Chapter XXVIII: Part II: , 405 n.; (5)

[264] “On Sunday, August 1st, ½ after 12, I had a shirt, cravat, 2 pairs of stockings, a little paper, and half dozen pens, a German book (Voss’s Poems), and a little tea and sugar, with my night cap, packed up in my natty green oil-skin, neatly squared, and put into my net knapsack, and the knapsack on my back and the besom stick in my hand, which for want of a better, and in spite of Mrs. C. and Mary, who both raised their voices against it, especially as I left the besom scattered on the kitchen floor, off I sallied over the bridge, through the hop-field, through the Prospect Bridge, at Portinscale, so on by the tall birch that grows out of the centre of the huge oak, along into Newlands.” MS. Journal of tour in the Lake District, August 1-9, 1802, sent in the form of a letter to the Wordsworths and transcribed by Miss Sarah Hutchinson.

[265] “The following month, September (1802), was marked by the birth of his first child, a daughter, named after her paternal grandmother, Margaret.” _Southey’s Life and Correspondence_, ii. 192.

[266] Southey’s reply, which was not in the affirmative, has not been preserved. The joint-residence at Greta Hall began in September, 1803.

[267] Charles and Mary Lamb’s visit to Greta Hall, which lasted three full weeks, must have extended from (about) August 12 to September 2, 1802. _Letters of Charles Lamb_, i. 180-184.

[268]

“_Here melancholy, on the pale crags laid,
Might muse herself to sleep_; or Fancy come,
Watching the mind with tender cozenage
And shaping things that are not.”

“Coombe-Ellen, written in Radnorshire, September, 1798.” “Poems of William Lisle Bowles,” _Galignani_, p. 139. For “Melancholy, a Fragment,” see _Poetical Works_, p. 34.

[269] I have not been able to verify this reference.

[270] “O my God! what enormous mountains there are close by me, and yet below the hill I stand on.... And here I am, _lounded_ [i. e., sheltered],--so fully lounded,--that though the wind is strong and the clouds are hastening hither from the sea, and the whole air seaward has a lurid look, and we shall certainly have thunder,--yet here (but that I am hungered and provisionless), _here_ I could be warm and wait, methinks, for to-morrow’s sun--and on a nice stone table am I now at this moment writing to you--between 2 and 3 o’clock, as I guess. Surely the first letter ever written from the top of Sca Fell.”

“After the thunder-storm I shouted out all your names in the sheep-fold--where echo came upon echo, and then Hartley and Derwent, and then I laughed and shouted Joanna. It leaves all the echoes I ever heard far, far behind, in number, distinctness and humanness of voice; and then, not to forget an old friend, I made them all say Dr. Dodd etc.” _MS. Journal_, August 6, 1802. Compare Lamb’s Latin letter of October 9, 1802:--

“Ista tua Carmina Chamouniana satis grandia esse mihi constat; sed hoc mihi nonnihil displicet, quod in iis illæ montium Grisosonum inter se responsiones totidem reboant anglicé, _God, God_, haud aliter atque temet audivi tuas [sic] montes Cumbrianas [sic] resonare docentes, _Tod, Tod_, nempe Doctorem infelicem: vocem certe haud Deum sonantem.” _Letters of Charles Lamb_, i. 185. See, too, Canon Ainger’s translation and note, _ibid._ p. 331. See, also, Southey’s Letter to Grosvenor Bedford, January 9, 1804. _Life and Correspondence_, ii. 248.

[271] “The Spirit of Navigation and Discovery.” “Bowles’s Poetical Works,” _Galignani_, p. 142.

[272] These lines form part of the poem addressed “To Matilda Betham. From a Stranger.” The date of composition was September 9, 1802, the day before they were quoted in the letter to Sotheby. _Poetical Works_, p. 168.

[273] The “Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni” was first printed in the _Morning Post_, September 11, 1802. It was reprinted in the original issue of _The Friend_, No. xi. (October 16, 1809, pp. 174-176), and again in _Sibylline Leaves_, 1817. As De Quincey was the first to point out, Coleridge was indebted to the Swiss poetess, Frederica Brun, for the framework of the poem and for many admirable lines and images, but it was his solitary walk on Scafell, and the consequent uplifting of spirit, which enabled him “to create the dry bones of the German outline into the fulness of life.”

Coleridge will never lose his title of a _Lake Poet_, but of the ten years during which he was nominally resident in the Lake District, he was absent at least half the time. Of his greater poems there are but four, the second part of “Christabel,” the “Dejection: an Ode,” the “Picture,” and the “Hymn before Sunrise,” which take their colouring from the scenery of Westmoreland and Cumberland.

He was but twenty-six when he visited Ottery for the last time. It was in his thirty-fifth year that he bade farewell to Stowey and the Quantocks, and after he was turned forty he never saw Grasmere or Keswick again. Ill health and the _res angusta domi_ are stern gaolers, but, if he had been so minded, he would have found a way to revisit the pleasant places in which he had passed his youth and early manhood. In truth, he was well content to be a dweller in “the depths of the huge city” or its outskirts, and like Lamb, he “could not _live_ in Skiddaw.” _Poetical Works_, p. 165, and Editor’s Note, pp. 629, 630.

