sate together in silence by the roadside.' The friends were not to meet again until the middle of October, Wordsworth's marriage1 taking place in the meantime.

Reverting to the beginning of May, we find Coleridge answering a friendly letter from Poole.2 It is only a month since the Dejection ode, but he is in better health and spirits, promising that by the end of the year he will have disburthened himself of all metaphysics, and that the next year will be devoted to a long poem! His small poems are about to be published as a second volume,3 but he will not write many more of that order. He has had an offer from a bookseller to travel on the Continent, for book-making purposes, but has declined on account of his ignorance of French, and that, in spite of many temptations to acceptance- household infelicity,' for one. He sees by the papers that a portrait of him is in the Exhibition, and supposes it must be Hazlitt's. Mine is not a picturesque face. Southey's was made for a picture.' The sheet is filled up with a transcript of Wordsworth's latest compositions -The Butterfly and The Sparrow's Nest-and an intimation that on the 4th April last he had written to Poole a letter in verse, but thinking it'dull and doleful,' had not sent it. He meant, no doubt, a transcript of the ode Dejection. Soon after this, Poole went on his travels in France and Switzerland, and did not return until December. From a letter of Southey we gather that in August Coleridge was full of projects, and in September-November he sent a few miscellaneous contributions to the Morning Post.4 August was cheered by an unexpected visit from Charles and Mary Lamb-unexpected, because time, as Lamb tells Manning, did not admit of notice. Coleridge received us with all hospitality in the world, and gave up his time to show us all the wonders of his country. . . . .Here we stayed three full weeks, in which time I visited Wordsworth's cottage, where we stayed a day or two with the Clarksons . . . and saw Lloyd. The Wordsworths were gone to Calais.' The greater part of the months of November and December were spent in a tour in South Wales with Thomas and Miss Sarah Wedgwood, the tour being followed by visits at country-houses of the Wedgwoods and their connections. Coleridge seems to have made himself very popular, and the tour was a great success, but T. Wedgwood was a dangerous companion, for he was an amateur in narcotics, and just then in hot pursuit of Bang-the Nepenthe of the Ancients,' as Coleridge, who helped to procure a supply, delighted to remember.

On December 24 Coleridge and Wedgwood called at Dove Cottage on their way to Greta Hall, when Coleridge learnt from the Wordsworths that a daughter had

* R. S. to S. T. C., August 4, 1802:-'As to your essays, etc. etc., you spawn plans like a herring; I only wish as many of the seed were to vivify in proportion. . . . Your essay on Contemporaries I am not much afraid of the imprudence of, because I have no expectation that they will ever be written; but if you were to write, the scheme projected on the old poets would be a better scheme' (Life and Correspondence of R. S. ii. 190).

1 October 4, 1802. Dejection: an Ode was printed in the Morning Post on that day, a sad enough Epithalamium. See Lamb's letter to Coleridge, October 9, 1802, (Ainger's ed. i. 185), and 'Note 162,' p. 626.

2 T. Poole and his Friends, ii. 79.

3 Nothing came of this.

4 Including the comparison between Imperial Rome and France; 'Once a Jacobin, always a Jacobin'; the letters to Fox; the account of The Beauty of Buttermere, whose story fills so large a space in De Quincey's article on Coleridge (Vorks, 1863, ii. 81); and the Ode to the Rain (p. 168). The last recorded contribution to the M.P. is dated November 5, 1802. See Essays on his own Times.

5 Letter of September 24, 1802 (Ainger's ed. i. 181). See also 'Note 163,' p. 628, post. 6 A Group of Englishmen, pp. 159-166; also

p. 208.

7 Ib. p. 215; Paris's Life of Davy, i. 173; and Cottle's Reminiscences, pp. 459 and 464.

been born to him that morning.1 The Grasmere Journals, unfortunately, are printed only as far as January II, on which day Coleridge is reported as 'poorly, in bad spirits.' He was still anxious to go abroad; so was Tom Wedgwood, and with Coleridge; but the latter was unwilling, though he did not like to refuse outright, and until February he professed to be at Wedgwood's call.2

