Chapter XXII: Last Words About Our Celebrities 233 (3)

It is in his 'Seven Lamps of Architecture' that the pæan on Giotto's Campanile occurs, wherein he tells us how, as a boy, he despised it, and how since then he lived beside it many a day and looked upon it from his window 'by sunlight and moonlight, noting the bright, smooth, sunny surface and glowing jasper, those spiral shafts and fairy traceries, so white, so faint, so crystalline, that their slight shapes are hardly traced in darkness on the eastern sky, that serene height of mountain alabaster, coloured like a morning cloud, and chased like a sea-shell.' His minute observation of form and colour in mountain gloom and mountain glory, in rushing torrents, and in feathered songster, and his unrivalled powers of description, must be an inspiration to all right-minded artists, notwithstanding his unsparing and incisive criticisms in his 'Notes on Pictures.' His scientific knowledge, too, stood him in good stead. His words on mountain sculpture, with an illustration from the Aiguilles or needle-pointed Alpine peaks, too long for full quotation, may well be cited. 'Nature gives us in these mountains a clear demonstration of her will. She is here driven to make fracture the law of being. She cannot tuft the rock-edges with moss, or round them by water, or hide them with leaves and roots. She is bound to produce a form, admirable to human beings, by continual breaking away of substances. And behold--so soon as she is compelled to do this, she changes the law of fracture itself. "Growth," she seems to say, "is not essential to my work, nor concealment, nor softness; but curvature is; and if I must produce my forms by breaking, then the fracture shall be in curves. If, instead of dew and sunshine, the only instruments I am to use are the lightning and the frost, then the forked tongues and crystal wedges shall still work out my laws of tender line. Devastation instead of nurture may be the task of all my elements, and age after age may only prolong the renovated ruin; but the appointments of typical beauty which have been made over all creatures shall not therefore be abandoned, and the rocks shall be ruled in their perpetual perishing, by the same ordinances that direct the bending of the reed, and the blushing of the rose." The cloud, the currents of trickling water, an interior knot of quartz, help the work of shaping, and the dew "with a touch more tender than a child's finger--as silent and slight as the fall of a half-checked tear on a maiden's cheek" help to fix for ever the form of peak and precipice, and hew the leagues of lifted granite, into shapes that divide the earth and its kingdoms. Then the colouring of the mountains is not done only by the chemical constituents of their rocks, but by the jewellery of the flowers--the dark bell-gentian, the light blue star-gentian, the alpine rose, the highland heather, the many-hued blossom-masses, and the golden softness of deep, warm, amber-coloured mosses.'

It is not always easy to follow Ruskin's own canons of Art in his exaltation of Turner--as, for instance, in the article of 'Truth touched with Imagination'--in such a picture as Whitby. There the painter's cliffs are unnatural and impossible, reminding us more of a straight-cut pound of cheese than anything ever seen in Nature--specially at Whitby! We are tempted to praise Turner more for revealing Ruskin than Ruskin for discovering Turner! Thus, in describing Heysham, it is Ruskin who in 'Harbours of England' gives us the true and very graphic painting, and Turner a glorified and unrecognisable one. 'A simple, north-country village on the shore of Morecambe Bay, not in the common sense a picturesque village; there are no pretty bow-windows, or red roofs, or rocky steps of entrance to the rustic doors, or quaint gables; nothing but a single street of thatched and chiefly clay-built cottages ranged in a somewhat monotonous line, the roofs so green with moss that at first we hardly discern the houses from the fields and trees. The village street is closed at the end by a wooden gate, indicating the little traffic there is on the road through it, giving it the look of a large farmstead, in which a right of way lies through the yard.' The rutty roads, the decayed fencing--haystacks and pigstyes--the parsonage--the church--the craggy limestone rocks amid the brushwood, and the pleasant turf upon their brows, the gleams of shallow water on the sandy shore, the fisher-boat on the beach--all help us to see old Heysham rather through the eyes of the prose-poet than those of the painter he is lauding.

Opening other--excluding his more voluminous--books, 'Love's Meinie' or 'Proserpina' to wit--the one of birds and the other of flowers--what exquisite passages meet us on every page! What Ruskinite does not revel in such as those contrasting the flight of the eagle and the seagull with that of the swallow, or as that speaking of 'the beauty of the bird that lives with you in your own houses, and which purifies for you, from its insect pestilence, the air that you breathe. Thus the sweet domestic thing has done, for men, at least, these four thousand years. She has been their companion, not of the home merely, but of the hearth, and the threshold; companion only endeared by departure, and showing better her loving-kindness by her faithful return.' She is a type of the stranger, or the supplicant, herald of our summer, 'who glances through our days of gladness'--and he gives us much more of the same sweet poetry about her. Then there are sentences like that outburst of joy at the discovery of the blue asphodel in the fields beyond Monte Mario--'a spire two feet high, of more than two hundred stars, the stalks of them all deep blue as well as the flowers. Heaven send all honest people the gathering of the like, in Elysian fields, some day!'

Ruskin confessed ignorance of the writings of political economists, of which he had read none but Adam Smith's--twenty years before--and his continual travesty of them as though 'buying in the cheapest market and selling in the dearest'--labour included--was their sole message to the world, makes it difficult to quote from his more philosophical or social science works. It must be remembered that Smith had forestalled Ruskin in stating that wage-earners had a right to a living wage, and that others, like Jeremy Bentham, had forestalled him in the doctrine of the 'greatest good of the greatest number' underlying his own strictures on our land system.

