English Literature
the good work of showing the romantic interest of common life; and
Wordsworth continued it in "Michael," "The Solitary Reaper," "To a Highland
Girl," "Stepping Westward," _The Excursion_, and a score of lesser poems.
Joy and sorrow, not of princes or heroes, but "in widest commonalty
spread," are his themes; and the hidden purpose of many of his poems is to
show that the keynote of all life is happiness,--not an occasional thing,
the result of chance or circumstance, but a heroic thing, to be won, as one
would win any other success, by work and patience.
(4) To this natural philosophy of man Wordsworth adds a mystic element, the
result of his own belief that in every natural object there is a reflection
of the living God. Nature is everywhere transfused and illumined by Spirit;
man also is a reflection of the divine Spirit; and we shall never
understand the emotions roused by a flower or a sunset until we learn that
nature appeals through the eye of man to his inner spirit. In a word,
nature must be "spiritually discerned." In "Tintern Abbey" the spiritual
appeal of nature is expressed in almost every line; but the mystic
conception of man is seen more clearly in "Intimations of Immortality,"
which Emerson calls "the high-water mark of poetry in the nineteenth
century." In this last splendid ode Wordsworth adds to his spiritual
interpretation of nature and man the alluring doctrine of preëxistence,
which has appealed so powerfully to Hindoo and Greek in turn, and which
makes of human life a continuous, immortal thing, without end or beginning.
Wordsworth's longer poems, since they contain much that is prosy and
uninteresting, may well be left till after we have read the odes, sonnets,
and short descriptive poems that have made him famous. As showing a certain
heroic cast of Wordsworth's mind, it is interesting to learn that the
greater part of his work, including _The Prelude_ and _The Excursion_, was
intended for a place in a single great poem, to be called _The Recluse_,
which should treat of nature, man, and society. _The Prelude_, treating of
the growth of a poet's mind, was to introduce the work. The _Home at
Grasmere_, which is the first book of _The Recluse_, was not published till
1888, long after the poet's death. _The Excursion_ (1814) is the second
book of _The Recluse_; and the third was never completed, though Wordsworth
intended to include most of his shorter poems in this third part, and so
make an immense personal epic of a poet's life and work. It is perhaps just
as well that the work remained unfinished. The best of his work appeared in
the _Lyrical Ballads_ (1798) and in the sonnets, odes, and lyrics of the
next ten years; though "The Duddon Sonnets" (1820), "To a Skylark" (1825),
and "Yarrow Revisited" (1831) show that he retained till past sixty much of
his youthful enthusiasm. In his later years, however, he perhaps wrote too
much; his poetry, like his prose, becomes dull and unimaginative; and we
miss the flashes of insight, the tender memories of childhood, and the
recurrence of noble lines--each one a poem--that constitutes the surprise
and the delight of reading Wordsworth.
The outward shows of sky and earth,
Of hill and valley, he has viewed;
And impulses of deeper birth
Have come to him in solitude.
In common things that round us lie
Some random truths he can impart--
The harvest of a quiet eye
That broods and sleeps on his own heart.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772-1834)
A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear,
A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet, no relief,
In word, or sigh, or tear.
In the wonderful "Ode to Dejection," from which the above fragment is
taken, we have a single strong impression of Coleridge's whole life,--a
sad, broken, tragic life, in marked contrast with the peaceful existence of
his friend Wordsworth. For himself, during the greater part of his life,
the poet had only grief and remorse as his portion; but for everybody else,
for the audiences that were charmed by the brilliancy of his literary
lectures, for the friends who gathered about him to be inspired by his
ideals and conversation, and for all his readers who found unending delight
in the little volume which holds his poetry, he had and still has a
cheering message, full of beauty and hope and inspiration. Such is
Coleridge, a man of grief who makes the world glad.
LIFE. In 1772 there lived in Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire, a queer little
man, the Rev. John Coleridge, vicar of the parish church and master of the
local grammar school. In the former capacity he preached profound sermons,
quoting to open-mouthed rustics long passages from the Hebrew, which he
told them was the very tongue of the Holy Ghost. In the latter capacity he
wrote for his boys a new Latin grammar, to mitigate some of the
difficulties of traversing that terrible jungle by means of ingenious
bypaths and short cuts. For instance, when his boys found the ablative a
somewhat difficult case to understand, he told them to think of it as the
_quale-quare-quidditive_ case, which of course makes its meaning perfectly
clear. In both these capacities the elder Coleridge was a sincere man,
gentle and kindly, whose memory was "like a religion" to his sons and
daughters. In that same year was born Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the youngest
of thirteen children. He was an extraordinarily precocious child, who could
read at three years of age, and who, before he was five, had read the Bible
and the Arabian Nights, and could remember an astonishing amount from both
books. From three to six he attended a "dame" school; and from six till
nine (when his father died and left the family destitute) he was in his
father's school, learning the classics, reading an enormous quantity of
English books, avoiding novels, and delighting in cumbrous theological and
metaphysical treatises. At ten he was sent to the Charity School of
Christ's Hospital, London, where he met Charles Lamb, who records his
impression of the place and of Coleridge in one of his famous essays.[224]
Coleridge seems to have remained in this school for seven or eight years
without visiting his home,--a poor, neglected boy, whose comforts and
entertainments were all within himself. Just as, when a little child, he
used to wander over the fields with a stick in his hand, slashing the tops
from weeds and thistles, and thinking himself to be the mighty champion of
Christendom against the infidels, so now he would lie on the roof of the
school, forgetting the play of his fellows and the roar of the London
streets, watching the white clouds drifting over and following them in
spirit into all sorts of romantic adventures.
