkins[269] may have it whenever he wishes. It would be gratifying to me if you would look it over and alter anything you like. My whole wish and purpose is to serve Mr. Tomkins, and you are not only much more in the habit of writing verse than I am, but must needs have a better tact of what will offend that class of readers into whose hands a showy publication is likely to fall. I do not mean, my dear sir, to impose on you ten minutes’ thought, but often _currente oculo_ a better phrase or position of words will suggest itself. As to the ten pounds, it is more than the thing is worth, either in German or English. Mr. Tomkins will better give the true value of it by kindly accepting what is given with kindness. Two or three copies presented in my name, one to each of the two or three friends of mine who are likely to be pleased with a fine book,--this is the utmost I desire or will receive. I shall for the ensuing quarter send occasional verses, etc., to the “Morning Post,” under the signature Ἔστησε, and I mention this to you because I have some intention of translating Voss’s “Idylls” in English hexameter, with a little prefatory essay on modern hexameters. I have discovered that the poetical parts of the Bible and the best parts of Ossian are little more than slovenly hexameters, and the rhythmical prose of Gesner is still more so, and reads exactly like that metre in Boethius’ and Seneca’s tragedies, which consists of the latter half of the hexameter. The thing is worth an experiment, and I wish it to be considered merely as an experiment. I need not say that the greater number of the verses signed Ἔστησε be such as were never meant for anything else but the _peritura charta_ of the “Morning Post.”

I had written thus far when your letter of the 16th arrived, franked on the 23d from Weymouth, with a polite apology from Mr. Bedingfell (if I have rightly deciphered the name) for its detention. I am vexed I did not write immediately on my return home, but I waited, day after day, in hopes of the “Orestes,” etc. It is an old proverb that “extremes meet,” and I have often regretted that I had not noted down as they _in_curred the interesting instances in which the proverb is verified. The newest subject, though brought from the planets (or asteroids) Ceres and Pallas, could not excite my curiosity more than “Orestes.” I will write immediately to Mr. Clarkson, who resides at the foot of Ulleswater, and beg him to walk into Penrith, and ask at all the inns if any parcel have arrived; if not, I will myself write to Mr. Faulder and inform him of the failure. There is a subject of great merit in the ancient mythology hitherto untouched--I believe so, at least. But for the _mode_ of the death, which mingles the ludicrous and terrible, but which might be easily altered, it is one of the finest subjects for tragedy that I am acquainted with. Medea, after the murder of her children [having] fled to the court of the old King Pelias, was regarded with superstitious horror, and shunned or insulted by the daughters of Pelias, till, hearing of her miraculous restoration of Æson, they conceived the idea of recalling by her means the youth of their own father. She avails herself of their credulity, and so works them up by pretended magical rites that they consent to kill their father in his sleep and throw him into the magic cauldron. Which done, Medea leaves them with bitter taunts of triumph. The daughters are called Asteropæa, Autonoe, and Alcestis. Ovid alludes briefly to this story in the couplet,--

“Quid referam Peliæ natas pietate nocentes,
Cæsaque virgineâ membra paterna manu?”
Ovid, Epist. XII. 129, 130.

What a thing to have seen a tragedy raised on this fable by Milton, in rivalry of the “Macbeth” of Shakespeare! The character of Medea, wandering and fierce, and invested with impunity by the strangeness and excess of her guilt, and truly an injured woman on the other hand and possessed of supernatural powers! The same story is told in a very different way by some authors, and out of their narrations matter might be culled that would very well coincide with and fill up the main incidents--her imposing the sacred image of Diana on the priesthood of Iolcus, and persuading them to join with her in inducing the daughters of Pelias to kill their father; the daughters under the persuasion that their father’s youth would be restored, the priests under the faith that the goddess required the death of the old king, and that the safety of the country depended on it. In this way Medea might be suffered to escape under the direct protection of the priesthood, who may afterwards discover the delusion. The moral of the piece would be a very fine one.