In his usual contradictory way he sometimes tells us the sword must still be whetted to settle international disputes. At others he calls war the mother of all evils, and writes paragraphs worthy of Carlyle on the French and English villagers from their respective Drumdrudges, pitying the peasantry upon whom the losses and cruelties fall, and denouncing the squires who officer them and lead them to death. Women he calls upon to exercise their influence in favour of peace, because they can, if they will, put an end to all wars for ever. The idleness of the upper classes, and the seeking of outlets for their capital by financial speculators are, he says, its chief causes, and ill-accumulated moneys are spent on it. In all this an ever-increasing multitude of Christians agree with him, as well as in his denunciation of the inhumanity of mere mercenary commerce uncontrolled by consideration for others, and in his pleadings for purer and happier homes, equal opportunities of education, and the glory and grace of honest labour. When a man who has done much for the good of his fellows can write of Ruskin in the second phase of his literary career, 'to him I owe the guidance of my life, all its best impulses, and its worthiest efforts,' we may be sure his later books were really great, notwithstanding their blemishes.

JOHN RUSKIN'S HANDWRITING IN ADVANCED LIFE.]

By A. C. Lucchesi.]

VIEWS FROM GRETA HALL

'This Greta Hall is a house on a small eminence, a furlong from
Keswick, in the county of Cumberland. Yes, my dear Sir, here I am,
with Skiddaw at my back--on my right hand the Bassenthwaite Water,
with its majestic _case_ of mountains, all of simplest outline.
Looking slant, direct over the feather of this infamous pen, I see
the sun setting. My God! what a scene! Right before me is a great
_camp_ of single mountains--each in shape resembles a giant's
tent--and to the left, but closer to it far than the Bassenthwaite
Water to my right, is the Lake of Keswick, with its islands and
white sails, and glossy lights of evening,--crowned with green
meadows; but the three remaining sides are encircled by the most
fantastic mountains that ever earthquakes made in sport, as
fantastic as if Nature had laughed herself into the convulsion in
which they were made. Close behind me flows the Greta; I hear its
murmuring distinctly. Then it curves round, almost in a
semi-circle, and is now catching the purple lights of the scattered
clouds above it directly before me.'--_A letter of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge's._

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.

From a Painting by G. Dawe, R.A.]

VII

A GREAT LIFE MARRED

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

'This illustrious man, the largest and most spacious intellect, the
subtlest and most comprehensive, in my judgment, that has yet
existed among men.'--DE QUINCEY.

In him we have another of our intellectual giants, a many-sided man, a poet, a theologian, a politician, or, in Charles Lamb's well-known phrase, a logician, a metaphysician, a bard. He was a fortunate man in so far as he has attained literary immortality. He was a singularly unfortunate man in so far as his natural character was deficient in will-power, and lacking in that subtle but invaluable property known as common-sense. His story, once you begin it, holds you, like the story of his own 'long, lank, brown, and ancient Mariner's,' captive to the end, it is so full of pathetic romance.

Garrulous, kind-hearted old Bookseller Cottle, of Bristol, very minor poet himself, yet devoted to letters, and staunch friend in their utmost need to an afterwards famous band of young men, tells us how Robert Lovell, an inexperienced and sanguine Quaker, was carried away by a Socialistic colonization scheme to be tested on the banks of the Susquehannah--the community to be called a Pantisocracy--from which injustice, wrath, anger, clamour, and evil-speaking, were to be excluded, thereby setting an example of human perfectability. Four young men, Lovell said, had joined the movement, who were to embark at Bristol for the American colonies--Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from Cambridge with whom the idea was supposed to have originated, Robert Southey and George Burnett from Oxford, and himself. In due time he introduced his friends--Southey, 'tall, dignified, possessing great suavity of manners, an eye piercing, with a countenance full of genius, kindliness, and intelligence'; Burnett, son of a Somersetshire farmer, who soon vanished from sight--never, indeed, comes fairly into it; and Coleridge, with 'an eye, a brow, and a forehead indicative of commanding genius.' The last soon applied on behalf of the fraternity for a loan, not to pay for the emigrants' sea passage, but their lodgings bill! The good man lent £5, and afterwards advanced Coleridge £30, taking the value back in MSS. as he could secure them. Meanwhile, Coleridge lectured to small audiences on somewhat abstruse subjects for a Bristol population, and managed to fall in love with a sister of his friend Lovell's wife, a third of these Miss Frickers becoming engaged to and marrying Southey, though he had not the remotest prospect of supporting a family. Lecturing and literature had not paid, Pantisocracy had perished in the bud, and Coleridge had not in any other direction shown the least capacity for dealing with every-day affairs. His antecedents both proved, and had intensified, his want of sagacity.

