MEMORIES OF THE AUTHORS OF THE Mediator," and earnestly and devoutly AGE. BY S. C. HALL AND MRS. 8. C. HALL. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 66 "POETRY has been to me its own 'exceeding great reward; it has soothed my afflictions, it has multiplied and refined my enjoyments, it has endeared solitude, it has given the habit of wishing to discover the good and the beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me." These eloquent and impressive words preface a book of poems bearing date "May, 1797," and up to a summer morning in 1834, when, under the pressure of long and painful disease," he yielded to the universal conqueror, and joined the beatified spirits who praise God without let or hindrance from earth, the comfort and consolation thence derived had brought continual happiness to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Yet was the joy of his heart and mind drawn from a far higher source. He lived and died a Christian, seeking NEW SERIES-VOL. I., No. 6. teaching "thanksgiving and adoring love," ending his last will and testament with these memorable words, "HIS STAFF AND HIS ROD ALIKE COMFORT ME." It is a rare privilege to have known such a man. The influence of one so truly good as well as great can not have been transitory. It is a joy to me now -thirty years after his departure. I seem to hear the melodious voice, and look upon the gentle, gracious, and loving countenance of "the old man eloquent," as I write this Memory. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born at St. Mary Ottery, on the 21st October, 1772, and was thus a native of my own beautiful county-the county of Devon. His father, the Rev. John Coleridge, Vicar of Ottery, and head-master of Henry VIII's Free Grammar School"the King's School"-was a man of considerable learning, and also of much eccentricity. It is told of him that, once going a journey, his wife had supplied 41 him with a sufficient number of shirts, | Lamb and, later, Leigh Hunt. cessor. The friendship with Lamb, then commenced, endured unchangingly through life. In one of the pleasantest of his essays he recalls to memory "the evenings when Coleridge was a solitary child, the we used to sit and speculate at our old youngest of a large family. Of weakly Salutation Tavern upon pantisocracy and health, "huffed away from the enjoy- golden days to come on earth." Wordsments of muscular activity," "driven worth told Judge Coleridge that many of from life in motion to life in thought and his uncle's sonnets were written from the sensation," he had "the simplicity and "Cat and Salutation," where Coleridge docility of a child, but not the child's had "imprisoned himself for some time;" habits," "and early sought solace and com- and Talfourd tells us it was there Lamb panionship in books. In "The Friend," and Coleridge used to meet, talking of he informs us he had read one volume of poets and poetry, or, as Lamb says, "be"The Arabian Nights" before his fifth guiling the cares of life with poetrybirthday. Through the interest of Judge "Our lonely path to cheer, as travelers use, Buller, one of his father's pupils, he ob- With merry song, quaint tale, or roundelay." tained a presentation to Christ's HospiYet full draughts of knowledge Coletal, and was placed there on the 18th July, 1782. Christ's Hospital-the Blue- ridge certainly took in at Christ's HosBlue-pital. Before his fifteenth year he "had coat School-was in 1782 very different from what it is in 1865. The hideous sius from the Greek into English anacretranslated the eight hymns of Synedress is now the only relic of the old ontics;" he became captain of the school, management that made "such boys as and in learning soon outstripped all comwere friendless, depressed, moping, half-petitors. "From eight to eighteen," he starved, objects of reluctant and degrad-writes, "I was a playless day-dreamer, ing charity." There is little doubt that the treatment he received there induced clumsy, slovenly, heedless of dress, and careless as to personal appearance, treat"a weakness of stomach "that was the ed with severity by an unthinking masparent of much after misery. The head-ter, yet ever luxuriating in books, wooing master was the Rev. James Bowyer. the muse, and wedded to verse. Coleridge writes of him: He was "a sensible, though a severe master," to whom "lute, harp, and lyre, muses and inspirations, Pegasus, Parnassus, and Hippocrene, were abominations." De Quincey considers his great idea was to "flog;" "the man knouted his way through life from bloody youth up to truculent old age." And Mr. Gillman relates that to such a pitch did he carry this habit, that once when a lady called upon him on "a visit of intercession," and was told to go away, but lingered at the door, the master exclaimed, "Bring that woman here, and I'll flog her!" Leigh Hunt thus describes the tyrant of the school: "His eye was close and cruel;" "his