Poems of the Week: Coleridge

I have written about the Lake Poets from time to time, and their poetry has featured in these pages fairly frequently. But, oddly enough, I haven’t written specifically about any one of them. I suppose logic would say I should start with Wordsworth, but for reasons of which shear capriciousness is the most important, I have decided to pick Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 – 1834).

Coleridge was born in a town called Ottery St. Mary in the English county of Devon, the tenth child of John Coleridge, the vicar of Ottery, and his second wife, Ann Bowden Coleridge. John Coleridge was an interesting man. In addition to being the vicar, he was headmaster of the King Henry VIII School in Ottery, and was a considerable scholar. A biographer of Coleridge in the nineteenth century, H. D. Traill (1842 – 1900), remarks “The vicar himself appears from all accounts to have been a man of more mark than most rural incumbents, and probably than a good many schoolmasters of his day. He was a Hebrew scholar of some eminence, and the compiler of a Latin grammar, in which, among other innovations designed to simplify the study of the language for "boys just initiated," he proposed to substitute for the name of "ablative" that of "quale-quare-quidditive case." The mixture of amiable simplicity and not unamiable pedantry to which this stroke of nomenclature testifies was further illustrated in his practice of diversifying his sermons to his village flock with Hebrew quotations, which he always commended to their attention as "the immediate language of the Holy Ghost"—a practice which exposed his successor, himself a learned man, to the complaint of his rustic parishioners, that for all his erudition no "immediate language of the Holy Ghost" was ever to be heard from him. On the whole the Rev. John Coleridge appears to have been a gentle and kindly eccentric, whose combination of qualities may have well entitled him to be compared, as his famous son was wont in after-life to compare him, to Parson Adams.”

Parson Adams was a character in a novel by Henry Fielding (1707 – 1754), Joseph Andrews. Fielding is often credited as being the creator of the novel in England, and he himself spoke of his book, which was published in 1740, as having been inspired by Miguel de Cervantes (1547 – 1616). Parson Adams has been called the first great comic hero in the English novel and one of the glories of human nature; one of the reviews remarks on his simple and good-hearted nature, marked by his pride in his worldly knowledge derived from books, his pride in his sermons, and his pride in his excellence as a teacher.

John Coleridge’s first wife was Mary Landon. She was born around 1719, and died in January 1753. Together they had four children, all girls; three of whom survived infancy. Very little is recorded of these children. Sarah, called Sally, was born in 1747, and died in 1832. Elizabeth, called Betsy, was born in 1751, and died in 1815. Coleridge himself mentioned his three half-sisters: “Mary, afterwards Mrs. Bradley,--Sarah, who married a seaman and is lately dead, and Elizabeth, afterwards Mrs. Phillips--who alone was bred up with us after my birth, and whom alone of the three I was wont to think of as a sister, though not exactly, yet I did not know why, the same sort of sister, as my sister Nancy.”

In sharp contrast, we know a great deal about the second family. Three of them were in the military: John (1754 - 1786), who died in India; James (1759 – 1836), one of whose sons was Sir John Taylor Coleridge (his grandson was John Duke Coleridge (1820 – 1894), who became the first Baron Coleridge and Lord Chief Justice); another of James’s sons was Henry Nelson Coleridge (1798 – 1843), of whom more later. The third of the family to enter the military was Francis ‘Frank’ Syndercombe Coleridge (1770 – 1792), who also died in India, in the Carnatic.

The other principal direction of the Coleridges was the Church, a career path that was pursued by William (1758 – 1780); Edward (1760 – 1843); and George (1765 – 1828). William died when he was very young, but Edward had a distinguished career, becoming Master at Eton. George eventually succeeded his father as the Vicar of Ottery St. Mary, and Headmaster of the King Henry VIII School from 1794 to 1808.