Born in 1772, into the large family of a learned Devonshire clergyman, who was also Head Master of a Grammar School--'a gentle and kindly eccentric'--he lost his father when only nine years of age, and was sent to the Blue Coat School (Christ's Hospital) in London. Here Charles Lamb was his schoolfellow. He grew, ere he left it, to be a tall lad of striking presence, with long black hair. At nineteen he was sent to Cambridge University. From Cambridge--owing, it is now generally believed, to some disappointment in a love affair, though others will have it that it was owing to debts recklessly contracted--he went up to London with little money in his pocket, and enlisted as a private in a regiment of light cavalry, under the assumed name of Silas Titus Comberback. In this regiment he remained only four months, proving 'an execrable rider, a negligent groom of his horse, and generally a slack and slovenly trooper.' Here a Latin quotation scribbled on a whitewashed wall discovered him, and led to his discharge, a visit to Oxford and an introduction to Lovell and Southey, then students, made him a more decided Pantisocratist, then a Bristolian, a protégé of Cottle and Charles Lloyd, and a benedict. In 1795 he was married at St. Mary de Redcliffe Church, and the thriftless pair set up housekeeping forthwith in a rose-covered cottage at Clevedon, then a village on the shores of the Severn Sea, though now a fashionable watering-place. Little furniture, no cash, no income beyond a promise of a guinea and a half for every hundred lines of copy, whether in rhyme or blank verse, offered a poor matrimonial prospect. Two days after the wedding, however, Cottle sent him 'with the aid of the grocer, and the shoemaker, and the brewer, and the tin-man, and the glass-man, and the brazier,' all he required--and more. In this retreat Coleridge did some necessary bread-winning with his pen, but still more planning and projecting of great world-astonishing magazines. Combined with his fancy for projecting big schemes was an unconquerable habit of procrastination. 'His strongest intentions were but feebly supported after his first paroxysm of resolve.' Such a man was unlikely to launch a serial on the world successfully. He issued circulars of a paper to be called _The Watchman_, travelled through the Midlands into Lancashire and Yorkshire to obtain subscribers, and issued a few numbers, and then it collapsed. In his travels he made the acquaintance of Lloyd, afterwards of Ambleside, who found him in books, and made a home for him at Nether Stowey. Wordsworth was then at Alfoxden, a close adjoining village. It was during a walk taken by the two poets over the Quantock Hills that their joint volume 'Lyrical Ballads,' was conceived, and that the 'Ancient Mariner' was partly written. 'Christabel' is another product of this period of Coleridge's life, and what has been aptly called the dream-poem of 'Kubla-Khan.' It was also now that he avowed himself a Unitarian, and commenced to preach in the chapels of that sect. Travelling to Shropshire in this ministry he captivated young William Hazlitt by his extraordinary discourses in public and in private, who records how it seemed to him poetry and philosophy were met together in the preacher, truth and genius had embraced under the eye and sanction of religion. At this time, he adds, Coleridge's personal appearance was of one above the middle height, inclining to be corpulent, with hair still raven-black, forehead broad and high, light as if built of ivory, projecting brows, with rolling, bright eyes beneath them, and a mouth 'gross, voluptuous, open, eloquent.' His preaching, too, brought him into contact with the generous De Quincey, and with the two Wedgwoods, the eminent Staffordshire potters, who defrayed the expenses of himself and William and Dorothy Wordsworth to Germany, and granted Coleridge a pension to enable him to devote his life to literature. On their return, Coleridge went to London on the staff of the _Morning Post_, in the columns of which he did first-class work.

In 1800 he removed his family to Keswick. He came to that town in many respects a changed man. The torrents of revolutionary talk he indulged in during his undergraduate days had lapsed into ultra-Toryism under the reaction from the disappointed hopes excited by the upheaval in France, but chiefly from his connection with the London Tory organ, although, as his German biographer somewhat grimly remarks, 'a trace of his partiality for the community of goods lingered in his blood; he never ceased to live upon his friends'! The Church of England doctrines he was intended to imbibe at school and college had given way before Unitarianism and the mysticism and pantheism of the Continent. Goethe, Kant, and Lessing had become his masters. He came, too, in broken health. At Keswick dwelt a good man in Greta Hall, or rather in the smaller of the two houses now known by that name. Mr. Jackson, who started as a common carrier, was a well-to-do man, and had accumulated a library. He charged Coleridge half the proper rent for the other cottage, and gave him access to his books. There seemed no reason why our poet-philosopher should not have been happier here than ever before. But the end of his poetical career was at hand. 'Opium,' says De Quincey, himself a victim to the drug, 'killed Coleridge as a poet.' He began taking the deadly poison to allay the pains of gout, to which he was a martyr. His 'Ode to Dejection' is undoubtedly his dirge over the grave of his muse. In his hours of awakening he gave himself afresh to philosophy to compel mental activity. He found the study an alleviation, but by no means a cure. An artist friend took him a voyage up the Mediterranean. On returning to his care-worn wife he found himself without sufficient means for the support of a growing family, though Sir George Beaumont, of Coleorton, and the ever-faithful Cottle and Sir Humphry Davy, helped him and interested themselves on his behalf, to enable him to earn something by lecturing in London. Returning again to the Lake Country, he started another weekly paper, which he called _The Friend_. It failed to capture the public, and ceased at the twenty-seventh number. He had magazine and review work, and published something. The opium habit still increased till these Kendal Black Drops (he probably so calls them because he first procured them as a quack medicine from this town) were at last taken in doses amounting to two quarts of laudanum in a week. Yet he was visited by the Lambs, the Wordsworths, Hazlitt, Professor Wilson, and many another who admired and loved him for his genius and his unique personality. In four years' time his brother-in-law, Robert Southey, and his family joined him at Greta Hall. On the other hand, the Wedgwood annual allowance was withdrawn, on the ground that his side of the agreement was not being fulfilled. More and more he drifted about from place to place, leaving his wife and children to the care of their relatives. One while he stayed with the Wordsworths at Grasmere, and another with a benevolent friend at Calne (he was three years there), till his generous host's means being much reduced he was compelled to withdraw his hospitality. Here he had been partly weaned from opium, but on going up to London in search of a livelihood he fell back under its complete tyranny. In a kind of desperation he carried his case to a Dr. Gillman, of Highgate. This gentleman, an able physician and a man of standing and culture, was happily married, and needed no 'paying guest,' but as Professor Brandle puts it, 'the spell of his talk, and the repute of his name, vanquished the Gillmans at once, and from that time he became the inmate and friend of the family, and remained so till his end.' Here in this beautiful home--beautiful in its then countrified surroundings, beautiful in its moral atmosphere--he was once again happy, and for no fewer than sixteen years. No opium was permitted within the walls. His wife and children, and friendly visitors like Irving, Hallam, Maurice, Hare, and T. H. Green, were welcomed. He became an undoubted Christian, and a powerful advocate of a form of orthodoxy commoner now than it was then--an attractive Anglican theology impregnated with the German type of platonic philosophy. His utter simplicity of character was never lost, and, unfortunately, his endeavours after pecuniary recovery were thwarted by a scoundrelly publisher cheating him of large sums he had fairly earned by hard work and genius. It was at this time he issued 'Aids to Reflection,' 'Lay Sermons,' and other memorable books.

