SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.

BORN in Devonshire in 1772. He speaks of himself as an imaginative child who, at the age of six, had read Belisarius, Robinson Crusoe and Philip Quarll. At nine he entered Christ's Hospital School,1 where Charles Lamb was already a pupil. Debts, disappointed love and Pantisocratic dreams interfered sadly with his studies at Cambridge (1791-94), which he left without taking his degree. One Cottle, a publisher, having offered to buy at a guinea and a half a hundred (eight cents a line) all the verses Coleridge could write, the young bard married on this brilliant prospect. The dreary struggle for bread and butter that followed brought on nervous prostration, and this that opium habit which DeQuincey says killed Coleridge as a poet. Kubla Khan and Christabel: Part the First, were written in 1797. His growing intimacy with the Wordsworths led him to publish The Ancient Mariner in Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads (1798). The same year a small annuity bestowed by some generous friends enabled him to visit Germany. From Göttingen he writes: 'I shall have bought thirty pounds' worth of books, chiefly metaphysics, and with a view to the one work to which I hope to dedicate in silence the prime of my life.

With Coleridge the metaphysician and the theologian we are not greatly concerned here. The thirty-six years of life that remained to him after 1798 were devoted chiefly to those subjects—with what success we may be content to let the metaphysicians decide. Occasionally Coleridge would make an excursion into the fields of Belles-Lettres and sow there such precious seeds as are to be found scattered through the Biographia Literaria and the Lectures on Shakespeare. At rarer intervals he would rouse his dormant poetic faculty, as when he wrote Christabel: Part the Second, The Ballad of the Dark Ladié (both of these unfinished and unfinishable), and the magnificent Hymn Before Sunrise, in the Vale of Chamouni. These fragments, thrown off during nearly four decades of inglorious dependence upon rich men's bounties; innumerable projects for a magnum opus that never came to anything; the worship of a little philosophical coterie whose feeble influence is rapidly waning; — such are the literary results of the manhood and old age of one whose youthful performance declares him to have been one of the most splendidly endowed of English poets.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

LIFE AND TIMES. - Prefixed to the latest and best edition of Coleridge's Poems is a careful and elaborate biography by J. Dykes Campbell. (Macmillan.)

1 See Thackeray's Newcomes, Cap. LXXV

This does not attempt any literary estimate in connection with the life; such a treatment will be found in Traill's Coleridge (E. M. L.). Hall Caine's Life of Coleridge (Gt. Wr.) contains a good Bibliography. The poet's grandson, E. H. Coleridge, has in preparation another and more elaborate biography: it is difficult to imagine what useful or pleasant result will be attained by exhibiting to the world in more detail the characteristics of the poetical Skimpole who dwelt at Highgate. Contemporary portraits will be found in Lamb's (fanciful) Christ's Hospital Five-and-Thirty Years Ago; in DeQuincey's Literary and Lake Reminiscences and in his Coleridge and Opium Eating; in Hazlitt's Lectures on the English Poets and in his Literary Remains (Essay XIX.); in Carlyle's Sterling, Part I. Cap. viii.

CRITICISM. - James Wilson (Christopher North): Essay on Coleridge's Poetical Works. If any one lack enthusiastic admiration for Coleridge, he should read this Essay, which places the Hymn before Sunrise ahead of any strain in Milton or Wordsworth!

Whipple: Essays and Reviews; English Poets of the Nineteenth Century; also, Coleridge as a Philosophical Critic. Two little studies as admirable for their sanity as for their brevity.

Swinburne: Essays and Studies; Coleridge. The most poetically-appreciative estimate we have; ranks Coleridge as the greatest of lyric poets 'for height and perfection of imaginative quality.'

Courthope: The Liberal Movement in English Literature; (Poetry, Painting and Music): Coleridge and Keats. Contends that whatever unity there may be in Coleridge's poems is not logical unity, but musical unity.

