Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Measured on the line of English history, his life extended from the last months of George II almost to the accession of Victoria, from the year of victories, the year of Wolfe's triumph at Quebec, through the whole course of the American War of Independence and the campaigns of the French Revolution, till Waterloo was already a memory and the Thirty Years' Peace was drawing to its close.

In the line of English literature, he travelled from the period of Johnson, Burns, and Cowper to a time when Coleridge had already passed away and the Lake School was on its way to literary victory and the first writings of Macaulay and of Tennyson were abroad.

And in the line of English religious history, he was born only twenty years after the definite rise of Methodism and died nine years after the publication of the Christian Year and only nine years before the secession of Mr. Newman to the Church of Rome.

Such parallels and comparisons are always interesting and often important in the study of a long and powerful life, for the man who gives out a large influence, continuous and operative through many years, must himself feel and assimilate much of the influence of his time.

It is true that there had been hints written in Hebrew and Greek and Latin, but they were but hints.

It was left to the age of Coleridge and Wordsworth to discern that in the spectacle of external nature there is something much more than mere pleasantness or sensuous beauty.

Horace found both these elements in his font bandusiae splendidor vitro, that in fact there is a revelation of things hidden in things which are open to all.

It is clear then that in a sense Coleridge and his fellows discovered the significance of the invisible world.

There was given to them a revelation of that which had been hidden from the beginning.

So it will seem pretty clear, I think, considering all the instances which I have quoted in physical science, in mental science, in architecture, in literature, in the contemplation of trees and clouds and streams and flowers, that things which are most clear may yet be most closely hidden, and hidden for long ages, and hidden not only from the gross and sensual man, but from the fine and cultured man.

I have alluded to Walpole and his sham Gothic, and I suppose that Walpole was beset by a sort of vague idea that there was something in this architecture of a past age which was somehow or other curious and admirable.

So Walpole tried to attain it, and it is quite clear from his imitations that he was far indeed from the truth of the matter.

Pope uses guess in the American fashion very frequently in his letters.

Coleridge was addicted to it.

He uses it in Christabel.

I guess twas frightful there to see.

Robert Louis Stevenson writes, Otherwise, much the same, I guess.

Quite naturally, and without italics or quotation marks.

Chaucer, Shakespeare, Pope, Gray, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Carlyle, Stevenson.

At least we Americans sin in good company when we guess.

Every now and then in reading I have come across something which has given me the wild surmise of pioneering mingled with the faint magic of familiarity.

For instance, some of the famous dicta of Wordsworth and Coleridge and Shelley about poetry.

I realized then that a teacher had told me these things in my freshman year at college, fifteen years ago.

I jotted them down at that time, but they were mere catchwords.

The Acadian loveliness of the Haverford campus and the comfortable simplicity of its routine, and then the hypnotizing beauty and curiosity and subtle flavor of Oxford life, with its long footloose rambling vacations, these were aptly devised for the exercise of the imagination, which is often a gracious phrase for loafing.

But these surroundings were too richly entertaining, and I was too green and soft and humorous, in the Shakespearean sense, to permit any rational continuous plan of study.

Like the young man to whom Coleridge addressed a poem of rebuke, I was abandoned a greater part of the time to, quote, an indolent and causeless melancholy, unquote, or to its partner an excessive and not always tasteful mirth.

I spent hours upon hours with little profit in libraries flitting aimlessly from book to book.

He had been sitting motionless for nearly two hours without any sense of the passage of time, and without ceasing he had murmured those words as he dreamed an endless wonderful story.

He experienced somewhat the sensations of Coleridge himself.

Strange, amazing, ineffable things seemed to have been presented to him, not in the form of the idea, but actually and materially, but he was less fortunate than Coleridge in that he could not, even vaguely, image to himself what he had seen.

Yet when he searched his mind, he knew that the consciousness of the room in which he sat had never left him.

He had seen the thick darkness gather, and had heard the whirl of rain hissing through the air.