Towards the end of his days he suffered much, notably from an affection of the heart, which 'bent his figure, furrowed his face, and hindered his work.' Finding death within sight, he settled what outward affairs he had to settle, ordered mourning rings for his friends, composed an epitaph for his tombstone, and in a marvellous calm, not begotten of narcotics, but of a living faith, he passed away into the fulness of light, in the year of our Lord 1834, and the sixty-second of his age.

What is the true estimate of his character? His was empathically a self-marred life. With a steady, reliable temperament and will he might have achieved one of the very highest positions among England's greatest men. 'Frailty,' cries a modern essayist, 'thy name is Genius.' His conversational powers were unequalled, and attracted eminent people from afar to hear him pour forth his brilliant scientific knowledge, philosophic speculations, and wealth of illustration. It is true that Charles Lamb adjudged him too great a monopolist of the situation. 'Lamb,' was the response, 'did you ever hear me preach?' 'I never heard you do anything else,' retorted Lamb. His talks were really spontaneous orations which electrified his hearers. That ineffectual outward life of his, so full of latent possibilities, has not, happily, been altogether thrown away. Both the pre-opium-drinking days and the post-opium-drinking were long enough for him to influence the thoughts and teaching of his own and future ages, and he still leavens the literature of the pulpit and the desk. His poetry yet delights young and old. It is comforting to know that one whom the 'Circean Chalice' had driven to wish for annihilation, and created in him a desire to place himself in a madhouse, could write from his death-bed to a 'dear god-son' that on the brink of the grave he had proved Christ to be an Almighty Redeemer, who had reconciled God, and given him, under all pains and infirmities, 'the peace that passeth understanding.'

His literary output I will neither expound nor criticise, tempting as it is to do both. His poems are on the shelves of every well-selected library, however small. His more solid works are not for the general public. They are too profound, and go far too deeply into the secret springs of life and thought, too far afield into the Divine and human undercurrents of motive and action; are too theological, too speculative, to lay hold of any but those who themselves are, in their spheres, and to some extent, at least, guides and moulders of other men's emotions and duties. They are essentially books for the patiently reflective, who learn that they may teach. If spiritual things are only spiritually discerned, so also are philosophical theories, methods, and categories appreciated only by those who have a natural leaning towards them, and some degree of training. Nine-tenths of my readers will be 'practical' men and women, to whom his revelations will seem guess-work and his intuitions dreams. But if any want a delicate and subtle analysis of Coleridge's mind, and whatsoever was in it, they may read the late Walter Pater's 'Appreciation' of him.

TO BE READ AT HIS GRAVESIDE

'I have no particular choice of a churchyard, but I would repose, if
possible, where there were no proud monuments, no new-fangled
obelisks or mausoleums, heathen in everything but taste, and not
Christian in that. Nothing that betokened aristocracy, unless it
were the venerable memorial of some old family long extinct. If the
village school adjoined the churchyard, so much the better. But all
this must be as He will. I am greatly pleased with the fancy of
Anaxagoras, whose sole request of the people of Lampsacus was, that
the children might have a holiday on the anniversary of his death.
But I would have the holiday on the day of my funeral. I would
connect the happiness of childhood with the peace of the dead, not
with the struggles of the dying.'--_Written on a book-margin by
Hartley Coleridge._

_Photo by Herbert Bell, Ambleside._

NAB COTTAGE, RYDAL.

The Home of De Quincey's Father-in-law (see p. 8), and
afterwards of Hartley Coleridge.]

VIII

A LIFE TO PITY

HARTLEY COLERIDGE

'Hartley Coleridge has come much nearer us, and probably you might
see as much of him as you liked. Of genius he has not a little, and
talent enough for fifty.'--WORDSWORTH.

'Dined at Mrs. Fletcher's. H. Coleridge behaved very well. He read
some verses on Dr. Arnold which I could not comprehend, he read them
so unpleasantly; and he sang a comic song that kept me very grave.
He left us quite early.'--CRABBE ROBINSON'S _Diary_.

Poor 'Lile Hartley'--_little_ Hartley, as the neighbours called him--is one of the most pathetic figures in English literature. Undersized in body, of promising intellect from childhood, of child-like simplicity in character, devoid of self-control, and overmastered by the alcoholic habit, as his father was by the opium habit, he is at once pitiable, excusable, and lovable. As you ride from Ambleside to Grasmere you pass a low cottage on your right, just beneath Nab Scarr, where the young farmer and his wife lived who cared so unselfishly for him and for his comfort and welfare. It is locally known as 'Coleridge's Cottage.' Here he lived in later manhood, followed and brought home tenderly, when he had wandered away, by his kind-hearted caretakers, and writing prose essays and sweet sonnets in hours of freedom from his besetment.

