Chapter XXV (7)

"The demons whom the sorcerer served seem rarely to have given
any assistance to their victims when the latter fell into the
hands of the judicial authorities; but if they escaped
punishment by the agency of the law, they were only reserved
for a more terrible end. We have already seen the fate of the
woman of Berkeley. A writer of the thirteenth century has
preserved a story of a man who, by his compact with the Evil
One, had collected together great riches. One day, while he was
absent in the fields, a stranger of suspicious appearance came
to his house and asked for him. His wife replied that he was
not at home. The stranger said, 'Tell him when he returns, that
to-night he must pay me my debt.' The wife replied that she was
not aware that he owed any thing to him. 'Tell, him,' said the
stranger, with a ferocious look, 'that I will have my debt
to-night.' The husband returned, and when informed of what had
taken place, merely remarked that the demand was just. He then
ordered his bed to be made that night in an outhouse, where he
had never slept before, and he shut himself in it with a
lighted candle. The family were astonished, and could not
resist the impulse to gratify their curiosity by looking
through the holes in the door. They beheld the same stranger,
who had entered without opening the door, seated beside his
victim, and they appeared to be counting large sums of money.
Soon they began to quarrel about their accounts, and were
proceeding from threats to blows, when the servants, who were
looking through the door, burst it open, that they might help
their master. The light was instantly extinguished; and when
another was brought, no traces could be found of either of the
disputants, nor were they ever afterwards heard of. The
suspicious-looking stranger was the demon himself, who had
carried away his victim."

FOOTNOTES:

[I] Narratives of Sorcery and Magic, from the most Authentic Sources. By Thomas Wright, Esq., M.A., F.S.A., &c., &c. In two volumes. Published by Bentley.

From the Examiner.

HARTLEY COLERIDGE AND HIS GENIUS.

Hartley Coleridge was a poet whose life was so deplorable a contradiction to the strength and subtlety of his genius, and the capability and range of his intellect, that perhaps no such sad example has ever found similar record.[J] Indeed we are obliged with sincere grief to doubt, whether, as written here, the memoir should have been written at all. With much respect for Mr. Derwent Coleridge, who is himself no unworthy inheritor of a great name, his white neckcloth is somewhat too prominently seen in the matter. There are too many labored explainings, starched apologies, and painful accountings for this and that. The writer was probably not conscious of the effort he was making, yet the effort is but too manifest, A simple statement of facts, a kindly allowance for circumstances, a mindful recollection of what his father was in physical as well as mental organization, extracts from Hartley's own letters, recollections of those among whom his latter life was passed--this, as it seems to us, should have sufficed. Mr. Derwent Coleridge brings too many church-bred and town-bred notions to the grave design of moralizing and philosophizing his brother's simple life and wayward self-indulgences. His motives will be respected, and his real kindness not misunderstood; but it will be felt that a quiet and unaffected little memoir of that strange and sorry career, and of those noble nor wholly wasted powers, remains still to be written.

Meanwhile we gratefully accept the volumes before us, which in their contents are quite as decisive of Hartley Coleridge's genius as of what it might have achieved in happier circumstances. A more beautiful or more sorrowful book has not been published in our day.

"Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,
And burned is Apollo's laurel-bough,
That sometime grew within this learned man."

Hartley Coleridge was the eldest son of the poet, and with much of his father's genius (which in him, however, took a more simple and practical shape than consisted with the wider and more mystical expanse of his father's mind), inherited also the defects of his organization and temperament. What would have become of the elder Coleridge but for the friends in whose home his later years found a refuge, no one can say. With no such friends or home, poor Hartley became a cast-away. After a childhood of singular genius, manifested in many modes and forms, and described with charming effect by his brother in the best passages and anecdotes of the memoir, he was launched without due discipline or preparation into the University of Oxford, where the catastrophe of his life befell. He had first fairly shown his powers when the hard doom went forth which condemned them to waste and idleness. He obtained a fellowship-elect at Oriel, was dismissed on the ground of intemperance before his probationary year had passed, and wandered for the rest of his days by the scenes with which his father most wished to surround his childhood--

("But thou, my babe, shall wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountains, and beneath the clouds
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags")

--listening with hardly less than his father's delight to the sounds and voices of nature, in homely intimacy with all homely folk, uttering now and then piercing words of wisdom or regret, teaching little children in village schools, and----.

