網頁圖片
PDF
ePub 版

Call'd to such office by the peaceful sound
Of sabbath bells; and ye, who sleep in earth,
All cares forgotten, round its hallow'd walls!
For you, in presence of this little band.
Gather'd together on the green hill-side,
Your Pastor is embolden'd to prefer
Vocal thanksgivings to th' eternal King;

Whose love, whose counsel, whose commands, have made
Your very poorest rich in peace of thought
And in good works; and him, who is endow'd
With scantiest knowledge, master of all truth
Which the salvation of his soul requires.
Conscious of that abundant favour shower'd
On you, the children of my humble care,
And this dear land, our country, while on Earth
We sojourn, have I lifted up my soul,
Joy giving voice to fervent gratitude.
These barren rocks, your stern inheritance;
These fertile fields, that recompense your pains;
The shadowy vale, the sunny mountain-top;
Woods waving in the wind their lofty heads,
Or hush'd; the roaring waters, and the still,-
They see the offering of my lifted hands,
They hear my lips present their sacrifice,
They know if I be silent, morn or even:
For, though in whispers speaking, the full heart
Will find a vent; and thought is praise to Him,—
Audible praise, to Thee, omniscient Mind,
From whom all gifts descend, all blessings flow!"
This vesper-service closed, without delay,
From that exalted station to the plain
Descending, we pursued our homeward course,
In mute composure, o'er the shadowy lake,
Under a faded sky. No trace remain'd
Of those celestial splendours; grey the vault,-
Pure, cloudless ether; and the star of eve
Was wanting; but inferior lights appear'd
Faintly, too faint almost for sight; and some
Above the darken'd hills stood boldly forth
In twinkling lustre, ere the boat attain'd

Her mooring-place; where, to the sheltering tree,
Our youthful Voyagers bound fast her prow,

With prompt yet careful hands. This done, we paced
The dewy fields; but ere the Vicar's door

Was reach'd, the Solitary check'd his steps;
Then, intermingling thanks, on each bestow'd

A farewell salutation; and, the like
Receiving, took the slender path that leads
To the one cottage in the lonely dell:

But turn'd not without welcome promise made
That he would share the pleasures and pursuits
Of yet another Summer's day, not loth

To wander with us through the fertile vales,
And o'er the mountain-wastes. "Another sun,"
Said he, "shall shine upon us, ere we part;
Another sun, and peradventure more;

If time, with free consent, be yours to give,
And season favours."

To enfeebled Power,
From this communion with uninjured Minds,
What renovation had been brought; and what
Degree of healing to a wounded spirit,
Dejected, and habitually disposed

To seek, in degradation of the Kind,
Excuse and solace for her own defects;
How far those erring notions were reform'd;
And whether aught, of tendency as good
And pure, from further intercourse ensued;
This if delightful hopes, as heretofore,
Inspire the serious song, and gentle Hearts
Cherish, and lofty Minds approve the past -
My future labours may not leave untold.

2 When I reported this promise of the Solitary, and long after, it was my wish, and I might say intention, that we should resume our wanderings, and pass the Bor ders into his native country, where, as I hoped, he might witness, in the society of the Wanderer, some religious ceremony which, by recalling to his mind the days of his early childhood, when he had been present on such occasions with his parents and nearest kindred, might have dissolved his heart into tenderness, and so have done more towards restoring the Christian faith in which he had been educated, and, with that, contentedness and even cheerfulness of mind, than all that the Wanderer and Pastor, by their several addresses and effusions, had been able to effect. An issue like this was in my intentions. But, alas!

"Mid the wreck of is and was,

Things incomplete and purposes betray'd

Make sadder transits o'er thought's optic glass

Than noblest objects utterly decayed."-Author's Notes, 1843.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE:

SKETCH OF HIS LIFE.

[ocr errors]

