On the morning after their arrival, Coleridge met with an accident which disabled him from walking during the whole of their stay. One evening, when they had left him for a few hours, he composed the poem, “This Lime-tree Bower my Prison,” in which he refers to his old friend, while watching him in fancy with his sister, winding and ascending the hills at a short distance, himself detained as if a prisoner:
”Yes! they wander on
In gladness all; but thou, methinks, most glad,
My gentle-hearted Charles! for thou hast pined
And hunger’d after nature, many a year;
In the great city pent, winning thy way
With sad yet patient soul, through evil, and pain,
And strange calamity! Ah! slowly sink
Behind the western ridge, thou glorious sun!
Shine in the slant beams of the sinking orb,
Ye purple heath flowers! richlier burn, ye clouds!
Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves!
And kindle, thou blue ocean! So my friend
Struck with deep joy may stand, as I have stood,
Silent with swimming sense; yea, gazing round
On the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem
Less gross than bodily; and of such hues
As veil the Almighty Spirit, when yet he makes
Spirits perceive his presence.”
During his residence here, Mr. William Hazlitt became acquainted with him, which is thus vividly recorded in the ‘Liberal’:
“My father was a dissenting minister at Wem, in Shropshire; and in the year 1798, Mr. Coleridge came to Shrewsbury, to succeed Mr. Rowe in the spiritual charge of a Unitarian congregation there. He did not come till late on the Saturday afternoon before he was to preach, and Mr. Rowe, who himself went down to the coach in a state of anxiety and expectation, to look for the arrival of his successor, could find no one at all answering the description, but a round-faced man, in a short black coat (like a shooting jacket), which hardly seemed to have been made for him, but who appeared to be talking at a great rate to his fellow-passengers. Mr. Rowe had scarcely returned to give an account of his disappointment, when the round-faced man in black entered, and dissipated all doubts on the subject, by beginning to talk. He did not cease while he stayed, nor has he since that I know of.
He held the good town of Shrewsbury in delightful suspense for three weeks that he remained there, ‘fluttering the proud Salopians like an eagle in a dovecot;’ and the Welsh mountains, that skirt the horizon with their tempestuous confusion, agree to have heard no such mystic sounds since the days of
‘High-born Hoel’s harp or soft Llewellyn’s lyre!’
My father lived ten miles from Shrewsbury, and was in the habit of exchanging visits with Mr. Rowe, and Mr. Jenkins of Whitchurch (nine miles further on), according to the custom of dissenting ministers in each other’s neighbourhood. A line of communication is thus established, by which the flame of civil and religious liberty is kept alive, and nourishes its mouldering fire unquenchable, like the fires in the Agamemnon of Æschylus, placed at different stations, that waited for ten long years to announce, with their blazing pyramids, the destruction of Troy.
Coleridge had agreed to come once to see my father, according to the courtesy of the country, as Mr. Rowe’s probable successor; but in the meantime I had gone to hear him preach the Sunday after his arrival. A poet and a philosopher getting up into a Unitarian pulpit to preach the gospel was a romance in these degenerate days, — which was not to be resisted.
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 this cold, raw, comfortless one, in the winter of the year 1798. ‘Il y a des impressions que ni le tems, ni les circonstances peuvent effacer. Dussé-je vivre des siècles entiers, le doux tems de ma jeunesse ne peut renaître pour moi, ni s’effacer jamais dans ma mémoire.’ When I got there, the organ was playing the 100th psalm; and, when it was done, Mr. Coleridge rose 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 two last words, which he pronounced loud, deep, and distinct, it seemed to me, who was then young, as if the sounds had echoed from the bottom of the human heart, and as if that prayer might have floated in solemn silence through the universe. The idea of St. John came into my mind, ‘of one crying in the wilderness, who had his loins girt about, and whose food was locusts and wild honey.’ The preacher then launched into his subject, like an eagle dallying with the wind. The sermon was upon peace and war — upon church and state — not their alliance, but their separation — on the spirit of the world, and the spirit of Christianity, not as the same, but as opposed to one another. He talked of those who had ‘inscribed the cross of Christ on banners dripping with human gore.’ He made a poetical and pastoral excursion, — and to show the fatal effects of war, drew a striking contrast between the simple shepherd-boy, driving his team afield, or sitting under the hawthorn, piping to his flock, as though he should never be old,’ and the same poor country lad, crimped, kidnapped, brought into town, made drunk at an alehouse, turned into a wretched drummer-boy, with his hair sticking on end with powder and pomatum, a long cue at his back, and tricked out in the finery of the profession of blood:
‘Such were the notes our once loved poet sung;’
and, 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 with the sanction of Religion. This was even beyond my hopes. I returned home well satisfied. The sun that was still labouring pale and wan through the sky, obscured by thick mists, seemed an emblem of the ‘good cause’; and the cold dank drops of dew, that hung half melted on the beard of the thistle, had something genial and refreshing in them —
…
“On the Tuesday following, the half-inspired speaker came. I was called down into the room where he was, and went half-hoping, half-afraid. He received me very graciously, and I listened for a long time without uttering a word, and did not suffer in his opinion by my silence. ‘For those two hours (he was afterwards pleased to say) he was conversing with W. H.’s forehead.’ His appearance was different from what I had anticipated from seeing him before. At a distance, and in the dim light of the chapel, there was to me a strange wildness in his aspect, a dusky obscurity, and I thought him pitted with the small-pox. His complexion was at that time clear, and even bright,
‘As are the children of yon azure sheen.’
His forehead was broad and high, as if built of ivory, with large projecting eyebrows, and his eyes rolling beneath them like a sea with darkened lustre.
‘A certain tender bloom his face o’erspread;’
a purple tinge, as we see it in the pale, thoughtful complexions of the Spanish portrait painters, Murillo and Velasquez. His mouth was rather open, his chin good-humoured and round, and his nose small.
Coleridge in his person was rather above the common size, inclining to the corpulent. His hair (now, alas! grey, and during the latter years of his life perfectly