"This will never do," wrote one of them; but he was wrong. "It did do;" for people were tired of artificiality, and were glad to return to nature and simplicity. Besides, Wordsworth did not keep to the language of everyday life. He was unable to do so his grand thoughts carried him away, and expressed themselves in grand and beautiful language. So that it is only in a few of his earlier poems that we find the language so commonplace as to be almost ridiculous. 16. When he was attacked by the critics, Wordsworth found a warm defender in his friend Coleridge, who perhaps understood Wordsworth better than that poet understood himself. Coleridge did not try to prove that Wordsworth's poetry was without faults. He thought him wrong on many points: for instance, in thinking that the words of everyday life were fit for poetry. But at the same time he showed how truly great he was; how pure his language was, how fresh his thought and fancy, how unfailing his truth, and how noble his purpose. Since Coleridge's death, Wordsworth has found many critics and readers ready to give him the high place in our literature which he deserves. CHAPTER XXVI. WORDSWORTH'S FRIENDS. 1. While Wordsworth was going to school at Hawkshead, and in his playtime was learning great lessons from the mountains and lakes in the north of England, away down in the far south, in Devonshire, a little boy was living in a world of books and day-dreams. That boy was SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. His father was a vicar, not very rich, and with a large family. By-and-by the boy went to London to Christ's Hospital; and one day, when wandering in the streets, he met a stranger, who began to talk to the dreamy-looking youth, and finding out his love for books, got him admission to a circulating library. Nothing could have pleased the boy better, and he read through the whole catalogue-poetry, stories, history, philosophy, every thing so that at fourteen his knowledge would have puzzled a wise man; and yet he was ignorant of most things that schoolboys learn. 2. The boy had no ambition, and when the time had come for him to leave school, he was about to apprentice himself to a shoemaker. But the head-master interfered, and made Coleridge work for a scholarship, which took him to Cambridge. In his first year he gained a gold medal for a Greek poem; but in the next two years he lost his scholarship, and got into debt, and also into trouble for taking the side of the French Revolutionists. Suddenly he disappeared from college, and could nowhere be found. 3. One day in London the colonel of a regiment of dragoons. was inspecting some recruits. Turning to a dreamy-looking lad, he asked, "What's your name, sir?"- Comberbach," was the answer.— "What do you come here for?"-"Sir, for what most other persons come, to be made a soldier.""Do you think," said the colonel, "you could run a Frenchman through the body?"-"I do not know," replied the recruit, "as I have never tried; but I'll let a Frenchman run me through the body before I'll run away.' "That will do," replied the colonel, and دو the recruit was enlisted. About four months afterwards, the captain of his company noticed some Latin words written under Comberbach's saddle, and wondering how one who knew Latin should come to be a common soldier, he made inquiry, and discovered that the new recruit was no other than our friend Coleridge, who had enlisted under a name which he had seen over a baker's shop. He had made a bad dragoon, but had been very useful to his comrades by writing their letters, while they in return groomed his horse and kept his uniform in order. So he was discharged. He had written some poetry, which he now published under the title of Juvenile Verses. 4. In the same year (1794), while at Oxford, he met the poet Southey, and the two young men became great friends. They and some others, young and hopeful like themselves, formed a scheme for emigrating to America, and forming a society in which all were to be equal, all were to work, and no one was any to be unhappy. All were to be married: the wives were to cook and do the housework; the husbands were to spend their leisure time in reading and in writing poetry. Those were grand castles in the air; but they came to nothing, for the only step of them ever took was to marry. Three of them—Coleridge, Southey, and another poet who died very soon-married three sisters. The wives, like the husbands, had youth and hope, but no money. Coleridge started a newspaper, which failed. He then went with his young wife to live at the foot of the Somersetshire hills, and though poor, they seem to have been happy. 