Well, it would be perhaps too much to say that he continued to justify the rejection of the Oriel fellows. Who knows how largely that event may itself have contributed to what it too hastily anticipated and too finally condemned? It appears certain that the weakness had not thus early made itself known to Hartley's general acquaintance at the University. Mr. Dyce had nothing painful to remember of him, but describes him as a young man possessing an intellect of the highest order, with great simplicity of character and considerable oddity of manner; and he hints that the college authorities had probably resented, in the step they took, certain attacks more declamatory than serious which Hartley had got into the habit of indulging against all established institutions. Mr. Derwent Coleridge touches this part of the subject very daintily. "My brother was, however, _I am afraid_, more sincere in his invectives against establishments, as they appeared to his eyes at Oxford, and elsewhere, _than Mr. Dyce kindly supposes_." How poor Hartley would have laughed at that!

One thing to the last he continued. The simplicity of character which Mr. Dyce attributes to his youth remained with him till long after his hair was prematurely white. As Wordsworth hoped for him in his childhood, he kept

"A young lamb's heart among the full-grown flock;"

--and some delightful recollections of his ordinary existence from day to day among the lakes and mountains, and in the service of the village schools, are contributed to his brother's Memoir. Here is one, from one of the scholars he taught:

"I first saw Hartley in the beginning, I think, of 1837, when I
was at Sedbergh, and he heard us our lesson in Mr. Green's
parlor. My impression of him was what I conceived Shakespeare's
idea of a gentleman to be, something which we like to have in a
picture. He was dressed in black, his hair, just touched with
gray, fell in thick waves down his back, and he had a frilled
shirt on; and there was a sort of autumnal ripeness and
brightness about him. His shrill voice, and his quick,
authoritative 'right! right!' and the chuckle with which he
translated 'rerum repetundarum' as 'peculation, a very common
vice in governors of all ages,' after which he took a turn
round the sofa--all struck me amazingly; his readiness
astonished us all, and even himself, as he afterwards told me;
for, during the time he was at the school, he never had to use
a dictionary once, though we read Dalzell's selections from
Aristotle and Longinus, and several plays of Sophocles. He took
his idea, so he said, from what De Quincy says of one of the
Eton masters fagging the lesson, to the great amusement of the
class, and, while waiting for the lesson, he used to read a
newspaper. While acting as second master he seldom occupied the
master's desk, but sat among the boys on one of the school
benches. He very seldom came to school in a morning, never till
about eleven, and in the afternoon about an hour after we had
begun. I never knew the least liberty taken with him, though he
was kinder and more familiar than was then the fashion with
masters. His translations were remarkably vivid; of [Greek:
mogera mogerôs] 'toiling and moiling;' and of some ship or
other in the Philoctetes, which he pronounced to be 'scudding
under main-top sails,' our conceptions became intelligible.
Many of his translations were written down with his initials,
and I saw some, not a long while ago, in the Sophocles of a
late Tutor at Queen's College, Oxford, who had them from
tradition. He gave most attention to our themes; out of those
sent in he selected two or three, which he then read aloud and
criticised; and once, when they happened to agree, remarked
there was always a coincidence of thought amongst great men.
Out of school he never mixed with the boys, but was sometimes
seen, to their astonishment, running along the fields with his
arms outstretched, and talking to himself. He had no pet
scholars except one, a little fair-haired boy, who he said
ought to have been a girl. He told me that was the only boy he
ever loved, though he always loved little girls. He was
remarkably fond of the travelling shows that occasionally
visited the village. I have seen him clap his hands with
delight; indeed, in most of the simple delights of country
life, he was like a child. This is what occurs to me at present
of what he was when I first knew him; and, indeed, my after
recollections are of a similarly fragmentary kind, consisting
only of those little, numerous, noiseless, every-day acts of
kindness, the sum of which makes a Christian life. His love of
little children, his sympathy with the poor and suffering, his
hatred of oppression, the beauty and the grace of his
politeness before women, and his high manliness,--these are the
features which I shall never forget while I have any thing to
remember."

The same writer afterwards tells us:

"On his way to one of these parties he called on me, and I
could not help saying, 'How well you look in a white
neckcloth!' 'I wish you could see me sometimes,' he replied;
'if I had only black-silk stockings and shoe-buckles I should
be quite a gentleman.' Those who had only seen him in the
careless dress that he chose to adopt in the lanes--his
trowsers, which were generally too long, doubled half way up
the leg, unbrushed, and often splashed; his hat brushed the
wrong way, for he never used an umbrella; and his wild,
unshaven, weather-beaten look--were amazed at his metamorphose
into such a faultless gentleman as he appeared when he was
dressed for the evening. 'I hate silver forks with fish,' he
said; 'I can't manage them.' So did Dr. Arnold, I told him.
'That's capital; I am glad of such an authority. Do you know I
never understood the gladiator's excellence till the other day.
The way in which my brother eats fish with a silver fork made
the thing quite clear.'