Lowell: Address on Unveiling the Bust of Coleridge at Westminster Abbey. A charming little speech that judiciously avoided taxing the thinking-power of the audience.

(Those who are courageous enough to follow Coleridge into what he himself called the 'holy jungle of transcendental metaphysics' will find an exposition and critique (1) of his social and political philosophy in 7. S. Mill's Dissertations and Discussions, Vol. ii.; (2) of his moral, religious and metaphysical systems in Shairp's Studies in Poetry and Philosophy. The latter is the Fine Old Tory view, and declares Coleridge to have been 'the greatest thinker whom Britain has during the century produced.' (!) Mr. G. E. Woodberry hardly shares this conviction, for he asserts (N. Y. Nation, 39, 549) that it is plain not only that Coleridge's 'mind ranged through a vast circuit of knowledge habitually, but also that it touched the facts only at single points and superficially.' Most of us, I think, will also agree with Mr. Woodberry when he adds: [Coleridge's] 'theology and metaphysics, in pursuit of which he wasted his powers, are already seen to be transient.' An artistic description of Coleridge as a critic is given by Professor H. A. Beers in the Introduction to his Prose Extracts from Coleridge.)

THE ANCIENT MARINER.

The origin of this poem is thus related in Wordsworth's Memoirs: 'In the autumn of 1797, he [Coleridge], my sister and myself started from Alfoxden pretty late in the afternoon, with a view to visit Linton and the Valley of Stones

near to it; and as our united funds were very small, we agreed to defray the expense of the tour by writing a poem to be sent to the New Monthly Magazine set up by Phillips the bookseller, and edited by Dr. Aiken. Accordingly, we set off, and proceeded along the Quantock Hills, towards Watchet, and in the course of this walk was planned the poem of the 'Ancient Mariner,' founded on a dream, as Mr. Coleridge said, of his friend Mr. Cruikshank. Much the greatest part of the story was Mr. Coleridge's invention; but certain parts I suggested; for example, some crime was to be committed which should bring upon the Old Navigator, as Coleridge afterwards delighted to call him, the spectral persecution, as a consequence of that crime and his own wanderings. I had been reading in Shelvocke's Voyages a day or two before, that while doubling Cape Horn, they frequently saw Albatrosses in that latitude, the largest sort of sea-fowl, some extending their wings twelve or thirteen feet. 'Suppose,' said I, 'you represent him as having killed one of these birds on entering the South Sea, and that the tutelary spirits of these regions take upon them to avenge the crime.' The incident was thought fit for the purpose, and adopted accordingly. I also suggested the navigation of the ship by the dead men, but do not recollect that I had anything more to do with the scheme of the poem. The gloss with which it was subsequently accompanied was not thought of by either of us at the time, at least not a hint of it was given to me, and I have no doubt it was a gratuitous afterthought. We began the composition together, on that to me memorable evening; I furnished two or three lines at the beginning of the poem, in particular:

And listened like a three years' child,

The Mariner had his will.

These trifling contributions, all but one, which Mr. C. has with unnecessary scrupulosity recorded, slipped out of his mind, as well they might. As we endeavored to proceed conjointly (I speak of the same evening), our respective manners proved so widely different that it would have been quite presumptuous in me to do anything but separate from an undertaking upon which I could only have been a clog.'

The effect for which Coleridge strove in this poem he has fortunately described for us in Cap. XIV. of his Biographia Literaria: During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbors, our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry: the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colors of imagination. The sudden charm which accidents of light and shade, which moonlight or sunset diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining both. These are the poetry of nature. The thought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, the incidents and agents were to be in part, at least, super natural; and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of th affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally accom pany such situations, supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being, who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency. For the second class, sub

jects were to be chosen from ordinary life; the characters and incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and its vicinity where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after them, or to notice them when they present themselves.

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'In this idea originated the plan of the Lyrical Ballads; in which it was agreed that my endeavors should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth, sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief, for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.'

