Admirable as in the main the essay is from | tural cruelty to my poor children. . . . After which this sketch is taken, it contains some my death, I earnestly entreat that a full and serious blemishes. De Quincey dwells on unqualified narrative of my wretchedness, some alleged faults of Coleridge with a lov- and of its guilty cause, may be made public, ing minuteness which the pure love of truth that at least some little good may be effected can hardly account for; and with regard to by the direful example." It is painful to the great and all-absorbing fault, the habit of dwell on these things, nor should they have opium-taking, his statements are directly op- been reproduced here, had it not been that, posed to those made by Coleridge himself, as they have been long since made fully and by those of his biographers who had the known, it might seem that we had given a best means of knowing the truth. He says too partial picture of the man had we avoided that Coleridge first took to opium, "not as a altogether this its darkest side. relief from bodily pains or nervous irritations, for his constitution was naturally strong and excellent, but as a source of luxurious sensations." Here De Quincey falls into two errors. First, Coleridge's constitution was not really strong. Though full of life and energy, his body was also full of disease, which gradually poisoned the springs of life. All his letters bear witness to this, by the many complaints of ill-health which they contain, before he ever touched opium. Again, as we have already seen, what he sought in opium was not pleasurable sensations, but freedom from pain, an antidote to the nervous agitations under which he suffered. But whatever may have been the beginning of the habit, the result of continued indulgence in it was equally disastrous. We have given the letter which marks his first recourse to the fatal drug in 1796. As his ailments increased, so did his use of it. At Malta, opium-taking became a confirmed habit with him, and from that time for ten years it quite overmastered him. In 1807, the year when De Quincey first met him, he writes of himself as "rolling rudderless," with an increasing and overwhelming sense of wretchedness. The craving went on growing, and his consumption of the drug had reached a quite appalling height, when, in 1814, Cottle having met Coleridge, and seen what a wreck he had become, discovered the fatal cause, and took courage to remonstrate by letter. Coleridge makes no concealment, pleads guilty to the evil habit, and confesses that he is utterly miserable. Sadder letters were perhaps never written than those cries out of the depths of that agony. He tells Cottle that he had learned what "sin is against an imperishable being, such as is the soul of man; that he had had more than one glimpse of the outer darkness and the worm that dieth not; that if annihilation and the possibility of heaven were at that moment offered to his choice, he would prefer the former." More pitiful still is that letter to his friend Wade:-"In the one crime of opium, what crime have I not made myself guilty of? Ingratitude to my Maker; and to my benefactors injustice; and unna Strange and sad as it is to think that one so gifted should have fallen so low, it is hardly less strange that from that degradation he should ever have been enabled to rise. The crisis seems to have come about the time when those letters passed between Cottle and him in 1814. For some time there followed a struggle against the tyrant vice, by various means, but all seemingly ineffectual. At last he voluntarily arranged to board himself with the family of Mr. Gilman, a physician, who lived at Highgate in a retired house, in an airy situation, surrounded by a large garden. It was in April, 1816, that he first entered this house at Highgate, which continued to be his home for eighteen years till his death. The letter in which he opens his grief to Mr. Gilman, and commends himself to his care, is very striking, showing at once his strong desire to overcome the inveterate habit, and his feeling of inability to do so, unless he were placed under a watchful eye and external restraint. In this home he learned to abandon opium, and here, though weighed down by ever increasing bodily infirmity, and often by great mental depression, he found on the whole "the best quiet to his course allowed." That the vice was overcome might be inferred from the very fact that his life was so prolonged. And though statements to the contrary have been made from quarters whence they might least have been expected, yet we know from the most trustworthy authorities now living, that there was no ground for these statements, and that the friends of Coleridge who had best access to the truth, believed that at Highgate he obtained that self-mastery which he sought. No doubt, the habit left a bane behind it, a body shattered, and a mind shorn of much of its power for continuous effort, ever recurring seasons of despondency, and visitings of self-reproach for so much of life wasted, so great powers given, and so little done. Still, under all these