"He often referred to his boyish days, when he told me he
nearly poisoned half the house with his chemical infusions, and
spoiled the pans, with great delight. The 'Pilgrim's Progress'
was an early favorite with him. 'It was strange,' he said, 'how
it had been overlooked. Children are often misunderstood. When
I was a baby I have often been in the greatest terror, when, to
all appearance, I was quite still;--so frightened that I could
not make a noise. Crying, I believe, is oftener a sign of
happiness than the reverse. I was looked upon as a remarkable
child. My mother told me, when I was born she thought me an
ugly red thing; but my father took me up and said, 'There's no
sweeter baby any where than this.' He always thought too much
of me. I was very dull at school, and hated arithmetic; I
always had to count on my fingers.

"He once took me to the little cottage where he lived by the
Brathey, when Charles Lloyd and he were school-companions. Mrs.
Nicholson, of Ambleside, told me of a donkey-race which they
had from the market-cross to the end of the village and back,
and how Hartley came in last, and minus his white straw hat."

Those who remember the ordinary (and most extraordinary) dress that hung about his small eager person, will smile at this entry in his journal of a visit to Rydal chapel, and the reflections awakened therein:

"17th.--Sunday.--At Rydal chapel. Alas! I have been _Parcus
Deorum cultor et infrequens_ of late. Would I could say with
assurance, _Nunc interare cursus cogor relictos_. I never saw
Axiologus (Wordsworth) look so venerable. His cape cloak has
such a gravity about it. Old gentlemen should never wear light
great coats unless they be military; and even then Uncle Toby's
Roquelaure would be more becoming than all the frogs in Styx.
On the other hand, loose trowsers should never invest the
nether limbs of led. It looks as if the Septuagenarian were
ashamed of a diminished calf. The sable silk is good and
clerical, so are the gray pearl and the partridge. I revere
gray worsted and ridge and furrow for [Greek: Omak rites] his
sake, but perhaps the bright white lamb's wool doth most set
off the leg of an elderly man. The hose should be drawn over
the knees, unless the rank and fortune require diamond buckles.
Paste or Bristol stones should never approach a gentleman of
any age. Roomy shoes, not of varnished leather. Broad
shoe-buckles, well polished. Cleanliness is an ornament to
youth, but an indispensable necessity to old age. Breeches,
velvet or velveteen, or some other solid stuff. There may be
serious objections to reviving the trunk breeches of our
ancestors. I am afraid that hoops would follow in their train.
But the flapped waistcoat, the deep cuffs, and guarded
pocket-holes, the low collar, I should hail with pleasure; that
is, for grandfathers and men of grandfatherly years. I was
about to add the point-lace ruffles, cravat, and frill, but I
pause in consideration of the miseries and degraded state of
the lace makers."

Occasional passages in his letters are very beautiful, and very sad. Here is one--adverting to some attack made upon him:

"'This jargon,' said my orthodox reviewer, 'might be excused in
an alderman of London, but not in a Fellow elect of Oriel,' or
something to the same purpose, evidently designing to recall to
memory the most painful passage of a life not over happy. But
perhaps it is as well to let it alone. The writer might be some
one in whom my kindred are interested; for I am as much alone
in my revolt as Abdiel in his constancy."

We are glad to see valuable testimony borne by Mr. James Spedding as to his habits having left unimpaired his moral and spiritual sensibility:

"Of his general character and way of life I might have been
able to say something to the purpose, if I had seen more of
him. But though he was a person so interesting to me in
himself, and with so many subjects of interest in common with
me, that a little intercourse went a great way; so that I feel
as if I knew him much better than many persons of whom I have
seen much more; yet I have in fact been very seldom in his
company. If I should say ten times altogether, I should not be
understating the number; and this is not enough to qualify me
for a reporter, when there must be so many competent observers
living, who really knew him well. One very strong impression,
however, with which I always came away from him, may be worth
mentioning; I mean, that his moral and spiritual sensibilities
seemed to be absolutely untouched by the life he was leading.
The error of his life sprung, I suppose, from moral incapacity
of some kind--his way of life seemed in some things destructive
of self-respect; and was certainly regarded by himself with a
feeling of shame, which in his seasons of self-communion became
passionate; and yet it did not at all degrade his mind. It
left, not his understanding only, but also his imagination and
feelings, perfectly healthy,--free, fresh, and pure. His
language might be sometimes what some people would call gross,
but that I think was not from any want of true delicacy, but
from a masculine disdain of false delicacy; and his opinions,
and judgment, and speculations, were in the highest degree
refined and elevated--full of chivalrous generosity, and
purity, and manly tenderness. Such, at least, was my invariable
impression. It always surprised me, but fresh observations
always confirmed it."