Wordsworth wrote a very animated account of his difficulties and his joyous meeting with you, which he calls the happy rencontre or fortunate rainstorm. Oh! that you had been with me during a thunder-storm[270] on Thursday, August the 3d! I was sheltered (in the phrase of the country, _lownded_) in a sort of natural porch on the summit of Sca Fell, the central mountain of our Giants, said to be higher than Skiddaw or Helvellyn, and in chasm, naked crag, bursting springs, and waterfall the most interesting, without a rival. When the cloud passed away, to my right and left, and behind me, stood a great national convention of mountains which our ancestors most descriptively called Copland, that is, the Land of Heads. Before me the mountains died away down to the sea in eleven parallel ridges; close under my feet, as it were, were three vales: Wastdale, with its lake; Miterdale and Eskdale, with the rivers Irt, Mite, and Esk seen from their very fountains to their fall into the sea at Ravenglass Bay, which, with these rivers, form to the eye a perfect trident.

Turning round, I looked through Borrowdale out upon the Derwentwater and the Vale of Keswick, even to my own house, where my own children were. Indeed, I had altogether a most interesting walk through Newlands to Buttermere, over the fells to Ennerdale, to St. Bees; up Wastdale to Sca Fell, down Eskdale to Devock Lake, Ulpha Kirk, Broughton Mills, Tarver, Coniston, Windermere, Grasmere, Keswick. If it would entertain you, I would transcribe my notes and send them you by the first opportunity. I have scarce left room for my best wishes to Mrs. and Miss Sotheby, and affectionate wishes for your happiness and all who constitute it.

With unfeigned esteem, dear sir,

Yours, etc.,
S. T. COLERIDGE.

P. S. I am ashamed to send you a scrawl so like in form to a servant wench’s first letter. You will see that the first half was written before I received your last letter.

CXXX. TO THE SAME.

GRETA HALL, KESWICK, September 10, 1802.

MY DEAR SIR,--The books have not yet arrived, and I am wholly unable to account for the delay. I suspect that the cause of it may be Mr. Faulder’s mistake in sending them by the Carlisle waggon. A person is going to Carlisle on Monday from this place, and will make diligent inquiry, and, if he succeed, still I cannot have them in less than a week, as they must return to Penrith and there wait for the next Tuesday’s carrier. I ought, perhaps, to be ashamed of my weakness, but I must confess I have been downright vexed by the business. Every cart, every return-chaise from Penrith has renewed my hopes, till I began to play tricks with my own impatience, and say, “Well, I take it for granted that I shan’t get them for these seven days,” etc.,--with other of those half-lies that fear begets on hope. You have imposed a pleasing task on me in requesting the minutiæ of my opinions concerning your “Orestes.” Whatever these opinions may be, the disclosure of them will be a sort of _map_ of my mind, as a poet and reasoner, and my curiosity is strongly excited. I feel you a man of genius in the choice of the subject. It is my faith that the _genus irritabile_ is a phrase applicable only to bad poets. Men of great genius have, indeed, as an essential of their composition, great sensibility, but they have likewise great confidence in their own powers, and fear must always precede anger in the human mind. I can with truth say that, from those I love, mere general praise of anything I have written is as far from giving me pleasure as mere general censure; in anything, I mean, to which I have devoted much time or effort. “Be minute, and assign your reasons often, and your first impressions always, and then blame or praise. I care not which, I shall be gratified.” These are _my_ sentiments, and I assuredly believe that they are the sentiments of all who have indeed felt a _true call_ to the ministry of _song_. Of course, I, too, will act on the golden rule of doing to others what I wish others to do unto me. But, while I think of it, let me say that I should be much concerned if you applied this to the “First Navigator.” It would absolutely mortify me if you did more than look over it, and when a correction suggested itself to you, take your pen and make it, and let the copy go to Tomkins. What they have been, I shall know when I see the thing in print; for it must please the present times if it please any, and you have been far more in the fashionable world than I, and must needs have a finer and surer tact of that which will offend or disgust in the higher circles of life. Yet it is not what I should have advised Tomkins to do, and that is one reason why I cannot and will not accept more than a brace of copies from him. I do not like to be associated in a man’s mind with his losses. If he have the translation gratis, he must take it on his own judgment; but when a man pays for a thing, and he loses by it, the idea will creep in, spite of himself, that the failure was in part owing to the badness of the translation. While I was translating the “Wallenstein,” I told Longman it would never answer; when I had finished it I wrote to him and foretold that it would be waste paper on his shelves, and the dullness charitably laid upon my shoulders. Longman lost two hundred and fifty pounds by the work, fifty pounds of which had been paid to me,--poor pay, Heaven knows! for a thick octavo volume of blank verse; and yet I am sure that Longman never thinks of me but “Wallenstein” and the ghosts of his departed guineas dance an ugly waltz round my idea. This would not disturb me a tittle, if I thought well of the work myself. I should feel a confidence that it would win its way at last; but this is not the case with Gesner’s “Der erste Schiffer.” It may as well lie here till Tomkins wants it. Let him only give me a week’s notice, and I will transmit it to you with a large margin. Bowles’s stanzas on “Navigation”[271] are among the best in that second volume, but the whole volume is wofully inferior to its predecessor. There reigns through all the blank verse poems such a perpetual trick of moralizing everything, which is very well, occasionally, but never to see or describe any interesting appearance in nature without connecting it, by dim analogies, with the moral world proves faintness of impression. Nature has her proper interest, and he will know what it is who believes and feels that everything has a life of its own, and that we are all _One Life_. A poet’s heart and intellect should be _combined_, intimately combined and unified with the great appearances of nature, and not merely held in solution and loose mixture with them, in the shape of formal similes. I do not mean to exclude these formal similes; there are moods of mind in which they are natural, pleasing moods of mind, and such as a poet will often have, and sometimes express; but they are not his highest and most appropriate moods. They are “sermoni propriora,” which I once translated “properer for a sermon.” The truth is, Bowles has indeed the _sensibility_ of a poet, but he has not the _passion_ of a great poet. His latter writings all want _native_ passion. Milton here and there supplies him with an appearance of it, but he has no native passion because he is not a thinker, and has probably weakened his intellect by the haunting fear of becoming extravagant. Young, somewhere in one of his prose works, remarks that there is as profound a logic in the most daring and dithyrambic parts of Pindar as in the “Organon” of Aristotle. The remark is a valuable one.

