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been greeted, it may fairly be said that this was not the lowest ideal in which both or either of them indulged. The coup de grâce to this speculation came when, in the autumn of 1795, Coleridge married Miss Sarah Fricker, of Bristol; Southey on the same day espoused one of her sisters, and Mr. Lovel, a utopian versifier of their acquaintance, wedded another. With these interests and responsibilities, pantisocracy dissolved its dream-woven fabric, and became a thing to smile and wonder over.

Coleridge remained as yet an ardent lover of liberty, and in many respects a devotee of the principles contended for in the French Revolution-that epoch of glorious hopes, and of great achievements too, which the progress of material well-being and of unheroic common-sense had been making somewhat too dim to us of the waning nineteenth century. The earliest published poem by Coleridge was the drama named The Fall of Robespierre—a statesman who was a mere political "bogy” in those days, and one whom an English reader of the newspapers could hardly help supposing much inferior to the patriotic but declamatory band of Girondins whom he had overthrown. Jubilation over the downfall of the "sanguinary monster" was natural to a Coleridge, as well as to a Barras or a Coburg: less natural to the Muse of History after the lapse of three quarters of a century. The drama was published with the name of Coleridge alone as author, in the same year as the event, 1794 it appears, however, that the second and third acts are in fact the production of Southey. In the following year this first poetical was succeeded by its author's first prose work, Conciones ad Populum, in which also Southey had a hand. Coleridge was now living at Clevedon, near Bristol, and soon afterwards he took a cottage at Nether Stowey, at the foot of the Quantock Hills. Here he was close to a friend, Mr. Poole, who gave him substantial proofs of his kind feeling; and was also near Allfoxden, the residence of Wordsworth, with whom he about this time became acquainted. The two illustrious poets recognized each other's gifts and loftiness of mind, and have left em

phatic testimony of the fact; although the cordial friendliness of Coleridge towards Wordsworth was not without some interruption in later years.

In February 1796, the former started a paper of liberal views, named The Watchman, and made a tour through the northern manufacturing towns, to beat up subscribers. The Watchman had to discontinue, at the ninth serial appearance, his vigilance over the public weal. His recurrences were made with a lack of punctuality deplorable in so alert an official, and the opinions which he emitted were not exactly what his few and rapidly fewer subscribers had been expecting. The editor's attitude of mind towards public questions was shifting fast: and what began with a change of circumstance ended in a settled divergency--a change of opinion, and even of sentiment. Coleridge was still indeed anti-ministerial in British politics; but, after the French invasion of Switzerland, he became bitterly antiGallican and anti-Jacobin. Practically, with whatever qualifications and saving-clauses of intellectual continuity, the pantisocrat developed into a tory. It would be equally needless and unfair, at this distance of time, to denounce Coleridge as a turncoat, or ascribe his altered tone of mind to any moral obliquity; he never made toryism pay to any extent worth mentioning, as did Southey, his associate in zenith and nadir of opinion; nor did he, like that distintinguished panegyrist of Wat Tyler and of George the Third, exhibit the personal spites of a rancorous renegade. This change of political opinion in Coleridge was gradually, though more slowly, accompanied by a similar change of religious opinion. In his schoolboy days he had dallied. with scepticism, which the bully Bowyer chastised with the only available weapon in his armoury, the rod. He grew up, however, a sincere adherent to biblical faith, but a unitarian-or (as he himself says) a "psilanthropist," or believer in the merely natural manhood of Jesus. While living at Stowey, he frequently preached in the Unitarian chapel in the neighbouring town of Taunton, and attracted large congregations by his gifts of surpassing oratory and