When Wordsworth heard of his death, he was much affected, and gave the touching direction to his brother:--"Let him lie by us: he would have wished it." It was accordingly so arranged.

"The day following he walked over with me to Grasmere--to the
churchyard, a plain enclosure of the olden time, surrounding
the old village church, in which lay the remains of his wife's
sister, his nephew, and his beloved daughter. Here, having
desired the sexton to measure out the ground for his own and
for Mrs. Wordsworth's grave, he bade him measure out the space
of a third grave for my brother, immediately beyond.

"'When I lifted up my eyes from my daughter's grave,' he
exclaimed, 'he was standing there!' pointing to the spot where
my brother had stood on the sorrowful occasion to which he
alluded. Then turning to the sexton, he said, 'Keep the ground
for us,--we are old people, and it cannot be for long.'"

"In the grave thus marked out, my brother's remains were laid
on the following Thursday, and in little more than a
twelvemonth his venerable and venerated friend was brought to
occupy his own. They lie in the south-east angle of the
churchyard, not far from a group of trees, with the little
beck, that feeds the lake with its clear waters, murmuring by
their side. Around them are the quiet mountains."

We have often expressed a high opinion of Hartley Coleridge's poetical genius. It was a part of the sadness of his life that he could not concentrate his powers, in this or any other department of his intellect, to high and continuous aims--but we were not prepared for such rich proof of its exercise, within the limited field assigned to it, as these volumes offer. They largely and lastingly contribute to the rare stores of true poetry. In the sonnet Hartley Coleridge was a master unsurpassed by the greatest. To its "narrow plot of ground" his habits, when applied in the cultivation of the muse, most naturally led him--and here he may claim no undeserved companionship even with Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth. We take a few--with affecting personal reference in all of them.

Hast thou not seen an aged rifted tower,
Meet habitation for the Ghost of Time,
Where fearful ravage makes decay sublime,
And destitution wears the face of power?
Yet is the fabric deck'd with many a flower
Of fragrance wild, and many-dappled hues,
Gold streak'd with iron-brown and nodding blue,
Making each ruinous chink a fairy bower.
E'en such a thing methinks I fain would be,
Should Heaven appoint me to a lengthen'd age;
So old in look, that Young and Old may see
The record of my closing pilgrimage:
Yet, to the last, a rugged wrinkled thing
To which young sweetness may delight to cling!

Pains I have known, that cannot be again,
And pleasures too that never can be more:
For loss of pleasure I was never sore,
But worse, far worse is to feel no pain.
The throes and agonies of a heart explain
Its very depth of want at inmost core;
Prove that it does believe, and would adore,
And doth with ill for ever strive and strain.
I not lament for happy childish years,
For loves departed, that have had their day,
Or hopes that faded when my head was gray;
For death hath left me last of my compeers:
But for the pain I felt, the gushing tears
I used to shed when I had gone astray.

A lonely wanderer upon the earth am I,
The waif of nature--like uprooted weed
Borne by the stream, or like a shaken reed,
A frail dependent of the fickle sky.
Far, far away, are all my natural kin;
The mother that erewhile hath hush'd my cry,
Almost hath grown a mere fond memory.
Where is my sister's smile? my brother's boisterous din?
Ah! nowhere now. A matron grave and sage,
A holy mother is that sister sweet.
And that bold brother is a pastor meet
To guide, instruct, reprove a sinful age,
Almost I fear, and yet I fain would greet;
So far astray hath been my pilgrimage.

How shall a man fore-doom'd to lone estate,
Untimely old, irreverently gray,
Much like a patch of dusky snow in May,
Dead sleeping in a hollow--all too late--
How shall so poor a thing congratulate
The blest completion of a patient wooing,
Or how commend a younger man for doing
What ne'er to do hath been his fault or fate?
There is a fable, that I once did read.
Of a bad angel that was someway good,
And therefore on the brink of Heaven he stood,
Looking each way, and no way could proceed;
Till at the last he purged away his sin
By loving all the joy he saw within.

Here is another poem of very touching reference to his personal story:

"When I received this volume small,
My years were barely seventeen;
When it was hoped I should be all
Which once, alas! I might have been.

"And now my years are thirty-five,
And every mother hopes her lamb,
And every happy child alive,
May never be what now I am.

"But yet should any chance to look
On the strange medley scribbled here.
I charge thee, tell them, little book,
I am not vile as I appear.

