"On the other hand," continued his friend, "the Unitarian Chapel people at Shrewsbury will pay me £120 a year to become their preacher: and that means that I give up literary work. I cannot combine both. Hitherto, as you know, I have refused to accept any remuneration for my sermons: to be a hireling is against my principles: when I go to Taunton or Bridgewater, I do it freely. But here are these two proposals, and I know not which to accept. I freely confess to you, Poole, what you probably know already,—that I am very seriously worried over money matters, and that I perceive I can never support my family by manual labour. My play Osorio, which Sheridan requested me to write for Drury Lane, has been rejected: I have no talent, I fear, for the drama. I am too tired after work in an evening to do any reviewing or writing. And now I am threatened by the prospect of Lloyd leaving us—that means the loss of our main income. A sort of calm hopelessness diffuses itself over my heart. Indeed, every mode of life which promised me bread and cheese has been torn away from me: but God remains."
This long speech was not without effect upon the kind-hearted Poole. Pocketing certain twinges of what in Charles Lloyd he had defined as jealousy, he asked, "And what does your friend Mr. Wordsworth say? You are so constantly in his company, that I should suppose he would be a very fit judge of the best course for you to take."
"Oh, Wordsworth,—well, need you ask? Of course he urges me to accept the Wedgwoods' generosity, and devote myself to poetical work alone. But my mind misgives me, lest in doing that I should be turning my back upon the service of God. Am I not more efficacious for good as a preacher than as a versifier?"
"We-ell, I don't know," muttered Poole, "We can all read your poems, you see, but we can't all follow you about the west-country to listen to you,—we can't track you to chapels at Taunton, or Bridgewater, or Shrewsbury, however eloquent you may be. Not but what," he added with a sly twinkle, "you do a pretty fairish deal of preaching in private."
"That's what Lamb said," remarked Coleridge, "I asked him if he had ever heard me preach, and he said, 'M-my d-dear f-fellow, I n-n-never heard you do anything else!' A trifle flippant at times, is our good Lamb.... But who's this?"—and he sprang from his seat with unwonted energy.
"Oh, it's your friends from Alfoxden," said Poole: and, with the resigned expression of one relegated to a back seat, he picked up the empty flip-jug and glasses, and returned to his own domain.
Two people were coming down Coleridge's garden,—a "gaunt and Don-Quixote-like" man in striped pantaloons and a brown fustian jacket, and a slender, pleasing, dark-haired woman in her early twenties. They were William and Dorothy Wordsworth: names dearer than any to the contemplative heart of Coleridge. For nearly a year they had been tenants of Alfoxden Manor-house, about a mile away among the hills: for nearly a year they had been his constant companions, his solace, his inspiration. To their example and society he owed, as he allowed, the awakening and consummation of his genius: for although the "magic and melody" of his verse were all his own,—that magic unsurpassed and unsurpassable, "altogether beyond price," and that melody,
Such a soft floating witchery of sound
As twilight Elfins make, when they at eve
Voyage on gentle gales from Fairy Land,
Where melodies round heavy-dropping flowers,
Footless and wild, like birds of Paradise,
Nor pause, nor push, hovering on untam'd wing!
(The Eolian Harp)
yet it was Wordsworth who had helped him to "find himself," and it was Dorothy whose influence on both men called out their best and deepest. "Three people but one soul," Coleridge had called this ideally-united trio of himself and his friends; and as "three people with one soul," they "walked on seaward Quantock's heathy hills," and had every thought in common.
"We are off for a long walk this lovely noon," explained Dorothy, "and taking our lunch with us: will you come, Mr. Coleridge?" A very hasty wash and brush, and a hurried goodbye to Sara, and the poet had forsaken a distasteful employment for a singularly congenial one. Over the hills and far away, he could postpone for the nonce every workaday question which troubled him, and, deep in the abstrusest consideration of poetry, or speculation of philosophy, could steep himself in the calm which was his ultimate desire.
He had a host of projects to discuss. He had planned, in collaboration with Wordsworth, a "great book of Man and Nature and Society, to be symbolized by a brook in its course from upland source to sea:" much on the lines of his own strophe from the German:
Unperishing youth!
Thou leapest from forth
The cell of thy hidden nativity;
Never mortal saw
The cradle of the strong one;
Never mortal heard
The gathering of his voices;
The deep-murmur'd charm of the son of the rock,
That is lisped evermore at his slumberless fountain.
There's a cloud at the portal, a spray-woven veil
At the shrine of his ceaseless renewing;
It embosoms the roses of dawn,
It entangles the shafts of the noon,
And into the bed of its stillness
The moonshine sinks down as in slumber,
That the son of the rock, that the nursling of heaven
May be born in a holy twilight!
He had begun the Ancient Mariner upon a previous walking-tour, also as a joint composition with the other poet, but had taken it into his own hands and finally completed it this spring. He had an immense proposal for an epic, which should take ten years for collecting material, five for writing and five for revising—nobody could accuse Coleridge of undue haste! He had undertaken a translation of Wieland's Oberon, which was likely to be more troublesome than remunerative. But most of all he desired to ascertain his friends' criticism on his newest fragment, Christabel: the bulk of his achievements were but fragmentary at the best.
GERALDINE IN THE FOREST.
"There she sees a damsel bright,
Drest in a silken robe of white,
That shadowy in the moonlight shone:
The neck that made that white robe wan,
Her stately neck, and arms were bare.
· · · · · · And wildly glittered here and there
The gems entangled in her hair."
(Christabel).
Coleridge's mind was that extremely rara avis in terra, which combines the artistic with the philosophic temperament—two inherently-opposed qualities. His acute and sensitive perceptions of sound, sight, colour and romantic possibility did not in the least satisfy his heavy logical demands. Of art for art's sake he had the poorest opinion. He was of dual nature,—and where the philosopher, the metaphysician and the divine preponderated in him, they completely over-weighted the exquisite, ethereal imagination, which was so infinitely more precious, had he known it. And although in this golden year of his life, this annus mirabilis of his sojourn at Nether Stowey,—he was still allured to the marvellous, the strange and the supernatural, he sought to disguise his surrender to these phantasies, by clothing his desires in the garb of a severe philosophy of poetry. He decided, in concert with Wordsworth, that it would be well for him to undertake a series of poems in which, as he put it, "the incident and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural: and the excellence arrived at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency."
A cold and unproductive