Luke (1765 – 1790) was an exception, in that he became a medical doctor; but he died when he was only twenty four. His son, William Hart Coleridge attended Christchurch College in Oxford, achieving a double first in Classics and Mathematics. He returned to the religious background of his family, and after several years, he was recommended for the newly constituted See of Barbados and the Leeward Islands along with British Guiana, and was consecrated the first Colonial Bishop in 1824.

Of John Coleridge’s second wife, the mother of this remarkable group, we know really very little. H. D. Traill has this to say:

“Of the poet's mother we know little; but it is to be gathered from such information as has come to us through Mr. Gillman from Coleridge himself that, though reputed to have been a "woman of strong mind," she exercised less influence on the formation of her son's mind and character than has frequently been the case with the not remarkable mothers of remarkable men. ‘She was,’ says Mr. Gillman, ‘an uneducated woman, industriously attentive to her household duties, and devoted to the care of her husband and family. Possessing none even of the most common accomplishments of her day, she had neither love nor sympathy for the display of them in others. She disliked, as she would say, your 'harpsichord ladies,' and strongly tried to impress upon her sons their little value’ (that is, of the accomplishments) ‘in their choice of wives.’”

The Gillman referred to here was Dr. James Gillman, with whom the poet spent the last years of his life. Gillman wrote a relatively brief biography, published in 1838.

I came across an interesting quote in a biographical note about the first Baron on the web; I couldn’t determine who the author was, but it gives some idea of what a remarkable family this is. Here it is: “No notice of Coleridge should omit to make mention of his extraordinary store of anecdotes, which were nearly always connected with Eton, Oxford, the bar or the bench. His exquisite voice, considerable power of mimicry, and perfect method of narration added greatly to the charm. He once told, at the table of Dr Jowett, master of Balliol, anecdotes through the whole of dinner on Saturday evening, through the whole of breakfast, lunch and dinner the next day, through the whole journey on Monday morning from Oxford to Paddington, without ever once repeating himself. He was frequently to be seen at the Athenaeum, was a member both of Grillions and The Club, as well as of the Literary Society, of which he was president, and whose meetings he very rarely missed. Bishop Copleston is said to have divided the human race into three classes, men, women and Coleridges.”

It is not surprising, therefore, that Samuel Taylor Coleridge was also a gifted person, apparently from early childhood. He attended his father’s school, but on his death he went to Christ’s Hospital School in London. This was also known as the Bluecoat School and was founded as a charity school in 1552, built on the site of the dissolved Greyfriars monastery in Newgate Street. There are other campuses of this school, several of which still exist. Charles Lamb (1775 – 1834) the essayist, also attended the school during Coleridge’s time there, and the two became close friends. After a difficult start, Coleridge did well, eventually becoming top of his class. His Master there was the Reverend James Boyer, and in his Biographia Literaria, dictated to his friend John Morgan in the summer of 1815, he refers to the “inestimable advantage” of having this “very sensible, though at the same time, very severe master”. He describes how Boyer guided them towards some classical authors as opposed to others, particularly favoring “plain sense and universal logic”. He also says “I learnt from him, that poetry, even that of the loftiest, and, seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more, and more fugitive causes.”

Judith Summerfield in Eleven Memos for the Year 2000: A Postmodern Pedagogy in ADE Bulletin 104 (Spring 1993) 40 – 43, writes:

“A moment from Walter Jackson Bate's biography of Coleridge, on Coleridge's teacher, the Reverend James Boyer. Coleridge is here sixteen years old, at Christ's Hospital Junior School; he has been admitted to a small group of students called the Grecians, the best classical scholars, to prepare for a university scholarship. Bate writes:

‘One of [Boyer's] customs, praised by Coleridge, was to permit the student's exercises [verse compositions] to accumulate until there were four or five of them. Spreading them out on the desk, he would then ask why this or that expression could not be just as appropriately used in any of the other exercises. If the student could not justify himself and two faults of the same kind were found in one exercise, the exercise was torn up and a new one of the same subject assigned in addition to the other tasks of the day.’