At nineteen this hopeless dreamer, who had read more books than an old
professor, entered Cambridge as a charity student. He remained for nearly
three years, then ran away because of a trifling debt and enlisted in the
Dragoons, where he served several months before he was discovered and
brought back to the university. He left in 1794 without taking his degree;
and presently we find him with the youthful Southey,--a kindred spirit, who
had been fired to wild enthusiasm by the French Revolution,--founding his
famous Pantisocracy for the regeneration of human society. "The Fall of
Robespierre," a poem composed by the two enthusiasts, is full of the new
revolutionary spirit. The Pantisocracy, on the banks of the Susquehanna,
was to be an ideal community, in which the citizens combined farming and
literature; and work was to be limited to two hours each day. Moreover,
each member of the community was to marry a good woman, and take her with
him. The two poets obeyed the latter injunction first, marrying two
sisters, and then found that they had no money to pay even their traveling
expenses to the new Utopia.
During all the rest of his career a tragic weakness of will takes
possession of Coleridge, making it impossible for him, with all his genius
and learning, to hold himself steadily to any one work or purpose. He
studied in Germany; worked as a private secretary, till the drudgery wore
upon his free spirit; then he went to Rome and remained for two years, lost
in study. Later he started _The Friend_, a paper devoted to truth and
liberty; lectured on poetry and the fine arts to enraptured audiences in
London, until his frequent failures to meet his engagements scattered his
hearers; was offered an excellent position and a half interest (amounting
to some £2000) in the _Morning Post_ and _The Courier_, but declined it,
saying "that I would not give up the country and the lazy reading of old
folios for two thousand times two thousand pounds,--in short, that beyond
£350 a year I considered money a real evil." His family, meanwhile, was
almost entirely neglected; he lived apart, following his own way, and the
wife and children were left in charge of his friend Southey. Needing money,
he was on the point of becoming a Unitarian minister, when a small pension
from two friends enabled him to live for a few years without regular
employment.
A terrible shadow in Coleridge's life was the apparent cause of most of his
dejection. In early life he suffered from neuralgia, and to ease the pain
began to use opiates. The result on such a temperament was almost
inevitable. He became a slave to the drug habit; his naturally weak will
lost all its directing and sustaining force, until, after fifteen years of
pain and struggle and despair, he gave up and put himself in charge of a
physician, one Mr. Gillman, of Highgate. Carlyle, who visited him at this
time, calls him "a king of men," but records that "he gave you the idea of
a life that had been full of sufferings, a life heavy-laden,
half-vanquished, still swimming painfully in seas of manifold physical and
other bewilderment."
The shadow is dark indeed; but there are gleams of sunshine that
occasionally break through the clouds. One of these is his association with
Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, in the Quantock hills, out of which came
the famous _Lyrical Ballads_ of 1798. Another was his loyal devotion to
poetry for its own sake. With the exception of his tragedy _Remorse_, which
through Byron's influence was accepted at Drury Lane Theater, and for which
he was paid £400, he received almost nothing for his poetry. Indeed, he
seems not to have desired it; for he says: "Poetry has been to me its own
exceeding great reward; it has soothed my afflictions; it has multiplied
and refined my enjoyments; it has endeared solitude, and it has given me
the habit of wishing to discover the good and the beautiful in all that
meets and surrounds me." One can better understand his exquisite verse
after such a declaration. A third ray of sunlight came from the admiration
of his contemporaries; for though he wrote comparatively little, he was by
his talents and learning a leader among literary men, and his conversations
were as eagerly listened to as were those of Dr. Johnson. Wordsworth says
of him that, though other men of the age had done some wonderful things,
Coleridge was the only wonderful man he had ever known. Of his lectures on
literature a contemporary says: "His words seem to flow as from a person
repeating with grace and energy some delightful poem." And of his
conversation it is recorded: "Throughout a long-drawn summer's day would
this man talk to you in low, equable but clear and musical tones,
concerning things human and divine; marshalling all history, harmonizing
all experiment, probing the depths of your consciousness, and revealing
visions of glory and terror to the imagination."
The last bright ray of sunlight comes from Coleridge's own soul, from the