hands hung out of the sleeves of his coat as if ready for execution." He states that Coleridge, when he heard of the man's death, said, "it was lucky the cherubim who took him to heaven were nothing but faces and wings, or he would infallibly have flogged them by the way." Among his schoolfellows were Charles At the age of eighteen, on the 7th of February, 1790, after much discomfort and misery, he left Christ's Hospital for Jesus College, Cambridge. His fellowscholars even then anticipated for him the fame which many of them lived to see. "The friendly cloisters, and happy lege" he quitted without a degree, algroves of quiet, ever-honored Jesus Colthough he obtained honors-poetical honors, that is to say. His reading was too desultory; in mathematics he made chance of the University providing him no way; there was consequently little with an income, and he had to take his chance in the world. During his resi *In the several memoirs of Coleridge and of Lamb, the Inn is described as being in SmithPeter Cunningham so states. field; I believe it was in Newgate Street, No. 17. There is still a Salutation Inn (though probably not the old hotel) in Newgate Street. Cunningham adds, that "here Southey found out Coleridge, and sought to move him from the torpor of inaction." Lamb, in his famous letter to Southey, reminds him of their meetings at the old tavern. dence at Cambridge occurred that romantic episode with which all readers are familiar. Having come up to London greatly dispirited, on the 3rd of December, 1793, he enlisted in the 15th Light Dragoons, under the name of Silas Tomkin Cumberbatch. The story is told in various ways. Joseph Cottle, who professes to gather the facts from several "scraps" supplied by Coleridge at various times, infers that he enlisted because he was crossed in love. He made, of course, a bad soldier, and a worse rider. According to Cottle, he was one day standing sentry when two officers passed who were discussing one of the plays of Euripides; Coleridge, touching his cap, "corrected their Greek."* Another account is, that one of the officers of the troop discovered some Latin lines which Coleridge had pinned up to the door of a stable. The discovery of his scholarship was made, however, his discharge was soon arranged, and he was restored to the University. Miss Mitford, in her "Recollections," states that the arrangements for his discharge took place at her father's house, at Reading, where the 15th was then quartered, and adds that it was much facilitated by one of the servants who "waited at the table" agreeing to enlist in his stead. What motive swayed the judgment, or what stormy "impulse drove the passionate despair of Coleridge into quitting Jesus College, Cambridge, was never clearly or certainly made known to the very nearest of his friends." De *In 1837, after the death of Coleridge, a volume of "early recollections" of the poet was published by Joseph Cottle, the bookseller of Bristol, by whom the poems of Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, were originally published in 1794. The book is not "to be entirely depended upon. So, at least, Southey says. Yet it is full of curious and most interesting matter, and, beyond doubt, the publisher was the attached, and generous, and sympathizing friend of the three immortal men whom he may be said to have introduced to the world. James Montgomery's view of this work seems to me a just one: that the reminiscent had not printed a single remark that was either dishonorable to himself or derogatory to the friendship that had existed between him and the highly gifted individuals." Cottle's bookshop stood at the N. E. corner of High Street; the house was burnt down long since, but has been rebuilt. His residence was Firfield House, Knowle, near Bris tol, where he died in 1853, in his eighty-fourth year. Quincey, who writes this, adds, that he enlisted "in a frenzy of unhappy feeling at the rejection he met with from the lady of his choice." In 1836 I published in the New Monthly Magazine "a letter from Wales, by the late S. T. Coleridge." It was addressed to Mr. Marten, a clergyman in Dorsetshire. Coleridge being at Wrexham, standing at the inn window, there passed by, to his utter astonishment, a young lady, "Mary Evans quam afflictum et perdite amabam-yea, even to anguish. "I sickened," he adds, "and well-nigh fainted, but instantly retired. God bless her. Her image is in the sanctuary of my bosom, and never can it be torn thence but with the strings that grapple my heart to life." May not this incident, which seems to have been unknown to his biographers, supply a key to the motive of his enlistment, as surmised by both Cottle and De Quincey? After his return to Cambridge he formed, with Southey, the scheme of emigrating to America. Southey, in a letter to Montgomery, long afterwards, thus briefly explains it: "We planned an Utopia of our own, to be