Coleridge, until then, had got away with murder, enchanting adults by his precociousness. Boyer—demanding, stern, and intelligent—gave him tough love. Nothing facile; nothing careless here. When one writes as a spectator, viewing one's work from a perch, writing is not flight but perching. But the two modes—flights and perchings, William James's terms for being—are fundamental. We live in both modes: in and out, near and far. Now the careful work is at the center. The attention to language, to the word itself: not just to one exam at the end of the term but to the cumulation, the works as a whole, and we should give the same demanding critical attention to student writing that we give to published texts. There can be no dummy runs, as James Britton would say. And students become critics of their own work, begin to develop a discourse for talking about discourse.”

Coleridge said of Boyer that “He sent us to the university excellent Latin and Greek scholars, and tolerable Hebraists. Yet our classical knowledge was the least of the good gifts, which we derived from his zealous and conscientious tutelage.”

While he was at Christ’s Hospital School, Coleridge began to write poetry, and also began to develop his interest in philosophy. Here is a poem written in his 16th year, entitled Real and Imaginary Time:

On the wide level of a mountain's head,
   (I knew not where, but 'twas some fairy place)
   Their pinions, ostrich-like, for sails outspread,
   Two lovely children run an endless race,
         A sister and a brother!
         That far outstripped the other;
   Yet ever runs she with reverted face,
   And looks and listens for the boy behind;
         For he, alas! is blind!
   O'er rough and smooth with even step he passed,
And knows not whether he be first or last.

Just a word here about how Coleridge was addressed. Apparently he was never called Sam or Samuel; some friends addressed him as Col, but he himself used ‘S.T.C.’, and he sometimes would use a Greek word which could be pronounced the same way. He translated the word as ‘he has stood’.

He went to Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1791, and although his working habits were criticized by at least one of his colleagues, he was awarded the Browne Gold Medal for a Greek Sapphic ode, in 1792. The Ode was entitled On the Wretched Lot of the Slaves in the Isles of Western India. Those of you who read our recent article on the poetry concerned with the abolition of slavery in Britain will know that this was a very active issue at the time, and William Wilberforce’s major speech denouncing the practice of slavery and slave trading in the House of Commons had been delivered in 1789. Here are few lines from a translation of Coleridge’s ode by Anthea Morrison; it is included in the Penguin Classics Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Complete Poems, edited by William Keach and published in 1997:

O you who revel in the evils of Slavery, O you
who feed on the persecution of the wretched,
wanton children of Excess, snatching your
brother’s blood, does not an inescapable Eye
behold? Does not Nemesis brandish fire-breathing
requital? Do you hear? Or do you not hear?
Because winds shake the earth from its foundations,
and the recesses of the earth moan, and the
depths bellow terribly, guaranteeing that those
below are angry with those who slay!
But what sweet-voiced echo, what throbbings
of the Dorian lyre, hover towards me?
What soft voice lets fall a sweet whispering?
O! I see a Herald of Pity, his head shaded
with branches of olive! O! the golden joy of
thy words, Wilberforce, I hear!

This was not, of course, the first of his poems. There is some disagreement as to which was his first, but the first published poem that we know about may have appeared in the Cambridge Intelligence. However, another source says his first publication was in the Morning Chronicle, and appeared in 1794. He himself, though, claimed that his first work was written in 1787, when he was 15; the title was Easter Holidays. Here is the opening stanza, from a letter to Luke Coleridge dated 12th May 1787:

Hail! festal Easter, that dost bring
Approaches of sweetly smiling spring,
      When Nature’s clad in green:
When feather’d songsters through the grove
With beasts confess the power of love,
      And brighten all the scene.