drawbacks, he laboured earnestly to redeem what of life remained; and most of what is satisfactory to remember of his life belongs to these last eighteen years. It was a time of gathering up of the fragments that remained-of ed his posthumous works, viz., the four volumes of Literary Remains, and the small volume on the inspiration of Scripture, entitled Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit. saving splinters washed ashore from a mighty | contains his own thoughts on the grounds of wreck. But to this time, such as it is, we morality and religion, and of the relation of are indebted for most of that by which these to each other, along with his own Coleridge is now known to men, and by views on some of the main doctrines of the which, if at all, he has benefited his kind. faith. The last work that appeared during During these years the great religious change his lifetime was that on Church and State, that had long been going on was completed published in 1830. After his death appearand confirmed. As far back as 1800 his adherence to the Hartleian philosophy and his belief in Unitarian theology had been shaken. By 1805 he was in some manner a believer in the Trinity, and had entered on a closer study of Scripture, especially of St. Paul and St. John. There were in him, as De Quincey observed, the capacity of love and faith, of self-distrust, humility, and childlike docility, waiting but for time and sorrow to bring them out. Such a discipline the long ineffectual struggle with his infirmity supplied. The sense of moral weakness and of sin, working inward contrition, made him seek for a more practical, upholding faith, than his early years had known. And so he learned that while the consistency of Christianity with right reason and the historic evidence of miracles are the outworks, yet that the vital centre of faith lies in the believer's feeling of his great need, and the experience that the redemption which is in Christ is what he needs; that it is the "sorrow rising from beneath and the consolation meeting it from above," the actual trial of the faith in Christ, which is its ultimate aud most satisfying evidence. With him, too, as with so many before, it was credidi, ideoque intellexi. The Highgate time was also the period of his most prolonged and undisturbed study. Among much other reading, the old English divines were diligently perused and commented on; and his criticisms and reflections on them fill nearly the whole of the third and fourth volumes of his Literary Remains. A discriminating, often a severe critic of these writers, he was still a warm admirer, in this a striking contrast to Arnold, who certainly unduly depreciated them. Almost the whole of his prose works were the product of this time. First the Two Lay Sermons, published in 1816 and 1817. Then the Biographia Literaria, published in 1817, though in part composed some years before. In 1818 followed the recast and greatly enlarged edition of The Friend; and in 1825 he gave to the world the most mature of all his works, the Aids to Reflection. Incorporated especially with the earlier part of this work, are selections from the writings of Archbishop Leighton, of which he has said that to him they seemed "next to the inspired Scriptures, yea, as the vibration of that once-struck hour remaining on the air." The main substance of the work, however, N-10 VOL. XLIII. It is by these works alone, incomplete as many of them are, that posterity can judge of him. But the impression of pre-eminent genius which he left on his contemporaries was due not so much to his writings as to his wonderful talk. Printed books have made us undervalue this gift, or at best regard it more as a thing of display than as a genuine thought-communicating power. But as an organ of teaching truth, speech is older than bocks, and for this end Plato, among others, preferred the living voice to dead letters. Measured by this standard, Coleridge had no equal in his own, and few in any age. How his gift of discourse in his younger days arrested Hazlitt and De Quincey, we have already seen; and in his declining years at Highgate, when bodily ailments allowed, and during the pauses of study and writing, fuller and more continuous than ever the marvellous monologue went on. Some faint echoes of what then fell from him have been caught up and preserved in the well-known Table Talk, by his nephew and son-in-law, Henry Nelson Coleridge, who in his preface has finely described the impression produced by his uncle's conversation on congenial listeners. To that retirement at Highgate flocked, as on a pilgrimage, most of what was brilliant in intellect or ardent in youthful genius at that day. Edward Irving, Julius Hare, Sterling, and many more who might be named, were among his frequent and most devoted listeners. Most came to wonder, and hear, and learn. But some came and went to shrug their shoulders, and pronounce it unintelligible; or in after years to scoff, as Mr. Carlyle. Likely enough this latter came craving a solution of some pressing doubt or bewildering enigma; and to receive instead a prolonged