By birth Hartley Coleridge belongs to the West Country, having come into the world while his parents lived on Redcliffe Hill, Bristol, shortly after their return from their little flower-covered, poverty-stricken Clevedon Cottage. The National Dictionary of Biography is in error in giving Rose Cottage as his birthplace. It was beyond all doubt Bristol, and he was born during the autumn of 1796. 'A pretty and engaging child,' his brother Derwent says he was. There must have been something attractive about the babe, for it is given to few to be apostrophized by two poets at so early an age, especially by two such as his own father and his father's friend, William Wordsworth. Great things were anticipated for him in the future by both the seers. He was taken to London for a visit when three years old, and, after being mystified by the street lamps, he suddenly exclaimed: 'Oh! now I know what the stars are: they are lamps that have been good upon earth, and have gone up into heaven!' At six years of age he was removed with the family to Keswick. Here for a season the two households of Coleridge and Southey dwelt at Greta Hall, an occurrence which seems in many ways to have remarkably influenced his career. Those who came in contact with him at this place speak of him as pouring forth, with flashing eyes, strange speculations far beyond his years, and weaving wild inventions. His dreamy boyhood was varied by another stay in London and a visit to Bristol, in both which places further mundane knowledge was acquired, only to be forthwith transmuted into the visions which filled his mental life. His very play related to the history of a kind of Utopia, its populations, its geography, its constitution, its wars, its politics. 'Ejuxria' was the name he gave his island kingdom, and he prolonged the existence of it for himself and his playmates beyond the length of the famous thousand and one nights of the Eastern story-teller. Everything he saw, everything he read, became forthwith 'Ejuxrian.' This habit of introversion and lack of practicality changed its forms as he grew older, but never left him. When at length he went to a boarding-school at Ambleside--or, rather, was placed in a clergyman's house near it with a few other boys for private tuition--his power of improvization was encouraged by his companions demanding long-drawn-out romances from him, while his morbid tendencies and consciousness of his small stature induced the habit of lonely wanderings and musing.

Desultory reading and frequent intercourse with his father's friends--Southey, Wordsworth, Professor Wilson, De Quincey, and Charles Lloyd--formed the chief part of his early education. He seems to have been as a schoolboy truthful, dutiful, and thoughtful, but with great infirmity of will and subject to paroxysms of passion and heartbroken repentance. From school to Oxford University was a natural and proper advance. Unfortunately, his rare conversational qualities made him much sought after for students' wine parties. The result of this was that, although he passed his exams creditably, and won an Oriel Fellowship, he was judged to have forfeited this Fellowship by his intemperance. The authorities were inexorable. No expostulation or influence could save him. It is probable some freedom of speech offensive to the narrow-minded dons of his day had something to do with their hardness. Sympathy and kindly common-sense might have recovered him just then from his snare. As it was, he tried for literary employment in London with little success, though his tarriance there resulted in a further development of his alcoholic tendency. Thence he drifted back to Ambleside, where he tried school-keeping, but in vain. He had no disciplinary power, and one by one his pupils were removed, till the school collapsed. From there he went to the Grasmere Cottage, already spoken of, facing the lovely little lake of Rydal, a blue island-dotted gem framed in with lofty green mountains. Everybody loved the lonely, affectionate man--a keen observer of Nature, an inspired writer of poetry--and everybody grieved when the end came one winter's day of 1849, and his remains were buried in Grasmere Churchyard. There a little group of us stood but a while ago, reverently uncovered, beneath the yews that overshadow his grave and the graves of the Wordsworth family. That he knew his weakness and lamented it, and at seasons valiantly struggled to overcome it, is certain, and one cannot help wondering whether he would not have triumphed ultimately had he lived in a teetotal age, when he could have been surrounded by abstaining companions, who would have sheltered him and kept him out of perpetually recurrent temptations. Some of his more personal verses are sadly suggestive both of his struggle and his need:

'A woeful thing it is to find
No trust secure in weak mankind,
But tenfold woe betide the elf
Who knows not how to trust himself.'

And again he writes:

'Oh woeful impotence of weak resolve,
Recorded rashly to the writer's shame,
Days pass away, and Time's large orbs revolve,
And every day behold me still the same,
Till oft-neglected purpose loses aim,
And hope becomes a flat, unheeded lie,
And conscience, weary with the work of blame,
In seeming slumber droops her wistful eye,
As if she would resign her unregarded ministry.'

Passing lightly over his 'Northern Worthies,' some dozen or so of biographic sketches, good and capable 'pot-boilers'--yet 'pot-boilers' essentially--one comes to his essays, written for _Blackwood_ and other magazines and papers, and his marginalia written in his books and published after his death. We cannot but be struck with the immense variety of subjects dealt with in his essays. Many of them are signed by a pseudonym, such as 'Thersites' if on 'Heathen Mythology'--or 'Tom Thumb the Great' if 'Brief Observations upon Brevity'--or 'Ignoramus' if a series on the 'Fine Arts'--and very few were issued in his own name. Some are full of quaint humour, such as 'Thoughts on Horsemanship, by a Pedestrian,' 'A Nursery Lecture delivered by an Old Bachelor.' Others have a fine literary flavour, as, for example, 'Shakespeare, a Tory and a Gentleman,' or 'On the Character of Hamlet.' It is, however, as a sonnetteer he will be longest remembered, and as a writer of miscellaneous verses. When rowing round Grasmere Lake the other day we recalled his lines, beginning:

'Within the compass of a little vale
There lies a lake unknown in fairy tale,
Which not a poet knew in ancient days,
When all the world believed in ghosts and fays;
Yet on that lake I have beheld a boat
That seemed a fairy pinnace all afloat,
On some blest mission to a distant isle
To do meet worship in some ruined pile,
Where long of yore the Fairies used to meet
And haply hallow with their last retreat.'