founded in the wilds of America, upon the basis of common property, each laboring for all— a PANTISOCRACY-a republic of reason and virtue." And Joseph Cottle writes: "In 1794 Robert Lovell, a clever young Quaker, who had married a Miss Fricker, informed me that a few friends of his from Oxford and Cambridge, with himself, were about to sail to America, and on the banks of the Susquehanna to form a 'social colony,' in which there was to be a community of property, and where all that was selfish was to be proscribed." Two of the patriots were very soon introduced to the more prudent bookseller: one of them was Coleridge, the other Southey. It was speedily ascertained that their combined funds, instead of sufficing to "freight a ship," would not have purchased changes of clothing; and very soon the Pantisocratic trio were necessitated to borrow a little money from the bookseller to pay their lodgings, which were then at 48, College Street, Bristol (the house is still standing, and remains in nearly its original condition). The scheme was of course abandoned, and Coleridge and Southey married the two | at college, Coleridge imbibed Socinian sisters of Mr. Lovell's wife.* 66 opinions. His mind became "terribly The shades of Chatterton, Southey, unsettled." In his monody on the death Coleridge, Wordsworth, Lamb, Davy, of Chatterton ("sweet harper of timeCottle, Lloyd, and of many others who shrouded minstrelsy") he thus indicated are "famous for all time," consecrate the his sad and perilous forebodings: streets of Bristol. A dark cloud has for "I dare no longer on the sad theme muse, ever settled over the proud church of Lest kindred woes persuade a kindred doom." the Canynges, although a monument re- He tells us that before his fifteenth calls the memory of the "marvelous year he had bewildered himself in metaboy"-whose birthplace is but a stone's physics and theological controversy, throw off whose grave is past finding and found no end, in wandering mazes out among the accumulated rubbish of a lost." One of the experiments as to his graveyard in London. In Bristol great future was to become a preacher, and he Southey was born, and there (in the city did actually, on a few occasions, preach. jail) Savage died, his grave, in one of the He preached, indeed, but in so odd a churchyards, yet unmarked by a memo- dress and so out of the usual routine, rial stone.† Here immortal Words- that it was quite clear, as a minister, "he worth first saw himself in print; here would not do."* Yet Hazlitt thus deHumphry Davy had a vision of a lamp, scribes one of the sermons of the "halfof greater worth than that of the fabled inspired speaker:" "I could not have Aladdin; here dwelt the profound essay- been more delighted if I had heard the ist, John Foster; here Robert Hail glo- music of the spheres. Poetry and phirified a Nonconformist pulpit; here Han- losophy had met together; truth and nah More taught to the young imperisha- genius had embraced under the eye, and ble lessons of virtue, order, piety, and with the sanction of religion." truth; here the sisters, Jane and Anna Maria Porter, dwelt in early youth and in venerated age; and here the artists Law-ism, and was freed from the trammels of rence, Bird, Danby, Pyne, and Muller, earned their first loaves of dry bread. But Bristol was never the nourishing mother of genius; the birds from her nest, as soon as full fledged, went forth, thenceforward uncared for; they obtained no affection, and manifested no attachment. Here and there a few lines of tributary verse, and a gracious memory, bear misty records of friendships formed and services received in the great city of commercial prosperities; but Bristol has assuredly not honored, neither has she been honored by, the worthies who in a sense belong to her, and of whom all the rest of the world is rightly and justly proud. Soon after the "enlistment," and while * The miserable sneer of Byron will be remembered, but the "three sisters were of Bristol, and not of "Bath;" in "Don Juan " they were transferred to Bath because the word suited better than Bristol the rhyme of the poet. I had the privilege to suggest to a respected merchant of Bristol the removal of this reproach from the city, and I rejoice to say he is about to place a memorial tablet on the exterior wall of the church, marking the spot where unhappy Richard Savage was buried. It was not long, however, before he struggled through the slough of Socinian infidelity. Cottle records how "he professed the deepest conviction of the truth of revelation, of the fall of man, of the divinity of Christ, and redemption alone through his blood," and had heard him say, in argument with a Socinian minister: "Sir, you give up so much, that the little you retain of Christianity is not worth keeping." He is also represented as saying on another occasion of Socinians, that "if they were to offer to construe the will of