In 1789, while still at Christ’s Hospital School, he wrote a poem called Julia. This did not appear in print until 1834, but there is a fair copy in Bowyer’s Christ’s Hospital Book, signed ‘Sam. T. Coleridge, 1789’. Here are the opening lines:

Julia was blessed with beauty, wit, and grace:
Small poets lov’d to sing her blooming face.
Before her altars, lo! a numerous train
Preferr’d their vows; yet all preferr’d in vain,
Till charming Florio, born to conquer, came
And touch’d the fair one with an equal flame.

One of the problems we have in quoting poems by Coleridge is that he rewrote them frequently. In particular, he published his Poetical Works in three volumes in 1828; a second edition in 1829; and a third in 1834, just before his death. In each of these there were significant alterations in the poems. Most of the collections prefer to use the latest versions of the poems, on the basis that the author was constantly improving them, correcting errors and infelicities, and so forth. As readers of these pieces may know, I don’t generally hold to that view, and in the case of the romantic poets there is a very obvious issue. In their youth, they were pro revolutionary, supporting the American revolution and the French revolution and so forth. We would nowadays call them radicals and left wingers. As they got older, they changed their views, particularly in the case of the French revolution as it turned to the Terror under Robespierre in 1794, the consulate of Napoleon in 1802, and his appointment as Emperor in 1804. A key event, certainly for the poets of the time was the invasion of Switzerland in 1798. As a result of living through these events, significant rewriting of their works by the radical poets of the time took place. I think it is important to see the early flames that illuminated their work in their youth. This is not to say that the later modifications produced worse poems, but they are different: the actions were not simply to correct the works.

To see how different the poems might be, Coleridge wrote a poem entitled Monody on the Death of Chatterton in 1790, and it appears in the Christ’s Hospital Book. The poem in this form was first published in 1893, long after Coleridge’s death; however another version appeared in 1794 in an edition of Chatterton’s Poems. The poem then appeared with further modifications in 1796, and again in later editions of his poems during Coleridge’s lifetime. Thomas Chatterton (1752 – 1770) is credited as the chief poet of the 18th Century ‘Gothic’ literary revival, and precursor of the Romantic movement. When he was eleven years old, he inscribed an old parchment with a pastoral eclogue, Elinoure and Juga, supposedly from the 15th Century, which deceived its readers. Following this, he wrote other similar poems, purportedly the work of a 15th century monk of Bristol, Thomas Rowley, a fictitious character created by Chatterton. These poems, as might be expected, had many failings, but they still were regarded as marking him as a poet of genius. In 1767, he was apprenticed to a Bristol attorney, but spent most of his time on his own writing. By threatening suicide, he persuaded his master to release him from his apprenticeship. He went to London, and had some initial success with a comic opera The Revenge, but soon he was starving. He refused the offer of food from friends, and on the night of August 24th, 1770, took arsenic in his Holborn garret and died, three months before his eighteenth birthday. The result was instant fame, and several poets wrote poems in his honor, including Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats and Byron. Here are the opening stanzas from the Song from a longer poem called Ælla:

O sing unto my roundelay,
O drop the briny tear with me;
Dance no more at holyday,
Like a running river be:
My love is dead,
Gone to his death-bed
All under the willow-tree.

Black his hair as the winter night,
White his face as the summer snow,
Red his face as the morning light,
Cold he lies in the grave below:
My love is dead,
Gone to his death-bed
All under the willow-tree.

Sweet his tongue as the throstle's note,
Quick in dance as thought can be,
Deft his tabor, cudgel stout;
O he lies by the willow-tree!
My love is dead,
Gone to his death-bed
All under the willow-tree.

(I have modernized the language a little!)

Anyway, here is the opening to Coleridge’s first version, written in 1790:

Cold penury repress’d his noble rage,
And froze the genial current of his soul.

            Now prompts the Muse poetic lays,
        And high my bosom beats with love of Praise!
   But, Chatterton! methinks I hear thy name,
For cold my Fancy grows, and dead each Hope of Fame.