and circuitous disquisition must to his then mood of mind have been tantalizing enough. But was it well done, O great Thomas! for this, years afterwards, to jeer at the old man's enfeebled gait, and caricature the tones of his voice? In the summer of 1833 Coleridge was seen for the last time in public, at the meeting of the British Association at Cambridge. Next year, on the 25th of July, he died in Mr. Gilman's house in The Grove, Highgate, which had been so long his home, and was laid hard by in his last resting-place within the old churchyard by the roadside. . Twelve days before his death, not knowing it to be so near, he wrote to his godchild this remarkable letter, which, gathering up the sum of his whole life's experience, reads like his unconscious epitaph on himself:"MY DEAR GODCHILD,Years must pass before you will be able to read with an understanding heart what I now write; but I trust that the all-gracious God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, who, by his only begotten Son (all mercies in one sovereign mercy), has redeemed you from the evil ground, and willed you to be born out of darkness, but into light; out of death, but into life; out of sin, but into righteousness, even into the Lord our Righteousness,-I trust that He will graciously hear the prayers of your dear parents, and be with you as the spirit of health and growth in body and mind. I, too, your godfather, have known what the enjoyments and advantages of this life are, and what the more refined pleasures which learning and intellectual power can be stow; and with the experience which more than threescore years can give, I now, on the eve of my departure, declare to you (and earnestly pray that you may hereafter live and act on the conviction) that health is a great blessing, competence obtained by honourable industry a great blessing, and a great blessing it is to have kind, faithful, and loving friends and relatives; but that the greatest of all blessings, as it is the most ennobling of all privileges, is to be indeed a Christian. But I have been likewise, through a large portion of my later life, a sufferer, sorely afflicted with bodily pains, languors, and infirmities; and for the last three or four years have, with a few and brief intervals, been confined to a sick-room, and at this moment, in great weakness and heaviness, write from a sickbed, hopeless of a recovery, yet without prospect of a speedy removal; and I, thus on the very brink of the grave, solemnly bear witness to you, that the Almighty Redeemer, most gracious in His promises to them that truly seek Him, is faithful to perform what He hath promised, and has preserved, under all my pains and infirmities, the inward peace that passeth all understanding, with the supporting assurance of a reconciled God, who will not withdraw His Spirit from me in the conflict, and in His own time will deliver me from the Evil One. "Oh, my dear godchild! eminently blessed are those who begin early to seek, fear, and love their God, trusting wholly in the righteousness and mediation of their Lord, Redeemer, Saviour, and everlasting High Priest, Jesus Christ. "Oh, preserve this as a legacy and bequest from your unseen godfather and friend, "S. T. COLERIDGE." And now, perhaps, we cannot more fitly close this sketch than in those affectionate words of his nephew, the faithful defender of the memory of his great uncle : Coleridge was a frail mortal. He had indeed "Coleridge! blessings on his gentle memory! his peculiar weaknesses as well as his unique powers; sensibilities that an averted look would rack, a heart which would beat calmly in the tremblings of an earthquake. He shrank from mere uneasiness like a child, and bore the preparatory agonies of his death-attack like a martyr. He suffered an almost life-long punishment for his errors, whilst the world at large has the unwithering fruits of his labours, and his genius, and his sufferings." If we have traced in any measure aright the course of Coleridge's life, no more is needed to show what were his failings and his errors. It more concerns us to ask what permanent fruit of all that he thought, and did, and suffered under the sun, there still remains, now that he has lain more than thirty years in his grave. To answer this fully is impossible in the case of any man, much more in the case of one who has been a great thinker rather than a great doer; for inany of his best ideas will have so melted into the general atmosphere of thought, that it will be hard to separate them from the complex whole, and trace them back to their original source. But the abler men of his own generation were not slow to confess how much they owed to him. In poetry, Sir Walter Scott acknowledged himself as indebted to him for the opening keynote of The Lay of the Last Minstrel. In the metre, sentiment, and drapery of that first canto, it is not difficult to trace the influence of Christabel, then unpublished, but well known. Wordsworth, aloof from his contemporaries, and self-sufficing as he was, felt Coleridge to be his equal-"the only wonderful man I have ever known." Arnold, at