"Oh! tell them though thy purpose lame
In fortune's race, was still behind,--
Though earthly blots my name defiled,
They ne'er abused my better mind.

"Of what men are, and why they are
So weak, so wofully beguiled,
Much I have learned, but better far,
I know my soul is reconciled."

Before we shut the volumes--which will often and often be re-opened by their readers--we may instance, in proof of the variety of his verse, some masterly heroic couplets on the character of Dryden, which will be seen in a series of admirable "sketches of English poets" found written on the fly-leaves and covers of his copy of _Anderson's British Poets_. The successors of Dryden are not less admirably handled, and there are some sketches of Wilkie, Dodsley, Langhorne, and rhymers of that class, inimitable for their truth and spirit.

FOOTNOTES:

[J] Poems by Hartley Coleridge. With a Memoir of his Life. By his Brother. Two vols. Moxon.

From the Cincinnati Commercial Advertiser.

LYRA.--A LAMENT.

BY ALICE CAREY.

Maidens, whose tresses shine,
Crowned with daffodil and eglantine,
Or, from their stringed buds of brier-roses,
Bright as the vermeil closes
Of April twilights, after sobbing rains,
Fall down in rippled skeins
And golden tangles, low
About your bosoms, dainty as new snow;
While the warm shadows blow in softest gales
Fair hawthorn flowers and cherry blossoms white
Against your kirtles, like the froth from pails
O'er brimmed with milk at night,
When lowing heifers bury their sleek flanks
In winrows of sweet hay, or clover banks--
Come near and hear, I pray,
My plained roundelay:
Where creeping vines o'errun the sunny leas,
Sadly, sweet souls, I watch your shining bands
Filling with stained hands
Your leafy cups with lush red strawberries;
Or deep in murmurous glooms,
In yellow mosses full of starry blooms,
Sunken at ease--each busied as she likes,
Or stripping from the grass the beaded dews,
Or picking jagged leaves from the slim spikes
Of tender pinks--with warbled interfuse
Of poesy divine,
That haply long ago
Some wretched borderer of the realm of wo
Wrought to a dulcet line:
If in your lovely years
There be a sorrow that may touch with tears
The eyelids piteously, they must be shed
FOR LYRA, DEAD.
The mantle of the May
Was blown almost within summer's reach,
And all the orchard trees,
Apple, and pear, and peach,
Were full of yellow bees,
Flown from their hives away.
The callow dove upon the dusty beam
Fluttered its little wings in streaks of light,
And the gray swallow twittered full in sight--
Harmless the unyoked team
Browsed from the budding elms, and thrilling lays
Made musical prophecies of brighter days;
And all went jocundly; I could but say.
Ah! well-a-day!
What time spring thaws the wold,
And in the dead leaves come up sprouts of gold,
And green and ribby blue, that after hours
Encrown with flowers;
Heavily lies my heart
From all delights apart,
Even as an echo hungry for the wind,
When fail the silver-kissing waves to unbind
The music bedded in the drowsy strings
Of the sea's golden shells--
That, sometimes, with their honeyed murmurings
Fill all its underswells:
For o'er the sunshine fell a shadow wide
When Lyra died.
When sober Autumn, with his mist-bound brows,
Sits drearily beneath the fading boughs,
And the rain, chilly cold,
Wrings from his beard of gold,
And as some comfort for his lonesome hours,
Hides in his bosom stalks of withered flowers,
I think about what leaves are drooping round
A smoothly shapen mound;
And if the wild wind cries
Where Lyra lies,
Sweet shepherds, softly blow
Ditties most sad and low--
Piping on hollow reeds to your pent sheep--
Calm be my Lyra's sleep.
Unvexed with dream of the rough briers that pull
From his strayed lambs the wool!
O, star, that tremblest dim
Upon the welkin's rim,
Send with thy milky shadows from above
Tidings about my love;
If that some envious wave
Made his untimely grave,
Or if, so softening half my wild regrets,
Some coverlid of bluest violets
Was softly put aside,
What time he died!
Nay, come not, piteous maids,
Out of the murmurous shades;
But keep your tresses crowned as you may
With eglantine and daffodillies gay,
And with the dews of myrtles wash your cheek,
When flamy streaks,
Uprunning the gray orient, tell of morn--
While I, forlorn,
Pour all my heart in tears and plaints, instead,
FOR LYRA, DEAD.

From Fraser's Magazine.

MY NOVEL:

OR, VARIETIES IN ENGLISH LIFE.

BY PISISTRATUS CAXTON.

_Continued from page 126._