And here is the opening of the one of the later versions; this one appeared in 1834:

O what a wonder seems the fear of death,
Seeing how gladly we all sink to sleep,
Babes, Children, Youths, and Men,
Night following night for three score years and ten!
But doubly strange, where life is but a breath
To sigh and pant with, up Want’s rugged steep.

After going to Cambridge, Coleridge increasingly ran out of money, although he had been awarded a couple of scholarships. Eventually, he left the University late in 1793, traveled to London, and then enlisted as a private in the 15th Light Dragoons, using the pseudonym Silas Titus Comberback (S. T. C.) (H. J. Jackson, in the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Major Works has it as Silas Tomkyn Comberbache). His family quickly discovered what he had done, and paid to get him out; he was discharged on April 10th, 1794, and returned to Cambridge.

In June he went to Oxford to visit a friend from School, and by chance met Robert Southey (1774 – 1843), then an undergraduate at Balliol College. The two became close friends, and collaborated in a verse drama, The Fall of Robespierre (1794). They also began to design a new society, called Pantisocracy – a utopian community that would fulfill the idealistic goals of the French Revolution without degenerating into the violence of the Terror, a community to be established in the New World, by the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania, on land bought by the radical Joseph Priestley after his exile from England. Coleridge wrote the following sonnet on the concept in a letter to Southey on 18th September 1794 (although there is some question about its authorship; Southey thought it was by Coleridge’s friend S. Favell):

No more my Visionary Soul shall dwell
On Joys that were! No more endure to weigh
The Shame and Anguish of the evil Day,
Wisely forgetful! O'er the Ocean swell
Sublime of Hope, I seek the cottag'd Dell
Where Virtue calm with careless step may stray,
And dancing to the moonlight Roundelay,
The Wizard Passions weave an holy Spell.
Eyes that have ach'd with Sorrow! ye shall weep
Tears of doubt-mingled Joy, like theirs who start
From Precipices of distemper'd Sleep,
On which the fierce-eyed Fiends their Revels keep,
And see the rising Sun, and feel it dart
New Rays of Pleasance trembling to the Heart.

In August, Coleridge went to Bristol, where he again met Southey, who introduced him to the poet Robert Lovell (1770 – 1796), a man of a similar political bent. Here is a sonnet of Lovell’s, Revolution:

The cloudy blackness gathers over the sky
Shadowing these realms with that portentous storm
Ere long to burst, and haply to deform
Fair nature's face: for indignation high
Might hurl promiscuous vengeance with wild hand,
And fear, with fierce precipitation throw
Blind ruin wide: while hate with scowling brow
Feigns patriot rage.
                        O Priestley! for thy wand,
Or Franklin! thine, with calm expectant joy
To tame the storm, and with mysterious force
In viewless channel shape the lightning's course
To purify creation, not destroy.
So should fair order from the tempest rise
And freedom's sun-beams gild unclouded skies.

Lowell had recently married Mary Fricker, on January 20th, 1794, and Southey was engaged to her sister, Edith (he married her the following year). The third Fricker sister was Sara, and Coleridge married her on October 4th, 1795. Later in his life he suggested that he had been persuaded by the others to marry Sara, and that it was an unhappy marriage. The contemporary evidence is otherwise, however, as Traill points out, “There is abundant evidence in his own poems alone that at the time of, and for at least two or three years subsequently to, his marriage Coleridge's feeling towards his wife was one of profound and indeed of ardent attachment.”

He left Cambridge without a degree in December, 1794, and from January to June of 1795 he lectured with Southey in Bristol; in September he met William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850). During this time the idea of establishing a pantisocratic community in America was abandoned. After he married Sara, they moved to Clevedon, in Somerset.