Sometimes, too, when religious controversies grow warm around the good old revelation those verses of his come to remembrance, called 'The Word of God':

'In holy books we read how God hath spoken
To holy men in many different ways;
But hath the present work'd no sign or token?
Is God quite silent in these latter days?

'And hath our Heavenly Sire departed quite,
And left His poor babes in this world alone,
And only left for blind belief--not sight--
Some quaint old riddles in a tongue unknown?'

Hartley Coleridge's longer and more ambitious pieces do not commend themselves to the public as do his shorter ones. His _forte_ was in--

'Singing of the little rills
That trickle down the yellow hills
To drive the Fairies' water-mills;'

of children whom he doted upon,--of 'the merry lark that bids a blithe good-morrow,'--of 'summer rain'--of 'rose, and violet, and pansy, each with its tale of love'--of poor Mary Magdalene. From his own soul, as from Mary's, it may be the Lord has 'wiped off the soiling of despair.' May we find it has been so when we ourselves reach the great hereafter.

KESWICK IN WINTER

'Summer is not the season for this country. Coleridge says, and says
well, that then it is like a theatre at noon. There are _no goings
on_ under a clear sky.... The very snow, which you would perhaps
think must monotonize the mountains, gives new varieties; it brings
out their recesses and designates all their inequalities, it
impresses a better feeling of their height, and it reflects such
tints of saffron, or fawn, or rose-colour to the evening sun. _O
Maria Santissima!_ Mount Horeb with the glory upon its summit might
have been more glorious, but not more beautiful than Skiddaw in his
pelisse of ermine. I will not quarrel with frost, though the fellow
has the impudence to take me by the nose. The lakeside has such ten
thousand charms; a fleece of snow or of the hoar-frost lies on the
fallen trees or large stones; the grass-points, that just peer above
the water, are powdered with diamonds; the ice on the margin with
chains of crystal, and such veins and wavy lines of beauty as mock
all art; and, to crown all, Coleridge and I have found out that
stones thrown upon the lake, when frozen, made a noise like singing
birds, and when you whirl on it a large flake of ice, away the
shivers slide, chirping and warbling like a flight of finches.'--_A
letter of Robert Southey's._

The Birthplace of Robert Southey.]

IX

GEORGE THE FOURTH'S LAUREATE

ROBERT SOUTHEY

'I could say much of Mr. Southey, at this time; of his
constitutional cheerfulness, of the polish of his manners, of his
dignity, and at the same time of his unassuming deportment, as well
as of the general respect which his talent, conduct, and
conversation excited.'--JOSEPH COTTLE, _Southey's first publisher_.

He was the most bookish and the most learned Laureate of them all. As a poet, he was inferior to Wordsworth and Tennyson, yet superior to Pye or Austin. He was a native of Bristol, where his father was an unsuccessful linen-draper in Wine Street. Heredity had little or nothing to do with the evolution of Robert's genius, except so far as from his mother's alertness of intellect and happy temperament he received a foundation upon which he was enabled to build his literary future. Industry, and a great practical capacity, animated by a sanguine spirit, carried him through a life of unremitting toil, and conquered difficulties that would have crushed or disheartened most men.

He first saw the light on August 12, 1774. 'Is it a boy?' asked the mother. 'Ay,' replied the nurse, 'a great ugly boy'; and the mother, when she saw the 'great red creature,' feared she should never be able to love him! However, he soon grew to be a handsome, curly-headed lad, sensitive, and very much alive. The Southeys being 'under water' most of their time, their first-born was adopted by a half-sister of the wife. Aunt Tylor lived in Bath. To Bath, then, he was removed, and the fashionable, theatre-going spinster, even over-nice and fastidious in her love of spotless cleanliness, and very imperious in her manner, did her duty conscientiously by her charge, letting him, however, attend dramatic entertainments, and read all he could lay hands on, till he was old enough to be sent to school. The 'Academy' selected was fully as low as the average of the 'Do-the-boys' Halls of the day. The master was a broken-down tradesman who had married his drunken servant-maid, and the school broke up shortly with a free fight between the proprietor and his son. Two years here had added little to the pupil's knowledge. He gained most by his private reading. The next four years were spent in attending as a day-boarder in the classes of a bewigged, irascible little Welshman, with whom he learned Latin and the Church Catechism. 'Who taught you to read, boy?' inquired schoolmaster Williams. 'My aunt, sir.' 'Then tell your aunt that my old horse, dead these twenty years, could have done it better!' This naturally terminated his attendance at that school. The aunt left Bath shortly thereafter, and finally settled at Bristol, Southey going with her, and still poring over Spenser, Sidney, Pope's Homer and translations of Tasso, Ariosto, and Josephus. By-and-by he was promoted to Westminster School to continue his Latin, which he remembered for reading though not for writing, and to learn Greek, which he afterwards forgot. A bias for history developed itself here, and he found a good library in the house of a friend in Dean's Yard, scarcely out of bounds. Here he studied Gibbon, Rousseau, and Epictetus. Authorship in a school journal was tried, and so successfully that his criticism on the ways of a stupid, 'flogging' preceptor, whose name may well pass into oblivion, led to his expulsion, and the expelled lad, whose name will never be obliterated, returned to his aunt in Bristol.