a later day, called him the greatest intellect that England had produced within his memory, and shared with, perhaps learned from, him, some of his leading thoughts, as that the identification of the church with the clergy was "the first and fundamental apostasy." Dr. Newman pointed to Coleridge's works long ago as a proof that the minds of men in England were then yearning for something higher and deeper than what had satisfied the last age. Julius Hare speaks of him as "the great religious philosopher, to whom the mind of our generation in England owes more than to any other man." Mr. Maurice has everywhere spoken with deeper reverence of him than of any other teacher of these later times. This letter was written on the 13th, and he Mr. Mill has said that "no one has contridied on the 25th day of July. buted more to shape the opinions among younger men, who can be said to have any opinions at all." These words were written five-and-twenty years ago. Whether he still exercises anything of the same influence over younger men seems more than doubtful. Very possibly Mr. Mill himself, and others of that way of thinking, may have superseded him. Yet though his name may have grown less, his works remain, and may be tested even by another generation that knew not Coleridge, by the thoughts which they contain. were some special wants, arising either from natural temperament or early education, which marred or impoverished his full poetic equipment. He had never lived much in the open air; he had no large storehouse of facts or images, either drawn from observation of outward nature, or from more than common acquaintance with any modes of human life or sides of human character, such as Wordsworth and Scott in different ways had. It was not the nature of his mind to dwell lovingly on concrete things, but rather, These works are most of them more or less by its strong generalizing bias, to be borne fragmentary, and this forms one difficulty in off continually into the abstract. Therefore rightly estimating them. Another, and per- we cannot think that Coleridge would have haps greater, lies in the width, we had done more, either for the delight or the benealmost said the universality, of their range. fit of mankind, if he had stuck wholly to Most original thinkers have devoted them-poetry, or that he did otherwise than fulfil selves to but a few lines of inquiry. Cole- his destiny by giving way to his philosophic ridge's thought may be almost said to have instinct. been as wide as life. To apply to himself the word which he first coined, or rather translated, from some obscure Byzantian, to express Shakspeare's quality, he was a "myriad-minded man." He touched being at almost every point, and wherever he touched it, he opened up some shafts of truth hitherto unperceived. He who would fully estimate Coleridge's contributions to thought would have to consider him as a poet, a critic, a political philosopher, a moralist, and a theologian. But without hazarding anything like so large an attempt, a few brief remarks may be offered on what he has done in some of these so widely different paths. His daughter has said that he had four poetic epochs, representing, more or less, boyhood, early manhood, middle, and declining life. To trace these carefully is not for this place. The juvenile poems, those of the first epoch, though showing here and there hints of the coming power, contain, as a whole, nothing which would make them live, were it not for what came afterwards. He himself. has said that these poems are disfigured by too great exuberance of double epithets, and by general turgidity. These mark, perhaps, the tumult of his thick-thronging thoughts, struggling to utter themselves with force and freshness, yet not quite disengaged from the old commonplaces of poetic diction, from "eve's dusky car," and from those frigid personifications of abstract qualities in which the former age delighted. Of these carly poems, one of the most interesting is that on the death of Chatterton, in which, though the form somewhat recalls the odes of Collins and Gray, his native self ever here and there breaks through. Some of them are pensive with his early sorrow, others fierce and turbid with his revolutionary fervours. The longest and most important, styled Religious Musings, which Bowles ranked so high, might easily, notwithstanding some fine thoughts, suggest one of his rhapsodies in a Unitarian chapel cut into blank verse. The religious sentiments it contains are frigid and bombastic; the politics denunciatory of exist things, of It was as a poet that Coleridge was first known, and the wish has many times been expressed that he had continued to be so, and never tried philosophy. No doubt he had imagination enough, as some one has said, to have furnished an outfit for a thousand poets, and it may be that Christabel will be read longer than any prose work he has written. But this belongs both to the substance and the form of all poetry that is perfect after its kind. Gray's Elegy will probably survive longer, and will certainly be more widely read, than the best