Poetic feelings, like the flexuous boughs
Of mighty oaks! yield homage to the gale,
Toss in the strong winds, drive before the gust,
Themselves one giddy storm of fluttering leaves;
Yet, all the while, self-limited, remain
Equally near the fix’d and parent trunk
Of truth in nature--in the howling blast,
As in the calm that stills the aspen grove.[272]

That this is deep in our nature, I felt when I was on Scafell. I involuntarily poured forth a hymn[273] in the manner of the Psalms, though afterwards I thought the ideas, etc., disproportionate to our humble mountains.... You will soon see it in the “Morning Post,” and I should be glad to know whether and how far it pleased you. It has struck me with great force lately that the Psalms afford a most complete answer to those who state the Jehovah of the Jews, as a personal and national God, and the Jews as differing from the Greeks only in calling the minor Gods Cherubim and Seraphim, and confining the word “God” only to their Jupiter. It must occur to every reader that the Greeks in their religious poems address always the Numina Loci, the Genii, the Dryads, the Naiads, etc., etc. All natural objects were _dead_, mere hollow statues, but there was a Godkin or Goddessling _included_ in each. In the Hebrew poetry you find nothing of this poor stuff, as poor in genuine imagination as it is mean in intellect. At best, it is but fancy, or the aggregating faculty of the mind, not imagination or the _modifying_ and coadunating faculty. This the Hebrew poets appear to me to have possessed beyond all others, and next to them the English. In the Hebrew poets each thing has a life of its own, and yet they are all our life. In God they move and live and _have_ their being; not _had_, as the cold system of Newtonian Theology represents, but _have_. Great pleasure indeed, my dear sir, did I receive from the latter part of your letter. If there be any two subjects which have in the very depths of my nature interested me, it has been the Hebrew and Christian Theology, and the Theology of Plato. Last winter I read the Parmenides and the Timæus with great care, and oh, that you were here--even in this howling rainstorm that dashes itself against my windows--on the other side of my blazing fire, in that great armchair there! I guess we should encroach on the morning ere we parted. How little the commentators of Milton have availed themselves of the writings of Plato, Milton’s darling! But alas, commentators only hunt out verbal parallelisms--_numen abest_. I was much impressed with this in all the many notes on that beautiful passage in “Comus” from l. 629 to 641. All the puzzle is to find out what plant Hæmony is; which they discover to be the English spleenwort, and decked out as a mere play and licence of poetic fancy with all the strange properties suited to the purpose of the drama. They thought little of Milton’s platonizing spirit, who wrote nothing without an interior meaning. “Where more is meant than meets the ear,” is true of himself beyond all writers. He was so great a man that he seems to have considered fiction as profane unless where it is consecrated by being emblematic of some truth. What an unthinking and ignorant man we must have supposed Milton to be, if, without any hidden meaning, he had described it as growing in such abundance that the dull swain treads on it daily, and yet as never _flowering_. Such blunders Milton of all others was least likely to commit. Do look at the passage. Apply it as an allegory of Christianity, or, to speak more precisely, of the Redemption by the Cross, every syllable is full of light! “_A small unsightly root._”--“To the Greeks folly, to the Jews a stumbling-block”--“_The leaf was darkish and had prickles on it_”--“If in this life only we have hope, we are of all men the most miserable,” and a score of other texts. “_But in another country, as he said, Bore a bright golden flower_”--“The exceeding weight of glory prepared for us hereafter”--“_But not in this soil; Unknown and like esteemed and the dull swain Treads on it daily with his clouted shoon_”--The promises of Redemption offered daily and hourly, and to all, but accepted scarcely by any--“_He called it Hæmony_.” Now what is Hæmony? αἷμα οἶνος, Blood-wine. “And he took the wine and blessed it and said, ‘This is my Blood,’”--the great symbol of the Death on the Cross. There is a general ridicule cast on all allegorising of poets. Read Milton’s prose works, and observe whether he was one of those who joined in this ridicule. There is a very curious passage in Josephus [De Bello Jud. 6, 7, cap. 25 (vi. § 3)] which is, in its literal meaning, more wild and fantastically absurd than the passage in Milton; so much so, that Lardner quotes it in exultation and says triumphantly, “Can any man who reads it think it any disparagement to the Christian Religion that it was not embraced by a man who would believe such stuff as this? God forbid that it should affect Christianity, that it is not believed by the learned of this world!” But the passage in Josephus, I have no doubt, is wholly allegorical.

Ἔστησε signifies “He hath stood,”[274] which, in these times of apostasy from the principles of freedom or of religion in this country, and from both by the same persons in France, is no unmeaning signature, if subscribed with humility, and in the remembrance of “Let him that stands take heed lest he fall!” However, it is, in truth, no more than S. T. C. written in Greek--Es tee see.

Pocklington will not sell his house, but he is ill, and perhaps it may be to be sold, but it is sunless all winter.

God bless you, and
S. T. COLERIDGE.

CXXXI. TO THE SAME.

GRETA HALL, KESWICK, Tuesday, September 27, 1802.

MY DEAR SIR,--The river is full, and Lodore is full, and silver-fillets come out of clouds and glitter in every ravine of all the mountains; and the hail lies like snow, upon their tops, and the impetuous gusts from Borrowdale snatch the water up high, and continually at the bottom of the lake it is not distinguishable from snow slanting before the wind--and under this seeming snow-drift the sunshine _gleams_, and over all the nether half of the Lake it is _bright_ and _dazzles_, a cauldron of melted silver boiling! It is in very truth a sunny, misty, cloudy, dazzling, howling, omniform day, and I have been looking at as pretty a sight as a father’s eyes could well see--Hartley and little Derwent running in the green where the gusts blow most madly, both with their hair floating and tossing, a miniature of the agitated trees, below which they were playing, inebriate both with the pleasure--Hartley whirling round for joy, Derwent eddying, half-willingly, half by the force of the gust,--driven backward, struggling forward, and shouting his little hymn of joy. I can write thus to you, my dear sir, with a confident spirit; for when I received your letter on the 22nd, and had read the “family history,” I laid down the sheet upon my desk, and sate for half an hour thinking of you, dreaming of you, till the tear grown cold upon my cheek awoke me from my reverie. May you live long, long, thus blessed in your family, and often, often may you all sit around one fireside. Oh happy should I be now and then to sit among you--your pilot and guide in some of your summer walks!