5. In their quiet cottage, while his young wife sat sewing or rocking her baby to sleep, Coleridge wrote some of his best poetry-his Ode on the Departing Year, the first part of a long poem called Christabel, The Ancient Mariner, and a tragedy called Remorse. He had also made acquaintance with his poetneighbour Wordsworth, and the two poets became great friends. They went together to Germany, where Coleridge lived for more than a year, reading German poetry and philosophy as eagerly as he had read English books when a school-boy. On his return to England, he went to live with his friend Southey at Keswick; and so the two sisters were together, while Wordsworth and his sister were not too far off to be visited and to visit them. 6. For a time Coleridge seems never to have thought it his duty to work for himself or his wife and children, but left all that to Southey, who was a very hard-working man. At last he got some work to do for a newspaper called the Morning Post; and a little later he went to Malta as secretary to the English governor there. But he soon grew tired of regular work, so in less than a year, after a journey in Italy, he came back to England. There he wrote and lectured by fits and starts. He was naturally dreamy and lazy; but he had also taken to eating opium, which made him still dreamier and more irregular in his work. So he never really did as much work as he might have done, but went dreaming through life, letting his friends provide for him and his family. 7. He went again to live with Southey at Grasmere, and started a new paper called The Friend. But sometimes he wrote well and sometimes badly, and as people did not know what to expect, they ceased to buy the paper. Then Lord Byron persuaded Coleridge to publish the "wild and wondrous tale" of Christabel, which had been begun soon after his marriage. The second part had been written after his return from Germany; but the poem, like much that Coleridge began to do, was never finished. He wrote dramas and a number of very fine prose works-political pamphlets, sermons, and criticisms. He planned a poem which was to be as grand as Milton's Paradise Lost; but he did no more than plan it, and talk about it with his friends. 8. Time passed on, and Coleridge wrote less and less, and talked more and more, living in the house of his friend Mr. Gillman, a surgeon in Highgate, London, for the last nineteen years of his life, while his wife and children lived on at Keswick with Southey. Many came to listen to the grand talker, just as they had come to hear Dr. Johnson; and perhaps many learned their most useful lessons from him, afterwards giving to the world in their own works the wisdom Coleridge was too dreamy or too indolent to put on paper. At the age of sixty-two, Coleridge died in Mr. Gillman's house. This is the epitaph which he wrote for himself the winter before he died :— 66 'Stop, Christian passer-by! Stop, child of God! Oh, lift a thought in prayer for S. T. C. ! That he, who many a year, with toil of breath, Found death in life, may here find life in death! He asked and hoped through Christ-do thou the same. 9. All Coleridge's best poetry was written when he was still a young man living in Somersetshire. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a wonderful story beautifully told. The story itself is borrowed, but the dreamy grace and delicacy with which it is told are Coleridge's own. The story of the mariner, with his long gray beard and glittering eye, fascinates us so that we must read on, and learn how the killing of the albatross was revenged, and how the curse was broken only when the mariner's heart was softened by suffering, and he blessed the water-snakes. The moral of the story is, that only he who loves "all things, both great and small," is like the great God whose name is love, "who made and loveth all." To find anything at all like The Ancient Mariner, so wild, and weird, and wonderful, we must go to the German ballads which Coleridge loved so much. We have nothing else quite like it in our English language. 10. Coleridge's long poem Christabel is the story of how a witch called Geraldine bewitches the sweet maid Christabel, the daughter of a rich baron named Sir Leoline. Christabel goes out into the wood to pray for her lover, a young knight about whom she has had a bad dream. While she kneels beneath the oak-tree where she used to meet him, she hears a moan, and stealing to the other side of the oak "There she sees a damsel bright Drest in a silken robe of white, That shadowy in the moonlight shone: 11. This beautiful lady, whose name is Geraldine, tells a pitiful tale of how she had been carried off by some horsemen from her father's hall, and left in a trance beneath the oak-tree. Full of pity, gentle Christabel takes the lady home, and shares her bed with her. While Christabel is asleep the spell of the witch seizes her, and she has terrible dreams. Next morning Sir Leoline discovers that Geraldine is the daughter of Sir Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine, once his dearest friend, but now his bitterest foe. "Alas! they had been friends in youth, And life is thorny; and youth is vain; Doth work like madness on the brain." |