INTRODUCTION

I

ALTHOUGH Biographia Literaria did not see the light until July 1817, for its genesis we must go back just twenty years, to July 1797, in which month Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy paid their first visit to Coleridge and were his guests. for a fortnight at Nether Stowey, under the Quantock hills, in Somerset.

Since that fortnight has become for us a diuturnity, and that visit, planned by William and Dorothy for a summer jaunt, has passed into high prose and song, let us glance over the scene and the persons, beginning with the host.

Coleridge was nearing twenty-six. Some two-and-a-half years before, he had quitted Cambridge, without a degree, after an undergraduate career (in Jesus College) which comprised the Browne Gold Medal, an ungodly row in the Senate House, a bolt to London, an enlistment in the 15th Light Dragoonswhich gave him, for life, "a violent antipathy to soldiers and horses"-a penitential return, an admonishment by the Master (Dr Pearce) in the presence of the Fellows, further irregularities, and this second and final bolt. I owe it to an ancient and permanently respectable Society to add that not even the present Master and Fellows of Jesus could have treated Coleridge more tenderly than did their forerunners of 1794, who, though all sign of him was lost, obtained from Christ's Hospital, and themselves granted, a reprieve of another six months. But Cambridge was no cage for this bird, and he did not return to it. In the intervening two-years-and-a-half many things had happened to him. He had, with his Balliol friend Robert

C. B. L.

b

Southey, hatched out the famous project of Pantisocracy, whereby "twelve gentlemen of good education and liberal principles" were "to embark with twelve ladies in April next," and settle in some "delightful part of the new back settlements" of America: but it never advanced nearer towards what the present-day denizens of those settlements would call a "practical proposition" than interviewing a real-estate agent who strongly represented the banks of the Susquehanna as suitable "from its excessive beauty and security from hostile Indians, bisons, and mosquitos." "Literary characters," added the agent, "make money there." Coleridge had preached a good deal, too, at set times from pulpits and continuously when any company or single soul would listen. He had written The Fall of Robespierre in collaboration with Southey: had published a volume of lectures, and another of poems: had edited The Watchman, which ran to ten numbers, and had touted the Midlands for subscribers-with serio-comic results: had been crossed in love and, on the backwash of disappointment had been carried into marriage with Miss Sara Fricker, sister of Mrs Southey. The marriage, says Mr Dykes Campbell, was not made in Heaven: and since Southey largely engineered it, we may perhaps agree.

The lady was comely, affectionate, of domestic instincts, not above roughing it. She probably deserves scarce one-tenth of the blame for what happened in the end. With the proviso that Coleridge was ever what is called "a faithful husband," we may repeat of Mrs Coleridge what we remarked just now of Cambridge, that the cage was too narrow for the bird. But, for the time, all was bliss: improvident and impecunious, yet bliss notwithstanding. In September 1796-being, rather characteristically, away on a visit at the time-Coleridge heard that he was the father of a boy (afterwards christened Hartley): hurried home; and composed three sonnets in the tumult of his feelings.

He had been disappointed in a promise of the post of assistant editor of The Morning Chronicle, and again of a private tutorship to the sons of a Mrs Evans, near Derby. The boys were under trusteeship, and the trustees, for some reason objected to the arrangements: but the mother, in an affectionate parting "insisted on my acceptance of £95, and she had given Mrs Coleridge all her baby-clothes, which are, I suppose very valuable."

At this crisis in his affairs Coleridge turned to a friend who truly was one of the best fellows in the world-Thomas Poole. Most of us whose fortune has drawn them into any literary or artistic set or coterie have known in it-but not remarked until afterwards as memorable-some quiet comfortable man, whose attachment had nothing to do with any talent in writing or painting or conversing. He had somehow a sense that these things, beyond him, were just splendid, and the men who did them, splendid fellows. For himself, he could ride to hounds or knock up a hundred in average cricket: but here was something his admission to which he dumbly enjoyed as a privilege. For his contribution to the improvement of mankind, he had oftener been known to lend money than to be repaid. If, by efflux of time, we come to outlive any such coterie, to look back on it, the odds are that we find a retrospective glow in the heart for old So-and-so, not only as the best of the bunch, but as the quiet man the punctum indifferens to which its extravagances referred themselves for help in practical crises and for counsel, however inarticulate.