ever-welling fluency-gifts by which we must always remember that he was distinguished among his contemporaries in a most peculiar degree, and fully as much as by the thought or beauty of his published writings, whether in poetry or in prose. But unitarianism was not to remain his spiritual tabernacle to the end. Towards the close of 1796, he engaged deeply and seriously in religious speculations; and, as time wore on, unitarianism became more and more barren and repulsive to him, and one final flash of conviction turned him into a trinitarian, not only sincere but impassioned in the faith. Thenceforth, without setting him-. self to speak in an uncharitable spirit of his opponents, Coleridge ceased to regard as any genuine Christianity at all that form of Christianity which is without belief in Christ as God. It is not altogether easy—not at any rate for those who approach the subject without holding the touchstone of the like form of faith-to enter into the workings of Coleridge's mind on this subject; to understand what it was that convinced him, or what was in fact the persuasion into which he was convinced, taken in its esoteric as well as its exoteric relations-for unquestionably the esoteric counted for a good deal. A memorandum written in February 1805 shows that he had been emerging from unitarianism seven or eight years earlier, and that the doctrine of the Trinity nad now at last "burst upon him at once as an awful truth :—No Christ, no God." He adds: “Oh that this conviction may work upon me and in me, and that my mind may be made up, as to the character of Jesus and of historical Christianity, as clearly as it is of the Logos, and intellectual or spiritual Christianity! that I may be made to know either their especial and peculiar union, or their absolute disunion in any peculiar sense!" The most obvious result of Coleridge's trinitarian conversion is a flood of eloquence and verbiage about "the Logos;" and perhaps its most persistently operative effect upon the reader is to make him glance rapidly over the page of prose to see whether that word appears upon it, and to turn the leaf decisively when he perceives that it does.

But I have been anticipating somewhat, and must revert to Coleridge's literary doings at Nether Stowey. He used for a while, with a view to ekeing out a subsistence, to write verses for money in a London journal; and in 1796 he published a volume, consisting mostly of his earlier poems, intermixed with others composed by Lamb. Of this volume a second edition appeared in 1797, with some added verses by Mr. Charles Lloyd. This year, 1797, was the great epoch of Coleridge's poetic fertility: the works by which he will be longest and always remembered were the production of a young man of twenty-five, a little less or a little more-a point which readers are apt to forget, and to relearn with surprise. Indeed, during the three years of his sojourn at Nether Stowey he composed most of his leading poems, though published at a later date. The Ancient Mariner was the work of 1797; also the first part of Christabel (the second part belongs to 1800), and the drama of Remorse, termed in the first instance Osorio. Zapolya was a much later work, written between 1814 and 1816, and published in 1817: a hasty performance which received a fair share of popularity. The plan of the volume named Lyrical Ballads, so famous in the critical contests of that time, was now formed in consequence of conversations between Coleridge and Wordsworth; the Ancient Mariner appeared in this volume, published in 1798. "During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours," says Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria, "our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry -the power of exciting the sympathy of a reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination. The sudden charm which accidents of light and shade, which moonlight or sunset, diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining both these are the poetry of Nature. The thought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, the incidents and agents were to be,

in part at least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real; and real, in this sense, they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency. For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life; the characters and incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and its vicinity where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after them, or to notice them when they present themselves. In this idea originated the plan of the Lyrical Ballads; in which it was agreed that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic-yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith." A good deal more, bearing on the same matter, will be found in the preface written by Wordsworth to the Lyrical Ballads. The name of "Lake Poets" was applied to the two authors of this book, soon after its appearance, and also to Southey.

In 1798, the year of the publication of this celebrated joint volume, Coleridge, through the liberality of the distinguished china-manufacturers Josiah and Thomas Wedgewood, was enabled to visit Germany, with a view to deeper and completer educational studies. He sailed on the 16th of September, in company with Wordsworth, and the sister of that poet; and he remained abroad for rather more than a year, returning to London at the end of November 1799. At Göttingen he attended Blumenbach's lectures on physical and natural history; and studied, through the medium of notes made by a young German, Eichhorn's lectures on the New Testament. He also took lessons from Professor Tychsen in the Gothic of Ulphilas, and went through a complete course of German literature. With the later

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