On April 16th, 1796, Coleridge published Poems on Various Subjects. On September 19th, their first son, Hartley, was born. He wrote two or three poems about this event, one to his friend Charles Lloyd (1775 – 1839), who had asked him how he felt when the nurse first presented his infant to him:

Charles! my slow heart was only sad, when first
      I scanned that face of feeble infancy:
For dimly on my thoughtful spirit burst
      All I had been, and all my child might be!
But when I saw it on its mother’s arm,
      And hanging at her bosom (she the while
      Bent o’er its features with a tearful smile)
Then I was thrilled and melted, and most warm
Impressed a father’s kiss: and all beguiled
      Of dark remembrance and pressageful fear,
      I seemed to see an angel-form appear –
‘Twas even thine, beloved woman mild!
      So for the mother’s sake the child was dear,
And dearer was the mother for the child.

In December, the Coleridges moved to Nether Stowey, which is in the Quantock Hills in Somerset; this was to be close to Thomas Poole. Poole was a self-educated tanner who built a considerable library and became a local benefactor. In 1802 he founded the Women's Benefit Society for poor women, and in 1813 he built the second free elementary school in England. Through his interest in books, attitudes to reform and friendliness, he gained the respect of many famous people of the time – in addition to Coleridge, Southey, and the Wordsworths, his friends included Charles Lamb, Hazlitt, the Wedgwood brothers and Sir Humphrey Davy.

In 1797 William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy rented Alfoxden House, close by Stowey. In July, the second edition of Poems was published, including works by STC, Lamb, and Charles Lloyd. In November Coleridge began to write The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In the following year Coleridge received an annuity of £150 from Thomas and Josiah Wedgwood (in 1812 this was reduced to £75). On the 14th of May their second son, Berkeley, was born, but he lived only until the 10th of February, 1799.

Under the leadership of Wordsworth, the Lyrical Ballads were being written, and the collection was published anonymously in September 1798. This is regarded as the key event introducing the Romantic Poetry movement. The first poem in the collection is The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and the final poem is Wordsworth’s Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey. Tintern Abbey is in South Wales, and Wordsworth had visited it on a walking tour; he and his sister were great walkers, but Coleridge had difficulty in walking. This actually resulted in one of his attractive poems from this period, This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison. This was written in July, 1797, and describes a visit by the Wordworths and Charles Lamb to the Coleridges home. Sara had spilt some hot milk on STC’s foot, but the others decided to go on a walk anyway, and he was confined to a garden seat. This will be our first poem of this week.

During this time, Coleridge’s physical problems became more evident to his friends, and also his use of laudanum (opium) to treat them. Here is part of a letter he sent to Poole on the evening of Saturday night, November 5th, 1796:

“I am very unwell. On Wednesday night I was seized with an intolerable pain from my right temple to the tip of my right shoulder, including my right eye, cheek, jaw, & that side of the throat----I was nearly frantic--and ran about the House naked, endeavouring by every means to excite sensations in different parts of my body, & so to weaken the enemy by creating division. It continued from one in the morning till half past 5, & left me pale & fainty.--It came on fitfully but not so violently, several times on Thursday--and began severer threats towards night, but I took between 60 & 70 drops of Laudanum and sopped the Cerberus just as his mouth began to open. On Friday it only niggled; as if the Chief had departed from a conquered place, and merely left a small garrison behind, or as if he evaculated the Corsica, & a few straggling pains only remained; but this morning he returned in full force, & his name is Legion!--Giant-fiend of an hundred hands! with a shower of arrowy Death-pangs he transpierced me, & then he became a Wolf & lay gnawing my bones.----I am not mad, most noble Festus!--but in sober sadness I have suffered this day more bodily pain than I had before a conception of--. My right cheek has certainly been placed with admirable exactness under the focus of some invisible Burning-Glass, which concentrated all the Rays of a Tartarean Sun.--My medical attendant decides it to be altogether nervous, and that it originates either in severe application, or excessive anxiety.--My beloved Poole! in excessive anxiety, I believe, it might originate!----I have a blister under my right-ear, and I take 25 drops of Laudanum every five hours: the ease & spirits gained by which have enabled me to write you this flighty, but not exaggerating, account----. ...”