philosophic pieces of Hume, Berkeley, or Butler. This, however, does not prove that these thinkers have not done more for human thought than that most graceful of poets. Again, it may be that imagination such as Coleridge's may be as legitimately employed in interpenetrating ing and quickening the reason, and revivifying domains of philosophy, which are apt to grow narrow or dead through prosaic formalism, as in purely poetic creation. Moreover, there were perhaps in Coleridge some special powers of fine analysis and introvertive speculation, which seem to have predestined him for other work than poetry; just as there "Warriors, lords, and priests, all the sore ills That vex and desolate our mortal life." They contain, however, some true thoughts, well put, though tinged with his Revolution dreams, on the good and evil that have sprung out of the institution of property, and a fine apostrophe to all the sin-defiled and sorrow-laden ones, whose day of deliverance | And closes with these grand lines :— yet waits. It had been well if the poems of the second period, which were mostly written during the Bristol and Nether Stowey periods, and now make up the chief part of the Sibylline Leaves, had been arranged in the order in which they were composed. This would have thrown much light on them, arising as they do out of either the events of the time or of Coleridge's personal circumstances. Compared with those of the former period, the stream flows more even and unbroken. The crude philosophy has all but disappeared, the blank verse is now more fused and melodious, the rhythm of thought more mellow, the religious sentiment, where it does appear, no longer reasoning, but meditative, is more chastened and deep. These poems, it must have been, which were to De Quincey "the ray of a new morning, a revealing of untrodden worlds, till then unsuspected amongst men." Such Wilson found them, and so in a measure they have been to many since. But in re-reading them, after an interval of years, this is somehow felt less vividly. Is it that time has weakened the relish for poetry, or that the new fragrance they once gave forth has so filled the poetic atmosphere that it makes itself now less distinctly felt? Whichever way it be, these accidents of personal feeling do not affect their real worth. Of two fine poems written at Clevedon, the one on the "Eolian Harp," contains a passage that may be com pared with a well-known, some might call it, a Pantheistic, one in Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey." The other, "Reflections on leaving a Place of Retirement," breathes a beautiful, though too brief, spirit of happiness and content. In the same gentle vein are the "Lines to his Brother George," and "Frost at Midnight," in which the blank verse is finely fused and nearly perfect. But higher and of wider compass are the three political poems, the ode on "The Departing Year," written at the close of 1796, "France," an ode, written in February, 1797, and "Tears in Solitude," in 1798. The last of these opens and closes with some of his best blank verses, full of lambent light and his own exquisite music, though the middle is troubled with somewhat intemperate politics, pamphleteeringly expressed. The ode "France," when his fond hopes of the Revolution ended in disappointment, is a strain of noblest poetry. It opens with a call on the clouds, the waves, the sun, the sky, all that is freest in nature, to bear witness "With what deep worship I have still adored The spirit of divinest liberty." on "O Liberty with profitless endeavour ever Didst breathe thy soul in forms of human Alike from all, howe'er they praise thee And there, I felt thee! on that sea-cliff's Whose pines, scarce travell'd by the breeze above, Had made one murmur with the distant surge! Yes! while I stood and gazed, my temples bare, And shot my being through earth, sea, and Possessing all things with intensest love, Equal, perhaps, to any of the above, are the lines he addressed to Wordsworth, after hearing that poet read aloud the first draft of "The Prelude :" "An Orphic song indeed, A song divine, of high and passionate thoughts, To their own music chanted! ... Wert still before my eyes, and round us both Of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel, the two prime creations of the Nether Stower period, and indeed of all Coleridge's poetry, nothing need here be said. Time has now stamped these as after their kind unsurpassed by any creation of his own generation, or perhaps of any generation of England's poetry. The view with which these two masterpieces were begun, as the two brother poets walked on Quantock, has been detailed elsewhere. Coleridge was to choose supernatural or romantic characters, and clothe them from his own imagination with a human interest and a semblance of truth. It would be hard to analyse the strange witchery that is in both, especially in Christabel: the language, so simple and natural, yet so aerially musical, the rhythm so original, yet so fitted to the story, and the glamour over all, a glamour so peculiar to the poet's self. The first part |