COLERIDGE'S COUNTRY

You cannot separate man from the world in which he lives; cannot imagine him severed from his accidentals.' Whose highest flights of fancy can conceive a disembodied spirit? Even ghosts must be visible to be appreciated. Hamlet's father revisited the glimpses of the moon in his habit as he lived, and walked the windy battlements of Elsinore in the very armour which he had worn in his mortality when at war with Norway. And in no ghost story which I have ever heard does the apparition come without costume; even if the spectral phenomenon is invisible, there is a rustle of silken attire, or a tapping of high-heeled boots, or a clatter of chain-armour.

Similarly there is a tendency to connect a man with the country in which he dwelt, and which influenced his character and career. No one is uninfluenced by the scenes which surround him. What island but Corsica, the home of romance and revenge and adventure, could have given the world Napoleon Bonaparte? Where, but in the very omphalos of England, could a Shakespeare or a Landor have been born and bred? What, save a London birth and education, could have made Charles Lamb our choicest essayist? Who can read a page of Mr. Tennyson without perceiving that he began life in a flat country? I have seen in my time all sorts of maps, which the enterprising publishers of Charing-cross originate; allow me to offer them a new idea. Why not a biological map—a map in which every county, and each district of each county, shall be coloured according to the men who have been its actual or adopted children? For, observe, it is not always the place in which a man is born that gives the tone to his life. I begin, for example, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge; he was a baby in Devon, a schoolboy in London, a pantisocratic enthusiast in Somerset, a great poet in Lakeland, a rather visionary philosopher at Highgate. His slight foreign adventures I omit as unimportant; nor need I recall the details of his brief career as a cavalry private. But, while Devon gave him his normal power, it was in the romantic region of the Lakes that he reached the perfection of his art. Everywhere have I followed his footsteps, and have thereby reached the conviction that among the Lakes was his natural home.

But when he was a young fellow of twenty-six, and had just begun to sow his wild-oats, he was living at Nether Stowey in Somerset. It is a pretty village enough, a few miles from what the Somerset folk flatter themselves is the sea-namely, the muddy SECOND SERIES, VOL. II. F.S. VOL. XII.

Severn estuary known as the Bristol Channel.

I think the mud along that coast is something perfectly unnatural. If you go down to one of the watering-places beloved by Bristol people-Clevedon or Weston, to wit-with the expectation of a Brighton or Scarborough seascape, how I admire your inevitable disappointment! Instead of seeing

'the wild white horses play,

Champ and chafe and toss in the spray,'

while a merry wind that has travelled over leagues of foam plays tricks with your apparel, you are face to face (at low water) with countless acres of mud, through which travels a thread of water looking like the Fleet Ditch, all that remains of the famous river Severn. When living down in this dull vicinage-really dull, for though the scenery is often rich, it is void of variety-Coleridge made up his mind to be a Unitarian minister. There is perhaps a recondite connection between flat scenery and Unitarianism. Any way, the pulpit of the disciples of Socinus was at that time the poet's great ambition; and in search of a cure of souls he made his way to Shrewsbury to preach. Here is that same river Severn, many a mile nearer its source, a clear and beautiful and rapid stream, undreaming of the mud in which its glory is doomed to expire. A quaint old town is Shrewsbury, and they show you Glendower's Oak to this day; it is an ancient tree, which grows green every spring, though its trunk is completely hollow. To the summit of this oak, says the legend, Owen Glendower climbed when the famous battle of Shrewsbury had begun, that very battle wherein Jack Falstaff fought a long hour by Shrewsbury clock. The tradition is, that Glendower ascended the tree in order to judge how the battle was likely to go before he decided whether or not to join his allies. His inspection was unfavourable, and the Welshman discreetly drew off his forces.

A curious glimpse of Coleridge in his early days is afforded by Hazlitt, who made his acquaintance at Shrewsbury. Hazlitt's father was a Unitarian minister living at Wem, ten miles from the capital of Salop. Young Hazlitt, in his twentieth year, was naturally attracted by the fame of this marvellous young preacher, who uttered with magical eloquence things unintelligible; so, on a Sunday morning in January 1798, he rose before daybreak, and walked ten muddy miles to hear Coleridge preach. Did you ever hear me preach ?' asked Coleridge of Lamb many a year later. 'I never heard you do anything else,' was the reply. This particular sermon intoxicated Hazlitt, who at once became Coleridge's admirer. His description of the great poet, as he seemed in his youth, is worth quotation. 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 goodhumoured and round; but his nose the rudder of the face, the index of the will-was small, feeble, nothing; like what he has done.' I may here remark, that the tendency to represent Coleridge as having done nothing is a symptom of that serene and supercilious ignorance which is often observable in second-class men who have to estimate their superiors. Mr. Carlyle has made the same marvellous blunder. It is as if a turnip-field were to brag over its superiority to a rose of Provence. What says Ben Jonson ?

'It is not growing like a tree

In bulk doth make men better be;

Or standing long an oak, three hundred year,
To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sear.

A lily of a day

Is fairer far in May,

Although it fall and die that night:
It was the plant and flower of light.'

Coleridge did nothing, forsooth! as Mr. Gladstone might say. Why, he wrote Christabel; but for which we should never have had the two series of poems which begin with Scott's Minstrel and Byron's Giaour. As to his philosophy- But I will not deal with these vexed questions. Let me forgive Hazlitt his splenetic attack upon his mightier friend, and walk with him from Shrewsbury to Nether Stowey in Somerset.

For Somerset was then Coleridge's country; and he invited his young admirer to come and see him there, offering to walk half-way to meet him. You see there were no railways in 1798; nor do I expect that the mail-coach service was quite as perfect as I remember it in my school-days. Was the old-fashioned stage-wagon extinct? Mr. Timbs or Mr. Thornbury would know. However, young men could walk-young poets and essayists especially; and William Hazlitt thought nothing of walking from Shropshire to Somersetshire, considerably more than a hundred miles as the crow flies; and he would have to fly across the Bristol Channel, just above the Steep and Flat Holmes. Hazlitt made his way first to Worcester -pleasant city in a pleasant vicinage-thence to Upton-on-Severn, where he thought of Tom Jones and the adventure of the muff; thence to Tewkesbury, where he took his ease at his inn, sitting up all night to read Paul and Virginia. On this silly sentimental story he records a remark of Coleridge's-that nothing could show the gross indelicacy of French manners and the entire corruption of their imagination more strongly than the behaviour of the heroine in the last fatal scene, when she turns away from a man on board the sinking vessel, who offers to swim ashore with her, because he has stripped himself to swim. St. Pierre, if I remember aright