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XV. COLERIDGE AND HIS CHILDREN

I would fain leave the narrative to work its own impression on the mind of the reader. If its somewhat fuller and more orderly presentment of what I honestly believe to be the truth, be not found to tend, on the whole, to raise Coleridge in the eyes of men, I shall, I confess, feel both surprised and disappointed. It is neither by glossing over his failings, nor by fixing an exclusive eye on them, that a true estimate of any man is to be arrived at. A better way is to collect as many facts as we can, set them in the light of the circumstances in which they were born, sort them fairly into the opposing scales, and weigh them in an atmosphere as free as possible from cant and prejudice. To my own mind it seems that Coleridge's failings are too obvious to require either all the insistence or all the moralising which have been lavished on them; and that his fall is less wonderful than his recovery. His will was congenitally weak, and his habits weakened it still farther; but his conscience, which was never allowed to sleep, tortured him; and, after many days, its workings stimulated the paralysed will, and he was saved.

A brief dawn of unsurpassed promise and achievement; 'a trouble' as of 'clouds and weeping rain'; then, a long summer evening's work done by the setting sun's pathetic light-such was Coleridge's day, the after-glow of which is still in the sky. I am sure that the temple, with all the rubble which combined with its marble, must have been a grander whole than any we are able to reconstruct for ourselves from the stones which lie about the field. The living Coleridge was ever his own apology— men and women who neither shared nor ignored his shortcomings, not only loved him, but honoured and followed him. This power of attraction, which might almost be called universal, so diverse were the minds and natures attracted, is itself conclusive proof of very rare qualities. We may read and re-read his life, but we cannot know him as the Lambs, or the Wordsworths, or Poole, or Hookham Frere, or the Gillmans, or Green knew him. Hatred as well as love may be blind, but friendship has eyes, and their testimony may wisely be used in correcting our own impressions.

Coleridge left three children. Hartley, his eldest born, was also a poet and a man of letters. Not a few of his sonnets have taken a place in permanent literature, and as a critic and essayist he is remarkable for lucidity of style, and balance of thought and judgment. He was a gentle, simple, humble-minded man, but his life was marred and broken by intemperance. He lies, in death as in life, close to the heart of Wordsworth, and his name still lingers in affectionate remembrance by those lakes and sandy shores' beside which he was, as his father had prophesied, to wander like a breeze.' The career of Derwent, both as to the conduct of life and its rewards, was in marked contrast to his brother's. His bent was to be a student, but he was forced into action, partly by circumstance, partly by an honourable ambition. During a long and useful life, more than twenty years of which were spent as Principal of St. Mark's College, Chelsea, he did signal service to the cause of national education. He cannot be said to have left his mark on literature, but his chief work, The Scriptural Character of the English Church, won the admiration of F. D. Maurice for its calm scholar-like tone and careful English style.' He was appointed a Prebendary of St. Paul's in 1846, and Rector of Hanwell in 1863. The leisure of his later years was devoted to linguistic and philological studies, in which his attainments were remarkable. At rare intervals, to the inner circle

of his friends, he would talk by the hour, and though in these conversational monologues' he resembled rather than approached his father, he delivered himself with a luminous wisdom all his own. He edited the works of his father, his brother, and of his two friends, Winthrop Mackworth Praed and John Moultrie. Of his sister Sara, it has been said that her father looked down into her eyes, and left in them the light of his own.' Her beauty and grace were as remarkable as her talents, her learning, and her accomplishments; but her chief characteristic was 'the radiant spirituality of her intellectual and imaginative being.' This, with other rare qualities of mind and spirit, is indicated in Wordsworth's affectionate appreciation in The Triad, and conspicuous in her fairy-tale Phantasmion, and in the letters which compose the bulk of her Memoirs.

POEMS

GENEVIEVE

MAID of my Love, sweet Genevieve!
In Beauty's light you glide along :
Your eye is like the star of eve,
And sweet your voice as seraph's song.
Yet not your heavenly beauty gives
This heart with passion soft to glow :
Within your soul a voice there lives!
It bids you hear the tale of woe.
When sinking low the sufferer wan
Beholds no hand outstretcht to save,
Fair, as the bosom of the swan
That rises graceful o'er the wave,
I've seen your breast with pity heave,
And therefore love I you, sweet Gene-
vieve !

DURA NAVIS

1786.

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Shalt thou be at this hour from danger free?

Perhaps with fearful force some falling Wave

Shall wash thee in the wild tempestuous Sea,

And in some monster's belly fix thy grave;

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Or (woful hap!) against some waveworn rock

Which long a Terror to each Bark had stood

1 State, Grandeur.

This school exercise written in the 15th year of my age does not

contain a line that any clever schoolboy might

not have written, and like most school poetry is a Putting of Thought into Verse; for such Verses as strivings of mind and struggles after the Intense and Vivid are a fair Promise of better things.-S. T. C. ætat suæ 51. [1823.]

B

Shall dash thy mangled limbs with furious shock

Should'st thou escape the fury of that day A fate more cruel still, unhappy, view.

And stain its craggy sides with human Opposing winds may stop thy luckless

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Ah! see how each with frequent slaughter red,

Regardless of his dying fellows' cries

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breast:

O'er their fresh wounds with impious Though oft with Horror back I see thee

order tread!

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1 I well remember old Jemmy Bowyer, the 'plagosus Orbilius' of Christ's Hospital, but an admirable educer no less than Educator of the Intellect, bade me leave out as many epithets as would turn the whole into eight-syllable lines, and then ask myself if the exercise would not be greatly improved. How often have I thought of the proposal since then, and how many thousand bloated and puffing lines have I read, that, by this process, would have tripped over the tongue excellently. Likewise, I remember that he told me on the same occasion-' Coleridge! the connections of a Declamation are not the transitions of Poetry-bad, however, as they are they are better than "Apostrophes" and "O thou's," for at the worst they are something like common The others are the grimaces of Lunacy.' --S. T. COLERIDGE.

sense.

start

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Or who shall heal his wounded mind, If tortur'd by misfortune's smart? Who Hymeneal bliss will never prove,

But soon emerging in her radiant might She o'er the sorrow-clouded breast of Care

That more than friendship, friendship | Sails, like a meteor kindling in its flight.

mix'd with love.

1788.

II

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ANTHEM

FOR THE CHILDREN OF CHRIST'S
HOSPITAL

SERAPHS! around th' Eternal's seat
who throng

With tuneful ecstasies of praise : O teach our feeble tongues like yours the song

Of fervent gratitude to raise— Like you, inspired with holy flame To dwell on that Almighty name Who bade the child of woe no longer sigh, And Joy in tears o'erspread the widow's eye.

Th' all-gracious Parent hears the wretch's prayer;

The meek tear strongly pleads on high;

Wan Resignation struggling with despair

The Lord beholds with pitying eye; Sees cheerless Want unpitied pine, Disease on earth its head recline, And bids Compassion seek the realms of

woe

To heal the wounded, and to raise the low.

She comes! she comes! the meekeyed power I see

With liberal hand that loves to bless;

The clouds of sorrow at her presence

flee;

Rejoice! rejoice! ye children of distress!

The beams that play around her head Thro' Want's dark vale their radiance spread:

Now hid behind the dragon-winged The young uncultured mind imbibes the

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