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444

CARLYLE'S PORTRAIT OF COLERIDGE.

which he had formed while using the drug as a medicine. Deeper and deeper he plunged into those abysses of German metaphysics towards which he had been gradually drifting. Various convulsive efforts at hard work were made by him at times, but all his great plans dissolved into vapour and vanished. The roof of Gilman, a friendly surgeon at Highgate, sheltered the dreamer during his last nineteen years; and there the old man used for hours to pour out his wonderful talk in a stream, which was often turbid and slow, but which sometimes broke into a brilliant run, or discovered, through its clear crystal, the rich sands of gold and shining gems below. At Highgate he died in July 1834.

Carlyle's portrait of Coleridge "sitting on the brow of Highgate Hill," to be found in his "Life of Sterling," is remarkably vivid :"Brow and head were round, and of massive weight; but the face was flabby and irresolute. The deep eyes, of a light hazel, were as full of sorrow as of inspiration; confused pain looked mildly from them, as in a kind of mild astonishment. The whole figure and air, good and amiable otherwise, might be called flabby and irresolute; expressive of weakness under possibility of strength. He hung loosely on his limbs, with knees bent, and stooping attitude; in walking, he rather shuffled than decisively stepped; and a lady once remarked, he never could fix which side of the garden-walk would suit him best, but continually shifted, in cork-screw fashion, and kept trying both. A heavy-laden, high-aspiring, and surely muchsuffering man. His voice, naturally soft and good, had contracted itself into a plaintive snuffle and sing-song; he spoke as if preaching-you would have said preaching earnestly, and also hopelessly, the weightiest things. I still recollect his 'object' and 'subject,'-terms of continual recurrence in the Kantean province; and how he sung and snuffled them into 'om-m-mject' and 'sum-m-mject,' with a kind of solemn shake or quaver, as he rolled along."

His noble fragment, Christabel, has been already named. Begun at Stowey, and continued upon his return from Germany, by the advice of Byron it was given to the world in 1816 in its unfinished loveliness. Both Byron and Scott have echoed the irregular music

"C CHRISTABEL" AND OTHER POEMS.

445 of its verse, though with peculiar variations. It is a tale of strange witchcraft. A sweet and innocent girl, praying for her lover's safety beneath a huge oak-tree outside the castle gate, under the dim moonlight of an April sky, is startled by the appearance of a witch, disguised as a richly-clad beauty in distress. The gentle Christabel asks the wanderer into the castle; the disguise is there laid aside; some horrible shape smites the poor hospitable maid into a trance; and the blinking glance of the witch's small, dull, snake-like eyes, shot suddenly at the shuddering victim, clouds the innocent blue of her eye with a passive imitation of the same hateful look. In dealing with mystic themes like this, Coleridge was master of a spell over thought and language, such as no other writer has ever possessed. But his inspiration came in gusts, and fragments grew around him at such a rate that soon the difficulty of choosing what to finish caused all to remain undone. His life was a succession of beginnings which never saw an end. He went to college, but took no degree. He prepared for emigration, but did not start. He got married, but left others to support his wife and children. At twenty-five he planned an epic on the Destruction of Jerusalem; but to-morrow-and to-morrow-and to-morrow -passed without one written line. A great genius with a great infirmity-the twinhood of mental strength and feebleness claims at once our reverence and our deep compassion.

- he

Besides the works already named there are two which cannot be forgotten, as examples of the varied powers of this great poet. For simple tenderness and depth of natural feeling his little lovesong of Genevieve cannot be surpassed. And the Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni, of which we quote some lines, has in it an exultant sublimity akin to Milton's song. While the melody of Genevieve most resembles the sighing of "a lonely flute," stealing through the odours of the summer dusk, this Hymn to Mont Blanc swells through the darkness of the Alpine morning up to the rosy summit of the snow, with all the tumultuous music of a vast organ, pealing in unison with the chorus of ten thousand rejoicing throats.

Coleridge's Lectures on Shakspere have been already named.

446

SPECIMEN OF COLERIDGE'S VERSE.

The review of Wordsworth's poetry, which may be found in his Biographia Literaria, has been pronounced to be "perhaps the most philosophical piece of criticism extant in the language." Though able to penetrate deep into the mysteries of Shakspere's power over tears and laughter, he had himself no genuine dramatic faculty. His tragedies, Remorse and Zapoyla, contain some noble passages, but we read them with cold, unkindling souls.

FROM THE HYMN AT CHAMOUNI.