*

On January 9th he describes graphically a foolish adventure in a storm in Kirkstone Pass, which resulted in his feeling unwell all over.' He took no laudanum or opium,' but ether (Scylla and Charybdis), and recovered at once. Only temporarily, however, for on the 14th a relapse is described, from which he had recovered (again an exception which proves the rule) without any craving after exhilarants and narcotics.' But eleven days later, existence at Greta Hall having again become intolerable, Coleridge is at Cote House, ready, professedly, to go anywhere with Tom Wedgwood 4-Arcades ambo. But the other Arcadian was in low spirits, and undecided, and by February 4 Coleridge was with Poole, after having spent a few days at Bristol with Southey, who found Coleridge a poor fellow, who suffers terribly from this climate.' At Stowey, Coleridge's health improved, but not, he thinks, sufficiently to permit of his accompanying Wedgwood in his travels. 6 He must go south alone, and accordingly, in March, his friend crossed the Channel with a hired companion. Coleridge's mythical History of Metaphysics' is still dangled before his friend's eyes. 'I confine myself to facts in every part of the work, excepting that which treats of Mr. Hume: him I have assuredly besprinkled copiously from the fountains of Bitterness and Contempt.' After a visit to Gunville (Josiah Wedgwood's country house), Coleridge returned to Keswick, vid London. Davy gives a sad account of him. During his stay in town I saw him seldomer than usual; . . . generally in the midst of large companies, where he is the image of power and activity. His eloquence is unimpaired; perhaps it is softer and stronger. His will is probably less than ever commensurate with his ability. Brilliant images of greatness float upon his mind . . . agitated by every breeze, and modified by every sunbeam. He talked, in the course of one hour, of beginning three works, and he recited the poem of Christabel, unfinished, as I had before heard it.'

During this visit it was arranged that Lamb should see a reprint of Coleridge's poems (1796 and 1797) through the press, and the volume was published in the

* One of Coleridge's finest letters: 'I never find myself alone, within the embracement of rocks and hills, . . . but my spirit careers, drives, and eddies, like a leaf in autumn; a wild activity of thoughts, imaginations, feelings, and impulses of motion rises up within me. . . . The further I ascend from animated nature . . . the greater in me becomes the intensity of the feeling of life. Life seems to me then an universal spirit, that neither has nor can have an opposite! God is everywhere, and where is there room for death?' and he asserts that he does not think 'it possible that any bodily pain could eat out the love of joy, that is so substantially part of me, towards hills, and rocks, and steep waters; and he has had some trial.' This is an immense recovery from the Dejection of nine months before (Cottle's Rem. p. 454).

1 Miss Wordsworth's Journals (Knight's Life of W. W. i. 359).

2 Letters of January 9 and 14, 1803, in Cottle's Rem. pp. 450, 454.

3 Unprinted letter to T. Poole, Feb. 2, 1803. 4 Cottle's Rem. pp. 458-461.

5 Life and Corr. of R. S. ii. 201. In a letter of February 6, 1803, he writes to W. Taylor: 'I am grieved that you never met Coleridge: all other men whom I have ever known are mere children to him, and yet he is palsied by a total want of moral strength' (Mem. of W. T. i. 455).

6 Cottle's Rem. p. 459.

7 Letter to Purkis, Stowey, February 17, 1803, in Paris's Life of Davy, i. 173.

8 Letter to Poole, May 1, 1803, ib. i. 176.

summer.1 At the beginning of June, Coleridge informs Godwin 2 that his health is 'certainly better than at any former period of the disease,' and asks him to find a publisher for a work of six hundred pages octavo, the half of which can be ready for the printer at a fortnight's notice. I entitle it "Organum verè Organum, or an Instrument of Practical Reasoning in the Business of Real Life"; to which will be prefixed (1) a familiar introduction to the common system of Logic, namely, that of Aristotle and the Schools; (2) . . .' and so on for a page of close print. When this work is fairly off his hands—more and more metaphysics to follow; not a word of the poetry, with the promise of which he pleased Poole. (Meantime, as a little relaxation, if Godwin will find a publisher for Hazlitt's abridgment of Search's-Tucker's -'Light of Nature pursued,' Coleridge will write a preface and see the sheets through the press.) I suppose Godwin knew as well as Coleridge that this newer Organum had not and never would pass beyond the stage of synopsis, and acted accordingly.

.