Opium also was a factor in one of his most famous poems, Kubla Khan: Or, A Vision in a Dream It is possible that he might have begun to draft this poem in August 1797, because a note at the end of the manuscript reads: “This fragment with a good deal more, not recoverable, composed, in a sort of Reverie brought on by two grains of Opium, taken to check a dysentery, at a Farm House between Porlock and Linton, a quarter mile from Culborne Church, in the fall of the year, 1797. S. T. Coleridge.” However, E. H. Coleridge, who edited his uncle’s works, argues for a date in 1798, because a later note in 1810 connected STC’s retirement to this farmhouse to the distress of his quarrel with Charles Lloyd, which reached a crisis in May 1798. This poem is our second poem of the week.

One of the people Coleridge knew well at this time was Joseph Cottle (1770 – 1853). He was a bookseller and an author, but he also acted as a publisher, based in Bristol. He knew the Lake poets very well while they were living in Somerset, and late in his life he wrote Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey. This is based mainly on his correspondence with them, but I think the following extract shows Coleridge’s facility and knowledge of the formal aspects of poetry (it also relates to some of our earlier discussions here about the same topics!). The entry is not given a specific date, but from the context it appears to be about 1797:

“Having once inquired of Mr. Coleridge something respecting a nicety in hexameters, he asked for a sheet of paper, and wrote the following. These hexameters appear in the last edition of Mr. C.'s Poems, though in a less correct form, and without the condensed and well-expressed preliminary remarks. Two new lines are here also added.

‘The Hexameter consists of six feet, or twelve times. These feet, in the Latin and Greek languages, were always either dactyls, or spondees; the time of a dactyl, being only that of a spondee. In modern languages, however, metre being regulated by the emphasis, or intonation of the syllables, and not by the position of the letters, spondees can scarcely exist, except in compound words, as dark-red. Our dissyllables are for the most part, either iambics, as desire; or trochees, as languid. These therefore, but chiefly the latter, we must admit, instead of spondees.

The four first feet of each line may be dissyllable feet, or dactyls, or both commingled, as best suits the melody, and requisite variety; but the two last feet must, with rare exceptions, be uniformly, the former a dactyl, the latter a dissyllable. The amphimacer may, in English, be substituted for the dactyl, occasionally.

EXAMPLES.

Oh, what a life is the eye! What a fine and inscrutable essence!
He that is utterly blind, nor glimpses the fire that warms him;
He that never beheld the swelling breast of his mother,
He that smiled at the bosom, the babe that smiles in its slumber,
Even to him it exists. It moves, and stirs in its prison;
Lives with a separate life, and "Is it a spirit?" he murmurs,
Sure it has thoughts of its own, and to see is only a language.

ANOTHER SPECIMEN, DESCRIBING HEXAMETERS IN HEXAMETERS.

Strongly it tilts us along, o'er leaping and limitless billows,
Nothing before, and nothing behind, but the sky and the ocean.

ANOTHER SPECIMEN.

In the Hexameter rises the fountain's silvery column
In the Pentameter still, falling melodious down.

* * * * *

THE ENGLISH DUODECASYLLABLE.

This consists of two dactyls, and three trochees; the two dactyls first; and the trochees following.

Hear, my beloved! an old Milesian story;
High and embosomed in congregated laurels,
Glimmered a temple, upon a breezy headland
In the dim distance, amid the skyey billows,
Rose a fair island; the God of flocks had blest it:
From the dim shores of this bleak resounding island,
Oft in the moon-light a little boat came floating,
Came to the sea-cave beneath the breezy headland,
Where between myrtles a path-way stole in mazes,
Up to the groves of the high embosomed temple.
There in a thicket of consecrated roses,
Oft did a Priestess, as lovely as a vision,
Pouring her soul to the son of Cytherea,
Pray him to hover around the light canoe boat,
And with invisible pilotage to guide it
Over the dusky waves, till the nightly sailor
Shiv'ring with ecstacy sank upon her bosom.
Now, by the immortals! he was a beauteous stripling,
Worthy to dream the sweet dream of young Endymion.’