their neighbor as they did that of their Maker, they would be scouted out of society;" and he eagerly protested against the theory that there was "no spiritual world, and no spiritual life in a spiritual world." He had "skirted the howling deserts of infidelity," but he had found a Haven-one that sheltered him in pain, in trouble, even in the agonies of self-reproach. He became a thorough Christian, and ever after, in all his speaking and writings, was the advocate of the Redeemer, proclaiming in a memorable letter to his godson, Adam Steinmetz Kinnaird, and on many other occasions, that "the greatest of all blessings, and the most ennobling of all privileges, was to be indeed a Christian." This passage is from This passage is from his last will and testament (dated September 17th, 1829); a few of the small things of earth he had to leave he bequeathed to Ann Gillman, "the wife of my dear friend, my love for whom, and my sense of unremitting goodness and never-wea ried kindness to me, I hope, and humbly trust, will follow me as a part of my abiding being, in that state into which I hope to rise, through the merits and mediation, and by the efficacious power, of the Son of God incarnate, in the blessed Jesus, whom I believe in my heart, and confess with my mouth, to have been from everlasting the way and the truth, and to have become man that for fallen and sinful men He might be the resurrection and the life." In 1796 he devised a publication which he called the Watchman, the motto of which was, "That all might know the truth, and that the truth might make us free." The first number was issued on the 5th of February, 1796, to be pub lished every eighth day, at the price of fourpence. It soon died, not having paid its expenses, but involving its editor in a heavy debt, which happily a friend discharged. In the "Biographia Literaria" there is a lively account of his travels in search of subscribers, mingled with some painful reminiscences of "those days of shame and regret," the degrading anxieties of his canvass. He was reminded by one to whom he applied, that twelve shillings a year was a large sum to be bestowed on one individual when there were so many objects of charity; a noble lord, whose name had been given him as a subscriber, reproved him for impudence in directing his pamphlets to him; a rich tallow ehandler was "as great a one as any man in Brummagen for liberty and them sort of things," but begged to be excused; while an opulent cotton dealer in Manchester was "overrun with these articles," and another "had no time for reading, nor money to spare." At the ninth number he " dropped the work," and had the satisfaction of seeing his ser vant light his fire with the surplus stock, recording the event in this expressive line "O watchman, thou hast watched n vain!" But, in truth, he soon disgusted all his Jacobin supporters by attacking "modvoice against it. Like "Balaam, the son ern patriotism," and raising a warning of Beor," he blessed where he was employed to curse. Instead of advocating infidelity and the freedom that France dron, French morals, and French phiwas then brewing in her infernal caulnational education, and a concurring losophy, he "avowed his conviction that spread of the gospel, were the indispensable conditions of any true political amelioration." Loyalty is now the easiest of all our duties-thank God! It was not so when Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth were Republicans. The help of Josiah and Thomas Wedgwood-worthy sons of a great father,* honored be the name!-by settling on Coleridge an annuity of £150, placed him at comparative ease. "Thenceforward," he writes, "instead of troubling others with my own crude notions, I was better employed in attempting to store my own head with the wisdom of to finish my education in Germany." others." By that help "I was enabled Wordsworth and his sister from Great In September, 1798, he sailed with Yarmouth to Hamburg. He was but London in November, 1799. The fruits fourteen months absent, and returned to of his journey were seen in his translation of "Wallenstein," which he wrote Strand; and soon afterwards he was at a lodging in Buckingham Street, The Wedgwoods then resided at Cote House, near Bristol. His travels in Germany, entitled, "Fragments of a Journey over the Brocken," etc., he gave to me in 1828, for publication in the Amulet one of the then popular "annuals,” of which I was editor from the year 1825 to the year 1836; they were subsequently reprinted by Mr. Gillman, in his Life of Coleridge. They contained the well-known poem— "I stood on Brocken's sov'ran height.” In 1835, however, I printed, in the New Monthly Magazine, of which I was then the editor, three letters from Coleridge to his wife (his "dearest love," from her "faithful husband, ") dated May, 1799, which contain more details of his tour than are found in the "Fragments." I can not call to |