In

At Greta Hall, Coleridge seems to have remained with his mind strangely shut up 3 until Sunday the 14th August, when in company with William and Dorothy Wordsworth he set out on a Scotch tour.* Incidentally we learn that an Irish jaunting-car, drawn by a jibbing old screw, carried the party (when the road happened to be level or not very steep on either grade), and that poor Coleridge did not enjoy the bumping so much as his robuster companions enjoyed the scenery. a fortnight, on the day after the meeting with that 'sweet Highland girl, ripening in perfect innocence,' by the Inversnaid ferry-house, Coleridge parted from his friends, professing to be very unwell, and unable to face the wet in an open carriage. He sent on his trunk to Edinburgh, and would follow it.4 On arriving at Tyndrum,5 a week later, the Wordsworths were astonished to learn that Coleridge, 'whom we had supposed was gone to Edinburgh, had dined at this very house. on his road to Fort-William . . . on the day after we parted from him'-but the kindly Dorothy has no word of reproach for her errant friend. I suppose Coleridge had found the close companionship incompatible with that free indulgence in narcotics which had become to him a necessity of pleasurable or even tolerable existence. In his solitude, as he told Beaumont and Poole, he walked to Glencoe, on to Cullen (between Fochabers and Banff), back to Inverness, and thence over the moorland, by Tummel Bridge to Perth,-doing 263 miles in eight days, in the hope of forcing the disease into the extremities. . . . While I am in possession of my will and my reason, I can keep the fiend at arm's-length; but with the night my horrors commence. During the whole of my journey, three nights out of four, I have fallen asleep struggling and resolving to lie awake, and awaking have blest the scream which delivered me from the reluctant sleep.' At Perth, Coleridge received a summons to greet the Southeys who had arrived at Greta Hall on the visit which ended only with their lives. Taking coach via Edinburgh, he reached home on the 15th

* See Recollections of a Tour made in Scotland, A.D. 1803, by Dorothy Wordsworth. Edited by J. C. Shairp. 1874. A charming book. Coleridge's partial account is printed in Memorials of Coleorton, 1887, i. 6-8; and Wordsworth's, i. 35.

† See The Pains of Sleep, p. 170, and the 'Note' thereto, p. 631; see also the other very interesting letters of this period addressed to Sir G. Beaumont in Coleorton Letters, vol. i.

1 See Lamb's letter to Coleridge of March 20,

1803; and APPENDIX K,' p. 545.

2 Letter to Godwin, June 4, 1803, in William Godwin, ii. 92.

3 Letter to T. Wedgwood, September 16, 1803, in Cottle's Rem. p. 466: 'For five months past my mind has been strangely shut up.'

4 Tour, p. 117.

5 lb. p. 184.

6 See 'Epigram 53,' p. 450, and 'Note' thereto, p. 653.

September. A week later he informs Beaumont that he is doing translations from his (Beaumont's) drawings, and will go on and make a volume of them. None of these translations' have been traced. On October I he writes of the continuance of the night-horrors, and fears that a change of climate is his only medicine. He sends, too, a copy of the Chamouni poem.1 The kind Beaumont, having a most ardent desire to bring Wordsworth and Coleridge together, purchased at this time a small property at Applethwaite, a mile or two west of Greta Hall, . . . and presented it to Wordsworth, whom, as yet, he had not seen'; 2 but the 'severe necessities' which soon drove Coleridge from the neighbourhood prevented further action.3 At the end of November 4 Southey describes Coleridge as 'quacking himself for complaints that would tease anybody into quackery': he has made up his mind to go to Malta immediately.

*

A fortnight later Coleridge is going to Devonshire,'-anywhere, apparently, away from Greta Hall. Poole was at this time temporarily established at a lodging in Abingdon Street, Westminster, and on the 20th December, Coleridge started for London that he might consult him. But on the way he went to Dove Cottage, where he fell ill. By the middle of January he had been, by the tender care of Mrs. and Miss Wordsworth, nursed into sufficient wellness to permit of his continuing his journey, and after spending a week at Liverpool he arrived at Poole's lodging about the 23rd. He did not, however, remain long at Abingdon Street; before the 18th February, he took up his quarters with Tobin in Barnard's Inn, and remained there until he left England for Malta. In February, he paid a short visit to the Beaumonts at Dunmow, their place in Essex. He saw much of Davy, then the spoilt child of society, of Sotheby, of Godwin, of John Rickman-Lamb's 'pleasant hand'-and, above all, of Lamb himself. And he was not idle, for, though Mrs. H. N. Coleridge has failed to trace any contributions of that period, during part of his stay he was at the Courier office from nine till four.5 He saw Mackintosh, who was about to go to Bombay, and who offered to take Coleridge with him, and provide him with a place. Judging from a letter to Poole (Jan. 26, 1804), Coleridge treated the offer with amused scorn. He met George Burnett-ci-devant Pantisocrat, and the only one who had taken the craze seriously enough to be seriously affected by its abandonment. He had become almost a waif, and Coleridge tells Rickman with the prettiest air of sympathetic innocence, that George's eyes look like those of an opium-chewer,' though he hopes to Heaven he may be mistaken. There were schemes, too, for publishing great works. One of them was to be entitled Consolations and Comforts from the exercise and right application of the Reason, the Imagination, and the Moral Feelings, addressed especially to those in

this arose from Coleridge's domestic situation' ('Fenwick-note' to the sonnet).