[274] Coleridge must have presumed on the ignorance of Sotheby and of his friends generally. He could hardly have passed out of Boyer’s hands without having learned that Ἔστησε signifies, “He hath placed,” not “He hath stood.” But, like most people who have changed their opinions, he took an especial pride in proclaiming his unswerving allegiance to fixed principles. The initials S. T. C., Grecised and mistranslated, expressed this pleasing delusion, and the Greek, “Punic [sc. punnic] Greek,” as he elsewhere calls it, might run the risk of detection.

[275] Parts III. and IV. of the “Three Graves”--were first published in _The Friend_, No. vi. Sept. 21, 1809. Parts I. and II. were published for the first time in _The Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge_, Macmillan, 1893. The final version of this stanza (ll. 509-513) differs from that in the text. “A small blue sun” became “A tiny sun,” and for “Ten thousand hairs of colour’d light” Coleridge substituted “Ten thousand hairs and threads of light.” See _Poetical Works_, p. 92, and Editor’s Note, pp. 589-591.

[276] The six essays to which he calls Estlin’s attention are reprinted in _Essays on His Own Times_, ii. 478-585.

[277] The residence of Josiah Wedgwood.

[278] Paley’s last work, “_Natural Theology_; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of A Deity, collected from the Appearances of Nature,” was published in 1802.

[279] For Southey’s well known rejoinder to this “ebullience of schematism,” see _Life and Correspondence_, ii. 220-223.

[280] Southey’s correspondence contains numerous references to the historian Sharon Turner [1768-1847], and to William Owen, the translator of the _Mabinogion_ and author of the _Welsh Paradise Lost_.

[281] It may be interesting to compare the following unpublished note from Coleridge’s Scotch Journal with the well known passage in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journal of her tour in the Highlands (_Memoir of Wordsworth_, i. 235): “Next morning we went in the boat to the end of the lake, and so on by the old path to the Garrison to the Ferry House by Loch Lomond, where now the Fall was in all its fury, and formed with the Ferry cottage, and the sweet Highland lass, a nice picture. The boat gone to the preaching we stayed all day in the comfortless hovel, comfortless, but the two little lassies did everything with such sweetness, and one of them, 14, with such native elegance. Oh! she was a divine creature! The sight of the boat, full of Highland men and women and children from the preaching, exquisitely fine. We soon reached E. Tarbet--all the while rain. Never, never let me forget that small herd-boy in his tartan-plaid, dim-seen on the hilly field, and long heard ere seen, a melancholy voice calling to his cattle! nor the beautiful harmony of the heath, and the dancing fern, and the ever-moving birches. That of itself enough to make Scotland visitable, its fields of heather giving a sort of shot silk finery in the apotheosis of finery. On Monday we went to Arrochar. Here I left W. and D. and returned myself to E. Tarbet, slept there, and now, Tuesday, Aug. 30, 1803, am to make my own way to Edinburgh.”

Many years after he added the words: “O Esteese, that thou hadst from thy 22nd year indeed made thy _own_ way and _alone_!”

[282]

A sweet and playful Highland girl,
As light and beauteous as a squirrel,
As beauteous and as wild!

Her dwelling was a lonely house,
A cottage in a heathy dell;
And she put on her gown of green
And left her mother at sixteen,
And followed Peter Bell.
_Peter Bell, Part III._

[283] Margaret Southey, who was born in September, 1802, died in the latter part of August, 1803.

[284] The “Pains of Sleep” was published for the first time, together with “Christabel” and “Kubla Khan,” in 1816. With the exception of the insertion of the remarkable lines 52-54, the first draft of the poem does not materially differ from the published version. A transcript of the same poem was sent to Poole in a letter dated October 3, 1803. _Poetical Works_, p. 170, and Editor’s Note, pp. 631, 632.

[285] The Rev. Peter Elmsley, the well known scholar, who had been a school and college friend of Southey’s, was at this time resident at Edinburgh. The _Edinburgh Review_ had been founded the year before, and Elmsley was among the earliest contributors. His name frequently recurs in Southey’s correspondence.

[286] Compare Southey’s first impressions of Edinburgh, contained in a letter to Wynn, dated October 20, 1805: “You cross a valley (once a loch) by a high bridge, and the back of the old city appears on the edge of this depth--so vast, so irregular--with such an outline of roofs and chimneys, that it looks like the ruins of a giant’s palace. I never saw anything so impressive as the first sight of this; there was a wild red sunset slanting along it.” _Selections from the Letters of R. Southey_, i. 342.

[287] Compare _Table Talk_, for September 26, 1830, where a similar statement is made in almost the same words.

[288] The same sentence occurs in a letter to Sir G. Beaumont, dated September 22, 1803. _Coleorton Letters_, i. 6.

[289] The MS. of this letter was given to my father by the Rev. Dr. Wreford. I know nothing of the person to whom it was addressed, except that he was “Matthew Coates, Esq., of Bristol.”

[290] Dr. Joseph Adams, the biographer of Hunter, who in 1816 recommended Coleridge to the care of Mr. James Gillman.