Such a man was Tom Poole, partner in his father's tannery at Nether Stowey,under the Quantocks: a young man of twentyeight, of strong character, alert interest in public affairs, and a heart as sound as God ever put into a Briton: who deserved, in short, to be what he is-the subject of one of the best small biographies in our language1. Like Coleridge and Southey, in whose marvellous talk he delighted, he sympathised with the

1 Thomas Poole and bis Friends: by Mrs Henry Sandford, 2 vols. 1888.

French Revolution up to the days of the Terror. In private affairs they knew him as a friend, to be trusted though the heavens should fall.

To Poole, then, Coleridge made appeal to find him a house at Stowey. "My anxieties eat me up.... I want consolationmy Friend! my Brother! write and console me." Poole reported a wayside cottage to let, with a garden behind it adjoining his own: but spoke poorly of the accommodation. Coleridge would let the accommodation go hang. "I will instruct the maid in cooking," he wrote; and, next day, that he would "keep no servant"-would even be "occasional nurse." Poole still doubted. Was it wise for the poet to bury himself in so remote a spot? This caused Coleridge "unexpected and most acute pain,' and he replied with a frantic letter that extends to ten pages in print. "No summary," justly observes Mr Dykes Campbell, "could do it the least justice." Poole engaged the cottage, and the Coleridges-papa, maman et bébé-were installed therein on the last day of 1796. The father looked around and announced to Poole, "Literature, though I shall never abandon it, will always be a secondary object with me. My poetic vanity and my political furor have been exhaled; and I would rather be an expert, self-maintaining gardener than a Milton, if I could not unite both." He seems to have repeated this in writing to Charles Lamb, eliciting the question, "And what does your worship know about farming?" Were it not better (queried Lamb) to be getting on with a projected Epic on the Origin of Evil, as something more in his friend's way?

Many word-portraits of Coleridge, as he was at this time or a little later, have come down to us: the best, of course, that incomparable one by Hazlitt in his essay My First Acquaintance with Poets. For this essay, it has been well said by the editor of the present volume, "the many who date an epoch in their own lives from a first reading of Biographia and Lyrical Ballads will always feel a peculiar affection.... It is Coleridge who is the

hero of the story, as he always will be to ardent youthColeridge in the dayspring of his fancies, with hope like a fiery pillar before him1." But let us see him as he struck one of his guests, Dorothy Wordsworth:

"You had a great loss," she wrote to a friend, "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 cheerful, and-like Williaminterests himself so much about every little trifle. At first I thought him very plain, that is for about three minutes. He is pale and 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 dark but gray, such an eye as would receive from a heavy soul the dullest expression, but it speaks every cmotion 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."

"Coleridge was still Mirandola, not yet Micawber" says Mr Sampson. But I seem to find hints of Micawber in the letters about the cottage: and here is a small significant entry of the previous year. He suffered from depression, and depression brought on neuralgia, for which (he writes to Poole)

I took between 60 and 70 drops of laudanum, and sopped the Cerberus just as his mouth began to open....I have a blister under my right ear, and I take 25 drops of laudanum every five hours, the ease and spirits gained by which have enabled me to write you this flighty, but not exaggerating account.

1 Hazlitt, Selected Essays, edited by George Sampson, Cambridge, 1917. Here is a part of Hazlitt's description:

His complexion was at that time clear, and even bright

As are the children of yon azure sheen.

His forehead was broad and high, light 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 gross, voluptuous, open, eloquent; his chin good-humoured and round; but his nose, the rudder of his face, the index of the will, was small, feeble, nothing-like what he has done. It might seem that the genius of his face as from a height surveyed and projected him (with sufficient capacity and huge aspiration) into the world unknown of thought and imagination, with nothing to support or guide his veering purpose, as if Columbus had launched his adventurous course for the New World in a scallop, without oars or compass. So at least I comment on it after the event.