Robert Southey had a maternal uncle, a clergyman, and English chaplain at Lisbon, who became more to him than a father, the real father having failed in business and died of a broken heart. Mr. Hill sent his nephew to Oxford, designing to make a clergyman of him. The Dean of Christ Church, however, hearing that the tall, handsome, enthusiastic young poet and Radical had been turned out of Westminster for daring to attack that fine old English institution, flogging in the great public schools, rejected his application. Balliol received him. Here he made some lifelong and most valuable friendships, one bringing him a future pension of £160 a year to aid him in his devotion to literature, an allowance continued, with unusual generosity, till he had made his mark, and Government had remunerated him for his eminent services. He owed as little to Oxford as to lower schools. All he learned, he tells us, was some swimming and boating. He wrote his epic poem, 'Joan of Arc,' in his nineteenth year; refused to enter into orders, 'joyfully bade adieu to Oxford,' tried to learn medicine, but hated the dissecting-room too much to follow it; had an interview with Coleridge, imbibed 'Pantisocracy,' returned to Bristol once more, fell in love with Edith Fricker, sister of Lovell's and Coleridge's wives, and was refused his Aunt Tylor's house in consequence of his erratic opinions and misdoings. His Portuguese uncle now stepped in to wean him from those ultra-democratic views, as they were then considered, though nowadays almost commonplaces of Toryism, and to relieve his pecuniary necessities. Pantisocracy, supplemented by a little lecturing and a little publishing, had not proved profitable, and poor Southey frequently knew the want of a dinner. Mr. Hill was over in England, and took his relative back with him. To make all fast, however, Robert and his beloved Edith, his faithful, loving, and every way admirable wife for many years, got themselves married in St. Mary de Redcliffe Church on the morning of the day the former started from Bristol on his travels. They could not raise the price of the wife's wedding-ring between them, and kind-hearted Bookseller Cottle lent the requisite guinea. They parted at the church-door, Southey going first to Madrid, and then to Lisbon and its environs. In the Spanish peninsula were many valuable libraries hidden away in monasteries. These he ransacked, learning the tongues in which they were written, or printed, posting himself up in Portuguese history, translating the romance of the Cid, and bringing back with him a number of valuable books and documents. It was one of the pleasantest and most profitable periods of his life, was this trip to the old medieval, Catholic world of modern Portugal, though he came home with an intense dislike of Romanism. But he returned to England and commenced studying law in London, forgetting all he learned the moment his law books were closed, and writing his second great poem, 'Madoc,' in the intervals of reading Blackstone and Littleton and Coke. A holiday near Christchurch followed during the bright summer weather of 1797 with wife and mother, brother Tom just released from a French prison, brother-in-law Coleridge, Bookseller Cottle, Friend Lloyd, Charles Lamb, and John Rickman; and then a homeless time, sometimes in London, sometimes in Bristol, and once among the literati of Norwich. Then ensued a residence at Westbury-on-Trym in a pretty cottage, and an acquaintance with Davy, afterwards the celebrated Sir Humphrey. Another trip to Portugal, this time accompanied by his Edith, involved more study, and produced another poem--'Thalaba.' Coleridge, it will be remembered, had removed to Keswick, to Greta Hall. He now wrote for the Southeys to join him there, which they did, and it was their home as long as their lives lasted. Here Robert toiled at literature for his daily bread, living a strenuous life not for his own and his growing family's sake alone, but for the Coleridges during Samuel's sad lapses into the opium habit, and for the widowed Mrs. Lovell and her child also. There was a time when I could not like Robert Southey as man or author. His longer poems seemed prosy, and most of his shorter ones trivial, and his prose lacking in sympathy with humanity, and his books narrow in their outlook on life. He seemed to be commonplace and cold, and every way humdrum. Fuller acquaintance with the author and his works has not greatly changed one's views, about some of his verses, but it has brought acquaintance with some books of extraordinary merit wherein prejudice fades into quaintness of thought and expression not altogether unpleasant, and since one's youthful days the commonplace virtues of domestic life and home cheerfulness and the heroism that toils and struggles unseen, and bears its life's burdens uncomplainingly, have received a spiritual glorification far beyond that which is due to the showy, romantic, good-for-nothing selfishness of the plunger who neglects his responsibilities while captivating the onlookers.

Life at Keswick was apparently a monotonous one. To-day was as yesterday, and to-morrow as to-day, with the exception of short journeys away, always leavened by longings to be at home. Each forty-eight hours was mapped out with as much regularity as social claims would permit. Reading, writing, walking among the beautiful landscapes of Keswick, and the hearty enjoyment of relaxation in the midst of his numerous family circle, had all their allotted times, with the hours of rest and sleep, for Southey needed sleep and exercise to keep in good order the bodily functions his very existence as an author depended upon. Yet did he never refuse to be interviewed by legitimate callers--that is, those who brought their own literary credentials with them, or introductions from those he knew. Among the men who sought him for his works' sake was Shelley during the time of his compulsory retirement at Keswick. He carried on also a very large private correspondence. His 'selected' letters alone fill four volumes. He befriended Kirke White, the poet, with wise counsel and friendly sympathies, and Charlotte Brontë, and not a few now quite unknown poets, struggling to make names for themselves among the stars of English poesie. The correspondents to whom he unbent, and showed the real man behind the books he wrote, included such geniuses as Bishop Lightfoot, Sir Walter Scott, Walter Savage Landor (who was an inspiration to him), Sir Henry Taylor, and, of course, the Lake Poets so well known to us all by now.

