Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 6.djvu/162

Rh 13(3 COLERIDGE Shortly afterwards a Cambridge friend recognized him, and informed some members of his family, who with difficulty procured his discharge. He returned for a short time to Cambridge, but quitted the university without a degree in 1794. In the same year he visited Oxford, and made the acquaintance of Southey, who continued through life, in spite of Coleridge s many misunderstandings, his firm friend and most devoted admirer. The French Revolution had stirred the mind of Southey to its depths. He received with rapture his new friend s scheme of Pantisocracy. On the banks of Susquehanna was to be founded a brotherly community, where selfishness was to be extinguished, and the virtues were to reign supreme. No funds were forthcoming, and in 1795, to the chagrin of Coleridge, the scheme was dropped. In October of the same year, Coleridge was married to Sarah Fricker, and took up his residence at Clevedon on the Bristol Channel. A few weeks afterwards Southey married a sister of Mrs Coleridge, and on the same day quitted England for Portugal. The cares of matrimony induced Coleridge to commenca lectures. The Bristol public did not encourage his efforts on politics and religion. Coleridge embodied these in his first prose publication, Condones ad Populnm. The book contained much invective against Pitt, and in after life he declared that with this exception, and a few pages involving philosophical tenets which he afterwards rejected, there was little or nothing he desired to retract In the course of a summer excursion at this period, he met for the first time the brother poet with whose name his own will be for ever associated. Wordsworth and his sister had established themselves at Eacedown in Dorsetshire, a retired spot, and it was here the friends first met. There are few things in literary history more remarkable than this meeting. The gifted Dorothy Wordsworth described Coleridge as &quot; thin and pale, the lower part of the face not good, wide mouth, thick lips, not very good teeth, longish, loose, half-curling, rough, black hair,&quot; but all was forgotten in the magic charm of his utterance. Words worth, who declared, &quot; The only wonderful man I ever knew was Coleridge,&quot; seems at once to have desired to see more of his new friend. He and his sister soon removed to Coleridge s neighbourhood, and in the most delightful and unrestrained intercourse the friends spent many happy days. It was the delight of each one to communicate to the other the productions of their minds, and the creative faculty of both poets was now at its best One evening, on the Quantock Hills, The Ancient Mariner first took shape. Coleridge was anxious to embody a dream of a friend, and the suggestion of the shooting of the albatroes came from Wordsworth. A joint volume was planned. The poetry of common life was to be the work of Words worth, while Coleridge was to indulge in romance. From this sprang the Lyrical Ballads, and after much cogitation the book was published by the amiable but gossiping bookseller at Bristol, Cottle, to whose reminiscences, often indulging too much in detail, we owe the account of this remarkable time. Coleridge projected a periodical called The Watchman, and undertook a journey, well described in the Biographia Literaria, to enlist subscribers. The Watchman had a brief life .of two months, and at this time, in the year 1796, the Juvenile Poems, for which Cottle, ahyays ready to help his literary friends, gave thirty guineas, appeared. The volume met with success, but at this time Coleridge began to think of becoming a Unitarian preacher, and abandoning literature for ever. Hazlitt has recorded his very favourable impression of a remarkable sermon delivered at Birmingham ; but there are other accounts of Coleridge s preaching not so enthusiastic. In 1798 an annuity, granted him by the brothers Wedgwood, led him to abandon his scheme of life. For many years he had desired to see the Continent, and in September of the same year the year in w r hich the Lyrical Ballads appeared in company with Wordsworth and his sister, he left England for Hamburg. A new period in Coleridge s life now began. He soon left the Wordsworths to attend lectures at Gottingen. A great intellectual movement had begun in Germany. Coleridge was soon in the full whirl of excitement. He learnt much from Blumenbach and Eichhorn, and took interest in all that was going on around him. During his stay of fourteen months in Germany, he made himself master of the language to such purpose that the translation of Wallenstein his first piece of literary work after his return to England was actually accomplished in six weeks. It was published in 1800, and, although it failed to make any impression on the ge-neral public, it became at once prized by Scott and others as it deserved. In several passages Coleridge has expanded and paraphrased the thought and expression of the original, but few, even amongst the greatest sticklers for accuracy, will be inclined to quarrel with the departure of the translator. It is matter for regret that a request to Coleridge that he should undertake to translate Faust never received serious attention from him. During the first two years of this century Coleridge wrote many papers for the Morning Post. He had vehemently opposed Pitt s policy, but a change came over the spirit of his mind, and he found himself separated from Fox on the question of a struggle with Napoleon. Much has been written of this political attitude, but there is no real reason to doubt his own account of the matter. Like the first Lord Minto, Mr Windham, and many other Whigs, he felt that all questions of domestic policy must at a time of European peril be postponed. From this time, however, his value for the ordered liberty of constitutional government increased ; and though never exactly to be found among the ranks of old-fashioned Constitutionalists, during the remainder of his life he kept steadily in view the principles which received their full exposition in his well-known work on Church and State, In the year 1801 Coleridge left London for the Lakes. His home was for a time with Southey. A temporary estrangement had entirely been forgotten, and Southey, it should be said, for many years extended to Coleridge s wife and family the shelter and care of true friendship. For fifteen years the record of Coleridge s life is a miserable history. He sank under the dominion of o ium. The Ode to Dejection and the poem of Youth and Age are sad evidences of the utter prostration of spirit, which was his terrible penalty for many a year. Few things are so sad to read as the letters in which he details the conse quences of his transgression. He was occasionally steu in London during the first years of this century, and wherever he appeared he was the delight of admiring circles. A visit to Malta in 1804, when for a short time he acted as secretary to the governor, and a brief stay at Bon.e in the following year, were the chief events of what may be called the opium period. In 1809 he published The Friend, and during that and the two following years he lectured on Shakespeare and education. The tragedy of Remorse was produced in 1813, and met with considerable success. Three years after this, the evil habit against which he had struggled bravely but ineffectually, deter mined him to enter the family of Mr Gillman, who lived at Highgate. The letter in which he discloses his misery to this kind and thoughtful man gives a real insight into his character. Under kind and judicious treatment the hour of mastery at last arrived. The shore was reached, but the vessel had been miserably shattered in its passage through the rocks. He hardly, for the rest of his life, ever left his