This exposition by the author leaves little need for more comment on The Ancient Mariner, save perhaps a word as to the form. This is modelled on that of the medieval ballad; but if you compare it with one of these - The Demon Lover, for instance, or Sir Patrick Spens you will notice the incomparable superiority of Coleridge, both in the depth of his psychological observation and in the bewitching melody of his cadences.

PART I.

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Eftsoons (12); from the Old English eft again + sone = soon = at once, speedily. With lines 21-24 compare the opening stanzas of Tennyson's The Voyage; indeed the whole of that poem shows Coleridge's influence. minstrelsy (36) = company of musicians. Compare, But now bring me a minstrel. And it came to pass, when the minstrel played, that the hand of the Lord came upon him.' 2 Kings, iii. 15. thunder-fit (69) = a noise like thunder. The oldest meaning of this word 'fit' is 'struggle; ' it has no etymological connection with the adjective 'fit,' nor with the noun 'fit' = ballad, song. shroud (75). Shrouds are supporting ropes that

run from the mast-head to the sides of the ship.

vespers (76) =

evenings.

PART II.

'em (92); dative case = to or for them. The form 'em is directly from the Old English dative plural 'him,' Middle English 'hem.' Our modern form 'them' is from 'þâm' or 'pâm,' the dative plural of the demonstrative 'se, seô, þæt' (that), whose plural has entirely supplanted that of the third personal pronoun. When at Mt. Saint Jean, then, the Duke of Wellington said (if he did say), UP, GUards, AND AT 'EM! he was not guilty of a barbarism, but was indulging a laudable fondness for Choicest Old English. uprist (98). A weak preterite : = uprose. See Whitney, §§ 240, 244. The stanza beginning All in a hot and copper sky reminds one of some of Turner's pictures. This great artist, as well as Coleridge, had a keen eye for the subtle aspects of nature that hard and brilliant minds like Macaulay's find so uninteresting. For similar touches see lines

171-180, 199-200, 263-271, 314–326, 368–372. death-fires (128); sometimes called 'fetch-candles' or 'corpse-candles;' supposed to portend the death of the person who sees them. 'Another kind of fiery apparition peculiar to Wales appeareth. . . in the lower region of the air, straight and long, not much unlike a glaive, mours, [mulberry-leaves?] or shoots directly and level . . . but far more slowly than falling stars. It lighteneth all the air and ground where it passeth, lasteth three or four miles or more, for aught is known, because no man seeth the rising or beginning of it; and when it falls to the ground, it sparkleth and lighteth all about. These commonly announce the death or decease of freeholders by falling on their lands. .' Brand's Popular Antiquities, iii.

237.

PART III.

they for joy did grin (164). 'I took the thought of 'grinning for joy' from poor Burnett's 1 remark to me when we had climbed to the top of Plinlimmon, and were nearly dead with thirst. We could not speak from the constriction till we found a little puddle under a stone. He said to me: You grinned like an idiot.' He had done the same.'. ·Coleridge in Table-Talk, May 31, 1830. the hornéd Moon (210). 'It is a common superstition among sailors that something evil is about to happen whenever a star dogs the moon.' - Coleridge. Did you ever see the phenomenon described in lines 210-211? Has Coleridge made a mistake?

PART IV.

Lines 226-227 were written by Wordsworth.

PART V.

silly (297) = (originally) blessed; then, 'simple-hearted,' 'guileless,' 'weak,’‘foolish' and (as here) ‘empty,'' useless.' sheen (314) bright, shining. The Sun, right up above the mast (383). The ship has now reached the equator, returning north. In line 30 she is represented as having crossed the line, going south. In Coleridge's prose comment on lines 103-106, he represents the ship, at that point of the narrative, as having reached the line, going north. But this is contradicted by lines 328, 335, 367-368, 373-376, all of which imply a cailing north from the point reached in 107.

1 Campbell (p. 598) says 'Berdmore of Jesus Coll. Cambridge,' but gives no authority.