SOUTHEY'S MONUMENT IN CROSTHWAITE CHURCH, KESWICK.]

The losses, occurring in every extensive family, came from time to time to tear the fibres of Southey's loving and sensitive heart. Children died, or married and left him, and at length his brave, and dearly-beloved wife's mental faculties decayed, and after some time of gradual and hopeless failure, she died in 1837. Two years later he married another excellent woman, though of quite different type from his deeply-mourned Edith. This was Caroline Bowles, who was a literary lady and poetess, and had been a correspondent for some time. He never fully recovered the shock of his first wife's loss, and his own later years were beclouded with brain disease resulting in something not quite imbecility, and yet bordering upon it, in which he seemed to live in a perpetual dream. A fever hastened his end, which came in the month of March, 1843. His successor in the Laureateship and his son-in-law were the only strangers present in Crosthwaite Churchyard at the funeral. It was a cloudy day on which he was buried, but as the service was ending a ray of sunshine touched the grave, and reminded the mourners of the better light in the world beyond into which his soul had entered. Southey was all his life a sincerely religious man. His refusal to enter the Anglican priesthood in youth, and his championship of liberal views, and even the narrowness of his later opinions on affairs of State and Church--in other words, his bigoted Toryism--were all due to the sincerity of his convictions, and his loyalty to what he thought at the time to be the truth. The best short life you can have of Southey is Edward Dowden's in 'English Men of Letters.'

Of his longer poems the world takes small account, though there is undoubted poetry in them. It preserves chiefly his ballads, things like the 'Battle of Blenheim,' 'How the Water Comes Down at Lodore,' 'The Old Woman of Berkley,' and so forth, which can be found in most anthologies. His prose writings were principally task-work, bread-winners, painstaking, and mostly reliable. His 'Life of Nelson' has still a circulation, and is probably the most popular of his books. His 'Life of John Wesley' is pre-eminently a Churchman's appreciation of one to whom he tried to be just, but had no kind of sympathy with. The works which best show us Southey himself are his 'Uneducated Poets,' a readable group of short biographies of his humbler brethren, to some of whom he had been personally a benefactor; his 'Book of the Church,' a volume of biographical sketches of builders and martyrs of the Church of England; his 'Commonplace Book,' which shows the marvellous industry of the man in collecting materials for his life-work; and, above all, that curious assortment of odds and ends of erudition connected by the thinnest thread of a story, around which the quaint old-world learning winds and winds endlessly with something of Rabelaisian humour without its grossness. This, of course, is 'The Doctor,' a book once captured from an acquaintance of mine by hospital surgeons on the ground that 'medical' works were not permitted to patients! This book, written for his own delectation and for the justification of his friends, is particularly suitable for long, wet winter evenings by a cosy fireside, and one that can be opened anywhere to disclose 'a feast of reason and a flow of soul' to the reader.

Friend and Patron of Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth, and
their first Publisher (see pp. 85, 87, 106).

Portrait (æt. 50) by Branwhite, also of Bristol.]

X

VICTORIA'S FIRST LAUREATE

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

'The Age grew sated with her frail wit,
Herself waxed weary on her loveless throne.
Men felt life's tide, the sweep and surge of it,
And craved a living voice, a natural tone.'
From _Wordsworth's Grave_, by WILLIAM WATSON.

Wordsworth is, of course, the greatest poet of the English Lake school. He is also the only one born in the lake counties, educated and, with slight exception, resident all his life within them. His birthplace was Cockermouth, his school the Grammar School of Hawkshead; his residences--except what time he briefly dwelt among the southern Quantock Hills--were at Dove Cottage, Grasmere, and Rydal Mount; his burial-place was among his kinsfolk in a quiet corner of Grasmere Churchyard, beneath the sycamores and yews. Most of his compeers and friends--Coleridge, Southey, De Quincey, Charles Lloyd, John Wilson, and even Hartley Coleridge--were born elsewhere, and came to live among these northern mountains in youth or manhood.

He wrote, also, more about our district, and wrote it better, than any other. This was partly due to patriotic devotion to his native corner of our common fatherland, partly because the love of rambling was ingrained in his being, chiefly because he was intuitively a Nature-poet, looking below the grand and the lovely into the mystical heart and core of sights and sounds that conceal and yet reveal their Creator, Fashioner, and Upholder. He was the inspired interpreter of things which ordinary men have not spiritual knowledge to understand--which, indeed, the majority do not so much as behold dimly until one of God's seers lifts the enshrouding veil.

Born in 1770, he died at noon on April 23, 1850. No one now living was contemporary with his birth. Middle-aged admirers of his poems, middle-aged controverters of his claim to pre-eminence, well remember the shadow of death that fell across the nation's heart when they heard the laureate had passed away. 'Surely,' writes F. W. H. Myers, 'of him, if of anyone, we may think as a man who was so in accord with Nature, so at one with the very soul of things, that there can be no mansion of the universe which shall not be to him a home, no governor that will not accept him among his servants, and satisfy him with love and peace.' There are few events to record between his earthly birth and his birth into the upper kingdom--or shall we say his return to that kingdom?--if there is anything in his own suggestion that--

'Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God who is our home.'