How good, for instance, to accompany Alexander Smith on a visit to the Mermaid in session, and there behold the great Shakespeare's bland oval face, the light of a smile spread over it, and Ben Johnson's truculent image, and Beaumont and Fletcher sitting together in their beautiful friendship.

and how good to think that we may go in the company of the same gracious guide to the famous literary club and there find burke and johnson and garrick and goldsmith the doctor has been talking there for a hundred years and there will talk for many a hundred more and then so highly are we favoured we may go and who would not to charles lamb's snug little room in inner temple lane and there find the hush of a whist-table in one corner the host stuttering puns as he deals the cards and sitting about hunt whose every sentence is flavoured with the hawthorn and the primrose and hazlitt maddened by waterloo and st helena and goodwin with his wild theories and kemble with his roman look and before the morning comes and lamb stutters yet more thickly for there is a slight flavour of punch in the apartment what talk there has been of hogarth's prince of isaac walton of the old dramatists of sir thomas brown's urn burial with elia's quaint humour breaking through every interstice and flowing in every fissure and cranny of the conversation ah yes it is good to have such glimpses as these to find the authors who have charmed and instructed us free from the fetters of the pen their own good or bad sweet or petulant always brilliant selves and how true it is that such glimpses lend peculiar interest to written words the book-lovers who like to feel the humanity of an author must surely form a vast and ever-increasing company you know how it fares with the superior individual who bears himself as though unmoved by feelings common to the average mortal he does not inspire friendship or admiration or for that matter any feeling worth the having knowing the frailty of human nature we suspect him of playing a double part and so it is surely with the author who addresses us in the manner of one who is a stranger to the feelings that mould this mortal clay we know better we know full well that the writer is not continually dwelling amongst the roses and lilies of life he is not continually uttering generous sentiments and saying fine things on him as on his brethren the world presses with prosaic needs he has to make love and marry and run the usual matrimonial risks the income-tax collector visits him as well as others around his head at christmas drives a snowstorm of bills outside of his books he is pretty much the same as other men and so i say we have greater sympathy with an author if he takes us into his confidence allows us to bear a part of his burdens to feel that he too is subject to human trials and difficulties it is interesting to note that authors themselves are of the same way of thinking they too like to get at the hearts of men Speaking of a visit paid to Coleridge at Highgate, Emerson complained that he was in his company for about an hour, but found it impossible to recall the largest part of his discourse, which was often like so many printed paragraphs in his books.

Perhaps the same, so readily did the great Coleridge fall into certain commonplaces.

The visit was rather a spectacle than a conversation.

and so you see we who desire at times to meet authors outside their books are in good company and if we are not so fortunate as to play boswell's part if we cannot sit at the feet of our heroes if we cannot mourn or make merry in their company we can at least approach them through the medium of a printed page and that i hold is as good a way as any other if not the best few are the books so deep in human interest as biographies of men of letters This, it is said, arises from the pictures of comparative defeat which, in almost every instance, such books contain.

Measured on the line of English history, his life extended from the last months of George II almost to the accession of Victoria, from the year of victories, the year of Wolf's triumph at Quebec, through the whole course of the American War of Independence and the campaigns of the French Revolution till Waterloo was already a memory and the Thirty Years' Peace was drawing to its close.

In the line of English literature, he travelled from the period of Johnson, Burns and Cooper to a time when Coleridge had already passed away and the Lake School was on its way to literary victory and the first writings of Macaulay and of Tennyson were abroad.

And in the line of English religious history, he was born only twenty years after the definite rise of Methodism and died nine years after the publication of the Christian Year and only nine years before the secession of Mr Newman to the Church of Rome.

Such parallels and comparisons are always interesting and often important in the study of a long and powerful life, for the man who gives out a large influence, continuous and operative through many years, must himself feel and assimilate much of the influence of his time.

Yet in its depth what treasures! You will see that which was Godwin, greater none than he though fallen, and fallen on evil times, to stand among the spirits of our age and land before the dread tribunal of to come the foremost, while rebuke cowers pale and dumb.

You will see Coleridge, he who sits obscure in the exceeding lustre and the pure intense irradiation of a mind which with its own internal lightning blind flags wearily through darkness and despair.

A cloud-encircled meteor of the air, A hooded eagle among blinking owls.

You will see Hunt one of those happy souls Which are the salt of the earth, and without whom This world would smell like what it is, a tomb.