THIS "wonderful man was the youngest of ten children, and was born Oct. 21, 1772, nearly two and a half years later than Wordsworth. The place of his birth was in the parish of Ottery St. Mary's, Devonshire. His father, the Rev. John Coleridge, was the vicar of that parish, and was living in the vicarage. He is said to have been very studious, absorbed in books, unknowing and regardless of the world and its ways, of simple character and primitive manners, and commonly known as "the absent man." Notwithstanding his oddities, he was a good faithful Christian pastor, much beloved and respected by his flock. Though Samuel was only seven years old when his father died, he remembered him to the last with deep reverence and love: "O, that I might so pass away if, like him, I were an Israelite without guile! The image of my father- - my revered, kind, learned, simple-hearted father-is a religion to me." During his childhood, Coleridge never shared in the plays and games of his brothers, but sought refuge by his mother's side, to read his little books and listen to the talk of his elders. He had the simplicity and docility of a child, but never thought or spoke as a child. At the age of nine, he was removed to Christ's Hospital, London, a large charity school, intended, says Charles Lamb, who was there at the same time, "to keep those who yet hold up their heads in the world from sinking." Of this removal, Coleridge wrote long afterwards, "O, what a change, from home to this city school; depressed, moping, friendless, a poor orphan, half-starved!" It seems that for boys of his grade, what was then called "the lower school," the supply of food was at that time cruelly insufficient; and as he had no friends within reach, to make up the deficiency, his sufferings were sometimes very great. On holidays in Summer, the boys were very fond of going on bathing excursions to a stream called New River; and on one of those excursions Coleridge swam the river in his clothes, and let them dry on his back: this planted in him the seeds of those rheumatie pains which did so much to frustrate the large promise of his youth.

Coleridge, however, did not spend his time in idleness. Even then he was a great devourer of books; and this appetite was fed by a strange incident. One day, as he walked down the Strand, going with his arms as in the act of swimming, he touched the pocket of a passer-by. "What, so young and so wicked!" exclaimed the stranger, at the same time seizing him for a pickpocket. "I am not a pickpocket," said he; "I only thought I was Leander swimming the Hellespont.' The man was so struck with the reply, that, instead of handing him over to the police, he subscribed to a library, that Coleridge might thence have his full of books. In a short time he read right through the catalogue, and exhausted the library. Another circumstance put him upon devouring Greek, Latin, and English books on medicine; and he is said to have got by heart a whole Latin medical dictionary. This carried him on into a deep course of metaphysics; which set him for a time to sporting infidel. Dr. Bowyer, the Head-master, who was noted as a severe disciplinarian, on hearing of this, sent for Coleridge. "So, sirrah! you are an intidel, are you? Then I'll flog your infidelity out of you." Thereupon he gave him the severest, and as Coleridge used to say, the only just flogging he ever received.

504

Dr. Bowyer's instructions were always remembered by Coleridge with grateful affection. In his Biographia Literaria, he speaks of the Head-master as one who taught him to prefer Demosthenes to Cicero, Homer and Theocritus to Virgil, and Virgil to Ovid; who accustomed his pupils to compare Lucretius, Terence, and the purer poems of Catulus, not only with "the Roman poets of the silver, but even with those of the Augustan era, and, on grounds of plain sense and universal logic, to see the superiority of the former in the truth and nativeness both of their thoughts and diction." - In his sixteenth year, Coleridge's poetical genius began to put forth, and this in such a shape as seemed to mark him out for a life of poetry. While he was in the upper school, metaphysics and controversial theology struggled for some time for the mastery; but at last, owing to certain happy influences, poetry carried the day, and for some years was paramount. I must dismiss his life at Christ's Hospital with the following passage from Charles Lamb :

"Come back to my memory, like as thou wert in the day-spring of my fancies, with hope like a fiery column before thee, the dark pillar not yet turned, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Logician, Metaphysician, Bard! How have I seen the casual passer through the cloisters stand still, (while he weighed the disproportion between the speech and the garb of the young Mirandula,) to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of Jamblichus and Plotinus; for even then thou waxedst not pale at such philosophic draughts; or reciting Homer in his Greek, or Pindar; while the walls of the old Grey-Friars re-echoed the accents of the inspired charity boy!"

Coleridge entered Jesus College, Cambridge, in February, 1791, just a month after Wordsworth had left the University. And in his case, as in that of Wordsworth, it soon appeared that Cambridge was not the place for him, or he was not for the place. He never made much headway there. As the French Revolution was then in full carcer, he plunged into politics, and was carried away with the prevailing frenzy. "In the general conflagration," says he, "my feelings and imagination did not remain unkindled. I should have been ashamed rather than proud of myself, if they had." At length, the pressure of some college debts, incurred through his own inexperience, drove him to despondency. He went to London, and there seeing an advertisement for recruits to the 15th regiment of Light Dragoons, he enlisted as a private under the name of Comberbach, and went to drilling in military horsemanship. For the grooming of his horse, and other like offices, he was indebted to his comrades, with whom he was a great favourite. He repaid them by writing all their letters to their wives and sweethearts. In the stable, he had written under his saddle, the words, "Eheu, quam infortuni miserrimum est fuisse felicem!" This was seen by a captain who had Latin enough to translate it, and heart enough to feel it. About the same time he was seen by an old Cambridge acquaintance, who informed his friends: so, after serving some four months, he was bought off, and returned to college; where he stayed but a short time, and finally left in June, 1794, without taking a degree.