This last poem (without the last two lines, as Cottle says) appears in his later collections, with the title Catullian Hendecasyllables.

On September 19th, 1798 Coleridge and the Wordsworths went to Germany; the Wordsworths stayed only until the spring thaw, and they went to different places than Coleridge, who spent most of his time at different Universities. In April, 1799, he was notified of Berkeley’s death, but he did not return to England until July.

In October and November he was in the Lake District and on November 9th 1799 he first met Sara Hutchinson, who he referred to as Asra. (She was the sister of Mary Hutchinson who would marry William Wordsworth on October 4th, 1802.) When the Wordsworths returned from their German trip, they moved to Dove Cottage in Grasmere in the Lake District, where they would live for the next eight years. On July 24th 1800, Coleridge and his family moved to Greta Hall in Keswick, also in the Lake District, to be near his friends. On September 14th his third son, Derwent, was born. The winter of 1800 – 1801 was a time when Coleridge suffered from prolonged illness, and it seems likely that this was the time when his opium use became an addiction.

In November 1802 The Southeys also moved to Greta Hall. Robert had assumed responsibility for Mary Lovell on Robert Lovell’s death in 1796.

On December 23rd 1802 Sara Coleridge was born, but on January 1804 Coleridge again became sick, went to London and on April 9th he left for Malta and later Sicily to try to recover his health. He returned to England in August 1806, in worse shape than when he left. At this time, he asked for a legal separation from his wife. She was furious. Apparently he also lost contact with his children for some eight years. For the next few years he lived with the Wordsworths, but in 1810 he again went to London, to try to make some money by lecturing and newspaper work. He had arranged to live with Basil Montague, but Wordsworth apparently thought it necessary to warn Montague of Coleridge’s opium addiction. Montague told Coleridge what Wordsworth had said, and this led to a very nasty split. Two years later, Wordsworth in effect apologized, and things were patched up; but the old collaboration was never resumed.

In 1814, Coleridge was under the care of a Dr. Daniel for opium addiction and suicidal depression, but that did not apparently last very long. In 1815 he dictated a biographical work including commentaries on a variety of topics to his friend John Morgan in Calne, Wiltshire (he was living with the Morgans at that time). It was published in 1817 under the title Biographia Literaria; or Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions, and is regarded as a major contribution.

Our last poem of this week is the first part Cristabel. The poem was begun in 1797, but not completed until 1800; it was not published until 1816. The poem concerns the beautiful Cristabel, who is the daughter of a rich elderly Baron, Sir Leoline. One evening, Cristobel hears a moan from the woods, and it turns out to be a beautiful woman, Geraldine, who claims to have been carried away from her home by five Knights who left her in the woods saying they would return. Cristabel takes her to her home, and it becomes apparent that there is more to Geraldine than her story would have one believe.

In 1816, Coleridge entered the household of Dr. James Gillman of the London suburb of Highgate as a patient and housemate: he asked Gillman to help him control his addiction because everything else had failed. It is said that he still succeeded in smuggling in additional opium, but the arrangement appeared to work to everyone’s satisfaction, and Coleridge remained there until his death at 6:30 am, July 25th, 1834.

On the 9th of November, 1833, Coleridge wrote his own epitaph:

Stop, Christian Passer-by! – Stop, child of God,
And read with gentle breast. Beneath this sod
A poet lies, or that which once seem’d he. –
O, lift one thought in prayer for S. T. C.;
That he who many a year with toil of breath
Found death in life, may here find life in death!
Mercy for praise – to be forgiven for fame
He ask’d, and hoped, through Christ. Do thou the same!

He was regarded by many, in spite of his failings, as one of the very greatest poets in the English language, and one of the group that transformed poetry at the turn of the nineteenth century. Their – and his – legacy is still with us.