Thou first and chief, sole sovran of the vale!
O struggling with the darkness all the night,
And visited all night by troops of stars,

Or when they climb the sky, or when they sink !
Companion of the morning star at dawn,
Thyself earth's rosy star, and of the dawn
Co-herald wake, O wake, and utter praise!
Who sank thy sunless pillars deep in earth?
Who filled thy countenance with rosy light?
Who made thee parent of perpetual streams?

And you, ye five wild torrents fiercely glad!
Who called you forth from night and utter death,
From dark and icy caverns called you forth,
Down those precipitous, black, jagged rocks,
For ever shattered, and the same for ever?
Who gave you your invulnerable life,

Your strength, your speed, your fury, and your joy,
Unceasing thunder and eternal foam ?

And who commanded-and the silence came-
Here let the billows stiffen, and have rest?

Ye ice-falls! ye that from the mountain's brow
Adown enormous ravines slope amain-
Torrents, methinks, that heard a mighty voice,
And stopped at once amid their maddest plunge!
Motionless torrents! silent cataracts!

Who made you glorious as the gates of heaven
Beneath the keen full moon? Who bade the sun
Clothe you with rainbows? Who, with living flowers
Of loveliest blue, spread garlands at your feet?
God! let the torrents, like a shout of nations,
Answer and let the ice-plains echo, God!
God! sing ye meadow-streams with gladsome voice!
Ye pine groves, with your soft and soul-like sounds!
And they, too, have a voice, yon piles of snow,
And in their perilous fall shall thunder, God!

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ROBERT SOUTHEY, a linen draper's son, was born in Wine Street, Bristol, on the 12th of August 1774. After passing through various local seminaries, he went in 1788, at the expense of his uncle, the Reverend Herbert Hill, to the celebrated school of Westminster. From that school he was expelled four years afterwards, owing to the share he had taken in an article against flogging, which appeared in a magazine conducted by the senior boys. Entering Balliol College, Oxford, in 1792, he spent a couple of years in general reading and industrious verse-making, carrying from the University, according to his own account, a knowledge of but two things as the fruit of his imperfect undergraduate course— how to row and how to swim.

At Oxford he met Coleridge, and these "birds of a feather," both smitten by the widening swell of the French Revolution, rank Republicans in political creed, and Unitarians in religious profession, formed, in conjunction with others, the wild American scheme spoken of in the sketch of Coleridge. Southey, Coleridge, and their friend Lovell, another of the Pantisocrats, became the husbands of three sisters of Bristol; all of whom were gathered in a while under Southey's roof, for Lovell soon died, and Coleridge in his vast dreamings often forgot the real duty of supporting his wife and children.

Already Southey's pen had been busily at work. At college he had composed an epic poem, Joan of Arc, for which that kindly book

448

"THALABA, THE DESTROYER."

seller of Bristol, Cottle, now gave the young husband fifty guineas. A volume of poems, written in conjunction with Lovell under the names of Bion and Moschus, had previously appeared; and a wild, revolutionary piece, Wat Tyler, had been written in a fit of republicanism. The last-named work was surreptitiously published many years afterwards by a bookseller, who wanted to annoy the Laureate, then a celebrated man.

Between his two visits (1795 and 1800) to Lisbon, where his uncle was chaplain of the British Factory, he studied law at Gray's Inn, advancing, to use his own expression, "with sufficient rapidity in Blackstone and Madoc." The latter was an epic poem. This divided love could not last, and so Blackstone was at last given up, while Madoc advanced to completion. Before settling down to these temporary and uncongenial studies, he had published Letters from Spain and Portugal, the offspring of his first visit to the Peninsula.

In 1801 appeared the first of a series of great poems, intended to illustrate those various systems of mythology, which are so rich in poetic ore. Although its sale was slow, this work did much to raise the author's literary fame. Called Thalaba, the Destroyer, it depicts, in blank-verse of very irregular length but of great music, the perils and ultimate triumph of an Arabian hero, who fights with and conquers the powers of Evil. A splendid moonlight shining on the Eastern sands, with two figures-a sad mother and a weeping boy-wandering in the pale radiance, is the opening picture of a poem which abounds in brilliant painting. For the copyright of this work, which was finished in Portugal, Southey received a hundred guineas.

After one more effort towards a permanent settlement in some recognised position-the acceptance of a private secretaryship to the Irish Chancellor of Exchequer, worth £350 a year, which he kept for only six months-he became a literary man 1804 by profession, and in 1804 fixed his residence on the banks of the Greta near Keswick, in the heart of the Lake country. Coleridge was already there, settled for so long a time as a being ever on the wing could settle; and

A.D.

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