Coleridge had decided to marry Sara. Though his addresses to her had at first been paid ‘from Principle not Feeling’, now his heart was engaged: ‘I love and I am beloved, and I am happy!’ He had found a cottage for them at Clevedon, a dozen or so miles west of the city, overlooking the Bristol Channel, for the modest rent of £5 per year. There they would live with George Burnett, the object of the Susquehanna delayed but not yet wholly abandoned. There Coleridge set ‘The Eolian Harp’, the first of what have since become known as his ‘conversation poems’, written in blank verse and usually addressed to an intimate companion, in which contemplation of nature evokes associated feelings, and leads to the resolution of an emotional or psychological problem. It would be hard to overstate the influence of these poems on Wordsworth and the later Romantic poets, and indeed on lyric poets ever since.40 Some critics have argued that they are not so original as has sometimes been claimed; that Coleridge drew on earlier poets such as Cowper and Thomson. But many great writers have plundered the past. And even if this new style of poetry did have its antecedents, it was Coleridge’s conversation poems that shaped the future.
‘The Eolian Harp’ opens with Coleridge seated, Sara’s cheek resting on his arm, outside the cottage which will be theirs when they are married, gazing up at the evening sky. The scent of flowering plants fills the air, while the sea murmurs in the distance. Sensuousness permeates the poem, suffusing it with tender eroticism. Everything is in harmony, and Coleridge meditates on the conceit of the Aeolian harp, a stringed instrument that plays as the wind blows though it. Coleridge was fascinated by Hartley’s* belief that all sensation in the body takes place by means of vibrations along the nerves, like the strings of a musical instrument, and that each vibration leaves a trace that can be detected by the memory. Coleridge imagines ‘all of animated Nature’ as ‘organic harps’ that ‘tremble into thought’ as a divine ‘intellectual breeze’ blows through them. In the conclusion of the poem, Sara gently bursts the philosophical bubbles that arise within his ‘unregenerate mind’, and in doing so, lovingly leads this ‘sinful and most miserable man’ back to his maker. Thus erotic fulfilment is linked with redemption; the conflict between sacred and profane love is resolved.
On 4 October† they were married in Bristol’s St Mary Redcliffe, the vast church where Chatterton had claimed to have found Rowley’s manuscripts. Southey was not present at the wedding. He was still in an agony of indecision. He could not face Coleridge; they passed each other in the street without acknowledgement. In a letter he accused Coleridge of having withdrawn his friendship – though to others he maintained that Coleridge was more his friend than ever. Tongues were wagging in Bristol; Southey charged Coleridge with gross misrepresentation and wicked and calumnious falsehoods’. He complained to Grosvenor Charles Bedford that Coleridge had ‘behaved wickedly towards me’.41 Cottle attempted to reconcile them, without success. Southey’s uncle suggested an escape from his quandary: six months’ stay in Lisbon while he pondered his future. He hoped to prise his nephew away from an unfortunate attachment. Edith nobly pressed him to go, as did Southey’s mother. But he did not want it to be thought that he had abandoned Edith. Without telling his uncle, he married her ‘with the utmost privacy’ and left for Portugal a few days later.
Coleridge learned of this plan only a couple of days before. Wounded and angry, he sat down to denounce his former friend in a long, indignant, devastating letter:
O Selfish, money-loving Man! what Principle have you not given up? – Tho’ Death had been the consequence, I would have spit in that man’s Face and called him Liar, who should have spoken the last sentence concerning you, 9 months ago. For blindly did I esteem you. O God! That such a mind should fall in love with that low, dirty, gutter-grubbing Trull, WORLDLY PRUDENCE!!
To Robert Lovell, Southey had cited Coleridge’s indolence as his reason for quitting Pantisocracy, a thrust against a vulnerable part. ‘I have exerted myself more than I could have supposed myself capable,’ protested Coleridge – not just on his own behalf, but on Southey’s too. He instanced his contribution to Joan of Arc and his exertions to improve the remainder: ‘I corrected that and other Poems with greater interest, than I should have felt for my own.’ He had devoted his ‘whole mind and heart’ to Southey’s lectures: ‘you must be conscious, that all the Tug of Brain was mine: and that your Share was little more than Transcription’. He conceded that Southey wrote more easily:
The Truth is – You sate down and wrote – I used to saunter about and think what I should write. And we ought to appreciate our comparative Industry by the quantum of mental exertion, not by the particular mode of it: By the number of Thoughts collected, not by the number of Lines, thro’ which these Thoughts are diffused.
He retraced the history of their ‘connection’: ‘I did not only venerate you for your own Virtues, I prized you as the Sheet Anchor of mine!’ He detailed the ‘constant Nibblings’ that had ‘sloped your descent from Virtue’. Again and again, he said, he had been willing to give Southey the benefit of the doubt: ‘My Heart was never bent from you but by violent strength – and Heaven knows, how it leapt back to esteem and love you.’
Once Southey had allowed himself to be tempted by the Church, Coleridge had ceased to confide in him: ‘I studiously avoided all particular Subjects, I acquainted you with nothing relative to myself … I considered you as one who had fallen back into the Ranks … FRIEND is a very sacred appellation – You were become an Acquaintance, yet one for whom I felt no common tenderness.’ But now everything between them was at an end: ‘This will probably be the last time I shall have occasion to address you.’ He never expected to meet another whom he would love and admire so much. ‘You have left a large Void in my Heart – I know no man big enough to fill it.’42
Perhaps through Godwin, Wordsworth met Basil Montagu, a young lawyer who was reading for the Bar. Though near contemporaries at Cambridge, they seem not to have known each other then. Now they rapidly became friends. Montagu was the illegitimate son of the fourth Earl of Sandwich, then First Lord of the Admiralty, and his mistress, the singer Martha Ray; in 1779 she had been shot outside a theatre where she had been performing by a disappointed suitor, the Reverend James Hackman, vicar of Wiveton in Norfolk, who had been hanged as a result. The story of Montagu’s mother’s murder had been a sensational scandal, recently revived by James Boswell in his Life of Johnson (1791). Poor Montagu was dogged by tragedy; his wife, whom he married soon after quitting Cambridge – against the wishes of his father, who never spoke to him again* – had died in childbirth, leaving him with an infant son, also called Basil. In the wreck of his happiness Montagu was ‘misled by passions wild and strong’; but his careful new friend gently but firmly led him away from these. ‘I consider my having met Wm Wordsworth the most fortunate event of my life,’ Montagu wrote in a memoir.
Montagu introduced Wordsworth to another recent Cambridge graduate, Francis Wrangham, who like Montagu was taking pupils in order to make ends meet. In 1793 – the year of Frend’s trial – Wrangham had failed to obtain an expected Cambridge Fellowship because he was rumoured to be friendly to the French Revolution. Since then he had been ‘vegetating on a curacy’ in Cobham, Surrey, where Wordsworth and Montagu often visited him. Wrangham was another radical, and a would-be poet; he had been in correspondence about his poetry with Coleridge, whom he had known at Cambridge. Now he and Wordsworth began collaborating on a verse satire based on Juvenal – a scholarly form of protest, which Wordsworth later abandoned.
By the summer of 1795, shortage of funds was becoming acute. After almost six months in London, nothing had come of Wordsworth’s plans to write for the newspapers, and none of the money from Raisley Calvert’s legacy had yet materialised. Four and a half years after leaving Cambridge, Wordsworth still had no career, no income and no home of his own. Perhaps