4 R. S. to Miss Barker, November 27, 1803, in Letters of R. S. i. 253, where it is misdated '1804.'

5 So he tells Rickman in a letter of Feb. 25. All the references to Rickman here, and some of the facts are taken from unpublished correspondence. In one letter Coleridge seems to allude to writings in the Courier: 'As soon as my Volunteer Essays and whatever of a Vindicia Addingstonianæ I can effect by simple attack on the antagonists of the Ministers are published, they shall be sent to you without fail.'

Sickness, Adversity, or Distress of Mind, from Speculative Gloom, etc.' 1-materials for which, as he believed, had occupied his mind for months past. But with all these projects and other distractions, Coleridge was steadily looking out for a ship to carry him to Malta. Malta, however, was then looked on merely as the most convenient stepping-stone for Sicily, Catania being the desired haven. Rickman's aid was sought, and it was he who, some time before March 5, found him a vessel, the Speedwell,' to sail with a convoy at some uncertain but not distant date. Almost the last thing Coleridge did before leaving England was to sit for his portrait to Northcote.2 On the 27th March he went to Portsmouth,3 but it was the 9th April ere the winds permitted the 'Speedwell' and her companions to set sail. She carried, besides Coleridge and his fortunes, two other passengers, whom he describes respectively as a liverless half-pay lieutenant, and an unconscionably fat woman who would have wanted elbow-room on Salisbury Plain.' The ways and means for carrying out this expedition, seem to have been provided by a loan of £100 from Wordsworth, and a gift of the same amount from Sir George Beaumont; Mrs. Coleridge being left free of debt, and with the whole of the Wedgwood annuity of £150. Out of the annuity had to come £20 for Mrs. Fricker, and taxes amounting to about £15.

VIII. MALTA

Gibraltar was reached in ten days, and Coleridge greatly enjoyed the short stay on shore. On April 25th, the convoy set sail again, but so baffling were the winds, that it was the 18th May when the 'Speedwell' reached Valetta harbour. The passage from England had been to Coleridge a time of much activity of mind, but also of much home-sick brooding, and the want of exercise had told unfavourably on his health. 5 His first letter was to his wife, and was dated from Dr. Stoddart's, G June 5, 1804,' no carlier opportunity of despatching letters having occurred. There was a pleased flutter in the kindly coterie over the news of the forlorn wanderer,' as Mary Lamb styled Coleridge in thanking her constant correspondent, Miss Stoddart, for the tidings, and for the kindness extended to him. But he did not for long remain the guest of Stoddart, mention of whom became so rare in the poet's letters to Lamb, that Mary felt suspicious, and asked, "Did your brother and Col. argue long arguements, till between the two great arguers there grew a little coolness?' Before the 6th July he had become the honoured guest, and in some measure the private secretary, of the Governor (his official title was Civil Commissioner), Vice-Admiral Sir Alexander John Ball, who had been one of Nelson's captains, and to whom Coleridge had carried letters of recommendation. 'Sir A. Ball is, indeed, in every

1 I take this from an unpublished letter to Poole, but there is a shorter title and a fuller account of the 'book' in a letter to Beaumont. In the same letter Coleridge gives a prospectus of another great work to follow, and states, that while at present he is giving only a quarter of his time to poetry, one half shall be devoted to it as soon as 'Consolations' is off his hands (Mem. of Coleorton, i. 44-48).

2 Letter to Davy, March 25, 1804 (Frag. Rem. p. 95).

3 See T. Poole and his Friends, ii. 138; Frag. Rem. p. 95; and Letters from the Lake Poets,

p. 27; for Coleridge's farewell letters.

4 Letters of Jan. 30 and Feb 1, 1804, in Mem. of Coleorton, i. pp. 41, 43.

5 Other details of the passage, and of his impression of Gibraltar, are given to Stuart in a letter of April 21, 1804, printed in Letters from the Lake Poets, pp. 33-41.

6 Stoddart was then not, as is commonly stated, Chief Justice of Malta, but King's Advocate (Attorney-General), and he enjoyed besides good private practice in the Vice-Admiralty Court. He became Chief Justice, but many years later.