Soon after, he fell in with Southey, and struck up a warm friendship with him; and the two went to live at Bristol. Though their characters were vastly different, their tastes and opinions were in full accord. Both were then enthusiastically democratic in politics and Unitarian in religion; and Southey at once responded to the day-dream of Pantisocracy which Coleridge opened to him. This was a plan for founding a community in America, where a band of brothers were to have all things in common, and selfishness was to be unknown. The land was to be tilled by the common toil of the men; their wives, for all were to be married, were to do all the household work; and abundant leisure was to remain for literature and social intercourse. The banks of the Susquehanna were to be the place of this earthly paradise; chosen, it is said, more for the melody of the name than for any known advantages. But they could not dream money into their pockets, and without money the scheme would not go.

Early in 1795 it was given up; and in the Fall of that year the two young men were married, Coleridge to Sarah Fricker, and Southey to her sister Edith.

The next few years were mainly spent by Coleridge in various attempts to solve the rather tough problem of bread and butter. First he tried lecturing to the Bristol people on the political subjects of the day and on religious ques tions. Then he tried the publication of a weekly miscellany. Neither of these brought in the expected returns. The third enterprise was the publication of his Juvenile Poems, in 1796, for the copyright of which he received thirty guineas. His next undertaking seemed at first to promise something better. He ordained himself to the ministry, and engaged to preach from time to time in the Unitarian chapels in the neighbourhood of Bristol. In this office he continued for some time, taking his texts from the Bible, but his real subjects from the political events of the time. At Birmingham he was heard by Hazlitt, who thus recorded the matter:

“It was in January, 1798, that I rose one morning before daylight, to walk ten miles in the mud to hear this celebrated person preach. Never, the longest day I have to live, shall I have such another walk as that cold, raw, comfortless one. When I got there the organ was playing the 100th Psalm, and when it was done Mr. Coleridge arose and gave out his text, 'He departed again into a mountain himself alone.' As he gave out this text, his voice rose like a stream of rich distilled perfumes; and when he came to the last two words, which he pronounced loud, deep, and distinct, it seemed to me, who was then young, as if the sound had echoed from the bottom of the human heart, and as if that prayer might have floated in solemn silence through the universe. The preacher then launched into his subject, like an eagle dallying with the wind. For myself, I could not have been more delighted if I had heard the music of the spheres. Poetry and Philosophy had met together, Truth and Genius had embraced, under the eye and sanction of religion. This was even beyond my hopes."

Of the first meeting and life-long friendship of Coleridge and Wordsworth, some account is given in the Sketch of Wordsworth's Life. Wordsworth with his sister was then living at Racedown in Dorsetshire, and in 1797 Coleridge removed with his family from Bristol, and took up his abode at Nether Stowey, under the Quantock hills. Thus the two poets were settled within easy reach of each other; and, mainly for the sake of being still nearer to Coleridge, Wordsworth soon after removed to Alfoxden.

I must here quote Miss Wordsworth's description of Coleridge, written to a friend who had left Racedown some time before: "You had a great loss in not seeing Coleridge. He is a wonderful man. His conversation teems with soul, mind, and spirit. Then he is so benevolent, so good-tempered, and cheertui, and, like William, interests himself so much about every little trifle. At first I thought him very plain, that is, for about three minutes: he is pale, thin, has a wide mouth, thick lips, and not very good teeth, longish, loose-growing, halfcurling, rough, black hair. But, if you hear him speak for five minutes, you think no more of them. His eye is large and full, not very dark, but grey,such an eye as would receive from a heavy soul the dullest expression; but it speaks every emotion of his animated mind: it has more of the poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling' than I ever witnessed. He has fine dark eyebrows, and an overhanging forehead."

While living at Nether Stowey, Coleridge shot up at once into poetic manhood. The Ancient Mariner, the first part of Christabel, and several of his best smaller poems were written there. In 1798, the Wedgwoods settled on him £150 a year for life; which enabled him to undertake a tour on the Continent, as he had for some time desired to do. Before this, however, we have one item which is sadly significant in reference to his subsequent life. He was troubled with violent neuralgic pains, which threatened to overpower him. "But I took," says he, "between sixty and seventy drops of laudanum, and

« 上一頁繼續 »