return; opium the cause; returns to Keswick; misunder- 92 De Quincey; his relations with the Coleridges; takes Mrs. Coleridge and children to Keswick; where they lodge with Southey; want of sympathy between Southey and Cole- ridge; in winter 1806 Coleridge comes to London and resumes journalism; lectures at Royal Institution; goes to live with Wordsworth at Grasmere in summer 1808; position of Edinburgh Review towards Lake poets ; early in 1809 Coleridge starts the Friend; mismanaged and not a success; more misunderstandings with his wife; leaves her finally October, 1810; comes to London penniless; writes for Courier and lives miserably; lectures again on Shake- speare and Milton; "Remorse" brought out at Drury Lane 1813; lectures at Bristol; more than ever a slave to opium; Means taken for his cure; "Christabel" published, and un- Coleridge lectures again in 1818 on Shakespeare and literature ; 105 127 LIFE OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. “I CHAPTER I. AM grieved," said Southey, "that you never met Coleridge. All other men whom I have ever known are mere children to him, and yet all is palsied by a total want of moral strength." "He is like a lump of coal rich with gas," said Scott, "which lies expending itself in puffs and gleams, unless some shrewd body will clap it into a cast-iron box, and compel the compressed element to do itself justice." "He is the only person I ever knew, who answered to the idea of a man of genius," said Hazlitt; "he is the only person from whom I ever learnt anything. His genius had . . . angelic wings, and fed on manna. He talked on for ever; and you wished him to talk on for ever." "He is," said De Quincey, "the largest and most spacious intellect, the subtlest and most comprehensive that has yet existed among men.” "Impiety to Shakespeare!" cried Landor; "treason to Milton! I give up all the rest, even Bacon. Certainly, since their day we have had nothing at all comparable with him. Byron and Scott were but as gun-flints to a granite mountain; Wordsworth has one angle of resemblance." Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born on October 21, 1772, at Ottery St. Mary, in Devonshire. His father combined the functions of vicar and schoolmaster of his native parish. The vicar had been twice married, and Samuel was the youngest of thirteen children. His mother is described as a homely, house-minding, unimaginative woman, uneducated, out of sympathy with the accomplishments that were fashionable among ladies, resembling Martha in being over careful in many things. Her husband appears to have been a man of simple manners and amiable character, a little eccentric, a little pedantic, a little unmindful of immediate interests. Coleridge used to tell a story which he considered characteristic of both his parents. On one occasion the old gentleman had to take a journey which would keep him from home three or four days. His wife packed his little trunk, and impressed upon him the necessity of putting on a clean shirt every day. He gave the required promise, and set out. On his return it was observed that he had not lost flesh during his absence. In due course his trunk was unpacked, and then it was discovered that all the linen had disappeared. The good man had strictly obeyed his wife's instructions by putting on a clean shirt every day, but had always forgotten to take off the old one. It seems to have been a constant habit of this rural clergyman to diversify his discourses with liberal quotations from the Hebrew, which he described as "the immediate language of the Holy Ghost." His rustic flock appear to have acquired a mysterious reverence for this kind of teaching, and when the old vicar was gone, they thought lightly of a successor from whom no "immediate language" was ever heard. Recalling the half-conscious pedantry, and less than half-conscious eccentricity, of this gentle, learned, simple-hearted father, Coleridge would compare him with Parson Adams. The comparison was meant in reverence and deep love, and it serves as a key to one side of the poet's own character. In gentleness, in unselfishness in "other-worldliness," and even in an amusing indifference to some of the plain issues of life, the vicar and schoolmaster of Ottery St. Mary was not more like Fielding's immortal character than he was like his own famous son. "I was the last child," says Coleridge, "the youngest of ten by the same mother, that is to say, John, William (who died in infancy), James, William, Edward, George, Luke, Ann, Francis, and myself, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, beneficially abridged Esteese (Eornos), i.e., S.T.C., and the thirteenth, taking in three sisters by my dear father's first wife Mary, afterwards Mrs. Bradley; Sarah, who married a seaman, and is lately dead; and Elizabeth, afterwards Mrs. Phillips, who alone was bred up with us after my birth, and whom alone of the three I was wont to think of as a sister, though not exactly, yet I did not know why, the same sort of sister as my sister Nancy." Before Coleridge came of age, death had made many gaps in this list-five brothers and one sister (the only daughter of his mother) were lost to him. He was delicate as a child, self-absorbed and even morbidly imaginative. There is a story that in his fifth or sixth year, having quarrelled with his brother, and being in dread of a whipping, he stole |