existed of Greta Hall,-Coleridge to pay £25 a year. The hall will be described later. We pause a moment to ask, with a Bristol bard,' a pertinent question : 66 "Ye nymphs, that skim along the silvery lakes, Then," says he,— "Then would I raise my cot your streams beside." "But canst thou," he asks, "But canst thou from thyself, O wanderer, fly?" Coleridge never could. From the point at present reached materials for our sketch largely fail us. Yet they must be in existence. Moreover, we have grown, in the course of our researches, distinctly aware of important episodes iu Coleridge's life, of which we can obtain but glimpses. We shall less and less attempt to forestall the complete account. The key-note of the Keswick period,—roughly 1 Bard.] From Select Poems, &c., by the Late John Dawes Worgan, of Bristol, who died on the 15th of July, 1809, aged Nineteen Years. Longman, 1810. Worgan was a watchmaker's son, of painful precocity, and some promise. From anything to be found in his book, he was entirely ignorant of the existence of our three bards. He was a protégé of Dr. Jenner. His Remains are edited by Hayley, who contributes an elegy on his death. We offer a sample verse :— "Sweet was the promise of thy early lyre, The interest of this digression must serve as its apology. speaking, four years, from August, 1800, to March, 1804; for we shall see that Coleridge resided little there after,-is illness, illness. It was a mistake for him to have settled here. The climate did not suit him. We have had ailments before, but during these four years we have little else. Despondency goes always, with some constitutions, with rain and damp air." 1 Coleridge and rain, as he tells us, in An Ode to the Rain, but ill agreed. They could not live" on easy terms together." 66 On Sept. 14, 1800, Coleridge's third son, Derwent,2 was born. Mrs. Mary Robinson, called " Perdita," from a part in which she distinguished herself, wrote an Ode on his birth. She was at or near Keswick at this time. How Coleridge came to know her3 we cannot explain, but the Annual Anthology for 1800 contains verses by her. Coleridge addressed to her a poem, A Stranger Minstrel, and gave her, for a little collection of poems which she contemplated, The Mad Monk. She died within the year. See the notes on these two poems in the text. The second part of Christabel was written at Keswick, this year. 1 Damp air.] We take leave to borrow this expression from Christabel. 2 Derwent.] He did not die till March 28, 1883; yet he never had the courage, and we feel little surprise,to write the life of his father. 3 Know her.] It is possible that the following passage refers to her :- Coleridge, in the course of our walk (June 27, 1779), illustrated some allusions to the sensitiveness of authorship, by relating an anecdote of Mrs. R., whose poetry, upon some occasion, he thought he had been abusing more than it deserved. He, therefore, by way of making some amends to her, wrote a sonnet in her praise, and inserted it in a newspaper. In a few days he received a highly complimentary letter from the lady, with a splendidly bound edition of her works."- Carlyon, i., 175. This sonnet might be traced, with a little trouble. In the summer of 1801 Coleridge encountered an old Göttingen friend. The story of the meeting is too good to omit.- -"It happened that my friend and I,"-writes Dr. Carlyon (i. 101),—“ were on a rambling visit at Keswick, in the summer of 1801, during the time that Coleridge resided there with his family. He came to dine with us at the inn on a Sunday afternoon, and expressed his disapprobation very strongly of a breach of the Sabbath, which we had that day committed, in spending the forenoon in perch-fishing, from a boat, on the lake of Derwentwater. It was my first and last offence of this kind, and the stamp of Coleridge's disapprobation will never be effaced from my recollection. And yet I do not believe that he had been at church himself that day; or that he was, at any time, much in the habit of going to church." In August, 1801, Southey appeared at Keswick. He was on his way to Ireland. He had been appointed private secretary to the Chancellor of the Exchequer for Ireland. He remained but little time there. In October he is at Keswick again, to take away his wife, whom he had left with her sister. They proceeded to London, whither his new duties called him. Coleridge and Wordsworth, in these days, are constantly walking between Keswick and Grasmere. In November Coleridge is in London. He was still, intermittently, engaged on the Morning Post. In April, 1802, was written Dejection: an Ode. We may see it is autobiographical. How sad it is to read of "A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear, July 26, 1802, we read with pleasure, in the Estlin Letters,-"I am at present in better health than I have been, though by no means strong or well-and at home all is Peace and Love." The italics are Coleridge's own. In the August following, Lamb and his sister spent three weeks at Keswick. The grand leaguer of the mountains round the little town, with banners of sunset aflame, overwhelmed Lamb's fancy on arrival, putting to the blush his streets and footlights. "Coleridge had got," he writes, "a blazing fire in his study: ' which is a large, antique, ill-shaped room, with an oldfashioned organ,2 never played upon, big enough for a church, shelves of scattered folios, an Eolian harp, and an old sofa, half bed." We often hear of this harp. In the poem quoted above we find it, and find it sympathetic : "What a scream Of agony by torture lengthen'd out It existed, we know, at Clevedon. fire" in August! "A blazing On Oct. 4,—the date also of Coleridge's marriage, -Wordsworth married. During the closing months of 1802, Coleridge made a tour in Wales with Thomas Wedgwood. Thomas Wedgwood was ailing, and needed distraction, and the tour was made at his request. Cole 1 Study.] "My study commands the finest view in England," says Southey, Dec. 1803. This is not Coleridge's study," the organ room," but the best room in the house. It is the corner room, in the frontispiece to our second volume, with a three-fold window, with arch above, on one side of Greta Hall, and two smaller windows to the front. 2 Organ.] This organ was the landlord's, who had also a good library. "I ridge had promptly and loyally acceded to it. have resolved," he writes, Nov. 3, 1802, "not to look the children in the face (the parting from whom is the downright bitter in the thing), but to go to London by to-morrow's mail." He returned to Keswick, if we may trust his daughter,' on Dec. 23. She herself was born 2 on the 22nd. Her mother entered her birth in the Bible Cottle gave them in 1795. In the early months of 1803 Coleridge is everywhere but at home. We find him at Gunville (an estate of T. Wedgwood's in Dorset), in London, at Stowey with Poole, at Bristol with Southey. He In the summer Sir George Beaumont, of Coleorton Hall, in Leicestershire, the mutual friend of the two poets, is "residing," as Wordsworth puts it, "in lodgings with" Coleridge at Greta Hall. purchased a little plot of land near Keswick, and presented it to Wordsworth, to induce him to build a house on it, and become a nearer neighbour. "The severe necessities" of Coleridge's "domestic situation"-Wordsworth would seem to mean his 1 Daughter.] Memoir, &c., v. i., p. 3. 2 Born.] She was one of the three Graces of Wordsworth's poem, The Triad. The other two, Dora Wordsworth and Edith Southey, were born in 1804, when Coleridge was in Italy. 3 Coleorton.] Sir George was also of Dunmow Manor House, Essex, and Haverhill Manor House, Suffolk. 4 Lodgings.] This is doubtless explained by the fact that Sir George was a painter, as ancestors of his had been poets. Coleridge pays a tribute to him in a fragment appended to the Second Act of Remorse. Beaumont, the dramatist, was born at Grace Dieu, which belonged to one branch of the Beaumonts in his day, and adjoined Coleorton. See several inscriptions which Wordsworth wrote for the grounds at Coleorton, laid out by his friend. |